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I. 黑水
You die cursing the world.
In your last moments, spitting and snarling like something feral and refusing beyond reason to give up your unseemly struggle, you force your eyes wide open, bloodshot and bulging from their sockets with fury and unholy hate, and you see the god descend in a blazing pillar of golden light. You brand it onto your soul: his white robes blinding as he approaches your body, the arrogant sweep of his eyes like he is evaluating the worth of a rare cut of meat, the exact twist of his mouth when he sees you choking on one last bloody breath.
Then, he is gone, and your angry heartbeat falls silent. In its place, an abyss awakens.
Mount Tonglu opens. You devour legions of ghosts on your way in. The volcano belches fire and tries to swallow you whole, to claim you in its gaping maw, raging when you will not join the wretched ranks of souls burning in its inferno. But you remember the god stepping over your cooling body on his way back to the heavens, and the volcano’s fury becomes nothing but a passing tantrum.
In the feverish, smoldering pit of Tonglu, you spill rivers of blood and snap a hundred necks beneath your feet in a recreation of that fatal autumn evening. Your angry heartbeat goes silent, and what is left thrums under your ribcage, claws around the remains of your dead heart, and calls itself, chilling and precise, purpose, purpose, purpose. You have dragged yourself through hell and refused to burn, and now you know that even volcanoes fear glaciers, those beasts of long-dead water that gouge slow, seeping wounds in the earth over centuries and centuries.
Black Water Sinking Ships emerges from Tonglu, and at once, rivers weep away from their paths, lakes turn ink-black and oily. The gods tremble at the birth of a new ghost king, fearing another devastation to the heavens like the one wrought centuries ago by Crimson Rain Sought Flower.
Against their expectations, you recede quietly. From the lonely shores of your island, you raise your manor of obsidian and dark glass. Then, you wait.
Slowly, the ocean yields its secrets, shipwrecked scrolls and long-lost records dredged up from its depths. You breathe spiritual power into the skeleton fish that swarm your waters, and they return with thick tomes crusted with salt, ancient folk tales written in forgotten languages, scraps containing the last confessions of the dead.
Once, these stories might have fascinated you. Now you feel nothing. You have nothing but patience and all the time in the world.
You sit cross-legged on the black sand with a scroll spread across your lap, a dark scholar by the bright moonlight, and the truth unfurls itself to you over a centuries-old paper trail: a forbidden ritual, and the one thing that even gods fear.
‘Fate?’ You turn the word around in your mouth, spit it back out at the silent black sea. The hollow in your ribcage yawns open its cavernous jaws. Your question washes away with the slow ebb and flow of the tide, and you turn from the water and stop wondering.
There was only ever one answer for you.
In this world, there is no such thing as equal retribution. To defy this wretched fate of yours is to seek to ascend beyond the gods.
I will find the god that put us here to die, you press your head to your hands, burying your snarl in the ground before your silent shrine of four urns, and eat him whole.
II. 地师
Fresh after your ascension as the new Earth Master, the Wind Master passes around an invitation to a dinner banquet at his pavilion. Printed on fragrant rice paper, it promises to be a lavish one.
You accept out of heavenly courtesy. Already, you have heard many stories of the Wind Master. Those starry-eyed with admiration whisper of the night of his ascension, a youth in brilliant clothes lifted to the heavens in a bluster of wind, wine cup still in hand, as naturally as though he’d been born to his godhood. There are others, more petty, who mutter darkly that it was only by his brother the Water Master’s efforts that he ascended at all. With the amount the Water Tyrant spent on him, they hiss, even the most lowly of beggars could ascend. It is the same everywhere, then. Even in the heavens, the capital is overripe with the rot of corruption.
Yet it is none of your concern. You did not come here just to listen to these officials wag their pathetic tongues.
It is not until late into the night that you properly meet the young lord of the house. The Wind Master seeks you out first, finding you seated in some inconspicuous corner, lifting a second and then a third leg of lamb into the maw of your mouth.
The first of the bunch re-emerges, stripped to stark white bone. The meat, savoury and tender, warm juice dripping down your chin in streams that you do not care enough to wipe away. Before you lies an endless banquet, a sprawl of tables piled high with islands of meat, rivers of wine, and all you can think are your own parents wasting away and dying and gone. These hypocritical gods, who luxuriate endlessly in their own glory while their wretched worshippers die of pestilence, war, and famine below, secure in their arrogant belief that they are somehow more deserving than all else of the golden halo that is heaven’s fickle blessing.
The Wind Master watches you for a moment and breezily offers you his handkerchief. ‘Easy, Ming-gongzi,’ he says, laughing. ‘There’s more than enough food to go around.’
It is something only someone like him could say, one of this lofty bunch of immortals.
Surrounded by the splendour that should have been yours, you lick your incisors clean and swallow down the taste of blood.
‘My compliments to the Wind Master,’ you say, ‘for an unforgettable meal.’
The Wind Master, pleased at the possibility of a new companion, parades you around the Heavenly Capital. ‘We must get you acquainted with all of my buddies!’ he says breezily, with a flick of his horsehair whisk in your direction. ‘That’s the fastest way to get you settled here in the capital.’
When all you offer in response is a blank stare, he only laughs, sheepishly but still earnest-eyed. ‘I just hope I can become very good friends with Ming-gongzi!’
‘Do as you please,’ you tell him.
You do not protest the Wind Master's friendship. You like him well enough. For all his frivolities, he is not like the other officials, neither arrogant nor greedy nor jealous.
The Wind Master, you find, is a contradiction in motion. He attends to his godly duties with care, answering the prayers of kings and simple farmers alike. Ever so often, he disappears to the market streets of the mortal world and flies back to heaven, caked in dust but beaming, with carriages stuffed with the latest human oddities. He brandishes his money in the form of new clothes, new accessories, shiny new trinkets, and believes, in his simple way, that others will share in his joy, too. He knows nothing of envy. Look at the new peacock-feather fan my brother bought me! he says to a pair of passing officials, who smile through gritted teeth and eye his pockets bloated with wealth. Among his friends, he lends out hundreds of thousands of merits in a single breath and never expects any repayment. He surrounds himself with flocks of admirers, but still returns to make a nuisance of himself by your side. You look at him quietly over a pile of heavenly records and tell him he is stupid to be strung along by those who only pretend to be his friend.
‘That’s okay,’ he says. Grinning widely, he leans an elbow on your desk, pressing his cheek into his hand. ‘As long as Ming-gongzi is my real friend!’
‘You think too beautifully,’ you say, and carefully push his ridiculous peacock fan away from your face.
His brother stands on the steps above you, silhouetted by the harsh golden sun, and you know instantly.
Shi Wudu slammed you to the earth, hacked out the warm, pulsing, bleeding golden core of your divinity, and poured his plunder over his unsuspecting, undeserving brother like a fountain of fortune. Shi Wudu the god wears rich robes with edges embroidered in gold and wields his silk fan like a dagger and is flanked always by Ling Wen and Pei Ming, exchanging whispers and smirks hidden behind opulent sleeves in a perfect, locked triangle of conspiracy. His own worshippers bow their heads low to kiss the ground beneath his feet and call him the Water Tyrant in the same fearful breath that they sing his praises. His arrogance is a dark wave that crests high enough to scrape the stars yet fears no retribution.
At your side, the Wind Master hollers a greeting. You carefully blank your expression and echo the gesture with Ming Yi’s cool politeness. After all this time, the dead thing in your ribcage stirs again and murmurs that it is hungry.
‘Qingxuan,’ Shi Wudu says disdainfully to his brother as if you are not right there, ‘must you make friends with every single nobody that crosses your path?’ He sweeps past you without a second glance. As his trailing sleeve cuts across your cheek, you imagine the delicious snarl of your hands around his high-collared neck.
It would only be too easy to crush Shi Wudu's windpipe to breathlessness, to plunge your hand into his chest and tear his heart from its stem, to slash his brother down where he stands, to empty their blood, still-warm and steaming, over your family’s altar. You could have your revenge now and escape the blinding, insufferable golden light of heaven to your underwater abyss, to the bottomless black depths of your despair, where even Jun Wu in all his imperial power cannot reach you, where you can be left alone with all the time in the world to build your monuments of grief.
But your patience is glacial. After all this time, finally you know how to return the Water Master’s favour.
The Reverend of Empty Words crackles with sick laughter when you hunt it down in the gloom of an alleyway in Fu Gu town. ‘What business could the esteemed Earth Master have with this lowly ghost that calls him away from the heavens?’
‘You took something from me,’ you say coldly. ‘I’m here to get it back.’
Its gash of a mouth splits wider as it leers at you. ‘My Lord must be mistaken. I don’t remember having ever offended the Earth Master in any way.’
Your own laugh is scraping and savage. Of course the Reverend owes the Earth Master no grudge, because the gods by nature are untouchable by it, because it shrinks before their heavenly brilliance.
But you have never been a god. When your godhood was bled away from you, the Reverend swooped down and plucked you and your family clean. In its breath, you can still smell their misery.
So you let your face go bloodless and curl your lips away from rows and rows of suddenly-sharp teeth. The air around you crushes down with the heavy hand of the ocean, smothering all sound as though far below its smooth black surface, and finally, the Reverend falls deathly silent. Finally, it knows to be afraid.
‘What a shame, then,’ you whisper, melting the guise of Ming Yi from your body, ‘that I am not the Earth Master.’
On another mid-autumn night, in an alleyway of your hometown, He Sheng walks the earth again and devours the Reverend of Empty Words in a feast of immolation. The Reverend grew swollen and bloated on your family’s suffering, and now you return the courtesy in the only way you know, by the only truth you can still believe: ghost eat ghost eat ghost. You sink your teeth in. You cram bite after bite into your endless throat. You have starved before, but never have you felt so hungry.
As you swallow the last of the Reverend of Empty Words, you wonder how despair, pure and black and divine, would taste on a god.
III. 明兄
These days, he calls you Ming-xiong, puckering his mouth sweetly like your name is honey melting on a warm tongue. Sleepy-eyed under a luminous golden rectangle of sunlight, he blinks at you, slow and deliberate, lifts a drowsy arm and murmurs for you to put down your scroll, to come join him in his afternoon nap. Stretched out on his couch, he turns the vulnerable curve of his neck toward you and slips back into sleep, mouth a soft crescent. You hover your hand over his hair, follow the gentle swell and fall of his breath, and cannot imagine what dreams he might be having.
In moments like these, he is just another victim of his brother’s tyrannical love. Shi Wudu, wild and audacious, clasped him to the heavens with its golden shackles, hiding from him the truth that they were forged in blood.
When he wakes, he looks up at you with eyes turned warm and liquid by the afternoon sun. You have never doubted the genuineness of his kind gaze for one moment. But that kindness must come with a price, and the price is that he has been coddled and loved his whole life; that he has never known hunger or pain or suffering like yours; that he has never stumbled and gasped out his last breaths in the filthy streets, then blazed up in hatred at the cold injustice of the heavens.
He is not merciless. He is not cruel. It does not change the fact that your family is dead while he sleeps his sweet sleep free of knowledge and nightmares.
Later, as the sky bleeds sunset from a punctured slice of sun, he leans against you and tells you of his day’s exploits, of the things he has seen wandering in the human world. Today, he says, a fortune-teller taught him to do palm readings. He had plunked himself down beside a dilapidated little stand and let the old woman point out the destiny mapped out in the lines and valleys of his palm.
You feel him shift against your back, lift his hand to trace the slow ascent of the yellowed moon.
He says, ‘What do you know of fate, Ming-xiong?’
Once when you were young, the local fortune-teller told you that your flinty eyes, the arch of your brow, and the sharp bow of your mouth made for an auspicious combination, that your future was to be endlessly bright with fate’s favour. He had chuckled to himself and touched his protective charm to the edge of your robes. Maybe I too will be fortunate enough to receive some of your heavenly blessing, he said.
‘Very little,’ you say. ‘Ask your brother.’
He hums, a quiet sound that rumbles through the both of you. ‘Let me try reading your palm, Ming-xiong,’ he says, suddenly.
You do not linger on the way his wine-heavy breath warms your cheek as he leans over your shoulder, his elbow a weight in your ribcage. Too close, you do not say.
Instead you let him take your hand. He runs a gentle finger over the landscape of your palm, and you feel it like the slow, hot seep of alcohol through your veins.
‘Huh,’ he breathes in surprise, ‘Did you know that your fate line is the same shape as mine?’
Your hands, those fine-boned, scholarly things calloused with years of hard labour, were the one part of your body you could never change, even in disguise. He presses his palm to yours now, smiling. Your fingers curve down to cup his.
You quietly study his face. He does not have the eyes of a god; his are too soft-lashed and bright and trusting. Not one destined for the heavens, your fortune-teller would have said.
You tell him, ‘The Water Master will find out you’ve snuck down to the human realm again.’
‘I can just say I was accompanying you on some important Earth Master business. Then he’ll have no right to complain.’
‘Your brother does not like me, you know.’
He laughs. He has always laughed too loudly. Too easily. ‘My prickly brother likes very few,’ he agrees. ‘But Ming-xiong is my favourite of all the gods in heaven! In my eyes, Ming-xiong is the most amazing, brilliant, talented—whatever praise you want to hear, I’ll give it to you. You don’t need his approval.’
‘Since when have I ever said I wanted your brother’s approval?’
Suddenly, you cannot stand his laughter, the sweet, honeyed sound of it. You grab his shoulders and push him back down into his luxurious cushions, trapping him within the cage of your arms, pressing in close enough that your nose crushes against his, your hair falling around his face in a smooth black ripple. His scent is everywhere.
‘Me or your brother. You can only choose one.’
He stares up at you with eyes rounded in surprise, then laughs, a light puff of air against your cheek. You cannot stand it. ‘Both,’ he says, ‘both!’ He thinks you are only fooling around, like when you tell him flatly that you are not his best friend, that you have never been. He has never once considered the alternative.
Your fingers dig sharp crescents into your palms while he grins and glides a strand of your black hair into the soft heart of his hand and says, ‘Eternal for as long as we are.’ His breath is slow and warm by your ear. ‘What I want is for my dear brother to go on showering me with sweet spring flowers forever, and for Ming-xiong to enjoy the bright autumn moon with me always.’
You want to say, again, You can only choose one. You want to say, Tell me you will choose me. But he only loops an arm around your neck, pulling you down to him so the two of you are crushed together, chest-to-chest, heartbeat-to-dead-heart. ‘Spring flowers and autumn moon. I can’t have one without the other,’ he murmurs into the dip of your collarbone.
It is one thing to be spoiled, naive, a fool. But what you can never forgive is his innocent ignorance of his brother’s tyranny.
You turn away from him. Him, and his pretty smiles painted bright red with the blood of your family.
Every year, every mid-autumn banquet, as he laughs at the center of the evening’s revelries and drinks himself stupid, you watch him in his delight and remember a different autumn night: fine wine in a luminous cup, your blood running a black river in the streets. The curve of his lips rewriting your history.
IV. 贺玄
It is only when the last of the fire dragon has dissolved into nothing but black smoke and ash remains that you find the Earth Master’s body. You kneel at his head and stare down into his blank eyes, wondering if he resented you in the end. You chained up his godhood, and he'd only bent his head before four obsidian urns and told you, quiet and resigned, Do what you must. Ming Yi was no gentle-hearted god, but he understood duty. In another life, you would have liked to be his friend.
You gather him up as best you can and take him back to the watery-still depths of your mansion. ‘I ask your forgiveness,’ you say to the body.
The silent line of his mouth holds no reply. The dead, after all, have no need for apologies.
A shower of blood rain announces Hua Cheng’s arrival. Silver trinkets clinking loudly on his boots, he strides in through your doors as brazenly as always.
‘Was it you?’ he says in place of a greeting, tipping his head in the direction of the Earth Master’s body, carefully arranged on your throne.
‘I’m no hypocrite, Crimson Rain Sought Flower,’ you reply smoothly. ‘It was something else that killed him.’
He smiles lazily, crossing his arms. ‘So? What will you do now? That little fire dragon spell of his was powerful enough to light up every corner of the heavens. Jun Wu would have to be blind and a fool not to send one of his officials to investigate it.’ In the curve of his smirk is a challenge: Your little farce cannot go on forever.
It is something you have long since known. For four hundred long years, you have played along. For four hundred years, the Wind Master has gusted about you like a strong spring breeze, cheerfully prattling to anyone who will listen that he likes you most, that he is your best friend.
There are times you have found yourself pulled along by the current of his whims. In his indulgent pout, you see your little sister; in his laughing insistence at passing you yet another dish heaped high with your favourite foods, your fiancée’s warmth. But your sister and fiancée are nothing but cold ashes in cold stone, while he prances through his glittering golden pavilions and wonders idly what next to occupy his heart in paradise.
For four hundred years, you have toyed with your food. Your prey sits placidly now in his golden palace in the sky and knows nothing of the noose you have been quietly tightening around his and his brother’s necks.
The moon casts no reflection on the silent black waters of your realm tonight, its pale light swallowed up by the abyss.
Four hundred years is a very long time to wait.
You say, in the voice of long-forgotten things stirring from still depths, ‘I am planning to end it all soon.’
Hua Cheng leans against a bone-white column and gives you a wordless look of appraisal. He alone in your shared world of ghosts and demons knows best that your resolve has never needed steel or fire, that water is dangerous and unrelenting above all else in its conquest of everything. He knows better than to doubt it.
‘It will be put into motion soon,’ you repeat. ‘The beginning to his wretched end.’
‘Good,’ Hua Cheng says, his single dark eye narrowing. ‘Remember our deal. Make sure you leave Dianxia out of this.’
‘As long as your beloved doesn’t try to interfere, I won’t touch a single hair on his head,’ you say.
You have seen the statues he left behind in the caves beneath Mount Tonglu. If only the officials of the Heavenly Capital knew the ghost king they so feared held one of their own as the singular point of his devotion. If they saw what you knew to be true, Crimson Rain Sought Flower kneeling in the temple of the crown prince of a long-vanished kingdom. Hua Cheng will crack the heavens open in a torrent of blood rain as evidence of his worship, but leave a patch of clear sky above a lone white blossom as evidence of his love.
That is the difference between you and him. For his god, Hua Cheng would tear heaven down, stone by stone, and build a thousand more silver cities over its ashes. Meanwhile in four hundred years, you have built nothing but cold stone altars to the dead. You have nothing to offer but destruction and bitter hatred. Your prayers are filled only with ruin.
‘You poor bastard,’ Hua Cheng says suddenly, baring his teeth in a cold sneer. ‘Have you not the slightest remorse for making him believe you cared about him all this time?’
Your heart, deep in the abyss. And the Wind Master’s tender one, between the sprung trap of your cold teeth. You think of your family, waiting silently, so patiently, in four black urns beneath your manor.
‘No,’ you say. ‘Why should I?’
And it is not a lie.
You can see it in his eyes that he is terrified beyond anything he has ever known.
There is a sharp satisfaction in knowing you were the one to put that fear there. You savour the memory of how his face blanched whiter and whiter with every poisonous whisper from the Reverend of Empty Words, how his rabbit-quick heartbeat grew fleeting against your back when you carried him away from the safety of the heavily-arrayed pavilion, then sucked his spiritual energy dry, and now how he trembles uncontrollably before you as you throw a rusty knife at your feet and give him one last ultimatum.
And because he is terrified, he reaches up and touches the golden longevity locket around his neck for comfort. It is solid and dense; this, you know because he once dropped it in your palm where you felt the crushing weight of family. You remember him beaming and saying to you in a voice brimming with pride, My brother infused them with both of our spiritual energies so as to be eternal for as long as we are. It is their sibling bond forged in unbreakable gold. It is just another reminder that he will always be Shi Wudu’s before he is yours.
You should not blame him for it. You of all people know that blood is thicker than water, that blood leaves a stain.
Still, you want to tear the thing from his fragile throat and crush it to dust beneath your feet.
Instead, you rip off his brother’s head.
+
When it is all over, you drag him from Shi Wudu’s body and out under the bright autumn moon. He crumples to his knees and bows his trembling, pale face from its cold light. Finally, he has stopped sobbing.
You have only one last thing to ask of him. ‘Do you have anything you want to say.’
‘I want to die,’ he says. His voice is perfectly hollow and cracking.
‘You think too beautifully,’ you say.
There is nothing left to repay. Nothing left to regret. Shi Wudu's head lies, bled out and rotting, twisted forever in a grimace on your family’s altar, and finally, you find peace in the aching cavity that used to hold your heart.
Once again, you are nothing to each other. At last, you can undo the long-dead knot that binds you together. And at last, you can begin to forgive him.
At last, on the shores of your bitter sea, you are finally left alone.