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When he first entered Mount Tonglu, he was little more than scraps of consciousness drifting through the mountain ranges. He was sustained by flickers of memory—the edge of a painted gold sleeve, flashes of mad blue fire, the smooth surface of a bone-white mask—and the persistent ache of an emotion that went deeper than he even really understood.
He knew that he was a ghost. That much, he could grasp. And by hovering around the crass and talkative spirits that would rather spill all the woes of their human lives to each other than fight, he learned a few things:
The first, and most important, was that ghosts remained for one thing and one thing only—hatred. They were fueled by their anger at humanity, at the world, at the heavens, at fate.
Second—that any ghost worth its salt vowed upon revenge. The more ambitious the plan for vengeance, the more powerful the ghost.
That was the purpose of Mount Tonglu. The most a ghost could ask for was enough power to enact its revenge and leave its boot mark upon the mortal realm that chewed it up and spit it out.
So, the nameless ghost thought, that must be his purpose as well. He must have died for his hate, and he remained tethered to this world because of it still.
-
Mount Tonglu, more than anything, was a place of memories. More than ghosts liked to kill, they liked to reminisce. As they slaughtered each other by the hundreds every day, so too did they sit together in the dirt and recall the days of their suffering, of their mistreatment and their scars. As the nameless ghost fire flitted about and listened, more snippets of memory rose to his empty consciousness.
He remembered a body that never served him well. Skinny legs, sickly pale bruised skin, hands that shook when they gripped the hilt of a sword. And a hideous crimson eye that he could never escape.
He remembered pain. The moment he recalled the sensation of cracked ribs, broken skin, and pierced organs, it was all that consumed him for some time. His death had been a long, shuddering one, he knew this now at least. Half a dozen open wounds and stumbling around uselessly on a dark battlefield. The memory ignited something in the ghost fire, and from within the shadows it lurked, it blazed brighter.
But it still felt like there was something missing. Try as he might, the resentment he mustered for any of the subjects that the other ghosts mentioned—heaven, the world, humankind—felt hollow. Quite real on the surface, but it dissipated upon further investigation, as if it did not have any pillars to hold itself up.
So the question remained. He was a ghost, so he must hate—and he did. But why?
-
The nameless ghost remembered red. Not just the red of fresh blood or a cursed eye, but the red of painted lips curved into a benign smile, of a delicate round pearl dangling from an ear.
He knew there was someone in his past. They were always there, their face always turned away just out of reach. When the ghost fire tried to reach out, he was met with a crushing sense of loss. Agonizing grief and fear and pain, worse than the memories of his childhood or his death.
He remembered white. White robes and a dizzying white light—a heavenly light, light like staring directly at the sun, light like a whole constellation of stars had descended to grace the mortal realm—and the little white flowers that shriveled up the same day they were plucked.
But then the white robes became a mess of red, and the light flickered and failed.
That, too, produced the same kind of overwhelming pain. But the ghost fire burned brighter.
He thought, I’ve found it. A reason to hate.
-
The name came to him suddenly, without warning. Not his own, no, all that he remembered of himself was red, but the other was more important anyway.
Xie Lian. Mercy. Thanks.
With it, came a face. The nameless ghost realized again the definition of that foreign word, beautiful.
Nothing in Mount Tonglu was beautiful. Except for a memory, in full color for the first time.
The birth of a ghost fire’s physical form was like the birth of a star—an explosion of light and dark and silent noise. It sent tremors through the earth and sky, and all remaining ghosts in Mount Tonglu raised their heads, sensing a shift in the energies of the cursed land.
A name was only the beginning. He remembered everything—his deaths, his rebirth, but most importantly, his savior. His glory, his tragedy, his fall, his hate, his kindness. It burned in his gut like it was his own. How could he have forgotten?
It wasn’t hate that he stayed for. As a child, it had been. He had vehemently cursed the world and the heavens at the young age of ten. And then—through the distorted red of his gaze, only one had pierced through, white robes unsullied.
From then on, it had been for love. If hate was what made a ghost, then he must have been dead as a child. Now, he was alive. Now, he could look down at his hands—still shaky, still weak, but they were there—and raise them to his eyes—one still red, one still black, but they could see so clearly.
He was surrounded by ghosts who knew only faithless devotion to themselves and their anger. This wasn’t a place for godly worship or gentle love. But then again, he had never known how to be gentle or warm, nor had he worshipped with a distant and respectable admiration.
If this was a place for the spilling of guts, then so be it. Against all odds, he was a ghost with a divine, undying love. And he would worship according to the customs of Mount Tonglu.
-
For eight years, a nameless ghost tore through the ruins of Mount Tonglu. He killed ghosts with their own weapons, outsmarted demons out of their own games, sacrificing each of their lives in vain to a god he knew would not have wanted so much blood to be spilled in his name. But he had nothing else to give, and the ghost could not deny the satisfaction that rose in his chest from every guttural final scream he produced and the blood that caked his skin many layers thick so that it felt like its own kind of armor. He had never known strength or power before, but now ghosts whispered about him in the shadows and fled in his wake.
When he found himself alone without any immediate threats nearby, he ventured into the ancient temples that he discovered deeper into Mount Tonglu’s core. He brushed the dust off cracked murals with his bloody hands, coloring their long-faded painted stories once more. He studied the foreign characters written over doorways and carved into walls, and, in time, made sense of them.
In this valley of curses and death, there remained the culture of a forgotten kingdom. The nameless ghost had never been one awed by art or language, but in the absence of anything like it for so long, he couldn’t help but bask in it sometimes.
If he could, he would have offered his god the entire cavern of art and history. It was surely more fitting than the blasphemous slaughtering he did nearly every day.
But these ancient ruins had ghosts of their own. At first, he had thought them to be odd statues of worship, relics from some long-lost religion. Clay figures huddled in groups or lay splayed on the ground as if asleep. But the more of these statues that he discovered, the more unnerving they became. They looked too human. Some appeared in pain, bent on the ground in strange positions. Others clung to each other like lovers who could not bear to part.
In pure fascination, he kicked one once. It crumbled into dust. A hollow shell. Still unable to settle the unease in his stomach, he crouched down to rifle through the remains until his fingers found a small chipped pebble. Raising it to his face to inspect it, he realized quickly what it was.
A tooth.
Further searches in other shells unearthed brittle bones that were distinctly human. And the ghost understood.
He was not frightened by this revelation. His questions had been answered about what had happened to this civilization. About why Mount Tonglu was so sacred to the ghosts that entered it, and why the death game that they played with such fervency was structured the way it was.
But there was another discomfort that had begun to itch at the back of his mind. He didn’t know how long those shells had stayed in their stasis, nor if their souls had been dispersed.
He feared—faithless coward that he was. How much longer could he cling to his devotion in a place like this, until he too became a hollowed-out body pantomiming at life? remembering what was no longer there?
-
It took a change. It took a chance encounter. It took an act of devotion that the nameless ghost had never performed before. And removing the part of him that had haunted him since birth.
He didn’t know how the small gaggle of mortals made it to the innermost layer of Mount Tonglu. Perhaps they had been lured there by malicious spirits and in their attempts to escape had only found themselves trapped deeper within the labyrinth.
He had been chasing down a particular demon that had been causing trouble around the ruins and was proving to be particularly elusive. He suspected it was using some sort of shapeshifting to remain undetected. So when he ran into about half a dozen humans cowering in one of the abandoned temples, he was suspicious. They screamed when they saw him; one tried to run away, but he blocked them with a casual throw of his battleaxe—one he had stolen from a pig spirit a while back—just a hair’s breadth from their face. It landed with a thunk in the rotting wooden beam of the doorway. He pulled the weapon from it just as quickly and approached the humans.
That demon was definitely among them; every one of them was wreathed in the aura of evil, but he could not immediately place who carried the strongest amount. This was part of the creature’s trick—it muddled the energies around it, swathed itself in ambiguous airs.
He circled them slowly, inspecting their terrified faces one by one. Finally, he landed on one—a pale-faced middle-aged man whose gaze seemed just a little too cool beneath the mask of fear. The ghost slit his throat swiftly.
The mortals screamed. The scent of rotting flesh filled the temple as a thick black cloud spilled from the man’s throat in place of blood. Of course, he had died the moment the demon took over his body.
As a few people converged over the body, searching in vain for signs of life, the ghost turned his attention to the demon. But it had already scattered in countless directions, and he had a feeling that he wouldn’t have been able to land a hit regardless.
When he turned back to the people shaking and clinging to each other in their fear, it was with some bemusement. He didn’t know how or when they had gotten here, how they had survived until now, or what to do with them now that he had discovered them.
His first instinct was to leave them to their devices and pretend he had never seen them at all. They would surely be picked off soon enough by other ghosts and monsters.
And yet…
That persistent ache of memory was never far. Warm arms encircling a dirty, worthless child, though it clung with ferocity to those white robes. He had never known how to let go of anything, not really.
He had been human too, once. Frightened and downtrodden and at the feet of death nearly every day. For him, a single, brief moment of feeling like he was safe—protected from the world like he never had been—was all it took.
The thing about an undying love was that it fundamentally changed the one who experienced it. What purer form of devotion was there if not doing as the subject of that devotion might have done?
-
It was almost frustrating how easily the humans trusted him. All it took was protecting them from a couple of moderate-level demons and suddenly they were latched onto him and could not be shaken.
Then again, how could he blame them? He had been the same. Perhaps that was just the nature of people.
He didn’t care to get to know them. He barely spoke to them. They whispered among themselves enough—seeking comfort, answers, solidarity. They clearly had no connections to each other prior to being trapped within Mount Tonglu, but they seemed to have created a camaraderie just by virtue of finding themselves in the same unfortunate situation. It confused him, but he would never dare ask them about it. His only job was to guide them out of here safely, so he could continue with his more natural purpose of spilling blood.
Meanwhile, word got around about the ghost that was leading a group of humans through Mount Tonglu. And most of them didn’t like the idea of that at all. More than ghosts loved to tear each other limb from limb, they ached to do the same to the creatures of the mortal realm.
Of course, the nameless ghost was twice as good a fighter than any of those low lives, and his will was stronger than all of them combined. But it was as if the entirety of the remaining population of Mount Tonglu had converged upon him. They began with individual attacks that were more a waste of time than anything else. But there were soon so many that they were practically falling over each other to get to the humans and the ghost that had the audacity and foolishness to protect them.
Pushing back against endless hordes of feral ghosts and leering demons, he lost track of time. For every hit that he took, he landed three more. He acquired weapons and discarded them just as soon as they proved to not be any more useful than the next one. He didn’t memorize a single face that he cut down, so it seemed almost as if he was fighting one continuous enemy that would never die no matter how many killing blows he landed.
On the outermost edge of Mount Tonglu—a jagged wasteland of mountains and rock that he had not visited since his second time as a ghost fire—he faltered. He was bleeding profusely from a wound on his upper arm. It trickled down to his hands gripping his saber and made them slippery, then stickier as the blood dried. Behind him, the five people that were left huddled in a corner, each trembling from fear and days-old hunger.
It all happened so quickly. The saber slipped from his grip as he swung at a two-headed demon. It severed one of them, but the saber went flying into the crowd of ghosts. The ghosts immediately pushed forward, taking advantage of their opponent’s opening. He managed to land a few blows with their own weapons, but he knew he was cornered.
He didn’t remember how many wounds he received; they came from all sides, all at once. It was his first death all over again, and he was still just as weak. Just as painfully human as before. Nothing ever changed.
He fell with the final slash of a curved knife to his face, right above his cursed eye. Blood filled his eye and mouth as his cheek hit the dirt. With that, the mob descended.
Through the haze of red that clouded his vision, he could still make out the people, being pulled from each other by the jeering ghosts. They would spend their sweet time taunting and torturing their prey before they killed them.
How foolish he had been to think he could protect anyone. How pathetic that he could not even do right by his god in this small way.
He could not rest in peace now. He had vowed never to do so. He would live if he joined the melee. If he got his hands on one of those humans and sacrificed a real life for his own imitation of one. It was what ghosts did, wasn’t it?
He had never been the right kind of ghost.
His eye burned deep in its socket. He was certain it would leave a scorch mark forever.
When he raised his hands to his face, it was of their own accord. He saw them, through his impaired sight. They did not appear his own.
So it didn’t hurt as much when they dug into his eyelid. It was obvious they didn’t know what they were looking for; they tore desperately through nerves and tissue even as they became heavy with blood and clinging bits of flesh.
From very far away, he realized he could no longer hear the screeches and cackles of the ghosts, nor the cries of terror of the humans. Not because they had left, or because he could not perceive them, but simply because they had stopped. They had surrounded him again, and this time they were intrigued.
He screamed as he finally tore it free. Not from pain, no, he had long since forgotten about that. But there was an overwhelming surge of triumph in his voice as he held it in his shaking hand, drenched in his own blood that spilled from his empty socket. His eye stared back at him—so small and round and red and no longer a part of him, no longer inside of him! No longer there to curse him and destroy him from the inside out!
He didn’t think about what kind of weapon to forge. The only thing that filled his mind was the half-mad cries of jubilation that couldn’t be quenched by the crush of ghosts that surrounded him or the fire that seared through his head. He tried to keep his gaze focused on the eye trembling in his palm, but the flow of blood was only growing stronger and faster and soon he couldn’t see anything at all.
His hands were growing warmer, the weight in them heavier—until, all of a sudden, they closed around the rough hilt of a sword.
A higher clarity seemed to overtake his senses. His remaining eye flew open. At the same time, the weapon in his hands started up a low hum, suddenly alive and awake.
He didn’t catch a good glimpse of the weapon that he had created. He barely comprehended rising to his feet and swinging it in the direction of the nearest ghost. Everything from the beings that he killed to his surroundings to the wounds that were inflicted upon him—if any—became a blur. All the while, there seemed to be a gentle pressure building in his meridians, like the flow of energy was being rerouted and strengthened tenfold.
Was this what power felt like? Was this the feeling that he had been chasing his entire life?
He had been born hungry before he knew what hunger was. Standing in the remains of what must have been every ghost left in Mount Tonglu—his already tattered and stained clothes barely recognizable as such beneath their filth, his face caked in his own blood and that of other ghosts’—for the first time, he felt full.
When his vision finally cleared enough to make out shadows and movement, he turned to where he last remembered the humans to be. But there was only the body of one woman, curled up in the shadows as if she had died of fright.
The rest had probably escaped long ago. It wouldn’t be too difficult to track them down to make sure they got out safely—but he suspected there weren’t many creatures left in Mount Tonglu to cause them trouble.
He raised his weapon to his face to inspect it. He caught his reflection in its curved silver blade and did a double-take. A crazed, monstrous thing stared back. Half its face a mess of gore and mangled flesh with pale-white bone peeking through; on the other side, a young man’s gaze filled with bewilderment.
He slowly turned his attention to the hilt. He knew what he would find there, and he knew he did not want to see it.
Set into the hilt and shining like a precious stone, his own eye stared back at him. Ruby red and rolling around madly within its new socket, it appeared even more inhuman. Familiar emotions welled up in the nameless ghost’s throat—fury, disgust, but most humiliating was the fear.
Would he never escape this cursed thing?
Strangely, that feeling of power was still thrumming through his veins. If he focused on it, it seemed to grow stronger.
A compulsion to turn his gaze to the sky seemed to overtake him. In all his years spent in Mount Tonglu, he didn’t think he had once been gripped by such an urge. The sun never rose in the Ghost Realm, but neither did the stars shine upon it. Now, looking up—he saw them. Glimmers of light in otherwise overwhelming darkness. He had never cared much for the stars; he didn’t hold the same fascination with them that the poets or the artists seemed to have. In fact, he had always despised the stars the same way he had despised fate.
As he stood there with his face upturned to the sky, the odder it appeared. The stars were too bright, the dark too endless. His blood—or was it spiritual energy?—rushed in his head. When he blinked, the darkness seemed to shift, like a creature awakening to stretch.
His insides felt so loud. He could hardly make sense of his own thoughts. And the sky was so dizzying. The stars were beginning to blur together into one solid beam of light, warm and all-encompassing.
And then, all of a sudden, he opened his eyes. They had been screwed shut the entire time.
The first thing he noticed was the light. In eight long years of endless night, he had forgotten how light felt on his skin, on his eyes. But even before, he could not recall such brilliance but for once: when a prince descended from the heavens to save his kingdom.
It hit him as his eye adjusted. The sickly sweet scent of lotuses in the air. The cool golden tile underneath his hands that his blood trickled onto and merely melted into like it had never been there at all. The soft murmuring of voices around him growing louder and louder until it was like thunder in his eardrums.
Oh. Oh, hell no.
~
In the darkest recesses of the mortal world and the intersecting quagmires of the Ghost Realm, they say that a dead soldier of a fallen kingdom rose to the heavens. No one can say what exactly he ascended for, as what could a nameless ghost do to catch the inscrutable eye of the heavens?
It begins mostly as a rumor among ghosts, the kind of thing that bored low-grade entities pass around because the absurdity of it tickles them. They say the soldier went mad and gouged out his own eye, driven to the brink by the unchecked evils of that red demon eye. Actually, who could tell if it was the ghost that scratched out his eye or the eye that clawed its way out of the ghost? The kind of riddle that was entertaining for its lack of an answer.
The gods don’t speak at all of the black-clad, red-stained creature that rose through the clouds and the stars to land on the gold-plated streets of the heavenly capital. It would be bad luck to pass around the tale of the deranged ghost that arrived in a great cacophony of light and screams, shaking the golden pillars and palaces almost as much as the ascension of one particular martial god from years ago.
What was a ghost story to heaven? A monster dripping blood onto golden steps, snarling at the gods like a feral dog at a stranger on the street, wielding a silver scimitar with a demon’s eye embedded in the hilt. And, his greatest sin of all: jumping back down to sully himself again with the dust and hatred of the lesser realms.
The tale makes its way to the living. It’s the kind of fanciful concept that street performers advertising their gift to convene with the gods sell to passing pedestrians for a coin. Barely anyone considers the idea worth the purchase. What is there in the mortal world that a ghost would choose over all the wonders of heaven?
But there are many myths with humbler beginnings and simpler questions. Despite its incredibility, it continues to circulate quietly, like the whisper of a god’s breath on the wind. And, with such a premise, it should be sure to grow stronger somewhere along the way.
~
The Kiln contains no sky at all. The nameless ghost looks up and sees only deep, suffocating blackness. He doesn’t mind. He’s used to it by now. And he would accept it over the blinding light of the heavens any day.
There isn’t much to do but wander the tunnels and caves that wind deep into the mountain. For the first couple of months, he tries to chart them, just to have something to do, to create a purpose for himself—to feel less like he is lying in the center of an enormous labyrinth that he will never escape from. But the tunnels seem to resist his every effort to be known or categorized, and so he gives up early on.
It’s not like he needs to get around to specific places much. All that exists within the Kiln are the tunnels, the churning pits of magma underneath, and the enormous cavern at the center of it all. The only noise that echoes through it is the distant rushing of the lava, a constant ebb and flow that he lets wash over him from time to time when the silence of his own mind becomes too much.
He sits under the yawning abyss over his head and closes his eye. As he tips his head back, he sinks into the solitary memories of his god. It does not matter that a prayer to heaven has probably never once graced this place; the Flower-Crowned Martial God was never associated with heaven in the ghost’s mind regardless. If the clouds upon which heaven itself rested were to fall, and if the world evolved past the need for gods, he would still worship without falter.
But it frightens him, somewhat, that as time passes, he begins to find it more difficult to picture his god’s face. He still recalls the warmth of his encircled arms perfectly, still remembers the beauty of his wrath and pride in the face of his misery. But his image—the slope of his smile, the stars aflame in his eyes—grows thin and wan in his mind’s eye, a ghost itself.
In the persistent heat of the center of the dormant volcano, he remembers shivering over a damp stone altar. That small, run-down shrine was more of a home than anywhere he had lived before. The statue that smiled despite the rain that beat down upon its face or the insults that common rebels spat upon had shone brighter than the hate that had plagued him all his life. It repurposed his energy into a devotion that was near blasphemous for its intensity.
In the darkness of the mountain that consumed nearly every ghost that entered it, the nameless ghost opens his eye.
Of course, that is what he needs. Outside the mountain, he had built his devotion on sacrifice. He spilled blood as offerings because he lacked fine wine. He dispersed spirits because he could not provide fruits and flowers. And he hadn’t the time or resources to build extravagant temples or altars.
But here he lies now, surrounded by precious rock and minerals, and an endless expanse of space. It even sits tucked away from the judgmental eye of heaven.
It’s about time he began worshipping properly.
-
For two years, he barely stops his fervent worship. His hands do not rest—they sculpt and paint with clumsy fingers at first, but soon grow steady and sure of themselves with each new creation. They carve that same smile of his memories over and over again until it is ingrained once more in his mind; they capture the moment of his salvation on the rough walls, a deliberate act of sanctification of this empty place.
As he paints the ugly creature that worships His Highness at the bottom of each mural, he cannot help but think about his own face. The last time he caught a glimpse of himself, he was a deranged blood-soaked monster. He doesn’t know how he looks now, with an empty eye socket and pearled eyelids that healed all wrong—not to mention the wild dark hair and stained black soldier’s clothes that remain from his service in both life and death.
When he carves the individual petals on the flowers that his god earned his name for, he tries to recall his own name. It had never felt like his—after all, it was not even a proper name. Only a mother’s moniker for a child that not even she expected to survive past infancy.
From hard rock he shapes delicate, paper-thin flower petals in the center of soft, open palms. And from somewhere deep within his consciousness, something begins to form. Something to hold onto. Something to call his own—to call himself.
With every finished piece the Kiln seems to grow warmer. Surrounded by the physical manifestations of his belief, a ghost waltzes through the tunnels and caves like they are the most lavish living quarters the world has ever known. He is sustained by his creation, by the hands that can sculpt rather than destroy, by the devotee’s eye that mines beauty from memory and turns it into ever-lasting silver.
And somewhere in between the heat of the magma bubbling away down below and the sprawling murals on the vast cavern walls, a ghost finds itself born from the purest hatred and carved out of the deepest love.
~
The second Supreme Ghost King in history breaks from the Kiln much like a god ascends to heaven. It shakes the earth and sky to their cores, rains ash upon the Ghost Realm, and leaves every avid storytelling creature scrambling to spread the word as if their very lives depended on it.
Naturally, word travels quickly.
This new ghost king dresses all in black—no, in red. He has one eye—unless he has three—and a deadly sentient scimitar that can kill with a thought—no, he’s far too powerful to even need a weapon. He’s a madman—actually, he’s quite decent—a demon of immense greed and hatred—well, who of us isn’t? He’s building a fortress for an army of ghosts—no, it’s a safe haven for outcasts—just outside the borders of the mortal realm. He’s a fallen soldier—he’s an obsessive lover—he’s a revenge-crazed, bloodthirsty freak of nature!
The one thing that ghosts, humans, and gods can agree on is that he despises the heavens with the passion of someone personally wronged by them. He destroyed thirty-three gods in seven days with the snap of a finger and a single lit match. Oh, how people worship him in fear, awe, and envy. And if anyone asks, which rarely do they not, the bickering storytellers will passionately swear that his name is—without a doubt—Hua Cheng!
And that is how a real myth is born.