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We met again, Harbinger.
Now hold on, and hold your punches. We are in a dream, the realm souls wander to in their slumber. You can't touch me here, nor can I touch you; though I apologize for intruding without permission, it doesn't really matter when this visit is my last.
Why am I here? To tell you a story about a cave.
Oh come on, no need to look all bored before I even begin. I know you've heard it once, but I promise, this one is better than the last. The Cave and the Sun: Expanded Edition, if you would.
Yes, I'm very obsessed with the sound of my own voice. You would too if you were stuck in the Palace of Darkness for centuries, accompanied only by the cries of hungry ghosts and my nine late colleagues, droning on and on about crimes and punishments. Please, Harbinger, just let me have my one last indulgence before leaving it all behind, once and for all.
Where was I? Ah, the cave.
Officially, it is not a cave, but the Terrace of Gonggong. But if you were born in the empty void beneath, amidst the pooling blood and endlessly collapsing earth, you'd never know.
Whose blood, I heard you ask? The blood of Xiangliu, loyal minister of Gonggong, shed by Yu the Great, from which my kind spawn and return to upon the end of a single life, so that we may be born anew. Rocks weren't the only thing you can spontaneously pop out of in the age of the ancients, it turns out.
One day, a little bird and a little snake crawled out of the pool, like countless others before them, and didn't get eaten by their malformed siblings on the way out. Up and up, they climbed, until they were scooped up by the scaled claws of the elders, nine heads fully grown, and told of their destiny: nothing.
Yes, you heard that right. Nothing.
That was all their kind were, and would be, sealed beneath the Five Altars, misbegotten ilks of the Floodbringer, whose blood and flesh were marked forever by the deeds of the Breaker of the Sky Pillar.
“So venture not into the light above,” they warned, even as their ramshackle nests sank deeper and deeper into the putrid swamp. “Our essences are cursed, stained by the transgressions of our forefathers. You will bring them nothing but misery and destruction, and be boiled down to nothing in return.”
And it was easy for the little bird to almost believe them, as she tore into the flesh of their malformed siblings, spawns of Xiangliu who had come back incomplete, in bits and pieces, driven only by hunger until they dissolved into the pool of blood once more.
But, as always, the best way to get someone to do something is warning them against it, and the little snake is a born contrarian.
He heard the call while hanging upside down on a stalactite, tasting the copper-scented air with his forked tongue, trying to catch a whiff of the wind that slipped through the cracks.
They all did. Yet, unlike the ones above ground, it was a call some were still capable of refusing, dampened by the seals and reduced to a fraction of its strength.
Come to me, it said, and only the spawns with the weakest and strongest will listened.
"What are you doing, Ah Jiu?" The little bird yelled, hovering above the many-limbed tide of malformed spawns, stepping all over each other as they made their way up the steep cliffs. "Come back here, right this instant!"
The little snake did not listen. Could not listen. As he unfurled his own wings and followed the tide, the call had become a song, loud and mesmerizing, drowning out all the other sounds inside and outside of him, till only a single word remained: Come.
So, like any frustrated, overprotective sibling, the little bird took off after him.
They emerged out of a sea of blood, covered in the viscera of their malformed siblings, who had slammed themselves against the protective spells of the seals, over and over and over, until a brief opening was created.
They looked into the light together, and it burned. Horribly. It's a miracle that they weren't blinded forever.
The little snake, who saw more with his tongue than his actual eyes, was the first to regain his senses. Whereas the world inside the cave was like a spiderweb, thin threads stretching across a metal-scented void, the world outside was a tapestry of smells and sounds and vibrations, stretching endlessly towards the horizon.
He took so long adoring this tapestry, he didn't even notice the little bird flying off. As fierce and practical-minded as she was, when she heard the call in all of its wondrous, terrible glory, she darted after it like a huntress pursuing her prey, an arrow cutting through the air.
If she was alive in this day and age, she'd be the sort of tourist who headed straight for the destinations, took photos of the biggest, most iconic landmarks, then spent the rest of the day sleeping on the bus. The little snake, however, preferred to stroll his way there leisurely. Enjoy the scenery, even as the tour guide was screaming his name into the speaker, telling him to hurry up, for heaven's sake.
Why am I so familiar with such...modern stuff? My my, do you know how many tourists managed to die in the dumbest manner ever, and how many of them ended up in front of the Tenth Court? Impersonating a king of the Underworld meant I got a share of the workload too, and I'll admit, after all the extra paperwork and inane cases the others had thrown in my way, it made killing them just a tiny bit cathartic.
Back to the little snake. When he arrived, the entirety of demonkind had gathered beneath a towering mountain peak. From its top, the call echoed on and on. Amidst beasts and beings of all shapes and sizes, he could barely spot the little bird, her dark, iridescent feathers standing in stark contrast with the white fur of the nine-tailed fox beside her.
He was only allowed a single glance, before the call became a deafening choir, and a verdant banner, made of jade-like scales, was raised up into the air, by a stunningly beautiful woman with the lower body of a snake.
A goddess, she called herself. And she had summoned them here to topple a dynasty.
You have already met Nüwa, Harbinger. You know very well what she's like.
Whatever you think of her now, I have a warning for you: do not ever see her as your mother, or your kin. Or anything other than a goddess.
We are her kin. Everything born naturally from Heaven and Earth, out of the Qi flow of Yin and Yang, whether they call themselves gods or demons——are of the same substance.
And look how she treated us. Watch that banner, the Spirit Calling Banner, work its magic, calling us to kneel before her regardless of our will. Would you ever make such a thing and keep it in storage, just in case you need to raise it against your friends and family?
You, whom she molded from stone and clay, are not her children either. Not even the children of a terrible parent.
The best analogy I can come up with is a figurine collector and her collections. If my brief peeks into the living realm hold true, some collectors love their dolls more than anything. Would probably save their collection instead of all the other valuables, when a fire broke out in their house.
But figurines can't think or feel. They won't have a problem with being locked eternally in a glass case and having it be their entire world. They don't bleed when used in a wargame. Nor will they worship their collector as a goddess, or write a love poem to her.
If Nüwa was ever human, I'd sympathize with her disgust a lot more, when Zhou the Tyrant expressed his desire to take her as a concubine.
Well, she isn't, and neither am I.
She sent my sister and her new friends to tempt King Zhou and topple his dynasty, promising to release our kind from the Terrace in return, then executed them for doing exactly that. All because they had harmed too many of her precious figurines in the process. Honestly, what was she expecting?
This, I can never forgive.
I, however, am not poor Azure. I don't fancy myself a champion for demonkind, and my dear sister had made her choices, however unwise they were. I have waited all these years, endured more setbacks than you can count, done my fair share of manipulation and sacrifices, for a goal greater than petty revenge.
I wish to shatter the cage that traps us all. Unravel the cruel threads of Fate and Destiny.
What do you know of Chaos, Harbinger?
It's scary. And bad. Hmm, I expected to hear that, yet I'm still disappointed. How very human——and divine, to impose morality and wishful thinking and arbitrary orders onto the unfathomable, the natural!
Allow me to show you a glimpse of the truth. The same truth the little snake gazed upon when he returned to the cave, and made his efforts in vain, to save those who did not wish to be saved.
This is Chaos.
The primordial cosmic sea, the warm deluge of nothing and everything. The potential for Life.
"One begets Two, Two begets Three, Three begets everything." Chaos separates into Yin and Yang, and through the copulation of the two, Heaven and Earth and Life come into existence. The spontaneous spawning of beings from Qi flows, from the mighty gods and fantastic beasts of old to your garden-variety yaoguai, as primordial matter divides itself——that will be impossible without Chaos.
To put it in simpler terms: remember the blood of Xiangliu? From the pool we came, and it's the pool we'd ultimately return to.
"After everything you've said and done, I'm even less convinced that it's a good thing."
Oh, that is not an argument. Merely a statement of facts. At the end of the Great Cycle, when the process of division runs out of momentum at last, everything will return to Chaos and be reborn once more.
An end that will not come in the next few eons, yet one Nüwa desires to "protect" this world from, nonetheless.
Confused? Need some time to process what you've just heard? No worries. Let me tell you another story in the meantime.
Or, as I like to call it, the fable of the failed cosmetic surgery.
The god of the South Sea is Shu, the god of the North Sea is Hu, and the Lord of the Center is Hundun.
The three encountered each other inside the domain of Hundun, and Hundun welcomed them warmly as guests.
To repay his kindness, Shu and Hu thought up an idea: "All humans have seven orifices through which they look and listen, eat and breathe. Yet Hundun doesn't have any. Let us bore some for him, so he can sense the world."
Everyday they bore one orifice, and on the seventh day, Hundun died.
"...What was the point of this story?"
Who knows! Maybe it doesn't have one. Maybe the old human who wrote it was poking fun at the incessant need to find a point in everything, like he always did.
But my point, Harbinger, is this: death, destruction, all the scary stuff you are thinking of——these are not the essence of Chaos, merely the results of its division. You cannot have Life without its opposite, Yang without Yin; for every push, there must be a pull.
Thus, by dividing this world from Chaos, Nüwa has ensured its doom.
Much like water, if you build a dam and only dams to defend against a flood, the silts and mud gradually build up at the bottom, and it's only a matter of time before the river overflows into an even more catastrophic deluge.
By creating the Pillar of Heaven, what would have been nothing but a storm of Qi currents, a surge of spontaneous births and deaths in the ancient ages, became a disastrous flood that periodically threatened to engulf the artificial bubble once and for all.
It is her prison as much as ours. And when its walls fell at last, it would have taken every single prisoner with it, in the same way the Terrace of Gonggong has taken mine.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so the saying goes.
Unfortunately, the little snake is quickly disabused of such notions. In the decades he was away, the cave had grown even colder, darker, more dismal than ever. Fewer of his kin stood in the swamp, as more and more youths came back malformed, wrong, incomplete, the Chaos in their blood fizzling out with each passing and birth.
Yet still they clung to the familiar, the corrosive certainty, the willful ignorance.
“You have taken the brightest of us with you, allowing her to burn up in the light, and still you dare whisper your poison into the ears of the younglings? Still you wish to lure them to such a cruel fate?”
Monster. Unforgivable.
Words turned into sharp retorts turned into accusations turned into screams, then, at last, pleadings, as his kin tied him to the heaviest stone they could find, then pushed it off a cliff, into the abyss where all the blood flowed to and gathered.
He sank and sank, further and further away from the nonexistent light of their warm bodies, for what seemed like an eternity.
Then he opened his eyes and saw.
He saw everything he had been, every time he had crawled out and returned to the pool. Basked in the remembrances of those he once called kin, clinging to him like dews on metal as he shook them aside, and gazed deeper into the blood-red void.
He saw the nine-headed serpent, hissing, sinking into and lunging out of the earth below as if it was made of water. Before it was a man with a face like weathered cliffs and an ape-like gait, who calmly held up his golden staff, standing tall against the poisonous tides the serpent unleashed with each of its breaths.
He saw the faceless vermillion beast, the winged tiger, the beast with human face and boar tusks, the horned monster gnawing on its own flesh, raging in vain as the glowing chains dragged them down, into the void between the stars.
He saw the red-headed giant, his snake tail lashing out wildly against the circle of fire that was shrinking around him, fueled by the burning man with the body of a beast. With one last desperate roar, the giant leaped out of the flames, plunging his head right into the golden pillar that stood between Heaven and Earth.
A crack formed. He looked into it, and he saw, he saw, he saw it all——
Come back to us, the shades of the pool cried out behind him. Come back and forget everything. Close your eyes and begin anew. Come back, it's safe and warm in here.
Never, he said.
Then he reached into the depth of himself. Felt the little droplet of warm chaos, cracking, pulsating, dividing——and set it aflame.
He slithered through the blood, like a flame burning across a trail of oil. Past the long-submerged caverns where generations of spawns once carved their tales into the stone, past his writhing, malformed siblings, through the cracks in the collapsed entrance where a little snake and a little bird once chased after the echoes of a call.
The seals did not even activate, as he burned his way out of long-dried bloodstains, and emerged into the chamber of the Five Altars.
Meticulously, he shattered them, one by one. With each altar that crumbled, the earth beneath shook, and the cracks in the ceiling and walls widened.
He could sense the ripple in the blood, feel his fellow spawns dissolving back into the pool. It was quickly becoming a vortex in the lightless depth, as the essence of Chaos ate through the bedrocks, the thick Yin energy of the Underworld, the very fabric of space, returning to the great beyond where true peace lay.
A peace that would be forever out of his reach. Or so he thought, as the Terrace came down around him.
"Wow, you are even more of a monster than I thought."
Ah, I see what you are doing here. Such childish provocation will no longer work on me, now that I'm in the process of discarding my own childish indignance, my body sinking deeper and deeper into the primordial sea as we speak.
But still: if trying to save people without their consent makes me a monster, then yes. I am a monster, and so are you, Harbinger.
Please. You think you have found a true third solution, a long-term one? No, had Nüwa even explained it properly, what your sacrifice was supposed to accomplish?
Of course she didn't. So allow me.
The so-called Great Cycle she spoke of is nothing like the real deal. It is as artificial as the division between this world and Chaos.
Had I not awakened you prematurely, you'd have emerged into a cold, desolate, broken realm where all life had withered, yet was not allowed to be broken down and returned to its origins. You'd have walked like a lamb to the slaughter, led by the last few ghostly fools of the Underworld, to burn yourself up inside the Pillar and reset the world. Moving it back in time to the very beginning, where life still flourished.
This is your true destiny. This is what she thinks of as a mercy, creating a sacrificial effigy who has no attachments, nothing to miss. Having never been properly alive, surely death will be as light as a feather to the poor thing!
"Then why did you still want me to sacrifice myself?" Have I ever told you that, child? Your decision was your own, whether I liked it or not. Had you said "No!" to my face and walked away to face the end with dignity, I'd have defended that decision too, and I did.
Either way, I'll have my exit. Whether swept up in the flood and returned to Chaos in bits and pieces, or...to a point where I'd no longer remember. When I'm still capable of making different choices.
Now, your solution is unexpected, not gonna lie, but still one that upholds the division. Instead of using five powerful support beams to hold up the broken pillar, you've made the entirety of humanity into its anchor, tying them irrevocably to the fate of the world.
If I were a true monster, the easiest way to render your effort naught would be killing off large swaths of them in one go, before they had time to fully adapt to their new reality. As wonderful as it is, this new barrier you've created is more of a net instead of a brick wall, full of holes, and an emissary such as me can easily slip through.
This emissary, however, is not the one you should be looking out for. It's the exiles, and they are coming.
But I've lingered and rambled long enough, haven't I? Guess it's time to leave my doubts behind, too, along with whatever sentimentality for this world that remains.
It's a pleasure talking to you, child. I'd say "Don't miss me too much", except I know you won't. Literally. You won't remember this dream, even if you want to.
And when we meet again——if we ever meet again——I will be me no longer, nor trapped in this maelstrom of divisions.
I will have merged back into the One, and I sincerely hope you will too, one day.