ATEG Chapter 135

Bang!

The table flipped, the teapot shattered. The attendant’s smile stretched to the point of drawing blood at the corners of his mouth; the cloth draped over his shoulder curled like a frog’s tongue, but he himself was hurled backward without any control, crashing into the counter.

Wine splattered, the counter splintered. The bookkeeper sidestepped the flying attendant, and with a flick of his wrist, the abacus burst apart — splitting into a chain of beads, each one carved from the skull of some creature. One hundred and five skulls pulsed with life-force and death-intent, gnashing viciously toward Li Quan.

Hmmm——

Sleeves billowing like wind, the abacus beads scattered in every direction. The patrons throughout the hall leapt to their feet — some dodging, some fleeing, some launching themselves into the fray. The attendant twisted his face and clawed his way up from the floor; a teacup rolled off him and smashed to the ground with a crack. Before the shards had even finished falling, he was already lunging forward again, that warped grin still plastered on his face, a gaping hole torn through his belly.

Spirit Deer Vanishing Step — Bai Qingya’s figure drifted and flickered, and the hall seemed to transform into a deep mountain hollow. The patrons who had been dodging scattered in all directions without knowing where they were. Those who struck at him saw only white deer leaping — never Li Quan himself. Every attack launched found nothing but the phantom silhouette of a deer.

A shout saturated with killing intent thundered from the back courtyard. The door curtain was blasted aside, and in charged a cook clutching a sharp knife, reeking of blood, striding toward Li Quan in great steps — only to be sent tumbling when the attendant, flying backward faster than he had come, crashed straight into him.

Li Quan planted a foot on the bookkeeper’s throat. “It seems your innkeeper doesn’t much care whether you live or die.”

The many lodging guests inside the inn had already been ensnared by Bai Qingya. The unfathomably dangerous attendant, the bookkeeper, and the cook who had charged out from the back courtyard looking thoroughly menacing — not one of them could drag themselves back to their feet.

Then a wind rose inside the inn. It began as barely a whisper, then in an instant surged into a howling gale — shrill and piercing, ferocious and venomous.

Bai Qingya’s form abruptly materialized, his face drained of color. His Dao arts had been broken through by this dense and malevolent force. Nor was he the only one affected — the cultivators who had emerged from within his arts each wore an expression of unbearable pain.

The countless wronged souls imprisoned in the inn stirred and shrieked restlessly. They could feel it: the hour of their release was drawing near.

They would be permitted to briefly leave this cage — to tear, to devour these cultivators who now stood atop their suffering!

This was the inn’s greatest weapon. The innkeeper need not show himself at all; so long as he held dominion over the power of these resentful souls, he held dominion over everything in this inn.

From the floorboards beneath their feet, from the ceiling above their heads, from the walls and pillars and tables and chairs alongside them — countless resentful souls burst forth like startled clouds of dust and surging river spray, erupting amid ear-splitting shrieks. In an instant, ghostly shadows blanketed everything.

There was nowhere to hide.

Bai Qingya formed a seal at his chest, eyes lowered. The true form of the white deer shimmered into being behind him — head raised high, a pair of snow-white, towering antlers majestic and imposing, flowers and grass sprouting wherever its four hooves touched the ground, sheltering Li Quan within its protection. Beneath this sovereign aura, the ocean of resentful souls all shuddered to a halt.

Yet Bai Qingya’s face grew even paler.

He could hold the inn’s lodgers ensnared with his techniques, and he could hold his own against the attendant without falling behind — even fighting all-out, he might wrestle free from the three attendants and claw his way to an escape. But against this throng of souls whose resentment ran as deep as the sea itself, he could not hold on for long.

This perilous inn had now truly become a savage and brutal beast, and they were inside its belly, with nowhere to run.

The resentful souls froze for only an instant before surging forward once more — carrying with them a fiercer malice, a more savage shriek — yearning to kill, to tear apart, to torment, to drag every living person here down into the sea of suffering alongside them!

Zheng!

All seven strings rang out as one.

The sound of the qin shattered the resentful souls’ shrieks. It was vast beyond measure — like a towering wave cresting high, like snow avalanching down a great mountain. The overwhelming tide of sound drowned out everything, and across heaven and earth there remained only an expanse of boundless white, from head to foot, swallowing every person within it.

Joy — finally able to vent one’s resentment and bitterness, to drag others into the same wretched state as oneself!

Rage — how dare they resist? Why must we endure this suffering? What right do they have to be spared from calamity?

Sorrow — souls forcibly refined into bricks and vessels; to possess sentience yet be treated as a container; to share the same suffering yet be made to slaughter one another.

Fear — to endure day and night the agony of one’s soul being shattered, without a single moment’s relief, without a single moment’s escape; and so to bow one’s head and submit to one’s tormentors.

Love like drifting duckweed and flying catkin — scattered at the first touch of pain.

Hatred like a gossamer thread or a floating sliver of ice — recoiling at the first touch of fear.

Desire — clung to with ferocious tenacity, like a raging fire, yet the heart beneath it wild and confused and weak.

For the Seven Emotions to run this deep — every one of them born from suffering. And the Seven Emotions born from suffering in turn bewildered the mind and blinded the eye, pulling at hearts made frail by torment until they committed act after act, leading ever deeper into suffering.

All living beings: deluded and foolish. Pitiable. Lamentable. Hateful. Wretched.

One vast note of qin music rang out, shattering the Seven Emotions of delusion filling the hall, scattering the dense malice of the resentful souls, and shaking open a vast expanse of white within the hearts of the many cultivators in the inn.

The resentful souls filling the hall stood there in hollow stillness.

No joy. No rage. No sorrow, no fear. And no love, no hatred, no desire.

The expressions on their faces were vacant and lost — as though they had just woken from a nightmare, still remembering the pain of the dream, yet uncertain whether to feel grief for it.

Li Quan held the qin in his arms, his face without sorrow or joy.

All living beings are deserving of compassion.

When the resentful souls’ malice dissolved, the Yellow Springs Inn — forced into existence against the proper order of the Underworld — began to collapse as well. Cups, dishes, tables, and chairs dissolved first into wisps of thin smoke, filling the emptied inn with pale blue mist.

The resentful souls still imprisoned in the inn and not yet released suddenly went quiet. They watched this mist as it dispersed, halting their endless slaughter, and within their venomous and brutish eyes, longing and desire were born.

The innkeeper, who had not shown himself until now, abruptly appeared, roaring in shock and fury. “Stop him — or you’ll all die!”

The pale blue mist rose gently and softly, carrying the inn’s roof along with it as it dissolved into a dreamlike, hazy vapor. In the thin light now filtering down through the emptied roof, the attendant who had been writhing on the ground trying to rise suddenly wrenched his face in agony; before he could let out a single cry, he had already disintegrated into a handful of ash and smoke.

The uppermost guest room had already lost its ceiling. From the back courtyard came the frantic shouts of the middle-aged man — but within moments, he had become a wrinkled, loose-toothed elder; and in another blink, his voice too vanished, and he collapsed on the ground, lifeless, a pile of dry bones.

In the main hall, cultivators likewise began rapidly aging. All of them had survived their tribulation only by relying on the Yellow Springs Inn; if the inn were destroyed, the Five Declines of Heaven and Man would come for them immediately.

The cultivators snapped from their stupor. With their Dao-hearts emptied, the stillness of their minds gave way in an instant to a churning tangle of desires. The qin music, in the end, was only qin music. It could not take the place of a person’s cultivation, nor alter the nature of their Dao-heart. The momentary stillness and purity bestowed by a deity was no match for the deep and tenacious delusions they had cultivated themselves.

Desire pressed and urged; murderous intent erupted. The many cultivators’ differing techniques all converged on the same target.

“Stop me?” Li Quan’s lips curved at the corner, his gaze sweeping sideways.

Every person his eyes fell upon found themselves unable to move. A great chill suddenly arose in the innkeeper’s heart. He seemed to see within those eyes a fathomless abyss — something far beyond anything he could comprehend, a scene too vast to contain — and so an immense and boundless terror rose up within him, and within that terror he trembled without cease.

Only now did he truly understand: the fight before had been nothing but child’s play. All his actions had only caused him, in his own foolishness and arrogance, to proactively release the resentful souls himself. Now that that portion of resentful souls was lost, the Yellow Springs Inn had a breach in it.

Li Quan walked step by step toward the center of the main hall. With every step forward, the Yellow Springs Inn collapsed a little further.

The uppermost rooms dissolved into pale blue mist, and within that mist, the resentful souls knew true joy for having been released.

Throughout the Yellow Springs Inn — in places both here and elsewhere beyond — numerous cultivators suddenly and rapidly aged and perished, experiencing immense terror between the life and death they had for so long been evading.

Another floor of rooms dissolved into pale blue mist, and the light from the world of the living above grew ever stronger.

The bookkeeper suddenly convulsed violently, then shattered into a floor of dust and ash.

The resentful souls waited in joyful anticipation. That joy dissolved the malicious resentment that had been building within them from the force of their old habitual power. The cultivators trembled in fear; that fear wrung from their forsaken, abandoned Dao-hearts one deep, heavy sigh.

Li Quan had already walked to stand directly before the innkeeper. In the back courtyard, when the last attendant dispersed into mist, he too crumbled into a floor of dust. Now in the Yellow Springs Inn, only the ground beneath their feet remained. Without walls on any side, the outside was exposed all around: that eerie path heaped with corpses and coated in ash had vanished; the clinging, viscous mist that had pervaded the place thinned to a bare, faint layer, stripped of the uncanny terror it had carried before. The image of the living world and the image of the Underworld overlapped within the mist.

The innkeeper stared in terror at those abyssal eyes, and suddenly within that abyss he saw himself — he saw one soul struggling desperately among the endless resentful dead. He saw how he had cultivated a body full of ferocity and cruelty, how he had become the strongest, most ruthless of them all. And so he had become the innkeeper, able to hold dominion over the resentful souls here. He had accepted this system. Accepted never dwelling on who had cast them all into this cursed array. Accepted the rule that so long as you were the strongest among this horde of resentful souls, you could in turn enslave them.

The resentful souls who had been freed from the collapsing inn crowded and pressed in all around. Perhaps they should take revenge. Perhaps they should want to tear everyone apart — most of all the innkeeper — to shred this one who had crawled up from among them only to turn around and control them and torment them, to drag him back down into their midst.

Yet not one of them moved.

The joy of release from suffering filled their hearts, and the yearning for liberation surpassed every other desire.

The innkeeper could not move. Within his terror, relief and bewilderment arose together; within those eyes, he saw his former self. Had he too once yearned for release? Or ought he to feel anguish at losing the standing he had clawed his way toward with such difficulty?

Would he be annihilated — like those extinguished aberrations, leaving not even a true spirit in the world? Why had he chosen this path in the first place? But had he truly had any other choice?

Li Quan took one more step forward.

That step seemed to land upon his already-wavering heart, and so the karma he had been resisting wound itself around him dense and tight, gripping fast the soul that had been sliding toward dissolution.

The innkeeper’s shell — that skin draped over his soul — shattered with a great crack. He would bear the fruit of the seeds he himself had planted, and he would be carried far from that black void that had sought to swallow everything he was.

Li Quan turned his palm. Resting in it was a piece of yellow jade, smooth and rich as fat. It dropped onto the floor of the inn — and it was as though an immense and towering mountain had fallen to earth. The inn’s last remaining foundation could not bear the weight of this jade and began sinking downward. The ground belonging to the living world held steady beneath those still inside the inn.

Bai Qingya stared in stunned astonishment at what lay beneath his feet. By means of an inconceivable and tremendous power, they now stood in a state between the real and the unreal, able to observe both the yin and yang sides simultaneously. Every person present could see it: where the yellow jade pressed the inn’s foundation downward — there flowed a dim, still, ancient river. This Yellow Springs Inn had truly been built upon the Yellow Springs!

As that jade piece too sank into the Yellow Springs, a solid, weighty, profound resonance settled firmly into place. The resentful souls within the inn descended one by one into the Yellow Springs, and within the ash into which the three attendants and the innkeeper had dissolved, a point of true spirit fell from each, drawn by the pull of the Yellow Springs back into the cycle of reincarnation.

This was the power of Shetu.

(TL: 社土 (shè tǔ) literally refers to the earth or soil god in traditional Chinese belief, often tied to the land and local spirits.)

The great earth nurtures life and gathers death; Shetu connects to reincarnation. When Shetu perishes, reincarnation grows unstable; the Underworld’s power to draw the true spirits of the dead weakens, and only then can Hundun steal the true spirits of living beings by aberrant means.

If the power of Shetu can be used to re-stabilize reincarnation and restore the connection to the Underworld, then the great calamity of aberrations in the world will resolve itself more than halfway. And this was only the first of the nine Yellow Springs.

The cultivators who still survived within the inn suddenly found they could move again. An understanding rose within their hearts: by following the path, now restored to its proper appearance, back out, they would be able to return to the world of the living. That guest who had smashed up the inn while carrying a qin — he had no intention of taking their lives as well.

They had not died in this catastrophe, and they would no longer need to worry about the lodging fee the Yellow Springs Inn had demanded. But the great calamity remained. The Five Declines of Heaven and Man remained. What were they to do after this?

Some left. Some stayed.

The old man who had been kind enough to warn the two of them earlier sat slumped on the ground. He had not raised a hand in any of the fighting — he had neither the power for it, nor the inclination. With the Yellow Springs Inn destroyed, he had grown so decrepit that he could no longer stand; he would be dead very soon.

Yet his eyes held neither hatred nor fear. He only gazed blankly at Li Quan, every crease of his wrinkles soaked through with grief.

After the qin music, poised between life and death, he had heard that one deep, heavy sigh — the sigh of a Dao-heart honed through many years and then abandoned. Some had ignored it. Some had heard it. And having heard it, the sorrow was inconsolable.

Years of painstaking cultivation, not a single indulgence permitted, and then one great aberration calamity had destroyed everything. Resentment, indignation — at these Five Declines of Heaven and Man that should never have come for him. And in the end, cultivation was gone, and the Dao-heart tempered through suffering was gone too.

“In this world, with karma thrown into disorder — does practicing goodness, keeping the precepts, cultivating the Dao still hold any meaning?” the old man murmured, tilting his head back to ask. His voice was as light as a thread of gossamer that a single breath could scatter.

“It does.” Li Quan lowered his eyes to look at him, his voice like a soft gust of wind lifting that gossamer thread toward the other shore. “They waited — and I came.”

The old man tilted his face upward. Within those downcast eyes, he saw a light — compassionate, warm, and boundlessly vast.

Slowly, he closed his eyes. In the flash between death and life, his Dao-heart gathered itself back together.

On that deeply aged, weathered face, his expression was peaceful and serene. His body dissolved in an instant into specks of fine dust.