ATEG Chapter 114.2

Marquis Wu shook his jug — there was no more wine. His gaze fell on an empty spot; he seemed to be speaking to Chi Zhenzi, and yet seemed to be murmuring to himself. “The karmic threads are already in chaos. What meaning remains in doing good and holding to one’s precepts?”

When doing good became an invitation to be bullied, when doing evil could instead seize advantage — with living beings guided by such incentives, what would the world become?

Before the Marquis Wu’s Temple, worshippers came and went. The small drum, dressed as a child attendant, was steamed red-faced and sweaty by the heat rising from the great incense burner, handing sticks of incense to the worshippers lined up in queue, watching them bow devoutly to pray to the god for smooth passage in life.

The immortals spoken of by living beings were themselves only beings walking the road of cultivation. Cultivators had no need to pray — cultivators followed the Dao, and the Dao was their guide and shelter.

But what if the Dao itself grew chaotic?

With karmic threads shattered and fates in disarray, with reward and punishment no longer meted out for good and evil — cultivation would lose its guidance, and living beings would lose their way.

Marquis Wu was not asking this of himself. He was asking it of all living beings. He had cultivated the precept-keeping method for two lives, his heart firm and his will resolute — no matter how the external world changed, his own intent would not be swayed by it. He had tried adjusting his precept, but that would be to betray his own heart, and what would that be but the same as abandoning the precept? He was unwilling to abandon it — but was it because he could not bear to lose the power of the precept cultivation method? He cultivated the precept cultivation method — but was he cultivating power?

No. He was cultivating his own heart. If that was so, why adjust the precept?

He had long since considered this possibility before his reincarnation. Heaven and earth were vast, and the power of one person was infinitesimally small. If he wished to maintain his Dao and hold to his precept amid the chaos of heaven and earth, he would have to act through extraordinary means.

He was using himself to fill the void torn open between heaven and earth.

Chi Zhenzi no longer urged him.

“I must take my leave, to make a journey to Mount Tu,” he said.

The Marquis Wu nodded, extending the arm that held the jug and calling for someone to refill it.

Yue Niang drifted silently in, carrying a jug, her face covered by an embroidered beauty-mask that was nearly indistinguishable from a real human face, save for a slight residual stiffness.

The Marquis Wu pointed toward Chi Zhenzi. “This is my senior martial brother. Give him an embroidered thread.”

Yue Niang drew a silken thread from her sleeve and passed it to Chi Zhenzi. Once Chi Zhenzi accepted it, the thread vanished from sight.

Owing to what she had clung to in life, after becoming a ghost cultivator she had first developed two particular abilities: one was the ability to find a person through an embroidered thread, and the other was the ability to alter one’s appearance through an embroidered face. The limitations on these two abilities were also quite evident. The former required the other party to willingly accept the thread — for those whose cultivation exceeded hers, severing it was very easy — but the advantage was that the thread left no detectable trace, being virtually indistinguishable from ordinary objects, and it could not be blocked; as long as the thread was unbroken, she could always follow it to find the person. The latter she had not yet perfected, and the face would still show some stiffness that a discerning person could detect, but compared to ordinary methods of changing one’s appearance, the embroidered face could conceal her spiritual presence, making her appear to be an ordinary mortal.

Marquis Wu gave no explanation, and Yue Niang did not ask further questions. If the Marquis Wu said Chi Zhenzi was his senior martial brother, that meant this was a person worthy of trust. Having refilled the wine, Yue Niang silently withdrew once more, jug in hand.

Chi Zhenzi rose to his feet and glanced at the Marquis Wu. Yue Niang did not understand, but he did. By having Yue Niang give the embroidered thread to him, the Marquis Wu was entrusting to him the care of all the ghosts, spirits, and worshippers under his domain. What sort of person would settle their own affairs in this manner? He poured wine into himself as though filling parched earth with water, yet would not let a single thread of pain show.

Chi Zhenzi pushed open the door of the rear hall and strode out with large steps. “Take care of yourself.”

Marquis Wu tilted the fresh wine into his throat and did not look up, only waving a hand in dismissal.

Before the temple, the incense fires still burned as vigorously as ever. Someone too hurried to wait in line for incense set their roasted chestnuts on the offering table, gave a deep bow to the divine image inside, and hastened back down the mountain, where the red dust of the mortal world below burned with the abundant warmth of ordinary life.

Chi Zhenzi turned his gaze away, and sighed inwardly.

Shouyi…

****

The high platform was well-suited for gazing far into the distance, and equally well-suited for reading the qi of the land.

From the Chenglu Platform of the capital of Liang Kingdom, which seemed to climb toward the heavens, one could observe the full measure of mortal life across Liang Kingdom. Even amid this land of widespread devastation and the aura of suffering, there were a few places of settled human warmth — these were the cities that had been secured by Xuanqing Sect.

“Have you seen the suffering of Liang Kingdom’s people?” Dují’s voice was cold and clear, mingling with the wind at that height. There was no need to look directly — merely from the suffering-malice permeating the land, one could see that it had been heaped up from countless wrongful deaths. “Before the Great Calamity, Liang Kingdom was already like this.”

This suffering-malice had not arisen because of the Great Calamity — Liang Kingdom had been in this muddled state even before the calamity began. People had lived lives equally bitter before the calamity and within it. Before the Great Calamity, Liang Kingdom had not even been wholly in the hands of the King of Liang. Many cities had their own masters — Shezhou City, for instance, had become the territory of the Luo Sect. These places still bore the name of belonging to the King of Liang in name only; each year they paid a token amount of tax, and beyond that had nothing more to do with the King of Liang. How the city was governed, how many people lived there, how much farmland, how prices ran, who commanded troops, whom to attack, whom to worship — all of these were handled by themselves, with no need to request instructions from the King of Liang.

In the vast expanse of Liang Kingdom, the cities that truly and completely answered to the King of Liang numbered no more than two handfuls. The remaining places had fallen into various hands — those held by comparatively upright cultivators, where nearby people could still live normal lives, and those that had fallen to heretical cultivators who did not go so far as to slaughter entire cities — that would be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. People were still useful; they had to be kept. Like pigs. They needed to know nothing except how to breed offspring; they would be fattened up and then slaughtered for their flesh. There were no ordinary civilians there, only slaves. A few obedient ones were pulled out from among them and stuffed into official positions to manage the rest, given a taste of authority as a sweetener — that was sufficient.

These factions had been kept in mutual restraint through the maneuvering of the Disciplinary Bureau, and so no one had made a hard move to swallow Liang Kingdom — the King of Liang was weak, and the other crooked sects and heretical factions were each other’s great enemies. With a tiger crouching nearby, who would bother with a small worm at their feet? If they reached down to crush the worm first, what would happen if the tiger seized the opportunity to take a bite out of them?

Besides, the world was not only Liang Kingdom. If they kept fighting among themselves with no end, what if another kingdom took advantage of the chaos to invade? Where would they find another kingdom like Liang where they could keep people as livestock so freely and openly?

Dují pointed a finger at Shezhou City. “The Luo Sect intended to perform a blood sacrifice on this city a few days ago. My people stopped them. They have done things like this before the Great Calamity as well.” He pointed toward Gannan City, even farther away. “The people there were originally like hens in a cage, like mad dogs in a pen — kept for breeding children and fighting each other. They were born slaves, and knew only how to live as slaves.”

“The suffering of Liang Kingdom lies not in the calamity, but in the chaos.”

These heretical factions and crooked sects that each held their own territory in Liang Kingdom were different from orthodox cultivators — they cultivated neither heart nor character, only grasping for gain. What mortals scheme for is wealth, power, and desire; what these cultivators schemed for were rare treasures that could enhance their power, cultivation methods, and formidable magical tools. They were no different from mortals — without restraint, they let their desires run freely and without limit. Whatever they wanted, they reached out and took it. If they could not take it, they fought. If they could not fight, they plotted by other means. To seize their own interests, they would do anything, issuing commands today and reversing them tomorrow, caring only for themselves, with no consistency whatsoever.

The people under the control of these cultivators had no order at all. They did not know how to live, and could only cling to the cultivators, and so had no choice but to live like wild animals — killing and seizing by instinct — or like livestock, waiting to be killed and seized.

Liang Kingdom needed an order. With order came guidance. Ordinary people need not live in perpetual terror — they would know what it took to keep themselves alive, what actions would bring punishment. The ambitious would know what it took to obtain what they desired, and which lines, if crossed, would mean death.

But in a place like Liang Kingdom, to make any such order hold, it was first necessary to deal with those who had already had their hearts turned feral. For such people, reason was useless — first a batch must be killed by overwhelming force to instill fear, and if there was resistance, another batch would be killed, until the remaining clear-headed survivors could be managed through a combination of incentive and coercion until they submitted.

The order built through such methods might not be good, but even a bad order was better than no order at all.

From that point on, people would no longer need to survive by depending on cultivators, no longer need to pray to immortals — follow the laws, and be self-sufficient.

Dují gazed out from the platform, his eyes both bright and cold. “The world is already in chaos. This is precisely the time to break down before building anew.”

He wanted to extend his order across the entirety of Liang Kingdom.

After their last meeting, his inner bitterness and resentment had been released, and he had returned to take his revenge. In the aftermath of revenge, he had naturally arrived at another question: before revenge, he had held that as his goal — but after revenge, what was he to live for?

After quiet reflection, he arrived at a resolution.

What Dují wanted was not an ordinary order. Though the order he was now establishing by force and power was still being imposed by brute strength, what he wanted was an order stable enough, one not easily broken by any single powerful hand — one that could operate on its own in this world where humans, gods, demons, and ghosts all existed together.

Now he used himself and the power of Xuanqing Sect to bring Liang Kingdom into alignment; in the future, he would have the strength of Liang Kingdom feed back into him in return. Order was originally an invisible, intangible abstraction, but when every person believed in its workings, this formless, substanceless order would acquire power. Just as ordinary people’s thoughts and prayers could be transformed into faith-power for divine cultivators to draw upon, so too could their belief in order naturally be drawn upon by him, its creator.

A decade of life spent in the old ancestral shrine, and the methods used to extend Xu Kang’s life, had left his physical foundation deeply compromised and difficult to repair — but Liang Kingdom could consolidate his foundation, and the formless belief of Liang Kingdom’s people could mend his losses. For this reason, the order he was to build in Liang Kingdom needed naturally to be as stable as possible.

He could not see through Li Quan, but that did not prevent him from feeling that Li Quan was someone worth knowing — only the time had not yet come to entrust him with his full confidence.

“Where does Brother Li plan to go next?” Dují asked.

“Hard to say. I may remain in Liang Kingdom for a while longer,” Li Quan replied.

“I am in the capital of Liang. You may use this to find me,” Dují said, pointing to the jade toggle Li Quan was turning over in his hand.

As they prepared to descend the platform, the immortal statue atop it stood with celestial grace, its robes seeming to flutter in the wind. Dují regarded it with utter indifference — a piece of refined copper this large, left out in the wind and rain, would be far more useful melted down and forged into tools.

Li Quan suddenly asked, “You do not believe in immortals?”

“I do not,” Dují said coldly.

He had also felt the tremors when the earth’s spine was reset — that had been a glimpse of the corner of power belonging to one of the world’s great abilities. As the earth’s spine settled, spiritual essence stabilized, the calamity-qi diminished, and the power of all the earth’s veins grew slowly under its nourishment; every living being in the world had benefited from it. But so what? In the one hundred and twenty thousand years before the earth’s spine had been set in place, had not living beings continued to live through it all the same? He would never place his hopes in another person’s hands. Only what he held in his own grasp was something he could truly rely upon.

Li Quan let out a quiet laugh. “Nor do I.” Beneath his half-lowered eyelids lay a vast, open wildness.

If there were truly an all-powerful immortal, how could heaven and earth have been allowed to become what they are now?