The mist on the mountain moved like a tide, drifting with the wind.
Yi Qiuyi and Yi Cun’er couldn’t see anyone through that sea of cloud, all they could hear was their junior sister’s heartbroken sobbing somewhere in the white haze.
They were frantic with worry.
In all the time they had known her, Junior Sister had never once wept so openly, so completely undone.
What had that unreasonable Chi Fengxue done to bully Junior Sister Fuliu now?
They squirmed and twisted, trying to work free of the vines binding them. But that mediocre senior sister of theirs, who used to be no match for either of them, had somehow trained up such quick footwork that they hadn’t even had time to pull out a talisman before they were trussed up tight.
Damn that Chi Fengxue!
The two of them shouted, “Chi Fengxue, stop bullying Junior Sister! Come at us if you’ve got the nerve!”
From somewhere, two drab gray mountain sparrows came flying out and circled twice above their heads.
‘Splat.’
An unidentified object dropped with perfect accuracy into their open mouths.
The youths spat frantically, hacked out the bird droppings, then clamped their mouths shut and glared murder at the sparrows.
Fortunately the sparrows flapped one more circle and left.
Damn birds!
They roared, “Just you wait, in a bit I’m going to butcher the both of you, dip you in honey, and eat you roasted.”
It wasn’t long before the sparrows came back, and they’d invited friends, bringing a whole flock of drab gray mountain birds with them.
The flock circled above their heads.
And then came the downpour, white and torrential.
The two youths stood there dazed and unfocused, heads plastered with bird droppings, no longer daring to utter a single threat.
It was the most unforgettable day they’d had since coming up the mountain.
When Feng Fuliu finally turned and walked out of the mist onto the plank walkway, she saw the droppings covering the ground and the two “dung men” hanging off the cliff, and froze as well.
“Qiuyi? Cun’er?”
The youths turned stiffly to look at her, and clear tears rolled down, washing two clean tracks through the mess on their faces.
“Wuuuu, waaaah—!”
Wails of pure misery rose through the valley and echoed on and on.
Hearing the crying from back up the mountain, Fengxue put a hand to her forehead. The two mountain sparrows darted back and forth around her as if presenting their achievements for a reward.
“All right, all right,” Fengxue said, digging out a piece of fruit to feed them. “Don’t pick on people too much.”
The sparrows chirped, “Love Ah Xue, love Ah Xue.”
Fengxue’s mouth curved, and she rubbed the soft crowns of their heads with her fingertip.
Behind her the crying grew louder, more forlorn and aggrieved by the moment.
Fengxue couldn’t help laughing, and then she thought again of the way Feng Fuliu had suddenly started crying.
A beauty with red-rimmed eyes, weeping into the wind, pitiable enough to move even her.
Besides highborn princesses like Zhangsun Heyue, there were also plenty of orphaned children on the mountain. They had lost their parents in these turbulent times and were left wandering with no one to rely on, until some Daoist making the rounds below picked them up and brought them home.
Ge Chunsheng was one such child. So was Feng Fuliu.
It was said that “the Way of Heaven is without feeling, and regards all things as straw dogs”, yet there was another saying passed down in Xuanmen:
‘The Way of Heaven plays no favorites, yet it tends to side with the good.’
When cultivators traveled down the mountain to wander the world and slay demons, and came upon a child starving to death by the roadside, in the end none of them could look on coldly and treat the child as a straw dog.
Disasters had come thick and fast in the mortal world these past years, and so the disciples of Qingming Mountain had multiplied, and every one of them carried some grief in their past.
What she’d said just now must have struck at whatever Feng Fuliu kept buried, to make a girl usually so composed and so deeply calculating burst into tears and lose her voice to sobbing in an instant.
If not for a world in chaos, very few parents would ever send a child up to a bleak, austere mountain to cultivate the Dao.
Fengxue recited silently to herself: ‘The immortal way holds life precious, and delivers all beings without limit.’
“Chi Fengxue, you just wait,” one of the youths bawled between sobs. “Wuuu, you just wait.”
Sooner or later we’ll make you know what it’s like to have dung raining down on your head.
Fengxue raised her brows and smiled, spun the Fuwei sword in her hand, and shouted toward the mist, “Fine by me, I’ll be waiting!”
Her mood was excellent. She spread her arms like a bird taking flight, the mountain wind roared, and the milk-white haze on the slopes was abruptly blown apart.
This was one of the few techniques she could actually use: wind-riding.
Qingming Mountain rose high as the clouds and its paths were treacherous, but the disciples seldom resorted to techniques, preferring to climb the perilous peaks on their own two feet, moving through the woods like gibbons.
It was a rule handed down over centuries, for three reasons.
First, new disciples had shallow spirit-foundations, and using techniques recklessly led easily to injury.
Second, it taught disciples to keep their feet on the ground and never fantasize about reaching heaven in a single step.
Third, the elders held that the spiritual energy of this world, along with its sunlight and rain and dew, belonged to all living things.
A cultivator might draw on spiritual energy to work techniques, but every portion a person used was a portion less for the grass, trees, birds, and beasts. One who sought to understand the Way of Heaven should not compete with other living things for its bounty.
Therefore, for the sake of the mountain’s flowers and grasses, its birds and beasts and insects and fish, disciples were to use their own bodies and do a bit more walking, thank you very much.
Naturally there were also plenty of disciples unwilling to suffer physical labor, who would rather sneak a technique to speed the journey, and then be caught by their elders and get a good hard whipping across the backside with a bamboo cane.
At the moment, though, Fengxue didn’t care to worry about any of that.
The mountain wind lifted her weightless body, the sparrows of the forest wheeled around her, and the pale haze drowned the ridges. Emerald pine forests, sheer cliffs, and Daoist palaces appearing and vanishing again all flickered past at speed, like a freehand ink painting splashed across silk.
Riding the air, cutting through cloud, roaming free between heaven and earth. She flew over the ranges with the birds and burst up through the boundless mist, and there was nothing but clear blue sky, the sea wide, the heavens high.
It felt as though all the gloom packed down in her chest had gone up like smoke, leaving only lightness and joy.
In her last life a single leaf had covered her eyes [1]one small thing blinded her to everything else jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2991336_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2991336_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, and she never saw the blue sky.
In this one, all she wanted was to break through the clouds and see how vast the world really was.
Fengxue rode the wind, skimming over hills and fields, watching the Daoist palaces sink into the sea of clouds, and began making plans for this life.
Qingming Mountain was a rare pocket of peace in the mortal world. The pity of it was that she couldn’t stay long.
In the Demon Den she had already been tainted by demonic qi, and in time she would slowly turn into a demon herself.
Haaah…
Fengxue’s feelings about Qingming Mountain were complicated. However ignorant a youth might be while on the mountain, once they went down they still remembered “slay demons and defend the Dao”, and if they saw someone in danger, they’d try to save that person even at the cost of their own life.
But in the traditional teachings of Qingming Mountain, demons did not count as people.
Not even demons in human shape, who could speak, who could be reasoned with.
Once they had gained something from their study of the Dao on the mountain, many disciples chose to go down and travel. In the course of those travels they fought vicious ghosts and demons, and with blood and lives they distilled a body of practical experience and compiled it into a volume called the ‘Record of Cloud-Wandering’.
The book set out in exhaustive detail how to kill a monster, flay it, and refine it into pills, or how to beat a vengeful ghost until its soul scattered beyond recovery. Its guiding spirit was cold-blooded ruthlessness and remarkable savagery.
In her last life, once she became a demon, things had gone very badly for her indeed, man and dog alike came along to give her a kick, and the ones who kicked hardest were the assorted immortal masters who slew demons and defended the Dao.
Fengxue shuddered without warning. Her half-baked wind-riding technique failed at that exact moment, and the wind circling her vanished with it.
“Ptooey—”
She spat out the weeds in her mouth, brushed the mud off her clothes, and thought with some relief that at least she had demonic qi bolstering her now, thick skin, tough flesh, good at surviving falls.
She’d landed right on a green hillside, grass thick as a carpet, with a few specks of snowy white shifting about in it.
Several big-rumped sheep were grazing slowly.
Below the green slope lay a small city named Jingquan, Well Spring.
Jingquan had a spring of sweet, fragrant water, and the wine brewed from it was smooth and mellow on the tongue with a clean sweetness in the aftertaste. It was quite famous.
Fengxue drew a deep breath of the spring wind, and the wind seemed to carry a soft scent of wine.
Merchant caravans coming to buy liquor, drinkers who had traveled from far away, scholars in white robes, they queued in a long dragon at the city gate and filed one by one into this city of wine.
In her last life, up on the mountain, Fengxue had practiced the sword hard every day with her mind on nothing else, and had never even noticed there was a wine city at the foot of the mountain. All she knew was that one stretch of mountain road was treacherous, and that senior brothers and sisters often went down to buy wine and came back sloshed, and on that stretch of road would go down ‘smack’ and snap a leg.
That stretch was called Broken Leg Cliff.
Later, when she was wandering the mortal world, for reasons she couldn’t explain she too had developed a taste for what was in the flask. By then Jingquan’s fine wine had grown famous, but by then everyone was out to beat her on sight, and of all the wide world, the one place she dared not go near was this little wine city at the foot of the great immortal mountain, to sit down with good wine and a bite of freshly steamed wine-lees cake.
She’d come down with such a crash, a great clattering thud, that perhaps it startled the flock, for the old shepherd silently waved his sheep along, driving them toward the woods off to the side.
Fengxue narrowed her eyes and said with a laugh, “Old man, sorry about that. Let your sheep keep grazing here, I’m off to drink!”
The old man’s straw hat was pulled low enough to hide half his face. He nodded.
Fengxue walked over and asked, “Old man, are you a local? Do you know which house in Jingquan brews the most authentic wine?”
The old man kept his head down and said in a low voice, “I’m an outsider. I wouldn’t know…”
Fengxue’s smile was sincere. “Old man, I startled your sheep just now. Let me buy you a drink in the city, what do you say?”
The old man waved a hand and declined, saying he didn’t drink, then began herding the sheep away.
A hand came down on his shoulder.
The girl behind him had a crisp, clear voice and a pretty face, and she asked, as though the thought had only just occurred to her, “Old man, why do your sheep have round pupils?”
His face was hideous with rage as he lifted his head, and in his eyes was the flash of a silver-white blade, frost-pale as snow.
In a world that held righteous sects like Qingming Mountain, sworn to slay demons, there were naturally also plenty of heretics and fiends who worked sinister arts.
After going down the mountain, Fengxue had encountered a great many varieties of evil technique used to harm people. Among them was one wicked art called ‘beast-making’.
A sorcerer draped an animal hide over a person, and the person became livestock.
Having finished off the old man, she stood with the dripping Fuwei sword in hand and murmured, “Junior Sister Feng, oh Junior Sister Feng, I never thought there’d come a day I’d be thanking you.”
Anyone practicing beast-making could hardly be a decent person, she’d struck first and struck fast. Fortunately the Fuwei blade was sharp enough to take the evil cultivator’s head off in one stroke, sparing her a hard fight, one she might well have lost.
Fengxue slid the sword back into its sheath, walked over to that one sheep, and silently recited an incantation. The sheepskin slipped quietly away, and out rolled a girl with a blank, vacant look on her face.
Fengxue turned the other sheep back into people too, and led them into Jingquan.
The children had been fed something or other, they were dull and obedient, trailing behind her like a docile little flock. She delivered them to the county office and told the runners to give the children clean water to drink and let them rest half a day, and if they still hadn’t come around, to go up to Qingming Mountain and ask for a talisman.
“Ask for a talisman? But aren’t you an immortal of Qingming Mountain, miss?”
“An immortal?” Fengxue waved a hand with a rueful laugh. “Ah, I just wave a sword around. What would I know about drawing talismans?”
The parents of the missing children came hurrying to the office soon after, and at the sight of their sons and daughters standing dumbly in the hall the tears poured down as they rushed over to hold them.
“My child, what’s happened to you?”
“Nannan, wake up, sweetheart, Grandma brought your favorite sesame candy.”
“Wuuu, my Niuniu…”
Mercifully, after a little while the children came slowly back to themselves and their wits returned.
The parents wept with joy, and only then remembered they ought to thank the one who’d saved them.
A runner pointed toward the door.
“Isn’t the young lady right over, huh? When did she leave?”
“She was standing right there a moment ago. Wearing Qingming Mountain robes, that one, but she said she can’t draw talismans, that she just waves a sword around. Probably some wandering swordswoman who admires Qingming Mountain.”
“If you want to thank her, next time you see her, give her a bit of money. The girl looked poor as anything, several patches on her clothes.”
…
Fengxue had no idea she’d just been written off as a shabby pauper.
With a cloth bundle at her waist and an empty gourd in hand, she looked around at everything with fresh curiosity, getting ready to pick out a tavern with good wine at a fair price and fill up her flask.
Jingquan was crowded and bustling with life.
Drunks lay sprawled on the stone steps hollering for another jug, a scholar leaned on a railing, seized by poetic inspiration, reciting verses into the breeze… even the cats seemed drunk, sprawled limp in the sunlight with their soft white bellies turned up.
The world was sliding into chaos, and yet this little city still held some lingering glimpse of a golden age.
Up ahead at a street corner there seemed to be some kind of performance, with a big crowd gathered around.
Never one to miss the fun, Fengxue squeezed in too.
At the center of the ring was a fair-skinned, delicate-featured youth, and the “dog” he had on a leash.
They called it a dog, but it had a round human face.
The youth called out, “Take another look, everyone. This bad dog of mine doesn’t just understand human speech, dance, and do sums, it can write, too.”
A scholar objected loudly, “I don’t believe it! How could a dog write? It hasn’t got hands.”
The youth grinned wide, showing a mouthful of white teeth. “Heh, I already told you, this is a dog demon that’s come into its own. Crafty little devil. There’s no end to the characters it can write.”
The scholar tossed over the brush, ink, paper, and inkstone he carried with him. “Then write. If it can’t, you’re fined a jug of wine.”
The youth laughed. “And if it can, you toss me a bit of money.”
The yellow dog crawled up to the brush, took it in its mouth, and dipped it in the ink.
The crowd’s eyes went wide, everyone cried out that it was marvelous.
Gripping the shaft of the brush, one paw pinning down the white paper, it wrote out in shaky strokes a single character: ‘help’.
Before the character was even finished, the youth snatched the brush out of its mouth in a hurry and said, “That’s all the playing for today. Off you go, all of you!”
The yellow dog lifted its face and blinked, and somehow squeezed out a line of tears. Then it opened its mouth.
There was no tongue inside.
“Hey, is that dog for sale?”
“It is not!”
“But I can meet your price.”
The youth looked toward the voice. It was a pretty girl carrying a gourd.
Even as she spoke she was untying the cloth bundle at her waist of her own accord, and she flung it at him. “Here, take a look. Is this enough?”
Mid-throw the black cloth came loose, and a ghastly pale human head with a hideous face came flying at him.
The youth’s expression changed completely, he scooped up the yellow dog and turned to run.
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