Chapter 13
SHENNONG GRABBED HOLD of Kunlun’s wrist. His aged, murky eyes were fixed on the naive yet savage gui as he walked forward. He was already very old. Kunlun-jun could only lean slightly forward and carefully support him. The faintest shadow crossed Kunlun-jun’s face when he looked down at Shennong. Old age meant Shennong was close to death.
Though Kunlun-jun had never experienced old age or death, he could smell the frightening scent of decay clinging to the old man.
“You heard my last discussion with Nüwa, I take it?” Shennong asked.
Kunlun-jun’s brow wrinkled. “Who’d be interested in your debates? Just tell me what we’re supposed to do now. I can’t believe you’re even mentioning Nüwa. If she knew you’d accidentally burned through the Great Fuxi Seal, you’d be lucky if she didn’t try to hunt you down! And doing it with my soul fire means you’re bringing trouble down on my head too.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” said Shennong. There was a passive-aggressive note in the noise Kunlun-jun made in response. Then Shennong coughed, and even his cough sounded old. “Life and death are serious matters,” he said. “All life fears death, and one shouldn’t joke about it. But if you can jump out of the cycle of life and death, then you’ll have no more need to fear.”
“I’m standing right here and not jumping anywhere.” Kunlun-jun’s tone was haughty. “Nor do I need to be afraid. I think you’re the one who should be frightened. But I should tell you that the Great Divine Tree has borne fruit. Only two fruits have ripened in the last century. I gave one to my furball and saved the other for you. It’ll extend your life by another hundred years.”
“Thank you, but I don’t fear death.” Shennong smiled. “Ah, little Kunlun, you don’t understand. If one doesn’t die, doesn’t perish, then one cannot become a god. Perhaps once we’re all dead, you’ll understand.”
Kunlun-jun rolled his eyes and glanced around, as if hoping to find something to stuff into Shennong’s yammering mouth.
“There will be hope, though.” As they were about to leave, Shennong took another long look at the gui, who carpeted the ground. “If life could spring forth from even this most barren of places, surely nothing remains impossible.”
Kunlun-jun was steadying him as they crossed the uneven ground, but upon hearing this, he turned back to look at the two gui closest to them. One was holding the other’s head and gnawing on it. The Mountain God of the Great Wild furrowed his brows again. “What kind of shitty life is this? I think you’re just senile. You should be thinking about how you’re going to explain all this to Nüwa.”
With that, Kunlun-jun and Shennong left the Place of Great Disrespect.
Shen Wei, who’d watched in silence, tugged on Zhao Yunlan’s hand. “Let’s go.” As they followed Kunlun-jun, Shen Wei said, “With your intellect, I imagine you already knew what Shennong was thinking back then. You just disagreed, thinking it was a wild fantasy.”
Zhao Yunlan gathered his thoughts. “Okay, so…Shennong wanted to create the Reincarnation Cycle. That way, as long as souls still existed, they could enter the six paths of reincarnation, where life would become death and death would become life. That was what he meant about standing outside of life and death, right?”
Shen Wei gave a light laugh. “Shennong wanted to use the darkness beneath the Great Seal to separate out the yin and yang on the edge of true death, thereby creating the Reincarnation Cycle.”
“But he obviously didn’t succeed,” Zhao Yunlan said. “If he had, Nüwa wouldn’t have died for the Great Seal.”
“Do you know why he failed?” Shen Wei stopped walking. A peculiar smile appeared on his face, and he continued before Zhao Yunlan could answer. “He couldn’t create the Reincarnation Cycle because there is only emptiness in Chaos. The gui born from Chaos don’t have souls.”
Great evil. A soulless being…
“We are nothing but physical manifestations of Chaos—violence incarnate. From the lowest to the highest among us, from the cradle to the grave, all we can do is instinctively consume and plunder. The craving for the freshest flesh and blood drives us.” For the first time, Shen Wei realized that he felt a kind of pleasure in saying it aloud. It was the kind of enjoyment someone might feel when squeezing their own wound or cutting into their own flesh with a knife. “And me…because you elevated me to divinity by force, I became an anomaly—neither human nor god, neither devil nor ghost. In all the world, I alone was entirely unlike anything else in existence.”
Zhao Yunlan couldn’t say anything.
Since the moment Zhao Yunlan had revealed that he knew Shen Wei was lying to him, Shen Wei had felt as if a lump of ice had sunk down into his heart. There it stayed, unable to go up or down; it had left him deeply chilled on top of his struggle to keep everything bottled up inside. But now, having said all that, he felt a miraculous sort of lightheartedness.
“We are Chaos,” he said. “Chaos that can walk and move through the world. What Ghost Face said to you wasn’t wrong either: death itself came to life thanks to a single flame and birthed us—these supposed ‘living things’ that are neither alive nor dead. What an interesting coincidence.” Shen Wei’s smile faded. He glanced over his shoulder at Zhao Yunlan, voice almost gentle. “But you—without the faintest regard for your own life, you had to come and provoke me. Do you know what you’ve lured in? Do you realize how dangerous this is?”
Zhao Yunlan slung an arm around him from behind. “C’mon, get to the point. Less of this bullshit.”
Through the embrace, his body heat flowed into Shen Wei. It felt like the first sip of warm porridge after being frozen to the very bone. It was enough to make one tremble.
Shen Wei was silent for a while. Before he continued, he reached up and grasped Zhao Yunlan’s hands in front of his chest. “Buzhou Mountain collapsed. The sky fell and the earth sank, thus unexpectedly ending the war between the humans, the yao, and the wu. The endless rain pouring from the hole in the sky washed over the resentful spirits floating in midair and struck the ground, from which nothing grew. And billions of gui climbed out of the abyss…all of which you must have seen in the Great Divine Tree.
“Actually, the day of my birth should’ve been the first time I saw you. But you were standing too far away, unwilling to take even a single step closer to me—as though I were something filthy. My eyes hadn’t fully opened yet, so all I could see was the vague shadow of a green robe.”
Shen Wei shut his eyes. Gently, longingly, he rubbed his cheek against Zhao Yunlan’s hand. “But from birth, I was more ferocious than my brother. I had consumed more of our brethren than he had. At that point, I could already hear, and could vaguely understand, what you and Shennong were saying…so right from the beginning, I knew exactly what I was. Later, I searched the world for you, resisting the temptation of the flesh and blood of the living. I ate only the things that crawled out of the ground—other gui, which I felt were just as disgusting as I was.
“I searched for you because I desperately wanted to ask you what life is.” When he said this, Shen Wei felt Zhao Yunlan’s grip on him tighten. “But then when I finally met you at the edge of that grove, when you were about to climb up Penglai… As soon as I saw you, the words all died on my tongue.”
“Why did I want to ascend Penglai at the time?” Zhao Yunlan asked hoarsely.