by F. C. Yee
I set my hands. He backflipped and landed with the balls of his feet on my laced fingers, and for the first time, I felt the true massive weight of the Monkey, born from a stone. Quentin was a friggin’ tank.
I hurled him sideways, straight at Princess Iron Fan, at the same time as he kicked off my hands. My move would have been an illegal carry in volleyball, but it turned Sun Wukong into a cannon shell.
Nezha whooped again and dive-bombed the enemy, his spear pointing the way. Guan Yu sent a fresh volley of laser blades at Princess Iron Fan. Every attack was going to hit her at the same time.
Princess Iron Fan took in the entire scene and decided she no longer wanted to bother. She spun around on a pointed toe, the prima ballerina demonstrating her grace, and a tornado followed in her wake.
▪ ▪ ▪
The air that hit me from the side scooped me off my feet so precisely that it felt like telekinesis. Guan Yu was sucked up by the raging wind as well, the god’s massive strength rendered meaningless with nothing to hold on to. He tumbled helplessly end over end, a dust bunny of beard and flapping robes.
I was spinning around like Dorothy’s house, watching familiar objects fly by. Bushes. Rocks. Oh hey, the Great White Planet, wide-eyed with fright, clutching his staff as if it were a pool noodle keeping him from drowning. I’d wondered what had happened to him.
A sense of order began to form out of the debris. The struggling gods and I came to float in a rough line, held still by roaring pressure differentials. We could flail all we wanted, but there were no solid surfaces to push off against.
Princess Iron Fan did not suffer from the same problem. She floated up through the center of the storm, supported by pillars of wind. Seeing her lean against nothing, anchored like a kite, told me what to do. Grow, I said to myself. Or stretch. Just reach the ground somehow to gain traction.
Princess Iron Fan shook her head at me.
Before I could change more than an inch in size, she slammed me forward and back against the sides of a clear cage of air. She rattled me like a bug in a jar. I lost focus as my head bounced around, and I tasted blood from my nose and mouth. Only the sight of Quentin trying to reach me kept me from blacking out.
Once she’d knocked the ability to concentrate out of me, Princess Iron Fan examined her captives. Nezha was farthest to her right. She beckoned at him, and he slid over to her as if he’d been mounted on rails.
“What do you want?” he yelled, writhing helplessly in her invisible grasp.
“I want the strongest,” she whispered.
I was concussed, without a doubt. But I could still comprehend why, despite the howling wind, every word she spoke was perfectly clear. If she controlled air, she controlled sound. That was how she’d taunted me from such a distance.
Princess Iron Fan used her invisible grasp to stretch Nezha out like a rack, cutting off his cry of pain. She inspected him from both sides, head to toe, searching for an answer until she found it.
“And it’s not you,” she said to him.
With both eyes, she blasted Nezha at point-blank range.
The young god was completely enveloped by the vortex of clouds. If he screamed, we didn’t hear it. Next to him, Guan Yu bucked with every ounce of his might, trying to get closer to the deadly wind, as if he might be able to pull Nezha out of harm’s way using his teeth.
Quentin was right. His friend was a good man. But Guan Yu’s efforts were in vain. When Princess Iron Fan ceased her attack, there was nothing left where Nezha had been.
The demon didn’t pick another victim from us immediately. She waited again, dissatisfied, until her winds brought one more figure into her floating gallery of targets. Guanyin, who’d been briefly separated from us at the start of the fight.
“Ah,” Princess Iron Fan whispered. “Better.” She elevated the Goddess of Mercy and brought her closer like she’d done to Nezha.
“Wait!” I shouted.
I was still so dizzy that yelling made me want to puke. I swallowed down my bile and shouted the most distracting thing I could think of. “I killed your son!”
Princess Iron Fan pushed Guanyin away and looked at me. This entire time she’d been serene and imperturbable, but now her face was locked in a frown.
“Red Boy’s your son, right?” I had no plan, no goal here other than to get the demon to focus on me instead of my friends. I fought the instinct to struggle and tried to hurt her back the only way I could. “I’m the one who ended him.”
Princess Iron Fan jerked me closer, until her fingers closed around my neck. She could have applied more pressure using her wind magic, but I’d made her angry. I was getting in her head.
“Your son was a rat bastard,” I snarled. “I buried him. I buried him in the dirt with only worms to keep him company. No air for his fire. And the last thing I saw in his eyes as I put him under, was that he was scared and wanted his mommy.”
I couldn’t believe how evil I sounded. But Red Boy was a murderous wretch who’d nearly blown up an entire city. I’d had no regrets. Until now.
Princess Iron Fan took in what I’d said. Mulled over her options. And then she curled her tongue and whistled. A long, low tone that a human could have produced. A swirl of wind, a little doodle of a cyclone sprang into being above my head.
As she kept going, her whistle became shriller and shriller. The cone whirled faster and faster. She didn’t stop for breath the whole time.
The narrow bottom of the white funnel began squiggling and extending like a living snake, searching for material to burrow into. It closed into a sharp spike the width of an ice pick and arced around until it found the right path. Straight toward my left ear canal.
Princess Iron Fan’s whistle was now the high-speed whine of a dentist’s drill. I couldn’t hear anything else. The tip of the cyclone reached closer.
The tiny spear of air caressed the outside of my ear, as if to taunt me one last time, and then dipped inside. I gnashed my teeth and screamed so that the last thing I would ever hear would at least be the sound of my own voice.
But then nothing happened.
I was too afraid to turn my neck to see, so I craned my eyeballs. The little storm that threatened to skewer through my earholes had stopped. So had the whistling.
When I looked back at Princess Iron Fan, she was recovering her balance, like she’d been punched. She angrily wiped something off her face.
It was water.
The demon straightened up, flicked her fingers dry, and glared at Erlang Shen.
The rain god hovered before her. He was both supported and shielded by a continuously flowing geyser of water that reached all the way back to an opening in the ground below. The vertical river encased most of his body, keeping him stable in the buffeting winds. The drops torn off by the storm were easily replaced with reserves from what must have been a massive underground aquifer.
“I found what I was looking for,” he announced to us with a grin.
Princess Iron Fan’s blank, vapory eyes took on an expression of rage. She suddenly thrust her hands forward, concentrating her energy into a single dimensionless point. At the same time, Erlang Shen mirrored her movements, down to the very last crook of his fingers.
It was more than simple mockery. His needle of water met her spike of air head-on, and in this clash of elements, the least compressible state of matter won. Erlang Shen’s thin jet of water pierced its way through Princess Iron Fan’s attack and straight into her body.
The yaoguai looked down at the rapier blade that had run her through, impaling her right in the heart.
Her imminent death amused her. Then it really amused her. Then it became downright hilarious. She tilted her head back and began cackling in laughter, her high-pitched voice echoing off the walls of the continuing storm.
In between her howls she managed to trade a few words to Erlang Shen. I couldn’t hear them this time. But whatever she said was enough to make his eyes grow wide. Princess Iron Fan’s suit sudden
ly ballooned out to spherical proportions.
Erlang Shen pulled a protective layer of water over himself like a fire blanket, right before the demon exploded with enough force to finally knock me out.
23
I came to on the cold, hard ground. I couldn’t tell which way was up. The dirt pressing into my back could have been a wall, not a floor. Maybe a ceiling.
I peeled myself off the surface and waddled around, trying to get my bearings in the haze cloaking my vision. I felt groggy, nauseous, but worst of all, hideously vulnerable. I had never lost consciousness like this before. Certainly not since embracing my identity as the Ruyi Jingu Bang. My knees were wobbly, my ankles twisty.
A big gray shape congealed in front of me. I didn’t understand why it was so big until enough time passed for my brain to process that it was part of the geography. It was a mountain. I was wandering around the slope of a frigging mountain. That was why I couldn’t get level and stable.
I looked up and saw the irregularities of the rocks and switchbacks converge over the distance into a forty-five-degree slope so perfect I couldn’t judge how far away the peak was. The sky had switched from pink to an electric blue, like someone had highlighted it in a web browser.
Looking down gave me nothing, either. A solid carpet of marshmallow-y white clouds blocked any view of the ground. The vapor stretched into the horizon. I couldn’t see any other peaks poking through the cloud cover other than the one I was standing on.
There had been no clouds and no mountain in the desert where we’d started. I was getting supremely fed up with how the rules of plate tectonics worked outside Earth. I had geological standards.
A groan coming from behind a nearby boulder told me I wasn’t alone. I picked my way around the house-sized chunk of granite and found the only person who could have made this situation even better.
Erlang Shen lay on his back with his arm draped over his eyes like an artist’s model waiting to be sketched. He appeared to be unconscious. I hadn’t been the closest to him when Princess Iron Fan self-destructed, but the cocktail shaker of the explosion had mixed us together and dumped us in the same spot.
A wave of sheer despair took hold of me. I dropped to my knees and gripped my own elbows to stop from shaking. I couldn’t handle what this implied.
We’d lost. Princess Iron Fan was the Yin Mo, and Erlang Shen had been the one to land the killing blow on her. By the rules of the Mandate Challenge, he was the new King of Heaven.
I felt dead inside—gutted and scraped of my vitals—as I realized this. The scales of the cosmos did not tilt toward justice. The good and the decent did not prevail. The Universe would throw chance after chance at the unworthy until they capitalized on it and stole everything from the rest of us.
I didn’t know if Quentin and Guanyin were alive in the wake of Princess Iron Fan’s explosion, but fate had decided Erlang Shen should be saved with absolute certainty. The circumstances that were required to get here—each precarious moment of stupidity and bad luck balanced on top of each other—made me want to weep.
You can do something about this, a voice whispered inside my head. I tried blocking it out, but it forced two small words through the cracks in my brain.
Kill him.
Erlang Shen was out cold and vulnerable. The Great White Planet was nowhere in sight. Whatever coronation or recognition that went along with declaring a new ruler of Heaven hadn’t happened yet.
Kill him. Before he wakes up.
The natural forces of the Universe were corrupt. I saw that now. I couldn’t reweave the fabric of events into an outcome that made sense. But I could lash out. Cut the cloth in defiance of the pattern.
I stared at Erlang Shen, trying to muster the will to murder him in cold blood. I knew he’d do it to me if our situations were reversed. He needed to die for the good of Heaven and Earth. He deserved to die.
And yet I couldn’t do it. Minutes passed while I struggled against my skin to move forward, my teeth grinding in an attempt to kickstart my body into action. My resolve failed an infinite number of times.
I slammed my hands against the ground over and over and cursed myself. I was weak, too weak to do what was necessary.
▪ ▪ ▪
Erlang Shen woke up to see me sitting off to the side, my head buried between my knees.
He scrambled away, conking his head into the nearby boulder. Like me, he realized how vulnerable he’d been. He glanced at his limbs, incredulous that I hadn’t broken them.
It took him a few halting tries to sit up, like someone who’d planked too long the day before and now had the sorest of abs. “Well,” Erlang Shen said as he planted one foot on the ground and leaned on his knee. “I’m waiting.”
I found I could talk to him normally now. My grudges didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. “For what?”
He frowned. “For you to thank me. I saved your life.”
He would have to wait a very long time for that. “What is this place?” I said. My voice was dull. I was asking on autopilot.
He prodded the back of his head and looked at his hand like he’d been expecting blood. “I think it’s a different Blessed Plane entirely. If I had to guess, with her last moments Princess Iron Fan hurled us through the boundaries of existence into a reality even farther from Earth.”
“How do we get back?”
He gave me an annoyed look. “So full of questions, like I know everything. I don’t think we can get back. At least not the way we came.”
“I would have thought the new King of Heaven could go wherever he wanted.” Drained of anger, drained of every emotion, I could call it like it was.
Erlang Shen didn’t look as celebratory as I’d expected. “First off, I would need the Great White Planet to make it official. In case you haven’t noticed, he’s not here. Secondly, I’m not sure if Princess Iron Fan was the source of the trouble to begin with.”
“What do you mean? She killed all those yaoguai. She nearly killed Ao Guang.”
“The last thing I said after I stabbed her was ‘Thank you for the Throne of Heaven.’ ” He got up and stretched, grimacing as if the memory was embarrassing. “She laughed and said I hadn’t earned it yet. That was right before she exploded.”
I still didn’t get it.
“The mandate winner is defined as whoever defeats the ultimate evil threatening the Universe at the time the challenge is called,” Erlang Shen explained. “Princess Iron Fan was the Yin Mo, but I think there’s something out there bigger than her.” He pointed toward the peak of the mountain. “Take a gander in that direction with true sight.”
I did as he requested, without the surge of revulsion at complying with my enemy. Was this what calm people felt like all the time? Weird.
But turning my eyes on the summit of the mountain revealed a troubling presence that managed to pierce the layer of indifference I was wrapped in. An energy signature like I’d never seen before. The qi of demons and gods was like an open flame, raw-edged and flickering in eddies and whorls.
The top of the mountain, on the other hand, held an entire sunrise of power. It was a solid halogen mass, a radial scorch in the atmosphere. I couldn’t look at it for more than a moment. It hurt my eyes and defied my belief.
Erlang Shen watched me squint in pain. “I believe that’s what Heaven originally detected when this whole mess started,” he said.
Great. Princess Iron Fan had just kicked the snot out of us, and she wasn’t even the final boss. I didn’t see the point of playing this game anymore. I wanted to go home. I wanted to see my parents again. I wanted to see Yunie. I wanted to turn back time to when I had Quentin by my side and our only concerns were which state landmarks we wanted to irresponsibly jump to next.
“There’s no ‘we’ here,” I said to Erlang Shen. “If you want to climb up there and get killed by whatever’s pumping out qi exhaust, then nothing would make me happier. I’d rather take my chances downhill.”
“I’m fairly s
ure down that way is an infinite slope into a never-ending abyss,” Erlang Shen said, pointing at the ominous layer of clouds. “And if your friends are still alive, and in this plane, our best chance of finding them is at the summit. We’ll have better odds of surviving this cursed place if we stick together.”
I thought about my options. He knew his way around the non-Earth realms better than I did. And he hadn’t been lying about needing to climb to the peak, both to find the others and to complete the Mandate Challenge. I’d watched him with true sight. He really believed he hadn’t won yet.
If I couldn’t stomach murdering Erlang Shen when his guard was down, I could always grab him and jump off the nearest cliff, I told myself. We’d fall forever, fighting for eternity. I could punch him as much as I wanted then.
I hauled myself to my feet. The deadness hadn’t left me, not yet. But I’d grind this out. I still had some fumes left in the tank.
He snorted at my labored efforts. “Good,” he said. “I was beginning to fear you’d become a sniveling little nuofu.”
I gave him the Italian chin-flick in response. If he didn’t know the gesture, he got the general meaning. Keeping him a safe distance ahead, where I could keep an eye on him, I followed Erlang Shen up the mountain.
24
I was starting to believe this place had been intentionally designed to mess with us as much as possible. The mountainside, though studded with little nooks and crannies of gray-pink stone that made plenty of steps and handholds, was angled in such a way that forced us to crawl upward on all fours.
Trying to go faster by beasting it with pure strength caused the rock surface to crumble like talc, leaching away the extra force. I also had the idea to stretch my arm out, plant my hand on the mountain, and then ride upward like a ski lift as my arm contracted, but I couldn’t shrink back to normal fast enough to make it worth it. The only thing I accomplished was looking like an idiot in front of Erlang Shen.
“This is stupid,” I said after my failed attempts to cheat the system. “You can fly.”
