Crown of the Starry Sky: Book 11 of Painting the Mists

by Patrick Laplante

  Cha Ming sighed and shook his head. She was mostly mature with her words, but sometimes she was downright senile. Their conversations could take abrupt turns, and sometimes she said the strangest things. And she always stayed close to him, whether he was painting a picture or a talisman or fighting with Huxian and the others.

  “This is the last of the talents I have to show,” Cha Ming said. “I have showed you my domain. I showed you the five elements. I can paint. I could maybe show you smithing, but…”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Smithing is not what we seek.”

  “Then I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Cha Ming said. He painted the last few lines of his talisman, and the large matrix of ink collapsed. Three layers of ink fell upon each other, completing the thin paper object that could be used to substantially increase anyone’s physical strength. “Do you think it will help if I paint talismans of other elements?”

  “No,” she said simply. That settled it.

  “Well, I’m going to take a break,” Cha Ming said. “Do you enjoy playing Angels and Devils?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like some tea?”

  “No.”

  “Usually people accept a drink when offered,” Cha Ming said, summoning a teapot. He brewed two cups and gave her one, which she grudgingly accepted.

  “I am focused,” Clever Dusk said. “I smell change upon you. I see it in the wind. Swirling threads of fate are spinning. You are a focal point. One of a few in this city. Yet can I seek them out? Should I speak to the one who has tamed a dragon of lightning? Should I speak to the destroyer? Should I take the counsel of the hunted, whose involvement could doom us all?”

  She can see the shifting threads of fate, Cha Ming said to Sun Wukong. Is that normal?

  Some of her kind can, Sun Wukong said. It is a rare ability. She is far stronger than her peers.

  Mi Fei mentioned one other Star-Eye Monkey that was similarly gifted, Cha Ming said. I don’t know who the destroyer is, but I have good reason to think she meant Captain Xing, given the lightning dragon reference. It seems she’s implying there are three karmic anomalies in this city other than me.

  You and I both know one of them, Sun Wukong said. Given your experience with her past incarnation, I don’t think it would be a stretch to call her hunted.

  Fine, Cha Ming said. Though I don’t like the implication that she would doom the monkeys.

  Not willingly, at least, Sun Wukong pointed out.

  It’ll take her some time to come to, Cha Ming said. Unless you’re willing to volunteer the power of your crown?

  My soul energy isn’t limitless, you know, Sun Wukong said. I refuse to be used as a crutch.

  Suit yourself, Cha Ming said. He rubbed his hands gleefully at the thought of a break. In truth, he didn’t want to paint talismans or cultivate. He had a new hobby these days. The puzzle Elder Ling had given him was challenging, and he used whatever spare time he had to work on it. He pulled out the black tower and painted the obvious missing line in its pattern. The pattern shifted, and Cha Ming painted two consecutive lines, one after the other, after which the pattern shifted again.

  It was a difficult puzzle, and Cha Ming had teased out certain rules over the past few days. The runes and lines involved were relatively simple, though each time he traced them, he learned something of their nature. There was an order to things. The puzzle always started with a single missing component, though that component varied. If he solved that iteration, the puzzle shuffled, and another component went missing. The increasingly empty puzzle space would be filled in by Cha Ming according to what he could determine from their nature and interactions. Some of these interactions were tricky, and if he failed, he had to start over from scratch. Moreover, if he waited more than a minute, the puzzle would reset itself. He would need to start anew. It was an interesting challenge, one that consumed his every available moment.

  In another life, Cha Ming had lived and breathed puzzles. He’d loved number puzzles, word puzzles, and other nonstandard puzzles like games. Games were puzzles with human elements that needed to be deciphered. Elder Ling had promised him that if he solved this puzzle, he would improve at Angels and Devils. At first, he had been skeptical, but the more he worked at it, the more he believed.

  Runes had shape. Runes had substance. Runes were emotionally charged, and their meaning changed from person to person. Yet runes also behaved like numbers. There were patterns to maintain. Order that must be kept. They could also be tricky. For example, given a combination of fifty runes, there might only be one way to solve a puzzle. Or there could be ten. Or a hundred. Yet only one of them was the best solution. In a sense, the runes were a bit like words. A hundred words could craft many paragraphs, yet how many would stand out as a work of art? Which had the most meaning? That was what he looked for in this puzzle.

  Perhaps it was a waste of time to work on the puzzle. Perhaps he could be doing something else. Yet the more Cha Ming painted, the more he felt something loosen in his mind. Runes added themselves to his spiritual sea, and even the web supporting them shifted. And while he wasn’t adding any important runes, he felt the benefit came less from that than the rearrangement itself. The runes in his soul space were a puzzle with thousands of moving pieces. How were they best joined? What was the optimal combination? He knew full well that there wasn’t just one way to combine them. There were hundreds of thousands of ways. As his waking mind chipped away at Elder Ling’s puzzle, his sleeping mind reorganized itself. It was easy to lose himself in the process.

  “What is this?” a voice asked, interrupting his thoughts many hours later. Cha Ming woke with a start. He realized Clever Dusk had already recovered. She was sitting quietly in their courtyard. The sun had already set, and indeed, it was about to rise again.

  “It was a gift,” Cha Ming said. “A puzzle. Sorry for getting distracted. I thought I’d work on it while you recovered. I’m embarrassed that so much time passed.”

  “Who gave it to you?” she asked curiously.

  “A teacher,” Cha Ming said. “He comes from afar, and we just happened to meet again recently.”

  “The puzzle seems a powerful object, yet not,” Clever Dusk said. “It reeks of salt and stone. I smell the depths of the ocean upon it, and the warmth of the earth’s deepest quarries. It is not a tower you hold in your hand, but a mountain. Dug up by rune-bound serpents. It took a thousand years for them to excavate it before it was dipped into the deepest of inky wells.”

  “Is that so?” Cha Ming asked. He wondered how much of what she said had substance and how much was pure nonsense. Yet he couldn’t ignore her comments, not since she’d mentioned Mi Fei’s gray wings and jade sword. He didn’t doubt her strange words so much as wonder what they really meant.

  “Do you like puzzles?” Cha Ming asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Clever Dusk said.

  “But you don’t like Angels and Devils,” Cha Ming said. “That’s a puzzle.”

  “It is a dance of sorts, and wonderful entertainment,” Clever Dusk said. “But it does not call to me. Yet…” She hesitated. She summoned a small spot of inky water and dipped her finger in it. She began tracing shapes in the air. Messy lines like a child might in class.

  He dismissed it as one of her quirks. That is, until he discovered what she was actually doing. Runic characters, messy as they were, appeared in the air. At first, he thought they were things she’d seen him paint on a talisman, but then he realized where he’d seen them. They were the same runes he’d just painted minutes ago, though she painted them in a different order. They were crude—so crude that they would be written off as preliminary writing attempt from a five-year-old. Despite this, they were binding. Interacting. They locked together in the air. Raw runes of ink that joined together in a pattern he had not thought of. One that made sense. Then she added the fifty-first rune, the one that had eluded him.

  Cha Ming swallowed. “You remembered the pattern? And you
solved it?”

  “Yes,” Clever Dusk said. “It was quite enjoyable. Can we continue? I find this game intriguing.” There it was. Interest. Not the passing observations of someone looking for something indefinite, but laser focus. Her eyes weren’t even shining, but she’d found something that was worth looking into.

  And so, Cha Ming took out the puzzle and began painting. He started from the beginning. Together, they went through the first forty-nine iterations he could easily solve. The puzzle he struggled with appeared once more. Though it wasn’t the same as last time, there were similarities in the solution. He incorporated some of them just as Clever Dusk did. The puzzle hummed as it accepted his solution, then shifted to the next one. Cha Ming took a few more seconds than Clever Dusk to begin painting the fifty-first solution. They both failed at the fifty-second.

  “Do you think some of your kin would enjoy puzzles?” Cha Ming asked.

  She paused. It was a long, ten-second pause, and the constellation in her eyes spun. Eventually, the shining stopped, and she smiled. “Yes. I think they would. Bring all of them.”

  “All of them?” Cha Ming asked, surprised.

  “All of them,” she confirmed. “There is worth here. We will learn this. We will learn, and then we will change.”

  Huxian, Cha Ming called out as she began tracing patterns in the air. Huxian popped through a void rift and appeared beside him.

  “Thank you so much for getting me out of that situation,” Huxian said. “There was mud wrestling and pottery, and it was going so badly. Please, tell me I can stay for a bit. I’ll do anything.” Indeed, he was covered in filth from head to toe and even had a few bruises.

  “Get the monkeys,” Cha Ming said. “All of them.”

  “All of them?” Huxian asked, eyes widening. There wasn’t so much shock or disbelief in his eyes, but pure delight. “I don’t think that will be a problem.” He disappeared, and soon enough, the courtyard was crawling with curious demon monkeys.

  At first, the demons didn’t do much. They simply sat and watched blankly, setting aside the tools they’d been working with. Clever Dusk sat beside Cha Ming, and they continued solving puzzles together. They traded ideas, and together, they began making good headway. It was only minutes later that he realized that not only was Clever Dusk painting, but the others as well. They were slower. Ponderous, even. But they were curious.

  A whole new world had opened up to the Star-Eye Monkeys, and there was no telling what they would do with this knowledge.

  It was a full day later when Cha Ming stopped. He was exhausted. So were the monkeys. Working on the puzzle was tiring work, both for his qi and his soul. Yet on this day, he’d made great strides in solving it. He’d finally breached a hundred consecutive elements, and he was getting a hang of how the puzzle actually worked.

  “All it took was a puzzle?” Mi Fei asked. They were sitting in a private room. Elegant demon waiters brought in food and drinks that had been prepared by a demon chef who was very experimental but very successful. Huxian had spared no expense in roping him in.

  “I showed them everything,” Cha Ming said. “All my arts and techniques. It was just a coincidence that I even brought out the puzzle.”

  “I showed them Grandmist,” Mi Fei said. “I even taught some embroidery of all things, as much as I hate doing it. I taught them riding, even though it has nothing to do with business, and they were predictably clumsy at it. But puzzles? I just don’t see how that’s useful.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Xiao Bai said. “Puzzles are versatile. Generals play Angels and Devils all the time for that reason. It seems the patterns in the puzzle happen to work with their ink. If my memories are any indication, they’ll soon be making a few disastrous attempts at rune crafting and will eventually figure something out.”

  Huxian nodded sadly. “It’ll be messy. It’s a good thing they’re Star-Eye Monkeys though.”

  “Good at learning,” Xiao Bai agreed. “Less of a mess.”

  “How long do you think it will be before they figure out a craft?” Silverwing asked. “Puzzles are nice and all, but that’s not exactly productive work.” Out of all of their members, he’d been the idlest. Monkeys didn’t care much for sword arts.

  “Three days,” Xiao Bai said.

  “Three?” Huxian scoffed. “I say eight.”

  “Want to bet on it?” Xiao Bai asked.

  “Eight is a long time, Huxian,” Cha Ming said. “I’m not sure I have that much time to spare either. The others are wrapping up their tasks, and we’ll need to make a move before our opponents do.”

  Killjoy’s reports were not promising. Stargazer City was quickly being isolated from any and all human trade. And instead of doing something about it, the prefectural army was sitting on their thumbs, despite the damage it was doing to the prefecture’s economy. “By the way, how did that cloth manufacturing project go?”

  “It went all right,” Huxian said. “They weren’t good at manipulating fibers, but they were passable. They did make up for it in being able to dye fabrics, though. Lots of colors.”

  “Colors?” Cha Ming said. “Their ink is black.”

  “I have no idea how it works,” Huxian said. “Still, they’re not very quick at it. They can’t dye things that have already been made. They need to be the ones weaving the material, which they’re slow at. We mostly gave up on it.”

  “And how about yourself?” Cha Ming asked Mi Fei. “How goes your training?”

  “My what?” she said. “Oh. That.” She shrugged. “I haven’t been able to focus much on training. Whenever I go back to our clan estate, my family pesters me. I haven’t had much of a chance to speak with my teacher.”

  “If you need sparring partners, I’m sure Silverwing would be happy to oblige,” Cha Ming said. “I could as well, if you like.”

  Mi Fei looked at him suspiciously. “So you can gloat?”

  “So I can practice,” Cha Ming said. “It’s hard to get good without practicing. Do you know how I learned to control the five elements?”

  Mi Fei shrugged. “Experimentation? Hitting rocks?”

  “I got hit by rocks,” Cha Ming corrected. “My teacher threw everything at me. Rocks. Fire. Ice. He changed the viscosity and heaviness of the air on me. He manipulated gravity when I tried to dodge. He threw razor blades and swords into the mix. In fact, he once forced me to fight and run while I was poisoned and tangled in vines.”

  “Sounds harsh,” Mi Fei said.

  “It was awful,” Cha Ming said. “Still, I think there’s something to be said for training for various scenarios. I might be good at dodging boulders and swords, but I’ve never experienced fighting Grandmist cultivators. Do I fight head on or do I deflect? Should I try to conserve energy while I fight? I have no idea, and it would be useful to know.”

  “I’d suggest giving it all you have,” Mi Fei said. “I’ve been told that against equal-level cultivators, I’m a very hard hitter.”

  “Yet I don’t like to leave myself open,” Cha Ming said. “I rarely fight one enemy at a time. And while I believe you probably have more raw strength than I do, there must be a way around it. Training against you wouldn’t be about matching you where you’re strong. I’d try to find an edge. A way to get past you without using much energy. I’d cheat if I had to.”

  “That hardly seems fair,” Mi Fei said.

  Cha Ming shrugged. “Fights are never fair. There are usually external factors or other group members present. If I didn’t fight the way I did, I’d die. I need to stay alive if I ever want to achieve my goals.”

  “And what are these lofty goals, pray tell?” Mi Fei asked.

  “Achieving immortality,” Cha Ming said. “Helping a friend forge a new body. Finding the one I love in the cycle of reincarnation.”

  Xiao Bai choked on a piece of cake she’d been eating. She coughed loudly, and there were tears in her eyes once the cough finally subsided.

  “Are you all right?” Mi Fei asked
.

  “Yeah,” Xiao Bai said. “He’s just way too intense. Still, he’s right. You need to practice. We’ve got a lot of sightseeing to do, the two of us. Alone. And that’s hard to do without strength.” She glared at Cha Ming. He glared back.

  Mi Fei didn’t notice the tense exchange. “I’ll keep your offer in mind. Sparring might help. My sword instructor said as much. You mentioned finding your love in the cycle of reincarnation. She was the woman in the picture you showed me?”

  Cha Ming ignored Xiao Bai’s unrelenting glared and nodded. “She was very dear to me. I miss her.” It was a painful admission. Moreover, it spoke to something he’d been realizing during the course of this mission. Mi Fei was not Yu Wen. Yu Wen was there, but she was hidden deep inside her. They shared many features, including a soul. But they were different, she and her.

  “And you think you can find her in her next life and bring her memories back?” Mi Fei asked. “It sounds both foolish and romantic. But I wonder—will she be the same person you remember, even with her memories?” Those words, coming from her, were a dagger to Cha Ming’s heart. Out of all his worries, none weighed more heavily on him. And the more he interacted with her, the more he knew her, the more he wondered about the answer.

  “I don’t know,” Cha Ming said. “But I can’t forget her. I have to try.” He ignored Xiao Bai’s death glare and mental threats. He didn’t care at this point. She could try to beat him up.

  After an exchange like that, there wasn’t much else to be said. Silverwing and Huxian had wisely stayed out of that conversation. They continued dining, but they ate in silence. The tension only faded with the arrival Clever Dusk and her father, Shallow Moon.

  “I’m surprised to see you,” Cha Ming said. “I thought you were going to be tinkering all night.”

  “Our people are easily obsessed with projects,” Shallow Moon admitted with a smile. “It can be self-destructive at times, but it is helpful.”

  Clever Dusk simply walked up to Cha Ming and held out her hand. “Here,” she said.