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

by Patrick Laplante

  He focused on the physical first. Light could mean many things. A light illuminated a room, but it also guided the way. The starry sky was full of lights, and these pinpricks told stories to not just his own world, but to all worlds. They weren’t like the moon—the only constant in the sky. Planets revolved around them. Every planet saw something different.

  “Origin,” Cha Ming finally said. “A light starts at a point. It dims as you walk away. It expands in perpetuity until it’s impossible to see its beginnings. As for a song, it begins and ends. It is a melody, a story given rhythm and sound. It brightens one’s mood when all else lies in darkness.”

  And what of love? Love was the trickiest of all. It was many things, yet those things failed to fully describe it. Love was wanting the best for someone. It was about devotion and caring. But what did it have in common with other things?

  Love doesn’t start or end in the same way as the other things, Cha Ming realized. Love is a story. A shared experience. A story begins and ends. Everything has an origin, and while not everything has an ending, it has a direction. Likewise, the hint is a story. So I should find that story and start at the beginning. I should follow it till the end.

  Cha Ming focused his vision. He focused on the roots in both directions. Now that he was looking, he could find what he wanted to see. One way, the roots grew younger. Another way, they grew older. If he wanted the origin, he would need to ignore the new and follow the old. He did so, and what he found surprised him.

  His steps became confident. He was no longer disoriented. He had as much sight as he needed—no more, no less. The maze opened up as he traveled. Still, he found dead ends where before there had been nothing. And sometimes, he turned around, doubling back when he saw the shifting in the grain. Some roots were young and old, and he needed to follow the trace to its origin.

  Cha Ming made progress, and as he did, the maze came to life. He broke into a run as vines shot out and tried to trap and strangle him. Thorns tried to bite him. He dodged and weaved, and no matter what he did, he always focused on the bark, its story and its origin.

  He bled. He fought. He sweated. He destroyed creations of wood and ash and stone. Despite the threats to his life, he was careful never to lose track of his quarry. Soon enough, he ran into a wall. He broke it down with the Clear Sky Staff and continued past the flimsy obstacle. And after the wall, the maze finally ended.

  “Well done,” said the Star-Eye Ancestor as he left the maze. She spoke with three voices from three places at once. She had three bodies, and even with his focused sight, Cha Ming saw that all of them were real. “That was fast for a first try. You have my admiration.”

  “Is the trial over?” Cha Ming asked.

  “Almost,” said the Star-Eye Ancestor. “Only one obstacle remains. A final riddle for you to solve. Tell me—which one is the real me? Two are fake, yet all seem real.” The three of them spoke in unison. There were no differences between them, whether in color, shape, or form. They looked at him in the same way, with the same intent, and with the same smile. “Take your time. You only get one try.”

  Calm down, Cha Ming thought, sitting down. There must be an answer. If he couldn’t find the difference, he was clearly looking at too many things at the same time. He had to stop looking at the entire sky and group things up into constellations. Only then would he solve this riddle.

  It turned out that the maze could be eaten. Or at least parts of it could be. That was Huxian’s great discovery in his exploration of the space-time maze. Certain roots were weak and tender. Others were old and coarse. Only the youngest ones were edible, as nasty as they were.

  Oh. And there were many mazes. Not just one. The trick lay in the nature of the maze. It was a space-time maze. “A thousand years in the past is no good either,” Huxian complained. “At least it doesn’t go further back than that.”

  The maze was much more than a thousand years old, but fortunately, the maker of the maze had shown him some degree of mercy. Nor was time continuous. Instead, there were several quantized access points at ten-year intervals in the maze. Counting the present time iteration, there were precisely a hundred and one mazes. All of them overlapping and containing edible roots. What was worse was, none of them could be solved when explored separately. He’d checked.

  “Break, please!” he called out. The maze stopped chasing him and trying to kill him.

  “Ten minutes!” the maze called back pleasantly. The Star-Eye Ancestor might be bloodthirsty, but she wasn’t completely unfair. There were certain rules you had to follow in every trial. They were codified and timeless. There had to be breaks in trials that didn’t test endurance, and fortunately, this one didn’t. It tested perception instead.

  All right, time for another memory dive, Huxian thought. He entered his pool of memories and fished around for five minutes before finding what he was looking for. Excellent. The last third of the Manual of Space-time Mazes.

  If he had one advantage, it was that his lineage was a space-time linage. One did not start an entire lineage that manipulated space-time without useful handbooks. Obviously. Otherwise, things would just get way too confusing.

  Step one of the brute-force method involves exploring a whole spatial pattern, he read. Step two involves exploring each time dimension. It then proceeded to introduce a very simple concept that involved using a certain method to explore both dimensions at once and save time. The reasoning was simple—if you had one maze with a hundred tricks and a hundred iterations, that was ten thousand tricks you needed to solve. Ah. This is what I was looking for. He continued reading.

  Master Bagua says: If no solution lies in space, and no solution lies in time, and the puzzle has a solution and is not a literal death trap, it stands to reason that the solution lies in both space and time.

  “Yeah. Makes sense. But how to solve it?” Huxian muttered.

  “Hey, are you accessing your ancestral memories?” the Star-Eye Ancestor asked.

  “Nope,” Huxian said. “Just thinking this through. All on my own.”

  “I’m watching you…” Hell’s Gazer said.

  Okay, this confirms it, he thought, reading the next entry.

  Master Bagua says: There are two ways to solve both space and time simultaneously: instance hopping and spatial hopping. One requires hopping from one maze to another using the time dimension, and the other hopping from one place in the same maze to another using space. The merit in the first approach is obvious—after all, if you can hop between time instances, and the maze changes, you can access otherwise inaccessible spots. However, what happens if the maze changes in the original instance, sealing off something that you wanted accessible?

  “Right, splitting,” Huxian said. “I just need to split!”

  “You are accessing your memories!” she said. “Foul!”

  “Crap,” Huxian said. He exited the memory. He didn’t need the next part. It would shorten how much time he used, but that didn’t really matter with such limited instances. “The trick is obviously to split myself as much as possible in as many instances as possible.” Of course, it helped that the maze’s disorientation feature didn’t work on his Time-Torching Eyes. They literally burned away any outside interference.

  The Star-Eye Ancestor chased him with brambles and vines. Huxian split as he avoided them, and one half of him stepped into a different iteration of time. It was disorienting at first, but he soon got used to it. He split again in each instance, and again and again.

  He continued splitting until all hundred instances were filled. Then, he split his clones in all the instances and stopped when he discovered he could split no further. It wasn’t that he couldn’t split, actually, but that it would weaken each clone too much. It took strength to eat the tender but disgusting crap roots in the maze.

  “Piece of cake,” Huxian gloated. “Two hundred clones plus space-time devouring plus time travel equals a solved space-time maze.”

  The only problem was having to stom
ach the disgusting substance each of his clones had to ingest in his harmonized being. But that was the thing about special tests: If you were going to be spiteful and not dish out the standard test, it had to be solvable. It could be insanely hard, sure, but it had to be at least possible on a theoretical level.

  “You mixed crap into these edible roots, didn’t you?” Huxian called out.

  “Nothing less for you bunch of cheating thieves!” she yelled back. “One of these days, I’ll see one of you dead.”

  “Never!” Huxian howled as he systematically destroyed the maze. Most of his clones did nothing productive. It was hard work to make all hundred mazes synchronize, but he did it.

  The solution went something like this: Travel into the maze. Eat a crap root. Get to a dead end but leave a clone behind. Travel in time to Maze B. Repeat process. Jump to Maze C but leave a clone behind. Maze A changes. Travel with clone in Maze A to second dead end and travel in time. Port to Maze C. By then, Maze C would have changed. Use the original clone to continue travel. Congratulations, you’ve reached the end of the maze! Except in this case, you didn’t have to deal with three mazes but a hundred and one of them.

  Oof. That was exhausting, Huxian thought as he banished his other clones. Their essence migrated across space and time and replenished his main body. He was at the exit of the maze.

  “Congratulations,” all three Star-Eye Ancestors spoke. “You’ve reached the end of my maze. But answer this final riddle: Which one is the real me?”

  Huxian yawned and summoned his Space-time Devouring Manifestation. Two of the clones were yanked in while only one remained. “Did I win?”

  “Clever,” said the Star-Eye Ancestor. “What would you have done if I let myself be swallowed? Would you have choked and died?”

  Huxian burped. “Gained a lot of power, I imagine. I ate a Taotie once. Not tasty. I don’t recommend it.”

  The Star-Eye Ancestor sighed. “Fine. I give up. Bunch of cheats, the lot of you.”

  “You mean you’ve met more than one Bagua fox?” Huxian asked.

  “Three, counting your stupid ancestor, Bagua Hushao,” she said. “Your reward is over there. Climb the inside of the tree to get to the next level, blah, blah blah.”

  Huxian ran past her and saw his reward. A whole orb of demonic energy! It was the richest one he’d ever seen, and it would definitely put a dent in the next stage of their advancement. Getting ahead was hard—especially when you had five friends to feed, and each one of them was a huge glutton.

  Huxian turned into his fox form. His familiar tiny fox form. He bit into the rich purple orb. “Urgh! What the hell is this?”

  “Don’t eat it all in one nutritious bite!” the Star-Eye Ancestor called out.

  Curses. Disgusting demon energy reward. He’d benefit from eating it, sure, but only if he suffered. “The things I do for my team,” Huxian muttered. He was on a deadline, so he got to work eating.

  “Which one is me? Which one is the imposter?” asked the young monkey lady with a grin. All three of them looked the same, but according to her words, they weren’t. Cha Ming wasn’t sure if she could lie, but from what he recalled of Huxian’s stories, demons had to be honest about the rules of their trials.

  Focus, Cha Ming thought. That was the key. He looked at their physical bodies. He inspected every detail on every inch of them, ignoring any provocative gestures she made as he did so. It’s not a test of will, he reminded himself. That meant the test wouldn’t be about ignoring seduction, even if he did have to deal with her antics.

  Minutes passed, and Cha Ming found nothing physical to latch on to. Therefore, he moved on to the soul. He found no differences there either. He widened his vision until he could hardly bear the sight of her soul’s phenomenal pressure, then narrowed his focus as much as he dared to. It wasn’t long before he saw individual strings linking her soul to countless planes. They were karmic tethers, and each of them were identical. They all led to the same places and the same people.

  Okay, let’s take a step back, he told himself. According to Huxian, demons are big on themes. They loathe bad presentation. That means that everything should tie together nicely. He thought back to the hint and the commonalities he’d found. Constellations. Stories. Path and origin. Unfortunately, all three bodies seemed to come from the same point in time. They were all the same age. Every patch of skin was identical. He’d confirmed this to his great discomfort and embarrassment. The same applied to her soul, which meant that the key should lie in her connections to everything. They seemed the same, but what if… he focused on the threads.

  Stories. The common theme was stories. The key to solving the maze was to follow the story in reverse. What if he took the same approach here? He focused again, ignoring the most recent karmic tethers. Then the second. The third. All the way down to the hundredth thread. When he reached 101st thread, he noticed something. The tethers weren’t the same. It was a different thread for each body. Bingo.

  Having found what he was looking for, Cha Ming sorted through them much more quickly. He found that the threads, though identical in other qualities, originated from different points in time. He discovered thirty different threads for each of the bodies. Each thread tied the Star-Eye Ancestor to a certain event and place. He needed to discover how they were different, so he read the threads and focused on their stories.

  This step was extremely time-consuming. Not just because of the effort involved in reading at such a deep level, but because of her power. Even small events caused chain reactions in causality. For example, in one of the events, the Star-Eye Ancestor took a bath. It just so happened that as a result of her action, an entire minor plane of existence collapsed, and another was born.

  An hour passed before he managed to narrow it down to three key events. The first: The Star-Eye Ancestor gave birth to her ninety-fifth child, the father being the Stone Spear Demon Emperor. The second: The Star-Eye Ancestor fought on the Eternal Battlefield. The third: The Star-Eye Ancestor met the Stone Spear Demon Emperor for the first time at a celebratory banquet after that same battle on the Eternal Battlefield. These three threads were woven in a different chronological order on each of the three Star-Eye Ancestors.

  “The one on my left is false,” Cha Ming said. “The thread representing the birth of her ninety-fifth child comes before meeting him in the first place. The one in the middle is also false. The thread for meeting the Stone Spear Demon Emperor comes before that of their battle on the Eternal Battlefield, even though it’s clear from the stories on the respective threads that the opposite should be true. That means the real you is on my right.”

  “Is that your final answer?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Cha Ming said. The two false copies grinned and walked toward him. Briefly, he saw hate in their eyes. It was a familiar hate, one he recognized but couldn’t put his finger on. He didn’t have long to wonder, however, as both copies of the Star-Eye Ancestor transformed. They became white-haired, black-striped creatures with white eyes full of malice.

  He barely had time to jump back and summon the Clear Sky Staff before one of them caught his arm and broke it off. He pierced one of them in the chest while the other reached for his head. Having no time to even pull his staff out, he unsummoned it and summoned it overhead in pillar form and brought it down on the creature that had him in a viselike grip. There was a crunch, and only a smashed remnant remained of the tiger.

  As for the other… it was no longer a monster, but the Star-Eye Ancestor. “What are you doing?” she cried. She looked innocent and afraid. Cha Ming hesitated, but in that moment, she transformed again and lunged. This time, he struck out with a destruction-infused palm. It blasted through her chest, and the ground ran slick with her blood.

  Only then did he look back at the crushed remnants of the other body. Her form had reverted to that of a black-and-white humanoid tiger. Meanwhile, as life left the last of the dying clones, her body transformed into a similar shape. She was beautiful
in that form, but even dead, he couldn’t help but loathe the sight of her.

  “What are they?” Cha Ming asked the Star-Eye Ancestor.

  “Rakshasa,” she whispered. “An ancient enemy. These are the mortal variants. Or I suppose that at your level, you would view them as transcendents. They are fledglings. Initiates. I wove them with great effort. How did you like them?”

  “They’re terrible,” Cha Ming said.

  “And powerful,” the Star-Eye Ancestor agreed. “Deceptive. Not many know the trick to seeing them. Many have the ability, but few know how to look.” That didn’t surprise him in the slightest. How would one even think of trying to untangle karmic threads? “Don’t worry, rakshasa are not nearly so skilled as I. Especially at that level. It would take a real expert with millennia of practice to get so good at weaving a deception. I’m sure you could tell them apart with minimal effort.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Cha Ming said. He shuddered. They were hateful, hateful things.

  “Come,” she said. “You don’t have much time to waste. I know what games your teacher and that stupid chieftain are playing.”

  “So you know he’s playing with fire?” Cha Ming asked. “Why not do something about it?”

  “I know that look,” said the Star-Eye Ancestor. “You want me to interfere. Let me be the first to tell you that I won’t. It’s not my story. It’s his. And yours, perhaps. Your teacher has certainly interfered more than he should, but I guess his situation is… extenuating.” She led him to an empty circle at the base of the trunk. There, he saw a pool. There were stars within it, but thankfully, there were a limited number.

  “They’re all constellations,” Cha Ming noted.

  “Yes,” she said. “You noticed those as well back there. I’m glad. You may not have felt it in your trial, but at one point, you were thinking faster than you ever had.”