The Great King Ordered Me to Marry – Chapter 33
by Little PandaSpeaking of the Fox Ascending the Tower Alone
Longming had already made herself clear—unless there was a third person present.
Zhuoxue’s suspended hand dropped down, poking her own nose bridge. Times had changed—even a great demon was now counting on her.
How extraordinary, truly extraordinary.
But she was only a fox, with no desire whatsoever to straighten her spine and be a proper person—why should anyone count on her?
After a moment, Zhuoxue gazed at the towering, pitch-black tower in the distance and asked, full of suspicion, “You didn’t specially trick me into coming here so I’d walk right into a trap, did you?”
The fox’s mind spun quickly—though not in the right direction.
“I went through all that trouble to trick you?” Longming gave a faint smile. “Then assume I have ill intentions.”
The immortal guise before her was uncannily lifelike, wreathed in Immortal Qi, looking as though she subsisted on morning dew and flower petals, untouched by a speck of dust.
“You admit it.” Zhuoxue reached out and grabbed at Longming’s side. Ethereal Immortal Qi slid across her palm, leaving a faint sting. “Where have you hidden the real Longming?”
She hissed and spread her five fingers. “Pain, at least, can’t be faked.”
Longming smiled faintly behind that utterly unfamiliar face, somehow appearing cutting, and said darkly, “Then I’d have to deceive not just you, but the entire demon realm, to sustain such an outrageous lie.”
Zhuoxue actually believed her. She rubbed her stinging palm and muttered with head bowed, “True enough—a hundred lies are hard to reconcile.”
“It’s Dragon Breath1.” Longming brushed her palm, sweeping away the sting. “Bought at the Huangliang Dream Market.”
Zhuoxue hadn’t truly suspected her in the first place—she simply didn’t want to ascend the tower alone.
After a while, she sighed. “There won’t be mountains of yin soldiers in there, will there? If I stride up the stairs carrying a lamp, wouldn’t I just be digging my own grave?”
“There are no yin soldiers inside.” Longming knew what the fox was worried about and had no choice but to slow her tone. “I will lure Yanwang out and still need to lead them a ways. I will find a way to break free, and then I will ascend the tower to find you.”
“After I go up, am I supposed to find the Destiny Register on my own?” Zhuoxue couldn’t even imagine what the inside looked like—how was she supposed to find anything?
“The Destiny Registers are neatly ordered. There is no need to panic,” Longming said.
Zhuoxue puffed out her cheeks, looking as though she were marching heroically to her death.
Longming enunciated each word as she continued, “When you reach the top of the tower, you will see a dark jade bead suspended from the central beam. That bead is called Shelter2. Rotate it one full turn—clockwise or counterclockwise, it matters not.”
“What does the bead do?” Zhuoxue had to get to the bottom of this—she didn’t have the courage to ascend the tower otherwise.
Longming explained, “Once the bead lights, it signals that Yanwang is resting. Yin soldiers and ghosts are absolutely forbidden from entering at will.”
“Then how will you ascend the tower?” Zhuoxue kept turning these few words over and over in her heart, ruminating like a cow.
What fox was she? She was more like an ox or a horse—yet here she was, entrusted with a crucial task, risking her life.
Longming shook her head. “I am neither a yin soldier nor a ghost. Why wouldn’t I be able to ascend?”
“I thought the bead had some wondrous effect—something to make intruders wish they were dead.” Zhuoxue had given herself a false scare. “Turns out it’s just hanging a sign on the door saying \u2018not receiving guests.\u2019”
“Rest easy,” Longming said, gazing steadily at her. “Have you memorized everything I just said?”
“I can recite it backward.” Zhuoxue took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then glared at her with full resentment. “You’d better come back quickly. You must not fail—otherwise, even as a ghost, I won’t let you off lightly.”
Longming made no reply. She simply raised her palm and swept it before Zhuoxue’s face.
Instantly, the girl’s form turned to drifting smoke, scattered by a gust of wind until she vanished without a trace.
Zhuoxue hadn’t seen it clearly—she only felt something strange before her eyes. How come… she couldn’t see her own nose?
She looked down at once. Her vision was completely empty. Only then did she realize she had vanished into invisibility without a sound—so thoroughly that even she couldn’t see herself.
“What is this?” Zhuoxue frantically raised her hands, groping blindly over her own body. “How come none of the incantations you taught me include this technique? You held back!”
After speaking, her moving lips froze—so it wasn’t just invisibility. She had also been silenced.
What had she just said?
Just because she couldn’t hear her own voice, her memory seemed to have deteriorated as well.
She didn’t know whether Longming had heard her. Longming unfurled the Celestial Edict in her hand, her expression composed as she read it from end to end.
After finishing the edict, she walked toward Yanwang’s Office and said calmly, “Follow me. No one can see you—not even Yanwang.”
Zhuoxue tiptoed along behind her. She couldn’t hear even the slightest sound of her own footsteps, as if she truly did not exist in this world.
Her footprints erased, her voice extinguished—she seemed banished from all three realms.
Zhuoxue said uneasily, “How long does this invisibility last? It isn’t for a whole lifetime, is it?”
“One shichen,” Longming answered.
So the caster could still hear her—Zhuoxue felt relieved.
She saw Longming stop before Yanwang’s Office, raise her arm, and release extraordinary spiritual power—three drumbeats.
No drum was visible, yet its sound was heard.
The first beat shook the earth; the second spun the heavens; the third stilled all creation.
Longming cradled the long scroll, and with a single wave of her hand, the Celestial Edict suspended itself in midair, undulating like silk ribbons.
Zhuoxue, hidden behind Longming, suddenly felt that Grandma Qian hadn’t been wrong back then—this demon really did have something of a goddess about her.
Even though this face was utterly ordinary, it somehow radiated an immortal’s poise and bearing.
Beneath those magnificent immortal robes, there must be endless fragrant winds—how else could she make one’s heart soar?
Longming parted her lips, and her voice immediately shook the eight directions.
Every character she recited from the scroll radiated golden light. The suspended Celestial Edict grew ever more dazzling—what had been a shimmering glow was now blazing brilliance.
Zhuoxue stared in awe. If this edict were truly conjured by demon arts, it would be convincing enough even in Kunlun Jade Capital itself.
This tiger demon was truly well-traveled. If it were her pretending to be a heavenly envoy, she probably wouldn’t even know she was supposed to drum and recite the edict.
Longming’s voice was right beside her ear. The transformed voice was unlike her original one, yet it carried the same unhurried cadence as always.
“By decree of Kunlun Jade Capital, Yanwang’s Office of the Yellow Springs Bureau shall hear this edict…”
The characters on the Celestial Edict blazed from beginning to end, their brushstrokes bold and magnificent. The entire scroll was like a star crashing to earth—enough to awe any living soul in a realm.
Zhuoxue couldn’t even look at it directly. Even the scattered light made her eyes sting, burning as though seared by fire.
This had to be genuine. After all, if Longming could bind the Yellow Springs Water Spirit at Lingkong Mountain, then secretly keeping a Celestial Edict would be no difficulty at all.
Her eyes burned so.
Just as hot as when the restriction on the back of her neck loosened. But while a burning neck was tolerable, once her eyes started burning, she just wanted to roll on the ground.
Yet Longming remained as composed as ever. The Celestial Edict’s radiance came so close to her, and she paid it no heed, utterly unmoved.
Zhuoxue could hardly imagine how powerful demonic energy must be to contend with celestial auspicious light.
Yet even so, Longming had not been able to reclaim Wugou Stream. The Nightmare King must be the toughest of the tough.
The Celestial Edict hung still in midair. Then the great doors of Yanwang’s Office swung wide with a rumble like a mountainside collapsing.
From within, a towering, broad-shouldered figure slowly approached. Ghost qi cloaked her face, and her long hair dragged on the ground, unkempt, making her true features indiscernible.
She suddenly spoke—and only then did one realize she was a woman.
“Yanwang heeds the command.”
Her stature was extraordinary—she appeared even taller than Longming. From a distance, she looked like a mountain crag given human form; she alone could block the entire great doorway.
The doors were half-open. Zhuoxue hesitated—should she go in or not?
If she just slipped past and Yanwang sensed something, Longming would likely be implicated as well.
She saw Yanwang take down the Celestial Edict, cradling it in her hands, and give Longming a slight nod. “My thanks, Celestial Envoy3.”
Longming turned without changing her expression, her gaze gliding past her side without lingering.
As the doors slowly closed, Zhuoxue gathered her courage and squeezed through the gap, only to be frozen in terror by the pitch-black interior of the tower.
The doors shed dust with a rustle, and the remaining crack vanished in an instant. Longming’s unfamiliar face was hidden behind the doors.
The tower was dead silent. Though Yanwang had departed, her oppressive presence lingered. That strange, prying gaze pressed in from all directions, pinning Zhuoxue in place.
After a long while, Zhuoxue turned to the left, drenched in cold sweat.
The Judge’s Token…
Where was the Judge’s Token!
Zhuoxue groped carefully, her mind a complete blank. Longming hadn’t told her what the Judge’s Token looked like—how was she supposed to find it?
She held her breath and felt around with trembling fingers. She didn’t know what she touched, but her fingertips were struck by cold, and she yanked her hand back.
After a moment, she tentatively extended one finger toward the cold spot. The objects beside her hand were loose, clattering together with the sound of wooden tallies.
Could this be it?
Zhuoxue pulled one out, only to find it wasn’t a wooden tally—it was carved from wood, but felt more like the audience tablets4 described in mortal storybooks.
The tablet had shallow carvings. She traced them with her fingertip and felt certain the characters resembled the three words “Yanwang’s Token.”
With Yanwang’s Token in hand, it was time to find the Ever-Burning Lamp before the shrine.
Strange—called an Ever-Burning Lamp, yet it gave no light. She’d been groping in the dark for ages, completely disoriented.
But the shrine should be on the wall. If she felt her way around the tower’s interior, how could she miss it?
Zhuoxue tucked the tablet under her sash and, while silently begging Yanwang’s forgiveness, shuffled sideways in small steps—reaching above her head and crouching to feel along the floor.
The tower’s inner walls were unlike those in the mortal realm—not flat at all, but studded with fierce ghost heads.
Yanwang’s audacity must be greater than the heavens. If she had to work alongside these ghost heads every day, she’d be joyless and depressed within ten days.
One moment she felt a ghost head’s sharp fangs; the next, its eyeball. She was terrified that the ghost eyes might blink, the ghost mouth snap shut, and clamp down on her fingers.
Zhuoxue kept repeating in her heart: So much offense, so much offense. Lord Yanwang is magnanimous—please do not hold it against me. She was just a country fox with no worldly experience, who had chased a chicken all the way to the underworld and stumbled into this place by accident.
After finishing with the floor, the fox shuffled one step sideways. She had just started to rise and feel above her when something struck her head.
The impact knocked the tears right out of the fox. She held her breath against the pain, stepped back half a pace, and carefully rose—finally feeling the small wooden cabinet that looked like a shrine.
She didn’t know whether the shrine held other objects. She touched it cautiously, afraid that one careless move would knock everything over.
Fortunately, unlike mortal shrines, this one had no fruit offerings or incense candles—just a single lamp.
Zhuoxue picked up the lamp and fumbled around with it, but couldn’t get it to light. She gave up trying and found the stairs, ascending step by step.
She couldn’t hear her own footsteps, and sometimes it felt as though she wasn’t stepping on solid ground. If this hadn’t been a 300-chi tower, grueling to climb, she would certainly have felt she had become dust, drifting upward on the wind.
The higher she climbed, the heavier her steps became, as though Mount Tai pressed down on her, making her pant like an ox.
Fortunately, the dark Ever-Burning Lamp was slowly beginning to glow. The closer she got to the top of the tower, the brighter the flame on the wick burned.
So the Ever-Burning Lamp wasn’t unable to light—it simply hadn’t been in the right place.
Zhuoxue was exhausted beyond measure. Her legs were weak and wobbling, and she nearly crashed to her knees.
As she finished the last step, the tablet tucked under her sash kept shaking, nearly snapping its beaded cord.
Zhuoxue hastily pulled out the tablet, but it suddenly flew from her grasp like a swooping bird, slamming onto the official desk not far away with a smack.
At once, the flame inside the Ever-Burning Lamp transformed into swarms of firefly-like sparks, scattering in blazing haste in all directions, rushing toward every surface of the tower.
The moment the firefly sparks landed, ghostly green fire blazed along the base of every wall, and the entire tower was instantly illuminated.
Zhuoxue understood now—the Judge’s Token and the Ever-Burning Lamp were meant to be used here. Nothing had been taken in vain.
With the ghost fire lit, towering shelf after shelf revealed itself before her eyes. The shelves were packed tight with Destiny Registers, so densely arranged that not another volume could be squeezed in.
She naturally didn’t dare touch the objects on Yanwang’s official desk. She stood frozen for a long while before tiptoeing to the shelves and looking up at the faint carved inscriptions.
Each level of the shelves was carved with a mortal place name, detailed down to a village stream or a desolate valley.
Zhuoxue summoned her courage and pulled down a volume, only to find it completely blank—or perhaps she was opening it wrong.
But no matter how she held it—right side up or upside down, flipping from front to back or back to front—she couldn’t find a single trace of ink.
Could it be that only Yanwang could read the words in the Destiny Registers?
Zhuoxue then thought of looking for her own lifetime’s Destiny Register, but suddenly remembered…
Lan Hui had only told her that she had been washed to Qiufeng Ridge by floodwaters, but had never said where she was born.
And the “resonance” Longming had mentioned never appeared either—perhaps because she was too far away, so the register couldn’t sense her soul.
She couldn’t possibly pick up every single volume to sense it—that would take until the end of time.
The fox had a sudden inspiration—why not look directly for the Imperial City? What if she had been born there in her past life?
Fortunately, she didn’t need to move the rear shelves. She easily found the Destiny Register for Yunjing, Shuyun Kingdom.
She searched starting from a century ago, casually picking up a volume.
When she opened it, she froze in astonishment.
This register had words in it.
Footnotes
- Longxi (龙息), literally 'dragon breath'; in Chinese cultivation lore, dragon-derived auras are prized for their ability to conceal other power signatures.
- Biyin (庇荫), meaning 'shelter' or 'protective shade'; in Chinese, the term also carries the connotation of a patron's shielding influence over a dependent.
- Xianshi (仙使), combining 'xian' (celestial/immortal) and 'shi' (envoy); in Chinese celestial bureaucracy, divine messengers bearing edicts from the heavenly court.
- A hu (笏) was a narrow ceremonial tablet held by officials during imperial court audiences in ancient China, used for noting instructions and signifying rank.
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