The Great King Ordered Me to Marry – Chapter 56
by Little PandaSpeaking of a Fox Going from One Tail to Nine.
Ten zhang1 was nothing, gone in a single breath.
Zhuoxue leapt into the narrow fissure. Her body, soul, and spirit were all still intact, yet she felt as though she were already at death’s door. The joys and sorrows of this life and her past life paraded before her eyes, vivid as a revolving lantern2.
This leap was not recklessness with her life on the line—it was the result of careful deliberation.
She was neither reckless nor afraid of the Impermanence coming to collect her. She was certain that spiritual herb couldn’t truly harm her. Its roots were formidable, yes, but she wouldn’t necessarily lose outright.
While she still had a burst of courage in her, she would gamble with the Heavenly Dao—let what came after be fortune or calamity.
From above, the mountain fissure had seemed deep and perilous. Now that she’d leapt down, she realized how insignificant ten zhang truly was.
She figured Longming wouldn’t just stand by and watch her die. Surely she hadn’t been scared witless at a moment like this?
A well-traveled demon lord of a mountain realm—reduced to this moment of befuddlement?
At this life-or-death juncture, the glimmering lights within the fissure rushed toward her.
Fireflies.
The fireflies blanketing the walls took flight all at once, their lights too numerous to count. What had been scattered and sparse became, in an instant, a river of stars.
She sat fallen in the midst of that river, the glow around her as brilliant as the night pearl Lan Hui kept enshrined at Qiufeng Ridge.
The fireflies were conjured by magic and had no consciousness of their own. They would never have gathered on their own accord—it was Longming’s spell that drew them here in swarms.
Zhuoxue barely managed to steady herself, only to watch helplessly as the orchid’s roots grew farther and farther away.
These fireflies were clearly carrying her back up!
Outrageous. The fox had finally summoned her courage.
Zhuoxue craned her neck toward the demon in the ink-dark dress at the cliff’s edge and called out, “Let me down!”
“Even blades can’t touch it. How do you intend to extract it?” Longming’s brow stayed furrowed.
Zhuoxue leaned forward and waved her hands through the fireflies like shooing gnats, muttering under her breath, “Shoo, shoo, shoo. And here I thought you were being kind.”
She then called up to Longming, “The art of overcoming hardness with softness3—I don’t just teach that to anyone.”
Longming laughed in sheer exasperation. Now the fox was presuming to instruct her.
Zhuoxue kept waving, her wrist bones aching from the motion, adamant about going down. “Let me down, and I’ll let you broaden your horizons.”
Longming’s voice turned cold. “It will devour the spiritual power I’m using to shield you along with everything else.”
Zhuoxue had anticipated this and scoffed. “That’s still better than you hacking away blindly up there. If I’m not mistaken, even through your blades, it’s draining your spiritual power—because your blades are made of spiritual power too. Otherwise they couldn’t cleave mountains and carve stone.”
The fox’s sharpness was no momentary flash. She had observed closely and seen through it at once.
Exposed in a single sentence, Longming’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly. Yet she still drove the fireflies to float upward, unhurried. “No matter. My spiritual power is enough to burst its belly.”
To burst its belly—how much spiritual power would that consume? Wasn’t that courting destruction?
The word “death” was easy not only to say but to do.
This was Buzhou Mountain, not just anywhere.
Zhuoxue looked up. In an instant, her expression went completely still, every trace of vivacity draining from her face.
The shift was too sudden—seemingly without cause, yet the trail was there, traced in her heart.
She spoke with grave earnestness. “Don’t waste your spiritual power here, Longming.”
Her voice was pressed so soft and so low. After all the grinning and jesting she’d done, this was the first time she’d been so deadly serious.
Longming paused. Her silver hair and robes streamed in the wind together. Her silhouette was not frail, but it was lonely.
In three hundred years of life, she had witnessed countless lives slip away, watched seas turn to mulberry fields, seen dynasties rise and fall.
In three hundred springs and autumns, the moments that could be called happiness were pitifully few.
Tranquility had always been elusive, joy even harder to hold. She wanted to hold on, but her heart outstripped her strength.
“Let me down. I’m the one taking its spiritual power, so naturally I should extract it with my own hands.” In a flash, Zhuoxue was all smiles again, utterly carefree.
After a long silence, Longming spoke slowly. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll come down for you at once.”
Zhuoxue curled her index finger, making as if to hook pinkies with Longming.
But the fireflies hadn’t lifted her back up yet, and the pinkie promise never connected.
Zhuoxue didn’t mind. She held her palm above the fireflies instead, waving and puffing out her cheeks to blow them downward.
As if she could budge them. It took a turn of Longming’s palm to send the fireflies descending into the depths of the fissure, bearing her down to the orchid’s roots.
When Zhuoxue landed, the fireflies scattered, reattaching themselves to the walls all around.
The roots were no small cluster. Up close, she could see how intricate they were—each strand slender, yet woven across the full breadth of the cavern wall.
Digging them out barehanded—who knew how long that would take. Then again, she…
Had overestimated herself.
Fortunately, no matter how starved the herb was, it fed only on spiritual power. Let it drain all it wanted—the fox didn’t have a speck of spiritual power in her body.
Zhuoxue reached out to touch the roots, already imagining what a fox-sicle would look like.
Pale and stiff, pitiful to be sure, but once sharpened, Longming could use her as a blade—far more practical than that White Jade Lily-of-the-Valley.
Since she’d come all this way, she couldn’t very well leave empty-handed. Besides, the Auspicious Radiance couldn’t harm her soul. Even if she had to drive her own corpse to haul a hoe, she would wrench this thing from the stone.
Zhuoxue held her breath and went still. Before her eyes, the spider-like roots pulsed faintly. At the heart of their interlacing, something seemed to hide—a powerful, beating heart.
Every root that extended outward clung tight to the stone wall. If beneath them lay countless barbed hooks, she would pry them out one by one.
Might as well try.
Her mind made up, Zhuoxue thrust her hand out and seized the center of the root mass.
In that instant, the spiritual power shielding her was sucked dry. Cold rolled in from every direction. She went numb with cold, instantly frozen in place.
If only there were Auspicious Radiance. However unpleasant it was, it would at least bring some comfort to her heart.
But the barrier above was now covered in snow—a canopy that blotted out the sky, blocking the Auspicious Radiance entirely.
A thin layer of frost formed on Zhuoxue’s face. She couldn’t blink, couldn’t move her lips. Her organs were frozen solid as ice sculptures. Only her heart still stirred, barely, faintly.
She wanted just a little Auspicious Radiance. If her body died, so be it—at least her soul could live on.
Every brush with death she’d felt before didn’t count. Now, unable to move, with barely a wisp of breath left—that was death bearing down on her.
From atop the fissure, Longming couldn’t see clearly. She could only vaguely make out that the figure among the fireflies had gone still.
She hastily channeled spiritual power to disperse the cold for Zhuoxue. But for every thread she sent down, the orchid’s roots devoured one in return. It was a bottomless pit.
The frost on Zhuoxue’s face melted just enough. Her frozen lips parted slightly, and two thin syllables escaped her throat.
“Auspicious Radiance.”
Faint as a gnat’s hum. If Longming hadn’t been listening with full attention, she might not have caught it.
Spiritual pressure erupted from Longming’s sides. Crystalline spiritual power spiraled out, condensing into two tiger arms—each as vast as the Heavenly Gate—that wrenched the fissure open to both sides.
Mountain snow came thundering down again, as if clouds were collapsing from heaven to earth, only to be swept aside by spiritual force.
The fissure split like a torn fan. As the ribs spread wide, a vast gap opened, and with no more snow covering the barrier, the Auspicious Radiance finally poured into the mountain.
The fireflies’ meager glow was instantly eclipsed.
Bathed in celestial light, Zhuoxue’s flagging spirit drank it in like rain on parched earth. Whatever pain wracked her body felt no worse than an itch.
Enduring the cold, she called out, “Pull your spiritual power back. Don’t waste it all down here.”
Longming’s eyes were the color of a still, deep pool, with a fierce resolve hidden in their depths. How could she withdraw her spiritual power? Was she supposed to watch that slender frame dissolve into nothing?
Three hundred springs and autumns, then three hundred more, without end. She cycled through all four seasons, yet it felt as though she’d been trapped in an eternal winter.
Every last thread of spiritual power she sent forth was consumed. Send more, and more was devoured. Endless, relentless—at the end of her rope4.
When would it end?
Zhuoxue could feel the spiritual power draining away. The more the roots absorbed, the faster the center pulsed.
“Take it back. Don’t give me any more.”
She wasn’t afraid of the herb blooming early from a full meal. She was afraid Longming would be sucked dry into a skeleton.
Longming didn’t stop. Instead she said, “Enough. I’ll take your place.”
The fireflies gathered again, swarming to her side without so much as a by-your-leave. Zhuoxue clutched the roots and refused to let go.
“Who told you to throw your life away like this?!” Longming snapped.
The shout rang out, carrying the echo of a tiger’s roar.
It lasted so long it seemed heaven and earth had dried up. Then silence fell—utter and absolute.
A single sentence rose from the mountain fissure, sudden and unbidden.
“Take it back, Hanxing.”
Longming’s composure shattered. Waves roiled in those deep-pool eyes. This time, she was certain she hadn’t misheard.
Zhuoxue beamed, thoroughly pleased with herself. So what if she was a great demon? The fox had her number.
A hundred roots. She tore them from the stone wall one by one, using her body as if it were forged of copper and iron, scraping her fingers raw until blood filled every crevice of her knuckles.
After a long time, the spiritual power cloaking her began to withdraw, slow as a snail’s crawl.
So cold.
Zhuoxue thought: if the cold hadn’t numbed her ten fingers, she would have been howling.
Since it couldn’t be cut, she’d tear the whole thing out. She’d always thought the phrase cutting grass and eliminating the roots5 was rather vicious—now she had no other choice.
One root, two roots, three roots…
Each one tangled with the next, each one driven in like a nail.
Her fingers were numb, but her mind raced on. If her body dissolved here and her soul survived, what then? Would she have to possess someone else’s body to live on?
That would be far too wicked.
Zhuoxue couldn’t think it through. The pain in her sinews had reached such an extreme that for a moment she lost all sense of her body—it was as if only a soul remained, still toiling away.
Halfway there!
But she noticed with alarm that the section of root she’d torn from the wall was being consumed by fire—charred black as coal in the blink of an eye.
The withered black stub snapped at a pinch, but those still pinned to the stone remained unbreakable.
The instant a side root withered, spiritual power surged to the center of the mass. The core grew thicker, pulsing more like a beating heart.
She had to hurry.
Zhuoxue gasped for breath. All ten fingers were a mangled mess of blood and flesh, the nails peeled back.
As time dragged on, frost gathered on her eyelashes. Her vision blurred into a haze—she could no longer see the blood.
The core of the root mass was on the verge of collapse—no longer than a finger joint—and every remaining side root had gone dark as an extinguished lamp.
Zhuoxue managed a strained swallow. When she looked down, she found her body had become translucent as glaze—she could see every blood vessel and sinew beneath, clear and distinct.
Beneath her clothes, it must be worse—her organs visible in stark clarity.
So this was dissolution.
She had lived only eighteen years in this life—far from enough. Even adding her past life, it still wouldn’t amount to half of Longming’s years.
She didn’t want to die. And yet here she was, living towards death6.
Zhuoxue buried her head low, not wanting Longming to see. She even turned slightly, using her back to shield her translucent arms from view.
She sucked in a breath of cold air and, with every ounce of strength left, tore the remaining orchid roots from the stone wall. Stripped of Buzhou Mountain’s earth-vein qi, the roots crumbled at a touch.
It could no longer devour spiritual power. It had nothing left but to disperse.
Seizing the moment, Zhuoxue crammed the roots into her mouth. She couldn’t afford to care about anything else. This time—
It was finally her turn to swallow spiritual power.
The roots were bone-dry. Chewing them was like gnawing tree bark or eating raw grass—hard even to chew at all.
But Zhuoxue had no time to chew properly. She swallowed them whole like swallowing a date whole7, every last bit, nearly choking on them.
She could only pray silently: please don’t let her die wretchedly by choking. That would be too humiliating a death.
The roots dissolved slowly in her belly. Then a sudden rumble echoed through her body. Her chest pounded like a war drum, and her parched spiritual meridians stirred with ravenous hunger.
The spiritual power that hadn’t yet dispersed from the roots was drawn in by her spiritual meridians. Without her consciously circulating it, they offered it all—generously, unconditionally—to the lingtai, to her demonic core.
Just this one segment of root was enough to shed another layer of gray shell from her dim demonic core.
Zhuoxue suffered agony beyond endurance. Her glaze-like skin split into a thousand fissures. Her body became a sieve of wounds, as if she were being flayed alive.
The demonic core’s interior grew ever brighter, ever more intricate. It was one of a kind, unheard of across the three realms. It resembled the sun and moon, a taiji disc—forged of two colors, joined as one.
One half was like polished, translucent black chalcedony. The other half was radiant gold jade.
It was not, strictly speaking, a demonic core at all. Neither immortal nor demon, it was chaos itself—primal as the dawn of creation.
At that very moment, the restriction from Kunlun Jade Capital burned away to nothing. It didn’t even manage to flash once.
Longming was too far above. She dove down without thinking—only to be stopped short by a wall of white.
Not snow. Fox tails.
The fox in the fissure had taken her true form. Countless tails—impossible to say how many—wrapped around her, and a vast spiritual pressure rolled outward, flooding through the fissure like a torrent.
The avalanche stopped. Even the falling snow hung suspended in midair.
Zhuoxue felt as though she were shattering, then being rebuilt. She was a piece of porcelain, hammered and fired over and over.
One moment: freezing, starving. The next: burning, restless.
Her thoughts were sand scattered everywhere, unable to cohere—as chaotic as her demonic core.
Her body had been fully repaired. The cold was gone entirely. Only heat remained.
If there were a fire blazing sky and earth in this place, it was spreading outward from her.
Even her breath was hot. The body wrapped in fox tails was drenched in sweat. She unfurled her tails, longing to gather snow and ice into her embrace.
It was mating heat—long suppressed, now unleashed the instant the restriction fell. Like a flood through a broken dam, it surged beyond all control.
The fox tails stirred restlessly, draped before her body. Their supple, sinuous motion made them look, at first glance, like spirit serpents coiled around her.
Where would snakes come from in a mountain fissure?
Through the parting of those swaying tails, Longming beheld the peerless Nine-Tailed Heavenly Fox. Every legendary encounter sung of through the ages was no encounter at all—what she saw before her was the true marvel.
The fox demon was exquisite but not coquettish. Her eyes held no spring passion—there was desire, but undefined. That faint stirring of feeling in her gaze was peach-blossom water rising, a warm fragrant wind drunk on its own sweetness.
Her gaze shifted. She looked toward Longming—hazy, as if she’d forgotten something, half-squinting to make out that solitary figure.
Footnotes
- 丈 | zhang | Traditional Chinese unit of length equal to approximately 3.3 meters, or about 10.8 feet; ten zhang thus equals roughly thirty-three meters, making the fissure Zhuoxue leapt into surprisingly shallow.
- 走马灯 | zoumadeng | A traditional Chinese lantern with paper figures mounted on a central spindle, rotated by heated air; when lit, shadows circle the lantern's walls as scenes in endless procession, hence the metaphor for memories flashing rapidly before one's eyes.
- 以柔克刚 | yi rou ke gang | A core principle from Laozi's Daodejing holding that the soft and yielding can overcome the hard and rigid; here Zhuoxue playfully presents it as her personal secret technique.
- 日暮途穷 | ri mu tu qiong | Literally 'the sun sets and the road runs out'; a classical four-character idiom from the Records of the Grand Historian, describing being cornered without further resources or hope, like a traveler who reaches the end of the road at dusk.
- 斩草除根 | zhan cao chu gen | Literally 'cut the grass and pull up the roots'; a proverb from the Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals advocating complete eradication of a threat so it cannot regrow, here applied literally to uprooting the orchid.
- 向死而生 | xiang si er sheng | A philosophical concept popularized in Chinese through Heidegger's 'being-towards-death' (Sein zum Tode), denoting the paradox of striving for life by confronting mortality head-on; here Zhuoxue faces dissolution to achieve rebirth.
- 囫囵吞枣 | hu lun tun zao | Literally 'swallowing a date whole'; from a Song-dynasty fable in which a man ate dates without chewing, ruining his teeth while failing to taste them; describes gulping something down without proper processing or consideration.
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