The Great King Ordered Me to Marry – Chapter 65
by Little PandaSpeaking of the Two Demons’ Search for the Lan Xiang Residence
“My thanks.” Longming set the tiny fox-puff from her palm onto her shoulder. The fox’s fur was nearly the same color as her clothes — utterly unremarkable.
Seeing this, Lan Hui finally realized that the thing she had so lightly flicked away was probably not a water droplet at all. It was a fox.
What folk remedy the little puff had used was anyone’s guess — it carried almost no scent. But that demon lord of Lingkong Mountain…
Lan Hui gaped, astonishment and doubt churning in her heart, and concluded that the water flooding her nose must have made her smell wrong.
Surely she’d smelled wrong!
Not daring to let down her guard, Lan Hui thrust out both palms. The spiritual power in the water, like color bleeding out of dyed silk, was retreating bit by bit to the Nightmare King’s side.
The Nightmare Dream, so lately running rampant at will, was now reduced to a few square cuns.
“And here I took you for some lofty soul above fame and gain — turns out you’ve been in league with the Sacred Immortal of Yaojing all along!” The black smoke on the Nightmare King’s face congealed into a sneer. He believed he’d caught Longming’s weak point, and his words dripped with wild glee.
“You’re wrong,” Lan Hui said evenly. “I stopped being the Sacred Immortal of Yaojing long ago.”
With the Nightmare Dream unable to spread, the waves, too, subsided back onto the sea’s surface.
The waters of Wugou Stream lay unruffled; where water met sky, the horizon settled once more into a single flat, placid line.
“Impossible!” The Nightmare King couldn’t believe it. He was the master of Wugou Stream — and he couldn’t crush one mere spirit turtle?!
Rage filled his chest. Eyes bulging, teeth grinding, he heaved the Yexu Waters over, whipping the stilled sea into mountainous waves that broke over Lan Hui.
Lan Hui stood unmoved as a mountain, steady on the swell, and with one strike of her palm raised a towering wall of waves to match.
The two wavefronts collided, each devouring the other, neither giving way.
The Yexu Waters were split in two: one half answered to Lan Hui, the other remained in the Nightmare King’s grip.
The Nightmare King recoiled a hundred chi, the dense fog about him spreading like a bat’s wings. Lan Hui was about to plunge through the great waves in pursuit when Longming’s voice stopped her short.
“Mind his nightmare arts,” Longming said, low.
Lan Hui’s expression went cold, and she halted at once.
Without the boundless Yexu Waters to anchor it, the Nightmare Dream could hold only a narrow strip of ground — the Nightmare King meant to lure her into his trap.
“No matter.” Unhurried, Lan Hui flung a strand of spiritual force out behind her.
The waves blocking the bramble wall shattered with a roar, crashing apart to open a passage.
“Go, quickly. This place I will hold.” Lan Hui sat down cross-legged, and a spirit turtle — black of shell, mottled of foot — flashed into being beneath her.
The turtle’s shell was hard as bedrock. She sat steady atop her true form, her own width not half a single shell-plate, as though enthroned on a hilltop.
“We’ll meet again before long.” Longming turned to meet the auspicious radiance, cut through cloud and gathered wind, and shot straight for the Nine Heavens with the speed of a thunderbolt.
Zhuoxue clutched the fabric at Longming’s shoulder, her heart soaring with them — then leaping up to jam itself in her throat.
She kept her eyes fixed below, but Longming flew too fast and Lan Hui’s figure was too small: she watched Lan Hui dwindle to a grain of sand, and then, in the next breath, Wugou Stream itself became a single grain of sand in the sea.
By the time she blinked again she was hanging at the cloud-tops beside Longming, with no hope of sorting out where on earth Wugou Stream had been.
“The Nightmare King has lost the Yexu Waters — it’s like a bird with both wings broken,” Longming said, brushing the clouds aside. “Sacred Immortal Lan Xiang will come to no harm.”
After what they’d just been through, Zhuoxue let out a small breath of relief.
Back when she’d lived cooped up with Lan Hui at the foot of Qiufeng Ridge, she’d always assumed Lan Hui was shy of company and weak in power — turns out she’d been leaning against a great mountain all along without ever knowing it.
That black-shelled, mottled-footed spirit turtle — was that not an indestructible ridge of rock? And Lan Hui’s fondness for red and green matched the mountains exactly.
Come spring, the hillsides would be a riot of reds and greens, quite festive.
“Kunlun Jade Capital, however, is another matter,” Longming said coldly.
Zhuoxue had seen that coming.
The million-strong host, clad in armor and gripping sharp weapons, came on with murderous momentum; the demon lords, compelled to obey, past all resisting, had become blades in the Nightmare King’s hand, one and all.
Demon lords all, mighty in their arts — and a blade made of such would slice through iron like mud.
And in the Nightmare King’s grip, that blade would not rest until it had seen blood.
“The heavenly thunder has a cause behind it,” Longming said gravely. “Tianji and the Nightmare King badly need a flawless pretext — one to wash away every demon’s and immortal’s doubts.”
The sea of clouds streamed past them; hot wind brushed their faces.
“The Nightmare King rides the thunder’s momentum to advance on Yaojing,” Longming went on, “and Tianji, riding it too, can pin the thunder’s origin on the demon tribes. This battle cannot be avoided.”
Zhuoxue gasped. “If we’d been trapped in Wugou Stream at just that moment, wouldn’t we have been the scapegoats? Tianji pins the crimes on the demon tribes, the Nightmare King substitutes you in their place — and with the dead telling no tales, the two of them come out flawless white jade, and turn a profit besides!”
Tianji crushes the demon soldiers and sits secure as Celestial Leader; the demon lords of every territory fall dead and maimed; and the Nightmare King rests easy on his pillow.
What a vicious scheme.
“A pity the Nightmare King has failed,” Longming said. “We still have room to maneuver.”
They did — but not much of it remained.
The million demon soldiers must have reached Yaojing’s Heavenly Gate by now, the demon lords hard on their heels — and before the Gate, by now… the blood may already run in rivers.
A hundred years ago the Nightmare King and Tianji had staged their play, sacrificing demons and immortals without a flicker of pity; now, with heaven’s punishment warning all the world, that one immortal and one demon, to bury their ambition, would likely harm only more innocents still.
Zhuoxue had never thought herself any world-saver; nine tails or no, she was nothing more than a fox who spent her days thinking about stealing chickens1.
Now, with the auspicious radiance pouring over her, the shadows in her heart had been swept clean away, and even the ink-black half of her demonic core seemed to shine.
She found herself thinking that if heaven and earth could truly be turned over, she would be willing to try her hand at it.
“Scared?” Longming looked toward her shoulder. The fox-puff was so small the fox’s very features could hardly be made out.
Zhuoxue refused to admit to fear. She gave a little humph. “What’s there to be scared of? These nine tails of mine didn’t grow for nothing.”
“Mm. Not for nothing,” Longming agreed.
“And what should you call me?” Zhuoxue asked, insufferably pleased.
The silver-haired great demon actually turned the question of a form of address over for a good long while, unable to gauge what the fox wanted to hear.
At last, with the most extraordinary solemnity, Longming pronounced two syllables: “Darling2.”
Dar-what? What-ling?
The fox very nearly lost her grip. Her ears went scalding in an instant, and she stammered: “I—I wasn’t asking for that!”
Longming’s face didn’t so much as twitch. “What did you want to hear, then?”
“Heavenly Fox. You should call me Heavenly Fox.” The fox’s voice shrank with every word, until even she felt the shame of it.
Who would have guessed that this same Nine-Tailed Heavenly Fox had once been chased crawling through the dirt by mortals over a stolen chicken.
Zhuoxue couldn’t help a wistful sigh. If Tianji and the Nightmare King had never meddled, she would surely be serving her post in Yaojing at this very moment.
A nine-to-five3 post, perhaps. Heaven’s discipline was iron-clad: immortals either fasted from grain4 or ate vegetarian, and that life truly wasn’t one a fox could live.
Now she was neither immortal nor demon, and no precept or statute in any realm could bind her — truly a stray blow that had landed square on the mark. She’d lucked into the bargain of a lifetime.
“Do you regret coming to Lingkong Mountain?” Longming asked next.
Naturally Zhuoxue didn’t. She tilted her head. “Don’t tell me you’re the one with regrets?”
“I do have regrets — just not about that.” Longming was perfectly calm.
“Regrets about what?” Zhuoxue was curious now.
“If I’d known, I’d never have gone searching for that Soul-Concealing Leaf,” Longming said. “I could have held you a while longer.”
That was deadlier than the “Darling.”
The fox jolted from nose to tail-tip, scrambled up to the crown of Longming’s head, then slid down along her smooth forehead.
Her fingernail-sized body was exactly big enough: one paw slapped over Longming’s mouth, and that ceaselessly clattering mouth was plugged.
“You’ll just say anything, won’t you? Do you even want to keep living?!” Zhuoxue’s ears were about to smoke.
Longming, though, paid for it — even shrunk to a fingernail, the fox’s claws were as sharp as ever.
Fortunately a demon body refined over centuries was tough as bronze and iron; a little spiritual force to nourish the skin, and the thin scratches sealed themselves.
As long as Zhuoxue held on, Longming kept her mouth shut.
After a while Zhuoxue finally let go, drifting lightly down onto Longming’s lapel — and, for no reason she could name, the tip of her nose began to itch.
Her spiritual meridians itched along with it, an itch that went down to the bone.
The fox shivered and wriggled, unable to get comfortable no matter how she twisted, and thoroughly rumpled the lapel in the process.
“What is it?” Longming lowered her eyes.
“I think I’ve caught lice.” The words were barely out before a sneeze ambushed her.
The sneeze burst forth, and the turbid qi inside her poured out with it — and the Soul-Concealing Leaf’s effects, of all things, dissolved ahead of schedule.
Her cinched sinews and bones creaked and cracked like sprouting stems; the downy fur fell away all at once, leaving only skin of ice and a face of lotus.
Fortunately her clothes had been conjured from her fox body, so the sudden growth didn’t split the seams.
But the change back came too abruptly; Zhuoxue couldn’t adjust to the suddenly cumbersome body, forgot how to arrange her own limbs, and flailed arms and legs every which way.
She dropped out of the air, and Longming caught her square. “Did Chunxi water down that broth of hers?!” she cried.
“It was the auspicious radiance,” Longming said.
Bathed in radiance, Zhuoxue’s spirits were buoyant. “If the radiance is this good, no wonder mortals all want to be immortals.”
Longming was not having nearly so easy a time of it; climbing straight to the Nine Heavens was far harder than scaling Buzhou Mountain, and it was a long while before she managed a soft “mm.”
If even a demon lord strained like this, the lesser demons would fare far worse — the Nightmare King’s order to storm the Heavenly Gate was plainly a death sentence.
The radiance was nearer now. If the light spilling over Buzhou Mountain was a ladle from the vast sea5, then the radiance over Yaojing was the sea’s very source.
From far off they could hear weapons ringing against weapons, immortal arts and demon arts careening into each other, the roar of it filling the sky.
The heavens themselves hadn’t stirred — colored clouds still spanned the sky, their glow bright as woven brocade.
And precisely in that clear, sunlit expanse, a thunderclap burst into being.
That single peal drowned out every other sound, with the force of a nest burned out and a den scoured clean — as if to wipe every last stain of filth from the mortal world.
Zhuoxue froze, spots of light still swimming in her eyes.
Only from atop the Nine Heavens did she learn how dreadful heavenly thunder truly was: the lightning was still rolling at the cloud’s edge, and already her ears rang with it.
When the peal passed she couldn’t hear a thing, and her heart shuddered along with heaven and earth.
Longming flew wordlessly for the Heavenly Gate; her own eyes and ears took a long while to recover, and she snapped out a palm to send the immortal wind tearing at her face off in another direction.
The Heavenly Gate had collapsed. White jade lay shattered across the ground — the bone-burying stone of demons and immortals alike.
The first three tribulation bolts had already torn half of Yaojing apart; now a fourth had fallen, and ruin stretched as far as the eye could see — not a trace remained of the iridescent celestial paradise of mortal verse.
Longming stepped across the heaped dead and at last released Zhuoxue. “Find the Tearful Eye,” she said, her voice cold. “If it’s gone, then on to the Lan Xiang Cave Abode.”
“What about Tianji? Aren’t we going after Tianji?” Zhuoxue’s heart pounded like thunder; she hardly knew where to put her feet.
“We’ll find him. But the Tearful Eye Spiritual Dew comes first.” Longming, straining under the radiance, was already drenched in cold sweat. “With Sacred Immortal Lan Xiang pinning down the Nightmare King, he has no strength to spare for sending word to Tianji. Tianji can’t possibly imagine we’ve already reached Yaojing.”
Only—
She pressed her lips together and looked toward the clouds. If Tianji and the Nightmare King couldn’t find Zhuoxue, they would never let it rest.
She could only hope Lingkong Mountain’s barrier would hold a while longer; so long as Chunxi and Qiu Ruo kept their wits, the demons on the mountain would come through unharmed.
Zhuoxue was just about to urge her on when a keen edge of spiritual force flashed at the corner of her eye.
A gravely wounded heavenly soldier hauled himself up on a broken halberd and came charging, ferocious, to bar the two demons from the Heavenly Gate.
Longming spared him a sideways glance. She didn’t strike to harm — she simply loosed her pressure and nailed the soldier to the spot.
His eyes split with fury. “You dare force the Heavenly Gate!”
“I won’t kill you. Sleep.” Longming struck out a palm of spiritual force.
It caught him full in the face; he tipped backward and went out cold.
“Let’s hurry,” Zhuoxue urged.
Above, corridor bridges were collapsing and shattering; spiritual forces of every color crashed together like fireworks bursting into bloom — dazzling, and cruel.
Demons in their beast forms coiled among the jade pavilions of the immortal peaks, and the immortals unleashed killing techniques without the slightest restraint.
Water clashed against fire, light against shadow; whose flesh was spraying across the horizon could no longer be told, and the white jade ran red as cinnabar.
This was no Kunlun Jade Capital. This was Avici hell6.
The immortals burned with fury, and the demon lords were grief-mad with rage — some great demons would sooner sever their own arms and defy their Life Oaths than be wielded by the Nightmare King a moment longer.
Blood and tears streamed down into the Mortal Realm, breeding reeking wind and bloody rain; the heavens showed their omens.
The Mortal Realm fell into chaos along with it. Mortals hid indoors, not daring to show their heads, gazing up at the sky in dread — terrified that the world’s road had run out, and their lives with it.
Longming gathered Zhuoxue in her arms and ran for the Tearful Eye, hoping only that that corner of heaven had been spared the thunder.
“Where is it?” Zhuoxue scanned everywhere, but rubble filled her eyes; not one intact patch of ground remained.
“The Tearful Eye stands on the peak of Wangri Cliff, shaped like a star, its water pouring down the mountainside like a stream.” Longming sighted the range standing beside the sun — and before joy could rise in her chest, it went utterly cold.
Zhuoxue was still searching, little knowing that the bald stone mountain before her eyes was Wangri Cliff.
“It’s run dry,” Longming said coldly.
Zhuoxue froze at the words. The distant peak stood stark against the sky, its sheer walls driving straight into the clouds, without a single drop of water on the whole mountain.
They say constant dripping wears through stone — and indeed deep vertical grooves ran down the steep rock, plainly carved by a stream’s patient years.
But where was the Tearful Eye?
The summit was bare. Only pearl-white crystal grit lay in the crevices, not yet scattered by the wind.
“Tianji did this,” Longming pronounced.
Not content with pouring away every drop of the Tearful Eye Moisture in the Huangliang Dream Market, he had destroyed the springhead in Yaojing as well. Tianji was dead set on deceiving heaven and earth.
Zhuoxue’s breath caught. “Then where is the Lan Xiang Residence?” she asked hastily.
Longming pointed west across Yaojing, to where the peaks ranged on and on and a single corner of weathered flying eaves could just barely be made out amid the tall woods and lush grass.
The building was buried in vegetation, plainly abandoned for years — and yet it had something of the grotto-heavens and blessed lands7 of the storybooks.
Longming swept down and plunged with the fox into the lush tangle of flowers and grass — and it was like falling into fog; they lost all direction.
Ancient trees towered here, branches and leaves lush and dense, and not even the abode’s front gate could be found.
Zhuoxue was burning with impatience — then she remembered the strange underground water cave back on Qiufeng Ridge, and a light went off in her head.
“Follow the sound of water!” she said, tugging at Longming’s sleeve.
In the old days, not knowing Lan Hui’s true form was a turtle, Zhuoxue had always thought her temperament odd — refusing a perfectly good mountainside just to keep her confined, choosing to live on the damp banks of the water instead.
So Lan Hui simply loved water by nature; confining her had been incidental.
Longming understood at once. She listened close to the water sounds around them and easily found a crevice — and through it, another world could be glimpsed.
“I’ll go down and scout first.” Longming leapt down and landed among the weeds, a clear spring at her feet, bubbling and burbling.
Zhuoxue, afire with impatience, didn’t even notice the nine fox tails that had sprung out behind her; she leaned in for a look, all nine tails resting on the green grass, their downy fur littered with clippings.
“Well?” she dared not say it aloud.
Longming looked around, then abruptly closed her five fingers and stripped away every green vine crawling the wall.
Years of growth had made the vines heavy as oxen; the whole mass crashed down onto the grass and threw dust into the sky.
Upon the stone wall stood revealed four characters in strokes of flying dragons and dancing phoenixes8 —
Lan Xiang Spirit Residence.
Zhuoxue leapt down after her and stepped from stone pillar to stone pillar across the stream, walking deeper into the abode.
Inside, some of the weeds already reached her shoulder; she knocked against something, bent to feel around, and found tables, chairs, and earthen jars.
Longming stepped up and struck out a single palm; where her spiritual force passed, not a blade of grass was left standing.
The whole abode flashed bright and new, even the dust swept off elsewhere. Looking at the tidy tables and cabinets and bed, it was as though Lan Hui had never left.
Zhuoxue walked to the bed, ran her fingers over it, then crouched down and dragged a wooden chest out from underneath.
A hundred years on, Lan Hui’s habits hadn’t changed a bit: whatever world-rare treasures she had, they were all stashed carelessly under the bed.
She studied it a while before opening the chest. Inside lay a good number of jade pieces and porcelain vials — any single one worth more than all of Qiufeng Ridge’s possessions put together.
Longming reached in and picked up a clam, its mouth clamped tight; when she shook it, something inside rang like a little bell.
“It’s in here,” she said.
Footnotes
- 偷鸡 | Touji | In Chinese folk tales, fox spirits are the stock villains of the village chicken coop, sneaking in by night for a hen; 'a fox that steals chickens' is shorthand for a cunning, gluttonous little demon.
- 心肝 | Xin gan | Literally 'heart and liver,' a classic Chinese endearment for one's most beloved, on par with 'sweetheart'; the comedy lands in Longming bestowing it with the gravity of a formal title.
- 朝九晚五 | Chao Jiu Wan Wu | Modern Chinese slang for the standard office workday, nine in the morning until five in the evening; deliberately anachronistic here, as Zhuoxue pictures celestial bureaucracy keeping regular business hours.
- 辟谷 | Bigu | 'Abstaining from grains,' a real Daoist ascetic practice in which cultivators renounce grain and cooked food, drawing nourishment from breath, dew, and herbs; a traditional mark of an advanced immortal.
- 沧海一瓢 | Canghai Yipiao | 'A ladle from the vast sea,' a cousin of the famous phrase 'a grain in the vast sea' from Su Shi's eleventh-century 'Ode to the Red Cliff,' meaning one tiny portion of something measureless.
- 无间炼狱 | Wu Jian Lianyu | Avici, the 'Uninterrupted' hell of Buddhist cosmology — the deepest of the hells, where torment continues without a moment's pause; invoked for slaughter beyond ordinary horror.
- 洞天福地 | Dongtian Fudi | 'Cave-heavens and blessed lands': in Daoist geography, sacred mountains whose interiors conceal hidden paradises where immortals dwell apart from the world; a staple setting of Chinese fantasy tales.
- 龙飞凤舞 | Long Fei Feng Wu | Literally 'dragons fly, phoenixes dance'; a set phrase for calligraphy so vigorous and flamboyant the strokes seem to soar — here the lettering over Lan Hui's door.
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