The Great King Ordered Me to Marry – Chapter 66

Speaking of the Fox Who Heard the Cry and Sought the Spirit Dove

Zhuoxue was still rummaging through the chest when the sound made her glance over at the pearl clam in Longming’s hand. She leaned in close to listen — and sure enough, caught a crisp chime of bells.

“How does water sound just like the Silver Bell?” she asked, puzzled.

            

“The Tearful Eye is the eye of a goddess; it must never touch earthly dust — the moment a drop meets soil, it’s gone. It’s shaped like a pearl, and when shaken it rings like pearls dropping onto a jade plate¹, its lingering echo enough to intoxicate.”

Longming gave the clam another light shake, and the faint music of forest and spring lingered at the ear.

Zhuoxue was a little reluctant to part with it. Lan Hui had hidden the thing beneath her bed — that was how much she treasured it. But the two of them had come for exactly this. Reluctant or not, it had to go.

            

“Where are the pages of the Destiny Register?” Longming asked.

Zhuoxue drew the few thin sheets from her sleeve — and for a moment didn’t dare look at Longming.

Back then she’d meant to bluff her way through, and to tease the white tiger with tales of the old days besides: innocence on her face, triumph in her heart. To this day she had never once owned up, openly and honestly, to that mischievous streak — she could hardly admit out loud that the more wistful the white tiger looked, the more gloriously smug she’d felt. And those pages of the Destiny Register? Torn off furtively and hidden in the latrine, of all places.

            

Handing them over now felt like being back on that day — except not quite. It was as if she were graciously inviting Longming to join her on a trip to the privy.

Very strange.

Zhuoxue kept her eyes lowered, grumbling to herself for a good while, but her hands didn’t dawdle — one motion, and the pages were spread open. They’d been folded neatly, and they opened the same way, corner lined to corner. She had kept them safe; she remembered exactly what the creases looked like, terrified that one careless moment and someone would swap them out on her.

            

The ghost-qi along the edges hadn’t yet faded, and not one word showed on the paper. The sheets had never touched water, yet they felt freshly dredged out of the Wangchuan River — cold and damp both.

When she’d torn them, she’d been so certain. Now she wasn’t so sure, and she mumbled, “If I tore the wrong pages, that really would be a joke.”

“Open the clam and find out.” Longming tossed the pearl clam into the air. Spiritual power held it aloft; it wouldn’t fall. Zhuoxue’s gaze rose with it, her breath catching, her fingers pressing a little harder into the pages. Right or wrong — this moment would tell.

            

The clenched shell was forced by spiritual power into a hairline crack, and with a snap the crack yawned open. Thankfully, the Tearful Eye’s dew didn’t come bouncing out with it. It hung there, crystalline and brilliant — no pearl, no jade, yet finer than either. One round drop, rosy light sealed inside it, shimmering through and through.

Zhuoxue held perfectly still, able only to shoot Longming a look — one hurried breath, she feared, and the pearl-tear would be knocked to the floor. The clam tilted; the drop rolled slowly off and landed with a soft patter, dead center on the page.

Days of running herself ragged with Longming, all to find this Tearful Eye Moisture — one twist after another along the way, but found at last.

            

The drop struck the middle of the sheet, and the pages stacked beneath took the water’s sheen as well. The moisture sank in and did not dry; it spread, millimeter by millimeter. Before long, every corner of every page held the stain — and beneath it, chaotic strokes burst into view, just as Zhuoxue had first seen them. The lawless scribbles crawled back into place like insects, assembling themselves into characters upright and generous. And, conveniently, the reader could go down them line by line.

The words were the same as before.

「Shuyun, Chaoyu Palace. Born in the Tianqu Yihai Year, on the sixteenth day of the Lotus Month², three ke past the Chen Hour³. Mortal flesh/body. Named Moqi Jueguang.」

            

She hadn’t torn the wrong pages. This really was Jueguang’s Destiny Register.

Seeing the birth record of her past life again, Zhuoxue still felt a pang — but this time was different from before. Looking at the register now, there wasn’t a trace of sorrow left at the tip of her heart, only a scattering of something unspeakable, a reluctance to let go. The whole of that past life still surged up on occasion, sometimes slipping into her dreams; forgetting wasn’t hers to choose.

Zhuoxue blinked. Longming’s gaze was fixed, utterly absorbed, and Zhuoxue couldn’t help reaching out to cover it. It wasn’t that she feared Longming pining over her past life — she feared Longming taking every word to heart, reading it until she knew it backwards. Everything she’d done was there on paper; how was that any different from wearing nothing at all? And here she was, holding her shirt open of her own accord, showing Longming everything with a swagger — practically opening the door to welcome a tiger in.

            

Longming pressed Zhuoxue’s wrist and floated her hand away, and kept reading — truly word by word, line by line, her expression grave.

“What, reading that closely? It’s not like I’ll reward you if you memorize it.” Zhuoxue’s face had gone warm.

Longming turned a page, read from head to foot — and the fingertip gliding along suddenly stopped.

            

Zhuoxue leaned in.

“This is where I met you,” Longming said.

Zhuoxue smacked her lips. “All I remember is you shut up in a cage, howling hard enough to bring the sky down. I thought I’d picked up something that could do nothing but talk — and here you are, in the palace, putting on airs.”

            

Longming went awkward — so Zhuoxue stopped being bashful.

Longming fell silent. Back then, gravely wounded, she had gone so far as to give up her mouth; without it, she hadn’t a shred of menace left.

Zhuoxue brightened, giving the pages in her hand a light shake. “Here. Take this page along, and I—”

            

Before she could finish, the heart in her chest, for no reason she could name, weighed a thousand jin⁴; it slammed against her until she nearly suffocated, the color draining from her face, going nearly ash-gray. Too sudden — as if something had been set upon her out of nowhere, though where this abrupt force came from, she couldn’t say. The Destiny Register in her hand? But it had shown its writing before — once in the heavens, once in the underworld.

Longming took the pages from her hand, and her face changed too. “Where does it hurt?” she asked sharply.

Every boon carries its bane — she had broken through a realm in a single night, and what harm that had done was still unknown.

            

Zhuoxue’s brows knotted. Wordless, she clutched her chest; each blow of the thousand-jin stone sent her reeling a little further.

“Let me see.” Longming reached out and set a fingertip against Zhuoxue’s brow, spiritual power driving straight in. Meridians clear; the lingtai as calm as ever — nothing amiss.

Zhuoxue understood no better. She only felt that, out of thin air, something had settled onto her heart, guiding her — and hurrying her.

            

She pushed herself up, gasping, jaw clenched tight with the effort, and abruptly tasted a thread of iron. In the mountain or out of it — what thing, and where?

Longming closed the wooden chest, slid it back beneath the bed, and said, after a moment’s deliberation, coldly: “Stay here. Don’t wander.”

Zhuoxue shook her head. The strangeness at the tip of her heart was thickening — and then she heard birdsong, and whipped her head around to search. The cave abode was green with growth, but all she saw was weeds and vines; never mind birds, there wasn’t so much as an insect or an ant.

            

Longming’s heart sank. She tried to reason with her: “I already have an idea. Wait for me here, just a moment?”

Zhuoxue didn’t ask what idea. Her thoughts had come all undone, and from between her lips escaped one word: “Bird.”

“What bird?” Longming had heard nothing; she swept the surroundings and saw not half a feather.

            

The birdsong drifted near and far — one instant clear in the ear, the next seemingly beyond the valley. Zhuoxue seemed to sway with it, forward and back, and abruptly the world spun. She gave up clutching her chest and clapped a hand over one ear instead, asking urgently, “Do you hear birdsong?”

“No. Where would there be birdsong?” Longming’s wrist turned, and spiritual power condensed into a long sword. Sword-light fell in a woven flash, like stars dropping out of the sky. Wherever the silver passed, weeds and vines turned to fine debris, a green dust flung skyward — and not one shadow of a bird.

Zhuoxue stared rigidly up at the narrow mouth of the cave, and a chill crawled over her, hair standing on end; the dizziness nearly took away her knowledge of where she was.

            

“What do you see?” Longming followed her gaze.

The question dragged Zhuoxue’s senses back. She doubled over, ready to vomit, and before Longming could gather her in, she threw herself against her, trembling. “Longming — get me out of here. Quickly.”

She was flighty by habit, but she was no fool about weight and consequence. She knew this errand was no game — by rights she ought to leave it well alone. But the birdsong was growing more and more desperate, and her thoughts were coming apart. Everything was tangling. Something inside her demonic core seemed to be surging. And yet — not just her; even Longming, just now, had failed to probe out the slightest anomaly.

            

When had Longming ever seen Zhuoxue like this? She wrapped an arm around her waist at once and threaded out through the leaf-choked mouth of the cave.

The birdsong ran on unbroken, cry upon cry, each more desperate than the last — but outside the cave the auspicious radiance blazed, and there wasn’t one bird in the sky.

“Bird.”

            

Even with both ears covered tight, the crying didn’t dull in the slightest. Still near, still far.

“What bird? The birds of Yaojing are nearly all goddesses in their transformed shapes.” Baffled, Longming set her fingertip to Zhuoxue’s brow once more — and still could not spy the faintest sign of anomaly. The lingtai was perfectly clear; her mind should not be swimming.

“Could it be a goddess calling me?” Zhuoxue wavered between alarm and wonder.

            

By now Yaojing lay in rubble end to end; even the places the heavenly thunder had missed were scored everywhere with spellwork. Carved beams and jade pillars, skywalks and colored banners — all of it ash now, trampled underfoot at will. How could any goddess still take her true form and go singing about? Had she misheard?

“If it were a goddess, she would leave breath behind, and traces of spirit.” Neither was here.

“‘Nearly all’ — not all. So there is an exception. Isn’t there?” Zhuoxue could barely make out Longming’s voice anymore.

            

The bird’s cry came rolling through her ears like thunder — not crisp in the least, but edged with something desolate: frantic, terrified, its life hanging by a thread. Every other sound shrank against it to insect-noise, a rustle softer than a murmur. Her own heart caught fire with the same panic. Every hair on her body was forced upright; half of her burned as if over open flame, half shuddered like a cicada in the cold of winter⁵. And this dread had nothing to do with life or death. She only felt urgency — urgency so sharp her lingtai and demonic core bristled with it, and not one of her organs was spared.

She couldn’t breathe…

She seized a corner of Longming’s sleeve, bent double, panting in short hard gasps, cold sweat streaming down her brow and back.

            

“There is. One exception only.” Longming, startled, hastily sent spiritual power coursing, trying to smooth Zhuoxue’s breath for her. Pass after pass, and Zhuoxue still poured sweat; she simply pulled Longming’s hand away and, while human speech still reached her in fragments, pressed her: “What’s the exception? What’s special about it?”

“The Mourning Spirit Dove.” Longming looked toward the collapsed palaces. “But the Mourning Spirit Dove is already dead.”

Zhuoxue reached out toward the source of the crying, as if touching something she could not see. Wretchedness and dread churned in her chest; even her voice shook. “When a creature of heaven dies — does it leave a soul?”

            

“With the auspicious radiance lying over everything, wandering ghosts and perished souls cannot drift where they please. They can only stay trapped inside their dead shells, waiting to fade out.”

Zhuoxue’s heart took another blow — worse this time, and edged with real pain now.

Her one stroke of luck: years of going half-deaf had trained into her a full repertoire of reading shapes and guessing meanings. Even now, with sound failing her, she could still read Longming’s intent.

            

Between the treasure palaces collapsed at the mountain’s base, spells flared against each other — one side’s power a black wind over an evil sea, the other’s a blinding brilliance. Where the two burst into nothing, even the grasses of the Lan Xiang Cave Abode swayed. If this were a mere duel of arts, it would deserve to be called magnificent — but it was nothing so pure. It was life set against death; heaven’s law near collapse, mortals in torment. And the demons and immortals of the two realms were, in the end, flesh and muddy bone — for this one hour they seemed lesser than mortals, nothing more than shadows cut from beast hide and pasteboard under the lamp.

Who had lit this calamity?

Why, the hand that holds the lamp — the one pulling the strings.

            

The maker of the disaster was no fool ignorant of heaven’s height and earth’s depth, but one who took himself for heaven, writing heaven’s law with his own hand.

Zhuoxue clutched Longming’s sleeve tight. By now even the sky-splitting crashes had gone silent to her; there was only birdsong in her ears. She couldn’t hear her own voice either — only knew her lips moved, and whether the syllables came out clean, she couldn’t have said.

“You go find Tianji, I—”

            

“I have to find the bird. The Mourning Spirit Dove.”

It wasn’t that she wanted to find the bird. She had to. Brooking not one moment’s delay.

A cluster of fire came streaking near at speed, and Longming hastily swept Zhuoxue aside. She fixed the roaring blaze with a cold stare, and in her eyes a single gleam of light tore through the vault of the sky. The lightning loosed from the palms of demons and immortals rivaled the celestial punishment itself; between the treasure palaces the thunder snarled, and swift bolts flung up ten-thousand-zhang⁶ smoke.

            

Longming tore her gaze away and lowered her eyes. “I’ll take you.”

Zhuoxue meant to refuse, but Longming’s arm clamped her fast; she couldn’t have struggled free if she tried. The two demons swept through the dust and smoke, racing hard toward that field of splendid mansions turned to rubble.

“The Mourning Spirit Dove followed the Celestial Leader and no other. In life it never once left the Hall of the Celestial Leader; where its corpse lies now, no one can say.” Longming’s voice was level. “Perhaps inside the Bureau of Heavenly Law.”

            

The Hall of the Celestial Leader had been razed to flat ground. One look at the wreckage strewn everywhere, and there was no telling where even to begin. Zhuoxue heard the crying come from far off, and shook her head, dazed. “Not here.”

So Longming flew her elsewhere, flicking hurtling rubble out of their path, and said, in a voice that permitted no refusal, “I’m taking you to the Bureau of Heavenly Law to look.”

Past ruined towers and broken halls, through stone-rotted, water-dried bridges, far off they could make out one place untouched. Untouched to the point of spotlessness: within ten chi⁷, wall and stone floor lay uniform and whole.

            

“The Bureau of Heavenly Law.” Longming could scarcely believe it. She raised a palm to shake the hall doors open — but before her power could even reach them, a shrieking gale battered it aside.

Then they could see it: a vast shroud of spiritual power covering the Bureau, its barrier rolling like wave upon wave, glinting under the auspicious radiance. It had none of the radiance’s warmth; it was needle-sharp instead, stabbing the eyes until they ached. This barrier was no ordinary thing. Even under the heavenly thunder it sat solid as rock, unmoved by a hair.

Zhuoxue, half-lost, felt the bird come nearer. Here outside that wave-walled barrier, the crying came without pause, trilling in her ears without end.

            

“The bird’s inside.” She stared deep into the hall; the pain in her eyes forced her head aside, and still she wanted to reach her hand into the barrier. The cries rang and rang; her mind was all chaos.

Longming’s pupils contracted. She seized Zhuoxue’s wrist and hauled her back to her side, voice like ice. “This barrier is wrong.”

Zhuoxue’s ears were full of rustling noise; she couldn’t make out a word, and could only work out from the shape of Longming’s lips what she’d said.

            

Wrong?

“How is it wrong?” Zhuoxue asked.

Even reading the Destiny Register, even recalling everything of her past life, she had never grieved like this. The tears fell of themselves, as if her insides were coming apart, grief surging up from nowhere. One cry in her ear, one tear down her face — tears like beads off a snapped string, without end, without pause.

            

No. This grief wasn’t hers. Zhuoxue understood all at once.

It was the Mourning Spirit Dove!

Longming wiped Zhuoxue’s tears away with her sleeve. Her jaw set. Unhurried, she cycled the spiritual power of her whole body. The power bound itself into a long sword, its blade lit as if it cradled jade — as if it held a soul of snow and ice. The cold bristled between Longming’s lips and teeth. “What secret is the Bureau of Heavenly Law hiding, that even if the whole of Kunlun Jade Capital comes down, Tianji still means to protect it?”

            

Three chi of cold light cleaved down. With a great boom, the earth shook and the mountains swayed. Ripples rolled across the barrier, and the roots that had drilled up from underground surfaced one by one — and sank away one by one. The roots came dense and thick, indestructible. These were no ordinary spirit-roots or immortal filaments. They were the earth veins of Kunlun Yaojing!

Tianji had not hesitated to deploy the Yaojing earth veins. Even if the whole heavenly palace came crashing down into the mortal dust, he meant to keep this secret.

“What is that?” Zhuoxue saw something flash across the face of the barrier.

            

“The Yaojing earth veins.” Longming lifted her head to the sky, eyes locked, unblinking, on the sun-swallowing clouds.

Zhuoxue thought for a long moment before she could read the words off Longming’s lips.

So it hadn’t been mere half-deafness after all — now she was utterly deaf, and her heart was fogged over to match; even with Longming straining to throw her voice, nothing reached her.

            

How were the Yaojing earth veins to be opened? And when would Tianji ever consent?

“Tell me,” Longming said slowly. “What is it you want to do?”

Slow and measured — for fear Zhuoxue wouldn’t catch her meaning.

            

Zhuoxue felt a wetness in the bowl of her ear. She raised a hand to wipe it, and her fingers came away full of fresh red.

The bird had cried until her ears bled.

Longming caught it at the edge of her eye. Her gaze trembled, once — and still she kept her face to the sky, waiting for the heavenly thunder to fall.

            

Zhuoxue rubbed the blood away between her fingers, faintly lost. “I think… I can save it.”

The Nine-Tailed Heavenly Fox carries nine lives within her. She can dissolve a hundred ailments; she can call the dead back from the grave.

The fog in Zhuoxue’s eyes parted like clouds before wind. “I can save it.”

            

And in that instant Longming understood too — why Zhuoxue had raced here, why she had gone seeking the bird with a will that would not be shaken. It was the bird that had been seeking her.

Why would a dead thing seek out the Nine-Tailed Heavenly Fox?

The answer stood plain as day.

            

Longming looked at Zhuoxue, fixed, for a long while, before a single word left her lips: “All right.”

With that one word, her clear and sober mind was worn down to a single thread; selfish desire very nearly carried the field.

Longming said slowly, “The celestial punishment carries three strikes. Two remain. The last one I am saving for Tianji.”

            

Overhead, the thick clouds churned and boiled — the punishment was already gathering.

And then the silver-haired great demon rose straight toward the heavenly thunder, the silver sword in her hand pointed not at the barrier but swung up at the clouds.

All Zhuoxue’s panic and desperation, every last shred of the bird’s urgency, was wiped out in that instant.

            

“Longming—!” she cried.

Longming meant to draw the heavenly thunder down — to break the spirit barrier.

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