The overt illusions stopped. Tian had thought he was done being tested, and just waited patently in the gray mists as Burning Heaven flew endlessly along. Liren groaned, now and then. He could feel the struggle in her. He was helpless to help her, any more than he could clear away the mists. He didn’t even know if he was truly hearing her.
The doubts clung to him like ghosts. The thought that he failed the test prickled at him. On the one hand, he didn’t really care about being someone’s disciple, especially if that someone was a stranger to him. On the other, he wasn’t used to failing. Failure was habit forming, and he had unconsciously developed a strong dislike of it.
More frustrating still was that the poisonous words of the illusion were working. He didn’t think he was the delusion of a dying child, but how much of his achievements were just his own self-centered opinion? Was he any different than the One Eyed King? A tyrant hemmed in on three sides, roaring mightily over the stretch of dirt no one could be bothered to take from him?
Tian imagined he could see Brother Mao walking into the mountains through the mists. Back straight, wearing his dignity like armor over his dead heart. Tian had been so sure he was right in how he handled that. He still thought he handled that right. At the very least, he didn’t act out of malice or indifference to the wellbeing of his brothers and sisters.
And yet, there went Brother Mao, steady steps traversing the rugged mountainside. An old hero, a leader, someone who taught the next generation how to be good cultivators and good people under the broad eaves of his temple. His dao path cut short, his dao heart killed, not by losing to Tian but by realizing that Tian pitied him. An old memory rose- which brother had said that mercy was for the transcendently strong? He couldn’t remember, but one of them had.
Mercy, compassion, those things took a certain foundation, a certain internal strength, and you wouldn’t extend them to someone who didn’t need them. Tian, probably seventeen years old and definitely Level Eight, extended his pity to Mao, a true pillar of the Outer Court for nearly two centuries.
What room was there for Mao to argue? Tian had won the physical fight and the political one.
Ghost after ghost joined Mao in the mists. Suneater, furious at receiving Tian’s compassion. The mercenaries he killed in Burning Flag City. Oily and Doughy from the Five Elements Courtyard had been pricks, but had the instructions of Elder Feng been reason enough to ruin them in their sect? Had a mere display of fortune been reason enough to join Brother Wang in humiliating dozens of array masters and scholars? Even then, it had seemed a strange way to treat your allies.
He had certainly felt no guilt at the time. He wasn’t sure he did now either. But doubt was in him, curling inside his lungs on the misty air of the valley.
He was so sure he was soon to ascend to the Heavenly Realm. Why? Was he magically more entitled to a revelation than others? Did he have more merit than someone who had been serving the people with their lives for two centuries? Seemed unlikely.
He was so sure he had few or no material desires, no desire for secret arts or powerful weapons, nor spirit crystals nor a crown of gold. It was easy to not be tempted when you weren’t looking. What would he do if what he had wasn’t enough? What would he do if Liren said she wanted more? Everything changed when you entered the Heavenly Realm. Could he stab someone in the back for a trinket?
Could he kill a brother for a sword?
He was sure he couldn’t. But he had been sure about a lot of things, and been wrong about many of them. His guts slowly clenched, thinking this might be another thing he was wrong about. The sick rose in his throat. Four hundred years of brotherhood, and Dean whatsit still stabbed Martial Uncle Gen in the back. His few years in the sect weren’t even a fart compared to that.
Breathe in, breathe out, each breath accumulating more and more doubts.
Had he destroyed his relationship with Brother Fu in the name of his self centered forgiveness? Was it arrogant of him to forgive in the first place? He denied the Xia, but could blood be something truly denied?
He had told Liren he loved her, and she agreed. But was it just guilt? Did she really love him?
That was it. That was the doubt that cracked him open and ravaged him. The curling mist turned to stone in his lungs, doubling him over as he gasped. His fingers held seizure-tight to Burning Heaven’s feathers. Had she been in the Earthly Realm, he surely would have ripped them out without seeing what he was doing, blinded by his fears. His mind froze, plunged into the freezing yin acid of his very own hell.
Did she, had she, ever really said she loved him back? She had said, so often, that she still felt guilt for what the Hongs did to the Xia. That he meant too many things to her. That his forgiveness only helped, but could not cure, the pain that had defined the path of her life. Was becoming ‘dao companions’ with him an act of penance? A life of make believe, a delusion of love offered to the ghost of the dead boy?
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Did… did he really love her?
The doubt was through the lungs now, freezing his heart.
Did he really love Liren? He thought he did, but how would he know? He didn’t know many sisters his age, practically none, really, and he had grown up with Liren. Was it love, or was it proximity? He had spent his life without urges, a life of bland indifference to sex and romance. Was what he felt for Liren nothing but a young man’s absurd infatuation with the first woman he really cared about?
It was a common enough story. He had heard it so often, from so many brothers, he was sick of it. “Oh, we promised each other the moon, to be together for eternity. A mere year away, and I come back to find her in bed with some rough boy from Roaring Saber Valley. She said it was my fault for never being there for her. Dao companions? Hah!”
Could he really trust his back, no, his future, to someone who walked with him out of guilt? He declared there was no eternity for him without Liren, what a joke! He was seventeen and in love. Dao companions? Eternity? How lightly he used those words! What boldness!
He had told the Emissary's illusion that he would pass the test through his faith in Liren. He thought he had proven his faith in Liren. Silently, invisibly, the Emissary had sent that teacup of faith tumbling across the table. All those warm emotions spilling out and staining his silks.
His heart usually felt like it was burning. The flames were guttering now, sputtering and going out. The cold was back on him as he retreated from not just the world, but himself. He didn’t want to think, to feel, to be tormented by these cruel doubts. But the doubts were in him, inhaled by him, part of him, now. He couldn’t cut them off and cast them away. Not without cutting off… him. Cutting away every thought and experience and memory he ever had.
Granny Meng’s soup had never sounded more delicious. He had been wrong before. He would drink it down in big gulps, weeping with gratitude. He had to be rid of these memories. This fake connection. This pain, freezing him until the ice crystals tore apart his flesh from within. He wanted it gone. It had to be gone, and he couldn’t possibly wait. This was unendurable. It would be so easy to end it. He could raise his strong left hand and-
He looked at the hand in front of him. He couldn’t see much, his vision barely wider than the hand he was looking at. Even with everything, he had fixed his hand. Liren had been part of that. She had stood by him, stood over him and defended him from tribulation lightning. He could remember the look on her face at the side of the frozen lake, the thousand emotions raging through her as she extended her hand. As she offered the Searheart fruit to him, and accepted the Thousand Layer Ice from him.
Was that love? There was guilt in her, but couldn’t there also be love? Nothing was all good or all bad. Nothing was only one thing. There was pain in that connection, but the joy was so much greater.
He could see an electric blue butterfly in his memories. On his frozen fingers, he could feel its weightless step. Walking over his fingers intertwined with Liren’s, her hand so warm. The moment in the garden so brilliant and holy and joyful. If that wasn’t real, then nothing was real. If the past was memory and the future a dream, then all this yammer about delusion was the real delusion.
What was real was what was in him. Maybe he didn’t know what the future held, but… who did? Did Liren love him? She was willing to die for him, and she was willing to live with him. What else did his greed and fear need?
What mattered was that he loved her, and accepted the way in which he was loved in return. Everything else was noise.
Doubt was a poison. He had heard that from his brothers too. And if there was one thing he didn’t fear, it was poison.
Tian forced his thoughts to converge on his breath. It was the most basic essence of meditation. He was breathing. He was alive, so he was breathing. Not reflexively, each breath was intentional, and considered. Yes, there was a storm of emotions raging around him. Doubt invaded him. He was scared, and lost, and despairing. But he was alive, and breathing and he just had to keep a piece of his mind on that most basic thing. In and out. In. And out.
The lungs were the organ most associated with metal, filtering and purifying qi, bringing in the new, and expelling the old. He had swallowed the mist. Now he would sieve out all the good he could gather from it, and expel the rest. The poison of doubt would be refined into new certainties. Tested, tempered, stronger than before. In and out. In and out. Steadier than his already calming heartbeat.
He had spent the first half his life so far being certain of the things in front of him, while ignorant of the entire rest of the world. The second half had been spent trying to understand the bounds of his ignorance, and coming to terms with the fact his life was built on pursuing the unknowable, unthinkable and unspeakable. Uncertainty? Doubt? These things were proof of a lack of cultivation.
Tian was a daoist. There were things he didn’t know, things he couldn’t know, and that was fine. Not knowing wasn’t the same as being uncertain. He would learn what he didn’t know in time, or not. Either was fine. He would cultivate his heart, and take the world as it came. It was enough.
He closed his eyes with a slight smile, gently, breathing in and out. Seeing Liren in his heart, descending from the heavens, trailing butterflies behind her. When he opened them again, he was standing outside the valley.
“Oh. That’s why Elder Rui was so insistent on my being filial like he is filial. Doubt. Because I’m doing the right things in the right ways, and I have come to an intolerable conclusion. The natural result of his reforms is something he wants without paying the price in pain. Shame and guilt are painful, after all, as is changing your mind. The edges of that pain are enough to make him doubt his whole project. But here we all are.”
Tian’s smile got wider.
“From top to bottom, we are here, given everything we need to make all the necessary changes. Everyone agrees with him. We doubt everything except the need to be more thoughtful and humane. We might not agree about why, or in what ways, but we all agree on this- the ancestors cannot be blindly imitated. We must find our own path.”
Tian couldn’t help it. He opened his eyes, saw the assembled Heavenly People, saw everyone here striving for that precious discipleship, the tutelage of a mighty ancient, and laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe.