“Zihao, you have said that there is no eternity for you without me. Which is romantic as hell, don’t get me wrong, but as a practical matter, what does that mean?”
Tian looked out over the rough garden surrounding the guest house. “Garden” was about all he could call it, other than maybe “clearing” or even just “cleared land.” The Holy Land’s commitment to pruning away any stray piece of thought or meaning that might leak into the guest quarters was impressively complete. Even the building itself was a copy of a building in the Monastery. It was a bit like floating in a void, where the only thing you could look at was you.
After a few moments, he hummed and said “I don’t know.”
Liren remained silent. Tian could practically hear her tapping her mental foot and waving her mental hand, demanding he elaborate.
“I really don’t. I just know it. I knew I had some kind of feelings for you since a bit before we ate the Heartsear fruit, and I have considered you my life and death sister since the Wasteland.”
The words stopped for a minute, the two of them just coasting through the emptiness.
“Do you ever really think about the things we study? I mean really think about them?” Tian asked.
“Yes? What kind of question is that?”
“An important one.” Tian waved his hands around like he was trying to mold something. “Think about how we talk about the dao. The dao is a path, and a destination. It is everything around us, but also a part of us, and also how we live our lives. We spend all this time scurrying around, adventuring, killing bandits, fighting heretics, and we are told it’s an unfortunate, but necessary, distraction from what really matters- sitting around doing nothing.”
“At least in the Earthly Realm. Where are you going with this?”
“The dao is our beginning and our end, and the line that connects both points. In fact, it’s not a line but a circle, every life repeating. It’s the sheer scope of it all, Liren. We are part of a single, unified thing called the Dao, something that is, and is happening, everywhere, all the time, forever. Something so huge, we can’t see it. Something so enormous, we feel like we are floating in a void. We have to think of nothingness, because the only way we can conceive of everything is by a double negative. The dao is a nothingness so profound, it doesn’t permit the existence of nothingness, which makes everything necessary. We can’t see the beauty we are part of. Only what we lack. We see ourselves as holes in the emptiness of the dao.”
Silence settled in around them for a moment longer, but for once, it was Tian who couldn’t keep still. He stood, stretching one hand up towards the seemingly infinite blue, reaching for the faint moon still visible in the daytime sky.
“And I was born in the West Town Dump, age six and afraid. Afraid to be caught out in the open. Afraid of the things I was sheltering under collapsing on me. Afraid what I was going to eat would make me sick and afraid of going hungry. Afraid of being alone forever, and afraid of being found by those cruel animals called humans.”
He looked back over his shoulder at Liren, and smiled like the moon rising. “I’m so much braver now. So much stronger. But I still can’t face that big empty by myself. I need someone who can fly with me, for me to be able to fly.”
Liren had her face buried in her hands. He could see the blush around her fingers.
“How about you?” Tian asked.
There was a startled moment. Then, muffled, between fingers, “What?”
“How about you? You don’t go in for the big declarations, but you agreed we were dao companions and, not to be too egotistical, but looking back on things I can see you felt some kind of way about me for years before we said anything-”
“It wasn’t years!” Liren yelped, looking up with wide eyes, then groaned and buried her face in her hands again. “You can’t just ask that.”
“I can. You did, so why not me?”
“Because you don’t mind getting naked, and it freaks me out!”
“You are completely-”
“Emotionally and physically! You… excessively literal person!”
Tian just grinned and waited. Liren wasn’t the only one who could use a pointed silence.
“Damn you. It was in stages. I trusted you with my life, and you were easy company. Then… then you got pretty. Which left me with some confused feelings, and let me tell you, I do get urges and have done for YEARS. And…”
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Liren was plainly flailing, trying to grope her way through her deathly embarrassment. She threw her hands up and glared at him. “I just do, okay? I don’t think about things the way you do, and I’m not good at prettying up my words. Even I don’t know all the feelings I was feeling about you. Our history is incredibly screwed up, and somehow still practically a cliche. It wasn’t until you put me on the spot that I wrapped words around it, and I could only borrow yours. ‘Dao companion.’”
She stalked over to him, and displayed her bangle.
“I don’t know what that means, properly. Now that you say it, ‘dao companion’ is a kind of terrifying concept. I don’t even have the words to say what ‘dao companion’ means to me.” She tapped the bangle. “This says it for me. Exactly this. Us on the river together. I don’t have my own words for this, so I have to use yours again.”
Her glare turned into a smile. “The dao that can be spoken is not the true dao. How can I say what you mean to me?”
She pointed to the sun, still in the sky. “Immortality is like the sun shining on us. A single brilliant blaze that lasts forever, lighting the world, bringing life and joy and yes, sometimes, pain, but always so much more that is good. Even when the sun is alone in the sky, it’s never really alone, because its companion is always there. There would be no life and no growth without both.”
Tian smelled the warmth of the sun on ripening rice, smelled the flagstones in the temple soaking up the afternoon’s heat, and could feel the warmth of the morning light shining from her. His eyes widened suddenly.
“That’s immortality to me. The golden pill, the single blazing point of forever wrapped in endless yin. To be immortal is to be the light that brings happiness, that burns away evil, that may sometimes be hidden but is never extinguished!”
“Then for me, immortality is the sky and the moon- The void that defines the earth, the cold light that heals the hot sun. Always changing, but always there. The rest that allows for growth, the stillness that gives room for life, the silence that cups a song. And within the darkness and stillness is light and motion- the moon, sometimes white, or yellow or gold or red, but always there. And one day, you look at the moon and realize the moon is still a circle. It’s not changing, all that’s changing is how you see it. It has always traveled through the endless heavens, between light and dark. And it, too, endures because it is never alone.”
Tian felt an electric shock running through him, a convulsive moment of realization. It suddenly seemed so obvious. What was immortality? It was the light shining in the void. It was that thing which seemed changeable on the exterior, but truthfully never changed. It flowed effortlessly along its natural course, having all it needed and bringing blessings to the world.
And so it was with him. Within him was that breath of immortal qi, was that seed of the dao, that holy piece of an incomprehensibly vast whole. His fleshy body was the void the breath of the dao blew over, and the note it played was the same one it had been playing his whole life, he had just never heard it before this moment. The sound of immortality. It was right there waiting for him, and always had been. He just hadn’t been ready to hear it.
Something was binding him. He could feel chains digging into him, cutting into his flesh as the breath of the dao blew into him. The wind was blowing into him too. Cold. It was terribly cold. He had never felt anything as cold as this before. It slowed his thoughts and brought despair.
Dark clouds were on them in an instant, turning black, then an unholy crimson.
Liren was next to him, blazing like a star. Like two stars, he could see the lit suns in her illuminating her from within. She looked beautiful. Truly beautiful. Like a divine being glowing with holy radiance, her features perfect and perfectly herself.
He could feel the chains digging into him, digging into his face and eyes and body. The pain was concentrated on his right hand. He looked down, forcing the chains to twist with him. It was agonizing. Thoughts of simply giving up drilled into him. Despair, suicide, apathy, seeped in through his flesh. Through the chains drilling into his bones and binding his tendons and piercing his nerves.
Binding his right hand was a net of chains. A horror of chains. Chains thin as razor blades, or spiked, barbed, hooked, burning like fire or acid or cold, biting chains, sucking chains, crushing chains, piercing chains. In every way a chain could be forged to carry suffering and defeat, they were, and they bound him.
The chains shrank, or perhaps it was a trick of perspective and they were traveling a long distance in a direction he had never before noticed. At the vanishing point, at the near infinite distance of the ragged stumps of his still missing fingers, were two dreadful gates, the binding chains running straight through them.
He couldn’t make out the details of the gate. Black. Ancient. So small as to be near invisible and big enough to each crush the mountain. Godly and infernal. Could there be such a thing as a heavenly demon or a holy devil? If so, these were gates of their construction, and they were sealing his missing fingers.
They were why his fingers weren’t growing back. Advent of Spring should have had them regrown a dozen times over by now. All the powerful medicines, all the natural treasures, the times he rebuilt his body, he should have completely recovered all his fingers, not just some of them. They were the reason that fake tribulation lighting had come for him. He had broken the gates the mad god set on him. Of course the petty bastard sent lightning.
The chains had been weakening him. He must have been breaking them one after the other as he crushed the gates binding him. These chains had nearly killed him in the dump. They still twisted and distorted his mind. And now they were trying to cut off his cultivation path. The breath of the dao filled him, transforming him. Inflating him. Either he would shatter, or the winds would leave him stuck in the Earthly realm.
Voidcatcher had said there were heavens above the heavens. Tian had seen that whatever granted merit opposed tribulation lightning. These chains, these gates, were creations of the mad god. Things of falsity. Not conforming to the true dao. They wanted to break his will. Confine him. Fetter him.
He had never been one for fetters.
Tian’s heart blazed within him, his cultivation roared, the Hell Suppressing Sutra chanted furiously down in his dantian. The little garden was flooded with the scent of lotuses and incense as his whole physique gathered the true qi pouring into him. It resonated with the sound of the dao, that tiny wisp of immortal qi deep within him vibrating like a plucked string. He gathered up every scrap of himself that he had built since he awoke in the trash, and slammed it into the gates.
“BREAK FOR ME!”