Chapter [B5] 7 — The Promise

Chapter [B5] 7 — The Promise

The scenes began speeding up.

The first century passed like a breath to those who cultivated on peaks and held nations in their sleeves. It did not pass nearly so quickly for the frontier towns.

At the start, the underworld split along a seam no wider than a river path and spat out a thousand shapes. They were misshapen, slow, and hungry. Their eyes were dull. Their claws were blunt. They rose from gullies and old graves and the bottoms of lakes where Water Qi had turned stale. They staggered toward the nearest walls and knocked on them like drunks who had forgotten their own doors.

They only had to take a few lives before they attracted the mighty emperor’s attention.

Shi Yan Yun stood on the eastern battlements and watched them for a while without drawing his sword.

“Pitiable,” he said at last. “Burn the ones nearest the wells. Drive the others west. Let the militias claim heads and markers. It will season them.”

They did not need him. He left before noon and returned to the palace to sign codes for road upkeep and to approve two new academies. When a minister asked if they should form a special corps for demonic incursions, he laughed once, mild.

“For this?” he asked. “That would be an insult. No.”

He wrote a line in his own hand: The frontier should be able to handle this on its own. Teach it how to grow teeth. He slept that night with his armor still sealed in its chest.

Shi Yan Yun did not laugh then, but he smiled anyway when he reached the Western March and saw that the governors had already raised proper walls and drilled proper troops. The old oaths had not gone to dust. A thousand banners snapped in the cold wind. The array stakes were true and notched to the right depths. The drums kept time in clean counts. He rested a hand on the parapet and felt the hum of the city’s heart. It was strong.

“Open the sluices,” he said. “Three counts. Then close. Let them think they can swim, and then freeze the channel.”

They did. Demons poured into the waterway, biting and climbing and clawing, and then the Fire Chi cultivators heated the bridge of air above the trench while water masters turned the channel from flow to glass. The things stuck in place, half out, half in, and the crossbow teams took their heads. The street lamps burned with steady light. The people cheered when they were allowed to cheer. At dusk, a woman brought fresh steamed buns to the watch and hid her shaking hands behind the basket.

A captain presented five broken spearheads and asked for replacements.

“You will get ten,” Shi Yan Yun said. “And gauntlets for the second file. I saw two men lose their grips.”

That night, he walked the inner ring alone. He did not look toward the palace wing where a closed room held letters with his brother’s seal from an age that had gone. Sometimes, he felt the urge to do so. Most of the times, like today, he scoffed at that childish and inane desire. He’d done what had been necessary.

Look at how the kingdom was thriving, now.

And so he left the wing to dust and spiders. He slept in the barracks. When a junior officer flinched awake, thinking he had heard his sovereign’s steps, he kept his head down and stilled his breath. Shi Yan Yun did not disturb him. It felt right, to sleep within the citizens, then cloistered away in that palace of his.

The third century began with a heavy moon and ended with a red plain. The demons did not run in scattered pods then. They marched. They carried bones as clubs and wore cords of hair. They howled in rhythm to a drumbeat that no mortal hand struck. When they struck a wall, the wall bowed. When they hit a formation, it bent. When they met a cultivator with a fresh core, they dragged him down and ate him alive.

Shi Yan Yun stopped smiling.

He went north to the old border where a gorge split the land, and he set down nine plates of his own. He carved each line with the tip of his index finger until blood made the chalk unnecessary. He did not wipe the blood off. He let it sink into the plates and bind the array to him.

I leaned closer, trying to learn from how Shi Yan Yun was creating the formations. The man was many things, but unskilled and unknowledgeable was not one of them; and I was always curious. Ki sighed at my curiosity, before a smile spread on her face.

“Second ring holds,” he muttered under his breath. “Third and fourth rotate by stones, not by flags. You will move on the sound of my breath.”

He inhaled once and the drums followed. He exhaled once and the second line rotated. It imitated the strength of the Divine Beasts, creating fragmented imitations of the glorious creatures he remembered. The Black Tortoise pressed weight over the field so that enemy leaps died midair. The White Tiger cut anything that broke the line. The Vermilion Bird drew a corridor in the sky so arrows softened and fell. The Azure Dragon called the beats so the soldiers would not drown in their own panic. They did not drown. They bled and held.

At night, when he closed his eyes, he heard a sound he had not heard in a long time. A younger voice at the back of his memory said, Brother, what will you do when the cycle asks you to pay? He did not answer the voice. He rose, checked the sentries himself, and watched the river below crack into plates of ice under the moon.

On the sixth night of that siege, a creature climbed the wall and bent its face toward him. Its eyes were hollow sockets full of heat. Its breath stank of old graves and broken pills. It spat a line of void at his throat. He deflected it with the back of his hand and crushed its skull under his boot. R̃äＮóᛒĚＳ

It whispered through a shattered mouth, “Shi… Yan Yun…”

He did not respond. He did not care for tricks.

It wheezed again with a sound like ribs buckling. “Do… you… remember…”

He broke its spine so it would stop moving and pushed it back off the wall. He did not look down to see it fall. He set another plate the next morning, so that the imitations of the Divine Beasts would guard this area. He did not look to any of the old letters, not even then.

The fourth century taught him that the underworld learned.

The demons appeared in a different place from where they had, the first three centuries. They split into three columns with scouts and rear guards and units that carried racks of talismans scavenged from burned caravans. They used those talismans without grace, but they used them. They formed crude circles and threw spikes of bone like spears. They understood the difference between a militia badge and a cultivator’s seal and aimed at the seals. The first time one of them smeared a chalk rune across a ward pillar and shut down a two-block fire grid, an entire neighborhood died before the backup ring lit. When the warders brought the grid back online, the houses that still stood had children sitting on steps with blank eyes.

Shi Yan Yun walked that neighborhood and did not speak. He stopped at a wall and traced the place where the chalk had changed the talisman’s flow. The cut was clean and true. It had not been an accident. He looked down at the smear itself. It was not chalk. It was ash and marrow.

And then he sensed it. The presence of one of the Divine Beasts, after so long. Looking up, he met the Vermilion Bird’s gaze, who stood at the end of the street and watched him.

But there was no hate in the Vermilion Bird’s eyes, much to his surprise. Only sorrow.

“They are not beasts,” he said. “They are not mindless.”

He did not answer the Divine Beast immediately. The emperor pressed his thumb into the smear, felt the fine grit, and wiped it away with a cloth someone handed him. He folded the cloth and set it in a jar. The jar would go to the palace lab. He would read the report himself.

When he looked at her, his eyes were steady. “I know.”

“You scoffed once,” the Divine Beast said.

“I had reason then,” he said. He looked past her at the dead cart rolling by. “I do not now.”

That winter, the demons stopped battering walls. They went for fields. They tore up the irrigation channels and salted them with something that killed Water Qi for a hundred meters. They broke reservoirs and turned the water black. They set pits outside towns and covered them with reeds and caught grain wagons trying to run. They waited. They watched. When the gates opened to launch a relief sortie, they retreated without breaking and led the sortie away from the wells. Then they turned and cut the relief off from the city.

The demons were very careful, with how they avoided and navigated his formations. The illusionary Divine Beasts may imitate a fragment of the true Divine Beasts strength, but they did not imitate their intelligence.

Shi Yan Yun left the capital in the middle of the morning. He walked out with his hair still wet from the morning wash and armor half buckled. He finished buckling it on the carriage and jumped off before it stopped.

He took one step onto the plain and the counting drums found his pace like the city had found his breath a century ago. Shi Yan Yun did not raise his voice. He drew a line in the air with the edge of his hand and array stakes rose from the ground like iron pushed through water.

“Your Highness,” the field-master said, “that line will break the third canal—”

“It will,” Shi Yan Yun said. “Break it. We need a dry trough between those two ridges. Move the civilians to the monastery ridge. Do it now.”

They did it. The canal broke and the trough dried and the demons poured into it and found the slope too steep to climb under the illusionary Black Tortoise’s pressure. The Tiger and the garrison butchered anything trapped below while the Bird and the Dragon stripped heat and sound from the air so that the demons could not hear or call.

After, he walked the drained stretch. It stank. He pointed once at a boy who had two fingers left on his right hand and told the surgeon to give him a light bow instead of a spear when he was fit. The boy looked at him like a man looks at a mountain. Shi Yan Yun did not hold the boy’s gaze. He walked on.

In the fifth century, the demons brought commanders.

At first, the command shapes were tall forms with horns and long limbs. They used two-bladed glaives. They moved with the snap and twist of men who had been trained by the same kind of masters who had trained imperial guards. They kept their rear ranks in reserve. They baited countercharges and bled them.

Then came a commander with six arms and three faces. It put its palms to the earth and sang in a tongue that reminded old men of rumbling in mountain roots, like something born from nature’s wrath. Formations went blind within its reach and talismans failed to activate. The air thinned around it.

Shi Yan Yun met it in the center and cut off two arms and one head. The other head laughed without sound and the other arms wrote on the dirt with black blood. Demons poured into the gap it had made and the second ring almost broke.

“Hold,” said Shi Yan Yun. His voice stayed level. It had been a while since his emotions had fluctuated. Whether this was peace or the apathy his brother had foretold, I did not know. “You are disciples of peaks, not reeds in flood. Hold.”

They held.

The Azure Dragon roared until his throat bled. The Vermilion Bird burned the air above the weakest file until their lungs stung with clean heat instead of void. The Black Tortoise anchored a ten-meter circle so that the ground would not turn to mud. The White Tiger went where the break would be and made sure there was no break.

After the battle, Shi Yan Yun stood with the four on a ridge above a city that still had its roofs. The roofs were black with soot from burned corpses, but not the corpses of humans.

“We are missing something,” he said.

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“We are missing balance,” the true Vermilion Bird said, appearing next to him like a mirage.

“You mean the old balance,” he said. “You mean the thing my brother loved to name like he knew everything. Like I’ve not disproved his claims. I’ve brought glory and peace to my people, unity and power.”

The true Azure Dragon appeared to his left, his expression a lot more bitter than the Vermilion Bird’s. He flicked his gaze toward the west where the earth met the sky in a flat line. “You ask a question and spit at the answer in one breath. Ask or spit.”

“I’ll ask,” Shi Yan Yun said, cold. “Tell me why the commanders come when the seam widens. Tell me why they learn and why they begin to aim at cores.”

The Vermilion Bird spoke first. “Because the cycle that cleans the soul after death is gone in this region,” he said. “Because the place where souls would rest and be sorted has been damaged since the day you claimed false immortality. And as much as we Divine Beasts try, we can shape a shield. We cannot build a sky. Not like this.”

“The world does not process what it cannot hold,” the Azure Dragon said. “So it spits it out. Dark. Angry. Hungry. It recycles nothing. It just returns.”

“They are driven by a will,” the Vermilion Bird continued. “Not our Heaven’s will. A will that took shape in death and called itself necessary.”

Shi Yan Yun did not flinch. “Name it.”

The Azure Dragon did not say a name.

The Vermilion Bird did. “Shi Qing.”

Silence held the ridge.

Shi Yan Yun’s breath did not change. His face did not change. But his knuckles whitened where his hand touched the pommel of his blade for a split second. Then the whiteness faded. His hand opened.

He did not look at any of them. “What do you want me to do?”

“Stop calling these floods a nuisance,” the Vermilion Bird said. “Stop pretending your walls will be enough next century. Walls are never enough. You know that.”

“We can help you build laws that will keep souls from falling back as teeth to bite everyone and everything,” the Azure Dragon said. “We can shape a frame for the sky again. But we are not enough by ourselves. We need a core worthy of anchoring edicts.”

Shi Yan Yun turned his head then. His eyes were a flat dark. “Mine.”

“Yes,” the Vermilion Bird said. “Yours.”

The ridge wind moved patterns in the soot on the roofs below. The people had gone back to sleeping. The watch bells sounded the hour. Two were answered by three. Shi Yan Yun remembered the way his brother had once folded the edge of a robe before sitting. He did not call that memory by name.

“No,” he said. He did not raise his voice. “I am not a peg.”

“You are an emperor,” the Azure Dragon said. “Since when did you think that meant comfort?”

“Since when did you think that meant suicide?” he asked.

“It is not suicide if it keeps an empire standing,” the Azure Dragon said. “It is rule.”

“Do not dress death as policy and expect me to bow.” He took one step down the ridge and stopped. “You tell me my brother’s shade guides this filth. Then why do you ask me to empty the palace to make room for him, taking over the sky? Why do you think that’ll stop him?”

The Vermilion Bird did not look away. “Because your brother’s will is not the only thing here. The souls of common folk, soldiers, elders, children. They are in that sea. Without laws, without a center, they fall back as claws. With laws, they pass on. The ones who would build nests of hate will hit a wall. If you anchor that wall, that is.”

“Anchor. A polite word for a stake through my soul.”

“A stake that should have been put a long time ago. This has been caused by you, yet we talk to you because you are our only solution. Laws without a spine will bend,” the Azure Dragon said. “If you lend your core, the edicts will anchor. Order will have a center.”

Shi Yan Yun looked at the city again. He could count the towers from here without moving his eyes. He could name the captains at each tower. He could tell the difference between the way the eastward watchfire and the westward watchfire burned. He could hear the clink of water ladles at the night kitchens where mothers filled pots for dawn.

He turned his back on the Beasts. “No. I still have two hands and a sword. I can hold another hundred years. I can hold another hundred centuries. I will not hand my throat to a plan that discards me the way Heaven discards tools when the work is done.”

He left them on the ridge and did not look back. The Azure Dragon did not call after him. The Vermilion Bird did, once, and stopped when she saw his shoulders stiffen.

But time has a way of grinding men down.

The demons came as a season. Winter would fall and a month later, the earth would shake, and they would rise from the snow. Spring would come and the underworld would drag at the feet of men who plowed. They would sink without warning and vanish, dragged below by shapes that swam in dirt.

In summer, black smoke would climb from grain warehouses that should not burn because the wards were designed for heat. The wards failed anyway because a commander had found the sigil that turned the binders inside out. In autumn, children would sing a game with new words that no one had taught them and then the nearest temple would crack at the base and swallow its own steps.

Shi Yan Yun stopped walking the cities at night and started running them. He ran from ridge to ridge with no break. He left squads behind him, stopped commanding armies, became the only one who held the empire together. They lost and won and lost and won and then they lost a district that had never fallen before. Shi Yan Yun did not grieve in public. He took three breaths and ordered the gates sealed and the pipes flooded with oil and the ward glass shattered. Then he lit the district himself.

He could not let the demons spread.

When he returned to the wall, his hair smelled like burned oil and his gloves left black marks when he touched a rail.

That winter, a demon commander climbed the palace peak.

It was the height of the storm season. The roofs were slick with ice and the courts were empty. The hall lamps burned with Ice Qi because the oil would not catch. The commander walked in under a bell that did not ring and turned toward the inner doors with a crooked grin. Two guards lunged. It broke their necks with two fingers and hung them on the door handles as if they were cloaks.

Shi Yan Yun stepped out of the inner room and shut the door behind him. “You came far.” He did not carry his sword, even then. He held a short spear that had no tassel and no ornament on the butt.

The thing cocked its head. It did not have eyes that understood expression, but its chin lifted with a weight that did not belong to a beast. “Brother…”

Shi Yan Yun said nothing. He took one step sideways. The thing turned. He took another step. It turned again. He drew a straight line with his feet on the stone and the spear tip drew the same line at knee height.

The thing moved, fast. It reached with two arms and tried to take him by the collarbones and tear his chest open.

He put the spear through its sternum and waited until he felt the point grind against the stone behind it.

It clawed at his face. He let it. Its nails scraped over his cheek and cut skin. He did not blink.

He pushed the spear another finger-width.

It stopped moving. Then it moved again because they always moved again.

He twisted the spear. Its wrists broke.

It smiled anyway with its dead mouth. “Brother,” it said again, softer. “You hear me now.”

“Enough.” He whipped the spearblade up and the thing fell in two heavy pieces. He stepped back so his boots would not slip and called for the servants to bring lime and rope. He wrapped the thing himself and took it down the back stairs so the court would not see.

He did not sleep that night. He did not talk to anyone. He went to the old training yard where he had broken hundreds of weapons and had even broken his own hands twice and stood there until dawn, then he left the palace by the north gate without telling the council.

He went to the shrine where the Vermilion Bird kept a roost and the Azure Dragon kept a river under stone and walked in without announcing himself.

The two divine beasts looked up from a map weighted by iron claws and jade scales. Their faces said they had expected him sooner.

“We will not ask again,” the Vermilion Bird said.

“Then do not,” he said. His voice was flat. “I will ask instead. How?”

They told him. The words were simple. The work was not. He would bleed his core through their talons and coils. They would take that core and set it above the world so the laws would stop sliding and start holding. The White Tiger and Black Tortoise did not like their plan and would not cooperate, but just the fact that they would hold the earth while the new frame set was helpful anyway.

“It will take everything,” the Azure Dragon said.

“And if I do not,” Shi Yan Yun said, “it will take everything anyway. Only slower. One ring at a time.”

“Yes,” the Vermilion Bird said.

He looked at them both. “So I climb up, you help me set the frame, and then I die.”

“You end,” the Azure Dragon said. “Your name remains. Your laws hold.”

“Names rot.”

“The Heaven does not,” the Vermilion Bird said.

Shi Yan Yun turned his head. He looked at the wall through the open doors of the shrine. He could see the peak over the roofs. He could hear the wind across the banners. He could taste iron in the air because he had bitten his own cheek during the fight on the palace roof and the taste had not gone.

“No. Not this year. I have one more century in my bones. The law can wait until I make it wait.”

He turned and left. The Vermilion Bird’s feathers rose once and then fell. The Azure Dragon looked down at the map and did not move a scale.

In that one century, Shi Yan Yun found he could no longer use his cultivation.

It was present, but something had fundamentally broken. His Chi refused to respond to him; it kept trying to split, become two halves. At first, he’d been angry. Then, he’d been melancholic. Finally, he’d become resigned.

But when everyone almost died, for the first time since he could remember in the past thousands of years, he finally looked… afraid.

The seam split open under the capital itself. The old lines that fed the main wards shook. The foundation stones of the palace cracked. The peak groaned. The scream that rose from the underworld did not have sound and it still split eardrums. People pressed their palms to their ears and blood ran down their wrists.

The first wave hit the south wall and climbed like ants. The second wave poured out of the river and took the guards on the bridges before anyone could cut the ropes. The third wave tunneled under the southeast market and rose inside the ward ring with their mouths already open around the legs of shopkeepers and soldiers who had slept with their boots on.

Shi Yan Yun was on the wall before the drums found the count. He took the drums himself and beat them in a slow four that forced panicked legs to match it. Even when the sticks split in his hands, he only threw the halves away and kept the beat with his palms.

When the second file finally found the rhythm, the White Tiger’s apparition could move them. When the third file found it, the Black Tortoise’s apparition could lay weight where it mattered. When the fourth file found it, the Vermilion Bird’s apparition could heat the air without cooking lungs. When the fifth file found it, the Azure Dragon’s apparition could pull wind out of the corners of eyes and lungs so that the boys could keep breathing and not pass out.

The beating stopped when he saw a line forming under the north gate. He left the drums and jumped. He hit the street with both feet and kept his knees soft. He walked straight into the new line without saying who he was. They made room anyway. Someone tried to put a crown on his head in panic. He knocked the crown out of the man’s hand with his elbow and kept walking.

“Hold. Do not stab at shadows. Stab at throats. If your spear breaks, drop it and take your neighbor’s. If your neighbor dies, step into his place. If you die, die with your spear in a throat. If you live, live with your spear in your hand.”

They did. They held. The demons hit and broke and hit and broke and then eventually did not break anymore. They hit and climbed. They went over the line in three places. They took a tower. They took a second one. Shi Yan Yun cut his way to the first tower and held it with seven men and a boy who had not lost his teeth yet. He cut his way to the second tower and held that one alone until the illusionary White Tiger arrived, bleeding from a cut across the ribs that had rust on the edge.

They held the towers until dusk. At dusk, the illusionary Azure Dragon barely held together, the sheer amount of demons it had to kill having consumed all its energy.

And then the Vermilion Bird came to the wall, right next to Shi Yan Yun, her expression thunderous.

“Look,” she said.

He looked. The plain below the wall was not a plain anymore. It was a moving field of bodies all the way to the horizon. Every few moments, a part of that field collapsed and then rose again as new shapes climbed over the old ones. The soundless screaming made the air shake. He could see the line of the old northern road under the bodies. He could see the place where a farmhouse had stood. He could see nothing else.

“Look,” she said again, because he was trying not to see.

He did not speak for a long time.

“Is there no other way?” he asked at last. His voice was not a shout. It did not need to be. The Azure Dragon came to stand at the Vermilion Bird’s side. They did not answer immediately. The wind moved over the wall. The lamps burned steady. The boy who had not lost his first teeth yet stood with his hands tight on a spear two sizes too big for him and tried not to cry.

The Azure Dragon said, “No.”

The Vermilion Bird said, “No.”

Shi Yan Yun did not sigh then. He did not lower his shoulders. He did not give any man the satisfaction of seeing him bend. He stared at the sea below until his eyes stopped trying to make shapes out of it and saw it as what it was: an end that would not end unless someone paid a full price.

He turned his head. He did not look at the Beasts.

He looked at the boy instead. “Hold your spear level. Do not lift it until you can feel his breath on the point. Then push.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” the boy said. His teeth chattered.

Shi Yan Yun left the wall and went to the mountain field where the air bit and silence carried farther. He did not run. He walked. The Azure Dragon and the Vermilion Bird met him there. They stood together and looked down.

The demons below did not raise their faces. They just kept moving.

“And sacrificing myself to the heavens will prevent this?” Shi Yan Yun asked without turning.

“With your assistance, we can create heavenly laws,” the Vermilion Bird said. “That is the best plan we have.”

Shi Yan Yun watched the sea again. He did not scoff. He did not spit. He did not look for a way around this that spared his skin. He had tried all of that for a hundred years and another hundred and another. He had paid by inches. The world had taken by miles. The city below him still stood. It would not stand in a century if he did not pay now.

“How ironic,” he said at last, and his mouth twisted without humor. “My brother’s curse did what my brother wanted. He is forcing me to cut myself out of the world I kept.”

“You can still refuse,” the Azure Dragon said, bitter and honest. “You can stay here and swing your sword until your arms fall off, standing on a wall that breaks one night while you sleep.”

“No,” Shi Yan Yun said. He closed his eyes and pulled breath through every channel he had walked since the day he had opened them. He sent that breath along old scars and new ones. He touched the place where his core sat in his dantian. It was clean. It was full. It reflected the sky when there was no water in sight.

He put two fingers to it.

And then the Emperor broke his own core without hesitation.