All things in this world have a point of birth and a point of destruction. That is the fundamental principle of the cycle of qì.
—Dào’zi,Book of the Way (Classic of Virtues),2.7
Zen awoke suddenly sometime in the night. He’d dreamt of a city made of sand, a silver crescent moon, a dragon wreathed in shadows.
And he’d dreamt of Lan.
He straightened, rubbing a hand across his face. The tallow candle had burned to the end of its wick, and his inkwell had run dry; the burial chamber he’d made his base was steeped in silence and darkness. These were what the common folk called the “ghost hours,” and the name had a deeper meaning than most knew: they were when the yin of whatever worlds lay beyond this one filtered through most strongly. When one was most likely to glimpse spirits and souls.
Strewn on his makeshift desk was a horse-skin drum, a golden eagle feather, a palm-sized brass mirror, and theClassic of Gods and Demons.
He’d spent the past day in solitude, hunched over the tome he’d found in the birchwood chest, his eyes glazed over andshoulders aching from painstakingly translating the Mansorian syllabary—a language heshould havegrown up with,should haveknown as well as the lines of his own palm—into Hin scripture. He hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten, and might not have drunk if not for the pot ofpu’erteaShàn’junhad steeped for him, now long gone cold.
The shadow of the Black Tortoise pulled itself from the darkest corners of the chamber, hovering in the spaces candlelight did not touch. It had remained by his side over the past day as his tenacity yielded to frustration, and he hadn’t bothered to break off their connection. He’d begun to rely on the Demon God to fill in the gaps when he became stuck.
And sometimes, he found, the line between his mind and the Demon God’s began to blur. He would stumble across an unknown character, and the meaning would come to him, drawn from the ocean of knowledge that belonged to the Black Tortoise.
Zen stood. He lit a fresh candle and walked to the first tomb. He took in the sight of the Mansorian general, so eerily preserved that he might have been asleep in a bed of funerary silks. On impulse, Zen lifted his hand, drew qì into his fingertips, and began to conjure the half-deciphered Mansorian Seal he’d just learned.
He could sense its incompleteness from the moment it activated, the qì pulling unevenly like a quilt with holes. The combination of strokes and strands of qì sparked several times before sputtering out in a hiss of smoke, leaving him in the flickering light of his candle.
He wanted to throw something. So many times, in frustration and resentment of all that had been taken from him, he’d wanted to destroy this place in a tide of black fire.
He inhaled deeply, letting the flames of his anger cool.Then he returned to his desk, picked up theClassic of Gods and Demons,and turned to the next page.
It was blank.
Zen stared, aghast, certain that his mind was playing tricks on him again. He flipped to the next page. And the next. Thumbed through the rest of the book.
All blank.
He returned to the last page that held scripture and ran his fingers down the first blank page again, studying it carefully. There wassomethingon the page, steeped into the yellowing vellum, glimmering like Masyrian glass.
Zen touched a finger to it—and sucked in a breath.
His fingerburned.The sensation rushed through his hand like wildfire, and his mind blanked at the pain. He stumbled away from the tome, knocking over the candle.
Flame swept through the chamber. It struck the burial tombs like lightning, and in a breath’s span, impossibly, the entire dungeon was afire.
Zen summoned qì to him, whipping up a Seal that called upon the energies of water while channeling away all the air. It was one of the most basic principles he’d learned as a practitioner: in the great cycle of qì, air birthed fire and water destroyed fire. Summon the element of destruction and repel the element of birth, and the qì would be successfully vanquished.
The Vanquishing Seal swept across the room. Yet the water passed through the fire as though it weren’t there; even when the air parted from the flames, they only blazed higher and brighter.
A tendril latched onto Zen’s wrist in a flash of searing pain. Zen snapped a water fú at it; the water had no effect. It splashed against his skin without dousing the flames even as they continued to snake up his arm. His vision filled with red: a great bird with crimson plumage, turning to him withgolden eyes…. The flames pierced his chest, and he couldn’t breathe….
Darkness wrapped around his mind and claimed the chamber. When he blinked again, he was kneeling on the ground, tome in hand. The candle had righted itself, lighting the place with a slow, steady flame. There was no trace of the fire or the crimson bird. The dungeon was as silent and still as ever, the walls now dripping gently with water from the Vanquishing Seal he had summoned in his panic.
Hands shaking, he swiped a lock of hair from his forehead. His fingers came away wet with perspiration. No burn marks or signs of injury—yet the pain, the flames, all of it had felt soreal.He could sense the powerful energies of his Demon God relinquishing its hold on him, withdrawing once again to the places where light did not touch.
“What was that?” He hated that he sounded out of breath, his composure lost.
A Seal,came the response, slow and somewhat hesitant for the first time since he’d known the Demon God.
Zen picked up the tome again and flipped to where the blank pages started. There, in the center of the parchment, a Seal of indecipherable strokes now blazed out. He stared, mesmerized for a moment by the sheer complexity of it and how the qì within lookedalive.Each stroke seemed to trail fire and blood, a well of unfathomable power unnoticed until one looked close.
This was mastery of the art that not even Master of Seals Gyasho or GrandmasterDé’zicould have dreamt of achieving.
“Perform the Counterseal,” he commanded his Demon God.
