He couldn’t move.
He tried to sit up. An invisible force bound him in place, coming from somewhere inside him. The will of the Black Tortoise rolled through his body, holding him still. He was no longer trapped in his mind but in his own body, the qì of his Demon God strong enough to command his flesh and bone even after the cut the dagger had inflicted.
He felt the Demon God’s smile: cruel, cunning, calculated.I used much of my power to bring you back from the brink of death. So much that our qì has begun to blend. Our connection is no longer something so easily or swiftly severed.
“You can’t do this,” Zen choked out. “Let me go.LET ME GO!” His voice rose, sharp and uncontrolled in his panic.
The Black Tortoise’s chortles scraped against his mind.Very well,it said, and he felt its claws begin to withdraw from his mind. As the Demon God’s presence retreated, the being left him with a final, ominous comment:I swore to protect your life for a price.No matter how much you resist, your end is inevitable.
The world seemed to brighten, and he could breathe again. It was far past midnight—the ghost hours. While he’d been unconscious, clouds had come to choke the sky, smothering the moon so that only a pale light seeped through. The Black Tortoise had used its power to staunch the bleeding of the wound in his side, though not enough to stop the pain. Zen wondered if that had been intentional.
He pushed himself to his hands and knees and stayed there, steadying himself while his dizziness faded. His breaths came faster, grief turning to fury at his Demon God’s deception.
Zen let out a yell and slammed his fists into rock. It cracked beneath the qì of his anger. Panting, he stared at the spiderweb fractures that radiated from his hands. Tears dripped down his cheeks, splashing onto his fingers, mingling with the blood and mud.
He held one of the greatest powers of this land, this kingdom, second to none…yet a power that he could not master, that threatened to drown him instead. He’d known of this inevitable end, yet he hadn’t anticipated things spiraling out of his control at such a rapid pace.
He still had so much to do. He needed to find the Crimson Phoenix and unlock the rest of theClassic of Gods and Demons,to summon the army his great-grandfather had once led. He needed to take down the Elantian regime with that power, to reestablish the Ninety-Nine Clans and rebuild the legacy of his Mansorian clan. He had dared to imagine a life ahead, of a land reclaimed, of freedom for his people, of spending the cycles with the girl he loved by his side.
All his plans, everything he had dreamt, crumbled to ash before him.
As he stayed there, curled against himself, he recalled one person who had seen him close to such despair. Back in Where the Flame Rises and the Stars Fall, the Nameless Master had told him of the imperial family’s ability to keep their sanity while being bound to their Demon God. They had been able to rule effectively for dynasties, with the help of the ancient clan of immortals in Nakkar.
Zen stood. Overhead, the moonlight brightened. It illuminated the snow atop the Öshangma Light Mountain. Clouds feathered the peak, rendered ghostly in the night, and between them Zen thought he saw moving shapes: trees and temples, the shadow of a great palace.
The Nameless Master’s instructions came to him:Legends say that in the hours of night when the moon is full and the yin is strong, the boundaries between our world and other realms—those of spirits, of ghosts, of souls—grow weak.
The wind picked up, and it brought those voices to him.Temurezen…Temurezen…
The ghosts of his parents called him from the top of that mountain, where an entire realm of immortals were said to have once lived in their palace of jade. An unnatural wind pulled him in that direction, and Zen had the feeling that the gods conspired to play with the fate of this world tonight.
He set off toward the mountaintop as though drawn by an invisible force, his steps quick with the Light Arts. The Boundary Seal, broken by Erascius’s violent entry, remained open. The qì of metals lingered in the air, a bitter stench resulting from the Elantians’ harsh, discordant magic. Erascius, though, was gone.
The mist at the peak rendered everything in gray when hearrived.
Zen paused. His footfalls, he’d noticed, made no sound. The qì had shifted into something he couldn’t place, something amorphous and intangible and…new. The disembodied calls of his parents continued, drawing him forward into the fog.
The palace appeared between one footstep and the next, as though in a dream. Night had shifted back to sunset, corals blazing in the sky and limning blossoms and willows in streaks of fire. The color bled into the ground, turning the pale stone steps carnelian, as though Zen walked a path of blood.
He’d seen illustrations of the supposed immortals’ palaces: sprawling, splendid things of jade and jewels, gardens of lush flowers abed foaming clouds. In the paintings preserved in the few tomes he’d seen at the school’s bookhouse, these realms—lands hidden behind Boundary Seals, really—had been filled with life. Immortals of the Yuè clan twirling in their signature long sashes, deerlike qí’lín darting between cathayas, flower spirits crouched amidst the begonias.
The Yuè clan knew the secrets to immortality, to the realms that may lie beyond our world.
The palace now sat empty, devoid of life. Zen walked alone in the setting sun. The clouds continued to shift like a slow-moving ocean, and once or twice, he thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Remnants of ghosts or spirits, perhaps, that still haunted whatever realm of the past he had walked into.
He paused at a pair of great doors that led into a long hallway. Sunlight poured in, staining the molten-gold carpet crimson. At the end of the carpet stood a figure, naught but a silhouette amidst the tangle of soft-blowing silks and swirling mists. His parents’ ghostly calls had fallen silent.
Perhaps there are yet answers to be found in Nakkar, the City of Immortals.
Zen stepped through the open doors.
The Goddess of Mercy once had a clear vial of the Water of Purity. One drop and a sweep of a willow branch will reveal hidden Seals to the wielder.
—The Way of the Practitioner,Section Ten, “Artifacts”
Lan’s breath feathered across the stars like smoke. One week’s travel northwest, following the instructions from the immortal that Dilaya translated onto her luó’pán, had led to sharply plummeting temperatures and long nights. As they traveled, the needle of thefeng’shuicompass had wavered at first before finally settling and pointing steadfastly: a sign that they approached their destination. Lan had failed to fathom how pointing the eight trigrams at various symbols on the wooden board—a crescent moon, spring rain, a jade dragon, a red sparrow—yielded the precise direction to Shaklahira, but she wasn’t going to question Dilaya again only to be lectured on theKontencian Analectsand geomancy.
Shaklahira, Dilaya had divined from that accursed luó’pán, lay near Crescent Spring, an oasis near the northwestern border of the Last Kingdom.The spring of a crescent moon,the immortal had told Lan.
