I am, the great dragon-turtle said, only a witness to the end of Guanqing’s story. So that is all I shall tell. Find others who knew him at the beginning if you wish. When we first spoke he had already established a great reputation among his sect brothers. But he had refused the post of Elder three times. Why? He claimed that he wished to unlock the secrets of creation and not to be a petty bureaucrat. I doubt it was the whole truth. In the scant years I knew him, Guanqing never spoke the whole truth. Even about his work.
Ah, the work. Yes. I suppose that would be what you were interested in. Young people always care about power, and rarely about consequence. Very well. I was a part of that great work. His Five Elemental Array, he called it. It was constructed in this very workshop, engraved with lines of carved jade on the floor. An ambitious plan: to bind a greater spirit representing each of the five elements to the array so that Guanqing might avail himself of their power and their wisdom. I don’t know that he actually had much use for the wisdom, mind you – two hundred years of life and he was as optimistic and ambitious as a man in his second decade. And as foolish. Truly it was a wonder that he survived so long.
He started on the right foot: he started with me. I was bored in the Underworld, you see. I had been there for over eight hundred years and spent the entire time shepherding the dead as they made their way to whichever of the divine offices sought to deal with them. The dead certainly didn’t know where they were going. Nor did most of them care. It was constant wailing and moaning from every mouth. Where is my son? I can’t be dead! Surely there is a way to undo it?
There isn’t, by the by. Not unless you wish to dabble in necromancy. And the entire divine bureaucracy disapproves of that, believe me. Necromancers turn order into chaos. Hungry ghosts escape, shambling monstrosities deface the temples and the graveyards. People spend an inordinate amount of time running for their lives and not enough time giving divine tribute. Stay away from the arts that disturb the dead, young one. Now, what was I--ah, yes. Guanqing. He summoned me first; I am aligned with the unending earth, and that is the sort of strength one needs to build an array of this power. He offered me companionship, access to mortal knowledge, and the promise of all the honey ginger balls I cared to eat.
Don’t look at me like that - do you think I have the manual dexterity to make them for myself? I would hardly begrudge you a treat or two over the long centuries.
Ahem.
We struck the deal, and I resided here in his workshop. It was a sight more pleasant a residence at that point, of course. Guanqing had a great library of scrolls and manuals. Not just on the cultivation of one’s spirit; I never knew a man more hungry for knowledge than he. Any sort of knowledge. He learned tavern ditties with the same delight as secret arts to grow his power. I never knew what scroll he would open for me on a given evening but I did know that he would have endless opinions on whatever it was, and be as interested in my opinion as he was in his own.
It was a nice change. I do believe that he had planned to progress the Array more carefully. But one evening Guanqing returned covered in blood and wounds from head to toe. He barely made it to his furnace before collapsing to his knees. I watched him refine an elixir with shaking hands, his usual smile dimmed to sharp and bitter embers.
“My young friend,” I said, “you seem to have run into some difficulty.”
He didn’t respond until the furnace ceased to burn and he could fish whatever he made out of the ashes of impurity. He downed it in an instant. From that moment the flesh began to knit. His pain must also have diminished; he slumped against the wall and turned to me at last. “A spark, elder. Only a spark.”
“And yet, it burned you quite well.”
He laughed. “That it did.” When the laughter passed, Guanqing’s face was set in an expression I’d never seen twist his features before: fear. He took a ragged breath. “Elder, I have done something foolish.”
“You are human. It is to be expected.”
That drew another laugh from him, but this one lacked joy. “Foolishness that exceeds expectations, then.” He raised one hand. It was streaked with blood and in this moment I realized that despite his injuries, not all of it was his own. “I have broken a vow, and taken the life of one I swore to serve.”
“Foolishness indeed. Heaven does not favor the oathbreaker or the betrayer.”
He looked up at me and despite everything there was humor there. “Heaven’s justice does not scare me nearly so much as my brothers’ vengeance. We must prepare.”
I remember sending my heart through the stone of the mountain, letting it drift upwards until it reached the sect clinging to the stone like barnacles to my shell. It was always humming with life. But on that day cultivators swarmed like ants who have just had their nest trodden on. I sighed, and pulled my head to the comfort of my shell. With only the tip of my mouth peeking out, I asked him, “Whatever have you done, Guanqing?”
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“What I had to.”
I did my best to help him avoid the consequences he had courted. I closed the tunnels that led down to the workshop. Together we studied the maps of the seasons and the stars that we might complete the Array. The heavens were not with us; it would have been best to activate a great spirit of metal - perhaps a sword with some decent war stories to tell - so that my power could have strengthened the new spirit and solidified the Array. But every divination we performed spoke to Water, instead. Water spirits are temperamental and mercurial. I’ve never liked them, myself.
Guanqing had chosen one to bargain with. A young dragon of the deep sea, ambitious but often disregarded by her kin. He believed that by offering her a part of his strength and mine we might win her to our cause. As a warrior spirit she would provide him with the offensive power he needed to survive the assault from above.
I urged caution. I wish that to be clear. Bargaining with a dragon is never simple; they are proud and easily offended, not like the patience and equanimity of myself. But his former brethren were blasting through the rock, opening new paths as quickly as I closed them. He never spoke of the details of his crime. But whatever it had been, it was more than enough. My strength would not last forever. We were running out of time, and if Guanqing had any allies left, he did not speak of them to me.
Instead, he summoned the sea-devil. I remember his haggard face as the portal opened over the water sigil. The black water on the other side, held back by the Array. She would not be so comfortable as I surrounded by stone, so he planned to offer her the portal so that she could dwell within the sea and emerge only when she wished. She is a sinuous and graceful creature; I will concede that. I have my own beauty, of course. There are more than a few divine spirits who composed poems in my honor. Don’t look so skeptical. I imagine I could take a form even you might find appealing, were I so inclined.
I’m not. Leave sporting with mortals to dragons and demons, I say. But this is all to say that for a dragon, I suppose she was fair enough. Guanqing seemed impressed. He bowed low to her and said in a more deferential tone than I’d heard him strike before, “Immortal daughter of the sea, I apologize for calling on your name unbidden. I beg you hear my plea.” He’d brought an offering of incense and spirit stones to sweeten her temper.
I won’t share the name, not yet. It will attract her attention if she isn’t watching us right now. And I know young mortals. You’ll only run off and do something stupid with it. She looked down at him and the small fortune of spirit stones, the pearl of her soul glowing in the center of her forehead, and replied, “Speak, once-mortal. I will hear you.”
Guanqing laid out his plan as the mountain shuddered over our heads. I will give him this credit: he never wavered. From his face and the tone of his voice, he could have been negotiating what we were going to have to accompany our tea. The devil listened just as impassively, her eyes gleaming. Dragons are always seeking power. Their courts are ruthless and complex. Having access to my strength, as well as that of my young friend and his connections in the world of the once-mortal must have been tempting.
Perhaps, when the ceiling caved in, she thought that this would be her chance to take everything she desired without having to give up anything in return. A half-dozen of Guanqing’s former brothers descended upon us. I shielded us. But after days of near constant use, my powers - prodigious though they are - were exhausted. “Time,” he cried up at me. “I need more time!”
I did my best to oblige. I am not a warrior like my progenitor. My preferred way to experience a war is with a nice pile of honey ginger balls, next to a warm stove, while a skilled musician sings of glory and danger I never have to see. But when pressed, I like to think I can give a good account of myself. I tasted blood in that battle. Both my own and the thinner, more ephemeral stuff that drives your fragile bodies. I positioned myself over Guanqing and the portal. I know that he spoke with her. But what he said? The words were drowned in the violence of the fight.
I can only assume that, in the heat of the moment, he spoke…poorly. Just as one of the sect members was attempting to fry my left eye with fire from the sky, the waters came. And the sea-devil came with them. I heard Guanqing’s last scream - surprise and betrayal. And then he was gone, before I could even think of breaking off my current fight and defending him. She’d dragged him through the portal into that primordial sea that not even a cultivator could survive.
In the next moment, she’d come through herself, all black coils and hatred. With gleeful strength she struck down the cultivators with great hands of water and the snap of her pearlescent teeth. When she finished with them…well, I do not mind admitting that in the state she found me, I thought that I might not get the full ten thousand years after all. But I don’t think she had any real interest in attacking another spirit. Instead, she must have sensed the power of the sect above. She brought the sea through and surged upwards, through the tunnels that I no longer had the power to close. The sect had no idea what had transpired here. They were still looking for Guanqing.
I felt the mountain tremble as she smashed every cultivator she found into the stone. Dozens of lives snuffed out in an instant. Eventually, someone with some sense must have taken over, for the brothers fell back, fled from the tunnels as if the Hells themselves pursued them. And what power she could draw from the Array and her own sea wasn’t enough to leave the mountain. Although she tried. How she tried! For several years afterward she raged up and down the tunnels, drowning anyone she found and looking for a way out. A way up to the sect compound.
They held her off, even if I don’t know that they ever realized what she was. They sealed off tunnels, forbade mining. There were a few attempts at exorcizing her, but the Array is still down there, and she is bound to it, even if in a lighter way than myself. Guanqing must have managed that in his last moments. That clever, terrible…tragic man. In tempting her into accepting his deal, even if only so she could reach through and take his life, he had the last laugh.
I believe he would have preferred a longer life, but it is what it is. For the last–however long this has been–the sea-devil and I have been reluctant housemates, while the artifacts and secrets of Guanqing rest beneath us. Covered in black water and a dragon’s killing spite. What can you do?
No, not me. I can do nothing. Even were I not bound, these are mortal problems and mortal treasures. I am asking–what can you do, daughter of the Zhou?