By the time the tides of pleasure brought by her surroundings waned, Wei Zhiruo felt she had sobered up a little. The sleep washed away the remaining of her restlessness. Sobriety dawned over her in waves like an epiphany. It stole away the shivers, the pleasures and in its place left a cold, hard touch of reality. Thoughts filled her: her own, others, permeable thoughts echoed each other, resounded and ricocheted.
Sobering up, Wei Zhiruo hid her tiny figure further inside the canoe, stiffening her body into an inconspicuous blob as she collected the events of the day, finally ready to analyze her current circumstances.
She woke up. Was cared for by a maid in her courtyard. Those shards of broken jar had vanished by the time she was dressed and dolled up for any proper company and left to her own devices for the rest of the day. She recalled the face of that maid, and the only exchange they had had today –
"Ninth miss, you must stay in your room, okay? Please don't go out on your own, it won't be good if Mistress finds out about it. It is the eldest master's crowning ceremony and many families from around the county have come to pay a visit. Everyone's been quite busy, you see. It is crowded and you usually don't like these kinds of occasions, do you? You're such a quiet child, may god bless you for that. You never give Tou'er any worries. Be obedient, miss, our Missus said she will ask you out when it's time for dinner. Then you can gift the young master with those embroidered kerchief you have made for so long! I must say, how happy he would be with you after that! It's your Eldest brother's most important moment in life! You wouldn't want to ruin it, right? Is miss happy? If not, I could go ask mistress for permission…"
A strange kind of schadenfreude had dripped from the maids seemingly well-intentioned words. Her eyes had almost narrowed down to a slit, especially showcasing her amiable cheerfulness, though. But a pretense was pretense. How dare it feel real?
'Snitch,' Wei Zhiruo had summed up the role of that woman in an instant.
She was this family's ninth miss and today she was forgotten, remained confined in her chambers, on the occasion of the coming-of-age ceremony of the house's heir. It was a lot of information to take in at once.
Unfavored or orphan? Perhaps, an illegitimate child? Wei Zhiruo had thought of many reasons of such disguised ostracization at that moment and even asked tentatively–
"Will others be there? My sister…"
"Eldest miss? She? Yes…of course she has to go. No other way about it. A while ago the royal edict came– all of us were so afraid, you mightn't have an idea how much (Aunt Jiang was so close to fainting – for a long time she refused to get back to the kitchen at her post, but I think she was pretending for the most part). We had no inkling of what was to come, and everyone just thought about which kind of trouble the Master had put us into this time, but fortunately! Guess what? It was an edict of engagement! Eldest Miss has been promised to the second prince! Although the royal family is so far away in the capital, far away from Jinghai, I heard that he had heard of our eldest miss’s reputation. They had met by chance (how lovely is that!)and then the engagement was settled. The prince might come to greet our Young master and meet the family this time. A prince, must you know! Such an honor has been earned by Eldest miss for the family, how could she not be present there on such an occasion?! Of course she will be there tonight!"
"Oh well…then, will my other sisters go too? Will you go there?"
"…oh, they…"
After that, there came no reply. Her maid had just continued twisting her long hair, twice her body size into an unfamiliar coiffure, adorning it with strands of jeweled ruby dangling beside her earlobes, touching down her small, narrow neck. Few carved pieces were stuck in between the rolled buns. The rubies, intricate though when put together in a single piece of jewelry, were uncompromisingly huge for her own head. Not her own for sure.
After that exchange, there was just silence; no pretense of obedience was heard for a long time. With a stiffened and annoyed smile on her lips and dull light in her eyes the maid had slipped away reminding-
“Ninth miss - don't forget alright? You cannot come out to the banquet tonight.”
If only this event had happened, it wouldn't have mattered much to Wei Zhiruo.
An abandoned child, uncared for by everyone is a great news for her personally. She could spend time at her leisure and find clues about her surroundings without any worry of being discovered or treated as an alien, much worse like a pariah - a body snatcher. Particularly, now when what she knew was so little about this world, that every step she took was filled with a probable chance of being discovered as something not right, like an alien with no common sense or knowledge of norms.
Although her age could act as a shield for such ignorance, putting it against such an affluent family as this where children are so precocious since birth - she didn’t want to take her chances at all. Finally, she couldn't be sure that her wayward emotions or streams of thought that phased like moon, would remain unnoticed if she was under the gaze of others all day long. Lesser the crowd around her, the better. Or she risked being declared insane. Being a closed off bastard was a great chance, an invisible role with little to no consequences.
What had troubled her mostly was…an unfamiliar, unkind gaze that had been chasing after her since the moment that maid had left her courtyard. From that moment on, a pair of cold, covetous eyes had been following her. Thoughts, unfamiliar, rootless and especially malevolent, so chaotic that if manifested in reality it would look like an unscrupulous, unresolvable piece of jumbled up wool, spattered with mud – had started filling up her room. One of the reason's she even went out tonight was that - she was looking for this thing, hiding in the dark.
This was deeply concerning, especially for her who was so easily influenced by thoughts of any kind – even a stone could arouse a storm in her mind, if she chanced upon such a Rune filled stone. Not to mention, that malevolent thought had no root. It was all chaos, with no good thing in it for her to accept!
All day, she had looked for its source, yet the strange thing was that it seemed to be especially alert of her combing spiritual consciousness. This situation of standing in the light, while her predator was looking up from somewhere, crouching in the shadows out of sight, was really unsettling – more than being uninvited to a special family gathering or banquet.
Wei Zhiruo breathed in the fresh cold air, her back straightening a little and losing their nervousness. A strand of her hair flew up in her inattention, blowing up with the wind. Then suddenly it touched the surface of the black water, creating a few ripples. She chased it blankly then looked up.
She unabashedly stared at the sky filled with countless stars, flickering, dancing merrily. She eased her mind, letting her spiritual consciousness travel as it pleased.
Waves after waves emerged from the depth of her soul. It rolled in small ripples, encompassing all that came in its way, like a misty cloud swallowing down hilltops and trees, herds of sheep and cattle asleep, inconspicuous housetops and rolling meadows and valleys. It submerged everything, intangible and tangible in its midst and rolled. Mightier and mightier waves emerged and followed. In a space, impervious to all, her spiritual consciousness was combing through the town.
From the small inconspicuous corner of that manor, it trebled past its majestic walls and shadows, past its grooves, orchards and bamboo yards rustling in the mellow wind and past the small stream that ran along its boundary walls, creating invisible ripples and waves in its cold, dark water. It flowed like churning waves, rustling past Jinghai city fort, even past the mirror-like water filled fields of suburb, past all the way towards the cracks and crevices, snowy tops of the snow-covered Mysterious mountains.
The spiritual Consciousness rose up like smoke and fume, and dark rolling tides of oceans– it brimmed over and bubbled, frothed and shattered its own loosening edges, finally merging into one with the wind. Once again –
"Over-exerted, have I?" She questioned an unknown bystander. "But where is its source – Or how could it be so traceless? Where are you hiding? What makes you so invisible? Not in this plane, are you?"
But no, not everything was futile. She found some strange traces – strange places with rune filled stones. Although, she couldn’t tell whether they were related to that sight that was chasing her, but any peculiarity was a step forward.
These specific stones formed a very conspicuous looking hexagon; each corridor, each chamber abandoned or occupied had these carved stones etched into their floor. It was so conspicuous that Wei Zhiruo realized that each of them was encircling this pond as its center. This puzzled her more than answered her questions.
"What is this shape – it tells a story, for sure. There is a law in it, a strange rhythm of sounds. A magnificent piece, but all too artificial. It's hardly any different from a man-made structure, but if so, could the mortals here draw such complex structures and with so much resonating laws in them? How much more advanced will they be from the Cuiping world, if it is so?" puzzled, she looked at it some more.
As her consciousness prodded and overturned the small agate like piece of stone etched into floor, examining them from all sides and grasping their runes – so intrinsically carved over yellow stones – all into her own mind, trying to touch their laws and find an entrance to its fully functioning structure of synthesis, she suddenly found a breach and entered.
But the next development was completely out of her expectation. She didn’t enter the proper space led by those stone’s Rune but was instead stopped in another space interface in the middle of transit -
Her spiritual consciousness was cut-off by a force, and then she was surrounded in a strange field of energy. The sky was no longer the starry sky, the water was no longer that of a small pond – no, it was much more unfathomable, more ancient and majestic looking.
As if she was stranded in an ocean on a small canoe, with a sky full of swirling majestic runes and clouds of aurora looking vibrant yet chaotic- if there was something akin to it, it must be the cloud swirl of a nebula she had chanced upon in space. Equally vibrant and bursting with energy. The vortices of it looked so powerful, all the more as her mortal body couldn't help perceive its unfathomable power without shirking in quakes of passionate fear. It took great discipline and control to not just jump out from her skin!
An ancient song seemed to appear out of thin air. Wei Zhiruo hurriedly looked at the water surface. The moon was nowhere, the sky a purple firmament.
The figure of the tiny girl was now completely leaning against the canoe's edges looking down deeply at the water – a mesmerizing ocean of floating star fragments. Wei Zhiruo was no longer rowing the canoe, but it never stopped moving forward.
No one knew how, even she was completely unsure – she was now floating above a behemoth of an ocean, with countless pieces of milky white star fragments floating abound. These were real star fragments, milky white – and they were floating in the water like pieces of broken iceberg. But they were hot - too hot for the water. Wei Zhiruo leaned further down to touch the ocean water - but it slipped right through her hands like a cold liquid, yet leaving no wetness on her palms.
The black of the water, the white of the star and the purple of the sky – no words could ever claim to capture their grace, their magnanimity, the resounding majesty of nature!
Wei Zhiruo fell back on her bottoms, her ears keenly filling themselves up with that hollow, primeval song. It was strange, but familiar.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
You yourself might have heard its soft edges, its trebles and falls, its gratified rise and twisted maneuverings of passion, or encapsulated its emotions and its headiness in your reason. Yet, for unknown reasons, when tracing it back to its origin or from where it frothed, its rhythm begins to fade away and it appears hollow like a carved flute. Emerging from the deepest, darkest corners of soul, yet so shallow and so flimsy as if it were made of a whim, or dream woven. So intangible that it seemed worthless to ponder over them. So most people enraptured in such a euphoric melody seldom care for reason for their being even there. For one, Wei Zhiruo hadn’t.
"Bright." Wei Zhiruo echoed suddenly, her mind finally easing a little.
That song swelled up in her head, replacing her thoughts and fear of the unknown; her lips urged her to burst into them. A tune so, so mellow. Something familiar yet unfamiliar. But unconsciously, she restrained. She mumbled, hummed along that thrumming in her red-blood and fed it back to heaven and her loosened thoughts. Unnoticeably, some strange runes started flickering in her cold eyes, the color of which darkened a degree deeper, becoming an icy blue.
Ah, how she remembered.
" There is a fond tale amongst travelers of the sky – that when it is night and right time, when the wheels of fate has just attuned to rhythm of the sky, when two realms overlap – in between them they synergize, they marvel and open up a space of their own, a space so volatile, so turbulent that no one dreams of staying longer than needed; but still a marvelous invention of true nature, a play of rules and heaven's grace. If luck accords you a chance to travel therein, you must beware of its enchantments, its ensnares – but also, stop a while, settle down and glimpse. Here the marvels of nature collude in a mystery, and here it sings a melody of order, primeval order and of life itself. If you capture those – you will be born anew."
Ages ago, she had forgotten most of the struggle of her life, but not the little pleasures she stole in her father's library. It was in one of its oddest-looking books she had found that passage.
At that time, she still hadn’t traveled up into space, or gone on any of her adventures. It was way before her Awakening into a being, much, much different from a human, from herself of the past - a true blooded member of the blood-clan. She forgot its title, but it was tucked in her memories as fresh as the rain of yesterday. Because it talked of strange lands and strange events – for years, it was no more than fantasy. But no, look! Here she was in that fantastical notion of her childhood! The five-year-old her would have been so happy to know such things do exist.
Yes, a fleeting dream, or fantasies should be transient. Washed off by the next wave of the ocean called reality. And her mind had never ebbed to set or froth at its edges. It had always maligned herself to grapple with the deepest, darkest secrets all at once.
Her bloodline had always had its own thoughts, and it liked to resonate with things and people around her. She liked it too. Since she shed off her human layer, it was more overwhelming than ever. She was never given a chance to study restraint, or find if such restraint was even possible. There was no chance to grow up and bottle up the excess thoughts that were eating her up. It was always the hope of others, the dragging force in her life that had defined her sole purpose that never gave her a moment to breathe – let alone the pleasure to quiet down and learn a skill or two to tame her wild thoughts and spirits!
So, her dead clansmen, her revenge, her bloodline became her sole concern. Nothing should have mattered anymore, now that she was dead.
The moment she ceased to be something she was, she lost the remaining reason to pursue the past. She knew she wasn't eternal and she knew that for a fact. She had seen death, played with it, felt its fangs and brittle wounds. So many days she had woken up to attempts at assassination rather than to a birdsong, or a mother's sweet chidings. So many hours she had spent arranging the little games of revenge between her elders. She played well – in that game of power, of control, but she lost too many times.
Each time was more humiliating than the other, each loss more dangerous than the previous one had been. Not being a human was no longer a statement of pride but rather, she was turned into a pariah, the other to their altruistic selves! Sacrificing her pleasures was called a duty. She was sanctified, going against her was sacrilegious - yet, only she knew she was there to bear that assigned role as all-forgiving, a dignified saint, and to swallow all pains and harm they caused, because she was not one of them. She could never be one of them!
She played their games. She wasn't petty and returned what was due at the right time and in the right amount. What should come to them was only a matter of time. But in all this, she had never imagined her own death.
In a world where her wishes were perfectly realized, she would have been wandering in space, like many of her ancestors had, with no abode, no destination in sight – eternal as time. But she was chained and drowned, and drowned so well that all her plans couldn't catch up with those people's sinister cold hearts!
She had forgotten how close it was – that fang named death, how closely it had always placed its forefingers over her jugular veins. She had died so inconspicuously that it was funny and ironic.
Some of the threads of her past had been severed, cruelly cut off by an invisible hand, and she now lay gasping for breath like a drowning man, with only a shred of will remaining. The storm she had seen coming had come and gone long ago, but her battered self, it had no respite. She wanted to ask someone, was this the end? Was this the honor she was promised?
How could she dare take a deep breath of ease when she didn't get any closure? What about her dreams? What about that 'hope' that had defined the majority of her past life – why couldn't her blood save her or itself in the last moment, when so many people had placed their endless hope and faith in it? Why wasn’t it still with her? Leaving her behind to fend for herself?
"Look, father. This is the result of your dreams - how pitiful. Not mine, but haven't I accepted that dream of yours as if it were mine? But, here I am. Dead and alive - I can hardly tell. Your bloodline, your hope, my blood and everyone's hope, like dust has settled in some past land. Somewhere so strange…"
The song continued.
She could try. Try to sleep off the past tiredness. Try to forget, a life spent on a knife's edge, with lingering fear of being pushed down the cliff at any moment by her own ignorance. She could try to forget all the malice her blood had churned, and crystallized into her blackened heart. Forget the pain, the agonies…caused by her mind.
Forget the nervousness, the powerlessness of watching her clansmen die one after another, butchered in cold-blood. Forget that piece of earth washed red, with her soles drenched in innocent blood as she screamed and begged an unknown god for help. Forget the shame, forget the pain and innocuous laughter of her enemies – those burning forts and those wailing of her infant cousins, the wailing of that infant's mother and the lamenting silence of that aftermath – her demon, her nightmare. Just because they were now some tales of a past life, must she forget? Shouldn't it be high time to let it all rest? Her past life.
'Should I forget?' A tiredness flickered on her face, muted in anger. She closed her eyes as her heart opened to that ancient rhythm, burning it in her soul, in her human blood. "Why? Why must I forget that shame? Though my revenge is already exacted and made into a thing of the past– but does that wash away the pain left in the aftermath?" What a joke! Should she suddenly stop being herself if she had died once? For each day of her life, she will remember those faces - and curse and pray for those departed souls! She had a right to that.
She was no more the Crown princess of her dynasty, the last of her lineage. But here, she was Wei Zhiruo. But she was a Wei Zhiruo who hadn't forgotten her past. This life could only carry that extra burden of a past life's memories and hatred!
She didn't know why she came to this world. There were some suspicions, and she did feel it floating in the air, lingering in the wind and the petals of the flower, in the cold walls of her new chambers, surrounding her, the strange vehement emotion that was not her own. Or in the mystery of that malicious thought.
Every karma has its bearer. If fate has brought her here, then she must be needed here. Or had intercepted someone's fate who was needed here. A fate, like a spider's web, was weaving invisibly. The rotten stench surrounded the air as if blurring her figure out from the heavens eye, telling her, she had stolen someone else's fate. This was not a life of her own keeping; someone's fate was left unfulfilled to awaken her own. She wasn't Wei Zhiruo who should have lived.
But it was Wei Zhiruo who survived! If there was any stealing, it was a matter of chance. Her intentions were never included in any event – as far as she was concerned, that made her innocent of charges of theft!
She had no qualms in occupying a body that was not done with her own initiative. And who could surely tell that she wasn't Wei Zhiruo born in this soil, with an alien soul brought from another world? She had seen the workings of her own mind in this – a strange set of enchantments had sealed her own memories. She was sure, only she could have done that! So here was the question? If she had just occupied this body, only this morning - then what could explain those intriguing Rune’s over this body left behind in past and which looked so much like something she would have done? Only she could have achieved this - but now she had completely forgotten when she sealed up her own memories and why.
The song came upon a turn. It swelled like in the breast of a swallow, awakened at dawns-break. It was ready to prance, to emerge and spring forth the most luscious of bushes and amongst the greenest boughs. Suddenly the canoe jerked to a stop, awakening Wei Zhiruo from her stupor. Wei Zhiruo' s eyes turned round in surprise.
All around her, wherever her eyes could reach, she saw an expanse of surface covered in more and more fragments of shining crystal-like stars or was it ice now, she wondered.
Burning against the murky darkness, emanating the softest, mildest of milky whites, as if dripping with grace and purity, floating around in some strange patterns.
Wei Zhiruo, although a bit distracted by her own musings, didn't forget to seal all these images in her mind and burn them into its deepest recesses. These were all virgin rules, so primitive and violently chaotic that there was nothing on par with them. If she lost this chance to capture their essence, she will not get another chance like this again!
She was swift in her actions. She opened up all the apertures of her soul and mind together, and then unsealed the highest level of sense perception that a human could allow in her own apparatus.
But what she didn't know was that, unknown to her, her blood had been boiling and burning all that it could find in the patterns in the sky, in the waters and the clouds independent of her consciousness. It worked like a thinking being, merging the highest rules and mysteries in itself – as if sealing a memory!
There were several of them, uncountable patterns to observe – like firmament on an autumn's clear night, these fragments danced, swirled and floated over the water like the clearest, brightest and most resonant pieces of stars conjoined in visible constellations.
She exerted and stretched the limits of her consciousness, reaching as far as possible while taking in all that she could. But her blood was faster than her, quicker at perceiving than her and more far reaching than her. While Wei Zhiruo had seen and captured but a small encirclement of those rules, her blood was already touching the edges of the ocean, the horizons where the purple firmament and the black sea merged into one and had even extended its filament down below!
Unconsciously, Wei Zhiruo's blood had escaped its bounds and overreached human conception. It was like a hungry and thirsty beast, crawling on all fours, struggling to reinvigorate itself-! Pushing boundaries after boundaries as if it were its last struggle and after which, if it failed to succeed in it, it will be a a lost cause, an existence with no remaining value.
The bloodline sang along the ancient rhythm, merging and manifesting its music in itself – becoming one with that ancient behemoth. Soon it was all rules and runes. Wei Zhiruo's blood unknowingly recaptured those traces of patterns and etched it in itself, preserving the spectacular phenomena in itself: those mysteries of time and space, the rhythm of the dawn of time, the marvelous infant runes with no parallel in the world and several incomprehensible phenomena! Everything, while she remained ignorant.
The heavenly song erupted once more, swelling sweeter and sweeter, with a heady affect over its listener. Its rhythm got mixed up in the waves, in the lolling of the canoe adrift a humongous ocean, and those unknown fragments emanating light. The star light from her surroundings, though, reached her strikingly. She comfortably smelled of home, of belongingness in the mellow whiteness of the star like ice fragments, contrasted brightly with black water current.
If she spent the rest of her time wandering in space, would it be as blissful as this moment? So fulfilling? Would she have been free like never before, accompanied just by her bloodline -?
"Plop!"
Another sound jerked Wei Zhiruo awake. Something else had fallen into the pond – the actual pond. She was back to reality before she could do anything.
She didn't know what had caused that splashing noise, but couldn't help feeling frustrated at being disturbed at such a pivotal moment.
Was this the magic of fate that the space travelers often talked off? The space and time of entrance into such spaces was fixed, perhaps even a rule in itself, longer than which she could never stay? Was staying longer beneficial for her if she could, or was this sudden interruption her fortune or loss? She dwelled on these random thoughts for a while before fully awakening to the coldness of midnight.
The song had died down abruptly, with no sign of awakening again. Wei Zhiruo couldn't help feeling a little disappointed. Her connection to the mellow power of those stars– was still there!
"What…" She felt a strange connection between herself on the earth, and the stars above in the sky. As if she was drawing their light into her body, melting them into herself!
Her connection with the outside heaven, with the stars and skies…
She jerked back to attention. 'Yes,' clear headed now, Wei Zhiruo stiffly closed her eyes, as if the mountain had descended over her shoulders, pushing her downwards.
'My affinity with the stars…is still there. The bloodline!'