Alice
The girl, she stared into the sky through the wiry metal frame of a greenhouse in another world and she began to speak.
Once upon a time, the big city gave birth to a bright girl. As a child to immigrants who'd believed she would find a brighter world, wherever she didn't seek self-improvement, a gentle hand pushed her along. She didn't remember how young she'd been when it became clear - the hand became firm if she did not yield. The blue skies never gave indication of the subsequent storms.
In fair weather, she was told that she would be someone special, someone better than everyone around her. Under darkened skies, she heard the words unsaid. Or else. By the time she was old enough to have her own interests, that instilled disdain for those around her had spread upwards. Her parents knew little of music and less of art. Her first language was English, but compared to the girl, they were barely literate in their native Chinese.
One day, the girl stepped into a library, one where she'd held a part time job over the summers. The library was dear to her - it was a place she could hide when every book she willingly read was suspicious. She had returned to participate in a talent show, with an instrument she'd taught herself to play. It was a surprise that the boy she'd managed to drag along with her showed the performance more than polite interest.
And then, on that sunny day, with no regard for her hard work, with no regard for her struggles, a sudden storm scored a bolt of lightning through the roof of the library and set it on fire while the girl was still inside.
In truth, Alice had never, could never, be sure that this wasn't some final, drawn out hallucination of the girl dying in a library after performing a historic piece of music from an ancient civilization. After all, did it ever make sense that she could perfectly recall texts she'd barely skimmed? Did it make sense that a foreign world happened to speak a language she did as well?
Had she really been plucked from her college applications and internships in New York City with a cute boy to wander a fantasy world? A fantasy world where she felt no hunger or fatigue and split a man in two by kicking him in the chest?
Twenty thousand years here allegedly spanned a single generation, dangerously close to the age of her species on Earth. Was she supposed to believe that some faraway castle in the sky had governed for fifty or more of these generations and doled out punishments for speaking a different language?
Was she to accept that the Book of Changes, a seminal text of Daoism, was some impossible, hushed secret that governed the composition of the Heavens above - and Alice just happened to remember every word of it? Alice didn't even remember when she'd read it.
Alice was sure that there could be nothing that could convince her that this convenient Eastern fantasy setting was real. This was a place inhabited by those who spoke of things like Fate and Karma academically. The sound of hissing and spitting, like silkworms spinning cocoons rang in her ears.
No, Alice had not been convinced.
Not by the lightning that spoke to her in the library. Not by the remains of the body she'd pulled the saber from in a dead sect. Not by the man who was a river who was a man she'd called Uncle affectionately.
Not by the sound of thunder from Earthly Tribulation, hundreds and hundreds miles to the south, past the haunted bamboo forest.
So how was it that she'd become completely, utterly sure that this moment - this scene of a cultivator at the twilight of her life, battling an immortal who'd proudly proclaimed that he'd cheated Fate and snuck into eternal life - wasn't a product of her imagination?
"Three times," said Granny Meng.
The Silkworms that had invaded her ears, if Alice was brave enough to listen - had, until this point, come together to narrate the Story of the world to her. It was a story that was consistent and constant - possibly an indication of waning mental health.
Whatever happened, they were within the myriad possibilities that the silkworms spat at her.
But with those two words - three times - Alice realized that the Silkworms had been completely convinced that the face-stealing, fate-stealing Kong Fu had already died by Granny Meng's hands on three separate occasions.
Under the rain of sharp glass, under the rumbling thunder to the south, Alice had discovered something completely beyond her own imagination. In a battle between an old woman and the contrasting Immortal, she'd felt both the will of someone who'd offered thousands of years of unwavering dedication to the Ascending Sky, and also the decision of someone who'd betrayed it.
Alice had learned what it meant to make a promise.
The girl had not died in a fire in her local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, but she had touched fire all the same, a fire lit by a lantern.
Disciple Chow, what does it mean to cultivate?
Alice remembered the affected arrogance in her response.
To issue a challenge to the skies above.
She'd been wrong. She hadn't understood. The Sword Fairy did not care about what Alice thought of cultivation. She'd wanted to learn who Alice Chow was.
If Disciple Chow should step through the gates, she will learn which battles are worth fighting.
It didn't matter what was clear to her, it didn't matter whether the skies were blue, it didn't matter how bright Alice shone. None of these things could light the fire under the heavens.
Fire under the heavens. Heaven over Fire. Three times. Thrice.
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Before she could stop herself, the words within that entry of the Book of Changes tumbled from her mouth. "Tong Ren - Concordance." The taste of blood rose from her throat, as it did whenever she pulled at the Story. "Ninth and third - with her arms hidden in thick grass, the Fairy makes no demonstration - thrice."
The Book of Changes, a wooly text of Daoist divination on Earth, did not predict the future ahead. It was an observation of the stars above and the higher planes their patterns represented. It was a record of what lay behind. Sixty four patterns, a trigram laid on top of another to form a hexagram. Each hexagram with a description and six divinations, one for each of its six lines.
These patterns, imprinted into the mind of a girl when she met with lightning in an unassuming library on a nameless Seed World - they'd had been a glimpse of a higher truth.
Fairy Guan was wrong. The world was not a grove. The world was a running river. Concepts which held the world together flowed downstream from the Starfields. Culture flowed downstream from the Starfields. The idea of a Sect, a gathering of people, flowed down stream from the Starfield whose symbol was Heaven over Fire.
Tong-Ren. Together-people. Concordance. Tong Ren - in the remote districts of the country, in firmness and correctness, we shall cross the Great Stream. That was the descriptive line for the hexagram, and what had left her lips had been one of the divinations provided by this particular one.
Heaven over Fire governed something beautiful and bright in the distance. It governed the agreement between people - it governed contracts. But it was more than that, it tied the Fates of those people who made promises to the skies above. If the world was a river, it was Fate that determined the way the currents flowed and it was the concordance between people that allowed them to swim upstream.
In his self-importance, Immortal Kong had inadvertently revealed something about his cultivation. He could, through his practice of the Skybound Scripture, manipulate the direction of Fate. He’d used it to escape death by a more powerful Heavenly Tribulation than the one that had claimed the life of the Widow of Tianbei.
Alice, and the silkworms, had believed that Granny Meng could have successfully killed the immortal with any of her three blows. In truth, none of them would have come close. Each blow had been fated to kill Kong Fu, and he would have escaped each of them.
After all, not even Heavenly Tribulation had managed to kill him. In his immortality, the Kong Zhixin, whose Principle tookchallengedstole the Fate of others, had become Kong Fu - he'd tied his fate to the currents of the river. One with the world, one with the heavens. This was why he was sure he was invincible.
This was why Granny Meng had borrowed her devotion to the Sect, her devotion to concordance. She had, within her first exchange of blows with him, realized that the way to defeat Kong Fu was to cross the Great Stream.
Alice realized that Granny Meng, despite her lesser cultivation, was far better than Kong Fu.
But that wasn't the only thing she'd learned from thinking about the world in front of her, rather than listening to the silkworms.
Alice, too, bore the mark of Fate, a wound with no explanation that punished her when she cultivated, one that made it impossible for her to form her Core. She had failed three times.
But unlike Granny Meng, she hadn't failed on purpose. She hadn't planned out her core formation in the way Granny Meng had planned out the fight with the immortal. Alice had tried her very best, each time. This example of swimming against her Fate was just another closed window.
Then, Alice had a dangerous idea.
What was a storyteller if she couldn't stretch the truth a little?
There was the sound of thunder in the distance, an unknown cultivator's Earthly Tribulation.
Chow Mulan
The girl, she stared into the sky, and she began to lie.
“This is the story of a girl who was born into a world where every man, woman and child had been, and could only ever be, mortal.”
Both Kong and Granny Meng were speaking, but Alice couldn’t even hear them over the ear splitting protest of the silkworms.
The look on your face tells me that you don’t even know what it means to cultivate without your Principle.
And why would she? Wasn’t that the definition of holding a principled stance? To hold herself to a higher standard and advance through life with what she found essential and true?
Heaven over Heaven. Qian - the essential, yet great, advancing and true, whispered the silkworms. Those were the first verses of the Book of Changes that described the universal process of cultivation.
Alice paused, and a response came to mind.
Open the door and walk the plains, by light of sun and moon, make them your own.
If she were to be honest with herself, Alice didn’t respect the Skybound Scripture. This was a lower realm, and that scripture was something she assumed had nothing to offer to her. She would not cultivate it - she would never cultivate it.
But if she couldn’t learn a lesson from it, how could she ever be better than the likes of Kong, who had also spat on the efforts of those he deemed lesser? Alice was sure that Kong’s Principle wasn’t infallible. What of her own?
The Book of Changes was a text on divination, but Alice had already seen with her senses that it could not be all encompassing. Why else would the volume of protest from the silkworms grow and grow as they had?
Alice continued.
“She read many books and allowed the fantasy of becoming more to overtake her. And at the age of seventeen, she made a vital mistake. She played a song she shouldn’t have on a stage that was not hers. It was a mistake because the skies above were listening. They were listening to her.”
She felt her fists clench.
“And because she argued with the skies above her head and made promises she shouldn’t have. Like a lotus, she rose through the mud that trapped her.”
She ignored the taste of blood in her mouth.
“And for this crime, she received a wound - not to her body, but to her spirit.”
Alice cultivated a Scripture known as the Book of Changes. Sixty four arrangements of broken and unbroken lines, each with contradictory futures.
“But it did not deter her. Once, twice, three times, she attempted to gather the emanations of heaven and earth, she tried to pull together the five elements, she failed to balance the yin that fades and the brightest yang - all to no avail.”
Her Principle had blinded her by selecting for likely stories in an unlikely world.
“What could have stopped her? Fate? Karma? Dharma? It did not matter. Because in the presence of danger from above and wisdom from below, she set sail on the sea of her self. And she learned-”
What were the names given to those who pursued Core Formation? Bearer. Believer. Core formation was choosing the path.
The blood welled in her mouth, the silkworms screamed, thunder sounded in the distance - the stormclouds of her youth had never left. And in this illiterate world, where Heaven and Earth conspired to keep her in darkness, Alice learned.
“To leave a light on.”