Chapter 17: The Demon Realm

The wind came in from outside, and then the rain.

Xi Jiuge looked at the rock not far from the cave entrance. Behind it, wrapped in a few rough pieces of cloth, a newborn lay. The rock might have sheltered him on a dry night. Tonight the wind was carrying the rain sideways, and the dampness was already settling on the stone.

An adult sleeping here would fall ill. She looked at the infant and thought: this strange little thing probably wouldn't survive.

She was a wandering divine consciousness, invisible, and had been present for the argument between two sisters earlier in the cave. She didn't know what beauty was, but the two women had seemed pleasing to her eye in some way she couldn't name. By their standards, the small creature in the cloth was very ugly.

Perhaps that was why the older sister had tried to strangle him. She had just given birth and was weak, and in the end her younger sister had stopped her. Before she left, she made her position clear: the child's life or death was not her concern. A bastard with Xuanyuan blood would never set foot in Jiuli territory. She leaned against the cave wall, refused her sister's arm, and walked out without looking back.

The younger sister — she didn't know what else to do. She tore strips from her own clothes to wrap the infant more securely, found a half-rotten wild fruit nearby and squeezed juice from it into his mouth. Then she found the most sheltered corner she could, put him behind the rock, and went home.

If anyone had been able to see Xi Jiuge, they would have found a girl who appeared to be about seven years old. She was a child herself. She didn't know how to care for an infant. But she could see that fruit juice in a cold cave was not a normal way to keep something alive.

Then the rain started.

She looked at the infant behind the rock. His movements were barely perceptible. She was only a wisp of consciousness — no body, no power to do anything — and she could not keep him warm or dry or fed. She didn't know who he was. She didn't know why his mother had looked at him with such disgust. She only hoped that in whatever came next, he might be born into a family that was willing to have him.

She waited through the night. The rain didn't stop. She had assumed the darkness was dusk, but after a long time, the sky did not change. Even on a heavily overcast day there should have been some gradation of light. There was none. She began to understand that this was simply what this place was: perpetually lightless, perpetually grey.

Without the rhythm of day and night, she could only track time by when the younger sister arrived. She learned their names this way: the older sister was Li Xuan. The younger was Li Yao, the clan's youngest daughter, unmarried.

The infant should not have still been breathing on the second day. Li Yao came trudging through the mud, found him alive, and couldn't pretend otherwise. She kept coming after that — almost every day, feeding him and then returning home alone.

The Demon Realm was cold and damp. Li Yao fell ill often. The infant, with almost nothing, no warmth, no proper food, no protection of any kind, survived anyway.

After some time, Li Yao stood in the cave looking up at a sky that was neither dawn nor dusk, and named him.

"Even the heavens won't accept you — it seems you're meant to suffer in this world." She looked at the child. "A lonely shadow before an icy mirror. Cold light against a jade-like face. The Demon Realm can't distinguish day from night, so it's hard to say whether you were born at dawn or dusk. Let's say dawn." She paused. "Your mother doesn't acknowledge you, but you have half the blood of the Jiuli tribe. You'll take our surname. From now on you'll be called Li Hanguang."

Xi Jiuge, floating above, heard the name and felt something she couldn't identify — a sense of having been overlooked. Even this infant had a name. She had asked the mysterious voice once, when it first spoke to her. It hadn't appeared since.

Everyone else had something she didn't.

She had no interest in watching this clown anymore. She picked a direction and drifted away.

---

She wandered the Demon Realm for what felt like a long time. Half the year, drizzling rain. The other half, ice and snow. The landscape never changed. Even time seemed to have lost interest in this place.

Eventually the gloom became less interesting than the infant had been. She turned around and went back.

The cave was the same. The clown was gone.

On the mountain path she found a figure fighting a wild beast — eight or nine years old by the look of him, slender, and covered in blood. Quite handsome, she noticed with some detachment, by the standards of Li Xuan and Li Yao. She drifted past him without stopping, still looking for her clown.

Along the path she came across a group of children carrying a blood-soaked monster corpse, talking among themselves.

"Li Hanguang can already kill a demon wolf. If we steal it while he's down, will he come after us?"

"No. He doesn't deserve the surname Li. The chieftain forbids him from entering tribe territory. As long as we stay near the tribe, he won't touch us."

The children proceeded to butcher the wolf cheerfully. Li Hanguang — wasn't that the infant?

She followed the trail of blood they'd left, back along the path, and found the same figure she'd passed. He was worse now — face streaked with mud and blood, two deep gashes on his arms that came close to the bone. He leaned against a tree, panting. Opened his palm. A small inner core sat in it — the one the children had missed. He wiped the blood off it and swallowed it. Pressed both hands against his arms. Got up and walked away.

Xi Jiuge stared at him.

This was the clown monster? He wasn't ugly anymore. How had that happened?

She felt genuinely aggrieved about this for a while. He had a name. He wasn't ugly. Only she remained exactly as she'd started — formless, nameless, on the outside of everything.

She spent half the night in the cave turning this over, getting progressively more annoyed, and decided to leave for good this time.

She drifted out of the cave entrance and nearly passed through a man crouching in the bushes. The Demon Realm rarely had a moon; tonight it did, faintly, and the man was watching the cave with focused attention.

There's only Li Hanguang in there. No money, no demon beasts. What does this man want?

Then the sounds of fighting erupted from inside. Li Hanguang came stumbling out.

He had washed the blood off at some point. In the moonlight he was — she noticed this unwillingly — striking. The only thing in this dark world that seemed to have any brightness to it. But his face was white, and blood was moving down his hands, and he was biting his lip against the pain. He made no sound. He grabbed a tree for support and ran.

The man followed. A twig-knife was lodged in his eye from whatever had happened inside; blood covered half his face. He was roaring: "You little bastard—"

Xi Jiuge didn't fully understand what the man intended. She understood enough. She abandoned her plan to leave and followed them into the forest.

Li Hanguang knew the terrain and used it, changing direction, throwing false impressions behind him. The man knew magic. It wasn't enough. A black nail flew from behind and caught Li Hanguang in the shoulder; he went down.

The man took his time closing the distance. He talked while he walked — about bloodlines, about war gods, about how delicate Li Hanguang looked, how pitiable, how tonight might be a mercy. Li Hanguang's hands were bound behind him by the magical artifact. His arms were already cut open. He looked up at the man with an expression that was nothing but hatred, pure and unmanaged, the eyes of someone who had stopped trying to hide what they felt.

The man found this funny. He raised his whip.

Xi Jiuge tried to pull Li Hanguang upright. Her hands passed through empty air. She tried again. Again. She had no body. There was nothing to grip, nothing to push, nothing she could put between Li Hanguang and what was coming. She could only watch.

The man began to undress.

Li Hanguang's whole body was shaking. He was pulling against the artifact with everything he had. His wrists were bleeding. His eyes were wet and red and he had bitten through his lip.

He closed his eyes.

Xi Jiuge screamed.

She had no body, no voice, no physical form of any kind — and yet something erupted outward from wherever she was, a wave that spread and spread, drawing in every scattered trace of fire in the earth and air around them. The bushes exploded into flame.

The man spun around. No one. Only fire, everywhere, closing in.

The Demon Realm was damp and dark; fire was rare and carefully held by whatever faction controlled it. A spontaneous blaze in open wilderness was impossible. The man had no framework for what was happening. The fire reached him before he could reason through it. He ran for the lake, screaming, and plunged in, and the fire followed him into the water.

It burned him to ash.

Li Hanguang sat in the clearing and watched. The artifact had released when its owner died. He pulled his arm free slowly and looked at the bushes. Still. Silent. As if nothing had caused this.

He stayed for a moment, then picked up the dead man's artifact and left. His steps were uneven. Before the trees closed behind him he looked back at the fire — still burning, huge now, dominating the dark hillside.

The strong do as they please. Only a power stronger than evil can punish it.

He didn't know what had happened. He tried to speak into the dark. No answer came.

---

Xi Jiuge fell asleep.

She didn't know the fire burned for seven days and seven nights. The Jiuli tribe came with water, magic, rain — nothing worked. It burned until the mountain was bare, and then it stopped.

When she woke, the forest around her was scorched and stripped. She remembered Li Hanguang immediately — had he gotten away? — and drifted out to look.

She passed through a tall figure without recognizing him. He walked to a charred tree, touched the trunk, and began clearing weeds from around its base.

She thought: this person is unwell.

She heard him talking to the tree. His aunt had married into the Chang family — the oldest and most powerful clan in the Demon Realm, descendants of Moon Mother Chang Xi, masters of Yin-Yang divination. His aunt had written that she missed home and wanted him to come stay. He talked through why this made no sense — why a place like that would want someone like him — and arrived at the real question underneath it: maybe he didn't want to go because leaving the Jiuli territory meant accepting that his mother was never going to find him there.

Even though she has never come to see me. Even though my uncles never acknowledge me. If I stay near enough, maybe one day I'll meet her on the road.

Xi Jiuge floated closer. She sat on a branch above him. His background sounded strangely familiar.

He said: "Ninety years, and you haven't appeared again. Do gods really exist? Or was I hallucinating that night — was there no divine intervention at all?"

He looked up at the dead trunk.

"If there are gods — tell me. Should I go to the Chang family?"

She recognized him then. The blood-covered figure on the mountain path. The infant in the cave. Li Hanguang — her clown monster, grown into this: a young man talking to a burned tree because no one in the Jiuli tribe would come near him, asking a question he didn't expect to be answered.

He wanted to be strong. He wanted to stop being at the mercy of people who could do whatever they liked to him because no one would stop them. He had only been lucky once in a hundred years. He knew better than to count on it again.

He finished speaking and looked at the tree.

A haze of golden light came from the branches. Faint, blurry — a small figure outlined in it, the face unclear, only the light itself visible: warm and righteous and, when it had last appeared, more powerful than anything in this dark place.

Li Hanguang's eyes went wide. Then the light was gone. He looked around at the scorched emptiness. Nothing.

He pressed his hand slowly over his heart.

So the gods truly existed. The light had not completely abandoned this place.

He didn't know who she was. She appeared to be very young. He hoped, looking at what little he'd seen of her, that her life would be easy. That things would go smoothly for her. That she would always be surrounded by people who loved her.

---

On her end, the golden light had startled Xi Jiuge out of her own body entirely. She rose like a kite cut loose, her hands glowing, and the voice she hadn't heard since the beginning finally returned.

"You drew upon the power of the Sun God. Your divine consciousness was nearly depleted. You've been asleep for ninety years. The Queen Mother of the West found the seal loosening and has set up an array at Yaochi to bring you back. You'll return to your body soon."

"You're back," she said.

"I've always been here. We will meet again."

The pulling force was already too strong to resist. She was losing consciousness.

Before she went, she thought about Li Hanguang going to the Chang family. Away from the Jiuli tribe, away from the people who took his kills and beat him in the dark and told him he didn't deserve his own name. Li Yao would still be there. He would be all right.

May your journey be bright. May you achieve what you're seeking. May you become the person you're trying to become.

She didn't know if he could hear her. She let go anyway.