Chapter 11 – Mortal Cities, Heavenly Stars
The gray bird folded its wings and landed on the highest branch atop the Divine Fu Tree.
With cries of “Aiyo, aiyo,” the three people behind it tumbled down its tail feathers. The Oracle Master grabbed Chou Bodeng and led him to a steady landing on the Fu wood.
“What’s your name?”
After a tour of the high skies, Chou Bodeng was in a good mood and, for once, actually asked.
The hand holding his suddenly tightened. For a moment, Chou Bodeng had the illusion that their finger bones were branding each other through flesh and blood. He frowned and looked up, ready to scold the person, but was met with a pair of vacant eyes. The firelight reflected in the pupils became a single, lonely, burning lamp.
You’ve got to be kidding me!
Young Master Chou’s scalp tingled.
It’s just a name, what’s with this expression? Is this guy some kind of genuinely unloved, pitiful soul? Has the name his parents gave him become some untouchable wound?!
“…A Luo.”
The Oracle Master quickly realized his gaffe. After helping Chou Bodeng down, he hastily let go and hid his hand in his sleeve.
“Sorry, it’s been a long time since…”
Chou Bodeng patted his shoulder, cutting him off crisply, “A Luo.”
It was a rare occasion for Young Master Chou to take the initiative to pat someone’s shoulder, but the force he used was hardly comforting—one wouldn’t even use that much strength to dust something off. It made one suspect he was actually taking the opportunity to retaliate for the painful grip just now. The Oracle Master’s dazed expression made Chou Bodeng find the situation a little amusing.
“Found it! Over there!”
Lu Jing, covered in dirt, emerged from a dense cluster of Fu leaves and shouted.
Chou Bodeng withdrew his hand and, as he turned to look, nonchalantly called out again.
“A Luo.”
“Yes,” the Oracle Master replied in a low voice.
Good enough.
Chou Bodeng thought.
All sentences starting with “It’s been a long time since” were always followed by a stretch of dust-covered time, and he hated anything covered in dust. When he encountered such things, he either burned them or had someone dust them off. This time, the dusty thing was a living person, so he couldn’t just burn him. With no servants around to order, he had to condescend to give it a pat himself.
Fortunately, it seemed the dust could still be patted off.
“This nest is huge.”
Zuo Yuesheng’s round head poked out from the foliage. Aside from Chou Bodeng and Shi Wuluo, the other three had been thrown by the gray bird into the crown of the Fu tree. In the area where the Divine Fu Tree’s spiritual energy was most abundant, the leaves grew in thick, dense clusters. Falling into them was like landing on a somewhat coarse but thick and fluffy blanket.
The gray bird’s nest was built between three branches, looking like a small wooden house at first glance.
Lu Jing’s Yin-Yang Pendant was hanging high up, surrounded by star-like, firefly-like specks of light. They gathered in clusters, flowing like a small stream into the nest.
The gray bird landed by the nest and chirped softly. Another, slightly deeper bird call answered from within, and then another gray bird with duller feathers—the female—peered out. The female bird’s feathers were stained with blood, and her injuries appeared much more severe.
“So that’s how it is.”
Chou Bodeng now understood why the normally gentle gray bird had reacted so violently tonight.
It was protecting its mate.
The Oracle Master subconsciously tried to walk over to Chou Bodeng’s side, but the moment he moved, the gray bird became instantly tense. It spread its wings, shielding the nest and the female inside, the feathers on its neck bristling. The female bird struggled to stand but was pushed back down by its mate.
“Alright, alright,” Chou Bodeng lazily stopped him. “Stop acting like the villain persecuting the young couple.”
The Oracle Master stopped in his tracks.
He stopped moving, but he looked a little unhappy. His expression hadn’t changed, but as Chou Bodeng watched him stand there ramrod straight, he had the strange feeling that the man was indeed a bit displeased.
…What is this all about?
Chou Bodeng didn’t really want to bother with him. But after a moment’s thought, he decided not to approach the nest either. He looked around, picked a branch far from the nest, and sat down to watch Zuo Yuesheng laboriously gesture at the two birds. Lu Jing was rummaging through a pile of bottles and jars from his Mustard Seed Pouch, looking for medicinal pills, while Ye Cang helped him sort through them.
“This is… a Subduing Clarity Pill.”
“A Jade Dew Pill… not this one.”
“Not this one either…”
“…”
Zuo Yuesheng squatted to the side, his eyes darting around. “How about I trade you for some of those Subduing Clarity Pills?”
Any one of these pills was priceless and unavailable on the market, yet in Lu Jing’s hands, they were like candy beans, making Fatty Zuo’s eyes burn with envy.
Without looking up, Lu Jing said, “Get lost!”
“Aren’t you the Young Pavilion Master of the Mountain Sea Pavilion? Aren’t you rich?” Chou Bodeng was puzzled. “Why are you always thinking about speculating and profiteering? You’re not poor, are you?”
“The money I have, I earned it myself, fair and square! If my dad let me take things from the treasury and spend money freely, would I need to run all over the place to build my own fortune?” Zuo Yuesheng said irritably. Halfway through his rant, he remembered the two guys in front of him. One could eat pills personally refined by the Medicine Valley Master like candy, and the other could casually take Taiyi’s greatest treasure out of the mountain. The sourness made his teeth ache. “It’s easy for you to say.”
They were all second-generation immortals, so why was the gap so huge?
“Isn’t making money quite simple?” Chou Bodeng sat on the tip of a branch, the Taiyi Sword resting on his bent knee, his other leg dangling and swinging slowly in the air. He asked with a smile, “I made eighty-one thousand taels of gold in two days.”
Zuo Yuesheng shot him a resentful look. “You have the nerve to bring up those eighty thousand taels?”
“That’s what you call setting a thief to catch a thief,” Lu Jing said coolly.
“I’ll give you a chance to rephrase that, Brother Lu,” Chou Bodeng said softly.
“I meant to say Young Master Chou was enacting justice on behalf of heaven,” Lu Jing quickly corrected himself.
Chou Bodeng let out a derisive laugh.
***
The Divine Fu Tree was so tall that from its peak, the voices of people on the ground were inaudible. Through the branches of the silver Fu, he could see the torches of crowds gathered in the streets, like people in ancient times lighting torches in the dark to perform some mysterious ritual. Chou Bodeng watched for a while, figuring they wouldn’t catch him anytime soon, and shifted his gaze to the distance.
“So this is what the Miasma Fog looks like.”
Chou Bodeng gazed out beyond the city, murmuring to himself.
Although he knew from books that the people of this world lived within a miasma fog, needing divine objects to carve out a place to live and reproduce, seeing it in a book was one thing, and seeing it with his own eyes was another. Looking out from the top of the Fu tree, the distant mountains and fields were just hazy silhouettes.
Darkness pressed in from all sides, threatening to swallow the city at any moment.
For thousands of years, the Divine Fu Tree had grown in such darkness, spreading its vast silver crown to cloak the entire city in an invulnerable, snow-white garment.
This world is so dark, Chou Bodeng said in his heart.
Even the stars were few.
“There are so many stars tonight.”
Lu Jing had traded three Spirit Lotus Pills with the gray bird to get his Yin-Yang Pendant back. Having recovered what was lost, he felt like crying again. But a glance from the corner of his eye at the Taiyi Sword resting on Chou Bodeng’s knees sent a chill down his spine. He quickly tilted his head back and pretended to admire the stars.
“…Are you serious?”
Chou Bodeng tilted his head back, counted the few stars in the sky, and asked slowly.
“Less than forty. You call this ‘many’?”
The moment he spoke, Zuo Yuesheng, Lu Jing, and Ye Cang all turned to look at him strangely.
“Young Master Chou,” Zuo Yuesheng asked earnestly, “how did the Taiyi Sect raise you?”
“What does this have to do with the Taiyi Sect?”
Ye Cang pointed to the sky. “Usually, seeing a dozen stars is considered a lot!”
Lu Jing added, “There are only thirty-six stars in total. That’s something even a three-year-old knows.”
“Astronomy is dead.”
Suddenly less knowledgeable than a three-year-old, Chou Bodeng ground his teeth and delivered his verdict expressionlessly.
“The stars in the sky are reflections of the cities on the ground.”
The Oracle Master had been silent ever since Chou Bodeng had called him “A Luo” twice. His silence was somewhat abnormal—though not entirely, as he hadn’t spoken a word to anyone but Chou Bodeng. It was only when the other three were teasing him that he finally spoke up to explain things to the bewildered Chou Bodeng.
“When the earth has cities, they gather its qi, and the essence of this qi becomes a star. Stars are bodies born of the earth, their essence formed in the heavens, arrayed and scattered, each with its own domain.”
Chou Bodeng grunted in understanding.
After he had won the bid for that dark-gold shamanistic mask from South Qian, theologians and folklorists had shamelessly shown up at his door every few days.
A folk astronomer he was on good terms with had once told him about the close connection between ancient celestial phenomena and geography, saying, “People often objectified representations of the mortal world’s geographical environment in the heavens, which ultimately led to the heavens becoming a replica of the mortal world [2].” What was most peculiar was that this concept didn’t exist in just one tribe or region, but in the beliefs of various peoples and races all over the world.
It was as if, during a certain period, the entire world had earnestly believed in this.
However, in the modern world, myths were just myths. In the world of immortals and heroes, they were facts.
“But not all cities have qi vigorous enough to form a star,” the Oracle Master said. “That star in the north is Taiyi.”
The star corresponding to Taiyi hung in the far north, with no other stars to accompany it, shining alone over the northern corner of the world.
It shone with arrogance.
“It’s so bright,” Lu Jing marveled.
“Ours at the Mountain Sea Pavilion isn’t bad either,” Zuo Yuesheng said, pointing to a star in the south. “Look, that’s ours.”
Lu Jing glanced at it disdainfully. “It’s dimmer than Medicine Valley’s.”
“Are you blind?” Zuo Yuesheng was displeased.
“I can’t see Fu City’s…” Ye Cang said wistfully.
Fu City was too small.
One or two hundred thousand people might seem like a lot, but in the grand scheme of the world, it was nothing.
“So few, only thirty-six,” Chou Bodeng said suddenly.
“Young Master Chou, you talk as if you’ve seen so many stars,” Zuo Yuesheng couldn’t help but mock. “Wake up, this is the most there is.”
“I have.”
Chou Bodeng, however, said he had. He stood up, holding the Taiyi Sword.
“I’ve seen the stars in the sky too numerous to count. I’ve seen the earth completely illuminated, as bright as it could be. I’ve seen, from billions of light-years away, a brilliant radiance upon the thick earth.”
“I’ve seen it.”
He didn’t sound like he was joking. The three, who had initially thought he was just talking nonsense, suddenly found themselves unable to laugh. They followed his gaze to the sky, imagining it filled with countless stars, and suddenly felt that with only thirty-six stars, the vast firmament was so desolate it made the night silent.
“If one day, the sky was full of stars, how bright would it be?” Lu Jing murmured.
“It would be very bright, I suppose,” Zuo Yuesheng mused. He couldn’t imagine it, having never seen it. “At least, there probably wouldn’t be any Miasma Fog… wait,” he suddenly thought of something and asked abruptly, “Stars are bodies born of the earth, their essence formed in the heavens, arrayed and scattered, each with its own domain… those are words from a secret scroll of the Immortal Sects. Why do you know them? Aren’t you just an Oracle Master?”
“He’s no Oracle Master at all!”
A cold voice spoke from the darkness below. As the words fell, a streak of azure sword light slashed out.
“Young Pavilion Master! Move!”