Chapter Text
It’s difficult not to notice a war. More difficult, still, when the dead are being dragged up before their final breaths escape their lips and made to dance like lethal puppets, but there's good reason why gods don't attempt to alter the course of such things. Heaven’s roster has already been upended once in the past decade after such an attempt, and so the gods stay their hands from anything more than small boons and guiding dreams—when it comes to great tragedy, not even the divine can truly alter the course of fate. Nothing but disaster comes to those who try.
How many kingdoms have fallen for the hubris of their ascended royalty? Too many to name, and those names are bitter on the tongue regardless, left firmly unspoken except in murmured warnings to young upstarts who are still learning their place in the heavens. General Ming Guang is neither a prince, nor a king, and has never cared to be either one; he knows better than to meddle beyond his due.
But there is pragmatism, and then there is survival.
And there are temples burning in the night.
“You’re going to wear a rut in my floor if you keep pacing like that,” Shi Wudu grouses, not sparing so much as a glance up from his work. “Straight through the stone, down to the mortal realm.”
Pei Ming cuts him a sideways look, mouth tightening, then turns on the ball of his foot to continue exactly as he had been.
“It would at least make his decision for him about descending,” Ling Wen points out. “I can always ask the Earth Master to lend a hand with the digging if you’d like, Lao Pei.”
The crease deepens between his brows. “This isn’t a laughing matter.”
“I didn’t say it was. Are you sure this was cultivators, and not…?”
“It’s not a new ghost king,” Pei Ming insists for what must be the dozenth time that day. “The Kiln hasn’t reopened; I’ve sent deputy gods to check.” Whatever is inside has been shut in for years, and will no doubt be a disaster if it survives, but nothing has replaced Bai Wuxiang just yet. Where his friends want answers he only has questions—the closest thing to reassurance he can offer is that the arson is without a doubt human in nature, and that’s poorer comfort than anyone would like.
Ling Wen tips her head. “Then you have your solution, unless you’d like to petition Jun Wu to step in.”
All three of them know that he won’t. This doesn’t fall under heaven’s jurisdiction; it’s sheerly personal. The natural life cycle of gods, bound up in the faith and worship of their believers and in turn reliant on them for their survival. Pei Ming isn’t the only heavenly official to have had his temples torched in the past few months as one of the cultivation sects conquers their way east—a handful of minor regional gods have already found themselves teetering at the edge of extinction as their previously-devout turned to other deities—but of the Upper Court he’s been the most affected by far. He’s not in true danger just yet, not with how widely his territory spans, but if the tide of battle doesn’t turn soon then he well could be. He’s old enough to know better than to ignore that risk; few men care to worship a martial god who loses them a war, even if taking the front lines like he longs to would earn him banishment.
“I don’t like it,” Pei Ming admits through grit teeth. “It’s underhanded—you know how I feel about that.”
“And how would you feel about being dead?” Shi Wudu retorts, finally setting down his brush, the question as harsh as it is honest. Because the truth of it is that, unlike those regional gods who have been demolished by the war, Pei Ming at least has an option. More than that, he has a reasonably safe option, one that Ling Wen herself helped him carve out of a thousand intricate heavenly laws. The trouble is that, safe or not, it’s distasteful.
“So my options are to die,” he scoffs, “or live at the cost of becoming something I’m not?” A moment too late he realizes his mistake and winces, raising his hands in hurried apology toward Ling Wen. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine,” she says, waving him off. In these halls, at least, she’s well-respected and knows as much. “And don't be so dramatic; it doesn’t suit you. It's only a disguise and you already wear them plenty anyway when you play around with mortals. Nobody’s asking you to become a spy.”
“It’s different, then,” Pei Ming insists, though his irritation is largely a front for his unease. “That’s only for a day, or a week, and I can become myself again whenever I like. If I descend, though, and this keeps up… there may come a day when I lose that choice.”
Shi Wudu rolls his eyes. “You’re catastrophizing. You have thousands of temples throughout the North alone, and hundreds more beyond. You’ll be fine.”
But they’re young, still caught up in the gilded glory of the heavens, while Pei Ming has seen the tarnish beneath. He has every reason to be wary. Gods may be immortal, but they’re not unkillable, and they don’t reincarnate once they’re gone.
Which is how he’s found himself sitting in a tea house in Yueyang, sipping a blend completely opposite his tastes while he tries to look less surly than he feels. It’s helped a little by the fact that the owner’s daughter is quite a beauty, who blushes delicately when he flirts and has a laugh like windchimes in a spring breeze, but he has no illusions of it becoming more than a few playful glances over his cup. He’ll be gone long before nightfall. It’s a long ride from Qishan to Hejian, after all.
A red jade token hangs from his waist, stark against his midnight robes but inconspicuous among the endless crimson tassels decorating the belts around him. Wen soldiers are scattered around the tables in various states of mid-afternoon drunkenness, and while he’s clearly not one of their number, he’s not a visible threat, either. He carries neither a sword nor any other weapon of note, and every time he crosses into Wen territory he takes on a new body, a new face.
It’s… necessary. Not only to avoid revealing himself and winding up banished, but because while he might not be a spy himself, the fates have a twisted sense of humor, and he’s aiding one instead. A courier, Shi Wudu had told him to call it, laughing when he heard the position Pei Ming had gained after joining the Sunshot Campaign’s ranks a year prior. Ling Wen had nearly managed to keep the humor out of her voice as she offered scout, or envoy, which had arguably been worse for trying so hard to endear him to it, and regardless of the words he uses they fails to change the fact that he’s carrying coded messages between Qishan and the eastern fronts. It makes his skin crawl. In all the battles he’s fought, he’s never so much as considered an ambush against the enemy; in his centuries of experience, anything worth the fight is worth facing honestly. Head-on, with a blade in one’s own hand and the hand of their opponent alike.
A man in drab gray brushes by in a lingering waft of incense, unremarkable but for the sunburst flames that lick in pale embroidery down the back of his robes and the fact that he seems to be uniquely sober. A Wen cultivator, but not a soldier and not of their bloodline. Pei Ming’s sleeve is a few sheets of paper heavier in his wake.
He takes another sip of the overly-floral tea.
Normally, he’d ride to the eastern coast to deliver the reports, but General Lan is needed elsewhere as the seasons change and has directed him north, instead. Pei Ming has few complaints—the new direction will take him back to the heart of his own territory, up into the mountains where he’s most at home in the mortal realm. Langya is beautiful, to be sure, but the coasts have always belonged more to Shi Wudu.
He swings south as he heads out of town, edging dangerously close to the Wen troops in a silent dare for them to take notice, holding none of the fear a mortal courier would. The reports he carries are in no danger from the overconfident cultivators on these roads, and if they attacked him then at least he’d have a reasonable excuse to fight them head-on instead of slinking around like a stray dog hunting scraps in back alleys. Regrettably, though, they only stop him once, and his disguise must be even more effective than he aimed for because they hardly bother to question him before sending him on his way.
A pity.
As the days pass, Pei Ming follows the line of towns strung through the mountain valleys like pearls across a noblewoman’s bosom, and indulges in at least one noble bosom himself. He sleeps in town when he can, plucking fresh apples off his temple altars to reward his mare for her willing temper, or beneath the open sky when he can’t—the autumn chill hardly touches him as the stars stretch towards his heavenly palace like a tether home. The horse he’s bought is a nervous, head-shy thing who gapes at the mouth from ill training, but when offered an open road and a gentle hand her stride devours the ground beneath her like a hungry ghost. Pei Ming needs to do little besides sit back in the saddle and point her towards the foothills, letting her choose the pace and path that pleases her. If there’s one boon to the past months he’s spent on earth, he thinks, it’s this: riding through open fields as the sun crests the horizon, sky bathed in shades of persimmon and gold, with the morning breeze tugging at his robes like a gently teasing lover.
It would be picturesque, were it not for the unease creeping under his skin like frost across a field. It starts as a restlessness, one that has him shifting his toes in the stirrups and thumbing at the tail of his reins, then gnaws its way through his meridians and into his gut. There’s a distinctive tug at his lower dantian, the swoop of looking over the edge of a cliff, and he has to steady himself with a hand on his mare’s withers.
Farther to the west, a temple has been set to flames. He doesn’t hear the prayers directly—he’s redirecting them to his palace for his deputies to sort through and address where they can, since he’s got his hands full in the mortal realm as it is—but the echoes have started to slip through in recent months. The horror of hundreds of men as they fall beneath Wen blades, the final desperate pleas of mothers throwing themselves in front of their children and husbands in front of their wives, he feels them skitter through the marrow of his bones and drag at his spiritual power. Feels the sting as the protective boons he’s extended to his followers snap, one by one, like the strings of an overtightened qin.
The destruction has been getting worse in recent months and his worshippers—former worshippers, in too many cases—are starting to realize that he’s not stepped in. The ones who live turn their backs on him more easily, now, with each unchecked blaze. The less prayer and offerings, the less power he has to lend them protection. The cycle is a vicious spiral that only consumes itself faster and faster with time.
His safest recourse is to ride, and so he does, for the better part of a month north by horseback. By sword that time could be cut to a third, but he doesn’t have one and anyone in the sky draws far too much attention from the Wens—on land he’s unremarkable, nothing but another wandering traveler. It would be simpler to use a distance-shortening array to reach the Hejian front, given how ubiquitous his followers are now that he’s in his own territory, but making the journey so fast would only raise suspicions and it’s taken him more than a year to earn Lan Xichen’s trust. Besides, the arrays are expensive to cast even for a god at full strength. He’s nowhere near, these days, creeping ever closer to the threshold when even shifting disguises becomes more of a qi drain than he can justify. Better to use the journey as a chance to scout the movements of the enemy troops, and save his draining godhood for sowing blessings amongst the towns he passes, needed now more than ever with a war closing in around them.
A sword, blessed never to break, for a boy too young to join the war but determined to protect his family. Luck in love, for a maiden torn between her heart and the man her parents want her to marry, and Shi Wudu’s grudging agreement to grant fortune in trade to the shopkeep she has her eye on. It’s not only the pair of them that will need the money in the coming year; the whole town will, as the war continues to disrupt the lives of the commoners swept up between its waves.
He spends the night in brothels when passing through cities of any size. No doubt the cultivators he rides for would ill approve, but it’s hardly as though he judges their methods, and as far as he’s concerned they have no place to judge his, either. It’s hardly as though the stops are slowing him down—his mare needs the rest regardless, to ride such distances—and Pei Ming, for his part, needs both the distraction and the chance to shore up his cultivation. For all the heavens may joke, few things help settle his thoughts like pouring his focus into another person. He’s never felt any shame in the press of lips or the dance of fingers across skin, and pays the women handsomely both in coin and the sensuous, panted blessings he’s best-suited to bestow. Pleasures of the flesh are his domain, after all, and he’s well aware that beyond his core territory most of his incense is lit by the hands of women in such employ.
When he finally leads his mare into the war camp on the Hejian front, the air echoes with the clang of sparring and a low but ever-present buzz of conversation, and the hems of his robes are dirty from travel. He can smell a distant tang of blood, likely from the medic’s tents, but from the looks of things it’s been quiet over the past few days; he’d not run across any signs of fresh battle on his way up the ridgeside and morale feels stable. The soldiers are tired, but not exhausted. Their clothes don’t seem worn too ragged, and the blades he catches glimpses of—mostly sabers, as opposed to the slim swords that make up the Langyan preference—are clean and well-kept. The Wens are vicious, underhanded foes, and the body counts Pei Ming has seen are nothing to overlook, but the Heijian camp is clearly well-managed and well-kept.
One of the Nie sect’s cultivators meets him in the rough-built stables while he’s tending to his horse. He’d been expected, of course, and his arrival was no doubt relayed to the camp’s general when he arrived. Pei Ming finishes pouring a bucket of water into the trough and turns to bow in greeting.
“Welcome to the Hejian front,” the man greets. “I’m Nie Zonghui, second in command to General Nie. May I ask the name of our guest?”
“Zhu Yifeng,” Pei Ming answers, offering the name he’s taken up as Lan Xichen’s messenger, along with the jade token as proof of his identity. This form is a few years shy of his true body’s appearance, plainer in the face and wiped clean of his most recognizable scars. He’s still handsome, to be sure—vanity would allow him nothing less—but in an everyday sense rather than a divine one. A bit rakish, perhaps, but not remarkable enough to be remembered once the war finds its eventual end.
“We’re honored to host you on the Lan Sect’s behalf. General Nie is indisposed tonight, but he sends his regards. In the meantime, I would be happy to give you the lay of the camp and show you where you’ll be sleeping.”
“My thanks for your hospitality.”
The young man is polite and well-mannered as he leads them between fresh-lit braziers and the deep grays of Nie sect tents. In the slow-waning light of dusk they almost seem to be hewn from the mountain itself, jutting up in jagged lines against the horizon. Overhead, the falling-sun banner flies in stark black and white. Pei Ming hoists his saddle bags higher on his shoulder and takes note of where he can find a warm meal once he’s settled.
His bedroll is in a shared tent of four—two rogue cultivators-turned-soldiers, and a boy just barely skirting the edge of manhood who helps in the stables. The accommodations are nicer than he’s used to; in Langya he’d been crammed into quarters far tighter, but the Hejian front serves as a defensive bulwark and the base camp is larger as a result. Semipermanent, rather than the living, breathing collections of tents that shifted with the changing lines of territories. The southern sects work to cleave through the Wen lines, driving in swift and devastating strikes forward from any angle they can find, and Nie Mingjue gives them that freedom by standing with unmatched patience at their northern flank. It’s the less glamorous position. Not the one most men will be boasting about, in decades to come, when they regale the tales of their glory days. And yet in truth it’s one of the most important; Pei Ming has seen enough war to recognize who’s serving as one’s foundation.
Commanding extended combat is draining at the best of times, and the Sunshot Campaign had begun while the eastern sects were already trapped beneath the Wens’ thumb; to stand firm for years and not lose one’s resolve to restlessness is a testament to Nie Mingjue’s strength of will. For all that Lan Xichen is a respectable cultivator, Pei Ming struggles to think of him—or any of the sect leaders—as generals. Both the Wens and the Sunshot Alliance are ultimately cultivators. Clever, yes, and skilled, but they were raised for nighthunting and duels, for fighting in small groups over short durations. None of these men have been trained for war. They’re learning everything from trial and error, lessons taught in screeching steel and the stench of blood. The tactics of a years-long campaign are new to them, forged from survival and paid for with mortal consequences.
The Nies are as close as any of them come to understanding the task. If the Wens are a stony cliff, then Nie Mingjue’s troops are the unrelenting tide that crashes against it, again and again, wearing it down a little more each pass. Slowly, they creep forward, but the shore hardly realizes it’s being swept away, one grain of sand at a time. It’s not a perfect strategy—not by a longshot—but it’s the best he’s seen among the alliance. Better, he can say with firm certainty, than the ghoulish mess that’s passing for tactics in the southeast.
Pei Ming unpacks as he muses, not that it takes very long to empty his bags. He’s well used to the road by this point, and even in Langya he’d only ever spent a few days in one place before they picked up to march again, so he carries little with him that he doesn’t need. In the time that’s left in the evening, he exchanges stories with his tentmates, striking a practiced balance between amicable and unremarkable. They seem companionable enough, well-humored and eager for news from the south; if he’ll be staying here for a month or so then he’d rather be on friendly terms… just not friendly enough to be remembered, at least not as anything but a passing face, once the war ends.
The sun sinks beneath the horizon, and its filtered light is replaced with flickering candles as they turn to bed. For the first time since his descent, Pei Ming finds himself lying down to rest on familiar ground. It’s some measure of consolation, he supposes, for the fact that he’s doing so in a body that’s as foreign to him as the rivers of Jingchu or the plains of Jianghuai.
And as he has every night for the past year and a half, Pei Ming drapes his outer robes over himself, leans over to blow out the last flickering candle in their tent, and falls asleep on mortal earth.