Voyage to the Bottom - 10
And so I waited, and waited, and at the end of all that waiting Puxian Zhenren finally brought in an old man whose hair had gone white to the roots. He looked like an elder who could barely stir, and yet his movements were vigorous, and every step carried weight. Well — there was no light in him, so that stood to reason.
Anyone who claimed to have killed Tongtian Jiaozhu was either a lunatic telling lies or a monster who had truly slain his enemy. That this one had not come shambling out all careless could be taken for a deep caution. Even so, had I not traded on Tongtian Jiaozhu's name, there was no telling how long it would have taken to meet even a counterfeit. I had no choice.
"Hello. You would be Yuanshi Tianzun, yes?"
"Indeed. You came looking for me, I hear. Claiming, no less, that you yourself killed Tongtian Jiaozhu."
So saying, the false Yuanshi Tianzun sat down across the table from me. He looked at me and put an expression on his face. It was only a halfway likeness of a human one, and even watching it I could not tell the feeling. It was hard to read what he intended by his words — whether the face was smiling, or frowning. And when he spoke again, I understood that none of that mattered.
"Have you come to eat me as well?"
Aha. At the very least, he knows Tongtian Jiaozhu is dead. The particulars, though — those he doesn't?
"I have never eaten Daegon."
"Well now. If to eat is to swallow the power a being holds and turn it to practical use, then what you do may certainly be called eating."
No. He knew it with more precision than I had expected. And as he spoke, Yuanshi Tianzun turned his head — plain as a gesture of explanation — toward the implement at my side. There was a single flower. One flower, made from a person and a special object.
"Twisting a living body into whatever one desires. That was his specialty."
Ah. So this was what had given me away. In truth, it made better sense to say I had killed Daegon and stolen his art than to claim I had been gifted in such things from the start. A technique from the latter reaches of that branch of the art called biotechnology. What one would have to meddle with for it to develop into a method of grinding down the thing called a soul and strengthening oneself with the grindings, I don't know, and I don't want to.
"For all that, it seems twisted far too strangely. Does one usually think of putting one's own body into a child of one's own kind, made out of another race?"
Puxian Zhenren, beside us, crumpled his face as if he could make no sense of what he had just heard, and Yuanshi Tianzun's expression remained as unreadable as ever. Something seen on a screen, I could probably manage. A robot or a mask is difficult. Or perhaps, if I remembered a biome of that sort, I might be able to read it.
"They were twisted as far as twisting can go, and so they became a race of that kind. And you mean to say that you are, at this moment, inside the body Daegon prepared."
When Yuanshi Tianzun finished, Puxian Zhenren's face became the face of a man looking at something whose nature he could not grasp. This man is terribly funny. Is it really all right for someone so easy to read to be standing right there?
"Strictly speaking, it would be a thing meant to give birth to a body. Headquarters had prepared it in advance, but a shell company set up as a front snatched it without understanding a thing and put it to another use, and that is why I ended up inside Choseol's body."
All of this was true. I had kept explaining because, even as I talked, I was searching for the being in front of me — and I could not see it. Daegon had been easy to find: a mass of light the size of a mountain. Here, there was nothing of the kind. I was already wondering whether the light was even as vast as Daegon's had been. If that was fortunate, then... was it?
"Then what is the name of you who dwells inside that body?"
Aha. So the long conversation had been for the sake of prying into what I am. Then I would explain. Few can come and go outside the glass bottle. Even if they gain the memories, without the wit to reason from them they cannot settle on an answer. Reading a detective novel does not make the reader a detective, does it? It is the same. My mind is always lacking, and the plans I can make are only half-measures, so rather than swallow a loss for the sake of a great gain, I aim only at a small gain that costs me nothing. That is why I do not lie.
"I have no name. I don't need one. So all this time I have used, in its place, the name of the child I wrote myself over."
There was no particular reason to coin a new one. I remember the original name, but no one can speak it. Or else I even doubt whether it was ever my name to begin with. I know it clearly, because I keep the shards of memory — scattered point by point — stored in the order of time.
The faded memory comes first. Then darkness. Then the night sky and the sea. A small light, fallen to the bottom. And after that, the memories of the time I climbed up into the glass bottle above. The man inside that faded memory is, without question, the beginning.
"I see. So that is how it was. Tongtian did not call you. There is no choosing and summoning a being that does not even possess a name. Then those children draped in that ill-omened purple were not Tongtian's making. They were yours."
He meant the Harvesters. But that part was a little strange. While they are alive, they have warmth too.
"They wanted it. Give me to someone who needs me, and their wounds close, and they gain a better body and a mind grown cleverer. Do you mean to say that is wrong?"
When I take warmth, as a rule I take it from the dead. There have been a few times I seized it from the living — the man who had been a general of one nation's secret service, for instance. Let one of them go, and I am made to witness something horrific, so I will not be letting anyone go.
At that, Yuanshi Tianzun laughed, a low chuckle.
"You do not grasp what you are. If you knew, you could not say such a thing."
That was true. I still don't know what I am. That is why, for now, I was talking. This, too, was drifting toward his being unable to truly know my nature, so I was considering whether to end the conversation. Because I don't know how warmth flows, and I haven't the faintest idea what becomes of a light that falls all the way to where I am.
"Then does Yuanshi Tianzun know?"
At my question, Yuanshi Tianzun shook his head.
"I do no more than seek the truth and infer. But if a name must be set upon you, then I shall call you Anti-Taiji."
Anti-Taiji? I didn't think it meant a half. Consider the taiji diagram — turn it over, and is it not still taiji? Or did he mean the rising of yin?
"Lord Yuanshi Tianzun, do you mean that this one is a power that annihilates the myriad things of the world?"
Puxian Zhenren asked it while keeping his guard up against me. For my part, I had understood, more or less. So that was why I could not use qi. The cold had been that. I had understood it so — and Yuanshi Tianzun shook his head.
Wait. Not that?
"Before yang and yin, there is being and non-being, and before that there is chaos, and thus begins the inexhaustible myriad of the world. This we call Taiji. Taiji was originally held to be the primordial chaos, a thing without direction or the like — but now even that has become an old law."
As he spoke, Yuanshi Tianzun swept a hand through the air. A hologram appeared in the empty space: a pitch-black image. But soon light glinted, and a world appeared. It showed a universe coming into being, then stars and planets, and Mount Kunlun at the center of them all.
He waved his hand, and the sigil in the upper left changed its shape. The vision ran in reverse, showing a world returning to a single point. Then it showed a sky in which that light had gathered without number, and wiped the lights away one by one. Soon there was black darkness without a single spark, and white space closed over the darkness all around. A grid was drawn across it, as if to show that this was not a space of the color white, but nothingness itself. The black space afloat upon that white field shrank to a point and, in the end, vanished altogether.
Yuanshi Tianzun waved his hand once more, and the sigil at the upper left returned to the mark that had been there when the image began. A dark space appeared. But there was a difference. Outside the pure-white box, alongside the darkness, a black sphere of exactly the same size. The black sphere grew apace with it — above, light came into being; below, nothing changed.
I had seen this somewhere. Yes. It was in my memory: the moment I watched the stars begin to kindle, one and then another, from above the sky, and realized that what I was looking at was an immensely wide sea.
"That, in itself, is the opposite of the world. A thing that grew up alongside, out of the shadow called Taiji. Not annihilation — only opposition. And yet that very thing is, to us, as good as harm. What you give means, for us, that something has been taken."
Yuanshi Tianzun pointed at me.
"You are fated to be nothing other than the enemy of the world."
He was right. So I nodded.
"Yes. That's right."
But this was not enough. It did not fit the moment, and still I laid out the thing I absolutely had to say.
"I am always cold. Cold without end. Forever — unable to die, unable to go mad. No. Have I gone mad already? I have to live that way. But sometimes a light that has despaired, and despaired deeply, falls to me. When a light that resented the world and hated it to the bone realizes it can change nothing, and falls into a despair close to giving up."
I smile.
"It meets me. Light is warm. Touch the light, and there is the faintest bit. The smallest bit. And yet that alone gives a very small warmth that is already happiness. Warmth enough to pull my eyes from the cold of a single moment. But the warmth vanishes in a flash."
What I would do from here had already been decided. What mattered was obtaining information — above all, drawing as much as I could from the illusion before my eyes. To know myself, I need the help of others. I am not that clever.
"Living things carry light in the body. And you call that light the soul. I place myself inside the light, do what they wish to do, and wait until they die. And when they die, I take back the self that was held inside, and I take the warmth as well."
I clapped once, sharp, to make them focus. Puxian Zhenren started horribly. I had only meant to snap him to attention, and a reaction that large left me rather put out.
In any case.
"Now. I don't take the light. I need only the warmth that is in it. Once I have the warmth, I have no need of the light, so I simply leave it there. Will you condemn what I do? Why?"
This was a question about what warmth is. From what the immortals had said so far, they had seemed not to know it properly — and yet there was a deep persuasiveness in Yuanshi Tianzun's words. And so I had cast the question, wondering whether I might learn something of warmth.
Yuanshi Tianzun opened his mouth.
"What would a soul that has lost Taiji become? Unable to become anything at all, it would halt in that state and slowly waste away. Until every last remnant of it is gone. Forever."
No — if Taiji is chaos, then the world was made of it, and only afterward did the soul come to be, wasn't it? The Taiji inside the soul is warmth? That doesn't hold together. But I could not ask anything more.
"Therefore we must stand against you. Now. The rest of the immortals have all withdrawn, and you alone remain. Puxian."
With that, Yuanshi Tianzun waved his hand, about to do something. Realizing the gesture was meant to let Puxian Zhenren flee, I lifted a single flower.
Bloom
The last of their words overlapped.