The Monkey's Paw
Whenever talk turned to the Three Kingdoms, that was what I said.
"I wouldn't have outdone Cao Cao or Liu Bei. But I would have done a damn sight better than Liu Biao. That's a lock."
In person or on the forums, I never once backed down from it.
To put it kindly, I was a Three Kingdoms maniac. To put it honestly, I was a guy who never shut up about it.
I was hardly the only one. The friends who shared the hobby were just as bad.
And one of those friends looked an awful lot like a monkey.
Sideburns hanging all the way to his jaw. A philtrum so long it looked wrong on a human face. Monkey was the polite nickname. The rest of the time we called him Australopithecus, Peking Man, the Missing Link, Planet of the Apes — he answered to all of it.
He asked me,
"Why Liu Biao, of all people?"
"Because he had so many chances."
Liu Biao, Inspector of Jing Province.
The title on the front of his name makes people think he only ever held Jing, but the land he actually ruled ran wider than that. South into Jiao Province, east into a slice of Yang — it was all his.
"If he'd just kept his head on straight, half of China would have been his."
Right.
Take the moment Dong Zhuo died, for instance.
"When Liu Yan of Yizhou plotted with Ma Teng to strike Chang'an and the whole thing fell apart — that was a chance to go after Yizhou, wasn't it?"
If Liu Biao had swallowed Yizhou then, he would have surpassed even Liu Bei at his height.
"This is the same man who put on the Emperor's robes in Xiangyang and offered sacrifice to Heaven. If he was going to nurse an ambition, he shouldn't have settled for playacting. He should have made himself emperor of half the realm."
Instead he went running to tattle like a child. The Inspector of Yizhou next door is trying to make himself emperor, you know~
"Look at Yuan Shao's plan to encircle Cao Cao, if you want another one."
Yuan Shao against Cao Cao. The Battle of Guandu.
Yuan Shao to the north. Yuan Shao's eldest, Yuan Tan, to the east. Sun Ce to the southeast. Ma Teng to the west. And as if that weren't enough, Liu Bei riding the waterways between the Yellow River and the Huai, tearing through Cao Cao's heartland.
"If Liu Biao in the southwest had just driven in the last wedge, Cao Cao would have been finished. Or if he'd only pinned Cao Cao's feet when Yuan Shao's sons started tearing each other apart, the whole board would have changed. A push into northern China would have been possible."
And if facing Cao Cao still felt like too much — why not put a knife in Sun Quan's back?
"Hit Yang Province in the chaos after Sun Ce's assassination. Those were the years Sun Quan was shaking apart under rebellion."
"Oho."
Monkey nodded.
"So if you'd been Liu Bao, you would have used 'all those opportunities.' That's what you're saying?"
I should have thought it strange then — the way Monkey leaned on that name.
"That's right."
"And you would have taken half of China."
"Yeah."
"And you would have pushed into the north."
"I already said so. Why do you need it three times? What is this, the Three Visits to the Cottage?"
Monkey shoved a hand at me without warning.
The hell was this guy doing?
But... had his fingers always been that long?
...No.
Had I ever even had a friend like this?
Monkey folded one finger down, slow as a closing gate.
He peeled his lips back off his gums and smiled a smile that crawled over the skin. His eyes, though, never blinked. Not once. They held me and did not let go.
Friend? Was this thing even human? No human philtrum is that long.
Why had I ever decided this creature was a friend?
He said,
There is a story called The Monkey's Paw.
It began as a modern short story, but it has been retold often enough — in comics, in film — that almost everyone knows the shape of it.
There is a relic made from a severed monkey's hand. Wish upon it, and each time a finger curls down, a wish is granted.
The trouble is how the wish comes true. It comes true with a kind of... malice.
Say you wish to be rich. Someone you love dies, and the insurance pays out. That is how you become rich.
I had not, strictly speaking, made a wish at all. But that Monkey bastard — monkey god, monkey devil, whatever he was — took my words as a wish anyway, and granted them.
The way a ghost story grants them. Maliciously.
The smell of animals hit me.
It was a scent I had never known, thick and living, and I tried to wrinkle my face against it. Then I dragged up eyelids that felt too heavy to lift.
"Oh!"
A woman's voice.
"Look at this!"
A woman's hands, soft — and large enough to gather my whole body into them.
Had I fallen in among giants? Fear should have come first. What came instead was a warm, unthinking relief, and I tried to stretch.
I wanted to stretch? Now? Before I could even ask myself that, I found that the arms and legs doing the stretching would not go where I told them.
I wanted to push them out long and easy and unkink every muscle. My hands and feet wandered off in stupid, useless directions instead. The frustration of it had no time to settle. The feeling of the hands around me changed.
Rough. Hard. Vastly bigger.
This — this was what it actually felt like to drop into a giant's grip. Terror ripped through me and I screamed.
What left my throat was a thin, helpless waah.
A huge, hairy face filled the whole of my sight, and I froze.
The face was smiling.
The woman's voice came again, close to my ear.
"He's already opened his eyes! He's looking around!"
At her words, something shifted in the bearded face.
A smile... was it?
"So he is. What clear eyes!"
My body lurched upward the way it does when a ride leaves the ground. The bearded man had lifted me high.
"Now this is a son of Yufuluo!"
Yufuluo? Yufuluo... a strange name. But I had heard it. Whose name was it? Who was Yufuluo?
I did not have time to pull the answer free. The bearded man who called himself Yufuluo looked down at me and roared it out.
By the will of a thing that was either a monkey devil or a monkey ghost, I had been born in the tent of the Xiongnu Yufuluo, as his son.
I could not even lament my luck. The only sounds I had were babble and crying.
Yufuluo.
You had to read a fairly detailed Three Kingdoms before that name so much as brushed past your eye.
It was not a name built like Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei — surname and given name in the Han style. It was one of those names that told you, at a glance, this man was not Han at all.
That was why I remembered it from every Three Kingdoms game and show I had ever touched. Remembered it in the key of who even is this guy?
In the games, Yufuluo was drawn as a joke face, or else piled with every savage marker the artists could hang on him. His stats were nothing. Put him in a duel with Lü Bu, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei — anyone like that — and his head came off in a single stroke.
If you were going to drop me into somebody, you could have at least picked someone famous. Or competent...
I thrashed and howled at the injustice. It came out as a baby fretting in a blanket.
Then the creature called Mother put a breast in my mouth, and a brutal infant instinct took the controls. I nursed, and I slept.
Breast milk, I was beginning to suspect, was essentially a sedative they pump into a rioting prisoner.
Bowel, bladder, even a burp — not one of them answered to me.
After several days in that prison called an infant's body, I finally met the one responsible.
The monkey devil slipped into the tent in the dead of night, when everyone else was asleep.
"What the hell did you do to me!"
I shouted it — and then sucked in a startled breath.
Words... were coming out?
The monkey devil peeled his gums back and made a dry little kik-kik. A laugh, maybe.
"That you can speak a single word is already my grace. You would do well not to wag that tongue so freely. A reckless tongue is what brought you here. Do not be so eager to hasten yourself to a deeper hell."
He flicked a hand — no, a forepaw — as if brushing dust off the air, and added,
"As I am now, no one sees me but you, and no one hears the words we speak. If you have something to say, say it. But the weight of those words will not be what it was in your last life."
What did this bastard just...?
I was in this state because I had run my mouth?
"What did I even do!"
"Hnh."
The monkey yokai scratched his jaw, then went on, as if offering examples.
There was no feeling in the way he said it. I knew at once exactly what he was reciting.
"S-stop..."
I had spent every day enduring the shame of a body that would not hold its own waste, a lower half I could not cover. The humiliation in the monkey's mouth was worse.
Of course it was. Every word he was reciting was a word I had run around saying in the modern world.
My internet history, more or less.
I thrashed, making raw little sounds in my throat. The monkey devil ignored me and kept reading from my collected works.
"No end to it, is there."
The monkey let out a rhythmic kak-kak-kak-kak, then cut it off clean.
"Arrogant beyond all measure."
I knew the judgment was unfair.
"Those were just memes! I was doing it for fun...!"
The monkey-monster's face twisted in a way that went straight through the bone.
This was not a smile. Or if it was a smile, it was not the one from before. It was the baring of teeth in front of meat.
Looking at that face, I understood something I had only ever known as a saying.
A devil is an evil god first. And in front of a weak human, even a monster is a local spirit that eats off the altar.
"I'm doing this for fun too."
All I could do was swallow.
"If you spent your time passing judgment on the men of the Three Kingdoms for fun, then I intend to have a little fun of my own — sitting in judgment on the spectacle of you thrashing through their world."
The monkey's face came in close. Very close.
He did not blink. Not once. He stared until infant instinct had nothing to do with it, and terror alone made me wet myself — as if he were pouring fear into my eyes like molten iron, thick and inescapable.
Then, somehow, he was far away again.
Only then did I realize I had been holding my breath. I worked my small baby's belly as hard as it would go and dragged the air back in.
The monkey devil put on a kindly smile that did not belong on him. The muscles of a monkey's face should not have been able to make that expression at all.
"It wouldn't do to give you nothing but punishment. I will grant you a few privileges, at least — enough that your thrashing can be entertaining."
A long finger tapped once against my brow.
"Hh—?"
Inside my skull, a set of memories slammed into order, as if a hand had reached in and sorted them by force.
"These memories are...?"
"You are a man of the future. A man from the years after 'Xiongnu Liu Bao' had lived his whole life, died, and hardened into history. And now you have entered the body of that same Xiongnu Liu Bao. So a privilege that is not quite a privilege has fallen into your lap."
In other words: because I had come from a time after Liu Bao of the Xiongnu, the memories of the life he had lived had arranged themselves, of their own accord, inside my head.
From the late second century into the middle of the third — the memories of a Xiongnu Liu Bao who had lived nearly eighty years.
Old Cao Cao, already King of Wei, crossed the front of my mind.
"Yes. Cao Cao broke up the last remnants of the Southern Xiongnu and scattered them east of the Yellow River. The 'you' who became Xiongnu Liu Bao only managed to gather the remaining tribes when his death was already close."
My brain strained to fuse the twenty-first-century me with the identity of the Liu Bao in those memories.
A split self would not help me survive this. Not even a little.
I managed, just barely, to answer.
"Even so, 'my descendants' open the age of the Five Barbarians and the Sixteen Kingdoms."
A chaos great enough to smash the sons of Sima Yi to pieces, no less.
The monkey devil shook his head.
"Your task is not to preserve the Xiongnu legacy as history recorded it. It is to do what you swore you would. At the very least — take northern China as Liu Biao."
That was Liu Biao of Jing Province, not Liu Bao of the Xiongnu... no. The real problem was something else.
Only then did I understand how irresponsible the words I had thrown around had been.
"I couldn't do it even as Liu Biao..."
The monkey devil snapped his fingers.
Huh?
Just now... what was that? I had seen something. Something I did not dare put into words.
That is Avici Hell.
I convulsed, a fine violent shaking I could not stop. The monkey devil passed sentence over me.