Chapter Nineteen How Cursed, This Cycle

CHAPTER NINETEEN

HOW CURSED, THIS CYCLE

I remember sitting numbly by Yang Guang’s corpse in the Fox’s cockpit, drained of anger and purpose after boasting to Huaxia about killing him, while other Chrysalises carried the Fox back to his watchtower. It hasn’t moved since, awaiting the next pilot powerful enough to inherit it. Which should’ve just been me immediately, but the old order was more committed to keeping power out of women’s hands than acting logically.

After landing on a hovercraft pad on the Great Wall with Wan’er and Qieluo—who’s just here to be my bodyguard, as the White Tiger is still stuck in Chang’an—we’re received by someone who freezes my blood like the sight of a ghost.

Auntie Dou, the senior maidservant who supervised my spirit pressure test before letting Yang Guang carry me away.

Really, I shouldn’t be surprised to see her. Although this stretch of the Wall is no longer a frontier, but a transportation hub that relays supplies to Zhou for reconstruction efforts, it’s staffed by the same people. Where were my fellow enlistees reassigned after Yang Guang’s death? I never gave it much thought until now. I wince at the memory of how I yelled at that one girl, Xiao Shufei. I shouldn’t have blown up at her like that. What did it accomplish?

At the same time, I’m glad I never made friends with those girls. Any girl I had a remotely positive relationship with would’ve ended up as a hostage at the Palace of Sages with my family. Because that’s how the old order kept us powerless—by turning any bonds we shared against us.

I’m pretty sure the Sages got Xiuying to convince me to reconcile with my mother and grandmother just so they’d have more effective hostages. And Xiuying would’ve never done something like that—nevermind attack the Vermilion Bird in the Black Tortoise—if the Sages hadn’t threatened her children. Perhaps my mother and grandmother could’ve forged a better relationship with me for real if they’d gotten to experience more life outside the stifling environment of our village. But I’ll never know now.

Auntie Dou falls to her knees before me on the launchpad. “May my empress live for thousands of years, thousands of years, thousands upon thousands of years!”

“Get up,” I mutter in extreme discomfort.

She shakes like a tree in a storm as she gets to her feet. I have so much to say to her, but not in front of others.

Soldiers carry Feng Xiaobao out of the hovercraft on a stretcher. He spent the flight strapped to a gurney at the back, sweat beading across his ashen face, unconscious from painkillers. I’ll be using him for the grunt work of transporting the Fox from the Sui-Tang frontier to the Han frontier, while Di Renjie is being flown directly to Han to be saved for real battle.

If it was Shimin I had met in the Tianlao, I wonder if I would’ve let this happen to him.

You would’ve had to , I insist to myself. There’s no right or wrong when it’s survive or succumb. I can’t torment myself for putting my own interests first, or I will lose to those who do it with ease.

Auntie Dou leads me, Qieluo, and Wan’er across a short bridge to the watchtower’s elevator. I tell Qieluo and Wan’er to go up first, using the excuse that we won’t all fit when I’m in my wheelchair. They don’t question me.

“Wu Ruyi,” I say once Auntie Dou and I are alone. A wind sweeps across the Great Wall, grazing us with dust. “That was my big sister’s name. She was a girl you helped settle into this watchtower. Yang Guang killed her while throwing a fit. He did that a lot, and you knew, didn’t you?”

A sob rips out of her throat. “Your Highness, I—”

I catch her by her elbow before she can drop to her knees again. “How many girls did you watch him hurt? How many bodies did you clean up?”

Her mouth convulses with gasping breaths. Tears shine on her cheeks. Suddenly, I see a flash of my mother showing the same terror, with my father seizing her elbow in the same way.

I let go at once. Auntie Dou collapses with her hands on the concrete ground. I take a few seconds to shake off the reminder of my parents.

“Listen,” I say more softly, “I don’t blame you for the things he did. I know no one would’ve listened if you’d spoken out. You would’ve been punished while making no difference. But from now on, you can no longer watch these things happen in silence. If anyone hurts a girl under your care again, you let me know, however you can. I will listen, and I will make sure justice is served. The world has changed, and you must change with it. Do you understand?”

“Y-yes, Your Highness,” she chokes out between sobs.

When I go to press the elevator button, I find my own hands trembling as well. There’s no doubt I killed innocent girls myself when I destroyed the Kaihuang watchtower and the Palace of Sages. Maidservants just there to earn a living, crushed to death by me, who fantasized about setting them free. I know what it’s like to push those lives to the back of my mind, not letting myself dwell on what their names might’ve been and who might be weeping for them. If I did, I wouldn’t last a moment without shattering.

It was because of the decisive actions I’d taken, this revolution I started, that I could even have this conversation with Auntie Dou.

There’s no way to make up for the lives I’ve taken, but if I break down, their deaths will mean nothing at all.

Getting the Nine-Tailed Fox to the Han frontier is a matter of physically trekking it there by following the Great Wall. At dawn, I swap into the Fox’s spirit armor—the exact suit stripped off me after that first ride—while a drug-dazed Feng Xiaobao gets shoved into the armor Yang Guang died in. Feng Xiaobao should have a decent chance at avoiding that fate when we’re only going to be traveling, not battling, but I also don’t really care. I take off with him in the yīn seat, which should hopefully be calibrated equal to the yáng seat now. His spirit pressure is so much lower than mine that I don’t meet him in any kind of metaphysical realm. His mind merely thrums in the back of mine like music through a thick wall.

Light spreads up from the horizon as my journey goes on, gold blooming into pink then into blue. Far from a perfect circle, the Great Wall meanders around the outer edge of the Qin Mountains, looking over barren plains and rocky hills. I pass defunct watchtowers whose owners are now stationed at the Zhou frontier. The air gets hotter and damper the farther south I go. The experience of temperature and humidity is generally duller in a Chrysalis, but having the sun bear down on the Fox’s metal surface brings a dizzying discomfort nonetheless. Mine and Feng Xiaobao’s human bodies must be disgustingly sweaty in the cockpit. The hours melt into one another, increasingly sluggish, until, at last, I spot the ocean for the first time.

It takes all my restraint not to race toward it with no regard for safety, considering that Hunduns could emerge from its red waves much more unexpectedly than across open wilderness. A cautious buffer zone is maintained between the Wall and the Southern Ocean to provide leeway for battle. Watchtowers, and the Chrysalises parked beneath most of them, are spaced much closer together than along the Sui-Tang frontier.

“The buggers can survive underwater, but not at too great a depth,” Sima Yi said while briefing me about the war conditions in Han. “They’re crowded in really close to the shore. That’s why they’ll always be fighting to get back to land.”

A certain heaviness weighs down on me as I run the Fox parallel to the distant shoreline. At the same time, I don’t slow my pace. This frontier needs my protection, and I need to protect this frontier to prove my right to be the empress, just like the pilot rulers of centuries past. The Fox’s four paws stomp deep imprints in pink dirt, different from the gray I’m used to thanks to the increase in Fire-red spirit metal particulates in the south.

In total, it takes over fourteen hours to arrive at the Han watchtower assigned to me. I’m so exhausted by the time I disconnect from the Fox that, after confirming Feng Xiaobao survived the bumps and jolts of the journey, I fall asleep right in my pilot seat.

I’m shaken awake by Qieluo, the cockpit hatch open behind her. She and Wan’er rode here with a bunch of soldiers who escorted the Fox in trucks on top of the Great Wall. I’m barely conscious of them veiling my face and helping me out to the docking bridge. The Han frontier’s head strategist introduces himself as Strategist Huo while soldiers climb into the Fox to deal with Feng Xiaobao.

After Strategist Huo finally shuts up and bows out, Qieluo and Wan’er support me up to the watchtower’s loft. It’s as pristine as we found Yang Guang’s yesterday, scrubbed clean of any hint that someone once lived in it. How many pilots have come and gone through these lofts, dazzling Huaxia like shooting stars before fading quickly from memory? There’s something grotesquely poetic about how these boy pilots drain the lives of their concubines for power, yet once they fall in battle themselves, their surviving concubines will erase the traces of their existence. I imagine Xiao Shufei and the other girls who enlisted with me were saddled with the task of throwing out Yang Guang’s belongings. How cursed, this cycle, and for what?

A world built from lies. A reality that isn’t real.

An impasse I can only break by growing strong enough to kill gods.

As soon as my head hits a pillow, I plunge into a deep, dark sleep.