Chapter Forty-Nine Havoc in Heaven

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

HAVOC IN HEAVEN

When my consciousness pulls itself together again, the first thing I feel is offended. What do you mean there’s pain in the afterlife?

It’s a long while before I consider the possibility that I may, in fact, not be dead. I peel my eyes open, then immediately shut them when a headache splits down my skull. There’s nothing to see but darkness, anyway. I can hear, though: my own ragged breathing, air straining through my clogged nostrils. I taste sticky blood on my upper lip.

A low groan rises behind me. Faint light reaches through my eyelids. When I make a second attempt at opening them, the sight before me shocks me alert.

The cockpit’s spirit metal walls, dimly lit with Qin Zheng’s qì, are much closer than before and utterly deformed, like golden waves frozen in movement.

“Skies…” he grumbles.

We’re slanted at an odd angle. I have to keep much of my armor attached to my seat to not fall off when I turn to look at him. He’s wiping blood from his nose.

“We’re alive,” I wheeze, scrubbing my own lower face.

“But no longer in the realm of mortals…”

My attention lashes straight ahead, to where the Dragon’s snout once was. What’s out there is beyond either of our imaginations now.

I flare my spirit sense. It trips upon a dizzying number of spirit signatures, dense as Chang’an, hurrying in all directions.

Chills run down my arms. I go as still as a hunter tracking prey.

“Do you feel them?” I whisper.

“ Yes ,” Qin Zheng says, like a curse.

Whatever the gods are, the Heavenly Court is full of living beings.

Shimin’s signature is among them, somewhere nearby. Well, nearer than the distance between heaven and earth, at least. With so many smaller signatures running interference up close, he’s paradoxically harder to pinpoint than when I was farther. I sense him in two directions at once, which makes no sense.

Carefully, Qin Zheng rises from his seat, gripping the back of mine for balance. He grimaces at the shrunken cockpit. “We no longer have enough spirit metal for a viable Chrysalis form.”

I clutch my helmeted head. “Then…then we’ll have to go out in our armor.”

“Perhaps. However, first order of war: survey your surroundings.”

Guard plates slam together over our faces, leaving only a gap for our eyes.

Qin Zheng leaps from his pilot seat. He doesn’t do it with particular vigor, yet he pitches out so unnaturally far that he smacks into the cockpit’s warped wall. He stumbles as he slides to the bottom. We exchange bewildered glances. He tests his steps, jumping and hopping with impossible ease.

“The gravity is lower.” He gawks at the floor, voice muffled by his face guard.

I detach my scythe from near my seat, channel my qì to fix the parts where it distorted along with the rest of the cockpit, and make my way down. Everything does feel lighter. I could be walking on vapor, not solid metal. Even my feet hurt less. When I get to Qin Zheng, he stops messing around and presses backwards against the warped wall like a spy. I mirror him.

Our eyes meet for one last moment of tranquility. Then he opens a slash in the wall, between us.

A sound like Hundun sirens wails in, along with distant screams. Very human-sounding screams. We peek through the opening.

I don’t know what I expected to see, but it definitely wasn’t tall buildings covered in luminous vegetation.

Past a short stretch of rubble and upturned earth in the murky realm, the buildings are strangely but gracefully shaped, playing with curves and geometry. Some twist and fan out in dozens of levels of plants; others have round platforms of overgrowth jutting out from different heights. The plants glow in oranges and greens and blues and purples, like certain rare finds in the mountains near my village. Grass swathes the spaces between buildings. I can match some of the spirit signatures I sense to the structures; the signatures are collectively rushing downward for some reason.

That’s all fine. That’s all comprehensible after a few seconds.

It’s when I peer higher that my sense of reality breaks.

We’re on the inner surface of the gargantuan ring we crashed into. The buildings sprawl up its curve and back around, hanging upside-down above us. Transparent interlocking hexagons encase this loop of civilization, about the width of downtown Chang’an. Our planet—that mortal realm we just broke out of—looms across the entire visible span of space above, shrouded in the darkness of night but veined with the radiance of man-made lights. It’s the kind of view I’ve seen on helicopter trips to and from Chang’an, except on an arrestingly grander scale, so inconceivably large that my palms break into a sweat within my gauntlets. It feels like that thing should be crashing down on me. This should not be a view biologically possible for me to witness. I recognize the batwing shape of Huaxia’s coastline, the concentration of lights along our two major rivers, then the void that must be the Xihuang Desert beyond the Kunlun Mountains. Gently, the planet turns on its axis—or, no, we’re orbiting it. When the pattern of lights picks back up on the other side of the desert, a shiver races through me. Those must be the human strongholds beyond Huaxia, which we’ve had next to no contact with due to how hard it is to get messages across the Hundun wilds. We only have photos and videos from a few expeditions, showing people with very different skin colors, features, architecture, and technology. Have any of them also tried to get up here?

I run out of time for questions when, over the sirens, there comes a sound like buzzing hornets.

Drones flit toward us between the buildings. Larger machines race below them on jointed legs, animallike. Many blinking parts pop out of the wide bulk of their bodies.

The parts start shooting at us.

We duck away from the opening. Qin Zheng seals it shut. Bullets—I think—strike the cockpit with crisp ping s, from every direction.

“That has to be the gods’ army, right?” I exclaim.

“Cowards.” Qin Zheng closes his eyes in concentration, hands on the wall. Despite the pattering outside growing from a drizzle to a storm, nothing gets through.

“The wall can hold.” His eyes fly open. “Then so can our armor.”

He forms a curved blade in his gauntlet palm, then makes an opening in the wall again and flings the blade out. It remains tethered to his wrist by a thin, unraveling line of spirit metal. Projectiles dart in through the gap. Instead of colliding with the back of the cockpit, they swerve to come for us. I shudder when they hit my breastplate. Thankfully, they bounce off our armor with little impact.

Qin Zheng retracts his blade with a sharp clang and shrinks the opening to a slit. He peers through it.

“We can damage them, confirmed.” A wild energy surges in his eyes.

I pick up one projectile. It’s metallic—though not spirit metal—and intricately designed. “These are smarter than regular bullets.”

“But useless against us nonetheless.” He detaches his sword from his hip. “Let’s go hunt some gods, shall we?”

I squeeze the projectile until it bursts. “What else is there left to do?”

“Well, actually, some flight capacity would be helpful when handling those airborne machines.” He backs against the wall. Large, bat-like wings carve into shape on either side of him, then he flaps them free.

“Machines!” Qin Zheng laughs as I make a pair of wings for myself. “Excellent. I won’t get the complaints that tend to come when I use my full power on humans .”

He digs his fingers into the wall and forges a second sword on the spot, pulling it free while sculpting it. His irises gleam silver as he sharpens its edges, then he swings both swords with a flourish. “Watch my back, empress.”

A breach gapes open beside him. He twists out through it and dashes into the realm of the gods.

Casting the last of my stray fears away, I follow him onto the dirt and rubble outside. The gravity is so light that even I don’t have much trouble traversing the mess. Smart bullets assail us as we approach the buildings ahead, which hold no more spirit signatures. The signatures are all deep underground, scurrying away.

The machines gather to blockade us. In sync, they emit a screeching noise that ripples through the air. It buffets us back a few steps, but it’s nothing unbearable after I will my helmet to squeeze painfully tight against my ears.

The machines then spew out a white gas. The glow of the plants goes hazy under its cover.

“Oh, not again !” Qin Zheng leaps into the air and cracks his wings in quick succession, creating gusts of wind that blow the gas back.

We learned our lesson about heading into strange clouds of gas. We keep going only once our wings are dispersing the mist faster than the machines can produce it.

Qin Zheng reaches the machines first. Mechanical arms dart out of them, grabbing at him with grippers and menacing him with whirring saw blades. He slashes clean through the legs of one machine and stabs it sideways as it falls. Then he spins to yank his sword out and shear more machines apart, exposing wires and electric sparks.

Battle is his natural domain, and he is undeniably brilliant and breathtaking within it. It’s impossible to watch him with anything but awe. The airborne drones swarm to disrupt his wing beats, preventing him from flying properly, but he simply springs up off the ground machines to flip and twirl and lacerate the whirling drones. On his drops, he drives his swords into more machines with the backing of his body weight.

I have not understood what he’s capable of until now. I’m slightly furious to realize he went easy on me in our training. Memories come to me, spilled from his mind into mine on our way up: Him training in the art of violence since he was a child. In a lab, in rain, in snow, in scorching heat, threatened with electric shocks and starvation. I don’t think he knows how to live in any way except unrelentingly and against resistance. He shreds through the legion of machines like a destructive cyclone, fusing his twin swords into a sledgehammer for certain blows. When he catches me staring, he has the audacity to wink at me.

I roll my eyes and swing my scythe into a machine behind us. While turning in nimble circles to take more machines down, or at least as nimble as my feet can manage, I spot a hole in the crystalline hexagons above. That must be where we smashed in. The jagged edges are glowing and…shrinking? Is it capable of repairing itself?

With only the radiance of luminous vegetation to rely on, it takes some effort to discern the trail of devastation our landing left. Silhouetted buildings with their tops blown off, a rupture in what I think is an elevated transport rail, and a ruinous gouge in the ground where we skidded to a stop. What’s left of the Yellow Dragon looks even worse from the outside, no more than a melted lump.

Careful to fan my wings in a way that keeps the gas from overwhelming me, I push onward with Qin Zheng, constantly checking over my shoulder and vaulting over the broken machine parts left in his wake. Although adrenaline keeps me going, my head throbs from the strain of the flight up. Bright spots mottle my vision with every big movement. My arms burn from overuse. When the machines come too quickly to handle with a scythe, I attach it to my back, its curving blade high above my wings, and detach the sword at my side for a more agile weapon.

Not for the first time, I wish Earth-type spirit metal could conduct qì blasts. Then again, if we were wearing any other type, we might not withstand the bullets. I grit my teeth through the acidic ache in my muscles and fend off the machines however I can with my sword. This place has the temperature of a mild spring night, but sweat quickly soaks my conduction suit under my armor.

“There!” Qin Zheng points one sword at a building ahead, comprising at least ten floors in a spiral pattern. My heart skips when I feel that it still has spirit signatures crowded inside. We slam back-to-back and fight our way toward the building.

“Brace yourself!” Qin Zheng shouts.

“Brace for wh—”

He attaches his swords to his hips, grabs me by the waist, and hurls me up. I barely avoid stabbing myself as I land on a balcony and tumble through glowing plants. He leaps up after me with a completely unnecessary somersault in the air. I curse at him to give me a clearer warning next time, but I lose no momentum in smashing through the glass at the back of the balcony.

I burst into…someone’s home?

The furniture may be designed in the same strange, sinuous style as the buildings outside, but it’s easy to see what they’re supposed to be: couches, chairs, a table, a kitchen. Almost every surface is made of a glossy white material inscribed with gold patterns. Digital symbols shine everywhere in vivid neon. Soft light effuses from stylish indents in the walls. The couches and chairs are somehow hovering off the ground.

A small round drone flits toward us, flashing a red light and shrieking in a language I don’t understand. With a thrust of my sword I skewer the drone against the ceiling. Its light goes out.

Meanwhile, Qin Zheng flings the couches to make a stack in front of the balcony entrance, blocking off the drones outside. When the bottom couch comes to a smooth stop, it continues to levitate off the ground. The others merely push it a bit lower when they land on top.

Catching our breath through the thin gap above our face guards, Qin Zheng and I press back-to-back again and stalk toward a room with a spirit signature inside. It’s faint, but so are most other signatures in the Heavenly Court. Without being familiar with their building structures, it’s hard to tell which are genuinely weak and which are just far away.

We pass what appears to be a bathroom full of glass and crystal before barging into a room with a floating bed. The signature takes us deeper, past the corner of another door—

Instead of a god, a small animal backs away beneath racks of strange clothes. It looks like a cat, except its ears are folded, its legs are pathetically short, and patches of green and magenta dapple its white fur.

Qin Zheng lurches toward it, sword raised.

“Wait!” I reach for him, but the creature evades his slashing blade and skitters past us on its puny legs.

He chases after it.

Despite my instinct to stop him from killing a small animal, I waver. Who knows what that thing really is? Appearances can deceive. It could be deadly poisonous. It could be smarter than humans.

“That can’t be a god, can it?” I go after him.

As he bolts around the home, failing to get the creature despite channeling Wood qì for speed, I take a closer look at everything else. The furniture is definitely human-sized. When I press down on a hovering chair, I feel an invisible force keeping it off the floor. There’s half-eaten food in the slick white bowls on the table. Neon symbols light up on the bowls when I touch them. They’re still warm.

Qin Zheng makes a strangled noise from the front door.

“What is it?” I hurry beside him, then air catches in my throat as well.

There are pictures displayed digitally on the wall, and the pictures have people in them. Unnaturally thin and bone-pale, their features are so different from anyone in Huaxia that I can’t tell their genders. I’m guessing they’re a family, two parents and two children. One adult has golden hair that swoops upward in defiance of gravity; the other has short purple hair cropped at an angle along their jaw; the two children in front of them have different shades of blue hair, and they all have light-colored eyes. Nothing like the statues of gods in our temples.

If they’re not human, I don’t know what else I’d call them.

“I knew it!” Qin Zheng’s hateful gaze rakes across the pictures. “They are no gods. They are ordinary humans, just as we are.”

“We…we don’t know that for sure. Maybe they have special powers.”

“Feel the way they’re running from us, empress. We are the ones with abilities they fear.”

The pictures change every few seconds. They show this oddly colored, oddly dressed family laughing with their arms around each other in front of a lake, dancing in a neon-lit chamber, hugging a tree with luminous lines in its bark, and more. Actions that could’ve been done by any family in Huaxia, if you ignore how the buildings arc upward behind the lake, the utter lack of gravity in the place where they’re dancing, and the planet looming over the trees. In some pictures, our cloud-wreathed continents and oceans serve as a pretty backdrop. In others, this curved world appears to have its own blue sky.

I have many questions, and one of these false gods had better answer them.

“Let’s keep going.” I glare at the front door. Maybe it’s not even a front door—we find no handle, knob, or button to open it. But there’s a mass of spirit signatures behind it.

Qin Zheng and I nod at each other. In sync, we take a few steps back and turn our shoulders toward the door. Channeling Fire qì for power, we charge forth and smash our way out.

The distorted door flies over a railing and lands somewhere below with a loud, metallic crash. We find ourselves on a wraparound balcony facing an atrium. In the center, a gigantic cylindrical aquarium soars to the top of the building, full of colorful bio-luminescent fish. The water’s ambient blue light dances over us, marbling our faces.

“ Fish? ” Qin Zheng throws his hands up.

Oh. Those are what’s giving off the spirit signatures.

With a growl, Qin Zheng peers over the railing at the shadowy bottom floor, then at the nondescript doors lined around the atrium at every level. “No more searching. They come to us .”

He crouches low before launching himself over the balcony railing, flapping his wings.

I fly after him, sneaking glances at the aquarium while staying on guard. With the Hunduns a constant threat in our oceans, we don’t have access to many varieties of fish in Huaxia. Where did these come from? Some are quite big, which explains the human-level spirit signatures.

Once he reaches the top of the structure, Qin Zheng shatters a glass pane in the ceiling and pulls himself through. I dodge the falling shards and emerge after him to a brighter scene outside. High above, a dazzling radiance beads at the edge of our planet, spilling over its curvature. We’re orbiting into the side of the sun.

Qin Zheng surveys our surroundings in a battle-ready stance. About a minute later, a lone drone whirs up to us.

“Mister Qin, Miss Wu, we would like to negotiate,” it says in Hanyu— our language. “If you agree to disarm yourselves, we will grant you refugee status in the Melian Republic. You have seen the marvels of our technology. You will not find a higher quality of life anywhere in the galaxy.”

As my brain trips over what they mean by “Melian Republic,” a hatch opens on the drone, revealing a screen.

A screen showing Shimin in the tank.

“In addition, we will—”

I swing my sword into the drone, shattering it against the ceiling we’re standing on. My pulse pounds loudly in my helmet. I can sense Shimin’s spirit signature somewhere above, but I made my mind up about this long ago.

“You hold nothing over me!” I point my sword skyward, if “sky” means the one on our planet, encompassing night and day in the same view. Sunlight spreads over the globe in an ever-widening crescent. White swirls of clouds drift over an ocean I don’t know, one that bleeds from blue to scarlet. Another stomach-plunging wonderment goes through me. A tender pressure grows behind my eyes.

Qin Zheng retracts his face guard and smiles at me with what might possibly be pride. He stomps on the broken drone and raises one of his swords as well.

“I am Emperor Qin Zheng of Huaxia, and you have subjugated my people for far too long!” he shouts. “Send no more of these machines, or I shall destroy this building and everything around it! Come out to face the souls you locked in a war you will not allow us to win, heavenly tyrants!”

More light sweeps across the Heavenly Court by the second, revealing the smooth white of its buildings and the vivid greens of its vegetation, adorned with bursts of other colors. No wind stirs the leaves and blossoms. I’d think of this place as peaceful—if I couldn’t feel the frantically moving spirit signatures beneath the ground. Gods, humans, animals…who knows?

Something flies in from the distance. We ready our swords.

A message beams across the building in front of us: DO NOT ATTACK .

We don’t relax. There are two spirit signatures in the sleek flying vehicle, which reminds me of one of the big flat fish in the aquarium.

At last, the false gods are daring to show up.

Qin Zheng clanks his swords together and morphs them into a meteor hammer—the best weapon we can make for ranged attacks. I detach my scythe from my back and forge one as well, shaping the handle into flexible chain links and gathering the blade into a spiked ball at the other end.

We hold our ground when the vehicle drops to a whisper-quiet landing before us. An arc of air flutters past us.

A door falls out of the vehicle’s side, forming stairs that lead to an opening.

We brace ourselves for our first encounter with a god. Yet the person who steps out, wearing shoes with absurdly high heels that clank down the stairs, and a red robe that exposes his legs and collarbones, is not a god at all.

“Hello again, Your Majesties.” Yizhi plants himself before us.