Chapter Twenty-Two

Wenshu wouldn't show me Zheng Sili's body.

He and Yufei had found it floating in the pond below the window of the throne room, but by the time I made it out there, nothing

was left but red water and stained dirt. I stood at the edge of the pond and stared at my crimson reflection, the surface

oddly frothy.

"Where is he?" I said, sensing Wenshu lingering behind me.

"Yufei handled it," he said quietly.

But that wasn't what I'd asked. "Tell me where you put him," I said.

Wenshu grimaced. "Zilan, there's no point. You would have needed a whole new body to bring him back."

"You're not an alchemist," I said, clenching my teeth. "You wouldn't know."

I'd expected anger, but his expression shifted into something pale, almost pitying. "Zilan," he said, "please trust me on

this one."

I wanted to argue further, to demand that he bring me to him. Didn't he know I'd handled half-melted corpses with rot foaming from their mouths before? I wasn't a child who needed to be shielded from anything, and how dare he treat me like one? But my throat closed up and my eyes felt traitorously wet, so I said none of it. Instead, I turned away, staring back at the scarlet pond.

"You can just add him to your tab when you get to Penglai," Wenshu said. I knew he was trying to sound lighthearted, but his

words made my throat clench with nausea.

"Did you know that when I first met him, he asked if my dress was made of diapers?" I said, letting out a dry laugh. "It was

technically the same fabric as diapers, so I guess he wasn't wrong, even if he was an asshole."

I looked to Wenshu for a response, but he was staring at me strangely, so I went on, inexplicably determined to fill the silence.

"I made him eat one of his teeth," I said. "The other alchemists hated me for it, but I don't regret it. I won't pretend to

regret it just because he's dead. He deserved it."

"Zilan—"

"And who the hell feeds eggs to a duck? Who takes someone else's duck for a walk? He would have let a little girl die in jail,

but he cared about a duck ."

"Zilan."

"He owes me a drink," I said. The wind picked up, and my dress fluttered in scarlet silk around me, so I hugged myself to

hold the fabric down. I didn't feel the cold at all. "That's probably why he died. So he could worm his way out of it."

Wenshu's shadow fell over me. I turned as he offered me a small green silk satchel. "I found this in his pocket," he said

quietly.

It took me a moment to recognize it—it was the satchel I'd bought for Zheng Sili in Baiyin to hold his alchemy stones. I took it without thinking, tipping the contents into my hand.

A single grape fell into my palm. The kind he'd fed to Durian.

I stared at it for a long moment, the rushing river of my mind grinding to a halt.

Then I let out a laugh, closed my eyes, and clenched my fist around the grape. It burst, cold juice seeping between my fingers,

twisting in sticky ribbons down my wrist. My hand shook, and I squeezed harder and harder until the flesh oozed out, then

relaxed my hand and stared at the split skin and pale white flesh. Everything—and everyone—was so fragile.

"Zilan, we're going to bring him back," Wenshu said, wiping my tears with his sleeve. "We're going to bring all of them back.

We have the rings now."

"Right," I said quietly, holding tight to his unwavering belief in me, because Wenshu only believed in things that were probable.

He wiped my hand clean with a rag, then waved for me to follow him back into the palace.

Yufei was sitting on the floor of one of the main hallways, eating bread. Her hands, normally dirt-stained, were suspiciously

clean. She waved for us to sit down and nodded to a basket of breads and fruit on the floor in front of her, probably gathered

from the storage cellars. The hall was one of the only parts of the palace with walls still intact, other than the throne

room, which none of us wanted to revisit.

The sight of the Empress's body hunched over a pile of food, cheeks filled with bread, was so undignified that I couldn't

help but laugh. "All the dead are waiting for me, and you want to take a snack break?" I said.

"Dead people can't get any more dead," Yufei said, "but bread will get stale."

"And you're about to open a whole new world," Wenshu said, tossing me an orange. "I think you deserve a snack."

I smiled even though my face felt stiff, then looked down at the orange and began peeling it so I wouldn't be expected to

say anything else. My stomach felt like it was clenched into a tight fist. I peeled the fruit slowly, letting my hair fall

over my lap to hide my trembling hands, and ate even though I could taste nothing but blood.

The hours wore on, and the shadows devoured the hallway. I'd been trying to make the transformation work all evening without

so much as a spark. Now the food basket was no more than fruit pits and orange peels, and the hall was so dark we could hardly

see each other. Wenshu complained and tried to light the hall torches, but I warned him that if the transformation rebounded,

they might set the whole palace on fire.

The only light in the whole room came from the three rings on my right hand.

The dragon's white eye, the faceless night,

The song of silver, the serpent's bite,

The child of Heaven, the scarlet-winged tree,

Together at last, the shadow makes three.

This was everything my father had died trying to find. But now that I had all the pieces, I didn't know what to do.

"If this is gonna take much longer, I'm getting more food," Yufei said.

I couldn't blame her for getting impatient. For the last hour, I'd knelt on the floor, trying to clear my mind and think only of Penglai Island, carving the words into the sky of my mind like I did in the river of souls. I could hear the rushing water of my qi somewhere far away, just waiting for me to tap into it, but couldn't quite bring myself to try.

"You're stalling," Wenshu said.

I opened my eyes, glaring at him. "I'm trying my best."

"No, you're just sitting there meditating," he said, crossing his arms.

"And how would you know?"

He rolled his eyes. "Because," he said, "when you do alchemy, your hands glow and your face pinches in like you're eating

something sour."

"Pardon me if it's a little hard to open an entirely new world with two people staring at me," I said, fists clenching, rings

pinching my skin at the tightness. He and Yufei always acted like alchemy was easy, just a simple matter of throwing the right

rocks together and watching what happened.

Wenshu sighed dramatically and turned around, staring out the window. "Better?"

"Everything's better when I don't have to look at your ugly face."

"Again, this is not my face," he said. "You're still stalling."

Yufei sighed and turned around, fidgeting with the hem of the Empress's dress.

I looked down at the rings as if they'd reveal the answer to me, their facets mockingly beautiful and bright. You have the most powerful rings in the world, and you don't know what to do with them? they whispered.

I closed my fist and looked to the gold ring Hong had given me when he was alive, which I'd moved to my left hand. I twisted the cold metal and tried to think only of what I'd promised him, what I'd promised all the alchemists. But rather than stoking fires of determination, I only felt my stomach hollow out with nausea.

It doesn't matter if you're nervous , I thought. I wasn't Zheng Sili, who had the luxury of performing alchemy under perfect conditions. People were depending

on me.

I closed my eyes and focused on the sound of the running river. It rose louder and louder in my ears, devouring all sound.

Darkness closed in overhead, the cool golden tiles softening into wet dirt.

I was kneeling once more at the river of my own qi.

Finally , I thought, letting out a tense breath. I pressed my hand with the three rings into the water.

Take me to Penglai Island , I thought, with all the authority of an empress. I flooded my mind with intention, feeding the river with the kindling of

that deep and desperate want—the River Alchemist and Paper Alchemist laughing with me in the courtyard, Hong kneeling before

me and clasping the ring in my hands, Zheng Sili blushing furiously when I caught him walking Durian. The river began to surge

around me, the storms within the jewels spinning faster.

My chest felt light, like I was full of brightness instead of bones, only tethered to the ground by the weight of my shoes.

I was so perilously close to unwinding all of my mistakes, healing all the scars I'd left on the world. I saw the River Alchemist

ripped to pieces, organs spilled across gold tiles, Hong's throat weeping blood and eyes darkening, the smashed grape in my

hand that was all that remained of Zheng Sili.

The rings began to heat up, scalding my fingers. I plunged my hand deeper into the river, hoping its coolness would soothe

the burn, but the heat only grew, searing down to the bone. I was clutching a comet in my hands as it devoured my flesh.

I yanked my hand away from the river and landed on my back in the hallway, the tiles beneath me melted into a pool of liquid gold and black sludge. I tore the burning rings from my hand and tossed them to the floor, where they spun in glittering circles.

Wenshu and Yufei grabbed my arms and dragged me out of the pool of melted gold onto a patch of clean tile, both shouting questions

at once that I didn't know how to answer.

I pressed my palms to the cool floor, soothing the ghost of a burn.

Yufei seized my wrist, examining my palm, but it was clean and unscarred. "What happened?" she said.

"I don't know," I said, my voice shaking. "It... it didn't work."

"What do you mean, it didn't work ?" Wenshu said, expression sliding into a frown.

"I mean I messed it up and it spit me back out!" I said, yanking my hand from Yufei.

"I don't understand," Wenshu said. "We have all the stones, don't we? So what's the problem?"

I clenched my fist, hanging my head and biting back the words I wanted to scream at him. "Me," I said at last, the word so

small that I wasn't sure if he would even hear it.

"What does that mean?" Wenshu said, not even bothering to hide the impatience in his voice. Of course he was tired of waiting

for me to fix everything—he wanted his body back, his life back, and I was supposed to give it to him. I was the Scarlet Alchemist,

pride of the south, the youngest royal alchemist in Chang'an, and I was supposed to be able to do anything.

"It means I can't do it !" I said.

Yufei blinked quickly, tilting her head like she didn't understand. Of course she didn't. None of them understood.

"Of course you can," Wenshu said, rolling his eyes like I was just a child throwing a tantrum. "You're a royal alchemist, you—"

" I'm not good enough! " I said, the words I'd been terrified to admit ever since we'd set out for Penglai. For so long, I'd clung to that hope of

fixing everything I'd ruined, wiping my past clean. But I was more destructive than any private army, for every time I created,

I destroyed ten times as much. "You have no idea how advanced this alchemy is," I said. "I don't know if the Moon Alchemist

could even do it."

"Why didn't you say so?" Wenshu said, his scowl deepening. "If you didn't think you could actually get to Penglai, then what

the hell have we been doing the last few weeks?"

" What else was I supposed to do? " I said, tears pooling in my eyes. "I have to fix everything I've ruined or I..." My hands twitched, wanting to grab something,

but there was nothing but melted gold and scattered rings. I gripped my hair, wishing I could tear it out, but a hand gently

pulled my wrist and fingers laced with mine.

Yufei knelt in front of me, the Empress's clean skirts soaking through with melted gold. "You're supposed to tell your jiějiě

when you don't know what to do," she said.

I shook my head. "I thought maybe, with Zheng Sili, we could do it together. But I don't think I can do it alone."

"You're not alone," Yufei said. Then she scooped the rings from the floor and slipped the red diamond onto her finger.

"What are you doing?" I said.

She tossed one ring to Wenshu, who caught it with a frown, then handed the third to me.

"You told me that using three people makes a transformation more stable," she said. "You told me your alchemy could run through

us for your resurrections."

"Yes, but I understood resurrections," I said. "This is dangerous."

"If it's dangerous, then why the hell were you doing it alone?" Wenshu said, jamming the ring onto his finger. "You're the

youngest. We're supposed to protect you, not the other way around."

He grabbed Yufei's hand, then held his other hand out to me, gesturing impatiently until I took it. Yufei held my other hand,

and the three of us knelt in the wet pool of gold.

"Do it again," Wenshu said.

I hesitated, my palms damp between them. "What if—"

Wenshu gripped my hand harder, crushing my fingers, cutting off my next words. "What's the worst that could happen?" he said.

"We die? Been there, done that."

"Or I somehow mess up and destroy the whole world," I said.

"It's a pretty awful world, anyway," Yufei said, shrugging. "Don't alchemists want to raze it all down and start again? Now's

your chance. End the world, Zilan, I dare you."

I cracked a smile, tightening my grip on their hands. "Okay," I said. "One more time."

I took a deep breath, then reached for the sound of the river.

I knew at once that this time was different.

Alchemy rushed like white lightning through our arms, stinging through our veins. I could tell from the way Wenshu and Yufei

stiffened that they felt it too.

Our rings suddenly blazed star bright, casting red light on the ceiling. The gold tiles beneath my knees dissolved into a

sparkling mist. A ringing began in my ears, an angelic hum like the vibration of a crystal drinking glass, the whole universe

clicking into alignment. The river roared louder in my ears, its waters crashing into the hallway, shockingly cold as the

ceiling fell away to a starless night sky.

Together at last, the shadow makes three.

I'd assumed it was the joining of the three stones that opened Penglai, but perhaps it was three souls, three hearts with

the same dream, intention clear and bright. Just as Zheng Sili had said, the man in the poem wasn't actually alone—he had

his shadow behind him and the moon above him.

Take us to Penglai , I thought. The river inhaled the words and began to rise.

Waters wrapped around me in warm ribbons, my whole body suddenly so relaxed that I almost let go of my siblings' hands. As

if they could sense it, both of them tightened their grip around me as the current lifted us off our feet.

The water carried us forward into warm darkness, its touch like silk as it ferried us forward. It felt nothing at all like

drowning in the river of life, but rather like falling slowly into a dream.

The waters set us delicately on soft ground and retreated, cool waves kissing over our feet, warm light cast over our faces.

The air smelled of summer, years spent splashing through cool mud with my cousins and sharing half a dragonfruit on the front

stairs and hunting for summer constellations. The memories scorched away all my fears, just as my father's notes had said.

It is a place of no pain, or hunger, or winter.

"Zilan," Wenshu said, tugging my sleeve. "What are you waiting for? Look where we are."

But I waited a moment longer, too aware that I was balanced on the precarious edge between dreams and reality, the moment

when a wish became truth. Nothing could ever be as beautiful as a dream. At least, that was what I'd always believed.

I opened my eyes.