"WHAT?!" Mo Ran blurted, reeling back. If not for the fact that he was an apparition, he might have already stumbled into the nets of the fishing vessel next to them.
The Flame Emperor's sacred tree could be used to construct a person?
"Nüwa's clay, Fuxi's qin, and the Flame Emperor's tree are the three holy instruments the deities used to create the world. Their spiritual energy is pure beyond measure. The first immortals, with all their limitless power, were made from these instruments. I had obtained only a tiny portion of the Flame Emperor's tree, but even without a deity's awesome strength, I could easily create a person out of it. In the end, I made up my mind. Just as Nezha's teacher reconstructed the god's body from lotus roots after his death, I would carve this piece of wood into the likeness of the young Chu-gongzi."
Mo Ran felt the world was spinning before his eyes. Huaizui would carve this wood into…the young Chu-gongzi—into Chu Lan?
"I wanted to give my savior back his son."
Mo Ran's throat was dry, as though something was lodged in it. After a long pause, he muttered, "Impossible…"
Within the memory scroll, the evening bell tolled. Wubei Temple was cloaked in the red of sunset. Weary crows had returned to their nests, and monks passed beneath the colonnades with the sleeves of their loose robes floating behind them.
Master Huaizui sat in one of the rooms within the monastery, the door and windows securely shut. In the pale glow of an oil lamp, beneath the shadow of the Buddha, he whittled with painstaking care. He knew every cut would be impossible to undo. Before touching the wood of the sacred tree, he'd carved hundreds of models, practicing until his creations looked exactly like the Chu Lan he remembered.
On this night, he finally held the wood of the sacred tree in his hands. After looking over it carefully a last time, he made the first cautious and considered cut.
Wood shavings drifted down, coating the floor in golden dust.
He poured all of himself into each stroke of the knife, envisioning those two figures from his past. A hundred years of memories ebbed and flowed beneath his knife. The old monk's head hung low, as though the weight of his sins had snapped his neck long ago.
"I entered seclusion within the temple. It took me five years to finish carving Chu Lan."
Mo Ran walked stiffly over to Huaizui as the monk set down the knife—he had made his final cut. He brushed away the last specks of bright dust. Huaizui touched the wooden child's face and clothes with shaking hands. Tears ran down his face as he knelt, kowtowing to it over and over.
Mo Ran turned his stunned gaze to the small sculpture on the tea table.
Its tiny form was carved from the sacred tree, using a blade animated by guilt. It looked just like Chu Wanning had as a child.
The evening bell began to toll once more; only a bloodred thread still stretched between earth and sky. The last ray of dusky light passed through the window and landed on the table. The low tones of the bell echoed through the temple grounds. Elsewhere in the monastery, the monks were burning cypress boughs and pine needles. A note of cool sharpness cut through the rich fragrance of woodsmoke.
Sitting in this hall as the bell sounded its final note, surrounded by twilit serenity, Huaizui gazed upon the wooden figure and murmured in a stroke of inspiration, "I'll call you Chu Wanning."
Wanning—evening peace.
He bit his fingertip to draw blood. A single red drop, replete with metal-elemental spiritual energy, fell onto the wood, and a flash of brilliant light flooded the room.
Mo Ran shut his eyes against the radiance, his lashes trembling. He squinted toward the light, trying to see what was happening, but between the tears blurring his vision and the blinding brightness, he couldn't make out a thing. When the light grew so brilliant he was forced to close his eyes again, Mo Ran's one wild thought was that Chu Wanning had already seen all of this. How much pain had it caused him?
He wasn't human; he had no parents to speak of. He was nothing but a chunk of wood and a drop of blood. He had spent more than three decades upon this earth, wholly in the dark about his origins.
"The wood of the sacred tree retained its own spiritual energy. After I gave my sculpture life with a drop of blood, it looked like Chu Lan in every respect, just as I'd hoped. I raised him in the monastery and taught him as my disciple. As he grew older, he began to ask me about his origins."
Mo Ran saw Chu Wanning as a child, sitting beside Huaizui with a stick of red tanghulu. "Shizun, you always say you found me in the snow and brought me back here. But where exactly did you find me?"
Huaizui was gazing at the cool shadows of the mountains in the distance. After a lengthy pause, his reply came like a sigh. "Lin'an."
"So I'm from Lin'an?"
"Mn."
"But I've never left the monastery. I don't know what Lin'an is like." Chu Wanning looked dismayed. "Shizun, I want to go down the mountain and see the outside. I…want to see Lin'an."
The illusion darkened, and the courtyards of Wubei Temple were replaced with the lush scenery of Jiangnan.
It was June, and the fragrant lotus flowers stood tall and vivid against the green and blue of the water. Chu Wanning, still a head shorter than Xia Sini, was skipping down a paved bluestone path. Huaizui followed a few steps behind him.
"Wanning, slow down. Be careful not to trip."
Chu Wanning turned and flashed his teacher a smile. Mo Ran had never seen such an innocent and carefree expression on his face. "Okay, I'll listen to Shizun."
The child wore a dusty green monk's robe. His head wasn't shaved; he wore his hair coiled in a little bun, and a lotus leaf was perched atop his head. The drops of dew glistening on the leaf made his face look all the purer and brighter.
Huaizui caught up to Chu Wanning and took his hand. "All right, now you've seen West Lake. Where do you want to go next?"
"Can we eat?"
"In that case…" Huaizui paused. "Let's go into the city."
The pair entered the city hand in hand, Mo Ran keeping pace beside them. As he watched Chu Wanning, crowned with a lotus leaf, head barely rising to Mo Ran's thigh, Mo Ran's heart swelled with pain and tenderness. He extended a hand. He knew he couldn't touch the illusion, but he couldn't stop himself from reaching out to pat Chu Wanning on the head.
At the same moment, Chu Wanning stopped in his tracks. "Hm?"
"What's wrong?" Huaizui asked gently.
Chu Wanning tilted his face up. His eyes like twin pools of sweet dew in the sunlight landed unerringly on Mo Ran.
Mo Ran froze in astonishment, pulse pounding in his ears. He knew Chu Wanning couldn't possibly be looking at him, yet a quiet frisson of excitement rippled through him.
"What's that?" Chu Wanning let go of Huaizui's hand and walked toward Mo Ran.
Mo Ran's anguish compounded—he'd never seen Chu Wanning so cheerful, nor his eyes so bright. He found himself leaning down and opening his arms to embrace this child…
But Chu Wanning stepped right through him.
Mo Ran blinked, then turned. Chu Wanning was making for a pastry stall behind him. Head tilted back to see over the counter, he watched the stallkeeper open a bamboo steamer to reveal the pale-pink, flower-shaped cakes wreathed in steam.
Mo Ran let out a breath of relief, but his heart sank ever so slightly. So it had been a coincidence, nothing more. He followed Huaizui to the stall. Chu Wanning was smiling up at his teacher. "Shizun, these cakes look so yummy."
"Do you want to try one?"
"Can I?"
Surprise flitted across Huaizui's expression. "You both have the same taste…"
Chu Wanning's eyes widened. "Who has the same taste?" he asked innocently.
Huaizui pressed his lips together. "…Nothing. Just someone I used to know."
He bought three sticky-rice flower cakes. He watched, pensive, as Chu Wanning took a bite, rising vapor blurring the child's face. The river of his memories crashed and surged around him. Huaizui sighed, letting his eyes fall shut.
After a moment, he felt a sudden tug on his sleeve. He looked down to find that Chu Wanning had split one of the cakes into halves, the sweet and fragrant bean-paste filling gently steaming in the air.
"Half for Shizun, half for me. The bigger half is Shizun's."
"Why is the bigger half mine?"
"You're taller than me, so you need to eat more."
Mo Ran looked on as Huaizui took half the cake and stood with Chu Wanning next to the pastry stall, eating and chatting. Beneath the bright Lin'an sun, Mo Ran stilled for a moment, and a smile stole across his face. His heart ached horribly, yet it also seemed to melt. No one, he thought, could feel anything but tender fondness toward this young Chu Wanning. He was the sweetest kid in the world.
The sun-dappled streets of Lin'an faded. This time, no other scene took its place. Mo Ran heard Huaizui speak in the darkness, his faraway voice like the whispers of a wandering spirit.
"I spent all my days with him, teaching him to read and write, schooling him in scripture and philosophy. But my main focus was his spiritual development. I never forgot that I had created this child in order to give him back to my savior. From the beginning, I resolved to bring Chu Wanning to the ghost realm as soon as his spiritual powers and physical form were mature enough to withstand it."
A pause. Huaizui's voice was lower and graver when he continued. "I would bring him to the ghost realm and fuse the remnant fragments of Chu Lan's souls into his body."
Mo Ran's mouth fell open.
Huaizui's voice was hoarse. "At the time, I never thought this would be wrong. What was Chu Wanning? He wasn't a real human. He was just a piece of wood, a hand-carved figurine. I had given him life and taught him the ways of humankind. But ultimately, the blood that flowed in his veins was not real blood, and the flesh that covered his bones was not real flesh."
At these words, Mo Ran could no longer contain his mounting despair. "That's not true!" he cried.
But what use were these words? Huaizui couldn't hear his furious shout of denial. The monk's voice swirled about him, tugging him deeper into a maelstrom of pain.
"Chu Wanning was unnecessary. He wasn't alive; he didn't have a soul."
"No! That's not true! Why wouldn't the sacred tree have a soul? He's alive! He has his own souls! He isn't anyone else! He's not like anyone else!" Mo Ran howled, trapped within the illusion like a caged beast. "Huaizui, you raised him yourself! You watched him grow up… How is he not human? How is he any different from you or me?!"
But Huaizui continued murmuring, flat and affectless, as though he were chanting sutras before the Buddha. Who knew if his lips shaped the words out of true devotion, or to numb the pain that lanced through his own heart?
"He was merely a vessel I carved for Chu Lan. He would only become a complete human with Chu Lan's souls inside him."
Mo Ran felt chilled to the bone. He had no idea what would come next; he felt like he was on the verge of losing his mind. He broke into a run, but there was nowhere to go, nothing but abyssal darkness. His repetitive murmurs became desperate shouts. "No! You can't ruin him—Huaizui, there are souls in his body—he's a living person, a human being…"
He fell to his knees, gripped by a terror that far outweighed his fear of the past life coming to light. He was so afraid he might see Huaizui bring Chu Wanning to the ghost realm, cut open his chest, and merge Chu Lan's souls into his body.
But what about the original Chu Wanning? The souls that belonged to the sacred tree would be forced out. He was just a block of wood—as the wheel of karma spun on, where would he go? Whether to the heavens above or to the netherworld below, whether amidst the high clouds or down among the Yellow Springs—what place would take him in?
"No, Huaizui…you can't…" Mo Ran was shaking, his lips bloodless. "You can't…"
How could he not have a soul? How could he not be human?
This child had skipped through the streets with a smile and a green lotus leaf on his head. He had carefully broken the flower cake in two and given the larger share to his shizun. He was still so little, yet he was already more compassionate and spirited than many. He was no less alive than any other creature of flesh and blood.
How could he not be human?
But no matter how Mo Ran begged and shouted, his words couldn't reach Huaizui's ears. The debt Huaizui thought he owed to Chu Xun's family had preoccupied him for a hundred years. He had gone through countless trials to craft this vessel; how could he possibly let it go?
"Day by day, Chu Wanning grew. Since he was to be the instrument of Chu Lan's rebirth, I worried for his safety and health far more than I worried about my own. Other than the time I brought him to Lin'an for a few months when he was five or six, he was never allowed to step outside Wubei Temple."
Huaizui heaved a sigh. "Sometimes I wondered if I was depriving him of the sights and sounds of the world. Up until he was fourteen, he'd never been anywhere besides Lin'an. All he knew of the heavens and earth, the changing of the seasons, was from what he saw within the confines of the monastery."
At last the illusion brightened again to show a moonlit night. Mo Ran saw Huaizui standing in the doorway of a temple, gazing out into the courtyard. He hurried over.
In the frosty moonlight, Mo Ran saw the fourteen-year-old Chu Wanning practicing with his sword, haitang blossoms swirling around him. In his white robes, wreathed in silvery light and bright petals, he was an ethereal sight.
Huaizui went on, and his words mingled in Mo Ran's ears with the sharp strokes of the sword through the air. "But I also thought it might not be such a bad thing for him to know less. After all, the world was a cruel place. If this spirit of the sacred tree wouldn't live for much longer than a decade before Chu Lan replaced him, wouldn't it be a kindness if his life was easy and straightforward, if he remained oblivious to the mortal realm's suffering?"
The dancing sword stilled, and fragmented flowers floated down. Calm and alert, Chu Wanning brought the blade behind his back and lifted his other hand, index and middle fingers raised. He caught his breath and looked up. Upon seeing Huaizui's eyes on him, he broke into a smile.
The night wind tugged at the wisps of hair at his temples, tickling him. He tried to gently blow them off his face to no avail. At last, he reached up to brush them aside. Pitch-dark phoenix eyes curved into gentle crescents as he gazed at Huaizui and Mo Ran at his side.
"Shizun."
"Mn, good work." Huaizui nodded. "Come—let me check the development of your spiritual core."
Guilelessly, Chu Wanning walked over. Brushing back his snow-white sleeve, he held his wrist out to Huaizui.
Huaizui felt for his spiritual energy flow and said, "It's already very strong, just not very stable. Keep practicing—you can make much progress before winter."
Chu Wanning grinned. "Thank you, Shizun."
Mo Ran couldn't be sure, but he thought he saw Huaizui's shoulders tremble minutely at these words. Yet Huaizui didn't say anything further; he neither explained nor amended his words. He merely turned and went back inside. Mo Ran didn't move a muscle. He was no longer interested in following Huaizui. He only wanted to watch Chu Wanning—with a greedy hunger, with a desperate urgency, he only wanted to drink in the sight of this youth who might disappear at any moment. He was so pure and pristine, so kind and gentle. How could a child like this not have a soul?
His gaze flicked down, landing by chance on Chu Wanning's chest as it rose and fell beneath his white lapels. Suddenly, he remembered something. It came like a clap of thunder, like a boulder landing on his chest, sending waves crashing to shore.
"No… No…" He stumbled back a step—but what good was that? His memories had already extended their fearsome talons and pierced his steaming entrails.
Chu Wanning had a scar on his chest.
His chest had been opened up! He… He…
Mo Ran was shaking. Before his eyes, Chu Wanning's sword danced beneath the moon, his footsteps light upon the flying flowers—a gallant sight. But Mo Ran felt like he had swallowed a bucket of ice water in a gulp; his heart palpitated with chills.
Chu Wanning's chest…had been cut open…
So Huaizui had done it after all? He had brought Chu Wanning to the ghost realm and fused Chu Lan's remnant souls into Chu Wanning's heart? So then, the original Chu Wanning was already long gone? So then—
Mo Ran brought his arms over his head, curling into a ball on the ground. He shuddered and didn't dare finish the thought. His heart hurt so much. He wished he could've been the one to have his heart carved out, to have his souls torn away.
Chu Wanning… He was so, so good. Why did he have to suffer such a cruel fate? To be deemed less than human, to have his creator treat him as a lifeless, empty shell, born for the sole purpose of sustaining the life of another?
Who was the man Mo Ran had chosen as his shizun? Was he Chu Lan, or Chu Wanning?
Mo Ran felt his sanity slipping. His head throbbed painfully, and he felt dizzy and nauseated. He had no idea how long he sat there for.
Eventually, the sky dimmed. The monastery and the flowering tree disappeared. Chu Wanning, too, faded away.
Huaizui's voice flowed out of the darkness. "After Chu Wanning turned fourteen, the time was ripe for my plan. I decided that at the end of the year, I would bring him to the ghost realm and merge him with Chu Lan's souls."