The world we live in depends on a perfectly balanced equation.
For every force, there is an equal reaction. The destructive fire has life-giving water to swallow its blazing path. The unmovable mountain has the high wind, patient and endless, eroding its surface century by century. And evil — well. Evil has the good to answer for its crimes.
And just as there is a match for everything in this world, there is a match for a life, and for where one goes after living it.
Seven layers of heaven, designed for those who spent their mortal years in virtue. And seven layers of hell , a mirror image below, carved from the darkest acts of humanity. The higher layers of hell hold all kinds of wretched souls who have wronged countless people in their lifetime. But the lower levels…The lower ones are not spoken of lightly. They say the seventh layer still keeps prisoners from the war of creation, when certain things that should not have existed fought against the gods of heaven and lost. That some of those prisoners are still there. That some of them are not exactly prisoners anymore.
...Sounds ominous.
Not that any of that is my business.
I was just a farmer. A simple one, who enjoyed the abundance of good soil and the company of people who smelled like sweat and fresh bread. I died sometime around my twentieth year. I don't remember how. I don't remember much, honestly — only flashes, impressions. The rough texture of worked earth under my palms. Wind cutting across a field on my skin. The sound of laughter carrying over from somewhere nearby, and the smell of a basket of bread, still warm from the fire, passed between hands.
Hm. I want bread now. The kind with the crusty outside and the soft, pillowy inside, that tears apart in your hands and smells like something you can't quite name but immediately recognizes as home.
I am very nearly drooling thinking about it.
"Ye Fen! Ye Fen —"
thud. thud. thud.
The warmth of the afternoon dissolves, chased off by that familiar voice and the persistent percussion of pebbles striking the branch I am currently napping on. I rub the bridge of my nose, swing my legs down, and look below.
Xiao stares up at me with the expression of a very small, very angry baby chicken.
"You missed the meditation class again," he announces. "Don't you want to ascend?"
Ah. Right. The lessons.
Every level of heaven has an academy, institutions where souls who wish to ascend are trained in the arts of cultivation and heavenly power. I had joined because the idea sounded interesting, and also because it came with kitchen access. No one really cooks here in the Third Level. In the lower levels, souls live something close to their mortal lives, just better and improved. The higher you climb and the nearer you draw to godhood, the more people tend to shed their earthly appetites. Which means spicy noodles are apparently a luxury reserved only for the spiritually unambitious.
I am, by all measures, spiritually unambitious.
Once I'd learned a handful of abilities that made daily life more convenient, I had stopped attending. Laziness, mostly. Though if I'm honest, I have flashing memories of being scolded back in the mortal world too — half-asleep under trees while everyone else worked around me. Some things, it seems, carry over.
I float down from the branch. Basic levitation, the first thing I'd actually bothered to master, and only because the quietest napping spots are always the highest branches and climbing felt like a great deal of effort.
"I don't really want to ascend," I say, yawning as Xiao falls into step beside me. "Too much bother. Besides, I'd never make it through the trials."
He pouts but walks with me.
"Don't say that, Ye Fen. To be placed in the Third Level directly after death — you must have lived a truly virtuous life." He beams, as if this is very obvious and I simply haven't noticed.
Hm.
The First and Second Levels are for ordinary good people. The Third is for those the heavens have marked as having potential for something greater, a vague classification that I have never been able to make sense of. Bullshit if you ask me. The line that separates them feels arbitrary and strange, and every time I try to think too hard about what I might have done to earn my placement here, something in me goes quiet and distant, and I let the thought drift away like smoke.
It hurts, a little. And I am already dead. So what is the point of chasing the past?
"Maybe the egotistical judges at the top made a mistake," I say, ruffling Xiao's hair.
"Don't insult the heavenly gods!"
I shrug and stretch my arms above my head, tilting my face toward the warm, golden light that passes for sky up here. It looks like the gods' idea of a perfect afternoon, and that's precisely the problem with it. It could use a few clouds here and there…
"Where are you going?" Xiao calls after me.
"Kitchen. I want to bake bread." I glance back. "You can come if you want some."
He grumbles but still falls into step beside me.
"You ought to at least tie back your hair," he mutters after a moment.
"Don't want to."
The wind picks it up — my shoulder-length brown hair, loose — and I let it. Heaven is obsessed with its idea of perfection: neat, luminous, aspiring ever upward. But the wind answers to nothing. It moves how it likes, and something about that feels so freeing to let it merge with the strand of my hair. As if I am just another simple leaf drifting with the wind, among the thousands of others.
I would sound ridiculous saying such sentimental things out loud.
So I don't. I just let it blow.