Volume One: Morning of the Empire -- The Beginning

Once upon a time in the ancient days, the world was filled with many mysterious lands, and inside those mysterious lands were many mysterious people.

A giant ball of fire hung in the distant corner of the dusk sky above the vast barren land. Rays of red lights, like a giant puff of flame, slowly but steadily propagated outward. Groves of young shrubs emerged from spots where the snow had begun to melt away, leaving patches of ugly burn scars everywhere. An uneasy silence engulfed the entire land, occasionally interrupted by short chirps from eagles high above the sky and sounds of antelopes leaping in the distance.

Then three travelers emerged from the horizon of the vastly empty land. Silently, they gathered around a small tree in the middle of the land, a tree that seemed out of place in this kind of barren land. No greetings were exchanged among the travelers. They all simply stared downward as if there was something very interesting under the tree, something very worthy of investigation, something thought provocative.

Two tribes of ants were in the midst of a territorial war around the light-brown tree root that had surfaced the cold and hardened winter soil. Maybe because of the extreme scarce of a perfect home like the tree root, the battle seemed extremely fierce. Within moments thousands of dead ants scattered about. As brutal and raging as it appeared, the final result was nothing more than a small black spot on the ground.

The winter air was still chilly. The three men under the tree, however, seemed to not mind even though they all only had thin robes. They just kept on watching with utter concentration as if they could watch on till the end of the time.

“Mundane world is ant’s world. But where is the way?” one of the travelers finally broke the silence in a muffled voice.

It was a young lad with a childish-looking face and a moonlight-colored collarless thin robe wrapped around his thin and tiny frame. He carried a sheathless thin wooden sword on his back. His long black hair was neatly put into a hair, held by a wooden hairpin. The hairpin looked as if it was ready to fall out at any time, yet was as firm as wild pines grasping firmly onto the side of the cliff.

“During the House Master’s sermon, I once saw countless of flying ants going up the sky bathing in lights.”

It was a young Buddhist monk in a ragged cassock this time. The new stubbles on top of his head were dark and sharp, just as determined as his appearance and the tone of his words.

“But ants that can fly will eventually fall. They can never touch the sky.” The wooden sword lad shook his head.

“If you insist on that idea, you will never truly understand the way of the heart,” the young monk said with squinted eyes as he continued watching the ants by his feet tearing off each other’s limbs. “I heard that your Hall Master just accepted a new kid named Chen recently. Haven’t you figured out that you are not the only genius in a place like the Hall of Comprehension and Perseverance^{^[1]}?”

“It has always baffled me. How can a guy like you, who is never spiritually free, be qualified to represent the Suspended Temple and wander about the earthly world?” the wooden sword lad raised his eyebrows and replied in ridicule.

The young monk did not respond to the provocation. He cast a glance to the scurrying ants by his feet.

“Ants can fly and they can fall. But they are very skilled in climbing. They are good at working as a team and become foundations for each other. They are never afraid to sacrifice for the tribe. When one after another ant stacks up on top of each other, as long as there are plenty of them, they can for sure pile into an ant hill tall enough to touch the sky.”

A sharp eagle chirp suddenly echoed in the dust sky. The chirp sounded alarmed and frightened. Was the eagle scared of the three strange travelers under the tree or was it scared of the non-existent giant ant hill that could have reached the sky? Or maybe it was scared of something else?

“I am very frightened!” the lad with the wooden sword suddenly exclaimed, cringing his thin shoulders inward.

The young monk nodded in agreement, although his face remained calm and determined.

The third young lad under the small tree had a brawny body. The short robe he was wearing seemed to be made of some kind of animal skin. The two bare legs looked as hard as rocks and the explosive muscles were clearly visible under the rough skins. He remained silent the entire time, but the small goosebumps on his skin revealed his true feelings.

The three young lads under the tree came from the three most mysterious places in the entire world, sent by their teachers to wander about the earthly world. They shined like three bright shooting stars, but even they felt irresistible fear in this barren land today.

An eagle would never be frightened by ants. In its eyes ants are only small black dots. Ants would never be frightened by an eagle, because they would never be important enough to become food for an eagle. In ants’ world, creatures like ferocious eagles do not even exist. It’s something they would never see or touch.

However, within a thousand or ten thousand years, maybe for some profound reasons several unusual ant individuals just happen to decide to cast a glance away from the rotten leaves for a second and looked toward the blue sky, then their world is no longer the same.

The three young lads under the tree raised their heads and looked toward a shallow trench tens of meters away from them. The shallow trench was not deep, and there was nothing inside except the black color, which made the trench very distinctive on the motley surface of the barren land.

The trench had suddenly appeared two hours ago. And as soon as it appeared, it went all the way to the end of the horizon, as if an invisible ghost had chopped with a giant ax as large as a mountain, or maybe a God had drawn it with a sweep of his heavenly brush, so magnificent, so awe-inspiring, and so frightening.

“I always thought the Lord of the Underworld only existed in mythology,” the young lad with the wooden sword stared at the black trench and murmured.

“Myth has it that the Lord of the Underworld has seventy thousand children. Maybe this one only stumbled upon the earthly world by accident.”

“Myth is only myth,” the young lad with the wooden sword replied with a straight face. “Myth also has it that a Sage would be upon us every one thousand years. But has anyone seen any Sage in the last several thousand years?”

“If you don’t believe it, why are you afraid to step over that black line?”

No one dared to step over that black line, that shallow trench, not even ones as proud and as powerful as them.

Ants can crawl over it. Grasshoppers can jump over it. Antelopes can leap over it. Eagles can fly over it. But humans cannot.

By then more than half of the setting sun had sunk into the horizon. The color of the night quickly surged from all directions. The temperature of the barren land quickly descended, and a daunting feeling began engulfing the entire sky and the land beneath.

The young lad in animal skins finally broke his silence. His voice was very coarse and had a very low pitch, quite usual given his age, reminding people of roaring waves in rivers and a rusty sword scraped against a hard rock non-stop.

Flames all of a sudden burst out of his two bare but brawny legs and quickly enveloped his entire lower body in a red glow. A strong gust came out of nowhere and swirled the gravels on the ground. Then it seemed as if an invisible force had suddenly seized his neck and lifted his body hundreds of feet above the ground before letting go of him. Then his body fell freely until it smacked into the ground heavily before the force would lift him into the air again, like a rock bouncing off the ground toward the far distance, clumsy yet swift.

“His family name is Tang. But what is his full name?” the lad carrying the wooden sword exclaimed. Then after a short pause, he said thoughtfully, “If he and I had met at a different time and a different place, I am sure only one of us would live. Even an apprentice can be so impressive. How powerful would his master become? ...... I heard his master has been self-cultivating all these years working on the Twenty-Three Years of Cicada. I wonder if he’ll find a think and heavy shell on his back when he finally breaks out of the self-cultivation.”

But no one answered and he was only greeted with utter silence. Puzzled, he turned around to look.

The young monk had his eyes tightly shot and his eyelids trembled rapidly as if he was right in the middle of thinking through a vexing problem. In fact he had been stuck in this uncanny state ever since the young man in animal skins had said the words about the night fall.

Feeling the gaze upon his face, the young monk slowly opened his eyes and cracked a grin. The calmness and determination on his face had for some unknown reason turned into clemency. Blood and bits of flesh filled his mouth, clearly visible through his opened lips; those were once his tongue, mutilated by his own teeth.

The young monk slowly untied the string of prayer beads from his wrist and sacredly hung them around his own neck. Then he walked away, his steps heavy but steady. Although they looked unhurried, only moments later his back had blended into the grayness of barren land in the far distance.

By then, there was no one else under the tree. All the emotions on the wooden sword lad’s face faded away, leaving only the absolute serenity, or in another word, absolute apathy. He glanced at the distant shadow still bouncing up and down like a rock in the northern dusts and jeered, “Evil demons.”

He then glanced at the distant figure of the head-bowing quietly walking young monk and jeered, “Wicked heretics.”

After those words, the thin wooden sword on the young lad’s back suddenly started vibrating in a loud and eerie buzz. Then all of a sudden, it shot into the air like a lightning and chopped the small tree in the middle of the barren land into fifty-thousand three thousand three hundred and thirty-three pieces. The branches and leaves turned into a puff of fine powder and covered up those daring ants.

The young lad strode toward the east, singing loudly as he walked. The thin wooden sword floated in midair only a few meters behind him and followed him like a silent servant.

In the first year of the Apocalypse Calendar of the Great Tang Dynasty, Heaven bestowed upon the barren land a profound wonder. Earthly Wanderers from all parties gathered here but none could comprehend the heavenly revelation.

Since that day, the lead disciple of the Suspended Temple began his self-cultivation of the Zen of Silence and no longer spoke another word; the Tang-named lead disciple of the Demons Cult concealed himself in the vast desert and left no trace of him; Ye Su, the lead disciple of the Hall of Comprehension and Perseverance comprehended the true meaning of death and began his journey around the world. Each of the three grasped something from the encounter.

But none of the tree had known that a scholar was also sitting by a little pond toward the direction of the Capital City, on the other side of the black trench, the side they dared not to cross, on that day when night was falling, a scholar wearing a ragged coat and a pair of shabby straw sandals.

The scholar held a book in his left hand and a wooden ladle in his right. He read the book leisurely, taking a break whenever he felt like to rest and drinking from the pond with his ladle whenever he felt thirsty. Although dust covered his body, his face was filled by gratification, as if he couldn’t feel the slightest pressure from the endless black trench, the trench that represented the ghastly mightiness and grand authority.

Not until the three men in the distance had left, only after the wild wind gradually filled the shallow black trench in the middle of the barren land with gravels and sand, the scholar stood back up. He brushed the dust off his ragged coat and then tied the wooden ladle to his waist. After carefully hiding the book inside his coat, he cast a final glance toward the direction of the Capital City and then left.

A long alley in the Capital City Chang’an divided that region of the city into two distinctive parts. The mansion on the east side of the valley belonged to the Imperial Advisor Supervisor^{^[2]}. And in the mansion on the west side of the valley resided the family of the Xuan-Wei^{^[3]} General. Although these two posts weren’t among the top posts or ranks of nobility, they were certainly prestige enough to silence all the pedestrian passersby. But the usually quiet long alley could no longer hold its peace today.

The mansion of the Imperial Advisor Supervisor was in the middle of a happy event – the birth of a new member to the noble family. However, as the midwives rushed in and out, the joy on everyone’s face, from the master of the mansion to all the servant girls, seemed to have been mixed with some other sentiments. No one dared to burst out in laughter. And for those slave women who carried water basins and hurried by the mansion walls, the occasional sounds from the other side of the wall always filled their face with terror.

Xuan-Wei General Lin Guangyuan, who was well-known for his valiancy, no longer had his valiancy because he had offended the most valiant senior general of the Empire, Xiahou. Having been indicted for collaborating with an enemy state and after months of inquisition by His Royal Highness himself, he finally received his verdict.

The verdict was very clear and the punishment was also very straightforward. There was only one sentence: Death to the entire family.

The front gate of the Imperial Advisor Supervisor Mansion was tightly shut. Inside the gate, the butler of the mansion leaned his entire body against the door, and through the crack of the door he stared intensely at the also tightly shut front gate of the General’s Mansion. Continued sounds of heavy objects cutting into fleshes kept flooding his ears. And the sounds of melon-sized things rolling on the ground gave him uncontrollable shivers.

The two families had been living along the same alley for many years. He was well-acquainted with many workers inside the General’s Mansion, from the mansion butler to the gatekeeper. While listening to the sounds of terror, he could almost see in his mind’s eye how countless sabers slashed open the necks of his many acquaintances and how the countless heads with familiar faces kept rolling and rolling on the slab stones in the courtyard until they hit the gate and bump into each other until eventually piling into a small hill of skulls……

Blood trickled through the crack under the front gate of the General’s Mansion, looking somewhat dark and thick, like a soup made of glutinous rice blended with cinnabar, together with bits of flesh that almost looked like pieces of purple yam paste. The butler’s face grew completely pale. He could no longer control himself except to stoop over and vomit.

Sounds of hurried horse hoofs suddenly arose from outside the gate followed by loud yells and rough poundings on the door. Vaguely he heard people bawling about someone escaping from the General’s Mansion. An officer from the Prince’s Royal House yelled sternly from his horseback.

On a wall near the back garden of the Imperial Advisor Supervisor Mansion, several scratch marks and bloodstains appeared.

“Young Master, listen. You can’t go out. Let Little Chu go. Let him go….”

In a firewood shed not far, a butler of the General’s mansion stared at the two four or five year old boys, his robe soaked in blood and his chapped lips quivering uncontrollably, his voice so hoarse and unpleasant, and his wrinkle and mud covered face filled with despair and struggle, until a few drops of tear finally squeezed their way out of his old, dry sockets only to immediately blend into the muddiness.

It didn’t take the Royal Guards much time to find the firewood shed and the two dead bodies, one old, one young, after they broke into the Imperial Advisor Supervisor Mansion. After inspection, the sergeant yelled out his report loudly, his heart still fluttering with fear.

The easiest way to interpret the phrase Unearthly Intellectual is that great intellectuals can always step out of the earthly world, and people who can stepped out of the earthly world are normally intellectuals. This seems to be nonsense, however there’s actually some truth in the statement. What they fear are matters mundane people could not get in contact with, and what they enjoy are things earthly people could not comprehend.

Therefore, people in the mundane world had no idea about what happened outside of the mundane world, and people outside of the earthly world would not pay any attention to the many dramas played inside the earthly world, dramas of departure between alive and dead or the joy of new lives born into the world, much less subjects such as the butcher’s steelyard cheated customers out of weight, or the wine vault of a drunkard had an extra tunnel burrowed by rats, or the government just lost a Xuan-Wei General, or a civilian supervisor just had a new born daughter.

In the outskirts of the Capital City Chang’an there stood a tall mountain, so tall that half of the peaks were engulfed in clouds. Among the west facing cliffs and precipices in the back mountain, a man walked upward slowly. The man appeared tall and straight. On top of the thin robe he wore a black overcoat. In his left hand he carried a food box.

When he arrived outside of a cave against the mountain wind with his leisure steps, the tall man sat down and took out a pair of chopsticks. He placed a slice of ginger into his mouth and chewed carefully, then picked up two slices of lamb and put them also into his mouth. After some further chewing, he let out a snort of great pleasure.

Under the setting sun, the Capital City Chang’an had been gradually enveloped by the coming night. And dark rainclouds in the distance seemed to be moving closer and closer.

The tall man gazed at a place in the Capital City and said affectively, “I seemed to have seen another you, like back then.”

Then he looked up into the sky, pointing his chopsticks toward the sky and exclaim, “And you, what good is it to fly so high?”

After a short moment of silence, the tall man lifted the bowl of rice wine by his right hand and poured the entire content down his throat. Raising the empty bowl up high he glanced over the sky and the land under heaven including both sides of the Capital City, then he exclaimed sincerely, “Wind rises, rain falls, and night is coming!”

When he said the words “wind rises”, a strong wind suddenly arose and the end of his robe fluttered rapidly in the wind. The aged trees on the side of the cliff shook back and forth violently and even gravels were blown off the cliff. By the time he said the words “rain falls”, that rainclouds that had finally reached the top of the Capital City suddenly darkened, and countless of rain drops poured downward like a waterfall in the last moment of the dusk. By the time he completed the entire sentence, the dark night had just occupied exactly half of the sky, as dark as the pupil of the dark lord.

The tall man slammed the wine bowl down heavily in disgust and muttered angrily, “It is so god damned dark!”

[1] I suspect the name “Comprehension and Perseverance” comes from Lao Tsu’s famous book Tao Te Ching in which he said, “I comprehend my nature of goodness, but I persevere in bad conducts.”

[2] Imperial Advisor Supervisor was a 4^th rank official post established in the Tang Dynasty where 1^st rank would be the equivalent of a Minister and the 7^th rank would be the equivalent of a local mayor.

[3] The Xuan-Wei General was a senior officer post in the ancient Chinese military probably equivalent to a Brigadier General. Xuan-Wu means demonstrating the martial power in Chinese.

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Prologue