Search for Success
Fang Yuan reads from The Legends of Ren Zu, which records how Ren Zu once fell into a certain-death situation inside Luo Po Valley, with no way to escape. To save her father, his daughter Desolate Ancient Moon climbs Cheng Bai Mountain to reach the one and only success Gu at its peak, since a wish made to it can save him. At the mountain’s foot a rockman blocks her, since Ren Zu’s second daughter had ruined love Gu’s dream there and love Gu, angered, woke the rockman against her. She kills the rockman and climbs to the mountain’s waist. Love Gu appears, mocks her for still wanting success Gu, and vows to topple Cheng Bai Mountain, a mound built entirely of stacked rocks, so she must search among billions of them. It crashes into the mountain until the whole mountain crumbles, then leaves smugly. ch. 547
Left staring at the ruined mountain with no way to tell one rock from another, Desolate Ancient Moon turns to cognition Gu for advice. Cognition Gu calls love Gu demanding and unreasonable, and says that even it or its child wisdom Gu would not confront it. It explains that success Gu sits at the peak and failure Gu at the bottom. Cognition Gu calls failure Gu the mother of success Gu. ch. 547
The scattered rocks are success Gu’s own siblings. Each is able to trigger a disaster when picked up. The one defense, it tells her, is to keep affirming her own selfhood, which will make each disaster fade. Desolate Ancient Moon asks how to tell the two Gu apart, and cognition Gu says they look almost identical but reveal themselves once held. It warns that failure Gu is the greater danger: holding onto it risks leaving her completely lost, with her life in danger. Before she leaves, cognition Gu asks her to keep its help secret, fearing love Gu’s anger, and she agrees. ch. 547
Back at the mountain, Desolate Ancient Moon picks up rock after rock. She is searching for success Gu. The first wounds her hand, which heals to a scar only once she affirms herself again, and the second brings a fear she barely resists. The third brings despair at the scale of the task, eased only when she thinks of her trapped father, and the fourth turns her nose into a pig’s, which affirming herself again only partly restores. Over the days that follow, more of failure Gu’s children injure her, dishearten her, frighten her, or reshape parts of her into animal features, and some of these scars never fully heal. ch. 547
The scars accumulate until they turn her into a monster. She grows six heads, three arms, five tails and a centaur-like body of sixteen legs, mixed with fur, scales, claws and hooves. In the search for success, the text notes, people often transform and become completely different. The ordeal also makes her several hundred times stronger, until the rocks no longer trouble her, and her seven mouths cry out for success together as her failures only sharpen her desire for it. ch. 547
Only two rocks remain, one success Gu and one failure Gu, and Desolate Ancient Moon faces a hard choice: success Gu would be the best outcome, but failure Gu would leave even her transformed and strengthened self completely lost, in danger of dying. She hesitates between one step to heaven and one step to hell, but decides that refusing the risk means never succeeding, judges herself strong enough to endure even failure Gu, and picks one of the two rocks. She picks failure Gu. An overwhelming loss and self-doubt take hold of her; she keeps affirming herself, but her voice softens, her seven mouths fall silent, and she sinks into endless confusion, completely losing her sense of self. The greatest tragedy for a human, the text states, is losing that sense of self. ch. 547
Fang Yuan sighs and closes the book, his thoughts drifting into a complicated expression. Snow still falls outside his window. As the ten year disaster approaches, the blizzard is not weakening but growing, and it is now the end of December in Northern Plains. Hei Lou Lan leads the army to Imperial Court blessed land’s entrance at the last minute, with the alliance now down to about half its members, after large numbers of mortals died on the march and many Gu Masters fell to beast attacks. ch. 547
Hei Lou Lan holds the item that opens the blessed land; when he stands, a mild golden light brightens into a ring and then expands into a grand city gate patterned with silvery flowers and studded with fist-sized copper buttons. An unseen force pulls the heavy door open, and sandalwood scent spreads thickly. The falling snow stops and gathers like swarming bees, forming a solid ice ladder that rises from the ground to the floating Imperial Court gate. ch. 547
Unable to hide his excitement, Hei Lou Lan takes three steps as one and becomes the first to climb the ladder and enter Imperial Court blessed land. Fang Yuan follows as the second, his gaze solemn and his strides calm, his thoughts on Eighty-Eight True Yang Building. Tai Bai Yun Sheng, Hao Ji Liu and other high-level experts follow after him. About an hour later the whole Hei tribe army has entered; the ice ladder breaks apart, the red gate closes, and the light ring shrinks to a single dot and vanishes. The Gu Immortals watching in secret withdraw their gazes, helpless and nostalgic, once everyone has gone in. ch. 547
