I.

There is a certain type of person who, like a flower born as the pinnacle of the plant kingdom, grows weary before all others of the battering of the elements—who is first to bloom, then first to wither.

Had the immortal mountains not hidden the sky like a canopy, Zhou Ying would still have come into the land of the living with little taste for it, grudgingly.

But had he slipped up and been born many years later, when the immortals and demons had passed away, in the era of mortals taking to the skies and beginning their long treks towards the stars, he still would have had no choice, however unwilling, but to be born.

Though no one would have removed his spiritual bones, these mortals who flew through the skies were not what they had once been; they had prenatal care so advanced as to challenge heaven. They had invented many kinds of “assistive reproductive technologies” to aid especially intransigent parents in keeping pregnancies that nature would have eliminated.

And so Zhou Ying was born, a contender one might say with a very high technological component to him.

His father was an unstable tyrannical CEO who had no notion of raising children beyond throwing money at them, while his mother suffered from bipolar disorder and regularly received inpatient treatment at a psychiatric hospital, with limited ability to care for herself.

Again, Zhou Ying was raised by his maternal grandmother and his uncle’s family.

Zhou Ying’s uncle was a heartbreaking beauty with a social phobia. Rumor said that in his youth he had been relentlessly pursued by a talent spotter named Xie, until his social phobia had nearly given him a heart attack. From then on, he had become even more of a shut-in and taken up work as a nocturnal computer programmer. Despite arranging in this way never to meet anyone, he had somehow excited the affections of a young lady from a contracting party. Later the young lady became a tyrannical CEO—of the not deranged, highly emotionally intelligent variety—and also Zhou Ying’s aunt.

Though his uncle was as quiet as a mute and kept everyone at a distance, his hearing was extremely acute. If his family members spoke in a very low voice…or even if they didn’t speak aloud, he would hear it, so he had an answer to every need—if he so wished.

His uncle’s family also had a little brat, whose only pastime apart from causing trouble was getting under Zhou Ying’s feet and grandstanding, talking about how when he grew up he’d buy this, that, and the other thing, and how he’d build a big submarine and ride it out to sea to capture Patrick Star.

Zhou Ying had been born against his will, and he had planned to make his stay brief, but contrary to his expectations this family kept him back one day and then another, year after year, and before he knew it, he had grown up.

II.

His grandmother was a children’s book author.

Her vision was getting worse, and she wasn’t good at typing, so she wrote slowly.

The old lady’s stories were different from those written by others. They didn’t teach morals to children and didn’t provoke any thoughts. She liked writing about animals as her main characters, all about how they lived their happy lives and played their games, and how for no reason whatsoever they got married.

Zhou Ying’s favorite was a series about a golden retriever puppy. Actually, this series sold poorly and quickly went out of print, because the trouble this puppy got himself into was exceptionally realistic and his intellect did not seem to be entirely sound, so adults were worried their children would imitate the puppy if they read the books.

But it was too bad that when all the other animals his grandmother wrote about were well received, this golden retriever puppy alone was unloved.

So Zhou Ying thought, Then I’ll be the one to like him.

He collected all the editions of the golden retriever stories and treasured them dearly, not letting anyone touch them. Bai Ling was the only one accorded the honor of borrowing privileges.

After Bai Ling had had the pleasure of reading them, he said, “I think this dog sounds like your little brother.”

As he said this, the ‘dog brother’ himself, with great clamor, came out with his latest and greatest stunt, carrying himself with the self-satisfaction of a general returning in triumph: He had gotten a group of friends together to go hunting in the yard. The haul was substantial. They had brought down a number of beetles, a number of centipedes, a number of inchworms, one caterpillar, and two long-whiskered cockroaches.

Such high-end ingredients required only the simplest preparation—the puppy stole his mother’s lighter and roasted his “prey” on the spot, then presented it to his big brother in a little box lined with napkins. He even seasoned it.

But his heartfelt efforts were doomed to meet rejection. His big brother, beholden to no one, gave not the slightest nod to good manners. Without even so much as a thank you, he started rolling up his sleeves.

Bai Ling took this in stride. Amidst the fray, he calmly gathered up Zhou Ying’s precious books with the greatest care and returned them to their place. He decided he was taking back his disrespectful opinion.

A-Ying’s brother was worse than a dog.

III.

Why did Bai Ling feel he could take such a liberty, one might wonder?

He and Zhou Ying had been elementary school classmates, though initially not in the same class. Once when their school organized a trip to the countryside, an earthquake struck the camp, and the two of them were trapped in the ruins for two days and a night, pushing each other to make it through until help arrived. Their friendship was based on surviving mortal peril together.

Actually, that wouldn’t have been enough on its own. Children whose intelligence outpaces their experience always see things they shouldn’t see and understand things they shouldn’t understand. In order to protect themselves, they are forced to construct high walls to keep out the enemy. When an occasional break appears in the moat, only the most suitably shaped little fish can take advantage of it to swim inside.

Bai Ling was that perfect little fish.

Bai Ling’s parents divorced when he was very young, and each went off to form their own family. Neither of them wanted him. He only had his grandmother to raise him. As the old woman aged, she became less and less able to do all that she would have liked for him, and the orphan in her care had no choice but to lean on his own precocity and instinctively seek out a foothold in the wide, uncaring world. The feelers he put out asking for help were subtle, but Zhou Ying received the message and accepted it.

As for Bai Ling’s character… He didn’t make waves at school. He committed no breaches of discipline, didn’t get tangled up in complex school romance polygons, and didn’t try to get attention. He was his homeroom teacher’s favorite class monitor. Put him with Zhou Ying, and he seemed to be a dark lord’s stabilizer.

Though that was a false impression.

Every time they caused trouble, the idea would be Zhou Ying’s, while the plan of execution would be polished up by Class Monitor Bai. When Bai Ling grew up, he naturally became a lawyer with a perfect outward smile, in cahoots with a certain Zhou. He hustled Zhou Ying’s less than amicable father into treatment ahead of time, aiding in his early reunion with his wife.

IV.

Zhou Ying did not necessarily take great pleasure in a life like this. Two hands, as aged as those of the grandmother in the text, moved across the keyboard without clumsiness—after all, these were hands that had played a guqin for centuries. At this point in his writing, he picked up a cigar set beside him and took a puff. He considered the flavor a moment and got nothing from it, so he clicked his tongue and dropped it. He kept writing: But it did not lie to him.

The world didn’t fool him. No fleeting illusions blocked his vision, no mountains conspired to stop his mouth. He was able to face the world directly…so that even if he didn’t like it, he was still willing to hold his nose and go around to have a look.

Many years had passed, and the god Tai Sui, going by the name Peony, was living an irregular life in his old age. He wore his white hair stylishly swept back and went from hotel to hotel, the whole world his home. When he wasn’t eating, drinking, and making merry, he occasionally wrote a little, snippets that didn’t come together into anything.

The Law Breaker’s axiom had been realized, so he could no longer enter the paradise where music could recreate his old friends. But still he wasn’t lonely. No matter how long or short an acquaintance, everyone he had met had left an impression on him.

He was like a stone tablet with the lives of everyone he had ever known carved upon him. For example, from Zhou Ying he had—

Oh, yes, Zhou Ying also had a dark secret. Bai Ling did all his homework when he was little. He was never a good student. He never skipped a grade and often cheated on tests. Even the idlers who hung around in the neighborhood of the school could have bested him academically.

That was just how it had been. Prince Zhuang Manor had housed a group of vassals who could forge Zhou Ying's writing. The classwork he turned in was never his own work. When he grew up he always had Bai Ling use papermen to take his place. The Kaiming and Luwu he directed spent all day studying talismans and didn’t let up even at night, working hard at their cultivation, not knowing that their boss rode in a car every day and went to sleep on time. He never meditated, and he certainly never studied.

He didn’t have a grasp on Detailed Account of Meridians, and he couldn’t draw any talismans at all. Xi Ping suspected he hadn’t even been very steady flying a sword.

When it came to being an ignoramus, san-ge was the master, while Xi Ping at best had inherited a smattering of his teachings.

But back then everyone had said His Highness Prince Zhuang was “fiendishly clever” and “astonishingly talented,” while when it came to him, he was “the most useless wastrel in Jinping,” “the cheater of the Latent Cultivation Temple,” “an illegitimate half-immortal,” “a fake established foundation,” “a disgraceful ascended spirit”… Really, he didn’t know where to go to lodge his complaints!

V.

The more Xi Ping thought about it, the more unfair it seemed to him. He decided to expose some other people’s dark histories, particularly those who didn’t understand Detailed Account of Meridians.

His shifu, for example.

Zhi… He paused. Even in this materialist world where Ways of the Heart had been destroyed, he still did not dare write out shizun’s name. He awkwardly backspaced and wrote instead, A certain well-known member of the Zhi family was a strategist, tactician, and ideological…ideological slitherer-outer.

Had he been born in the era of college entrance exams, he would certainly have been the sort of student who sat in the very back and took it easy. He would have come to class every day regardless of the weather, and his body would sit perfectly upright and attentive while his soul would be wandering elsewhere—maybe he would occasionally listen in math class, as his secondary aspiration was to be an accountant.

Shifu had spent two hundred years cultivating at Xuanyin, and this was precisely how he had spent his time.

Because he was handsome and friendly, and the captain of the school basketball team on top of that, starting in high school he was the first crush of everyone in his own school and several other ones nearby. But he himself was a very late bloomer. It wasn’t only romance that he didn’t understand; even basic human feelings were lost on him. In university a girl invited his entire dorm to see a movie; the whole dorm knew what was up, with the exception of himself. As soon as the male and female main characters started their romance, he fell asleep, but woke up at once when it came time to fight monsters. After the movie, he went to war with his friends writing posts about which monster was the strongest. The girl monitored the battle for a time, pressed “like” on the monster she preferred, then mass blocked the lot of them.

In his youth, when Xi Ping was being punished for various trivial infractions, he had held his nose and helped his shifu arrange his possessions on Flying Jade Peak, and in the process had come across a pile of gifts, full of all kinds of hidden sentiments and intentions—all of these had been received prior to shifu's becoming an ascended spirit. Later, when Great Wan’s heartthrob had become the master of Flying Jade Peak, he was too far above these aspirants, so naturally no one dared be so bold again.

When the filial Xi Ping brought these things out to mock his shifu, all he got in response was a bewildered expression that read “Who are all these people?”

He was well known for his forgetfulness. He regularly erased his own data in games and forgot what he had been doing and who he had been doing it with. He could never even remember his cards—

When he had played cards with Peak Master Wen next door, he’d lost nine out of ten hands.

And in the fishing world, he was commander in chief of coming up empty handed. Despite his limited skills, he was delighted by the game. The less he caught, the more he liked fishing.

In the cold pool at the foot of Flying Jade Peak he had come up empty. In the wild lakes of Jingzhou he had come up empty. And later, when he had removed himself to the Law Breaker, he had remained an automatic fish food dispenser.

At this point, Xi Ping felt a sudden craving for milk tea—shifu had always liked sweets, but he’d had no taste for strong flavors. Had he been born now, he’d almost certainly be ordering a cup a day, with 30% sweetness and no toppings.

Xi Ping decided to order two cups: one for himself, and one as an offering to shifu.

Shifu was neither a god nor a sage; he was the person who had always held up a lantern to light Xi Ping’s way.

VI.

Actually, there was another notable personage who was unfamiliar with Detailed Account of Meridians—though perhaps she had never considered herself a “notable personage.”

Wei Chengxiang was a dropout of the cultivation world. And as soon as she opened her spiritual eyes, she had encountered Zhi Xiu.

Per regulations, a peak master could not divulge Xuanyin’s secret texts to an “evil cultivator,” so Zhi Xiu had exploited a loophole and given her the patched together fragments of what he had worked out for himself after opening his spiritual eyes…which naturally did not include Detailed Account of Meridians.

Miss Wei had a difficult childhood in a poverty-stricken area and lost her parents when she was very young. She was a good student, so the county middle school requested a scholarship for her, a thousand a year. It was just about enough to cover her studies, but it wouldn’t do for anything else—for example, she couldn’t use it to pay her grandfather’s medical expenses

The education level at the county middle school was not particularly good, and its students almost never went on to high school. With a mountain in the way of her developing knowledge, Wei Chengxiang could see no benefit to attending high school herself. So, without consulting anyone, she hitched a ride with a fellow villager and went out to make herself a living.

There are hundreds of thousands of ways to make a living, but it seemed that none of them were open to a poor girl with nowhere to turn. And Miss Wei’s fellow villager wasn’t an upstanding person. Knowing she was alone and unsupported, his greed got the better of him, and he sold her to a human trafficker. But she got lucky. When she stood on the precipice of fate, a gust of wind blew her away from the edge—a middle-aged woman who had been kidnapped by the traffickers and forced to help them secretly loosened her bonds.

Wei Chengxiang escaped and went to the police, but the human trafficking gang had already made a break for it. Her ailing grandfather meanwhile had departed the mortal world while she was out of contact. She had no home to return to, so she could only walk forward into the darkness. She picked up odd jobs and did a bit of business. Later she ran into some dumb luck. She mixed with people from all walks of life and made herself a bit of a fortune. She was commonly known as Wei-laoban. She even endowed a foundation dedicated to ending human trafficking.

VII.

Wei-laoban eventually became very successful and did a great deal of work in the public interest, but for some reason, stories always went around that she wasn’t an honest businessperson and that she’d had illegal dealings overseas.

Because of this scurrilous gossip, a reckless newbie reporter investigated her.

This reporter was upright and courageous, with an excellent education. She was just a little artless. The investigation she believed to be covert was in fact more obvious than lice on a bald pate. Very soon she was brought before Wei-laoban.

Wei-laoban had no reason to fear investigation; she was just mischievous. Her reputation was already bad, and she wasn’t at all properly behaved. She flirted glibly with the young reporter, and after that there was no getting rid of her. The reporter took offense and carried it forward for over a decade. At that point, Wei-laoban was still Wei-laoban, but the reporter’s grudge had turned her into Editor-in-Chief Zhao, and real feeling had grown out of her attacks on Wei-laoban.

By a series of coincidences, Editor-in-Chief Zhao learned of the things Wei Chengxiang had experienced in her youth and called in many favors, managing in the end to find a lead. So, at long last, that human trafficking gang was arrested and brought to justice. Wei Chengxiang hastily sought the whereabouts of the woman who had rescued her, but she found nothing good.

After blowing her to safety, that wind had scattered and vanished.

Having spent all the early part of her life as an “evil cultivator,” Wei-laoban had either grown accustomed to concealment or else, despite her outward easy temper, still harbored resentment for the “orthodox path.” She simply wouldn’t agree to have her statue erected in the new capital of Southern He. But it wasn’t up to her. The last word went to the survivors—ultimately, Southern He’s “Fire God” had ended up with Wei-laoban’s face.

More recently, the story of the Fire God had been turned into a TV drama, and just like all the other gods she was pulled into onscreen romances. Mr. Peony had skimmed through the drama and nearly laughed himself sick.

Though the Fire God’s name had not changed—she was popularly known as “Chunying” to this day.

He thought that if A-Xiang were still around, she would be happy enough to answer to the name “Chunying.”