Chapter 47: The Mirror of Romance and Moonlight

“You two scoundrels are really bold!”
Bound to a chair and wrapped up like a zongzi, Heiyun struggled desperately to break free. “It’s a serious crime to unlawfully restrict the freedom of a public official!”

The Junior Lord Tai Shang replied unhurriedly, “Heiyun, let’s not make things difficult for everyone. Just help us open the passage to the mortal world. Otherwise, if I make a mistake and accidentally shave all your hair, you’ll end up a monk—no, a nun. That would be awkward, wouldn’t it?”

Heiyun turned her gaze to Huasheng. “Huasheng, I saved your life once!”

Huasheng smiled bitterly and pleaded, “Sister Heiyun! You know our classmate was taken away! The mortal world must be in dire straits! We only want to rescue the suffering. Please, dear sister! Help us just this once—turn a blind eye and let us go to the mortal world!”

“Bah! One of you plays the good cop, the other the bad cop! You think I can’t tell? Privately allowing residents of Sacred Pingning to travel to the mortal world is also a serious crime. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days in prison.” Heiyun gritted her teeth. “Huasheng, you’re truly ungrateful. I helped you apply for a scholarship, and if I hadn’t sent you pocket money every month, you wouldn’t even have had money for underwear! If I’d known, Baiye and I should’ve let you sink to the bottom of the sea to feed the sharks!”

Heiyun’s words were perfectly justified. Thinking of tying up his benefactress like a dumpling, Huasheng was overcome with shame and wished he could crawl into a hole.

“Confucius said it well, Heiyun—let’s not hurt our own unity.”

“Nonsense! That’s Confucius?”

“The purpose of ritual is harmony. Who else but Confucius?”

“Why do you only quote half the sentence?” Heiyun was relentless. “The rest goes: ‘But not to compromise principle for harmony. To know harmony but not to regulate it by ritual is also not right.’”

“A true civil servant—so well versed in the classics,” the Junior Lord Tai Shang conceded with a grin. “If you help us today, I’ll put in a good word with my grandfather, the Grand Supreme Elder Lord, and get you a promotion and a raise!”

“Get lost! If your grandfather finds out what you’re up to, he’ll skin you alive!” Heiyun remained resolute and unmoved.

“How could he? He only has one grandson—skinning me would break his heart.” The Junior Lord was unconcerned. “But as for you—if I can’t get you promoted, I can certainly get you demoted…”

Heiyun was stunned.

“If we get caught returning, I’ll just say you incited us to go to the mortal world. I’m quite capable of dragging someone else down with me. Heh heh heh!”

“You really are a scoundrel!” This time it was Huasheng who spoke.

The Junior Lord turned to Huasheng. “Hey! You stole her line? Where’s your conscience? I’m on your side, after all.”

Huasheng replied, “At a time like this, a bit of shamelessness is exactly what we need. Besides, you play the scoundrel so naturally it hardly feels like acting. Please, continue your performance.”

“Is that a compliment?” asked the Junior Lord.

“Or is it that you’ve always wanted to sneak off and play in the mortal world?”

The Junior Lord was caught off guard. “That sounds terrible!”

“I knew it—I hit the nail on the head!” Huasheng suddenly realized.

The Junior Lord didn’t answer. He took his foot off Heiyun’s chair and, face growing serious, said, “Heiyun, let’s be frank. Sacred Pingning hasn’t had any dealings with the mortal world for a thousand years, but you must have heard—something big happened at the Academy of the Dao. The Black Tortoise Serpent has been resurrected and escaped to the mortal world, even abducting a secretary from the student council. This has never happened before. I know how the immortals of Sacred Pingning will argue about what to do—it’ll take ten days or half a month before they reach a decision.

“But we can’t just stand by while our fellow students are in danger. So even if Sacred Pingning ignores the mortal world, we still have to go rescue our classmate. If you’d just let us go, it would be a good deed, much better than learning later that a young disciple died in the mortal world and regretting you could have helped but didn’t. Besides, time is of the essence. To save a life is greater than building a seven-story pagoda—to save an immortal life, seventy pagodas! Please, Sister Heiyun, make an exception!”

Heiyun was silent in the face of the Junior Lord’s righteous appeal.

“You’re just trying both hard and soft tactics. Even if you knock me out—” Heiyun lowered her head, “I’ll never tell you the passage to the mortal world is hidden in the scroll behind me.”

“You’re a clever one, Heiyun.” The Junior Lord patted the wall behind her. Instantly, Heiyun was struck by a spell and fell into a deep sleep.

He then said to Huasheng, “Told you. Civil servants are all geniuses.”

He looked at the wall behind Heiyun. There, pasted along the entire surface, was a long scroll made up of hundreds of manuscript pages, densely covered in writing.

Huasheng leaned in for a closer look. It appeared to be an excerpt from a chapter-style novel from the Ming or Qing dynasty, but it didn’t start at the beginning. The first page read, “Chapter Eighty-One.”

He read a few lines and saw the name “Jia Baoyu.”

“This, on the wall—it’s Dream of the Red Chamber!”

“Yes,” replied the Junior Lord. “The book known today in the mortal world as Dream of the Red Chamber was originally titled The Story of the Stone. It had other names too, such as The Record of the Passionate Monk, Mirror of Love, and The Twelve Beauties of Jinling.”

Huasheng glanced across the wall. There were forty chapters in all, ending with Chapter 120.

“Why only the second half?”

“The first eighty chapters are in the mortal world.”

“Wait, I remember as a child reading Dream of the Red Chamber—it was 120 chapters.”

“Have you heard of someone named Zhiyanzhai?”

“I heard he was Cao Xueqin’s friend and annotated the book. Some editions even print the Zhiyanzhai commentary.”

“When Cao Xueqin was alive, he completed the full manuscript, but the last forty chapters were lost before his death. Later, he tried to finish them, but due to illness, he never did. His friend Zhiyanzhai published the first eighty chapters, renaming it The Story of the Stone according to the preface from the Jiaxu year. Later, someone named Cheng Weiyuan in the Qing dynasty commissioned Gao E to write the last forty, publishing the whole as 120 chapters under the name Dream of the Red Chamber.”

“So what are these forty chapters on the wall?”

“They’re Cao Xueqin’s original handwritten manuscript.”

“Heavens! How did Cao Xueqin’s original end up here?” Huasheng gently touched the yellowed pages of this legendary masterpiece.

The Junior Lord carefully searched the manuscript for something.

“In fact, before Zhiyanzhai died, he found the forty chapters Cao Xueqin had written earlier—some say he’d always had them. But at the time, the Qing dynasty was persecuting writers, so he never dared reveal them. On his deathbed, he encountered the immortal Lan Caihe, who was traveling the mortal world, and entrusted the forty chapters to him to save them from destruction. Lan Caihe brought them to Sacred Pingning for safekeeping.

“Many masterpieces lost in the mortal world are actually preserved in Sacred Pingning—like my Ganjiang and Moye swords. These treasures are not destroyed but carefully kept here, which may be their best fate. Who would have thought this peerless novel would serve as the passage between Sacred Pingning and the mortal world?”

Huasheng was amazed. “I have to see the real ending!”

“Lin Daiyu still dies, of course. She drowns. It’s just the manner of her death that differs,” said the Junior Lord.

At that moment, footsteps echoed from the corridor outside.

Huasheng’s face tensed with worry. “We have to get out! If anyone sees Heiyun like that, we’ll never escape!”

“I should have realized! There’s a reason Sacred Pingning chose this book for the primordial Dao!”

“What has it to do with Dream of the Red Chamber?”

“Sacred Pingning was built from a single tear of Avalokiteshvara. And in the mortal world, what tear could compare to the ‘repaying a tear’ motif in Dream of the Red Chamber, the foremost of the Four Great Classical Novels? More importantly, since this original manuscript is unique, Sacred Pingning can control the passage. But in the mortal world, countless copies exist—meaning any copy of Dream of the Red Chamber can serve as an exit!”

“We must hurry!” Huasheng heard the steps growing closer.

The Junior Lord quickly searched the final chapters. “Help me look!”

“For what?”

“We need the character ‘tear’—the final tear of the Crimson Pearl Fairy, Lin Daiyu!”

Huasheng hunted through the text and finally found the character “tear.” To its left, a drop of ink glittered gold.

“This is it! The tear that links Sacred Pingning to the mortal world!” the Junior Lord cried. “With the power of the decree!”

The golden ink burst into dazzling light. The Junior Lord seized Huasheng’s hand and leapt into the radiance!

The passage wasn’t long. Bathed in golden light, they traversed in a flash and found themselves in a narrow space. As they steadied themselves, a roar of noise filled their ears, and it felt as cold as a freezer. All around them were messy heaps of luggage.

The Junior Lord shivered. “I thought we’d end up in a bookstore. Where is this? Looks like a warehouse.”

Huasheng examined the piles of suitcases and bags, all tightly netted. The deafening engine roar made it feel like a factory, the noise numbing his mind.

He had to raise his voice so the Junior Lord could hear. “It’s too noisy—let’s use wall-walking to get out of here.”

“What?” The Junior Lord didn’t catch that.

Huasheng shouted at the top of his lungs, “Let’s use wall-walking to get out!”

“Alright!” The Junior Lord gave a thumbs up.

They formed hand seals and chanted, passing downward through the floor. As they moved through the space below, a female voice suddenly blared from a nearby speaker:

“Ladies and gentlemen, we will soon be arriving at Shanghai Pudong International Airport. Please fasten your seatbelts, stow your tray tables, and open your window shades.”

A rush of wind and the thunder of engines swept over Huasheng.

“Whoa!”

He realized he was floating in midair. Looking up, a Boeing passenger jet roared past, its belly skimming his hair.

So they’d been in the cargo hold of a civilian airliner all along—who would have thought that the copy of Dream of the Red Chamber that led back to the mortal world was on a plane?

Books ought to be in bookstores, shouldn’t they?

As the airliner soared overhead, the two began to fall.

“Hey, hey! Free-fall!” Huasheng exclaimed. The sensation was just like parachuting, except he had no parachute.

Below, the city blazed with lights that turned night into day—Shanghai’s Lujiazui district shimmering in magnificent splendor.

“What a lively metropolis!” The Junior Lord shaped his body into a spindle and shot downward faster.

“Oh no, I’m so nervous I can’t remember the incantation for cloud-riding!” Huasheng fumbled in panic.

“You never study until you’re in a jam!”

A flash of inspiration struck Huasheng—he grabbed the Junior Lord’s leg.

“What are you doing?”

“Isn’t this the perfect time to hang on to a thigh?” Huasheng replied.

“Shame on you!” The Junior Lord shot him a withering glare.

Slowly, the two drifted down and landed atop the broadcast antenna at the very peak of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai’s Lujiazui.