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“Genie,” she said, rubbing her knuckles against my scalp.
“Were you waiting here for us?” I said. “How did you know where we’d be?”
“I had a feeling,” Quentin said, his voice even more robotic than his stance.
Oh, right. Our “mystical connection that spanned time and space, forever linking our souls in the most intimate manner imaginable.” Pfft. Whatever.
I put Guanyin down so I could take in our surroundings properly. Behind the other gods was a forest, thick and dense enough to house a horde of German witches. There were barely any gaps between the trunks, and the canopy seemed to replace the sky itself. Quentin and Guanyin were right; the geography here wiped its butt with Earth-based standards.
The Great White Planet stared at the woods with a face of extreme worry. “There’s been many false starts to our adventure, but without a doubt it ends here, one way or another.”
I didn’t need to turn true sight on to confirm his statement. Being this close to the gigantic source of qi, I could feel the troubling energy on my skin in rhythmic waves, like something breathing on me. Rather than having to detect its presence, we had to mentally block it out so as not to lose our minds.
“Princess Iron Fan may have been the one who defeated Ao Guang and attacked the yaoguai, but whatever this phenomenon is, it’s orders of magnitude more powerful than her,” the Great White Planet said. “If it grows any stronger it could crush entire realms of existence under the mass of its energy.”
He reached into his robes and pulled out his notebook. I thought he was going to scribble more in it, but he shocked me by tearing out his older pages entirely and crumpling them in his fist. The notebook was much thinner now, with only a thin sheaf of blank space remaining.
“I’m declaring that the Mandate Challenge is still ongoing,” he said. He gestured toward the woods. “Whoever can safeguard Heaven and Earth and all the planes in between against that will be the victor.”
“Oh come on!” Erlang Shen snapped. He was either protesting the Great White Planet’s decision to cancel his previous victories or the fact that Guan Yu had the edge of his halberd pressed against his neck.
Good on Guan Yu for showing initiative. “What, are you going to whine when things don’t break exactly your way for once?” I said to Erlang Shen. “Because that would be a pretty spineless move of you.”
“I’m saying there is no fighting whatever ‘that’ is,” he said, wiggling his fingers in air quotes, a gesture that was probably lost on the more traditional gods. “If whatever’s out there is many times stronger t
han Princess Iron Fan, then we don’t have any hope of beating it. I say better to leave it alone and hope it doesn’t stir. Now that we’re together, we can combine our powers to figure out a way off this blasted plane.”
“We already tried opening a portal while we waited for you, and it fizzled,” Guanyin said. “That energy source is like a dwarf star pulling us in and trapping us on its surface. Spiritual gravity, remember?”
Erlang Shen swore up and down. He was the one who’d explained the concept to me in the first place. Spiritual power attracted spiritual power like magnets, the smaller charge getting stuck to the larger. That was why yaoguai tended to cluster around me in the Bay Area. I couldn’t imagine what kind of power was needed to immobilize Guanyin, Sun Wukong, and three other full-fledged gods.
“We can’t get back to Heaven, and Genie can’t get back to Earth, until we shut down the source of that qi,” Guanyin said. “The only way out is through.”
Erlang Shen grimaced. Part of it was that he wanted to call the game early while he was still winning. But there was another emotion behind his mask, one I recognized because I’d put it in him before. The god was afraid. He didn’t want to confront the monster in the forest. By the looks on everyone’s faces, no one did. I could tell they were thinking of Nezha, how the young god’s power and immortality had failed him.
“Welcome to our world,” I said.
The assembled divinities looked at me, confused.
“Now you know what we humans feel like,” I said. I could smell the hospital disinfectant as I spoke and could see my mother’s thin hands worry her nails as she tried to be brave in front of me. “We’re afraid. We’re vulnerable. We have no control over when death comes for us. Life isn’t some grand adventuring quest where each setback is really a leap forward to victory. Sometimes you get set back into the dirt six feet deep, and there you stay.”
I knew Guanyin already understood this. I was trying to deliver the message to Guan Yu and Erlang Shen in case one of them ended up the new King of Heaven. The Great White Planet needed to hear it, too, for the next time he tried to dungeon master a Mandate Challenge without concern for who might perish in the upheaval.
“So yeah,” I said. “Welcome to the party.”
Guan Yu chuckled. “Aye, the child is full of wisdom. What a paradise the Protectorate of California must be, under her reign.”
I didn’t tell him that California was jacked up beyond my control. “Are we forging on, then?”
“It would be prudent to rest and regain our strength first,” Guan Yu said. “A good tactician knows when to exercise caution.”
“I’m with the general,” Erlang Shen said. “If you’re putting me through the crap of having to win the Mandate Challenge twice, then I’m doing it at a hundred percent and nothing less.”
I glanced at Guanyin. She made a shrug saying she didn’t disagree.
“Okay,” I said. “How do gods recharge?” I knew Guanyin sometimes mentioned needing to do so, but she’d never revealed the details. “Do you sleep? Meditate? Power down like robots?”
My curiosity earned me a round of annoyed stares, including Guanyin’s. “I’ll . . . give you your privacy and go take a nap over there,” I said, pointing over my shoulder.
