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“None of you have any idea how long I’ve waited to do this!” Erlang Shen roared. “A year passes on Earth for every day in Heaven? Well, a decade passes in Hell for every day on Earth! A decade of torment for EACH! DAY!”
Erlang Shen was far away. Tinny. Ringed by darkness. I was having an out-of-body experience watching him. Despite everything that had transpired between us, I was overcome with only one desire: to scream at him to run away. To save himself.
He stood before the Jade Emperor and gripped his uncle by the shoulder with one hand, raising his weapon high with the other.
“Here’s to a better Universe,” Erlang Shen said. He plunged the weapon down.
The Jade Emperor caught the tip of the blade with his fingers. The water evaporated.
Erlang Shen lost his balance and stumbled forward. The Jade Emperor reached up with his other hand and gripped his nephew by the throat.
Making a slow, deliberate show of it, the King of Heaven finally, fully opened his eyes, sending a fresh wave of annihilating power over us. He looked at the group in turn, the Great White Planet, Guanyin, me, Quentin, and Guan Yu, pointedly ignoring the strangled cries of Erlang Shen.
He got to his knees, and then to his feet, never taking his hand off his nephew. The motion caused his robes to slip from his shoulders, revealing a body that had been flensed of its former softness. He was covered in thick knots of tendons and ligaments like a braided bullwhip, and each twitch of his muscles caused Erlang Shen to gag in pain.
“Children,” he spat at us. He made the word sound like the most vile kind of creature imaginable. “You complete and utter children.”
Erlang Shen hammered at the Jade Emperor’s wrist, but his attempts to free himself were no more effective than a schoolyard bully back home trying to escape Quentin’s wrath. The difference in strength was that big.
“You ingrates have no idea what I do for you! You mock me when you think I’m not looking! You spit on my commands! And the first chance you get, you try to replace me, just like I knew you would! I counted on your treachery! You’re nothing but children! Grasping, overweening children!”
He shook Erlang Shen like a rag doll. “And why are you here?” the Jade Emperor screamed in his nephew’s face. “How did you manage to worm your way out of Hell and into the Mandate Challenge?”
The missing piece that I’d mentioned to Quentin. It was being unveiled, inch by inch. But I still didn’t know where it fit yet. The Jade Emperor had planned for a Mandate Challenge to occur in his absence, but why? Why disappear in the first place?
“My flesh and blood,” the King of Heaven said, summoning a fresh reserve of contempt. “How pathetic you look. Do you miss your eye? Is that what this is about? Here!”
He viciously smashed his own forehead into his nephew’s. The blow tore a gash in Erlang Shen’s skin like an old scar had been reopened. The blood that flowed down the rain god’s face made a pattern, a crying wound where a third eye could have been once.
“Do you know why I never listened to you?” the Jade Emperor said. “Why I kept you in your place?”
Tears streamed down Erlang Shen’s face, mixing with his blood. He couldn’t get a sound out around his tongue blocking his throat.
“The reason I treated you like garbage i
s because you were garbage,” the Jade Emperor said to him. “I bet not once while you were brooding in the shadows, plotting your revenge, did you ever realize that you were useless trash. You assumed I was afraid of your power? No. I was never afraid of you, boy. I rejected you because you were too weak to help me rule. You always were.”
With a final sob, Erlang Shen gave up. Stopped resisting. The most defiant person I had ever met closed his eyes and accepted his fate.
The Jade Emperor crushed his neck.
? ? ?
It was the lightness. The utter lack of weight the Jade Emperor gave to any of us. I had known how little he cared about humans, but to see him cast aside his own family was more than I could stand.
I screamed, and to my surprise, the Jade Emperor heard me. He looked at me and tossed the corpse of Erlang Shen to the ground, where it lay still and bent. His nephew already forgotten, not worth wiping his hand over.
The Jade Emperor stuck his tongue out and wagged his head in sarcastic, undignified mockery of my incomprehension. “You look confused,” he said. “Since there’s nothing more disgusting than a face of an idiot human who doesn’t know what’s going on, I’ll tell you what this is about.”
He extended his finger. Not to point at me. But at Guanyin.
“I needed her,” he said. “The Goddess of Mercy.” He gestured at Guan Yu, the Great White Planet, and Quentin, all of whom were still locked up by his raw power. “The rest of you are chaff. I don’t know how Princess Iron Fan managed to let so many of you survive, but no matter. The witch sent me what I asked for.”
The Jade Emperor left me reeling as he closed in on Guanyin. There was no end to how much I’d ruined everything, no bottom to the pit I’d dragged us into. She wouldn’t have been here if not for me. I was a living, walking mistake, and my friend was going to suffer for it.
Guanyin made eye contact with me, her gaze full of desperation. I saw one of her arms twisted behind her back, her fingers working over a spell. She was using her body to hide the motions from the Jade Emperor. I couldn’t tell what she was casting until a warm glow appeared to the side of me.
It was a portal.
