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Quentin and Guanyin had to restrain me from grabbing the pen and shoving it up his nose.
“Tea!” Guanyin shouted as she twisted one of my arms into a hammerlock. “We should have some tea and catch up. It would be nice to sit down with a drink instead of being under the hot sun, no?”
The Great White Planet’s eyes lit up, and he put away the Red Pen of Doom. “That sounds like a wonderful idea,” he said. “There is a particular Earthly confection I’m interested in trying.”
? ? ?
I stared at the Great White Planet from across the table in the bubble tea shop, plotting out how I could grab his booklet and force-feed it to him. My best option seemed to be waiting for him to slip on the greasy, canola-oiled floors.
The cafe was right around the corner from a more popular one that served the same menu, so we didn’t bother with disguises or illusions or the like. The clerk was sitting in the back unhygienically on the prep counter, more interested in his phone than the Great White Planet’s odd robes. If anyone cared, we could have passed him off as a cosplayer.
In our booth the old man sipped his boba’ed, jellied, foamed abomination through an extra-wide straw with satisfaction.
“I think there’s been an issue with communication,” the Great White Planet said as he wiped milk froth off his mustache. “No one ever gave you the inside track on what having the mandate of the Jade Emperor means.”
Guanyin got a little defensive upon hearing him suggest she’d failed at bringing me up to speed, though she hid it much better than me. “We explained to Genie that the source of her authority on Earth comes from the fact that the Jade Emperor granted her his official approval. The exact same way that early human kings were dependent on Heaven’s favor to rule their lands.”
Quentin and Guanyin had indeed explained it to me. And I’d expressed my distaste for the lesson vehemently. In my opinion, the reason the demons did what I told them was because they didn’t want me punching them straight into the bowels of Hell.
Plus I hated what the whole concept of a mandate implied. The idea that you could only hold power because a higher-up gave you permission was utterly terrible. That meant your personal merit counted for nothing. The well-being and opinions of the people you were supposed to be leading counted for nothing.
“Yes, but what can be given can be taken away,” the Great White Planet said. “When a king of old lost favor with Heaven by making one too many mistakes, the gods withdrew their mandate and visited disaster upon him until he was overthrown. The mandate passed on to the new leader, who was able to overcome said disaster and right the course of governance.”
“I know my actual Chinese history, thanks,” I said. I was better versed in Things That Had Really Happened than legend and folklore. “The Zhou Dynasty supplanted the Shang Dynasty, the Qin took over from the Zhou, and so on and so on. The conquerors always used the idea of a mandate to justify and legitimize their conquests. Which to me smacks of post-hoc rationalization, survivorship bias, and a whole bunch of other logical fallacies. Someone takes advantage of a flood or a famine to create a violent rebellion, beheads the ruler, and then screams ‘Look at me, I have the mandate now.’”
The Great White Planet poked at the slush gathered at the bottom of his drink. “You have a point. To an ordinary human being, the concept of a mandate can be opaque. But it’s a little harder to argue when the god who personally judged those rulers over several millennia is sitting right in front of you.” He stared at me while making a slurp of great import.
Even though he seemed to be more concerned with getting his pearl-to-liquid ratio right, the Great White Planet’s words carried a load of warning. That big red pen of his had caused the fall of empires. I had been right to fear it.
“The big lesson here is that everyone can be replaced if they’re not doing their job well enough,” he said. “You can be replaced. I can be replaced. Hell, the Jade Emperor can be replaced.”
The atmosphere went rigid. I certainly had my opinions about the King of Heaven, given how many problems he’d dropped in my lap. But the one time I’d brought up the scenario of him not being in charge, Guanyin had nearly drawn and quartered me. The hierarchy was to be respected. Insubordination was not tolerated.
Maybe that rule didn’t apply to the person doing the judging. I tried dipping a toe in the water, carefully. “I’m a little confused. I thought the Jade Emperor passed out mandates, not held them. Are you saying he’s subject to the same laws as the rest of us?”
“King of Heaven is an office,” the Great White Planet said. “And the Jade Emperor didn’t always hold it. So while deference is certainly due, the answer is yes. He is playing the same game. And right now he’s not scoring as high as he used to.”
Oh my god. God gossip. About one of my least favorite gods. I fought to prevent a massive grin from spreading over my face.
“Oh nooo,” I said in a register of polite concern. “How so?”
“Well, to begin with, there was the whole embarrassment with his nephew.”
“Embarrassment” was a funny way of boiling down my efforts to stop the rogue god Erlang Shen from destroying the Bay Area and usurping the throne of Heaven to a family squabble. A tiff really. I was barely even there when it happened.
Still, I was glad that the King of Heaven hadn’t gotten away unscathed. It was immensely gratifying to know his negligence had caused him to lose face. “To begin with?” I said as demurely as I could, ravenous for the next course. “You mean there’s more?”
“Yes. So far he’s done nothing about the massive demonic energy that’s been gathering in the cosmos.” My nascent smile vanished. That wasn’t funny at all. I wanted tea spilled, not blood.
“Back that up a bit,” I said. “What exactly is gathering where?”
The Great White Planet brushed a bit of candied debris off his mustache. “Not long ago, a very, very hefty source of demon qi was detected in the Blissful Planes.”
Guanyin preempted my next question. “A Blissful Plane is like another layer of existence in the Universe,” she explained in a hurry. She looked as concerned as I felt and didn’t want to waste time. “Imagine reality as a book. You know, a real one with paper. Heaven, Hell, and Earth would only be three of the pages. There are many other realms, each one physically separate from the other, full of lesser spirits and yaoguai who aren’t evil enough to be consigned to Diyu.”
“I used to live in one,” Quentin said. “The Mountain of Flowers and Fruit.”
“Okay, so alternate dimensions,” I said. The concept was easy enough to grasp after the mystical wackiness I’d been through last year. “I want to hear about this demon energy. What’s causing it?”
