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What little logic that remained to me, after the fires of shock and dread had burned my mind to ashes, was expecting a massive, horrible head to poke its way out of the hole. Humanlike, to match the arms. Or perhaps an animal’s, like a yaoguai. But no head came. Instead the titanic shoulders that emerged had nothing in between them.
The headless, mountainous torso rose into the air, a tectonic act, a new range forming, until it paused, seemingly stuck by its waist. Its pectorals blinked. They blinked. Like eyes. Right where its nipples would have been, the skin of its chest folded rapidly in the unmistakable pattern of a pair of eyes adjusting to the light.
“Nüwa have mercy on us,” the Great White Planet whispered, his entire body reliving a nightmare. “It’s a Primordial!”
“Xing Tian,” the Jade Emperor said. “The embodiment of resistance. It is hundun, chaos, un-creation. The destruction that constantly lurks behind the veil.” He gazed upward at the monster with an almost appreciative calmness, in the same way a skier might stop to recognize the beauty of an oncoming avalanche. For the moment, it was far enough away that it was still a landmark.
“Xing Tian cannot be killed,” he said. “It cannot be fought to any end. When it rouses, it can only be appeased and suppressed, as it has been for eons by the holder of the mandate. I originally came here to reinforce the wards that keep it from tearing through the boundaries of Heaven and Earth and obliterating the Universe.”
The missing piece. I understood everything now. The Jade Emperor had detected Xing Tian stirring and rushed here to contain the threat. But he didn’t want to be trapped in this duty forever, when someone else could possibly shoulder the burden.
In a spectacular display of wu wei, letting events unfold to his advantage, he waited for a Mandate Challenge to be called in his absence, knowing that strong gods would step up. He’d sent Princess Iron Fan to filter out the most powerful challenger and discard the rest. The plan had been to swap whichever god it was into the job of keeping Xing Tian at bay, like a fresh battery.
It was Atlas tricking Hercules into holding up the firmament in his stead. And the rest of us had fallen for the gambit, right until the point where I’d veered off script.
Finally comprehending the chain of events that led us here did absolutely nothing for our situation. The thing blotting out the sky twisted around. The false eyes on its chest lowered their gaze until they spotted our group standing there, dumbfounded.
Xing Tian’s reaction was as immediate as ours was slow. I’d never truly appreciated the term abomination before I saw it painted on the giant’s expression. Its eyes turned to furious slits, and the torso’s cavernous navel suddenly expanded to encompass its entire waist, forming a fleshy abyss like a whirlpool out of Greek myth.
It’s screaming at us, I thought. It hates us more than anything in the world. Its very purpose is to hate us.
Had Xing Tian lungs connected to its navel-mouth, I was one hundred percent sure that the noise from its roar would have liquefied us outright. But the colossus was horrifically silent, making our voices sound like they were cutting through the aftermath of an explosion.
“Run!” the Great White Planet said. Whatever level of familiarity he had with these types of beings gave him his wits back while the rest of us were stunned stupid. “We have to run!”
The Jade Emperor laughed again. “Where? Now that it’s fully awake, it’ll pull down the walls of the Universe.”
“Anywhere but here!” the Great White Planet snapped.
This time there was no need to carry the old man. Terror made us all equally speedy. We sprinted back in the direction we came, even the Jade Emperor with his defeatist attitude. For someone who’d accepted his fate, he was pretty damn fast.
The sky turned darker over our heads.
A ponderous crash behind us nearly sent me flying into the air. I glanced back to see we’d just managed to avoid getting squashed by the monument of Xing Tian’s hand, slapping the ground. From its position stuck in the rift, it’d flung itself out as far as it could reach to try and kill us. It was so big it had crossed the distance with one flop.
It wasn’t going to stay stuck long. The hand clawed into the ground, fingernails punching deep into the stone. Xing Tian pulled with the force of a million pack animals and heaved forward, a man on the verge of successfully climbing out of the ice he’d fallen through.
The shadow from its other hand loomed overhead, blotting out the light. We were going to get crushed if we stayed our course. Maybe the gods of Heaven had watched as many terrible movies as me where people were flattened by trying to outrace a rolling boulder, because we all cut sharply to the side, right in the nick of time. The gust of wind from Xing Tian’s falling-log fingers twisted my knees up and sent me tumbling.
Is this what it’s like to fight me? I thought as I hit my head on the stone floor. How completely unfair.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Jade Emperor open a portal for himself with great difficulty. Xing Tian’s spiritual gravity made it no sure thing. The King of Heaven wriggled through the miniscule window, disappearing down to his thighs before the rift snapped shut, leaving chunks of his legs behind. He’d simply regenerate them later.
I hadn’t the notion to be upset about his comical, lizard-like escape. If nowhere was safe from Xing Tian, then the most the Jade Emperor had secured himself was dying in his own bed.
Quentin picked me up off the ground. “We have to make a stand!” I yelled. “Why aren’t we fighting?”
“We can’t!” Quentin said, echoing the now-gone Jade Emperor. “It’s more than a god! It’s a concept! It’s resistance itself! It can fight back forever until it wears us down and kills us!”
He pulled me away from the giant hand that was beginning to stir again, and I heard the unthinkable spill from his lips.
“We lose, Genie!” he said. “There’s nothing we can do! We’ve lost, and it’s over!”
I couldn’t believe it. Quentin would never say that. Not when the two of us were together and there was something left to struggle against.
Xing Tian pulled back both of its hands this time
, opting to push itself upward instead of pull itself along the ground any farther. Its torso raised into the air, a gigantic barn being raised, nearly causing a vacuum in the atmosphere. It shifted ponderously, like it was getting ready to try standing up for the first time. I couldn’t imagine how big it would be if it got to its feet. We all backed away from its growing height.
