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Except for Guanyin.
? ? ?
At that moment, I would have sworn up and down that somehow, Erlang Shen had planted his future-glimpsing eye in my forehead, as some kind of parting curse. Because I could see the threads of possibilities weaving themselves together into one singular outcome.
“What are you doing?” Quentin shouted at her. “You can’t fight it!”
Guanyin smiled, and her face shone with light. “Since when am I a fighter?”
She beckoned Guan Yu closer and whispered in the general’s ear. The stoic god’s face crumbled. He nodded and muttered something back.
“No!” I cried. I tried to grab her and pull her away from Xing Tian, but Guan Yu tackled me by the waist as hard as he could and ran in the other direction.
“Quentin!” I screamed. I tried to find purchase with my feet so I could push back. “You can’t let her! Stop her!”
Quentin shared one last glance with Guanyin, their centuries of friendship unable to buy them a proper farewell. She pointed with her chin at me, and Quentin turned away with tears streaming down his face. He caught up with Guan Yu and grabbed me right when I almost slipped free. Together they managed to keep me from digging my heels in.
I could no longer hear what I was screaming. Guanyin walked up to Xing Tian.
The monster had shoved one knee under itself, readying to get up. But upon spotting the easy prey, it clasped its hands together above its headless shoulders in a double hammer-fist. It wanted more than to kill her. It wanted to erase her existence.
Xing Tian’s hands came plummeting down. In response, Guanyin whipped her arm upward, as if she were hurling a submarine fastball. Her motion ended with a snap of her fingers.
The behemoth stopped where it was. But the stay of execution was short-lived. There was too much of Xing Tian, and it was too strong. It broke through Guanyin’s fourth-dimensional restraints, the only being I had ever seen do that, and resumed its deathblow.
Guanyin seemed to have expected this. She hurled another invisible fireball of time at the hands coming to crush her, and they stopped again.
This wasn’t a solution. Xing Tian kept powering through her magic, reaching her in stuttering steps like a buffering video stream. It truly could not be resisted. Guanyin’s barrage of time freezes lasted shorter and shorter, until the monster’s massive fists lay right over her. The skin on its chest was folded into a tortured caricature of rage.
In her last moment, she reached up and placed her welcoming hands on Xing Tian’s. It was then I saw what had eluded everyone else but her—how much pain and suffering this creature was in.
And that much pain, the Goddess of Mercy would never ignore.
Guanyin released all of her good karma. All of it.
? ? ?
To call the wave of energy similar to a bomb blast would have been an act of disrespect. There was nothing dangerous or hurtful about the glow that wrapped snugly around us. It was bliss. A state of grace. This was what the denizens of Hell must have experienced all those years ago when Guanyin’s freely given blessings washed away their sins.
And the cruelest thing about it was that when the light receded, her body was still there. In a twisted way, I wanted her to be smashed to bits. Vaporized. If there was nothing left of her, then I could have struggled through the guilt of abandoning her to her fate.
But she and Xing Tian were both present, motionless. The giant had been trying to crush her, but now, in its kneeling posture, with its hands clasped and extended, it looked like it was praying to the goddess for relief.
Mercy had been granted. Xing Tian’s mockery of a face was no longer in agony. It was calm and still, as if it were an acolyte in the presence of its master.
Guanyin stood before her supplicant. She was as perfect and beautiful and lifeless as the statue in a shrine. She was gone.
? ? ?
I surged forward again, only to be caught by Quentin.
“Genie,” he funeral-whispered. His face was wet against my side. “If we wake Xing Tian, her sacrifice will have meant nothing.”
I pounded my fist on his back, hard enough to injure him. He made no noise as I hit him over and over again. Quentin only hugged me tighter and tighter as my strength sapped away. My arm fell on him one last time, and I broke down sobbing. My chest collapsed under the weight of despair, and I gasped without end.
A large glow appeared in the air close to us, demonic purple instead of Heavenly amber, and a furry snout poked through.
It was the fox. The one I’d seen saying goodbye to her mate, the werewolf who’d made the doomed last stand against Princess Iron Fan. She forced her way into this plane until her top half was visible. She extended her paws and beckoned us, asking for an embrace. Something about the way she couldn’t come any farther out of the newly formed rift made it seem as if she were restricted, tethered to safety by her legs. Other animal limbs—deer hooves and octopus tentacles and the like—peeked through around her. An entire zoo crammed into a phone booth.
