Nezha (1-2 part)

Era 1 · Moment 1.3 · The years behind the wall

Market morning in Chentang Pass. Fish still flap on the gutting tables, steam rolls off the dumpling baskets, and under a red awning a charm-seller is doing brisk trade in paper talismans against demons, sea monsters and, he adds with a wink, certain children. Down the lane the calligraphy seller is brushing the character for 'peace' for a fisherman's wife, very slowly, because she will not stop haggling over the price.

Then, from the direction of the commander's mansion, comes a crash, a roar, and two voices bickering at the top of their lungs.

The whole street knows that sound. Shutters bang. A grandmother snatches two toddlers off a doorstep by their collars. The fishmonger throws a sheet of oiled cloth over his catch, as if fish could be stolen just by being looked at.

"He's out! The commander's little calamity is out again!"

"Bar the doors, bar the doors! Last time we were picking pickled radish out of the roof tiles for a week!"

Over the mansion wall, the barrier that should be holding him in hangs open like a torn curtain of light. On either side of the gap stand the two boundary beasts, squat slabs of green bronze with gold mask-faces and enormous square-toothed grins, and they are not chasing anybody. They are shoving each other.

"You let him through!"

"I let him through? Who was snoring? Who was snoring like a temple bell?"

"If Master Taiyi hears about this—"

Both bronze faces go pale, or as pale as bronze can go.

On the roof of the pickle shop sits one small figure, swinging his bare heels: a big round head, two stiff black buns tied with red ribbon, a red vest with lotus flowers on the front, and eyes ringed so dark he looks as if he has not slept since the day he was born. Ne Zha is eating somebody's steamed bun and grinning down at the gang of boys gathering below him with their pockets full of stones.

"Demon!" the biggest boy bawls, winding up his arm. "Demon child! Go back in your cage!"

The grin does not move. The bun stops halfway to his mouth.

Demon. Again. I'm the Spirit Pearl. Dad said so. I'm going to hunt every demon from here to the sea, and then the whole lot of them will have to bow.

He stands up on the tiles, bun in one fist, and declaims to the entire street:

"Heaven sent me, bright and bold, to hunt your demons, young and old! Throw that rock, you snot-nosed crew, and the first demon I catch is you!"

The first stone flies anyway. Ne Zha catches it without looking, crams the rest of the bun into his mouth, and jumps.

Era 1 · Moment 1.4 · Ten days before Ne Zha's third birthday

The fishing village below Chentang Pass is having the worst morning of its life.

Something huge came up out of the surf: a hulking, olive-green toad of a creature draped in dripping kelp, with thick red lips, a few big gapped teeth and two red, spiky fin-crests on its head. It went straight for the smokehouse and the dog meat hanging inside. Now it is lumbering back toward the water with a whole haunch of meat under one arm and, under the other, a tiny girl in orange-red clothes with a chestnut fringe and a little bun, kicking and wailing at the top of her lungs.

"It's got Yaya! The demon's got Yaya!"

Nobody gets close. The Sea Yaksha spits over its shoulder, and a wobbling bubble drifts across the sand and pops against an upturned boat. The boat turns grey from bow to stern and stays that way: stone.

Then, from the cliff path above the village, comes a whoop.

A small boy hurtles down the slope in huge, reckless bounds: big round head, two black buns trailing red ribbons, a red vest, bare feet, eyes ringed dark as a panda's. Where he lands, he lands hard. A rack of drying fish goes flying. A net catches on his heel and comes along for the ride. He flings a spark of red-black fire at the Yaksha's back, misses by a mile, and sets a boat shed blazing instead.

"Hey! Toad-face! Drop the kid! This young master is hunting today!"

A demon. A real one, at last. Wait till Mom hears about this. The Spirit Pearl's very first catch.

The villagers do not see a rescue. They see the demon child of Chentang Pass charging through their homes with fire at his heels.

"It's him! The commander's monster!"

"He's burning the boats! Run for the commander!"

The Yaksha reaches the waterline and wades in up to its knees, Yaya still howling under its arm. And there, on the black rocks where the surf breaks white, somebody is already standing in its way: a slender boy in pale robes worked with waves and clouds, his hair bound up high under a silver crown, perfectly calm in the spray.

"Please put the child down," he tells the monster, as courteous as a scholar at a gate. "I would rather not hurt you."

Ne Zha skids to a halt on the wet sand, one eyebrow climbing.

...And who is that supposed to be?

Era 1 · Moment 1.5 · Ne Zha's third birthday

All of Chentang Pass has been invited to a feast, and all of Chentang Pass is still deciding whether to go.

The Li mansion is dressed for it anyway. A red carpet runs up the central stairs, colored banners snap from the main roof, and servants trot across the courtyard with stacks of bowls and towers of steamed buns under the old butler Li Xin's despairing eye. Guests trickle in through the gate in their best clothes, whispering.

"A banquet for the demon child. A banquet."

"They say he saved that little fisher girl, Yaya, from a sea demon."

"They say a lot of things. They also say he burned half the fishing village doing it."

In the middle of the courtyard squats the evidence: the Sea Yaksha, hulking and olive-green and sulking in heavy chains, with the two bronze boundary beasts standing guard on either side, chests puffed out, taking turns to poke it with a stick whenever it looks like it might spit.

Li Jing stands at the gate in his ink-green robe, receiving every guest with the same stiff salute, palms pressed together. He has been rehearsing his speech since before sunrise. It is four sentences long. He is still not sure about the fourth.

Lady Yin, in violet silk for once instead of armor, has straightened her son's vest three times and retied his ribbons twice.

"Zha'er. Stand up straight. Smile at the guests. No, a nice smile, not the one with all the teeth. Your old mom is begging you."

She smiles back at him so hard her cheeks ache. Not today. Nobody in this house cries today.

Ne Zha has been sitting on the top step since dawn, chin on his fists, staring down the road toward the sea. A small pale conch shell turns over and over in his fingers, and every so often he lifts it to his mouth and mutters into it.

"You said you'd come. You said. It's today, okay? Don't be late. Dad's going to tell everybody I'm a hero."

The Spirit Pearl who saved the town, and my best friend at my party. Let them try calling me a demon after today.

Nobody pays much attention to one more guest. He is tall and gaunt, in stark black Daoist robes, with a topknot that stands up like a brush and long fingers folded into his sleeves, and he does not join the line at the gate. He stops at the edge of the courtyard, where he can see the small figure on the top step, and his thin mouth curls.

Three years to the day. Heaven keeps its appointments.

Shen Gongbao straightens his sleeves, clears his throat, and starts up the stairs.

Era 2 · Moment 2.1 · Just after the Tribulation

Chentang Pass still smells of lightning.

Yesterday the whole town went down on its knees in the scorched street, fishmongers and soldiers and grandmothers and the boys who used to throw stones, all of them kneeling to the two children who had saved them. Today they are standing up again and do not quite know what to do with their hands.

The answer, it turns out, is lotus roots.

Overnight a pond has bloomed where there was none: a broad sheet of still water crowded with lotus flowers, their leaves as wide as cart wheels, and at its heart the Seven-Colored Lotus floating half-open like a small mountain of jewel and shell. Two lights move inside it. One is red and restless. The other is pale blue and very still.

Every lotus-root farmer in Chentang Pass is in the water up to the waist, digging. The old farmer from the ponds outside the walls and his wife work side by side, hauling up roots as thick as a man's arm, white and glistening with mud.

"Careful, careful! That one is for the young master. Or the dragon. Aiyo." Taiyi Zhenren paces the bank with his robe hanging open over his belly and his whisk forgotten under one arm. He looks like a man who has mislaid something important and cannot remember what. Every so often his hand drifts up to the top of his head, where something used to be, and he frowns. "Water for the red one. No. Fire for the red one. Water for the... which one is the red one?"

He turns to his flying pig. "You remember. You always remember."

The pig does not answer. It is busy. Up to its belly in a trough of fresh white starch, with surprising delicacy of trotter, it is pressing two small figures out of the paste: one with two stiff little buns on its head, one with its hair swept up high. It pauses, considers, and gives the first one darker rings around the eyes.

Li Jing stands at the water's edge with his arms folded and has not moved in an hour. Lady Yin stands beside him with mud up to her knees, because she went in to help dig and nobody alive could have stopped her.

"Hey. Old Li." She bumps his shoulder with hers. "He's in there. Both of them are. You can let your face come down now."

At the far end of the pond, a young farmer straightens with a root cradled in both arms and goes very still.

"It's warm," he says. "It's warm. Like something in it is breathing."

Era 2 · Moment 2.3 · Day one of seven

Chentang Pass wakes up a prisoner.

The streets still steam where the lava came through the rifts and hardened into black, glassy tongues across the paving stones. Half the market is rubble. The garrison's weapons lie in a heap beside the main gate, and the guards standing over them are sea monsters: red mantis-shrimp brutes with crested heads, goggle-eyed pufferfish clutching knives, crabs with eyes on stalks, all in rusted scraps of armor and all still dragging their chains.

On the wall above the gate, three figures who are not monsters keep watch in chains of their own. A woman taller than any man in town, in a gown of iridescent scales that ends in drifting jellyfish fins, inspects her long crystal claws. A hulking giant of cooled lava, molten orange glowing in his seams, glares at the sunrise as if it owes him money. A spindly grey man in armor made of blades leans on the parapet at an angle no spine should allow, grinning at everything.

In the square below, a gaunt man in stark black reads out the terms.

"N— no one leaves Chentang Pass. No one. Until the elixir is brought b— back from Kunlun, this town is held as surety. If it does not come within s— seven days..." Shen Gongbao's stammer snags and repeats, and he pushes through it. "...every soul here d— dies."

Nobody in the square says a word. Then the commander steps out of the crowd.

"There are wounded from last night," Li Jing says, very evenly. "Burns. Broken bones. Let one doctor go out for herbs. He will come straight back."

"No."

For once the word comes out of Shen Gongbao clean, without a single snag.

At the gate of the Li mansion, Lady Yin is packing a travel bundle for the third time.

"Dried meat. Rice balls. Talisman paper. Clean socks... you don't wear socks, fine, clean socks anyway. Zha'er, are you listening to your old mom?"

Ne Zha stands in front of her in his new lotus-root body, looking exactly like himself and not quite feeling it. Beside his shoulder, faint as breath on glass, a second boy glows soft blue: Ao Bing's spirit, his hair swept up under a silver crown, his hands folded politely in his sleeves.

"He is listening, Madam," Ao Bing says. "I will make sure he eats."

"Hey! Whose body is this?!"

Taiyi Zhenren is already up on the flying pig, patting the seat of his trousers where his bottomless pocket lives. "Kunlun, Kunlun! Seven days, one handsome escort, no problem at all! Come on, come on, before I forget where Kunlun is."

Up on the wall, the woman in the scale gown leans over the parapet and waggles her crystal claws at the boys.

"Do hurry home, little ones," Ao Run calls, sweet as poisoned honey. "Auntie hates to wait."

The pig squeals and lifts into the sky with the boy clinging on behind his teacher, and the whole hostage town watches them dwindle into the clouds. When they are gone, Shen Gongbao sits down cross-legged on the steps of the square, closes his eyes, and begins to cultivate.

Era 2 · Moment 2.4 · Yuxu Palace on Kunlun

Above the clouds there is nothing but snow light and thin, cold silence, and then Yuxu Palace rises out of the cloud sea: a vast octagonal ring of white jade halls under green-glazed roofs, floating on the white, cranes circling its ridge beasts, living jade birds dozing along its eaves.

The flying pig lands on the terrace before the main gate with a squeal that bounces off every wall in the place. A row of disciples in white stop sweeping all at once and stare.

"Martial Uncle Taiyi." A tall woman in a white-and-cream gown drifts toward them a hand's breadth above the jade, sleeves of sheer gauze stirring, a small red crest in her black hair and an open book in her hands. She does not look up from the page. "Welcome back to Yuxu Palace. The Master will receive you in the main hall."

"Crana!" Taiyi beams. "My disciple, Ne Zha. Here for the ascension trial! Don't mind the eyes. Inside he's pure, upright immortal material, I swear it on this handsome face."

Crana does look up then, at the small boy sliding off the pig: big round head, two black buns tied with red ribbon, a red vest, and eyes ringed so dark they look painted on. One thin brow rises by a hair.

A horn sounds from the mountain road. Every jade bird on the eaves wakes at once and pours off the roofs in a glittering flock, sweeping down toward a column of disciples in white and gold marching up through the snow: the demon-catching team, home from a hunt. At its head strolls a dashing man in olive-gold silk with a gnarled antler bow at his belt. Behind him creak ox carts, and in the carts are cages, and in the cages are demons, furred and scaled and feathered, staring out between the bars.

"Senior Brother Deero," Crana says, turning a page. "The Master's first disciple. Captured demons are brought here to be taught the right path."

'Taught the right path.' They'd teach this young master real quick if they ever sniffed him out. Somewhere deep inside the small body, very quietly, Ao Bing sighs.

Then Ne Zha shifts from one bare foot to the other. And back. And again.

"Hey. Book lady. Where's the latrine in this place? This young master has been sitting on a pig since the coast and he's about to burst."

Crana closes her book on one finger and regards the dark-ringed little boy for a long, composed moment.

"This way," she says. "Quietly. This is a place of pure cultivation."

She glides off across the white jade, long gauze sleeves and pale-gold cords and the feathered hem of her gown trailing behind her, and Ne Zha trots after her, bare feet slapping the stone, straight onto the hem.

Era 2 · Moment 2.5 · The first trial: Tufei Slope

Tufei Slope is hot, bright and extremely busy. Between the dunes the marmot burrows bristle with little chimneys, and today every one of them is smoking, because today is a cooking contest, and nothing on Tufei Slope is taken more seriously than a cooking contest. Plump grey-brown marmots in ragged maroon scarves and patched leather scurry from oven to oven with ladles and sacks of millet, arguing about salt.

On the biggest dune sits the Marmot Boss, stout and solemn, a wooden club across his knees, tasting a spoonful of stew with the gravity of a magistrate. Beside him his second-in-command, small even for a marmot and twice as full of himself, is loudly explaining why the stew needs more pepper.

Then a shadow falls across the sand.

The banner of the Chan sect has come over the ridge. Under it march disciples in white and gold, ranks perfect, swords bright, with empty ox carts creaking along behind. At their head strolls a dashing man in olive-gold silk, an antler bow hanging at his belt, looking as bored as a man can look in a desert. Overhead a fat flying pig wallows through the heat with a round, blue-robed immortal on its back and a small boy clinging on behind him.

Somewhere at the back of the crowd, one marmot opens its mouth and lets out a long, piercing scream.

"Tufei Slope," Deero announces, polished as a courtier. "One demon king of earth-immortal rank. Candidate Ne Zha, this is the first of your three trials. I am your examiner. Subdue him."

Three demon kings, seven days, one brat. I'll be back at the palace in time for a nap.

The pig lands. The boy slides off: big round head, black buns, red ribbons, red vest, those famous dark-ringed eyes. Taiyi Zhenren pops something small into his mouth. The boy yawns hugely. His eyes close.

When they open again the dark rings are simply gone. The brows are fine and clean, the eyes a clear aqua, the flame-mark on his forehead has cooled to a blue-green swirl, and his black hair has taken on a sheen of blue. He straightens, presses his palms together and bows to the marmots like a young scholar at a stranger's gate.

"Please forgive this intrusion," says Ao Bing, in Ne Zha's voice. "We will try to be quick."

Taiyi beams like a proud father. Deero's eyebrow climbs. The Marmot Boss rises, club in hand, and the Second hops onto the rim of the stewpot and puffs out his chest.

Then the clean little face flickers. For one heartbeat the dark rings are back, a jagged grin flashes, and a very different voice says, "Huh? Where'd all this sand come from?"

The Second sees his chance, and swings.

Era 2 · Moment 2.7 · The second trial: Feitian Waterfall

Deep in the rainforest of the Seven Mountains and Five Ridges, Feitian Waterfall drops off the mountaintop in one long white rope and shatters into a pool as green as jade. Mist hangs over everything. Out of the pool rise dozens of bamboo plum-blossom stakes of every height, and on every stake balances a young demon: a fox girl with her tail wrapped around her ankle, a turtle boy wobbling on one foot, a pair of frog brothers who keep forgetting their human faces. All of them are sweating, swaying, and refusing to fall.

On the shore stands their teacher, hands clasped behind his back: a tall, stern old leopard in a slate-blue overcoat, his grey-white topknot pinned with silver, his huge white eyebrows sweeping out sideways like wings, his long beard bound into a tail. Shen Zhengdao has not smiled once this morning. He does not intend to start.

"Cultivation begins with essence, breath and spirit," he says, and his voice carries over the roar of the falls. "Only a heart that holds to itself keeps its way. Lower your center, Third Sister. Your tail is cheating."

The little one should have found his brother by now. It is a thought he allows himself exactly once each morning, and then puts away.

The mist tears open.

Something small comes flying out of the trees, bounces off the lowest stake, then the next and the next, scattering wobbling students left and right, and lands balanced on one foot on top of the tallest stake in the pool. A little boy with a big round head and two black buns, a red vest, bare feet, and eyes ringed so dark they look like bruises. He flings out both arms and declaims at the waterfall:

"Waterfalls bow and mountains kneel, this young master is the real deal! Born in fire and raised on spite, Heaven itself can't win this fight!"

A whole pool of young demons stares at him with their mouths open. Somebody's tail falls into the water.

Shen Zhengdao looks up. One great white eyebrow rises, very slowly.

"Hm," says the old leopard. "The meter is crude. The spirit is not."

Then his gaze settles on the dark rings, the slouch, the grin full of jagged teeth, and narrows.

"And you, boy. Have you ever once in your life slept through a night?"