Chapter 186: The Divine Land Overrun by Demons
For Rowe, the progress of others mattered, but it did not hit as directly as the one walking beside him.
Sun Wukong.
Even before any guidance, she was already an abnormal existence. With a few days of instruction and a lot of shameless curiosity, she began to manifest what it meant to be a Stone Monkey.
The Seventy Two Earthly Fiend Transformations.
Change at will.
They had only just arrived on the Divine Land, yet she was already turning theory into habit.
Great Qin.
The Qilu region of Shandong.
Streets packed with people, merchants calling out prices, travelers moving like rivers between districts. Since the First Emperor unified the realm, standard script and unified cart tracks had done more than please bureaucrats. They had made movement easier, and profit faster.
Merchants loved that kind of world.
Goods from far regions now flowed into every corner of the Divine Land. Trade grew hotter by the day, and the cities swelled with it.
Rowe stood by the inn window, waiting for Sun Wukong to finish sleeping off her own excitement.
He had brought her across the Divine Land to see customs and faces, to carve the traces of Human Order into her memory through her own eyes.
If you want to understand humanity, you do not float above it.
You walk. You eat. You stay in a cramped room and listen to the floorboards complain.
He watched the crowd below and felt a familiar, quiet satisfaction.
Then something else slid under it.
Unease.
The Divine Land was prosperous, almost unnaturally so.
Only a short time had passed since the First Emperor crushed the six states. A new framework had been built, yes, and Qin moved with terrifying speed, yes.
But this was too fast.
Rowe's eyes narrowed slightly.
He would keep watching.
"Hehehe, Master, what do you think? How does your disciple look like this?"
A clear, bright voice sounded behind him. Rowe turned.
A black haired girl stood there in a long black robe, just revealing enough of her figure to be deliberately provocative. Crimson eyes. Playful smile. Even the aura was cleanly replicated.
Consort Yu.
At a glance, the imitation was perfect.
The only issue was that the real Consort Yu was in the East Flower Palace, digesting the peach tree Xu Fu had brought, grinding toward a stronger foothold at Rowe's side.
She could not be here.
Rowe reached out and tapped the girl's forehead with one finger.
Not hard.
Just precise.
"Do not be mischievous."
"Hmph hmph hmph, Master is really boring." She held her forehead and made a pained noise that was far too theatrical for how light the tap had been. Somehow she looked pleased anyway.
Then she twisted her body, and the disguise slid off like a shed skin.
Black hair pulled back and shortened into orange red. The robe tightened and reshaped into a fitted red ancient style dress. A youthful figure, sunlit skin, and a fluffy tail that swayed as if it had its own opinion.
Sun Wukong grinned.
"Heavenly Emperor Master, that woman really gets a reaction out of you, huh? Just now your heart skipped."
"That is your Mistress," Rowe said calmly, not bothering to deny it.
"I know. One of the Mistresses." Wukong said it as if she had been born with the concept and was already bored of it.
Rowe tapped her forehead again.
Wukong yelped and toppled backward, rolling on the floor while clutching her head. Her voice echoed through the room loud enough that people outside the door turned to look.
As a Stone Monkey, her body should have been hard as iron.
Yet Rowe's taps always hurt.
Pain that arrived instantly and vanished just as fast.
Wukong sprang up again, eyes shining.
"Master, where are we going this time?"
Rowe rested his gaze on the street below as if considering the question seriously.
"Where fate pulls us, and where we feel like going." His tone stayed flat. "Why do we need a destination?"
Wukong blinked, then laughed.
"Good! That sounds free!"
Rowe looked west, past the old borders, toward the Qin core beyond the passes.
Consort Yu and Ereshkigal were both there.
By the time he crossed the old lands of the six states and reached Xianyang, their transformations should be nearing completion.
When they met again, the situation would not be the same.
Rowe left the room. Wukong stared at his back, head tilted, thoughtful beneath her messy red hair.
Following fate…
Then Master and I must have fate too, right?
A satisfied smile slipped onto her face.
At first, she had trusted Rowe because of his relationship with the Goddess of Mount Li. That connection made it easy for the Lingming Stone Monkey to accept him. She had followed him because he could teach her what she wanted, and because she wanted freedom more than anything.
But traveling north and south, seeing different people and different scenery every day, felt good.
Comfortable.
Master was like Sister of Mount Li.
Both were good.
Wukong hurried after him.
A tall man in a long robe with a sword at his back, and a pretty red haired girl in red clothes bouncing beside him. The moment they stepped out of the inn, they drew eyes.
No one assumed they were a couple.
Wukong was too loud, too bright, too shamelessly childlike. She chattered nonstop, skipping and hopping like this was her first day outside the stone, which, in a way, it was.
"Master, what ability do humans even have? They are so weak, but they can build cities this big. Bigger than the island I lived on."
"Oh, and do humans have kings too? On the island, the monkeys called me Monkey King, but they did not dare come close. They said I was too beautiful compared to them."
"They even called me Beautiful Monkey King."
Endless.
Rowe listened with a faint smile. He answered sometimes, but most of it was harmless noise. There was no need to treat every sentence like scripture.
Then Rowe stopped.
Wukong did not brake in time and bumped into his back.
Her chatter cut off.
She raised her head, golden eyes narrowing as she looked ahead.
They were still inside the city.
Morning sun poured onto a river. Water ran clear under an arched bridge, ripples catching light like scattered coins.
They were on that bridge.
And as far as they could see, people packed the streets and alley mouths. A crowd thick enough to feel like a living wall.
Wukong frowned.
"What are they doing?"
Rowe did not answer.
He did not need to move closer to see.
Compared to Wukong, Rowe saw more by default. And with the instinctive reading of terrain and change that he had begun to internalize from her, he could trace the contour of events like reading a wound.
A pear hawker.
A Daoist in gray.
The hawker looked angry. The Daoist laughed too loudly. The crowd urged and jeered as if they were feeding on the noise.
Wukong squinted, trying to understand.
Still confused.
The Daoist raised his voice.
"I asked for a pear to quench my thirst. He refused. Look, everyone supports me!"
A passerby pointed.
"It is just one pear. What is the harm?"
"They are my pears, not yours," the hawker snapped. "If I give him one today, do I give everyone one tomorrow?"
"Just give it. He is dusty from travel."
"His clothes are neat. Why does he not work and buy one himself?" the hawker shot back.
The crowd kept talking.
Kept judging.
More people arrived. The voices grew thicker and louder until it stopped being conversation and became a tide.
The hawker could argue with one person.
He could not argue with a hundred.
He broke.
"Fine! Take it!"
He threw a pear.
The Daoist's face lit with greedy joy. The instant the pear left the hawker's hand, something in the man's chest went hollow, as if he had thrown away more than fruit.
Around him, the crowd's faces went strangely blank, like a restraint inside them had loosened.
The Daoist reached out.
His hand trembled, as if he were receiving a treasure.
Then his fingers closed on air.
The pear never reached him.
It was caught mid flight by a sudden gust that curved like a sleeve in motion, lifted high, then tossed upward again.
A figure stepped into the open, ink black hair stirring.
Rowe.
Wukong's eyes widened.
She turned her head and found her side empty. Rowe had already moved, appearing among the crowd as if distance had agreed to stop existing.
He looked over the packed faces, and when he spoke, the sound cut through the noise like a bell.
"Greed."
Some people flinched. Shame flashed.
"Arrogance."
Others stiffened, guilt surfacing.
"The desire for unearned gain, and the arrogance of standing on moral high ground." Rowe's gaze settled on the Daoist. "The mortal world really is fond of theater."
The Daoist's face twisted.
At that moment, Rowe finally understood the discomfort he had felt since entering these cities.
This sudden booming commerce.
This rapid prosperity.
It was not healthy growth.
It was a hunger binge. Drain the pond, catch the fish, and pretend you are thriving.
Merchants racing for profit, people obsessively chasing novelty, crowds intoxicated by moral superiority.
And this was not simply human weakness.
It was being stirred.
The Daoist was not a Daoist.
He was a demon wearing a Daoist's skin.
Demons were phantasmal species, whether born of nature's distortions or of the shadows that gathered in human hearts. In the mythic era, they existed as anomalies that fed on meaning.
But this was not the mythic era.
Rowe's Heavenly Court on the Pan had no place for them.
And yet they were here.
Which meant something had opened a path for them anyway.
Wukong stared, finally sensing the shape of it.
Rowe addressed the creature directly.
"You are a demon of desire and arrogance. The pear you want is not a pear. It is the greed and arrogance in human hearts."
Rowe caught the pear as it fell back down, holding it lightly.
"If you take it, these people lose control over what is already inside them."
"And you profit from that. You harvest the demons that bloom in their hearts."
The false Daoist's eyes widened.
"You… who are you?"
So clear. So clinical.
This was not the language of an ordinary mystic.
"I know I was wrong," the demon said quickly, voice shifting as panic crept in. "But you cannot kill me. I am tied to human hearts. If you kill me, Human Order rejects you. I will return to the Sea of Stars and never come out."
It was the truth.
Many who dealt with such things did not truly erase them. They sealed them, or drove them out. They feared the backlash of cutting too close to humanity's own shadow.
The demon's panic was real.
Its confidence was also real.
It believed it would not truly die.
Rowe smiled.
"Unfortunately, you guessed wrong."
"I will not kill you."
He lowered his hand, pressed the pear into the earth at his feet, and continued with calm certainty.
"I will make you a shackle inside the hearts of gods."
The demon froze.
The crowd gasped.
The pear hit the ground and immediately took root. It split the earth like it had been waiting for permission, sprouting at a speed that insulted reality, shooting upward in a breath.
A tree.
A vast tree.
It stretched above and below, and its roots did not merely bite soil. They sank into human hearts.
The pear had been born from the demon's work.
So what it drew in, what it devoured as it grew, was also the demon's own power.
The creature wailed. It screamed as if its voice could climb out of the trap.
It could not.
Rowe did not trust demons, and he did not trust any spirit that treated human nature like a handle.
Humanity's heart should be decided by humanity.
Not farmed.
"You and I are enemies," Rowe said quietly.
"And Human Order is even less a threat to me than you think."
He stepped onto the growing trunk as if it were solid ground.
Upward.
Higher.
His awareness rose with it, riding the concept the tree had anchored, and the Divine Land unfolded in his sight.
Nine Provinces.
Vast.
Alive.
And threaded through it all were wisps of black smoke, everywhere like rot under paint.
Beacon fires flared across the land.
Demons.
Spirits.
Devils.
They were scattered everywhere.
Yet the densest, strongest concentration, the place that allowed them to reappear in the present, burned brightest in one direction.
Outside Hangu Pass.
The former Qin heartland.
Xianyang.
"Hahahaha! I am an Emperor whose achievements surpass the Three Sovereigns and whose virtue exceeds the Five Emperors. This is the posture I was born to wear!"
In the majestic Qin Palace, solemn steps climbed the hall.
Cheers rolled outward in waves.
With every breath drawn and released, it sounded like the exhale of a dragon.
.....
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