“What do you mean? Xuanzang chose to go on his journey to get the sutras. The gods didn’t make him.”
“That was different. Xuanzang had a say because he was a human. You, however, are not.”
Clank.
My fist hitting the table sloshed the contents of the cup in front of me over the sides. Tepid water dripped on the floor but I made no motion to clean it up. Quentin shifted uncomfortably. He’d gotten pretty good at telling when I was primed to go off.
“Would you like to say that again? I don’t think I heard you right.”
Erlang Shen was unfazed by how long I’d dragged out the sentence through my teeth.
“Yes, you have a human form,” he said. “Yes, you’re mortal. But humans don’t have the essence of a celestial body inside them. Humans aren’t walking weapons so powerful they’re strategic assets in their own right. My uncle’s stance is that you’re still the lost property of Heaven and thus beholden to his will.”
I flexed my fingers open and closed a few times.
“From what little I understand of reincarnation,” I enunciated very carefully, “any person, spirit, or whatever can become human. So long as they work hard enough at it in their past life. I thought those were the rules. That everyone gets their chance to spin the Wheel of Life and Rebirth in the hopes of bettering themselves.”
“I’m sorry, Genie,” Guanyin said. “But there aren’t rules for what’s happened to you. A weapon reincarnating is completely unprecedented. Not in the history of gods and men has this ever happened. When you were the Ruyi Jingu Bang, no one even guessed you had a soul.”
Welp. Nothing like having your personhood denied in the morning to start the day off right.
I finally understood the piercing, migraine-y anger that shot through my core the first time Quentin had called me the Ruyi Jingu Bang. If there was any of my past self in me right now, it hated being thought of as an object. It hated not being acknowledged for what it accomplished by turning human. It valued Genie.
Even if no one else did.
“What a pile of crap,” said Quentin.
I turned to find him giving me a hard stare.
Most people probably would have thought from his facial expression that he was agreeing with the Jade Emperor. After all, he was the one who’d lost his most valuable possession as a result of my very existence.
Except that he glanced at the gods, and then back at me. I had a sense of what he was thinking.
“You come here to Earth to tell us how it’s going to be,” Quentin said to Erlang Shen. “Let me tell you how it’s going to be. If Genie refused, the Jade Emperor would be up the creek without a paddle. Your uncle has made the biggest gaffe of his career, letting these demons escape, and he’s so afraid of losing face over it that he needs to beg for her help without appearing to do so. Meanwhile you’re too much of a kiss-ass to go against his orders and pitch in the effort, you goutuizi.”
Erlang Shen didn’t change expressions, but I could have sworn the room got several degrees colder and draftier as he bristled at Quentin. A duel might have broken out in my kitchen right then and there, but Guanyin put her hand on the rain god’s forearm.
“Enough,” she commanded.
The thunderclouds slowly rolled back. Erlang Shen calmed himself under her grasp, but Quentin eyed the contact between him and Guanyin, not liking it one bit. Interesting.
Guanyin faced me with a wince of sadness and right then I knew I was in trouble. She wasn’t throwing in the towel with her long-suffering air. She was powering up.
“Genie, I know none of this seems fair,” she said. “But if demons are returning to the mortal world, this no longer becomes solely about you.”
I knew that. And I’m sure she knew I knew that. But we were going down this road anyway.
“These particular fugitives—they’re ambitious,” Guanyin said. “They’ll stop at nothing to gain more power. And their go-to strategy is to consume humans with strong spirits.”
“It doesn’t have to be a holy man like Xuanzang. There are plenty of laypeople in this day and age who have the essence they’re looking for, like that girl in the shop. Once the demons arrive, they’ll begin hunting, picking off innocents from the shadows.”
Guanyin motioned at Quentin. “Tell her. Am I exaggerating?”
Quentin let out a deep sigh.
“She’s right, Genie,” he said. “If this is the bunch that I’m thinking of, then the common folk are in trouble. Obtaining human energies was an obsession for some of these demons. A madness. They won’t stop, not even in the face of death.”
I squeezed my nose between my palms. Partly out of frustration and partly to keep the stench of the Demon King of Confusion from flooding back into my nostrils. Closing my eyes only brought the image of Tawny Lion’s gaping, distended jaws back to the forefront of my mind. Monsters like these couldn’t be left alone.
Guanyin sensed her victory was near. “I can tell deep down that you want to help,” she said. “You’re the type of person who takes matters into her own hands. You’re like me in that regard.”
I remembered some of Guanyin’s legend. The story went that she was once a mortal girl who was so pure, kind, and enlightened that she easily attained Buddhahood in her youth. Just like that, in a relative snap, she accomplished what some holy men couldn’t in lifetimes of training.
But as she was about to leave the planes of Heaven and Earth entirely for the ultimate nirvana, she looked back and heard the cries of the suffering and downtrodden. Her compassion led her to stay behind as a Bodhisattva, a lesser divine being, so that she could do her best to relieve the pain of humanity and guide it to its own enlightenment. She was a figure of self-sacrifice and humility. I couldn’t see how we compared.
This sucked.
This sucked so goddamn much.
“Fine,” I said, in a grouchy harrumph that was very un-Bodhisattva-like. “I’ll do what I can.”
20
Guanyin’s eyes sparkled at me. It was too pretty to look at, and I wanted to sneeze.
The sunbeams of her countenance traveled around my kitchen until they found Quentin, still the only one of us who hadn’t taken a seat at my table.
“What about you, dear?” she asked.
“Sure,” he replied with a shrug. “I have my reputation to think about. Sun Wukong doesn’t shy away from a fight.”
Maybe I was reading into it too much, but that was a pretty weaksauce reason to go along with everything, even for someone as prideful as Quentin. Which meant he was taking up this burden to protect the little people, like in the old stories. Or he was doing it simply to have my back.
It was a nice feeling either way. The cockles of my heart and such.
“So do you have names?” Quentin asked. “Or do we have to wait until every yaoguai shakes our hands and reintroduces themselves?”
“Baigujing,” Erlang Shen answered. “The Immortals of Tiger, Deer, and Goat. Linggandaiwang. The Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord. Huangpaogui. General Yin. The Wolf of the Twentieth Mansion . . .”
He went on. And on.