My Whole Family Ascended to Immortality—and Left Me Behind in the Mortal Realm!

My mother, my father, my elder brother, my elder sister — my whole family cultivated the Dao.

Everyone except me.

I was born a useless husk with no Spirit Root, the only mortal the Lin clan had produced in a hundred years.

On the day they ascended, ten thousand beams of golden light split the sky and heavenly music rang out.

Everyone in the family stood bathed in that radiance, their faces alight with joy. Only I was pushed outside it, standing in the mud of the courtyard like a piece of garbage that had turned up at the wrong hour.

My father, the head of the family, had become an immortal without losing one bit of that cold manner of his.

The last look he gave me was the look you give a rock by the roadside.

“Lin Shu, the mortal ties between the Lin clan and you end here. From now on, you look after yourself.”

As the words left his mouth, he swept his sleeve, and an invisible blade of qi cut through the last thread of blood between us.

I felt something that had been tied tight to me break down to the root.

Not one of them looked back. They turned into streaks of light and shot up into the blazing immortal gate in the sky.

The whole world went quiet, so quiet it was frightening.

I had no idea that the immortal realm they had ascended to was under my authority.

1

The Lin clan’s ascension was the grandest event Qixia City had seen in a hundred years.

For three days and three nights the townsfolk knelt to that radiance that would not fade, calling out the honored title “Immortals of the Lin clan” and begging for blessings.

And I, the “mortal” the Lin clan had left behind, pushed open the heavy vermilion gate of the Lin estate on the morning of the third day, taking my time.

Outside, the side branches of the clan and the rich merchants of the city had gathered at the news and packed the street solid.

Their eyes on me were full of pity they made no effort to hide, and under it, a thin thread of greed.

A clan uncle with a goatee pushed to the front first. He cleared his throat twice and put on the airs of an elder. “Lin Shu, look here. Your parents and your brother and sister are all immortals now, and this enormous estate… a Miss like you will hardly be able to hold it up. Better hand it to the clan to manage. The clan will pay you silver every month and see that you never want for food or clothes as long as you live.”

“Yes, yes,” a distant cousin-uncle, round as a ball, chimed in. “A young Miss on her own, guarding a mansion this size — it isn’t safe! We’re only thinking of you!”

They went back and forth, one on top of the other, and the whole of it came down to one idea: you are a piece of trash the immortals threw away, so be sensible, hand over the Lin clan’s mountains of gold and silver, and go find a corner to die in.

Those ugly faces. I found them a little funny.

In their eyes, my father, my mother, my brother and my sister were immortals throned high above.

And I, Lin Shu, was the stain they had abandoned in the Mortal World.

They were not wrong. I really was a mortal.

I liked the Mortal World’s sunrises and sunsets. I liked listening to rain on the banana leaves. The Mortal World gave me wontons at Li’s on the street corner, and the storybooks people wrote down here, where there was always some bittersweet tangle worth reading.

None of that was anything my parents, who had cultivated for eight hundred years, or my brother and sister, who had cultivated for three or four hundred, could understand.

What they wanted was great freedom, great ease, a lifespan that ran as long as Heaven’s.

For that, anything could be thrown away.

Family, naturally, included.

No answer. I only swept my eyes across the crowd, once, without much interest.

That one glance was enough to silence the whole noisy street.

Perhaps my eyes were too calm. Too calm to belong to an orphan girl her family had just abandoned. More like… someone looking at a swarm of loud Ants.

“This estate is mine now.”

I spoke quietly, but every ear in that street heard me. “If you want it, fine. Trade me your lives.”

Then I stopped paying them any mind, turned, walked back into the courtyard, and shut the gate hard.

The bang of it cut off every startled face and every resentful one on the other side.

2

My father said our mortal ties were finished. He certainly cut them cleanly enough.

I thought that was just as well.

The Lin estate used to be run on iron rules. Servants measured every step they took, afraid of disturbing some master’s quiet cultivation.

Now everyone was gone. The first thing I did was pay out the severance in full and send every servant home.

I was the only one left in the whole place.

I dragged a reclining chair into the back garden, where the rare flowers and strange grasses grew.

Those plants were Spirit Herbs my parents had gone out and found, the kind that helped with cultivation.

To me, their only use now was that they looked nice.

I lay back in the chair, picked up a Mortal World storybook — The Domineering Sword Immortal Loves Me — and read it with great relish.

The sun was just right. The breeze was mild.

Even an immortal could come down and offer to trade lives, and I would not take it.

I was deep in the book when, beneath the crooked peach tree in the corner of the garden, a head came burbling up out of the soil.

The Earth God of this patch of Qixia City.

A little old man with a white beard, clutching an immortal peach bigger than his own head, shuffled up to me trembling and squeezed out a smile uglier than a crying face. “G-great deity… are you… are you settling in all right?”

Nothing in me even lift my eyelids. I turned a page. “Not bad. Only a little too quiet.”

He set the peach down by my hand and bowed and scraped. “This small god will see to it at once! At once! The larks in the east of the city, the thrushes in the west — this small god will call them all over for you. I guarantee it will be lively!”

“No need.”

I waved a hand. “I was only talking.”

He wiped away sweat that was not on his forehead. He knew who I was.

Or rather, within the Three Realms, any god or immortal with a rank worth mentioning knew who I was.

I, Lin Shu, was on the surface the useless mortal of the Lin clan, the one who could not cultivate.

In fact, I was the Lord of Divine Punishment. The Heavenly Dao’s penalties lay in my hand.

Put plainly, the post is that of disciplinarian to the heavens.

Above, I answer for the Thirty-Three Heavens. Below, for the Eighteen Hells of the Ninefold Abyss. Anyone who dares break the rules and violate heavenly law answers to me.

The post carries great power, great responsibility, and a great deal of hatred. It is hard work.

My predecessor held it for ninety thousand years, worked himself into the ground, and took early retirement.

When my turn came to take over, I made one condition: I wanted to go down to the Mortal World, pass through a tribulation, and live a little.

The Heavenly Emperor agreed, and thoughtfully sealed my fate from heaven’s calculations so that I could be a mortal in peace.

So I became Lin Shu.

The most “useless” daughter of this Great Clan of cultivators.

For these few hundred years I watched my father grow from a nameless Rogue Cultivator into the founder of the Lin clan, by way of a hard heart and better luck; watched my mother turn from a gentle woman into someone vain and mean; watched my brother go from a sweet child to a “genius” who could not see anyone above himself; watched my sister lose her face entirely to envy.

I watched them enter Closed-Door Cultivation, Breakthrough, pass Tribulation Transcendence…

Honestly, it was boring.

Like watching a play that had been running for eight hundred years.

Now, at last, they had “ascended,” and the play should be over.

I picked up the peach the Earth God had brought, bit into it, and sweet juice burst across my tongue, spiritual qi spilling out of it.

Mm. Not bad.

“Where did you get this peach?”

I did not look up from the page.

The Earth God’s body gave a jerk, and he came clean. “This… this small god picked it on the sly… from the immortal peach orchard outside the Southern Gate of Heaven. This small god thought you surely would not be used to mortal fruit…”

“Oh?”

I raised an eyebrow. “On the clock, slacking off and stealing, and stealing clear up to the Southern Gate of Heaven. Earth God, do you want this month’s performance review or not?”

“Spare my life, great deity! Spare my life!”

The old fellow went down on his knees with a thud, sniveling and weeping. “This small god will never dare again! It was out of filial devotion, nothing more!”

I laughed at him and waved a hand. “All right, get up. Don’t let it happen again.”

Timid as a mouse, he nonetheless put his heart into the job.

I went back to my storybook. The old deity withdrew to one side, careful as could be, picked up a little broom, and began sweeping the fallen leaves in the garden for me.

Sunlight, a storybook, an immortal peach, and an Earth God who swept the yard on his own.

This life was far more comfortable than being Lord of Divine Punishment.

3

After that, I lived a thoroughly “lonely and wretched” life.

I slept until I woke up on my own every day, wandered the busiest market in the city, listened to the freshest gossip, and bought little things I liked.

The townsfolk still looked at me with pity.

They all said the Lin immortals had ascended and left behind their only mortal daughter, and what cold hearts they must have.

That girl Lin Shu would not last long, surely. Those wolfish relatives would swallow the family property whole.

I was happy to let them think it.

As for those clan relatives, they posted people at the Lin estate gate every day, hoping for a chance to get in and “reason” with me. I turned them all away.

After a few rounds of that, they quieted down. They had probably decided I was too stubborn to move, and meant to wait until I starved or sickened and died, then come collect the inheritance.

That day I was in the garden watering a half-dead soul-returning grass — in the immortal realm that stuff is a treasure that can pull a life back from the brink; in my hands it was a potted plant, and a wilted one at that.

A heavenly soldier in silver armor appeared in the garden out of nowhere and dropped to one knee.

“This soldier reports to the Lord. The monthly brief on immortal realm affairs. Please review it.”

He held a Jade Slip in both hands and raised it high above his head.

I took the slip and swept it with a Divine Sense, and the information poured into my head.

Most of it was small stuff.

The Third Prince of the East Sea Dragon King had quarreled with the little princess of the North Sea again, for instance. The Weaver Girl had complained that the water of the Heavenly River was not clear enough and was spoiling the clouds she wove.

I flipped through quickly, until one entry caught my eye.

[Four members of the Lin clan of Qixia City, lower realm, ascended to Eastflower Heaven on the third day of this month. At New Arrivals, their Spirit Roots were found to be mixed and their Temperament impure. Rated lowest grade, “Loose Immortal.” Assigned to reside in Yunmeng Marsh, on the outer edge of Eastflower Heaven.]

Ah. So they were up there already.

Lowest-grade Loose Immortals, living in the “suburbs” of the immortal realm. That had to be a good ten thousand li from what my ambitious father had expected.

I could picture that sour face of his, written all over with “unrecognized talent.”

There was a note under the main entry.

[Note: Lin Feng, eldest son of the Lin clan, displeased with the assignment, raised his voice at New Arrivals and quarreled with the receiving immortal official. Penalty: one hundred years of Cultivation Base deducted.]

I could not help laughing out loud.

One day up there, and my insufferably arrogant “genius” brother had already been taught his place.

How amusing.

“Lord?”

That laugh puzzled him; I could see it.

“Nothing.”

I put the Jade Slip away. “Keep watching. This Lin clan especially. Anything they do, report it to me.”

“Yes, my Lord!”

The soldier took the order and vanished in a streak of silver light.

I was in a good mood, so good that even that drooping pot of soul-returning grass looked better to me.

I flicked a drop of water holding pure divine power onto its leaves.

One breath later the grass that had been sallow and dry turned a dripping emerald green, before my eyes, and a tiny white flower the size of a grain of rice opened at its tip.

I nodded, satisfied.

It seemed the days ahead would not be too dull after all.

4

Life in the immortal realm was nothing like what my family had imagined.

They thought ascension meant one step into heaven, and from then on an endless supply of immortal fortune, a lifespan level with the sky.

They thought they would build palaces above the clouds a hundred times grander than the Lin estate, keep a crowd of fairy maids and immortal servants, and live as people above people.

Unfortunately, the immortal realm cared about birth and class even more than the Mortal World did.

Loose Immortals like them, who had hauled themselves over the immortal threshold on mortal resources and a little luck, were the bottom of the bottom up here.

Thin spiritual qi where they lived, no stipend, and every cultivation resource to be fought and snatched for.

And they, plainly, had not worked out what kind of place they were in.

Half a month later, the heavenly soldier brought another brief.

[Lin Wei, Lin Feng, Zhao Lan and Lin Yue, Loose Immortals of Yunmeng Marsh, privately occupied a public Spirit Vein node and came to blows with their neighbor, Zhang the Immortal. The eldest son struck with deliberate cruelty and hurt Zhang the Immortal, damaging his immortal body. He will need three hundred years to recover.]

[Judgment: Lin Feng to one hundred years of Confinement. The Lin family to compensate Zhang the Immortal with three fifth-grade immortal pills and ten thousand Spirit Stones.]

Reading the Jade Slip, I could see the whole scene.

My father cared about face above all things. He would have decided the spiritual qi node at his own door belonged to his family.

My brother hit first and talked later, and believed a fist was an argument.

And the result?

He ran into someone who hit harder.

Zhang the Immortal was a Loose Immortal too, but before he ascended he had been a martial fanatic who trained his Physical Body and nothing else. Even with his immortal body damaged, he gave Lin Feng a beating he would not forget.

The quarrel finally reached the inspecting immortal official of Eastflower Heaven, who knocked both sides on the head and still laid the main fault with the Lin clan.

Ten thousand Spirit Stones. Three fifth-grade pills.

For a Lin clan that had just ascended with nothing to its name, that was ruin.

I could even guess how they scraped the compensation together. The jewelry Zhao Lan had carried up from the Mortal World, the pieces she had prized above all, were worth nothing in the immortal realm.

But she had a jade hairpin. My father had gotten it years ago out of some ancient cultivator’s Cave Residence, and it just barely counted as half a Magic Tool.

They must have pawned that hairpin to settle the matter.

My mother would have been sick with it, lying awake at night.

I shook my head and set the Jade Slip aside.

All of this was only the appetizer.

With that family’s temperament, worse trouble was still ahead.

5

I was right.

The clan’s troubles came one after another.

Lin Feng: one hundred years of Confinement.

Rattled, probably, my father began hunting frantically for ways to earn Spirit Stones and cultivation resources.

He set his sights on the most famous place in Eastflower Heaven: the Hundred Herbs Garden.

The Hundred Herbs Garden is the Eastflower Emperor’s private garden. In name it is open to every immortal, but every Spirit Herb and immortal medicine in it, down to the last blade and branch, belongs to the Emperor. Picking anything without leave is strictly forbidden.

But my father had always held to the creed that fortune is found where the risk is.

The new brief arrived on schedule.

[Lin Wei, Loose Immortal, entered the Hundred Herbs Garden by night and attempted to steal three-thousand-year-old dragon-blood ginseng. Discovered by the Golden-Eyed Beast, the immortal beast that guards the garden. Lin Wei was no match, was clawed by the beast, and fled in disgrace, but dropped his Identity Token at the scene.]

[The Inspection Hall of Eastflower Heaven has issued a warrant. Lin Wei is to be hunted throughout the domain.]

When I finished reading, I wanted to press a hand to my forehead and groan.

Stupid.

So stupid.

Did he think the immortal realm worked like the Mortal World, where stealing something was fine as long as you ran fast enough?

Every immortal’s Identity Token carries a breath of its owner’s life-bound Soul. As long as the token exists, you can run to the ends of the earth and still be tracked.

He was now a wanted man in the immortal realm.

Next was my sister, Lin Yue.

She was probably the only one in the Lin clan with a clear head.

She knew that brawling and petty theft would not get anyone anywhere up here.

So she picked a “shortcut.”

[Lin Yue, Loose Immortal, has deliberately attached herself to Young Master Yuxu, the seventh Disciple of the Eastflower Emperor. With some looks and a few seduction tricks brought up from the Mortal World, she has succeeded in drawing his attention. Recently the two have been seen everywhere together, their relationship ambiguous. They have become the favorite gossip of Eastflower Heaven.]

My eyebrows climbed higher at that.

Yuxu?

The name rang a bell.

He was a famously rakish Immortal Lord. With the Eastflower Emperor for an Honored Master, he had left a fair trail of romantic debts across the immortal realm.

There were more than a dozen Fairies on record whom he had taken up and then thrown over.

My sister thought she had found someone to lean on. She did not know she had jumped into a different fire.

The little cleverness and the seduction tricks she had carried up from the Mortal World were nothing but a fool showing off an axe before a master, up against an old hand at playing with feelings like Yuxu.

And last, my mother, Zhao Lan.

She had probably taken it hardest.

Her husband was a wanted man, her son was locked up, her daughter was off being someone’s concubine.

Everything she had been proud of had turned into a joke the moment it reached the immortal realm.

The brief had only a line or two on her.

[Zhao Lan, Loose Immortal, is listless and weeps all day. She frequently curses the injustice of the Heavenly Dao from her residence in Yunmeng Marsh. Her negativity is so heavy that it disrupts the flow of spiritual qi for a hundred li around her, and neighbors have filed repeated complaints.]

Four people in that family, not a year since they ascended.

One wanted man, one prisoner, one tearful wife in waiting, and one still on the road to it.

Truly… a tidy set.

I set the Jade Slip down, picked up the teacup beside me, and took a sip.

The tea was pre-rain Longjing from the Mortal World. A little bitter, with a long sweet finish.

Far better than the jade nectar of the immortal realm.

6

My father’s career as a “wanted man” did not last long.

Not because he came to his senses and turned himself in. Because he was so bad at hiding that within a month, the immortal soldiers of the inspection squad cornered him in a cave.

Caught with the goods. The evidence was airtight.

Under heavenly law, stealing Spirit Medicine from an immortal emperor’s herb garden is a serious crime.

But Yuxu stepped in.

Something Lin Yue had poured into his ear had addled him, apparently, because he really did plead for his future father-in-law.

The Eastflower Emperor, for the sake of his beloved Disciple, showed leniency beyond the law. He spared Lin Wei a prison sentence and only sentenced him to ten thousand years as a gardener in the Hundred Herbs Garden, to work off his debt by service.

The Lin clan was overjoyed at the outcome.

Shame never crossed their minds. They took it as proof of the “family’s standing.”

Look at that — my son-in-law is Yuxu!

Even the Eastflower Emperor has to show him respect!

My father went from wanted man to “in-law of the throne” in one turn. He served in the Hundred Herbs Garden, and instead of feeling disgraced, he felt honored, and often bragged to the other gardeners about what a good daughter he had.

My brother came out of Confinement a changed man too.

He was no longer the hot-tempered brute who struck first. He had become… darker, and more calculating.

He had learned what power was worth.

He began to follow at Yuxu’s heel, running his errands, holding his horse, and became Yuxu’s most loyal dog.

When Yuxu pointed east, Lin Feng would not go west.

When Yuxu told him to rough up some newly arrived minor immortal, Lin Feng would beat the man half to death.

The Lin clan’s name in Eastflower Heaven was now thoroughly rotten.

None of that mattered to them.

They believed that with Yuxu to lean on, they could walk sideways through the immortal realm.

I watched the briefs the heavenly soldier kept bringing me grow thicker and thicker, packed close with the Lin family’s “glorious deeds”:

Skimming the Monthly Allowance of Spirit Stones owed to newly promoted immortals.

Seizing the Cave Residences of lower-ranked immortals.

Forcing sales and forced purchases in the immortal markets.

…

Each item on its own was nothing close to a monstrous crime, but added together it was enough to make your jaw drop.

They were like a herd of mad bulls loose in a porcelain shop, wrecking without restraint the order and rules the immortal realm had kept for ten million years.

And all of it Yuxu had pressed flat.

He seemed to enjoy the feeling of doing exactly as he pleased. He enjoyed the Lin family’s flattery and their dependence just as much.

I closed the Jade Slip. To the heavenly soldier waiting at my side: “Send word to the master of the Inspection Hall in Eastflower Heaven.”

The soldier bowed at once. “Speak, my Lord.”

“Tell him: in that seat, mind that seat’s business. When a man sits crooked, someone should shift him.”

“Yes.”

After the soldier left, I walked over to the soul-returning grass in the garden.

It had grown to the height of my waist. Clusters of small white flowers had opened at the top, sending out a fragrance that cleared the head.

My hand went out and stroked its leaves.

“About time.”

The words came out almost to myself.

Time to pull the net in.

7

The spark was a birthday banquet.

The Eastflower Emperor’s ten-thousand-year birthday.

The grandest celebration in all of Eastflower Heaven, and every immortal worth the name had received an invitation.

The Lin family as Yuxu’s “family,” were naturally on the guest list.

My family was beside itself with excitement.

They took it as the sign that the Lin clan had formally entered the upper circles of the immortal realm.

Zhao Lan burned through the last of the family’s savings to buy herself and Lin Yue each a set of gorgeous Drifting Cloud immortal robes.

My father dressed himself up like something out of a painting, as though he were not a gardener at all but some great officer of the immortal court.

My brother was more full of himself than anyone, following at Yuxu’s side, the very picture of an adjutant.

The family swept in fine style into the main hall of the Eastflower Emperor’s birthday banquet: Lingxiao Hall.

The scene was recorded in the immortal histories afterward like this:

[The Lin family entered like country folk come to the city, greed in their eyes, their manners coarse. The assembled immortals stared.]

At the banquet they caused the biggest scene since their ascension.

It began over a Magic Treasure.

At the banquet, Immortal Lords from every nation and every realm presented gifts.

Among the gifts was a Divine Water-Calming Pearl from the Dragon King of the West Sea,, its luster brilliant, vapor curling around it, able to lay the waves of the four seas, a rare acquired Spirit Treasure.

My brother took one look and had to have it.

His Cultivation Technique was of the fire attribute, and what he lacked was exactly a water-attribute Magic Treasure to balance yin and yang.

So halfway through the banquet, he took his wine cup and swaggered up to the West Sea’s dragon king, and with Yuxu present to back him, opened his mouth to ask for the pearl.

“Dragon King, I am Lin Feng, elder brother of Yuxu. I have taken a liking to that pearl. Name your price.”

His tone was not a negotiation. It was a notice.

Who was this dragon king?

A great power who ruled a whole sea and stood level with the Heavenly Court.

Any shrimp soldier or crab general in his service outranked Lin Feng.

To be challenged in public by a lowest-grade Loose Immortal like this — the Dragon King’s face went black on the spot.

But he had good breeding. “This is a birthday gift for the Emperor. It is not for sale.”

Anyone else would have taken the hint and backed off.

But Lin Feng had been made drunk on how smoothly everything had gone lately.

He believed that with Yuxu behind him there was nothing in Eastflower Heaven he could not do.

His lip curled. “Dragon King, don’t be so ungracious. My sister’s husband is Yuxu, and his Honored Master is the Eastflower Emperor. It’s one pearl. The Emperor won’t hold it against you.”

He had hauled both Yuxu and the Eastflower Emperor out in front of everyone, a threat wrapped in a bribe.

Now even Yuxu’s face changed.

This brother-in-law of his was beyond saving, and stupid with it.

West Sea’s ruler laughed, the sound raw with fury. “Well. Well. The elder brother of Yuxu! It seems Eastflower Heaven is going to change its surname to Lin!”

He slammed his palm on the table, and Lingxiao Hall shook.

The thing had blown up completely.

8

I sat in my courtyard in the Mortal World and watched the farce in Lingxiao Hall live through a water mirror.

The water mirror was a little toy I had put together out of boredom. It could connect to the Heavenly Dao network and show me anywhere in the Three Realms I wanted to look, and it was far more entertaining than the Mortal World’s storytellers.

Beside me the Earth God sat cracking melon seeds, watching with his heart in his throat.

“Great deity, this… this eldest young master of the Lin clan, his nerve is enormous! That’s the Dragon King of the West Sea!”

I spat out a seed shell. “The ignorant know no fear.”

In the mirror, as the mood turned uglier, the Eastflower Emperor finally spoke.

He sat in the seat of honor, his face as still as deep water, and nothing of anger or pleasure could be read on it.

“Yuxu.”

Yuxu jerked as if stung, and dropped to his knees. “This Disciple is here.”

“Your household needs a firm hand.”

The Emperor’s voice held no warmth at all. “The Dragon King of the West Sea is an honored guest of Eastflower Heaven. Who is permitted to insult him?”

Cold sweat ran down Yuxu’s back. He knocked his head on the floor again and again. “Honored Master, calm your anger! This Disciple has been lax in discipline. The fault is mine!”

He turned and glared at Lin Feng, a look that would have swallowed the man whole and picked his bones.

Lin Feng was stunned with fear. Only now did he understand the size of what he had done.

His knees hit the floor, and he shook like a sieve.

My father, my mother and my sister were all grey with terror and knelt where they stood.

Only now did they understand that Yuxu was not an all-purpose shield.

In front of the truly great, they were nothing.

The dragon king gave a cold snort, swept his sleeves, and left. He had no wish to look at that family another breath.

A perfectly good birthday banquet, wrecked like this.

His face was thoroughly lost.

He waved a hand as if brushing off flies. “Take them away. They will await judgment.”

Two squads of immortal soldiers came forward at once and dragged off the still-shaking Lin family of four, and Yuxu with his face the color of dead ash.

In Lingxiao Hall, the immortal music and the passing of cups resumed quickly.

As though that farce had never happened.

But every immortal there knew. House Lin was finished.

Yuxu was finished too.

He let out a long breath. “Finally, some quiet. That family — if you don’t go looking for death, death won’t come looking for you.”

I smiled and shut the water mirror.

“This is nothing yet.”

The good part had only just begun.

9

The Emperor’s judgment came down quickly.

Yuxu, as the one chiefly responsible, was stripped of his title of Immortal Lord, had half his Cultivation Base abolished, and was banished to the frozen wastes of the North Sea to Face the Wall in reflection for three thousand years.

It would be hard to call that a light punishment.

It cut his future off at the root.

And the Lin family of four, as the ones who had started it, came off worse.

[Condemned immortals Lin Wei, Zhao Lan, Lin Feng and Lin Yue: beguiled an Immortal Lord, defied a higher deity, disturbed the order of the Heavenly Court. Guilt is grave. Yet the Heavenly Dao cherishes life, and since this is a first offense, the sentence is commuted.]

[All Cultivation Base to be abolished. They are to be reduced to mortal frames, cast into Reincarnation, and pass through ten lives in the beast realm to atone.]

Copies of the judgment were posted on every street and alley of Eastflower Heaven.

Every immortal who read it clapped and cheered.

Lin clan that tumor, had finally been cut out.

A soldier brought me a rubbing of the judgment document. The corner of my mouth pulled into a cold smile.

Commutated?

Ten lives in the beast realm?

The Emperor certainly knew how to do a favor.

He knew this family would end up in my hands sooner or later, so he had struck a pose first, setting the punishment heavy, to show me, and the whole Heavenly Court, how just and selfless he was.

But he had kept something back all the same.

What he sentenced them to was “cast into Reincarnation,” not “delivered to the Hall of Divine Punishment.”

Reincarnation answers to the underworld.

The hall answers to me.

The Ten Yama Kings of the underworld are independent in name, but in front of me they still have to bow and call me “my Lord.”

Yet Reincarnation has its own set of laws, and I do not usually step in directly.

Eastflower’s ruler wanted to make the big thing small and the small thing nothing.

Once that family went into the wheel of Reincarnation and finished ten lives of beast suffering, their guilt would be washed clean, and there might even be a chance for them to cultivate the immortal path again.

He still wanted to save his Disciple, and the family tied to his Disciple.

He thought I was far away in the Mortal World and knew nothing of immortal realm affairs.

He thought the Hall of Divine Punishment was only a legend.

He thought the Lord of Divine Punishment was a decoration.

“Carry my order as Lord of Divine Punishment.”

I tossed the rubbing into the brazier and watched it burn to ash.

“Summon the thirty-six generals of the Thunder Division. They go to the Reincarnation Terrace in Eastflower Heaven at once.”

“Order the Ten Yama Kings of the underworld to seal every exit of the Six Paths. No one is to enter.”

“Arrest the condemned immortals Zhao Lan and Lin Wei, Lin Feng and Lin Yue, and Yuxu with them. Deliver all of them beyond the Ninth Heaven, to the hall.”

My voice was cold. Not a drop of feeling in it.

The heavenly soldier kneeling on the floor shuddered hard, and in his eyes there was deep fear, and something else… excitement.

The Hall of Divine Punishment.

That final court of the Heavenly Dao, silent for tens of thousands of years.

At last, it was going to open again.

“Yes… yes, my Lord!”

The soldier left on his escape light, carrying my will out to stir the winds of the whole heavenly realm.

I stood up and walked to the middle of the courtyard.

I raised my head and looked at the sky.

To the mortals of Qixia City it was clear and blue.

To me it was wind and storm gathering, chains of Law trembling, the whole order of the Heavenly Dao spinning up to full speed because of one order from me.

“Father. Mother. Brother. Sister.”

“You wanted to become immortals, didn’t you.”

“Then let me show you a place you have never seen. The true highest point of the immortal realm.”

10

An order from that Lord is the highest writ in the heavenly realm.

When the thunder generals of the Thunder Division, clad in black armor of lightning and holding my command arrow, appeared in Eastflower Heaven, the whole domain fell into a silence like death.

Even the Eastflower Emperor, when he saw that token carved with the ancient character for “punishment,” went pale and came down from his emperor’s seat to bow.

“This one did not know the Lord was coming. Forgive the poor welcome. I beg your pardon.”

The lead thunder general showed no expression. His voice was like ten-thousand-year ice. “Eastflower Emperor. The Lord commands that the condemned immortals Lin Wei, Zhao Lan, Lin Feng and Lin Yue, and the immortal Yuxu, be arrested and delivered to the Hall of Divine Punishment for trial. Do you object?”

“I would not dare. I would not dare…”

Cold sweat poured off the Eastflower Emperor.

Object? How would he dare?

This Hall of Divine Punishment was a place even the Heavenly Emperor himself feared a little.

And the Lord who held that hall was said to know no kin and bend no rule.

He had calculated every angle, and never calculated that the mess of the Lin family would reach that legendary figure.

He gave the order at once, and handed over the Lin family of four, who had been about to be taken to the Reincarnation Terrace, and Yuxu, who was already more dead than alive.

By now my father had lost every scrap of his pride. Looking at those thunder generals with their murderous air, his legs were knocking together.

“G-great immortal, weren’t… weren’t we going to Reincarnation? Where are we going?”

The thunder general glanced at him as one looks at something already dead. “The hall of Divine Punishment.”

“The Hall of Divine Punishment?”

The four of them looked at one another.

Lowest-grade Loose Immortals like them had never even heard the name of the place.

But from the awe and fear in the eyes of the immortals around them, they could guess it was no good place to be going.

Then Zhao Lan screamed. “We will not accept this! What monstrous crime did we commit, to be treated like this? I want to see the Eastflower Emperor! I want to see Yuxu!”

“Enough noise.”

The lead general waved a hand, impatient, and an invisible Restriction sealed her mouth.

Always so cocky, my brother now kept his head down and said nothing.

Lin Yue had gone the color of a withered flower. She pressed close to Yuxu, who was just as grey, and trembled.

Only Yuxu understood. As the Emperor’s Direct Disciple, he knew what those words meant.

The blood drained from his face. His lips worked, and he muttered to himself, “It’s over… all over…”

That thunder general wasted no more words. He swept his hand, and a great net woven of lightning appeared out of the air and bound all five of them tight.

“Take them.”

The thirty-six thunder generals escorted the five condemned immortals out, and together they became a black bolt of lightning that split the sky, flying toward that forbidden place wrapped in eternal chaos beyond the Ninth Heaven.

The immortals of Eastflower Heaven watched that black lightning bolt and took a long time to come back to themselves.

“By heaven. The Hall of Divine Punishment…”

“What did the Lin clan do, to drag even the Lord of Divine Punishment into it?”

“They say when that hall opens, someone great always falls. That family probably will not even get a turn at Reincarnation.”

In the middle of the talk, the Eastflower Emperor sat back down on his throne, slumped.

He knew he had lost the throw this time.

Not only had he failed to save his Disciple, he had made an enemy, thoroughly, of a being he could never afford to offend.

11

Beyond the Ninth Heaven, in the void of chaos.

No sun, no moon, no stars here. No spiritual qi moving. Only endless dark and dead silence.

A black palace hung at the center of the chaos, too big to be held by any word I had.

It seemed to have existed since the beginning of everything. Countless arcane runes of Law were cut into its walls, and the pressure it gave off made the Soul flinch.

This was the hall.

The final court of the order of the Heavenly Dao.

The Lin family of four and Yuxu were thrown out of the thunder net and landed hard on the plaza before the hall.

The ground was paved with some nameless black crystal, cold enough to bite, cold enough to freeze a soul.

My father struggled to his feet and looked up at the enormous hall and at the two ancient characters above its door, carved in a script like dragons and phoenixes in flight, thick with the air of killing: “Divine Punishment.”

He could not read them. But just looking, he felt a chill climb from the soles of his feet straight to the top of his skull.

“Where… where is this place?”

His voice shook.

Nobody gave him an answer.

The thirty-six thunder generals stood to either side like statues.

The two great doors of the hall, shut tight, doors that seemed able to swallow all light, swung open without a sound.

Inside was deeper darkness still.

“Condemned immortals. Enter.”

A voice without any feeling in it came from far inside the hall and echoed across the empty plaza.

The Lins of four and Yuxu were pulled off their feet by an invisible force and floated into the hall.

Inside was emptier even than the plaza.

Above, the high vault held rivers of stars in motion and broken fragments of Law.

Two rows of enormous stone pillars ran up to the vault, carved all over with reliefs of gods and demons under punishment, so lifelike that at any moment they might come alive and start screaming.

At the very back of the hall stood a platform reached by ninety-nine steps.

On the platform was a throne cut from primal chaos stone.

On the throne sat a person.

Or rather, a figure whose face was hidden behind a curtain of beads.

The figure was slender. It looked like a woman.

She sat there perfectly still, and yet she seemed to be the center of the whole universe.

Every Law, every order, turned around her.

The four Lins and Yuxu were pressed down by that force and made to kneel at the foot of the platform.

They did not dare raise their heads.

The pressure was too terrible.

Ten thousand times more terrible than the Eastflower Emperor, than the Dragon King of the West Sea.

It was a trembling that started in the deepest part of the Soul, the instinct a lesser life cannot resist when it faces a greater one.

“Yuxu.”

The figure on the throne spoke.

It was my voice.

But I was using the voice that went with the post. Majestic, vast, not one drop of human feeling in it.

Yuxu, kneeling at the front, jerked hard. “Con… condemned immortal Yuxu is here…”

“Do you know your crime?”

“This Disciple… this Disciple knows.”

There was a sob in Yuxu’s voice. “This Disciple failed to see what people were, sheltered and indulged them, broke heavenly law. I will take my punishment gladly. I only beg… I only beg that my Honored Master be spared.”

Even now, he was thinking of his Master, the Eastflower Emperor.

Some filial feeling in him, at least.

“The faults of the Eastflower Emperor will be judged by this seat in its own time.”

My voice was still flat. “Right now, it is you on trial.”

I paused, then went on. “A Direct Disciple of an Emperor, an Immortal Lord by title, you should have stood as an example to every immortal. Instead your private conduct is rotten, you let your household run wild, and you threw a whole heavenly domain into disorder. Yuxu, you have disappointed this seat.”

“This Disciple deserves ten thousand deaths! Ten thousand deaths!”

Yuxu knocked his head against the cold black stone again and again, and each blow rang out with a hollow thud.

I paid him no attention. My gaze went past him, to the four people behind him.

My dear family.

12

“Lin Wei. Zhao Lan. Lin Feng. Lin Yue.”

I read out their names, one by one.

With each name, the four kneeling there shook harder.

At last they understood that this mysterious being on the throne knew them down to the bone.

He had been the head of a household once, after all. He forced down his fear and raised his head, trying to make out what I looked like.

All he saw was a blur of swaying beads.

“Might I ask… might I ask the great deity, what crime our… our family has committed, to be dragged to this place?”

It came out with all the courage he had.

“Crime?”

I laughed.

The laugh echoed through the hall, hollow and clear, and more unsettling for it.

“Your crimes could fill every bamboo slip ever cut.”

As the words left my mouth, an immortal official standing at my side stepped forward and unrolled a golden scroll.

That scroll was a copy of the Book of the Heavenly Dao, which records the merits and faults of every living thing in the Three Realms.

“Condemned immortal Lin Wei,” the official began, in a tone that never rose or fell, “before your ascension, on Mount Qixia in the Mortal World, you killed the Rogue Cultivator Zhang San in secret to take the Purple Sun Flower from him. He died, and his Dao with him. This is the first crime.”

Lin Wei’s face went white in an instant.

He had done that five hundred years ago, and done it quietly. He had thought no god or ghost would ever know.

“After your ascension, for your own greed, you stole dragon-blood ginseng from the Eastflower Emperor’s Hundred Herbs Garden, to the ruin of the immortal realm’s morals. That makes the second crime.”

“To curry favor with the powerful, you let your daughter Lin Yue practice seduction. The intent alone deserves death. Count it the third crime.”

…

With every item the official read, Lin Wei went whiter.

By the end his face was the color of gold leaf, and he had slumped to the floor and could not summon a single word in his own defense.

Next was Zhao Lan.

“Condemned immortal Zhao Lan, mean of temper, vain, forever measuring yourself against others. In the Mortal World you were cruel to servants and beat the innocent to death. After ascension, you turned bitter, cursed the Heavenly Dao, and your venomous words polluted the spiritual qi of an entire district…”

Then Lin Yue.

“Condemned immortal Lin Yue, eaten by envy, a sower of lies. To get what you wanted you stopped at nothing, and you cultivated the arts of wicked seduction to disorder other people’s minds…”

And last, my “genius” brother, Lin Feng.

His list of crimes was the longest.

“Condemned immortal Lin Feng, perverse of temper, violent, fond of fighting. At New Arrivals you defied an immortal official; in Yunmeng Marsh you injured an immortal neighbor; at the Eastflower birthday banquet you openly extorted the Dragon King of the West Sea, with insolent words, showing no respect for your elders, and set two powers against each other, nearly causing disaster…”

The reading of that long list went on for the full length of a stick of incense.

The whole hall held nothing but the cold voice of the official.

The family of four went from disbelief, to shock, to utter despair.

Every mean thing they had ever done, great or small, in the Mortal World or the immortal realm, was written down plain and clear.

Before the Heavenly Dao, they had no secrets at all.

13

When the official finished and rolled up the scroll, the hall sank back into dead silence.

Then, after a long while, Zhao Lan burst.

The seal on her mouth had come loose at some point, and she let out a thin, tearing scream.

“I don’t believe it! It’s all lies! We never did any of it!”

Her hair had come down, and she looked like something gone mad.

“We worked so hard to become immortals! We are immortals! What gives you the right to treat us like this? Who are you? What gives you the right to judge us?”

Her raving moved nothing in me.

I only found it a little pitiful.

Even now, she was using the word “immortal” to numb herself.

She did not understand that before true Law, an “immortal” is only an Ant, one size up.

“Enough noise.”

I let the two words drop, with no weight in them at all.

An invisible pressure came down on Zhao Lan at once.

Her scream cut off as if an invisible hand had closed on her throat, and she was pressed flat against the floor, unable to move, unable to lift a finger.

That quieted the rest of them for good.

Lin Wei watched his proud wife lying on the ground like a dead dog, and the fear in his eyes finally beat out his hope.

He began knocking his head on the floor, begging in a tangle of words.

“Mercy, great deity! Mercy! We were wrong, we were truly wrong! We will never dare again! Give us one chance — we will be your oxen and horses, only show us mercy!”

Lin Feng knocked his head down too, weeping. “I was wrong, I know I was wrong, I should never have been so arrogant, never looked down on everyone… please, let us go!”

Lin Yue cried until she was a picture of lovely grief, the sort that makes a man’s heart turn.

She raised her face to the bead curtain on the platform, her voice shaking. “Great deity… if only you would spare us, Lin Yue… Lin Yue will serve you for life after life…”

The whole family put on the full performance of begging.

Perhaps some of it was true remorse. More of it was fear of a punishment they could not imagine.

I let them cry themselves out and beg themselves hoarse before I spoke.

“Are you not curious who this seat is?”

All four stopped. They raised their heads, and there was a little hope in their eyes, and a great deal of confusion.

Yes. Who was this Lord on high, this being who knew their family down to the bone?

Why would such a one have it in for a small Lin clan like theirs?

I lifted a hand and parted the bead curtain before my face.

The beads knocked together, clear and bright, and rang out in a small run of notes.

And then my face, the face they had looked at for hundreds of years, the face they knew best and held cheapest, was laid out plain before them.

Time seemed to stand still.

14

The hall was silent as death.

I could see every shift on the faces of my father, my mother, my brother, my sister: how in one instant fear and hope turned to pure shock, then to absurdity, to disbelief, and last to a fear deeper than before, fear down in the marrow.

My father’s eyes went wide as bells. His mouth hung open wide enough to hold an egg, and a hoarse sound came out of his throat, but not one word.

Zhao Lan, pinned to the floor a moment ago, found strength from somewhere, wrenched her head up, and stared at me as though she had seen a ghost.

Lin Feng dropped where he stood, the blood gone out of his face, and muttered, “No… impossible… it can’t be… a hallucination, it must be a hallucination…”

Lin Yue reacted hardest.

She screamed, pointed at me, and her voice came out cracked and strange. “You! Lin Shu! How can it be you?!”

Her cry seemed to break some Restriction, and the other three woke as if from a dream.

“Shu… Shu’er?”

My mother’s voice shook to pieces. “How… how are you here?”

“Witch! What foul art have you used!”

Lin Wei had found his voice at last. He pointed at me and roared, all bluster and no nerve, “You, a useless thing with no Spirit Root, how could you sit in that seat! Who are you really?!”

Useless thing.

That word, I had heard for hundreds of years.

From the day I could remember anything, that word had followed me.

Their faces were twisted with shock and fear. Suddenly the play seemed more interesting than before.

I rose from the throne and came down the steps, one at a time.

With each step down, the pressure around me drew in a little more.

By the time I reached them, I had changed back into the Lin Shu they knew, in a plain long dress, a mortal girl who looked like she could not hurt a fly.

“Father.” I stopped in front of Lin Wei and smiled a little. “A moment ago you wanted to know what gives me the right to judge you.”

My finger came up at the slow river of stars of Law turning overhead.

“That does.”

“The rules of all Three Realms are set by me, and kept by me.”

“And you, having ascended, happen to fall under my authority.”

My tone was light and soft, as though I were talking about some perfectly ordinary small thing.

But to their ears it was no less than nine heavens of thunder bursting inside their skulls.

15

“No! That is impossible!”

Lin Feng tore himself off the floor, screaming, “You are a mortal! A useless thing who cannot even draw qi into her body! How could you be that Lord! I don’t believe it! I won’t!”

He looked like a madman, eyes bloodshot, and threw himself at me without a thought. He gathered into his fist what little immortal power he had left, most of it already stripped from him, and drove it at my face.

“I’ll kill you, you witch! Kill you!”

That last desperate blow did not even make me blink.

A thunder general of the Thunder Division moved to strike, and I raised a hand to stop him.

I only looked at Lin Feng.

And in the instant his fist was about to touch the tip of my nose, his whole body stopped dead in the air.

As though someone had pressed pause.

The snarl on his face froze. His eyes filled with horror.

He found he could not move.

And not only him. In the whole hall, everything except me — time, space, the flow of Law — had gone still.

“Brother.” I walked up to him and laid one finger on his forehead. “You were always this reckless.”

“You think I am useless?”

I smiled, and from my fingertip a thread of power too fine to see, purer than chaos itself, seeped into the space between his brows.

And then, before my eyes, Lin Feng’s immortal body began to come apart from the inside.

His skin, his flesh, his bones, his Meridians… everything that made him an “immortal” dissolved without a sound, breaking down into the rawest particles and drifting away into the air.

There was no pain in it.

And it was more terrible than any torture could be.

Because he could see it, clear as day, see himself disappearing by degrees.

His mind was awake the whole time.

“Ah… ahh…”

He tried to scream, and no sound came out.

He tried to beg, and could not even open his mouth.

In his eyes there was a fear and a regret with no bottom to them.

In the space of a few breaths, the “genius” Lin Feng, who had once thought nothing in the world was above him, was wiped out of this world, root and branch.

Not one trace left behind.

I drew my finger back and flicked a speck of dust that was not there from my sleeve.

Then I released the stillness.

In the hall, everything began to move again.

Only Lin Feng was gone.

My father, my mother, my sister, and Yuxu all stared at the place where Lin Feng had stood, and found it empty.

“Feng’er… my Feng’er!”

Zhao Lan screamed until her voice broke, and fainted where she lay.

Lin Wei shook like a leaf in an autumn wind, and a foul smell came from between his legs.

He, the Clan Head of the Lin clan, had wet himself with fright.

Lin Yue had gone limp on the floor and could not even cry. She only stared at me in despair, and there was no envy in her eyes now, no venom. Only the purest fear.

“Now.” I looked them over, and my voice went cold and grave again. “Does anyone still question who I am?”

16

No one dared speak.

In the hall there was only my father’s ragged breathing and Lin Yue’s stifled sobs.

I walked over to Yuxu.

This Immortal Lord, once so dashing, now looked worse than a corpse.

He had watched a living man, an immortal, wiped out with one flick of a hand, and it had hit him far harder than any punishment could.

“Yuxu.” I turned to him. “Do you still think they are innocent?”

Yuxu shuddered and shook his head hard. “No… not innocent… they got what they deserved… they deserve death ten times over…”

“And you?”

I pressed him.

“I… I am guilty too!”

Yuxu did not hesitate. “I helped a tyrant do his work, I covered for evil, I am beyond forgiveness! My Lord… my Lord, give me death!”

He was begging to die.

He really had been frightened out of what was left of his nerve.

I shook my head. “Death is too good for you.”

I gave it to him without turning a hair. “I will strip your immortal root, scatter your hard-won cultivation, and send you back to a mortal frame. But I will not send you into Reincarnation.”

“I will throw you down into the lowest mortal world, the one you held cheapest. Let you find out how the mortals you took for Ants struggle through birth and old age, sickness and death, love and hate and grief.”

“You will live out a hundred lives there. In every one of them you will taste hardship to the dregs, and watch the people you love die in front of you while you can do nothing.”

“After a hundred lives, if there is still a thread of good left in you, I will give you one chance to enter Reincarnation again.”

“That is your punishment.”

Yuxu took it in and went blank.

A hundred lives of parting by death, a hundred lives of helplessness.

That was ten thousand times crueler than killing him.

“No… don’t…”

He howled in despair.

It was too late.

I waved a hand, and his body went thin and transparent at once, then broke into a point of flowing light and vanished from the Hall of Divine Punishment.

Somewhere in an unknown mortal world, he was beginning his long and painful road of atonement.

With Yuxu dealt with, my eyes went to the last three.

My dear father, mother, and sister.

17

That was where my father came apart completely.

He knelt on the floor, his face a mess of tears and mucus, knocking his head toward me with all his strength.

“Shu’er! Your father was wrong! Truly wrong! I am not a man! I am a beast!”

“I should never have treated you so, never called you useless… I had no eyes!”

“For the sake of the father and daughter we were, spare me this once! I will be your ox, your horse, your dog, anything!”

As he spoke he slapped his own face, hard, each blow landing with a crack, until his face swelled up like a pig’s head.

Lin Yue crawled over too and wrapped her arms around my leg, sobbing so hard she could not get the words out.

“Little sister… no, Lord! Your sister was wrong, she knows she was wrong!”

“It was always your sister’s fault before. I was jealous of you, I always bullied you… I am not a man… I am not human! Remember that once I washed a diaper for you, and spare this dog’s life!”

They had started playing on my feelings.

They had started calling up that “family love” they had flung to the far corners of the sky long ago.

My eyes went to the display they were making of themselves, and my stomach turned.

If you know today, why did you not think of it then?

When they took me for the clan’s shame because I had no Spirit Root, did family love occur to them?

When they locked me in a dark room for ten years so I would not interfere with their cultivation, did family love occur to them?

When the whole family ascended, cut the mortal ties with me without a backward look, and left me alone in the Mortal World to live or die, did one shred of family love occur to them then?

And now, with disaster on their heads, they wanted to talk to me about father and daughter, about sister and sister.

Truly, it would be hard to invent anything more ridiculous.

I kicked Lin Yue off my leg and looked at my father, still mutilating himself.

“Father.” There was nothing in my voice at all. “Do you remember?”

“The day of your Ascension. What did you say to me?”

Lin Wei’s hands stopped. He raised that swollen face and looked at me without understanding.

So I gave him back his own words:

“You said, Lin Shu, that the mortal ties between the Lin clan and you end here.”

My voice was not loud, but it came down on him like a great hammer.

“I have kept that sentence in mind ever since.”

“So, Lin Wei.” I regarded him and gave him each word separately. “When you walked into this hall, you should have understood.”

“Here there is no father and daughter. No family love.”

“Only the Lord of Divine Punishment, and a sinner waiting to be judged.”

The last thread of hope in Lin Wei’s eyes went out.

18

I paid no more attention to their wailing and begging.

I walked back up onto the platform and sat down again on the throne.

“Attend me.”

“Here!”

Two thunder generals came forward, their voices like great bells.

“Read the sentence.”

No lift in my voice at all.

The immortal official at my side stepped forward again and unrolled another scroll, this one black.

The verdict, on black paper.

“Condemned immortal Lin Wei: cold of heart, stopped at nothing to get what he wanted, and for these crimes… he is to be executed.”

When the word “executed” came out of the official’s mouth, Lin Wei went limp, like a heap of wet mud.

“However, the Lord, mindful of the debt of birth and raising, shows leniency beyond the law.”

The official paused, then went on:

“Sentence: abolish his immortal body, draw out his immortal bones, and cast him into the Uninterrupted Hell beneath the Ninefold Abyss, there to suffer the burning of fierce fire for ten thousand years. When the term is served, his repentance will be weighed, and whether he enters Reincarnation decided then.”

The Uninterrupted Hell!

The thunder generals on either side of the hall could not hold back a gasp.

That was the most terrible place of punishment in the heavenly realm, where the demon gods of the ancient age, the worst of the worst, are kept.

They say the fire there burns the Soul directly, and leaves a man unable to live and unable to die.

Ten thousand years!

That punishment was a thousand times more painful than Soul Scattering on the spot.

When Lin Wei heard the verdict, he could not even scream. His body only twitched, foam at his mouth.

Next was Lin Yue.

“Condemned immortal Lin Yue: cruel of heart, envy made into a habit, and for these crimes… she too is to be executed.”

“The Lord, mindful of her youth and ignorance, likewise shows leniency beyond the law.”

“Sentence: abolish her immortal body, destroy her looks, and banish her to the Laundry Bureau of the immortal realm, a slave for ten thousand years. Every day she must wash one hundred thousand robes of sin steeped in resentment, until the resentment wears her Soul away and the matter is ended.”

The Laundry Bureau sounded a little better than the Uninterrupted Hell.

But anyone who knew the place knew the suffering there was no less.

The resentment in those robes of sin eats at the Soul day and night, and a person dies by inches inside endless pain and madness.

Her looks destroyed, condemned to slavery.

For my sister, who held her face and her standing dearer than her life, that was without question the cruelest sentence of all.

She heard it, her eyes rolled up, and she fainted, the same as my mother had.

That left only Zhao Lan, still lying on the floor unconscious.

The official glanced at me. “My Lord, and Zhao Lan…”

I took in the woman on the floor, once so stately and splendid, now a wreck, and something complicated went through me.

Vain and mean as she was, when I was small she had held me, and sung me children’s rhymes.

On the day I was tested and found to have no Spirit Root, and the whole clan laughed at me, she had gone off and cried where no one could see.

It was only that this thin scrap of mother love had never been enough to beat her hunger for a Longevity to match Heaven’s own, and for high standing.

“She…”

I let the silence sit a while. Then I spoke.

19

“Let it go.”

After a long while I let out a light sigh.

“Condemned immortal Zhao Lan. She has many faults, but none of them deserve death.”

The official and the thunder generals looked at me in some surprise.

They had not expected the Lord, whose even-handedness was a byword, to really show “leniency beyond the law.”

I offered no explanation. I only went on:

“Abolish her Cultivation Base. Reduce her to a mortal frame.”

“Send her to an ordinary mortal world. Let her be born into an ordinary household.”

“In this life, let her pass a mortal’s life quietly and safely, as a mortal should.”

“Birth and old age, sickness and death, grief and joy, parting and meeting. Let her find out what they are for herself.”

“A hundred years from now, dust to dust, earth to earth.”

“As for what comes after that, it will be up to her own fate.”

The last tenderness I had to give her.

And it was the last cut that separated me from the identity of “Lin Shu.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

The official bowed and accepted the order, and wrote Zhao Lan’s final sentence on the black scroll.

Soon two thunder generals came forward. One hauled up Lin Wei, already half mad; one dragged up the unconscious Lin Yue. They were taken away to have the sentence carried out.

Other immortal clerks drew Zhao Lan’s mortal soul out, carefully, and set it in a jade bottle made for the purpose, to be sent to the Bureau of Reincarnation.

The great Hall was empty and silent again before long.

As though the harrowing trial just past had been a dream.

“My Lord.”

The lead thunder general stepped forward and dropped to one knee.

“The Eastflower Emperor has been lax in teaching his Disciple and blind in judging men, and nearly caused great disaster. How is he to be dealt with? The Lord’s instruction.”

I leaned back against the cold throne and felt tired.

“Send him a message.”

“Tell him this seat was not at all satisfied with his ten-thousand-year birthday banquet.”

“Fine him ten thousand years of his stipend. He is to shut his doors and reflect for a thousand years.”

“If Eastflower Heaven stirs up trouble again inside a thousand years, this seat will come and sit in his Lingxiao Hall in person.”

Something like a smile moved in the thunder general’s eyes.

He knew this punishment only looked light. In truth it was harder to bear than a beating, or than having his Cultivation Base abolished.

For a great power who lived on face like the Eastflower Emperor, it was a public flogging.

“Yes!”

The thunder general took the order and withdrew from the hall with all his men.

At last, the great hall held no one but me.

20

I sat quietly on the throne and looked around the empty hall.

In all my years as Lord of Divine Punishment I had judged countless immortals and demons, the worst of them.

Never once had it left me feeling… tired, as it did today.

I let my eyes shut, and the memories of “Lin Shu,”, these few hundred years, went through my mind whether I wanted them to or not.

The sound of my father’s laughter when he lifted me over his head, back when I was learning to talk.

My mother’s worried, gentle eyes when I was first finding my feet.

My brother’s back, planted between me and the neighbor’s children when they picked on me.

The childhood when I wore my hair in two little horns and trotted after my sister, calling, “Sister, wait for me.”

…

The images went by, frame after frame.

And then they stopped on the day they tested me and found no Spirit Root.

Every face changed.

The warm sunlight turned into a wind that cut to the bone.

From that day on I was the clan’s shame, the one nobody needed.

I changed back from the girl on the high throne into a mortal girl in a plain dress.

I walked to the door of the hall and looked out at the endless void of chaos beyond it.

“It’s all over.”

Nobody was there to hear it, which was how I wanted it.

I, Lin Shu, have finished my life as a mortal.

I, who hold the office, will go on keeping the order of the Heavenly Dao.

These few hundred years of mortal life were like a long dream.

The dream is over, and it is time I went home.

I stepped out of the Hall of Divine Punishment. One step.

When I appeared again, I was back in Qixia City, in the back garden of the Lin estate.

The sun was warm as ever. The breeze was mild as ever.

Under the crooked peach tree in that corner of the garden, the Earth God was holding a little watering can and humming a tune, watering the soul-returning grass that was thriving so nicely.

He jumped out of his skin when I appeared. The watering can hit the ground with a clang.

“G-great deity! You… you’re back!”

“Mm.”

I nodded, walked to the reclining chair, and lay back down in it.

The storybook I had left half-read on the stone table was still there; I picked it up.

The Domineering Sword Immortal Loves Me.

Mm. I had got to the part where the hero charges alone into the demon realm to save the heroine and cuts down everything in sight.

Truly… a hackneyed and delightful plot.

Seeing that I was not about to scold him, the Earth God picked up the watering can carefully, then fished a big red apple out of his coat and held it up to me.

“Great deity, this small god just bought this at the mortal market. They say it’s the freshest of the year. Will you try it?”

I turned my eyes on the apple, plain and unpolished, with a worm hole or two in it.

I took it from him, rubbed it on my clothes, and bit off a large chunk with a crunch.

Very crisp. Very sweet.

It tasted of mortal sunlight.

“Mm.” I studied the Earth God, whose face was full of hope, and smiled.

“Good.”

Yes. This plain, unpolished life of the fields suited me best.

As for all that killing and quarreling and old grievance up in the immortal realm?

Too tiring.

Better to be a mortal, quietly, and let it be.