Priest wrote a new book and I’m dutifully following it chapter by chapter.
For those that are unaware, there’s a little green website by the name of JJWXC (Jin Jiang Literature City) that’s been around since my middle school days circa 2003 that publishes web novels in installments. You pay something like 13 cents per chapter, the author releases the book as they write it, and you get roughly one chapter each day, something around 3000 words. If you grew up in a household without TV (ahem yours truly) this was an excellent substitute to get your daily dose of entertainment.
One of the most popular authors these days is called priest, and she writes truly excellent stories. I’ve written a bit before about her story No Pollution, No Public Harm. I’d like to talk a bit about her ongoing new story, 太岁 (tai4 sui4), False Deity, or Jupiter. A title translation for this one is hard. Fan Tai Sui, or to have crossed the Tai Sui is commonfolk slang to express that someone’s getting extremely bad luck due to possibly having offended the gods. Think of it as Mercury retrograde for the plebs of ancient China. Tai Sui is supposedly a god with no origin, no history, no backstory, some say it’s a gigantic mushroom, and some say it’s the star known as Jupiter. Whatever it is, many people worshipped it for no apparent reason both historically and in real life present day — and that’s kind of what it is in the story. In priest’s novel, Tai Sui is a false deity, whose power derives from the people who worship it out of desperation.
The novel Tai Sui is styled as a steam punk variety of Taoist cultivation fantasy set in ancient China. There are at least three kingdoms, each with its own standard ancient China monarchy, aristocracy, and strictly hierarchical society. Except that each monarchy is at the mercy of a higher order — that of taoist cultivators. The “steam punk” aspect of this story comes from a magical mineral energy source, 灵石 (crystals). Cultivators extract energy from such crystals in order to harness them to hyper elevate their senses and reflexes, and to magically manipulate the world and elements around them. Due to a particular scientific discovery, mortals were able to harness the energy of crystals via magical instruments created for mortals — 降格仙器 aka level-reduced magical instruments — in ways like electricity and steam powered factories, lights, trains, and steamboats.
【Spoiler warnings ahead】
The story follows Xi Ping (奚平), a young aristocrat, born to a life of idleness and luxury, interested in little but mischief. He opens the story in drag, masquerading as a female accompanist to Jiang Li, the beautiful singer of the local brothel. Caught by his irate father, who was in the audience, he runs up and down the city chased by his family guards. However, the young mischief-maker is soon caught up in a series of supernatural murders — young aristocrats are dropping dead of supernatural causes with only one common theme — Xi Ping was the last person that saw them.
The Pavilion of Divination (天机阁), a police-like task force of low level cultivators intervenes and discovers that the instigators are a group of unorthodox practitioners known as 邪祟 (demonic spirits). Deformed and grotesque, these demonic spirits very much look the part of the antagonist — it turns out that they are all followers of a mysterious cult, looking to revive their false deity — Tai Sui. The brothel beauty Jiang Li was a member of this cult. She set a magical and deadly fragrance on our main character that caused the deaths of his fellow aristocrat wastrels, but gave him a charm preventing certain death out of unrequited love.
During a magical battle between the demonic spirits and the Pavilion of Divination, Jiang Li’s charm protected Xi Ping from a fatal blow — the charm traded her life for his. However, as a cultist, Jiang Li had already promised her life, energy, past and future to the false deity. This double-promise led the way for Xi Ping to be possessed by the false deity Tai Sui after he was gravely wounded by the magically shootout with the Pavilion. Since the year’s pickings of young aristocrats for the school of magic were of particularly questionable moral quality this year, Xi Ping ends up replacing a different young aristocrat who had raped and then killed his cousin, and enters the world of Taoist cultivation.
priest’s steam punk fantasy world rests upon certain assumptions. One of them is the stratified social hierarchy. Another is that the orthodox cultivators and the Pavilion of Divination is righteous, and all unorthodox practitioners are evil spirits bent on world destruction.
For the young aristocrat, all is well. The ambitious folk will either seek a political career, or seek to enter the school of magic and join the Pavilion of Divination. So long as one does not run afoul of politics or magic, he is guaranteed at least a life of idle luxury. The Xuan Yin Crystal Mountain, the secret organization of cultivators behind the monarchy and it’s mortal world office — the Pavilion of Divination — is authoritative on all matters.
The average plebeian, however, is at the constant mercy of famine and abuse by power. A young peasant girl joins a protest for money — unbeknownst to her this is the ploy of one prince against another — and her grandfather’s life swiftly becomes collateral damage in a game of chess between two royals. A drunken aristocrat drives his carriage into a crystal powered factory, and the consequent explosion kills hundreds of factory workers and residents of the surrounding slums. The brothel beauty was once the daughter of well-off family of merchants and bureaucrats, but the wastrel son of a more powerful family laid a plot in order to take over her family’s crystal mine and sent the male half of her family to the gallows and the female half to the brothels.
In priest’s steam punk fantasy world, the three Kingdoms are superficial monarchies actually governed by Crystal Mountains, each with their own set of governing philosophies. It is assumed by the public that the taoist practitioners are necessarily virtuous and deserving of their position because they are governed by a 道心 (a cultivators path), something akin to a moral path, a philosophical worldview, or a set of morales that they will necessarily abide by. Basically, if they disobey their Path, then their practice, their magical powers, and their immortality will all disintegrate, and they will become mortal once again (or dead, if they had exceeded the standard mortal lifespan). Xuan Yin of the Kingdom Wan is a world of checks and balances. San Yue of Kingdom Chu is a winner takes all world where only the fittest survive. We have not yet seen the third kingdom, but the Path of each Crystal Mountain, almost seems like a political system or political philosophy — democratic, republican, authoritarian, etc.
When we start the story, we assume that this is the way things work because in Xi Ping’s tiny slice of aristocratic life, things work well. As the story progresses, we come across things that don’t work well — gross inequality, abuse of power, corruption, etc — until they pushed to desperation, people generally assume that this is the way things work because this is the way things have always worked. But is it?
Xi Ping is an interesting character. As he progresses throughout the story and meets other characters, he keeps an extremely admirable trait — he treats the people he meets with empathy, and he corrects the wrongs that he sees without turning a blind eye. In the process of doing so, without having done anything wrong himself, he becomes an outcast of the orthodoxy, and in this process, he realizes that the reason why “demonic spirits” looked evil is due to magical damage from not having enough resources. The Crystal Mountains control all crystal resources, and claim that anyone who has not gone through their system, or does not abide by their system is evil. However, the route to the Crystal Mountain, is tightly limited to the descendants of four aristocratic families and a handful of other aristocrats. Through the Crystal Mountains, which in turn controls the monarchy, these four families control a country where the poor and powerless are ruthlessly exploited to mine and deliver resources to the capital, where they are concentrated in the hands of the few.
The Wan Kingdom does so with four aristocratic families, despite the checks and balances. The Chu Kingdom, does so with its single ruling family that owns both the monarchy and the Crystal Mountain. “Official” history says that the Crystal Mountains were established by the most venerable Taoist practitioners that reached the stage of nirvana. Rumor says that they did so after defeating all the other Demon Gods (魔神). But unknown to most, prior to the establishment of Crystal Mountains, magical resources were abundant everywhere and not concentrated in the hands and control of few. Known to even fewer: the so called Demon Gods who fell to the Nirvana stage cultivators were not necessarily evil per se, they were merely cultivators with different paths that were less powerful in a duel.
So the story is still ongoing. As of the latest chapter, Xi Ping has accidentally inherited the Path of a former Demonic God, and consequently become an outcast of the Xuan Yin mountain, where he first became a disciple. He’s taken refuge in Tao Village on the Wan Kingdom and Chu Kingdom border, and sought to replenish the damage done to the village’s environment as result of a cultivator fight. In doing so, he came to the San Yue Crystal Mountain in attempt to find a magical artifact, and witnessed a powerful taoist cultivator reach the 月满 stage of Nirvana and came to new conclusions and questions about how the entire Crystal Mountain system works.
All is not what it seems has been a common theme in many stories I’ve recently enjoyed. The Untamed, or MDZS, certainly has that theme — evil might not actually be evil, good might not actually be good. But whereas priests earlier works like No Pollution, No Public Harm, and The Great Battle Against Procrastination focus on individual choices within a larger society, Tai Sui is much more a question raised at the system itself. How does it actually work? Why does it work this way? How did things come to be? Is this the way things should be? There’s a lot in the power of naming, rhetoric, and history. Over time, arbitrary decisions become engraved traditions and people do not think to question or challenge history or power.Something as simple as a name — evil spirits — made unorthodox cultivators suddenly antagonists, feared and isolated by all. Who decides what is orthodox and what is not? Who decides who is good and who is evil? Who decides that these aristocratic cultivator families and their descendants get the vast majority of all resources while everybody else starves and fights for scraps? When things don't seem right, just, or fair, Xi Ping asks why, and in doing so, challenges the power of orthodoxy, and discovers the lies in the history they proclaim.
I guess this brings us back to the story’s stated theme: a revolution against subjective idealism. I’m not a philosophy person and I won’t try to figure out what exactly subjective idealism is, but the gist of it is this. Tai Sui is a “false deity” worshipped by people in their direst need, in contrast to the “deities” and cultivators of the Crystal Mountains, which as officially sanctioned religious entities to pray to. When people lose hope in their government and “official religion”, they turn to a fictional thing they completely made up. Somehow, through a combination of sheer chance, Xi Ping is forced into the position of representing Tai Sui, and hearing everyone’s prayers, from which he derives power. So ultimately, is it a cult or is it real? What is real? What is the actual revolutionary power?
We can wait until next week to find out. If you read Chinese, you can follow the story here. If not, you can ask for a translation on Twitter. =)
