1 The Monk's Curse
A monk peered at the gloomy sky. His tattered robes of rough linen fluttered in the wind, its colors faded by decades of traveling. He wandered across a thousand towns, and by the end of his endeavor, he had lost his own name. The wrinkles on his face contorted like writhing snakes as he stared into the distance. Even throughout the violent storm where trees flailed to the whims of the wind, he still sat there on top of the mountain as pensive as ever.
His faint eyebrows scrunched up even more until he had a spontaneous fit of violent coughing. Ignoring his pain, he picked up a sharp flint, using it to etch messy scribbles on a strip of bamboo.
Looking up once again, he murmured to himself, "There is a demon in this world."
He resumed his writing, failing to notice that the candle flame illuminating the area had been extinguished. There, his solitary figure retreated into the temple's main hall and continued carving words on a bamboo scroll.
No one knew when this place was built, but by the time he had occupied it, everything was already in shambles. In the center of the hall, there was a stone Buddha with a jagged crack in the middle which split the statue's face into two. Corpses of warriors in heavy iron armor littered the ground below the statue, blood-red flowers blooming in the crevices of the floor.
The monk was unfazed by all of this, with the echo of his writing permeating every single inch of the temple.
He smiled, revealing a mouth of hideous yellow teeth. Looking at the wall of the temple courtyard, he gently whispered "Even emperors are afraid of Hell, but we shouldn't worry about it. We are already in it."
The monk cackled towards the wall, bullets of spittle raining everywhere. The plain red wall was his only companion in his exile, and he saw it as his only child.
The monk inhaled sharply and whispered, "We...we...have been consigned to death in this limited world. A world abandoned by the gods, no heaven or hell, no possibility of ascending to a higher plane. When Nüwa, the mother of the world and mender of the cracking sky, created humans, the Earth cried for two eons, until she finally compromised and bestowed upon her creation death."
He coughed out red chunks.
Lifting his hands, his mouth trembled as he failed to continue speaking.
The monk opened his mouth to continue, but he stopped, laughing and coughing in bizarre combinations for several hours.
The robe which he used to cover his cough was blotted with specks of dark blood.
Drip….Drip...Drip...
The blood flowed onto the ground, forming branches and branches of rivers seeping into the ground.
With his last scraps of strength, he willed his palms together, trembling intensely.
He finally felt content. It was all over. Twenty arduous years were over. He dreamt of bountiful riches and eternal glory, but he ended up with nothing.
The bamboo strip of his unrestrained writing remained in the robes of his corpse, buried by the sands of time and consigned to oblivion in an uncharted mountain range.
Nine years later came a scholar of modest stature with an entourage of high officials. Seeing an outline of a temple in the forest ahead, they arrived at the abandoned monastery. As they walked into the courtyard, the leading scholar suddenly clutched his head and collapsed in agony on the stone tiles.
An old frail doctor rushed to his side, administering a handful of herbs and grasses to alleviate the noble-looking scholar.
All the officials in the scholar's entourage knelt on the ground, beads of sweat covering their old, wizened faces.
The scholar laid on a pillow brought by the doctor, sighing deprecatingly, "Don't kneel, I don't deserve it. I'm not a prince anymore."
The old statesman in the front pleaded with the lavishly dressed figure in gold, "The new emperor doesn't have the capacity to lead! All he does is idle around in luxury, killing officials at random for entertainment purposes."
The Prince sighed, shaking his head.
"We are already dead, our traces erased from the world. No one knows us and those who did are either dead or missing because of the Emperor. It cost the Grand Preceptor his life to get us out of the Imperial Dungeons. We are not going back."
The Prince signaled from the doctor to help him up and walked towards the looming stone Buddha smiling down at them. He touched the feet of the Buddha and suddenly turned around.
"We will be staying here for the rest of our lives. Any other recourse spells death."
The camp settled there at dusk, organizing their meager belongings. A total of ten people slept on the stone-cold ground that night, their only solace.
At midnight, two beds were noticeably empty.
The Prince had woken up after hearing the bloody screaming of the willow trees. The senior statesman who pleaded to him earlier in the day also woke up, accompanying the Prince to explore the temple.
They were shocked to find a bloodied corpse in the corner of the courtyard, covered up by a wildly growing bush. Their eyes honed in on the dried streams of blood that stemmed from the robes of the monk.
Now, the howling of the wind sounded like the screeching of compassionate Buddhist scriptures. They had an unsettling realization that those animal bones and flowers were not the bones of wild animals or the pure conception of nature, but rather, the bones were of decayed humans, and the flowers were unnaturally perverted by the staining of blood.
The Prince shook his head to refocus, and a peculiar brown edge stuffed in the corpse's robe caught his eye. He carefully pulled the object out and discovered a singular strip of bamboo coated in the dust of passing years.
The statesman inquired nervously, his eyes filled with worry, "What does it say?"
The Prince gazed at it and then gazed at the starless, moonless night, repeating the monotonous action several times before murmuring almost silently, "The supreme truth of the world….It never should have been seen by the dirty eyes of humans."
The Prince sat down on the ground in a crouching position, throwing the bamboo strip to the statesman, who saw the lines upon lines of scribbles. It fascinated him. Each symbol had been condensed from a thousand words.
His hands shook violently, and in a split second, the bamboo strip fell out of his wrinkly hands. He silently recited prayers in his mind.
He looked back at the Prince with a glance so precise in its meaning and intoxicated with fear that they proclaimed at the same time seven unfathomable words.
"There is a demon in this world."
Three years passed. A shrine was built for the supreme text that they had discovered, and they all delved into a rabid fanaticism of religious frenzy. Solitude eroded their sanity, and the sole goal in their minds was to create statues. They rabidly dug stones with their hands, using them to mold statues of otherworldly creatures of contorted shapes and gruesome visages.
For every statue they built, they eagerly drew a lottery to compete who would obtain ownership of the statue.
The first statue they built, perhaps the most human-like, had a face that was peaceful, euphoric, depressed, and furious at the same time. An old finance minister had won the lottery.
That old man, previously refined and sage-like, had become frenzied. They delved so deep into the text on the bamboo strip that they started to have hallucinations where they dreamt of being converted into godly beings. The minister who won the statue gleefully allowed himself to be encased into the statue.
The image last seen of him was of his dilated pupils, reflecting a gaze of the highest ecstasy. He never came out of the statue.
From the inside and outside, it was nailed shut. The finance minister bragged about how he sensed an invincible, omnipotent power coursing through his bones and spirit. He felt like a deity.
The others were exasperated and filled with envy. They rushed to construct a second deity statue.
Their undisturbed insanity didn't last for long though. Soon, a band of fugitives who were escaping from government officials chanced upon the temple.
The Prince's eyes gleamed an insane scarlet luster as he attempted to ambush the group. He sorely miscalculated, getting impaled in the heart as a result. The frenzied statesman swarmed towards the mercenaries like insects into a fire, being torn apart by the blunt sabers of their adversaries.
They all died in triumph and unceasing euphoria, perishing as disembodied, limbless maniacs giggling like infants.
"We finally ascended to godhood," they all began to chant. They wiggled on the ground in fervor, alarming the criminals with their wild impulses.
The group of criminals was so bewildered that they quickly headed in the other direction.
Two days passed, with the bodies decomposing at lightning speed. Suddenly, a leg twitched out of the pile of corpses which the criminals made. Blackened hands, plagued with cracked skin and calluses, blindly touched around the surroundings and a deformed creature climbed out through ragged breaths.
It was the Prince, who still had the arrow sticking through his back. By sheer luck, the arrow didn't kill him.
He opened his arms towards the sky and cackled, proclaiming "I am superior to the Heavens. I finally am relinquished from my human shell. I have unlimited power!"
The Prince, with his eyes half-open, saw gods prostrating at his feet and himself sitting on a majestic, eternal throne. A bystander deer peered through the bushes, confounded by the creature who once was a prince who was sitting on the pile of corpses. Those gods were a bustling swarm of red ants.
The Prince felt his time of ascension coming, and frantically, wanting to show off his magnanimity and virtue, he wrote a declaration using his own blood:
"I have spent tireless days working on deity statues so I could become one. I didn't realize how difficult it was, but after reading this bamboo slip, I was able to attain godhood in just three years, becoming an omnipotent existence feared by the heavens!"
He was screaming in excitement and taking huge breaths, but suddenly after inhaling, he froze, his eyes as wide as humanly possible. He finally ascended!
He felt so powerful, so satisfied, so relieved when he saw the divine golden light embracing him. The earth was rumbling in terror of him as he obtained godhood.
He could feel the confirmation of his godhood, as the earth shook uncontrollably. He smiled the hardest he ever had, but instead of rising towards the sky, he sank.
Into a sinkhole.
Buried in the rubble, he deluded himself that this was just a detour in his ascension. He died of indigestion. Who could live their lives as good as his? Fantasy replaced reality when he read the line that the monk wrote numerous years ago.
"There is a demon in the world."
The monk was right. There was a demon in the world. It was himself. The monk had wiped out thousands of cities and hamlets. After he died, the Prince became the demon, cursed to death the moment he stole the bamboo strip from the robe of the monk.
There the bamboo strip laid in the sinkhole, banished to the realm below the living. Its potent magic still holds the potential to corrupt the mind, creating sensations of godly powers deluded to the point of insanity. The demonic realm, the heavens, the gods are all products that derive power from human thought, but once the bamboo slip is recovered again, chaos will flood the entire world, unleashed from the dam of reality, the farthest border which separates the world from empty void.
