The Blue Jade Table

At dusk the sky over the little village was dyed red by the sinking sun, layer upon layer of gold spreading out before darkness dropped all at once like a lid. Before the last of the light vanished, some said they saw crimson dandelion fluff rise on the wind and sweep over the entire village, covering it through the whole night. When morning came again, the village had fallen into ruin, and all its people had vanished. The tale went that a young woman wronged and killed there had refused the cycle of rebirth and laid a blood curse over the place instead. People said no one alive could undo it.

By the light of a trembling candle, in a room painted wall to wall with occult symbols, I looked upon a face woven tight with hatred. How deep must a hurt be to hollow a person so completely? He sat before the circle he had prepared, eyes shut, lips moving, summoning the spirit called Panling. Blue fire rose. Panic seized me at once. Panling was one of the darkest and most perilous of the ghost-immortals: swift to answer prayers, but never without demanding blood, tears, or life in return. When the blue light had filled the room, I stepped out from the shadows and appeared before him. Surprise flashed in his eyes, but he recovered quickly and dropped to one knee. "Panling, help me avenge Seiran." He bowed his head as he spoke, yet every line of him burned with vengeance. So that was the name of the woman he loved. At the thought of her, something sour and purple coiled in my own heart. "Blood debts will be paid in blood," I answered. Then I pointed toward the low table at the room's center. "That blue-jade table is where my spirit must rest. Let me keep it with me for now." He hesitated. "That table was left to me by Seiran." I forced a smile. "Then perhaps even my arrival is part of Seiran's design." After a moment he accepted that. I laid a hand on the blue jade, and the eight-immortals table shrank small enough to hide in my sleeve. Yes, I was the one he believed he had summoned. He must have thought this was our first meeting, but in truth I had seen him long before. I had spoken his name in my heart a thousand times. Sumikawa Kuon. Yet he had never known mine. To him I was only Panling, Panling, Panling. I was tired of it. "My name is Wakaba," I said at last. He looked up, startled, then repeated it carefully. "Wakaba." Just that one name laid a vast distance between us. He thought, I knew, that we could be no more than strangers. My chest gave another sharp little pain. However powerful my spiritual arts might be, they did nothing to spare me the agony of a heart. I ached for Sumikawa Kuon. And he ached for Seiran.

Seiran had died because of him. At the time he was a scholar on his way to Kyoto. He passed through her village and saw her by the stream, washing silk, her long hair tied up with a blade of grass, and in that instant her clear figure entered his heart. He lost all taste for study and, because he could paint exquisitely, made a living drawing portraits so he could stay in the village beside her. The night he asked for her hand, he spent all the silver he had on a length of brocade and painted on it the image of her at the water's edge, every stroke full of devotion. Her eyes lit like flowing jewels when she took it from him. Then he told her, "When I have made my name, I will come back and marry you." The whole world dimmed at once. The joy in her face turned to knives. He meant to leave. After six months beside her, he still meant to go on to Kyoto. He tried to embrace her and say goodbye, but she stepped back, turned her eyes aside, and said in a flat voice, "The village head intends me for his son. I have no parents. He raised me. I cannot disobey. As for your kindness, Master Sumikawa, I do not have the fortune for it. Go." They were only angry words, meant to make him stay. She wanted no fine clothes and no noble prospects, only to remain with the man she loved and never part from him. But he took her literally and left in a miserable rush, never seeing the flood of tears in her eyes. Three years later he returned with some small success to his name and, without forgetting her, deliberately passed by the village to see how she had fared as another man's wife. Instead he found only her grave, a few peach branches and willows leaning over it. He fell to his knees without knowing he had done so. An old woman who came to sweep the grave told him Seiran had left something for Sumikawa Kuon if he should ever return. It was the blue-jade table. The moment his fingers touched it, visions surged before him: their happy days together, then the village head and his men forcing marriage upon her. When she resisted, they accused her of having already given away her body before marriage. At last they threw her alive into the lake. He could feel her heart calling out for him. When he tore his hand away from the jade table, tears had already soaked his face. He took the table into the wind and let the cold cut his hands and cheeks because only pain made his heart any easier to bear.

I knew the whole story between Kuon and Seiran. When I asked him what form he wanted his revenge to take, he answered: a blood curse. I flinched inwardly, but I still smiled and said, "If you want to learn it, I will teach you." How could I have guessed that the mild and courteous Sumikawa Kuon would wish to master something so absolute? A blood curse is placed into the body through some tiny medium, then drinks the blood away little by little. Its victim suffers both terror and agony until death. No one has ever found a remedy. One midnight I came to his half-open door. The candle still burned within. He had fallen asleep bent over the book on blood curses I had given him. I sighed and, from a distance, drew his cloak up across his back with a thread of air. The movement woke him. He looked up and said softly, "Wakaba, it's so late. Why aren't you resting?" My eyes dropped to the book. "A blood curse isn't something you learn in a day." He understood me at once. "Seiran's death anniversary is near," he said. "I want to learn it before then." Seiran. Seiran. Seiran. Why was every conversation with him bound to return to her? Then what was I in his eyes? I stiffened my face and said, almost like an order, "I heard you're an excellent painter. Paint my portrait." His expression changed at once. "Wakaba... if you ask anything else, I will do my utmost. But as for painting, I swore at Seiran's grave that in this life I would never paint another woman. Please forgive me." The refusal struck so hard that I lost control for the first time in my life. A lash of power flew from my hand and cracked across his cheek. Blood rose at the corner of his mouth. Yet he only smiled sadly and said, "You had every right to strike me." I staggered back in horror at myself and fled. Nothing should have happened like that. Nothing. It was the first time my magic had ever broken loose because of one person. That person was Sumikawa Kuon.

I hid in the back mountain for more than ten days, meditating, trying and failing to calm the turmoil in me. At last I heard him calling my name through the woods. I assumed he had come only because he had met some difficulty in mastering the blood curse, and all of it, in the end, was still for Seiran. So I hid from him until night fell and his voice had gone hoarse. When the full moon rose from behind the clouds, I could no longer stay away. Moonlight draws all impure things. If he remained on the mountain much longer, midnight would become dangerous for him. So I stepped out beside him. He turned, saw me, and his tired face broke into pure relief. "Wakaba. I've finally found you." The words were so beautiful that for one dangerous moment I forgot everything else. Then I forced myself to ask, "You came for me because of the blood curse, didn't you?" He blinked, surprised. "The blood curse?" Then he said honestly, "No. I saw that the jade table was still in your room and worried you'd left your spirit-medium too long. I was afraid it would harm you." In the moonlight his face was clear and open and unbearably young. I reached out and laid my hand against his cheek. It passed straight through. He stared, stunned. Then he reached toward me too, but his fingers closed on nothing but air. "I almost forgot," he said softly. "You are the Panling I summoned. Of course you are only a spirit." I laughed, though it hurt. He looked at me for a long time and then said, "People say Panling are dark and terrible, but Wakaba, you don't seem like a ghost-immortal at all. You seem more like a heavenly one. And..." He stopped and smiled shyly. "This may be disrespectful, but the first time I saw you, I felt as if I had already met you in a dream." At that, every shred of anger melted away. We returned to the house together, and because he had compared me to an immortal, my heart bloomed all over again. Besides, we truly had met in a dream before. Only once, but he had remembered.

Back in my room I reached the jade table just before midnight. Hidden in my sleeve, it was already pulsing with blue light, bright and dim, bright and dim, as though something inside were pushing to get out. I raised my hand and cast a pale gold halo over it, suppressing the glow. Then I wrote a talisman in the air and sealed it to the jade. Only then did the table fall quiet. If I had waited even a little longer, what was trapped inside might have broken free. "Forgive me, Seiran," I murmured. "I cannot let you out."

At my insistence, Kuon soon gave up calling me my lady and simply said my name. "Wakaba." That one simple change was enough to make me wild with happiness. He took me through markets and mountains and rivers, guarding me from jostling crowds, telling me that every place became more beautiful when I stepped into it. I cared little for the admiration of strangers. What I cared for was his. For a while our conversations went by without mention of Seiran or the blood curse at all, until I almost managed to forget that Seiran's death anniversary was drawing closer. Perhaps I was only choosing to forget. Such peace could never last. First came his illness. He collapsed suddenly and no physician could diagnose it. Day by day he weakened. I would never allow that. On the next night of the full moon I carried him to the courtyard and let the moonlight pour over him. Leaning close to his bloodless face, I whispered, "Sumikawa Kuon, whatever happens, you must not die." I gathered all the power left in me. Pale light spread over my body and then slowly entered his. It was enough, for the moment, to hold his life in place, but the effort dropped me to the ground. When he opened his eyes at last, his expression was complicated and wounded. "Wakaba," he said, "you shouldn't be sacrificing your strength to teach me." I could only look at him. Then the tears I had held back for so long finally fell. He looked helpless, like a child who did not know how to comfort someone he could not even properly touch. Yet when my tears landed in his hands, they did not pass through him. They rested there, warm and real. He said, "Even if your tears are the only thing I can hold, I still like you best when you smile. You're very beautiful when you smile." I tried to obey. I couldn't. All I could do was let my tears keep falling into the cup of his palms. It was the first time I had cried for someone, lost control for someone, let all my dignity unravel for someone. It was all because of him. Sumikawa Kuon.

That same night two things vanished from the house: the blue-jade table I had sealed, and the book of blood curses I had given him. I had spent myself saving him and no longer had the strength to keep Seiran contained. Let her come, then. If she wished to steal the blood-curse text as well, so be it. I would face her.

For the next few days I stayed beside Kuon, brewing him medicine from mountain herbs and mixing what little power I had left into each dose. There was no clear improvement, but at least he no longer worsened. Seiran appeared exactly when I expected. I was sitting by his bed, speaking of all the places I wanted him to take me once he recovered, when the door blew open on an icy gust. She entered in the same form as when he had first loved her, only her face now shone with a greenish pallor and her voice was hollow with resentment. "I died such an unjust death, and yet the two of you can sit here and speak so happily. Have you already forgotten me?" Kuon froze. Then, after a stunned pause, he forced himself to stand and reach toward her. "Is it really you?" She laughed bitterly. "You said you would avenge me. Did you truly mean it? The whole village had a hand in my death. Will you kill every last one of them?" She turned on me, eyes burning. "Or did you stop because of her? You know she's an earth immortal. If she teaches you sorcery to harm men, she'll lose her chance at becoming corporeal and can never stay at your side." Kuon looked at me then, full of confusion and questions. I could not lift my head. After hurling that last truth between us, Seiran vanished. Kuon moved to follow, then stopped at the door and turned back. "Wakaba," he said quietly. "Before anything else, answer me this."

So I told him everything. I was not Panling at all. The true spirit in the jade table had always been Seiran. After her unjust death, her lingering grievance had attached itself to the blue jade and over time she had become the ghost-immortal Panling. Spirits like that cannot appear on their own unless summoned by a human. Jade is full of yin. It makes a powerful vessel, but it also deepens hatred until revenge becomes almost inevitable. I, on the other hand, was only an earth immortal, the third rank among immortals. I had been wandering the world when I came upon Sumikawa Kuon painting landscapes by the roadside. I let him never see me. I simply followed him, watching him gather mountains and rivers into his brush. Many nobles and officials tried to hire him, but he always refused them with a smile: "I paint only the beauty I truly love. Not for money." Then I began to wonder what would happen if I appeared before him. Would he paint me? I was still smiling over that thought when he met Seiran by the stream. I watched him stay for her, give up the rule he had lived by, and begin painting portraits just to remain near her. Jealousy made me foolish and cruel. Half a year later I entered his dream and woke again his ambition to go on to Kyoto. He left her exactly as I wanted. I followed him all the way to the capital, where at last he earned the admiration of the Hanlin. Only then did I understand that my jealousy had become the reason Seiran died. When he received the blue-jade table she left behind, my heart was pierced with guilt and yet also with hope. Seiran was dead. If I could obtain a real body, then perhaps I could be with him. Until then, I had never wanted such a thing. The night he used a folk method to summon Panling, I suppressed Seiran's spirit within the table and took her place. I told myself that if she were released, she would slaughter the village in revenge. Now, after spending too much of my strength to save him, I had lost the power to restrain her any longer. From here on, I thought, his heart would belong entirely to Seiran, and I would never again even earn an extra glance.

He left as soon as he heard me out. He had gone to find Seiran. Though I worried about his health, I followed anyway and saw him reach the ruined little house that had once been hers. I could feel Seiran's presence there. They were divided now by death and life, but of course they would have many things to say. He would explain to her, I thought, that Wakaba was only the spirit he had summoned to help him seek revenge, that his heart belonged to Seiran alone. I pressed my hands against my head and ordered myself not to imagine it, but the scenes rose against my will. At last I turned away and wept. My heart had become a dead gray waste. I flew back to the mountain where I had once hidden from him and sat there in meditation, telling myself I would forget. If I could not do it in one year or two, I had centuries ahead of me. Three evenings later the sky changed. The glowing dusk dimmed abruptly, and if one looked carefully, crimson dandelion fluff could already be seen floating in the air toward Seiran's village. It was not the season for such wind. Someone had cast a spell. In the blood-curse text I had given Kuon, it was written that dandelion fluff makes an excellent medium for planting blood curses. Whether it was Kuon or Seiran who had begun the rite, many would die when it reached the village. And what did it matter to me who lived or died? Even if I lost forever my chance to gain a body, why should I care? He would not care. Yet in that dark quiet I heard him calling my name again and again. "Wakaba. Wakaba, where are you?" I had sworn I would not answer him. Then he clutched his chest and fell before my eyes. How could I leave him like that? I ran to him, ready to pour my strength into him again, only for him to spring upright and say with sudden bright relief, "I knew you wouldn't stay hidden from me." He had seen straight through my heart. I turned away in anger, but he went on, clear and urgent. "Seiran is going to lay the blood curse over the entire village. Only you can save them. And if you do..." He hesitated, then asked, "Then by the laws of the earth immortals, won't you earn enough merit to gain a real body?"

I used every scrap of my remaining power and flew faster than the wind to the village. Fortunately, the dandelion fluff had not yet arrived. I carved sigils around the whole place and raised a vast barrier over it. My strength was already terribly depleted. I knew I could not fight Seiran head-on now. So after thinking quickly, I chose to use the talismans to transfer every villager to the mountain instead. The village itself I could not save. At the mountain they appeared all at once, confused and frightened. Kuon stood waiting there. He explained everything with such calm certainty that even the doubting ones gradually fell silent. Then they all knelt before me, pressing their foreheads to the earth and thanking me for saving them. I looked toward Kuon. He was smiling, his hand lifting and falling, lifting and falling as if he wanted to reach for me and did not dare. I laughed and told him that he had become strangely hesitant. The smile left his face. He looked into my eyes, and I returned his gaze without looking away. That was enough to give him courage. He raised his hand again, slowly, until it hovered less than an inch from my cheek. Then he stopped. His voice broke. "Wakaba... I don't dare." This time I caught his hand myself and guided it to my face. This time he truly touched me. No longer a phantom. No longer air. He drew me into his arms so hard it was almost pain, and joy shook through him as if he might cry. "Wakaba," he whispered. "It's you. It really is you." At last I had skin and blood and warmth of my own. To be held by the one I loved was more unbearable and more precious than anything I had ever imagined. Sumikawa Kuon was the man I loved. If I had come into his life one step earlier, perhaps the first woman he loved would never have been Seiran. I wanted to stay with him from then on, even if time took his youth and left me to watch him grow old. I would have stayed until his last breath if he had allowed it.

A child's scream shattered that peace. We turned to see Seiran standing at the edge of the crowd with a little boy in her grip, her nails pressed into his throat. One slip and he would die. The villagers shrieked and scattered. Some recognized her at once as the woman drowned four years earlier. The boy's parents threw themselves at my feet and begged for mercy. Kuon seized my trembling hand and faced Seiran. "I was the one who wronged you," he said. "Please let the child go." Seiran's laughter tore through the night like glass. "You swore to avenge me," she said, "and when you came to find me, it was only to ask how she could gain a body. She is an earth immortal. I cannot hurt her. As for you..." Her voice broke. "I hate you, and yet I love you too much to kill you. Who then is to bear all this hatred?" "It's not like that," I cried, shaking my head so hard it hurt. "He didn't betray you. Haven't you noticed the way his body has been failing? It's because he already placed the blood curse on himself." Silence fell. Kuon said nothing. Seiran said nothing. I could only stand there crying. At last she let the child go. The parents snatched him up and fled down the slope. Soon only the three of us remained on the mountain. Seiran was the first to speak. "Is that true?" Her voice trembled. Kuon wiped my tears with his sleeve and sighed. "So you knew." Then he said to her, "Seiran, the only person I have ever hated was myself. The one who killed you was never anyone else. It was me. The blood curse was always meant for my own body. I never intended to place it on the villagers. I had learned the book by heart long before, but I couldn't bring myself to begin it, because I had grown greedy for the days I spent with Wakaba. Forgive me. I offer you my life. If I do that, can you forgive me?" I do not remember clearly how Seiran left after that. Only that she said she no longer hated us, and that she would cross to the Yellow Springs, drink the river's forgetting, and be reborn. The memory of this life was too painful to carry any farther.

That night Kuon finally collapsed in my arms. He spoke haltingly of all the days since we had met. Then from his sleeve he drew out a painting and unfolded it. It was me, smiling. "Wakaba," he said, "I painted you long ago. I just couldn't bear what it meant for Seiran, so I never gave it to you. Now that I'm about to die, let me at least be a faithless coward once. The day I placed the blood curse on myself was the day I finally understood my own heart. I was afraid that if I waited any longer, I would never be able to part from you. I'm sorry. If there is another life, come and find me, will you? If you smile at me, I know I'll recognize you." As his eyes began to close, my own heart became strangely lucid. I had already said it: no matter what, I would not let him die. There may be no cure for a blood curse in the ordinary sense, but there is one final way to break it. If another willingly offers life in exchange, blood for blood, the planted medium can be drawn out of the cursed body. How fortunate, then, that I had only just gained a real body. I lay down holding him and bound our wrists together, fingers interlaced, giving him what blood and power remained in me. This body of mine would sleep forever. Only a thread of spirit would remain, circling through heaven and earth, needing three more lifetimes of cultivation to gather itself again. But if it was for him, then even if I were scattered to nothing, I would still accept it gladly. Though from now on he would never see me again, I stayed beside him. Always. I never left.