bookcurios Chapter 131 131 | Jealousy
Chapter 131 131 | Jealousy
The first drop hit the window like a fist.
Eathan jerked awake from a half-doze he had not meant to fall into. His forehead had been resting against the grime-streaked glass; now a splash of blue light spread across the outside of the window, sliding downward in a trembling streak.
For a second, he thought something had exploded.
Then another drop struck.
Then another.
The Speedy Spada lurched.
Someone downstairs swore. The old spider-bus pitched left so violently that Eathan nearly slid out of his seat. Chewie caught the back of his jacket with one hand and the railing with the other, expression darkening at once.
"Why the hell is the bus crying?" she said.
From below came Yang Mingze's voice, loud enough to cut through the creaking shell. "Why is hell the sky spitting on us?"
The spider shrieked, which prompted everyone to move at once.
By the time Eathan and Chewie came stumbling down the curved staircase, the first level had already turned into a cramped battlefield.
Ji Renshu stood near the front with one hand braced against a webbed support beam, spear already in her other hand. Yue Shiyin had his fan open, eyes narrowed as he watched the rain trace unstable patterns over the windows.
Bai Hu remained seated. across from Mei Yuling, hands folded loosely over his chest. The bloodstained coat still rested over Mei's lap. Chen Mo, who had been staring at Bai Hu from the rear with the dedication of a minor plague, now looked offended that weather had interrupted his obsession.
Another drop struck the window beside Eathan's head. The impact made the whole panel bow inward.
"What is that?" he asked.
"Emotional current," Yue Shiyin said, voice steady despite the cabin's violent sway. "The Passing doesn't have weather the way mortal realms do. It responds to collective spiritual pressure."
Chewie grabbed a swinging strap overhead and grimaced. "In English."
"Mortal weather follows season and climate," Shiyin replied. "Here, mass emotional states create phases. Glee mist, yearning wind, grief fog. This appears to be—"
Another shudder from the spider, and every strand of green mucus hanging from the ceiling swung at once. They had looked disgusting before. Now they were bulging, growing heavier by the second, each drop swelling with a dark shine at the tip.
Yue Shiyin looked up. His expression changed by a fraction.
"Melancholic Drizzle," he finished.
Eathan followed his gaze.
The mucus strands pulsed. The spider wailed again, the sound rolling up from inside its body. The floor under them shifted as the creature's legs scrambled over invisible lines. Outside, its wings beat unevenly, struggling against the rain.
Ji Renshu's eyes sharpened. "It's altering its internal sacs."
Yang Mingze, who had one hand pressed against the wall to keep himself upright, looked up at the ceiling and made a face. "Acid?"
"Likely," she said. "If the sacs rupture in the cabin, the passengers corrode. The spider absorbs remains after landing."
"Professional little thing."
Eathan stared at her. "It finishes the route before eating people?"
"Tourism standards," Mei Yuling said from her seat, voice flat. "Commander Foxfire was very strict about punctuality."
A mucus sac swelled directly above Chen Mo's head, and he looked up in disgust.
"It is a transport animal," Yue Shiyin said before he could do anything stupid.
"It is nasty."
"It is also currently carrying us," Ji Renshu said. "Yuling."
Mei Yuling nodded and rose with the coat still folded over one arm. Without comment, she stepped into the center aisle, and pressed two fingers to the floor. Thin sapphire threads slipped from her hand and sank into the spider-bus.
Eathan felt it brush past him, too soft to count as an attack but too deliberate to be harmless.
"You are not hungry. You have already eaten. Your route is nearly complete." Mei Yuling's voice softened, gaining a strange rhythm. "Land first. Feed later."
The mucus sacs quivered overhead.
Chewie folded her arms. "That is a horrifying lullaby."
"She's bending the hunger response," Yue Shiyin explained. "Karmic persuasion. Cause first, belief second."
Eathan watched Mei's face as she worked. Calm, yes. Pale, though. The rain kept striking harder, and every drop made the spider's body twitch against her control.
"Land," she said again. "You are full. You are tired. You want to rest."
For a moment, it worked.
Speedy Spada's wings unfolded outside in ragged shapes, their shadow flashing across the windows. The bus tilted downward, descending from the web-lines toward the darker outskirts below.
Then, out of nowhere, the rain intensified.
Rain drops slammed into the shell in rapid bursts. One window cracked. Another exploded inward, sending wind and rain slicing through the cabin. Eathan threw an arm over his face as cold water splattered across his sleeve and immediately sank into his skin.
His chest tightened.
Not his grief. Someone else's. A hundred someones. A thousand. Old regrets dissolved into rain and flung against them in fist-sized drops.
The spider screamed, lost its grip on the web-line, and fell.
The entire cabin dropped out from under them.
The first impact tore through the lower legs. Seats ripped loose, and webbing snapped like wet rope. The second spun them. A strand of mucus burst against the ceiling, spraying acid across the aisle where Yue Shiyin's fan shield flared just in time to stop it from reaching anyone's face.
The third impact threw Eathan straight toward the broken window.
He hit the frame shoulder-first, glass cutting across his sleeve. The world outside spun, and for one bright, idiotic second, he'd just accepted the fact he was going to die in an afterlife public transportation.
Then a hand caught the back of his collar and yanked.
Hard.
Eathan slammed backward into the aisle, choking. A drop the size of a plum shot through the air exactly where his face had been and burst against the opposite wall, eating through three layers of webbed shell.
Eathan stared at the smoking hole, then at the hand gripping his hoodie.
Bai Hu released him almost immediately.
"Mister White," Eathan said, stupidly emotional despite the circumstances.
The White Tiger did not soften. He only tilted his chin toward the window.
"Look below."
Eathan looked—and realized that the ground was coming up too fast.
Speedy Spada hit the edge of a crater at a terrible angle, the impact throwing the entire cabin sideways. Ji Renshu drove her spear into the floor to anchor herself. Yang Mingze grabbed the nearest row of seats and tore half of them loose anyway. Chewie slammed shoulder-first into Eathan, and the two of them went down in a tangle of limbs and profanity.
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The spider screamed, skidded, bounced once, then crashed into the crater's center with all eight legs folding under it.
Silence followed.
Then the old broadcast made one final brave attempt.
"Thank you for choosing… Speedy Spada… please rate your ride…"
A spark burst from the ceiling.
"…five stars."
No one moved for three seconds.
Then, Yang Mingze coughed from somewhere under a pile of seats. "I give it zero."
Chewie kicked a broken cushion off her leg. "I'm giving it a lawsuit."
Eathan rolled onto his back, stared at the ceiling, and decided he had reached a new stage of spiritual exhaustion.
Outside, the Melancholic Drizzle kept falling.
They crawled out through Speedy Spada's open maw because the side door had fused shut with acid and disrespect.
The crater around them spread wide beneath the sky. Maroon dirt rose in curved walls, forming a bowl-shaped hollow pocked with countless holes. Some were no larger than fists. Others were wide enough for something tall to crawl through. From the holes came low, uneven wails—some animal, some almost human.
They gathered beneath the overhang of its open jaws, using the spider's dead-eyed head as shelter. The creature, either stunned or deeply ashamed, had stopped moving except for the occasional twitch of a leg.
Chen Mo walked to the edge of the shelter, eyed the rain, then snapped a nearby dead tree in half with one clean strike. The trunk crashed down, split into two serviceable logs. He dragged one back and carefully placed it in front of Bai Hu.
"For you, Commander."
Bai Hu glanced at the log.
Then leaned against Speedy Spada's furry side instead, closed his eyes, and sank an inch into the spider's damp pelt.
Chen Mo stood beside the unused log. His expression did not move.
Chewie leaned toward Eathan. "I almost feel bad."
"No you don't."
"You right, I really don't."
Quine Long settled near the edge of the shelter, robes surprisingly dry for someone who had been in the same crash as everyone else. He glanced at Bai Hu, then at Eathan.
"Do not disturb him."
Eathan's expression tightened at once. "Is he—"
"Stabilizing," Quine Long said. "He absorbed two shards too close together. If he lets the core grind itself into alignment unattended, he risks internal backlash."
"Wonder who made him do that." Chewie's brief amusement faded. "Wait, backlash as in pain?"
"As in qi deviation," the dragon said. "Divine scale, of course. Physicians would call it 'very bad' and then perish before they could even fill out the form."
Eathan looked at Bai Hu again.
From the outside, he seemed calm. Damp hair, closed eyes, blood gone dry at the corner of his mouth, one shoulder pressed into the spider's fur as if he were resting during a mildly inconvenient delay. Nothing in him showed the storm Quine Long described.
Of course it didn't.
Taeril White could look bored while bleeding out in three realms at once. Eathan knew that now, and hated that he knew.
Quine Long's gaze swept across the Paladins.
"He is still aware," he added.
Ji Renshu's expression did not shift, though her spear hand settled a little more carefully against her knee.
"Good to know," Yue Shiyin said.
"It was a warning," the dragon added pleasantly.
"We are aware," Ji Renshu replied.
Yang Mingze crouched near the edge of the shelter, scooped a pinch of maroon soil between two fingers, sniffed it, and grimaced.
"The drizzle won't stop soon," he said, wiping his palms. "Ground's holding the current. We may need to wait it out."
Eathan glanced up at the sky. The rain came down in fat drops, each one hitting the ground with a splatter before sinking into the crater's porous earth.
"Wait it out as in… an hour?"
"As in long enough we may as well call it night."
Technically, the Realm of Passing did not have night. Eathan had learned that by now. It had twilight, deeper twilight, and administrative despair. But everyone understood the comparative meaning.
He looked around at the crater and its hundreds of holes.
"Where exactly did the spider dump us?"
Ji Renshu looked out across the pocked earth, then the distribution of the holes.
"Houyi's Crater."
Eathan blinked. The name tugged at some memorized corner of his mind.
"Houyi, as in Chang'e's husband?"
Quine Long turned toward him with visible interest. "Ah. CHN 104 lives."
Chewie folded her arms and leaned against the spider's jaw. "Ah. The love and hate of the shot-range couple."
Eathan glanced at her. "What?"
"Houyi and Chang'e." She shrugged. "Extremely long-range marital dispute."
"Mr. Lin," Quine Long said, all of a sudden formal. "As an ex-student of my course, a pop quiz seems appropriate."
"Here?" Eathan stared at him. "Now?"
"Education should be adaptable."
He took a second to accept that he was being academically interrogated in a crater while acid rain fell around them, then sighed.
Fine. He had sharpened his [Intelligence], survived divine audits, and memorized enough course material to weaponize Chinese mythology in emergencies. If the Azure Dragon wanted a recitation while everyone sheltered inside a wounded spider's mouth, sure. Why not?
"According to the textbook," he began shamelessly, "Houyi was the archer who shot down nine suns. Chang'e was his wife, who became the Moon Goddess after stealing an elixir of immortality and fleeing to the moon."
"Huh." Chewie made a face. "Can't believe the textbook would scam kids like that."
Yue Shiyin, who had been pretending not to listen, closed his fan. "It did remove most of the divorce."
Eathan slowly turned toward him. "The what?"
Mei Yuling sat on the unused log Chen Mo had prepared, Bai Hu's coat folded neatly beside her. "The divorce."
She only shrugged slightly when Eathan turned to stare at her next.
"It comes up in Heavenly Court ethics seminars."
"Why would an ethics seminar cover—"
"Because Houyi shot at people," Yang Mingze said, settling near them with a grin. "A lot."
Quine Long took over with visible enjoyment.
"The mortal version claims Chang'e stole an immortality elixir. Convenient little moral lesson, yes? Beautiful woman betrays heroic husband, flees to the moon, spends eternity lonely. Very tragic. Very marketable."
"That's… not what happened?"
"Oh, parts of it happened," he said. "The theft, certainly. The flight, yes. The loneliness, depending on who was asked and who was listening."
Eathan felt an ominous chill unrelated to the rain. "So… which part was inaccurate?"
"The theft," Mei Yuling answered. "It wasn't an immorality elixir she stole."
Silence.
Eathan waited.
"It was a jade hairpin."
Quine Long smiled. "Specifically, the jade hairpin Houyi kept from his first love."
Chewie clicked her tongue. "Iconic."
Eathan blinked twice.
"…Huh?"
The rain drummed against Speedy Spada's shell. Quine Long leaned back, eyes half-lidded.
"Chang'e and Houyi met during an early Realm-Barrier cycle. Houyi had charm, a bow, and the sort of confidence that convinces audiences a man must be deeper than he is. Chang'e was young by immortal standards and fond of beautiful disasters. It happens."
Chewie made a face while Yang Mingze shook his head.
"After the Games," the dragon continued, "Houyi's reputation rose. The bow helped. So did the songs. Once Heaven began calling him a hero, he started expecting his household to perform the same worship."
Eathan glanced at Mei Yuling, who had gone quiet.
"He wanted Chang'e to stay in his residence," she said, picking up the thread. "Appear when needed. Smile at banquets. Avoid politics."
"So basically," Yang Mingze said, "be decorative."
"Chang'e agreed," Quine Long said, "for perhaps two, three decades. Then she discovered boredom could be more lethal than monsters."
Eathan, against his will, leaned forward.
"What happened next?"
"She asked Erlang Shen, who had yet to become Commander at the time, whether Houyi truly had enough Heavenly Court work to justify returning late every night," Quine said.
"Erlang Shen answered honestly?" Eathan asked.
"Erlang Shen always answers honestly if the question is framed well enough." Quine Long's mouth curved. "He said no."
Chewie let out a snicker. "And so she investigated."
"And found the hairpin," Mei Yuling said.
Eathan looked at her again.
Her expression remained bland. "And several women."
"Wow."
"And poems," Yue Shiyin added. "Bad ones."
"Truly a spectacle," Quine Long mused.
Eathan sat back against the spider shell, trying to rearrange his entire understanding of Chinese mythology around the image of Chang'e stealing a hairpin out of spite.
"So she took it and left?"
"She took it, left, ascended fully, and came here first," Quine Long said. "Houyi followed with the bow, furious enough to forget that shooting at one's divine ex-wife across the Realm of Passing is generally frowned upon."
He gestured at the crater around them.
"This is one of the places where he missed."
Eathan looked at the maroon bowl, the countless holes pocked into the walls, the strange wails echoing from underground.
"Several arrows struck here," Ji Renshu said. "The impact left spiritual burrows. Creatures formed in the aftermath, drawn to the residue."
Chewie pulled out her holopad from nowhere.
"RealmNet has the whole thread," she said.
Eathan lowered his hands. "There's a thread?"
"CloudBo." Yang Mingze scooted over at once, very invested. "Lady Foxfire started the exposure post during one of the old Mid-Autumn scandals. Anonymous submissions blew up for three days."
He projected the feed into the air before Ji Renshu could stop him. The interface flickered, then stabilized into a messy thread full of censor bars, ancient screenshots, commentary from suspiciously knowledgeable anonymous accounts, and one pinned remark that read:
Some men shoot down nine suns and still cannot locate accountability. Tragic.
Eathan stared at the post.
"That's definitely Foxfire."
Yang Mingze nodded. "Some details may be exaggerated. Heavenly gossip often improves itself with age."
"Rumours don't usually emerge baseless," Yue Shiyin said.
Ji Renshu gave him a look.
He smiled politely and had Yang Mingze close the feed before his captain could say anything about professionalism.
Eathan absorbed what he'd just heard, looked at the holes again and immediately regretted it.
"So we are sleeping in a divine domestic dispute scar."
"Welcome to immortality." Chewie gave him a solemn thumbs-up. "Where there is much power, too much time, and exactly zero therapy."
He returned the thumbs-up with equal solemnity.
There was a pause.
Then Eathan asked, because helpless situations seemed to prompt curiosity, "Did Houyi ever get the hairpin back?"
Yue Shiyin's fan opened again with a soft snap. "No."
"Chang'e hid it." Mei Yuling looked out at the rain. "Fed it divine qi for several hundred years. Eventually, the artifact gained awareness and took spiritual form."
Eathan's mind arrived at the answer one painful second before the words did.
"No way."
Chewie grinned.
Mei Yuling, with perfect deadpan, said, "Yueto."
Eathan stared at her.
"The Jade Rabbit?"
"Yes."
"The rabbit that lives with Chang'e."
"Yes."
"The rabbit who helps her make medicine and also caused the birth of the Nine-Headed Infant."
Quine Long looked deeply amused. "Both her greatest success and fumble."
Eathan pressed both hands over his face.
Chang'e had stolen the keepsake from her husband's first love, nourished it into sentience, and made it her closest companion.
"Immortals," he said faintly, "are something."
The rain thickened outside. Blue drops rolled down the edge of Speedy Spada's jaws and fell into the maroon dirt, where they smoked gently.
For a while, no one spoke.
Bai Hu remained still against the spider's side, eyes closed, white hair stirred by the damp wind that came through the open maw. From where Eathan sat, he could not tell how much of the conversation he'd heard.
…Probably all.
Quine Long's gaze rested on the crater wall.
"And jealousy," he said at last, voice softer than before, "does things to even the most disciplined soul."