Nezha

L i Jing held the garrison at Chen Tang Pass, and his wife, Lady Yin, had been pregnant for three years and six months — long enough that the household had stopped expecting a child and started fearing a monster. One night she dreamed a Daoist walked into her room and set something inside her, and she woke screaming that the time had come. When the baby arrived it was not a baby. It was a ball of flesh, round as a wheel, spinning and giving off a red light, and the whole room smelled of strange incense. Li Jing came in with his sword, decided that whatever this was, it was no good, and split it open with a single stroke. Out of it jumped a small boy, his face powder-white, a gold bangle already on his right wrist and a length of red silk wound around his belly. The father stood there holding a sword over his newborn son. It was not the last time. Li Jing was the commander of Chen Tang Pass, and his wife, Lady Yin, had been with child for three years and six months without giving birth. One night she dreamed a Daoist entered her chamber; she cried out, and the birth began. In the room was a mass of red vapor and a strange fragrance filling the house. There was a ball of flesh, round and turning like a wheel. Li Jing, alarmed, struck the ball of flesh with his sword; it parted with a sound, and out leaped a small child, red light all over the floor, his face like powder, a gold bangle on his right wrist and a piece of red silk wrapped around his belly.

The immortal Taiyi Zhenren came down from his mountain to congratulate the family, named the boy Nezha, and took him as a disciple — which is to say the child of a frontier general now belonged, in some larger sense, to the cosmic order. Seven years passed. One scorching day Nezha walked out to the Nine Bend River to cool off, and being a boy with a god's toys and no judgment, he dipped the red sash into the water to wash with it. The sash was not made for washing. The river turned crimson, the water shook, and the shaking ran all the way down to the crystal palace of the Dragon King of the East Sea, whose halls rocked as though the world had come loose. The Dragon King sent a yaksha up to see who was rattling the sea. Nezha killed him with one throw of the gold ring, brains on the riverbank, and went back to rinsing his sash. Taiyi Zhenren came to offer congratulations, gave the child the name Nezha, and accepted him as a disciple. When Nezha was seven, on a hot day he went out to the Nine Bend River to bathe and put the treasure into the water, which turned the whole river red. He gave it a shake and the rivers swayed; he gave it another and heaven and earth trembled. As Nezha bathed, the Crystal Palace was already rocking and roaring. A yaksha was sent up; the treasure came down and landed square on his head, his brains burst out, and he died at once on the bank.

Then the Dragon King's third son, Ao Bing, rode up out of the water on a sea-beast, demanding to know who had killed his officer. He found a seven-year-old. Words turned to blows, and it ended with Nezha's foot on the prince's neck, the gold ring brought down on his skull, and the prince's true body lying in the dirt — a dragon, full length, dead. Most children would have run. Nezha crouched down and pulled out the dragon's tendons, the long white sinews, and announced he would weave them into a belt for his father's armor. He carried them home like a fish he'd caught. It is worth pausing on the arithmetic the boy was not doing: he had just killed a son of the divine houses of the sea, the way another child might break a neighbor's window, and he meant the trophy as a gift. The third prince Ao Bing came up to demand an account; words gave way to fighting. Nezha set one foot on Ao Bing's neck, lifted the gold ring, and struck the crown of his head, driving out his true body — it was a dragon. Then he said, "Let me draw out his tendons and make a dragon-sinew belt for my father to bind his armor," and he pulled the sinews free and took them home.

“A son's flesh and bone are his parents' to begin with. He was only giving them back.”

The Dragon King came in person to Chen Tang Pass — not as a monster but as a wronged official, furious and grieving, vowing to take the matter to the Jade Emperor and see Li Jing's whole line destroyed for what the boy had done. While this was unfolding, Nezha got into a second catastrophe almost by accident. Up on the city wall he found another of his teacher's treasures, a heaven-shaking bow, drew it for no reason but the pleasure of drawing it, and loosed an arrow at the horizon. The arrow flew forty miles and killed a disciple of the Stone Immortal Lady, a powerful ancient adept who lived at White Bone Cave. She was the kind of being who did not need to ask the Jade Emperor for anything. She came for the boy herself. The Dragon King Ao Guang went to Chen Tang Pass to confront Li Jing, threatening to petition the Jade Emperor, warning of ruin upon his house. Meanwhile Nezha, on the tower of the pass, took up the Qiankun Bow (乾坤弓) and the Heaven-Shaking Arrows (震天箭), drew the bow and shot. The arrow flew to White Bone Cave and struck dead Biyun, a disciple of the Stone Immortal Lady. The Stone Immortal Lady dispatched yellow-scarved warriors to seize Li Jing and bring him to White Bone Cave, then set out herself for Taiyi Zhenren's mountain.

She traced the arrow to its archer, then to his master, and went up to the Golden Light Cave to take the matter out on Taiyi Zhenren himself. Two immortals faced each other on the mountain. She came at him with her magic, and for a moment the disciple's teacher actually gave ground — then he turned, raised his sword, and brought out the Nine-Dragon Divine Fire Cover, a net of nine dragons made of fire. It dropped over the Stone Immortal Lady. Inside it burned the samadhi flame, the true fire of an immortal's own cultivation, and it burned away everything she had become over the ages until there was nothing left of her power at all — only what she had been at the start, a plain gray stone, cooling on the ground. Heaven called it fate. The novel calls it the day Taiyi Zhenren first broke the precept against killing, because the great work ahead required it. The Stone Immortal Lady went to the Golden Light Cave and confronted Taiyi Zhenren, then attacked him. He withdrew, then came out with his sword, and at last sent forth the Nine-Dragon Divine Fire Cover and dropped it over her. The three-samadhi true fire burned away her cultivation, and her true form was revealed — a stone. This was Taiyi Zhenren opening the killing precept, as the times required, for the great task of the Shang-Zhou transition.

Back at the pass, the bill came due. Not one Dragon King but all four, the lords of the four seas, descended on Chen Tang Pass together and seized Li Jing and Lady Yin, binding the general and his wife to answer for a son who had killed a prince of the sea. Nezha came home to find his parents in chains because of him. He did not argue that he was a child, or that the dragon had started it, or that he was a celestial being on a heavenly errand — though all of that was true. He looked at his father and mother held by the gods of the ocean, and he understood the only thing that mattered, which was that they were paying for him. The four Dragon Kings — Ao Guang, Ao Shun, Ao Ming, and Ao Ji — came to Chen Tang Pass and seized Li Jing and Lady Yin. Nezha saw his parents bound on his account.

One man acts, one man answers, Nezha said — a child quoting the oldest rule of justice to the lords of the sea. I killed Ao Bing and the yaksha, so I will pay with my life. There is no law under heaven that lets a son drag his father and mother down with him. He told them what he was: not an ordinary boy but the Spirit Pearl, sent down into the world on heaven's own warrant. And then, so that his parents would owe the sea nothing, he took up his sword in his own right hand. He cut off an arm. He opened his belly, drew out his entrails, scraped the flesh from his bones, and scattered his seven souls and three spirits — giving the flesh back to the mother who made it and the bone back to the father, until there was nothing left to bind. His one life went down to the Yellow Springs. Nezha cried out: "'One man acts, one man answers.' I killed Ao Bing and Li Gen, so I should pay with my life — how can a son implicate his parents? My body is no light thing; I am the Spirit Pearl, sent down to the world by the warrant of the Jade Pure Realm. Today I cut open my belly, draw out my entrails, and scrape my bones and flesh to return them to my parents, so I do not burden them." Then with his right hand he took up the sword, first severed an arm, then cut open his own belly, drew out the entrails, scraped flesh from bone, his seven souls and three spirits scattered, and his life returned to the underworld.

It worked. Faced with a child who had already paid in full, Ao Guang relented — well enough, he said, you have saved your parents and earned a name for filial duty — and the four Dragon Kings let Li Jing and his wife go. But a scattered soul has nowhere to be. Nezha's spirit drifted to his mother in a dream and begged her to build him a small temple forty miles off, on Green Screen Mountain, so that the incense of worshippers might gather him a body back. She did it in secret, with her own money, and told no one. For half a year the little shrine to the boy-god worked wonders — a thousand prayers, a thousand answers — and pilgrims came from everywhere to a son who had killed himself to save his parents and was now, quietly, becoming a god on a hillside his father knew nothing about. Ao Guang, hearing this, said, "So be it. Since you have done this and saved your parents, there is filial merit in it." The four Dragon Kings then released Li Jing and his wife. Afterward Nezha's soul appeared to his mother in a dream, saying, "Forty miles from here is Green Screen Mountain; build a shrine for me there, that I may receive some incense." Lady Yin secretly sent a trusted servant with silver to break ground and raise a shrine with an image of Nezha; it was finished in a month. A thousand prayers met a thousand answers, ten thousand prayers ten thousand answers, and worshippers came from all around.

Then Li Jing rode past Green Screen Mountain, saw the crowds, asked whose temple it was, and learned it was his dead son's. He did not feel what his wife felt. He felt the cold calculation of a frontier officer: a general who keeps an unsanctioned cult is a general the court can destroy. You troubled your parents alive, he said to the painted image, and now you fool the common people dead — and he took up his whip and beat the clay statue to powder, then ordered the shrine burned to the ground. So Nezha's spirit went back to his teacher with nothing, and Taiyi Zhenren, who would not let the work end there, sent a boy to fetch two lotus blossoms and three lotus leaves from the immortal pool. He laid the petals out as the three powers of heaven, and folded the stems into three hundred bones, set a golden elixir at the center, and ran his breath through it nine times. Become a man, he said — what are you waiting for? There was a crack, and a boy sprang up off the ground: face like powder, lips like vermilion, eyes full of light, sixteen feet tall, no longer flesh at all but lotus, his father's bone given back and forgotten, a new body that owed the man who burned his shrine precisely nothing. Li Jing, passing Green Screen Mountain and learning the shrine was his son's, pointed at it and cursed: "Beast! In life you troubled your parents, and in death you fool the people!" He took up his whip and smashed Nezha's golden image to powder, then ordered the shrine burned. Nezha's soul returned to Taiyi Zhenren, who called the boy Jinxia to pick two lotus blossoms and three lotus leaves. The immortal stripped the petals and laid them as the three powers, folded the lotus stems into three hundred bone-joints, set the three leaves as upper, middle, and lower for heaven, earth, and man, placed a golden elixir in the center, and worked the primal breath through nine cycles. He shouted, "Nezha, if you do not take human form now, when?" There was a crack, and a man sprang up — face like powder, lips like vermilion, eyes shining, sixteen feet tall. The immortal then gave him the fire-tipped spear, and wind-and-fire wheels for his feet.