Chapter 127#
The River of What Was — Part One#
The vine had heard something that interested it, which was why it had perked up. But Yu Feichen had no interest in what made the question interesting — he only wanted to hear the answer.
“The power is still there, and it is unusually calm,” Anfei said. “Every order has resumed running. Eden is more stable than it has ever been.”
Yu Feichen looked down at the vine.
The vine didn’t move.
“You’ve gotten it back under control?”
Anfei also looked down at the vine.
“More or less,” he said. “Over many ages, we haven’t always been at odds — sometimes we coexist peacefully. We’ve been together long enough for that.”
Yu Feichen found this peculiar, and turned the sentence over in his mind several times.
“You describe it as though it were a conscious person,” he said.
Anfei: “Everything has its own will, whether strong or weak.”
The vine stayed still.
Anfei raised his hand.
A firefly landed on his knuckles. He reached his right hand out the window and released it upward. As that faint, glimmering light rose and disappeared into the night sky, countless fireflies suddenly materialized across the deep blue canopy above — so high up that the entire Divine Realm could see them.
His fingers lowered back down and rested on the windowsill.
The fireflies became a brilliant meteor shower, arcing across the sky and falling toward every corner of the Divine Realm.
From the other carriages came sounds of wonder. One traveler said excitedly that in all their years wandering the world, they had never seen anything like this.
They had no idea the person who had conjured this scene with a single thought was sitting in the very next carriage. He had just proven that he was still the master of all Eternal Day — his word still made it so.
Just then they passed through a forest clearing. After the meteors scattered, a full moon hung directly overhead, and the plants all around gave off a silver radiance like moonlight itself. That same light shone in Anfei’s eyes as he looked back at Yu Feichen.
Yu Feichen asked: “Why did you suddenly want to come see Landenwaren?”
He still remembered the Chief God standing at the edge of the pool at dusk, gazing out at the setting sun with a mind full of thoughts. Claros had said things were about to change; Sather had said the God had decided not to sleep again. Something was bound to happen. Power that had suddenly slipped its leash, an entire mountainside of eternal-sleep flowers wilting at once, a journey that had never happened before — all were signs of something out of the ordinary.
“It wasn’t sudden,” Anfei said. “I’ve wanted to come for a long time. I only just had the chance.”
The vine shook its leaves once — then froze, as if it felt it shouldn’t have done that. It held still and seemed to think for a few seconds, then slowly shook them once more anyway.
Yu Feichen: “Do you regret opening the gifts?”
Anfei sighed. In the space of a single day, the vine had undermined him multiple times already. But if he were back in that moment facing the gift boxes, he would still want to open them.
Undermining him was fine — Yu Feichen wouldn’t actually be angry with him. He hadn’t yet made his decision; it was only that fate had cast a faint premonition over him.
Yu Feichen truly didn’t take it to heart. The Chief God was surrounded by throngs of divine officials and believers, yet He was always, in truth, alone. Others didn’t need to know the world’s true face — they only needed to rest easy and receive the gifts of Eternal Day. He had long grown used to that.
Then, unexpectedly, Anfei spoke after a moment’s quiet: “If there is something you want very much, but to obtain it you must pay an enormous price — and furthermore… you cannot foresee the outcome. What would you do?”
Yu Feichen: “I’d go get it.”
“That sounds like something you’d do. Like a gambler.” Anfei’s lashes curved with the faint trace of a smile.
Yu Feichen turned it back on him: “Aren’t you?”
Anfei considered this and said nothing.
“You are the most powerful Chief God in existence — you built this entire Eternal Day,” Yu Feichen said. “Then you already understand that everything requires a price, and you accept the risk.”
“But if…” Anfei fixed his gaze on him. “The price, to me, is so important, so precious — that I simply cannot bear to lose it?”
What kind of price could that be? Yu Feichen thought.
— What the Chief God would be most unwilling to lose was surely His territory, His people, and the Eden He had spent a lifetime sketching into being.
And what He wanted most — could that be dominion over all of Eternal Day and Eternal Night?
“But you want that thing too, don’t you?” Yu Feichen said. “So a choice has to be made.”
Anfei’s gaze in the stillness carried a trace of sorrow. He looked at him for a long time, and the carriage fell into a long silence.
The carriage passed into a deep, dense forest. On the undersides of the trees hung enormous, colorful butterfly wings. As the carriage moved through, the ring-shaped scales on the wings rose and fell in unison — opening countless small, densely packed eyes.
Xiassen’s clear voice rang out cheerfully: “Travelers, we are about to arrive at our first stop on the Landenwaren tour — the town of Yoran.”
“Yoran is one of the oldest settlements in Landenwaren. Next, we’ll be crossing the River of What Was, then descending into the valley beneath the town to see the ancient murals depicting the moment of creation. One thing to remember: although the townsfolk are very warm and welcoming, please do not disturb their way of life. They are a rather private and mysterious people.”
After passing through the dense forest, all the butterfly wings opened quietly, and the unicorn slowed to a stop before a silver river. It wasn’t deep; the current was gentle; and the surface was veiled in mist, as if it divided the two banks into entirely different worlds.
“This is the legendary River of What Was. A mysterious temporal magic flows within it. Cross this river, and something will change about you. Some people find something they lost long ago. Some remember a forgotten stretch of the past. Others become how they once were. Still others experience a change they themselves don’t understand — they have no memory of ever being that way. The townsfolk tell them: that was your previous life.”
As he spoke, Xiassen walked into the river. The river of time did not soak through your clothes. When he emerged from the other side, mysterious dark red patterns had appeared on his face. “Roughly like that. Perhaps my ‘previous life’ liked to tattoo himself.”
The second to step into the River of What Was was the bald-headed captain, whose gleaming head suddenly sprouted a thick head of dense brown hair.
The captain: “There’s really no need for this! The whole reason I shaved was because I didn’t want to deal with it.”
His teammates burst out laughing. The other travellers, caught up in the excitement, waded in too. One person recovered a beloved weapon they had lost long ago and was beside themselves with joy. Another remembered a completely pointless, garbage memory. Someone else had no idea what to make of the change that had come over them.
And for some people, nothing happened at all — like Yu Feichen.
Stepping out of the river, Yu Feichen examined his own reflection.
“Did I change?” he said.
Anfei was still in the silver river, not yet on the bank. He looked Yu Feichen over from head to toe. “No. Strange.”
Xiassen: “Could it be that Brother Yu is just… the kind of person who has never changed?”
Anfei: “Perhaps.”
“Come on up,” Yu Feichen said. He’d never had much interest in this to begin with. He reached a hand out toward Anfei in the river — the riverbed was full of rounded stones and uneven, and Anfei naturally reached back to take it.
Seeing this, Xiassen’s eyes went slightly unfocused.
He looked over at the captain, who was already exchanging a speechless glance with another teammate: “Have you ever seen this before?”
“Never.”
“I still remember watching Brother Yu quietly look on while I fell out of a tree. That deserves a hundred complaints. How much extra would you charge for this level of service?”
“You, at least, are worthless.”
Yu Feichen was far away, and heard every word of it.
No extra charge. It costs him, in fact.
Anfei, being pulled along, seemed to have heard it too — because Yu Feichen saw him smile, lashes curving.
Yu Feichen drew him over, and Anfei stepped out of the River of What Was. The silver mist dispersed from around him.
Yu Feichen’s movement stopped.
— The person he had pulled out was not the same Anfei as before.
In the moonlight, at the mist-veiled riverbank, a golden-haired youth of about seventeen or eighteen was looking up at him. His eyes were the quiet, beautiful shade of ice-green jade.
Anfei only came up to his shoulder.
Yu Feichen: “You…”
“Me?” Seeing the slight stunned look on Yu Feichen’s face, Anfei first asked in confusion, then looked down at himself. It was still him — just several years younger, as if from nowhere.
“Well,” Anfei said, a faint helplessness in his eyes.
But Yu Feichen kept looking at him, fixed and unmoving, hand still not letting go.
“What’s the matter?” Anfei said.
Yu Feichen didn’t know how to describe what he felt.
The Anfei before him was so vivid — as clear as if branded onto his soul. It was as if his face blindness had suddenly been cured. He closed his eyes, and could still recall every detail of his features and contours.
Had the River of What Was healed him?
He looked over at Xiassen and the others. It did seem somewhat better — noses were noses, eyes were eyes, he could piece together a general impression. But it faded from his mind the moment he looked away.
From start to finish, the only face he had ever clearly remembered was the Chief God’s — well enough to produce a decent likeness on paper. But not like this. Not like —
Like something drawn countless times, thought of ten thousand times over.
In the moonlight, he looked at Anfei. Every sound outside went quiet. Everyone else’s form faded away. He was too sparing to let his gaze stray anywhere else. He could only see this one person.
Slowly, the Chief God’s features surfaced clear in his memory — not so different from now, only older, the lines of his face having unfurled and settled over a long stretch of years, his expression thinned.
Superior officer. Luther. Anfil… He remembered all of them. The memories, given a vivid and living face to anchor them to, suddenly became clear as clean water. He was like a speck of dust that had been drifting in the air for a long time, and had finally landed somewhere real.
So this is what it feels like, he thought, when one person truly looks at another.
The longer he stared at him, the more Anfei felt this trip had been a mistake.
Had he remembered something?
He reached out a hand — the slender fingers of a young man passing briefly before Yu Feichen’s eyes.
Anfei: “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Yu Feichen pressed his temple, then looked at Anfei again. Still that real.
Yu Feichen: “What point in time is this you?”
Anfei glanced at the vine. The vine was bright and lively.
He let out a quiet inner sigh, and said: “This is how I looked at the very beginning.”
The vine looked like it was trying to decide whether to shake itself or not. He added softly: “When I was not yet a God, and Eternal Day had not yet come to exist in the world.”
The years of youth had passed in a flash, barely a few years of them. By the time he looked back, they were already gone.
His voice was low, but Yu Feichen heard it.
The very beginning. Right — he had seen it in Tangpo’s dream.
Was it because that original face was the most true, and that was why it had lodged so deeply as to become everything after it?
There was an inexplicable unease in Anfei’s tone. He asked again: “What are you thinking?”
Yu Feichen had never told anyone about his face blindness, and he felt there was something deeply strange about spending so long examining everyone else’s faces in his mind.
After a brief deliberation, he said: “You’re very beautiful.”
The bald-headed captain, who caught a faint fragment of this from a distance, nearly had his pupils shatter.
Anfei slowly blinked.
He reached out and pressed his hand to Yu Feichen’s forehead: “Are you sure you’re all right?”