C1 Part1

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【海上牧云记】| Pt. One: Muyun Sheng

On that winter’s day, the sound of an infant’s cry echoed through a palace enshrouded in snow. The maids and the eunuchs, the nobility and the ministers, the concubines and royalty, even the commoners in the city outside the palace walls rushed to deliver the news: “The sixth prince has been delivered.” Then, in that moment, everyone had believed he was destined to be the next emperor of the great kingdom of Duan.

This was due to a wedding stranger and more fantastical than anything that had ever been seen before, for Muyun Sheng’s mother had once possessed the most beautiful countenance in all the world, and she had once been the most beloved wife to the Emperor Ming, Muyun Qin.

When she was still alive, the ladies of the six courts could not be compared to her without dulling their lustre. Even the Empress had to rely on her to cajole the Emperor Ming to show her even an ounce of favour.

Yet she wasn’t happy, and the discovery of her pregnancy added more to her worries.

“If someday you must finally choose between me and the kingdom, which would you choose?” she had asked the Emperor Ming.

“Why should you speak thus? Isn’t everything perfect the way it is now?” She sighed a heavy sigh, raising her head to gaze through the window at the starlight, not saying anything more.

Disasters entered the world one after another close on the heels of Muyun Sheng’s birth.

From the day the child was born, a wild, relentless snow began to fall that didn’t stop for three months. The plains of the north were buried in it, and the wandering tribes began to migrate southward, which came to a head with an insurrection.

A year later, thunderstorms in the southern province of Yue led to calamity, forcing countless to abandon their homes, losing everything. The evacuees, unable to find food, began looting in the county seat.

Another three years later, an earthquake devastated the shore, which caused a strange island to simply rise from the sea. A tsunami rushed inland to the provincial capital, and the hungry ocean came ashore to swallow people whole. In two coastal counties, thousands of miles of fishing villages turned into desolate shorelines.

People began to say that the sixth prince, Muyun Sheng, was someone who never should have been born.

The sages from the Imperial Polaris Holy Sect were finally able to divine the reason for the troubles: Muyun Sheng’s mother was no real human, but a spirit whose form was congealed from the accumulation of energies heavenly and of the earth.

How much did the Emperor Ming once love her, that for her he was willing to throw aside the sacrament that commoners could not be allowed to be imperial concubines? That he banished many hundreds of ministers from the capital for their opposition? That he fell out with his relatives and his advisors? Decades ago, the crises he’d caused on her behalf had shaken the world.

And yet, everything had already passed. The boundless splendour that had in those days been capable of bringing ruin to kingdoms was now no more than legend. The Emperor had aged, and no longer had the energy to stand off against those traditions that were as unyielding as city walls. People now said that she was a devilish mei, that she would bring devastation to the kingdom, to the world, and when these rumours echoed across the land, the Emperor Ming’s credence with the people began to fall. He issued an edict to detain her within the walls of a high tower, always to be alone.

Sometimes, a very small Muyun Sheng would stand beneath the tower and watch from afar as his mother reclined in the tower above, gazing vacantly into the vibrant clouds so far from her reach, fluttering the fan in her hand every so often. Sometimes, she would smile a small little smile, as if recalling some bygone era. But the era was gone, and her happiness and beauty had departed with it.

When she died, she was only thirty-two.

Before she passed, she had said to little Sheng’er, “Don’t be bewitched by too-beautiful things, because they are always short-lived.”