I bite back a heated reply. For while I am aware that there are other paths, there must be some specific kind that Wukong is referring to and he knows I’m not seeing it. And he’s not suggesting some kind of Yoda deal here, where I must unlearn what I have learned. He’s acknowledged that I’m on a pretty high plateau of martial skill; he wants me to ascend above that somehow.
Or he might be speaking of a completely different path, unrelated to martial arts. For all I know, he might actually want me to watch better anime series than I’m currently watching. I appreciate the value of ambiguity in some situations, but it’s damn infuriating when it’s the guardian of a gateway to a deeper knowledge of the self.
And I know the purpose of it: The ambiguity forces the student out of established patterns of thinking, and the subconscious begins to chew at the problem like a tough, day-old bagel, even when the conscious mind is otherwise occupied. But knowing the purpose doesn’t help; I’m still faced with a mental obstacle course obscured by fog.
Regardless, we are through speaking and training. The Monkey King grasps his staff in his left hand and reaches out his furred right hand to me. “Come, Granuaile. It is time to defend humanity, to live or die in the moment. If they win free of Yangmingshan Park, the loss of life will be vast.”
I don’t know what he intends to do here, so I hold tightly to Scáthmhaide and put my left hand in his right. Sun Wukong grins at me.
“Sometimes humans soil themselves when I soar the clouds with them. Do please try not to do that.”
“What?”
He cackles, shakes, crouches, and then I am yanked bodily into the air by his power, swept along in a massive jump toward the boiling, apocalyptic mess of Yangmingshan. In Journey to the West, it is said he can travel one hundred eight thousand miles in a single leap—enough to circle the globe four times, essentially no different from flying, so this comparatively brief hop to Yangmingshan from Old Taipei is nothing to him but a breathtaking and indeed a possibly pants-shitting experience for me. If it were not for my background flying as a peregrine falcon, I think I might well have had an accident of one kind or another, for as a human it is terrifying to be aloft without visible support.
And what we’re flying into is terrifying as well. The Monkey King controls our descent to the base of the mountain; we must both bat away skyborne mouths ravening for our flesh along the way, and on the ground a few figures clear a space for us because together we make a strange silhouette.
Once there, I’m not sure how to feel about what I’m facing. Some of them are clearly demons of unusual physiognomy and have never been anything but horrid creatures that take delight in the pain of others. But some of what I see are maddened human figures, both male and female, charred or bearing scars of some kind, confused as much as anything else. They are souls working off their bad karma in hell until they can be reincarnated, and they’re as worried as I am about what will happen if I kill them like this. Will they immediately be reincarnated, or will they return to their purgatorial hell for centuries more of purification? But there’s a certain fatalism to them as well, these wretched creatures who died who knows how long ago: They know full well they cannot stroll into Taipei and resume their lives as is, being shades of their former selves. They must instead please whatever Yama King is in charge of their hell, and right now their Yama King wants them to slay whatever’s in front of them. There’s a moment in their faces, a flicker of curiosity in their expressions at why there’s suddenly a red-haired white woman here, and then a palpable shrug when they realize it can’t matter in their particular scheme of things, right before they lunge at me with sharpened fingernails and feral teeth in mouths gaping wide. The blunt end of my staff thrust between their eyes, or a blow to the temple or back of the head, ends them quickly. They are unarmed and unskilled and offer no serious threat to me, and I’m saddened by the necessity to hurt them to defend myself. I suppose I’m defending plenty of people back in Taipei, but I don’t feel that; instead, I feel like some sort of monster for taking advantage of their weakness.
That is, until a serious demon comes my way, blue-skinned and borne aloft by brightly colored wings akin to peacock feathers, with red glimmering eyes in a black-toothed visage. He wields a mace dangling on the end of a chain rope, and I know he’s a dude because he wears nothing.
“Uh, Wukong?” I glance over my shoulder and see that he is already otherwise engaged. This one’s all mine, apparently. Some lord of a hell upset that I’m plowing through his forces so quickly.
“Have no mercy,” Wukong calls over his shoulder. “Do not hesitate.”
Taking his advice to heart, I pull out a throwing knife from my belt and bullseye the demon in his junk. He shrieks and curls around the shaft buried in his shaft, and I brain him with Scáthmhaide while he’s mourning his nads. That makes the damned pull back from me a bit, and I pause as well.
“No,” Wukong says. “Continue, Granuaile! They must all be sent back, you see? These souls must continue their punishment until they can be reborn again. You do nothing wrong by your violence here. You are both protecting the living and helping these souls on their journey.”
That wrenches my head around to a different paradigm. I’m not really killing the innocent, or anyone; this is a cleanup operation. Sanitation, even. As evidenced by the fact that soon after these vessels “die,” they melt away much like demons from the Christian hells do, but thankfully these don’t smell as bad.
“Just think,” the Monkey King said, “after another thousand years or whatever debt their soul has taken on, these people can be reborn and experience bubble tea.”
That’s a mighty strange thing to think about in combat while shattering skulls. What shall I say to them right before they die again? “Try the kiwi watermelon flavor when you get a chance,” or something like that? Would such words even hold meaning for them? Would they hold on to the idea throughout their purgatorial suffering and then through rebirth? Would they even understand a single word of my language, or might I be communicating to them somehow my personal regret and hope for them? I certainly hope better things for them than mere bubble tea. Their expressions are desperate to simply get through whatever this is—me, hell, whatever—so that they can reach a better place.
“Am I helping them to learn and grow?” I ask as more of the damned flood down the mountain and our staffs whirl and thunk against heads, caving in temples and crowns.
“Probably a measure of mercy,” Wukong replies. “We are both giving them quicker deaths than anything they receive from the Yama Kings.”
I don’t know how merciful it is to send these people right back to be tortured for—did the Monkey King say a thousand years? How does one do so much evil in a human lifetime to deserve that much punishment? I imagine someone like a dictator or a serial killer could manage it, but I’m sure all these people weren’t such. They were millers who cheated farmers, perhaps, or farmers who didn’t take care of their horses, or petty local officials, or terrible grandmothers, but not spirits that could do anything in seventy years to earn a thousand years of punishment, right?
I try to shake away the thought, because attempting to judge systems of judgment is how one winds up with a head full of batshit. Pick a system—any system, legal or ecclesiastical—and you’ll start to wonder at how anyone could think it was fair. And then you’ll realize it was never meant to be fair but rather was intended to protect the interests of the powerful, and then you’re wading through a swamp of cynicism and your day’s ruined.
What I like about being a Druid in service to Gaia is that Gaia doesn’t judge much at all—just the theft of her own life force to kill some other part of her. That’s why she prohibits us from using our powers to directly harm others. Otherwise, she’s going to let us sort out judgment for ourselves.
Why should Gaia care precisely how people once behaved in Taiwan, or about the spiritual life of a mayfly in Connecticut, or about the deviant proclivities of an alley cat in Kathmandu? She will endure so long as the life upon her keeps reproducing. The violent tides of creatures eating, shitting, and fucking each other are what keep her alive. She’s not going to impose morality on that.