Section Ninety-Three: Li Chunfeng Ascends to Immortality

Later generations have always been intensely curious about the relationship between Feng Xiaobao and Empress Wu Zetian. The most credible account is that Feng Xiaobao served as the empress’s personal beautician.

Many refused to believe it, pointing instead to the official record that says, “When the empress paid her favor, Xiaobao attended her, the empress was greatly pleased, and Xiaobao was utterly exhausted.” This, after all, is written in the dynastic histories.

Could a beauty treatment be so tiring?

It was certainly an oddity, yet the authorities insisted this was the truth.

Unofficial histories, meanwhile, produced countless tangled and wildly imaginative versions of the tale, such as The Story That Must Be Told About Xiaobao and Wu Zetian, Before and After the Empress, Feng Xiaobao, the Imperial Beautician, Xiaobao and the Empress of Zetian, Xiaobao and the Empress, and The War of the Two Empresses. But the authorities never acknowledged any of them.

Beyond that, there was another indirect clue. In the earlier days, Feng Xiaobao and Princess Qianjin had an unusually intimate, beyond-friendship sort of relationship. But after the empress paid a visit to the princess’s residence, Feng Xiaobao and Princess Qianjin became thereafter nothing more than courteous acquaintances. Business continued, friendship endured, but whatever lay beyond friendship was gone.

The friendship boat could capsize at any moment.

On this matter, Xiaobao said nothing, and Princess Qianjin remained silent as well.

The relationship between Feng Xiaobao and Wu Zetian was never acknowledged by either of the people involved. Those who knew kept their mouths shut, and no true record was ever laid down. In the end it vanished into the mist and dust of history, becoming an unsolved mystery.

Snow was drifting down. The sky was a murky yellow. Along the official road from Luoyang to Chang’an, six riders were racing at full speed.

All of them were mounted on excellent horses, and each man had a spare horse as well, for they were in urgent haste.

At the head of the party rode Feng Xiaobao and Daoist Master Xuanqing of Temple of the Lord Lao.

Xuanqing had been a formal disciple of Li Chunfeng, that singular wonder of the Tang era. By his master’s command he had gone to meet Feng Xiaobao on the banks of the Wei River and had accompanied him to Luoyang, becoming his earliest patron and protector.

Feng Xiaobao was truly fascinated by Li Chunfeng. He was a godlike figure who could know the past five thousand years and the future three thousand as though they lay open in his palm.

The moment Xuanqing came to meet him and said, “Purple clouds rise in the east; my master has sent me to welcome the sage,” Feng Xiaobao was thoroughly convinced. He had once wanted to pay Li Chunfeng a visit, but Xuanqing told him that Li Chunfeng’s health was poor and that he had long since retired to quiet repose, receiving no visitors at all.

No one was admitted, not even the emperor, the empress, or the ministers and generals.

But yesterday Xuanqing had sent word summoning him to travel with him to Chang’an, so that he might see Li Chunfeng for the last time.

That great and wondrous man was finally being summoned by Heaven and returning to the celestial court.

The messenger who delivered the news had come to gather Li Chunfeng’s disciples for their return, and also said that Li Chunfeng wished to see Feng Xiaobao once before the end.

So the two of them set out before dawn, braving snow and cold.

Even with good horses, and with Xuanqing being a capable rider, Feng Xiaobao was even more like a man of the steppes. The attendants he brought were fierce retainers borrowed from Tang Tian, all of them hardy men from Liangzhou with admirable riding skills.

But the roads were slick with snow. It took them a full two days to reach Chang’an. They did not enter the city itself, but skirted around it to the west, where, beside the road leading out toward the western passes, stood a small temple in which the singular wonder had spent his final years.

The little temple’s doors were shut tight. The two lanterns hanging before it swayed in the wind, casting a faint trembling glow that seemed to portend something.

Xuanqing sprang from his horse, grasped the ring, and struck the mountain gate.

Then he suddenly stiffened and stopped, standing there in a daze.

In that instant he felt that he had lost something terribly important.

He turned back in alarm. Feng Xiaobao’s face had gone dark, and he was looking at him with grave intensity.

Feng Xiaobao had felt it too.

The two exchanged a look. Then Xuanqing gripped the ring with force and slammed the gate so hard it rang through the courtyard, crying out in anguish, “Master! Master!”

The door opened. A thick-set Daoist priest with a black beard appeared. Seeing him, Xuanqing hurriedly cried, “Senior Brother Xuanzheng, Master...”

The newcomer was Xuanqing’s second senior brother, Xuanqi. His eyes were slightly red, and he looked at Xuanqing and Feng Xiaobao with a calm, subdued expression.

Xuanqing was still young. Though gifted with natural understanding, his cultivation was not yet complete. His lips trembled, but no words came.

Xuanqi bowed his head and said quietly, “Infinite Heaven’s Venerable. Xuanqing, Xiaobao, come in at once.”

“Yes!”

Xuanqing rushed inside at once. Overcome with emotion, his foot slipped, but Feng Xiaobao caught him by the arm, and the two of them hurried across the Hall of the Three Pure Ones to the quiet chamber beyond.

There, several Daoists had already gathered, all second-generation disciples. Some were even older than Xuanqing and would have had to address him as senior uncle, much as Feng Xiaobao had once done in the territory of the Golden Blade King Li Jinglong.

As a first-generation disciple, Xuanqing had the right to face his master directly, even though he ranked at the bottom among them. When the two entered the chamber, they saw a gaunt Daoist lying quietly upon a cloud bed, motionless and still.

A peerless man, bearing boundless wisdom and hidden mysteries, had taken leave of the splendid world of Great Tang.

On the open floor of the chamber, five Daoist masters were kneeling, each with a face full of grief.

“No!” Xuanqing seemed to lose all strength. He had to lean on Feng Xiaobao’s support as he made his way step by step toward the cloud bed.

Master, oh Master!

How could you not have waited for Xuanqing to return!

Then his knees gave way, and he sank to the floor, tears streaming down in two relentless lines.

Feng Xiaobao knelt beside him as well.

He seldom yielded to anyone, and though he came from a world of science and was not much moved by ghosts and gods, he held Li Chunfeng in the deepest reverence.

The man had not even met him, and yet had somehow divined his origins and foreseen his arrival. Thinking of it now... fortunately, Li Chunfeng had not meant him harm. Otherwise all his lofty ambitions would have come to nothing.

Standing at the head of the group was the eldest disciple, Xuanzheng. He told Xuanqing, “Master passed into immortality half an hour ago. Before he departed, he said you would surely arrive half an hour later, so we remained here to wait for you.”

Xuanqing’s sorrow only deepened. Master, oh Master, he had not even been willing to wait half an hour longer, so that Xuanqing might see him one last time.

For a wondrous man like Li Chunfeng, to live an extra half hour was no small thing. Even King Yama would have to give him face. And yet he would not wait, not even that little while. He simply went when he was ready to go.

Xuanqing asked, “Did Master leave any final instructions?”

Xuanzheng raised three fingers and said, “First, he ordered us to shut the temple gates and recite the two volumes of the Yellow Court Scripture in quiet contemplation.”

Xuanqing shuddered slightly. Such arrangements for his disciples could only mean one thing: it was a way of avoiding disaster.

The Daoist world must be facing some coming peril, one that Li Chunfeng had already foreseen and for which he had long prepared.

As Xuanqing, Xuanqi, and the others saw it, the danger to the Daoist order must lie in the character for Wu.

“Second, he ordered you to oversee Temple of the Lord Lao in Luoyang,” Xuanqi said.

To preside over the temple in Luoyang meant choosing what to do and what not to do. The other disciples would be avoiding disaster, while Xuanqing, at the very center of the whirlpool that was Luoyang, would have to contend with whatever enemy might come from who knew where. The pressure was immense.

“Third, there is a letter for... this Brother Xiaobao.”

Since Xuanqing and Feng Xiaobao were of the same generation and treated each other as friends, Xuanqi also addressed Xiaobao as a brother.

The letter was passed over, and Feng Xiaobao took it.

Soon after, Xuanqi announced Li Chunfeng’s passing to the outside world, and a great wave of mourning arose at once.

While the Daoists busied themselves with the arrangements, Feng Xiaobao opened the letter in a brief pause and read: “From one of the past to one of the future.”

The very first line set his heart pounding.

The letter was not long. Its general meaning was that the Great Tang would in time blaze with splendor beyond measure, like flowers embroidered upon brocade and fire cooking oil, but once it reached the height of prosperity it would begin to decline, never to rise again.

Another line terrified Feng Xiaobao even more. Li Chunfeng said that if Feng Xiaobao did not act, matters would develop into a catastrophe in which the war drums of Yuyang shook the earth and shattered the Song of Rainbow Skirts and Feathered Robes, and once that happened it would be impossible to contain.

Yes, that was exactly the line.

It was from Bai Juyi’s Song of Everlasting Sorrow, a poem from the future middle Tang, describing the moment when Emperor Xuanzong of Tang was enjoying his pleasures with Yang Guifei and then An Lushan rose in rebellion. Yet now Li Chunfeng had written it so solemnly into his farewell letter.

Li Chunfeng, you plagiarized the verse of a later generation!

Feng Xiaobao was a man from the future. Though he was not especially learned in poetry, Bai Juyi’s Song of Everlasting Sorrow was indeed famous, and he had read and remembered the line about the war drums of Yuyang shaking the earth and shattering the Song of Rainbow Skirts and Feathered Robes. It had all happened in real history.

Prosperity brings suffering to the people; ruin brings suffering to the people as well.

At the end, Li Chunfeng asked Feng Xiaobao to think of the common people, to follow his conscience and act accordingly. Then he would surely bring everlasting renown to the Great Tang and, in one stroke, shatter the future history foretold by his own Back-Pushing Chart.

Li Chunfeng had once composed that chart to calculate the future course of history.

But now there was an extra man from the future, so the Back-Pushing Chart... might no longer be valid.

It was not that Li Chunfeng had been wrong. He had not been wrong at all, because he had even calculated Feng Xiaobao’s arrival.

He had also calculated that without Feng Xiaobao, the history of China would proceed in cycles, turning back upon itself again and again.

But once Feng Xiaobao made his move, history would become a one-way road, a single line running straight ahead.

Feng Xiaobao gripped the letter, and in his chest surged a fierce ambition, a sense that this destiny belonged to him and to no other.

Since even Li Chunfeng had said as much, then so be it. That was the path he would take.

The future would be changed because of me.

<End of Volume One>