Chapter 303: Establishing the Lord's Name

The inverted mountain gate hung suspended above the Righteous Manor. Within the gate there was no sky, only layer upon layer of stacked old paper.

Every layer of paper bore a name written upon it.

Some had thick ink, some had thin ink, and some were left with only half the strokes remaining, as if someone had repeatedly erased them.

What blew out through the cracks of the gate was not wind, but a damp, cold murmur of human voices, mingled with weeping, counting voices, and the sound of bells. It was as if all the people whose names had been changed beyond the Great Wall over the past several decades had simultaneously awakened from behind the gate.

The gray-robed man stood before the seven black carriages, his six fingers slightly spread, yet his voice suddenly became very flat.

"The gate is already open."

"If the six do not enter, the headquarters will find people to fill the vacancies on its own."

Lu Yuan looked up at the mountain gate.

"Fill whose vacancies?"

"Fill the vacancies of those who lack names."

"You change people's names, relocate their names, borrow their shadows, and return them to the registers. Yet in the end, you still lack people."

The gray-robed man said:

"It's not people that are lacking."

"What's lacking is a single master name capable of pressing down all the other names."

Wang Cheng'an understood immediately.

"You're not trying to get six people to fill the gate."

"You're trying to fuse six people into one master name."

The gray-robed man looked at him.

"The Iron Abacus truly knows how to calculate."

"Fusing them into one is the only way to pass through the gate."

Lu Yuan said coldly:

"To pass through your gate, one must first discard his own name."

"Not discard."

The gray-robed man raised his right hand, and his six fingers lightly pressed together beneath the shadow of the gate.

"It is consolidation."

"After consolidation, the six are no longer six, but one person who can speak for all those who have been name-relocated."

Song Qinghe raised the bronze lamp higher, and the lamplight fell upon that gate.

The paper pages within the gate shifted slightly, revealing an extremely thin line of text:

"Gate Master: Not yet established."

"If the Gate Master is established, name relocation may continue."

Zhou Heng saw that line of text, and his face darkened.

"The Gate Master is the name position of the Malevolent Deity."

Lin Zhaoxuan said:

"No wonder the Kiln, Marker, Well, and Manor were all merely locks. The true offering altar is here."

Xu Erxiao tightened his grip on his short sword.

"Then what are we waiting for? Just chop the gate down and be done with it!"

Lu Yuan did not move.

He reached out to press down on the wooden tablet and black brick, then spread the name relocation ledger open at his feet.

"Chopping the gate is easy. Settling the accounts is hard."

"Behind this gate lie not only all the names that were relocated away, but also all the roads that were altered."

"If we only chop the gate without questioning the accounts, what gets severed is still the path of return for the living."

Zhou Shoumo lay prostrate on the ground, coughing up a mouthful of blood, and suddenly let out a laugh.

"Even at this step, you still think of settling accounts first."

"Lu Yuan, you are too much like Gu Changgeng."

"You both believe that as long as the old accounts are settled, the evil rules will scatter on their own."

"But the people inside that gate may not be willing to come back."

Lu Yuan turned to look at him.

"You've finally been willing to tell the truth."

"What exactly is behind the gate?"

Zhou Shoumo was silent for a long while before he spoke:

"It is the Relocation Headquarters."

"It is also the Gate-Closing Altar."

"Back when there was great chaos inside the pass, too many people were fleeing. The mountain folk feared disorder, so they set up three name-verification checkpoints."

"But later, people's hearts grew chaotic. Verification was no longer just for taking people in, but also for screening them. Screening their origins, screening their sect affiliations, screening their families, screening whether they could be allowed to stay."

"The people who stayed became fewer and fewer, yet the names piled up more and more."

"So someone said, why not just fuse all those who remained into a single Gate Master."

"The Gate Master would make decisions on behalf of everyone, sparing the need for Public Deliberation every time."

Song Qinghe looked up.

"So you turned living people into sacrificial components of the gate."

"Not sacrificial components."

Zhou Shoumo said.

"They are keys to the door."

"Every person believed they were seeking a path to survival, and in the end, they all became the ones who opened and closed the door for the gate."

When Lin Zhaoxuan heard this, his fingers tightened bit by bit.

"The White Cloud Sect's old site had a similar saying back then."

"They said that if you could merge all the name registers of the refugees into a single master genealogy, then one gate could contain a hundred calamities."

"In the end, the master genealogy became the lock, and the people became the keyholes."

Zhou Heng pressed the copper coin into his palm and said slowly:

"The Green Pine Temple was the same."

"They said that to keep the incense burning, one must first keep the names."

"In the end, the names were kept, but the living could never leave again."

Lu Yuan looked at the three of them.

"So the three of you came from inside the pass to beyond the Great Wall, not to find the gate."

"You came to find a path that would not be devoured by the gate."

None of the three spoke, but each of them looked toward the inverted mountain gate.

The weeping behind the gate suddenly changed.

Immediately after, a faint female voice came through the gate:

"Brother Lu."

The voice was very soft, yet it made Xu Erxiao and Wang Cheng'an both shudder simultaneously.

Xu Erxiao blurted out in shock:

"Meng An?"

A sheet of paper slowly drifted down from the crack in the gate.

On the paper was only a single line of text:

"Witness beside the righteous well, Meng An, pending verification."

Wang Cheng'an's face changed dramatically.

"Wasn't he guarding the register at Ma Family Gully?"

Lu Yuan caught the paper, and his gaze sank.

"This wasn't written by Meng An."

"It's the gate borrowing his name to call people."

"It wants to drag the people at the righteous well into this as well."

The moment he finished speaking, the sound of carriage wheels crushing snow suddenly came from outside the Righteous Manor.

A black carriage, with no driver, drove into the courtyard on its own.

The wooden box on the carriage trembled, and the lid sprang open with a sharp "crack."

Inside, there was no corpse, no books, and no offerings.

There were only bundles of red lines, each with a small slip of paper tied to its end.

On the slips were written the names of each household in each settlement.

Some had been crossed out, others had been added anew, and still others had a small handprint drawn beside them.

Wang Cheng'an's scalp went numb.

"This carriage came to deliver the bottom registers of name relocation."

"It's wrapping things up."

Lu Yuan crouched down and took out a slip of paper from the box.

On it was written:

"Xu Erxiao, origin from within the pass, pending verification."

Xu Erxiao was so angry his eyes turned red.

"Pending verification my ass!"

"I've walked all the way here with Brother Lu. Who dares say my origin is unclear?"

Lu Yuan did not soothe him. He simply handed the slip to Zhou Heng to look at.

Zhou Heng understood at a glance.

"It's not trying to verify who's real and who's fake."

"It's manufacturing unease."

"As long as one person is written as pending verification, the others will start to doubt themselves."

"Once doubt takes root, the shadow loosens."

Song Qinghe raised the lamp to illuminate the black carriage.

"All the red lines on the carriage are tied to name papers from various households."

"These weren't written anew."

"They were pulled out from the old registers and then strung back together."

Lin Zhaoxuan reached out and touched them. A thin layer of ash clung to his fingertip.

"There's kiln ash."

"And well mud."

"And the musty smell of old paper."

Lu Yuan stood up.

"Someone pulled out the old accounts from the Kiln, the Well, the Manor, and the Gate, stitched them into these seven carriages, and laid them out before our eyes."

"This isn't delivering accounts."

"This is forcing us to acknowledge the accounts."

The gray-robed man suddenly spoke:

"Acknowledge them, and you can pass through the gate."

"This is a transaction."

"What transaction?"

Lu Yuan asked.

The gray-robed man pointed to the densely packed names inside the gate.

"You establish the name of the Gate Master, and the gate will let go of those who were relocated away."

"If you refuse, all the names behind the gate will continue to seek out replacements."

Xu Erxiao laughed in anger.

"In plain terms, you're trading people for the gate."

"What about the Gate Master then?"

"The Gate Master is the only one who can speak outside the gate."

"In other words, after the six are fused into one, that remaining one."

Wang Cheng'an said in a low voice:

"In the end, you're still trying to press us into a single offering."

Lu Yuan nodded.

"So we cannot enter the gate."

"But the gate is already open, and the names have already begun to reach outward."

Zhou Heng looked up at the crack of the gate.

Inside, the paper pages were fluttering wildly. Some names had already floated up off the surface of the paper, like a swarm of shadows without bodies, about to crawl out.

He suddenly spoke:

"I'll go."

Everyone looked at him at the same time.

Lin Zhaoxuan frowned.

"What are you going to do?"

"Go to the gate's mouth and receive its first question."

Zhou Heng clenched the copper coin.

"The gate wants to verify names. I'll go report."

Song Qinghe immediately said:

"After you report your name, it might follow your shadow and drag you inside."

"Then I won't let it drag me."

Zhou Heng looked at Lu Yuan.

"Senior Brother, lend me that hemp cord of yours."

Lu Yuan handed him the hemp cord.

"What do you plan to do?"

"When the gate verifies names, the first question is origin."

"I'll report my origin, then tie the cord to the gate nail."

"If the cord doesn't break, it means I'm still myself."

Lu Yuan pondered for a moment, then finally nodded.

"Go."

Zhou Heng drew his blade and stepped forward, standing beneath the inverted mountain gate.

The paper pages inside the gate abruptly stopped.

An icy cold voice came from behind the gate:

"Report your origin."

Zhou Heng steadied his breathing and said word by word:

"A disciple of the Green Pine Temple from within the pass, fled as a refugee to beyond the Great Wall."

"My sect has not perished, and the incense has not been severed."

"Today I walk the same road as Lu Yuan, to investigate the evil ledgers of name relocation."

Behind the gate, there was a moment of silence.

"Origin verified."

"Next, verify your true name."

Zhou Heng pressed the sect copper coin into his palm.

"Zhou Heng."

"Name verified."

"Next, verify your sect affiliation."

"The Green Pine Temple."

"Sect affiliation verified."

"Next, verify those who walk with you."

Zhou Heng turned back to look at Lu Yuan and the others.

He did not report empty names, but pointed clearly at each person one by one.

"Lu Yuan, Wang Cheng'an, Xu Erxiao, Lin Zhaoxuan, Song Qinghe."

"Companions verified."

The voice behind the gate suddenly softened slightly.

"One question remains."

"What question?"

"Why have you come."

Zhou Heng raised his head and answered calmly:

"To lead the people back out from the gate."

Behind the gate, there was a pause.

Then, the entire inverted mountain gate trembled violently.

The layers of names within the gate seemed to be scorched by fire, all emitting fine, crackling sounds.

One by one, the paper names fell from the gate, landed on the snow, and dissolved into fine white ash.

The gray-robed man's face changed dramatically.

"You shouldn't have answered so directly."

"When the Gate Master asks 'why have you come,' it wants you to acknowledge that you're willing to guard the gate for it!"

Zhou Heng said coldly:

"I don't guard the gate. I guard people."

With that, he tied one end of the hemp cord to the gate nail, and wrapped the other end tightly around his own wrist.

The cord snapped taut, and immediately a low, deep roar came from behind the gate.

On the snow, the seven wooden boxes on the black carriage burst open simultaneously.

The red lines scattered, and name papers flew everywhere.

The wind rolled, and they pieced themselves together into six massive characters in mid-air:

"Lu Yuan, enter the gate."

Wang Cheng'an moved with lightning speed. He grabbed his abacus and smashed it against the ground.

The beads scattered, landing in a circle.

"Don't look at the characters!"

"It's establishing the master name for the gate!"

Song Qinghe immediately lowered the bronze lamp, and the lamplight covered the ground beneath the six of them.

Lin Zhaoxuan quickly scattered a handful of white rice before the gate. The grains landed, forming a broken, intermittent line.

"The thing inside the gate wants to use the traces of our shared witness to piece together a single name that can speak."

Lu Yuan looked at those six massive characters and, instead, smiled.

"It's panicking."

"When it panics, it exposes its foundations."

He turned around, picked up the name relocation ledger from the ground, and flipped through it page by page.

With every page he turned, a red line snapped loose from the gate.

"It says the six of us walk the same road, so we should be fused into a single offering."

"But the people in this ledger were clearly sent here along separate roads."

"North Mountain Pass, the righteous well, the brick kiln, the Righteous Manor."

"Each place did not share the same fate."

"They were merely strung together by the same set of evil rules."

Lu Yuan raised his hand and directly spread the name relocation ledger open on the snow before the gate.

"Wang Cheng'an, keep count."

"Lin Zhaoxuan, record the roads."

"Song Qinghe, illuminate the names."

"Zhou Heng, guard the gate."

"Xu Erxiao, guard the people."

Wang Cheng'an responded immediately, and the abacus crackled to life.

"Of the six hundred and forty-seven names, three hundred and eighteen were relocated from within the pass, one hundred and ninety were renamed beyond the Great Wall, ninety-four borrowed shadows, forty-five pending verification, and one missing Gate Master."

"It's not that one is missing."

Lu Yuan said.

"It's that there should never have been a Gate Master at all."

He laid the broken blade horizontally on the ground, and the back of the blade pressed down the flying name papers.

"Name relocation should have been verified household by household, settled person by person, and handed over register by register."

"Instead, you pieced them all into a headquarters."

"So the error isn't that there are too many names."

"It's that you wanted all the names to recognize only a single opening."

The voice behind the gate finally shifted from cold to furious.

"Without a Gate Master, who will make the decisions?"

"Public Deliberation."

Lu Yuan answered with extreme speed.

"If Public Deliberation is slow, then let it be slow."

"If Public Deliberation is wrong, then change it."

"If someone uses the slowness and the changes to scheme, that is the fault of people, not an inevitability of the gate."

The inverted mountain gate suddenly contracted inward.

From the crack of the gate, a hand suddenly reached out.

That hand was withered and pale, with five long, slender fingers, palm facing upward, as if begging for something.

When Zhou Shoumo saw it, his expression shifted dramatically.

"The Gate Master's hand!"

"It truly intends to establish the master name!"

The bronze lamp flame in Song Qinghe's hand suddenly flickered.

From the wick, a wisp of extremely fine white flame shot out and landed on that hand in the gate's crack.

The white flame was not hot, yet it made the hand immediately retract.

Lin Zhaoxuan seized the moment and shouted:

"The gate may verify names, but it cannot establish a master!"

Zhou Heng yanked the hemp cord hard.

The gate nail cracked open with a "crack," and the inverted mountain gate swayed twice. The sea of paper within the gate instantly churned.

Lu Yuan seized that instant. He raised his blade and wrote four characters on the ground:

"Name relocation ends here."

The moment the strokes landed, the old ledger, the wooden tablet, the black brick, the abacus beads, the copper coin, the green lamp, and the hemp cord all lit up simultaneously.

The name papers that had been dragged in from all directions suddenly stopped flying toward the gate.

They fell like rain, covering the snow.

As each paper landed, a person's voice surfaced from it.

There were voices of the elderly, voices of women, voices of children, voices of Daoist refugees, and voices of the dead who had long since had their names changed.

They no longer cried out in unison, "Give me a gate."

They began to speak of their own destinations, each one.

"I'm going back to Ma Family Gully."

"I'm returning to the Northern Guan Righteous Manor."

"I have a grave at the old forest."

"I have family at the Xiling Grass Temple."

"I won't enter the public registry to hold a seal."

"I only acknowledge my old name."

For the first time, hesitation appeared in the voice behind the gate.

"If none of you enter the gate, then the Gate Master cannot be established."

Lu Yuan looked up at the gate.

"Then don't establish it."

"Tear the gate down."

He thrust the broken blade into the middle of the threshold.

Zhou Heng, Lin Zhaoxuan, and Song Qinghe stepped forward at the same time, each pressing their sect token beside the blade.

The copper coin, the white rice, the lamp flame, the hemp cord, the wooden tablet, and the abacus. Six items lined up side by side, pressing down on the threshold.

Xu Erxiao and Wang Cheng'an, one on each side, held down the black carriage, refusing to let it retreat.

"The gate does not acknowledge people, so people will not acknowledge the gate."

"This road was walked out by us, not written out by you."

Lu Yuan formed hand seals with both hands and shouted in a low voice:

"The gate is the gate, the road is the road."

"Names return to names, shadows return to shadows."

"The relocated have their origins, the returning have their destinations."

"If the Gate Master is not established, the evil altar shall empty itself!"

The moment the words fell, the inverted mountain gate trembled violently.

Layer upon layer of paper pages within the gate began to combust on their own.

But the fire was not black. It was white.

Wherever the white fire burned, all the altered characters revealed their original brushstrokes once more.

Some were pet names given by parents. Some were secular names hastily reported by Daoist disciples when fleeing. Some were affectionate nicknames used by villagers.

Those names detached from the gate pages one by one and flew toward their respective origins.

From the direction of the righteous well, Meng An's voice suddenly came.

"Brother Lu!"

"The name ledger wasn't lost!"

Everyone turned around.

From the direction of Ma Family Gully, a beam of lamplight shot up into the sky.

It was the duplicate register beside the righteous well, lifted to a high place, being carefully tended in turns by Meng An, Asheng, and several women.

The paper names in the well water no longer bubbled up. Instead, they began to sink downward.

On the black carriage, the red lines snapped apart one by one.

The gray-robed man stumbled backward, finally revealing a look of terror.

"Impossible..."

"Once the gate opens, name relocation should continue."

"How can this be..."

Lu Yuan looked at him.

"Because you treated people as parts of the gate."

"But people are not."

"People remember one another, and they also tear down gates for one another."

Zhou Shoumo suddenly clutched his head and let out a long-suppressed roar.

"I was just afraid."

"Afraid that once the name ledgers scattered, no one in this chaotic world would collect the dead anymore."

"Afraid that too many people would come from beyond the Great Wall, and the mountain wouldn't have room for them all."

"Afraid that everyone else would leave, and I'd be the only one left guarding a pile of names no one acknowledged."

"So I erected the gate."

"I wanted to keep a place for them."

Song Qinghe looked at him, her expression not softening.

"Keeping a place is not the same as establishing evil rules."

"If you truly want to keep people, you should let them choose their own paths."

"Not gather all the paths into a single gate."

Zhou Shoumo knelt down.

The sea of paper behind the gate was still burning.

That voice, which had been silent for so long, finally spat out its last words from amidst the ashes:

"If the Gate Master is not established, the gate shall return to the earth on its own."

Afterward, the inverted mountain gate came crashing down.

It did not smash into the ground. Instead, it shattered into countless paper ashes mid-air, like a silent heavy snowfall, covering the Righteous Manor, the righteous well, the black carriage, the old ledger, and the shoulders of the six people.

Lu Yuan raised his hand to brush the ash from his shoulder, and suddenly felt the weight in his hand lighten.

The broken blade was still there.

But the black ash that had remained within the blade had scattered completely, leaving only a piece of cold iron.

Wang Cheng'an looked down at his abacus.

The black bead that had once represented "seventeen" had shattered into six small beads, landing at the feet of the six people respectively.

Xu Erxiao picked up one of the beads and grinned.

"Well now, even the beads have split up the family."

Lu Yuan did not laugh. He simply gazed toward the North Mountain Pass.

The black smoke that had been there was now gone.

In its place was an extremely long white line, stretching from the mountain pass all the way into the depths of the snowfield beyond.

At the end of the white line, there was an old gate that could not be seen clearly.

The gate was half-open and half-closed, as if waiting for someone, and also as if seeing someone off.

Lin Zhaoxuan said softly:

"The gate is shattered, but there are still gates beyond."

"That's right."

Lu Yuan sheathed the broken blade.

"So we still have to walk."

"But this time, it's not to enter a gate."

"It's to find the person who opens the gates."

He turned to look at the others.

"There are no gate deities beyond the Great Wall, but there are name relocation officials within the pass."

"This ledger has only just turned to its first page."

The six did not say anything more. Each simply picked up their own belonging.

Wang Cheng'an took his abacus, Xu Erxiao collected his short sword, Lin Zhaoxuan gathered his white rice, Zhou Heng gripped his copper coin, Song Qinghe lifted her green lamp, and Lu Yuan carried his broken blade.

Six lines of footprints on the snow advanced side by side toward the North Mountain Pass.

And behind them, the old bell in the courtyard of the Righteous Manor rang once more.

This time, no shadows grew out from the walls.

Only a crisp sound of paper.

Like many names that had been altered, finally finding their way back to where they came from.