A Song Of Eleven Princes: The Year Of Sixty-Six White Flowers
The worst year of the war, by the accounts of the two extant story cycles, and indeed of every writer, was the 113th year of the war, the Year of Sixty Six White Flowers. It marked in one sense the height of the drama, holding within it the stories of a generation of war.
In peacetime before the war, the Empire was thought to be stacked heavily with White-level Cultivators because it had fifteen in total. But if you add together anyone who was at or reached that (second) highest step in that year, it is said that the number would add up to sixty-six.
Seventeen of them would not survive even the year, flaring briefly and brilliantly in times of desperation to try to save a cause, family, or way. They are given the most attention in the "Lament Of The Seventeen", a moving part of the Song cycle that highlights desperation, success, and failure. Those who entered White did so sometimes to successfully save causes at the cost of their death, valuing their Way not only more than themselves but even more than its culmination. Others tried and failed, becoming brief, brutal sparks that made the end of a cause--like the bandit lord of Two Peaks--a massacre that destroyed entire cities with the scope of the suffering needed to defeat them.
But even among those who survived the year, most would die before the war was over. At the time of the end of the civil war and the ascension to the throne of Cai Renxiang, there were only twenty-two White Cultivators left in the Empire, and two of them were outlaws on the run from the destruction of their Clans, and powerful foes indeed of the new government. The year was a tragedy from start to beginning, such that the Songs could not even if they were able to cover every one of the White Flowers, both those who were White at the start of the year and those who ascended upwards during the year.
Instead, they almost use the idea of their inability to fully capture everything as a narrative tool, trying to reveal all they can within the Songs and yet admitting at many times bafflement, wonder, or horror at the proceedings that left many millions dead just in that year alone. So it is best to similarly focus and ask questions of some of its key narratives and give a first overview now of what to expect of the 7th to 8th Realm narratives during this period of Songs.
There are roughly four or five of the advancements to White that get significant attention in the Song Of Eleven Princes during that fateful year. But to understand why it was a fateful year, one must understand the year before, when Bei Meizhen was at last driven from her iron grip upon the Bai and her half-exile, her precarious position that had led her to transfer some loyalist Bai to Cai lands, became permanent. At the same time, the subjects beneath the earth, the city-states whose integration was the ultimate fruit of the Cai rulership, grew restive. One city, the Traitor City whose name was sacrificed for the power to strike at the Cai, in particular, rose up. So as Bai Meizhen tried to deal with the hostility of the Bai, the entire fate of the Emerald Seas rested in the balance.
At the same time, the Jin were starting to lose ground to the Xuan and indeed to the Bai, though the collapse of Bai Meizhen's rule relieved the pressure as the great family fell into infighting. The Jin and their empire were bedeviled by the Jing, and by their own follies when a 7th Realm Cultivator known as one of the greatest crafters of his age sought to reverse it.
Meanwhile, in the lands of the Zheng, spirits were growing out of control and the death toll outside of combat was quickly surpassing the death toll in combat, even before starvation and disease were factored in. It was in that context that the Wandering Blade, the Tailless Fox, at last reached her final and definite purpose.
These are the three stories of advancement to White that the Song focuses on most during the year, in addition to the travails of the Jungle and the wandering and wondering poet-philosopher Sai Zhu, whose journeys among the Clouds, the Jungles, and the desert Wastes had honed them into a figure whose postwar importance and renown would in a strange way far eclipse their deeds during the war.
So, one by one, let us talk about these figures and how the Song and other works treat them.
First, let us look at the most controversial one. Jin He was the man whose Circle Conspiracy would define and guide the Jin Clan for the remaining thirty-five years of their existence as a Clan and as a powerful state. Often the word of the Viscount Kongs under the Cai are taken as being of merit in talking about the craftsmanship of those Jin who went towards that side of the art. The long tradition and focus on producing things that could be easily made again and again was at times mocked, but Jin He was someone who believed fully in the ability of this to be innovation. Already by the Year of Sixty-Six White Flowers, he was regarded by many as a dangerous iconoclast whose emphasis on standardization was almost machine-like in its perfectionism and desire to create goods that anyone with the requisite skill could make.
Indeed, it was pushing towards understanding what this meant, and even more what this could mean, that allowed him to advance in the 8th Realm. While the
Sagas written by the Jin portrays him as a world-shaping genius, the
Songs speak of him as a man whose mind is machine and gear, cold and cunning but undeniably brilliant. The contrast between the passion for the cause of the Jin Clan and the way the Songs sees him as ultimately an extension of his craft speaks to the deep contradictions within the work.
Indeed, as entire books have been written on the subject of Jin He's motivations and the truly difficult manner to which his ascension to a Great Spirit obscured his political perspectives and the debate on Jin Ai's leadership and the last decade of the Jin. Despite the antipathy towards him that the Songs show, it is also the origin, not the Sagas, of the lines, "Oh what a marvelous machine his mind is, that encapsulates and understands everything…" and the monologue that followed, often regarded as one of the best of its age.
Antipathy can at times create as powerful art as love.
The second to draw the attention of the Songs is of course the Untouchable Ling Biyu, the Dancing Death, whose grin is said sometimes to flash with sorrow, sometimes with rage, and sometimes with mirth. On a field frozen by the power of her sister she, she who had been at the edge of 8th Realm for several decades, but who was aware of what she was going to give up and remained in one sense at the verge of either pushing through or shattering her way… made a choice.
The Song makes it quite clear what the truest choice is. Just as Ling Qi struggled with the contradiction between her Way and what her Way sought, so too did Ling Biyu face the fact that to be untouchable, to dance through a shower of gore with a laugh and a joke, is to in one sense not be a person at all. When one dances through the raindrops, when one dodges danger and responsibility alike, when one must wipe oneself clean of thoughts to use your most potent Arts, you cannot it is said be a sister or a friend, a lover in any but the most technical sense. So therein lies the cruel irony. As Ling Qi fell, as her life was in danger, Ling Biyu was able to let go of it all, because of and in spite of her love for her sister.
It is said on that day that the Cai gained a truly powerful ally, and Ling Qi lost her sister in all the ways that mattered. This is the personal tragedy that makes the story one that so many return to, again and again. But there are personal triumphs in the stories of Cultivation even in that dark year, and that is how the Wandering Blade's story is ultimately portrayed when she passes through the final barrier.
The name of the Wandering Blade is said to be Su Ling, and her past is partially shrouded in mystery, but it seemed clear that she was or had been in a relationship with the Peerless Gan Gaungli, and is said to have been a friend of Ling Qi. Yet she also is said to have turned her back on that friendship, or at least rejected the idea of fighting for the Cai.
The
Songs cite this Tailless Fox as having said, "The world may need me, but what is the world without its people?" She did not fight for any side at all, instead struggling throughout the war to keep rogue spirits in check, catch bandits, and save the innocent from the devastation that thoughtless Cultivators could do.
This put her on a strange collision course with the Cai, and it is one that the Songs almost glosses over, emphasizing instead the continued relationship between the Wandering Blade and the eventual Great Spirit of Just Warfare, Shield Of The Innocent, Whose Sacred Word Is Protection.
(For more on Gan Gaungli and the Wandering Blade, click here.
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One of the most fascinatingly odd decisions that the Song makes is in the introduction to the Year of Sixty-Six White Flowers, in which the book proposes seven different orders of reading for the materials that make up the Year, and five more alternate readings which involve not reading entire sections simply to change how one views the events. In other words, it creates what a destrucivist or post-destructivist would call the ambiguity of the modern age, of the fixity and artifice of storytelling and the assignment of chronological meaning, despite being from a work many, many centuries removed from the modern forms of literary expression.
Thus the work has resonated with scholars of such fields in part for its odd forward-timeliness, which at the time was regarded as a strange gimmick but is now one of the most significant subjects of debate about translations and how to present the work in its entirety…
A/N: So I get to continue hinting things, but I was also forced by my own canons for this apocrypha to actually explain Ling Biyu's fate and more about what's going on. Sixty-Six is perhaps too high, but it is meant to be an absurd number for a world gone largely mad.
And so I decided to present three of the transitions to White: a Culmination, a Tragedy, and a Triumph.
Also, an obvious reference to another story, the coincidence of the (very common) last name was just too funny.
). That's why Green is the realm that separates the normal wealthy people from the crazy people, as we've seen with the Gu daughters for instance.
