The Classic of the Great Wilderness: North: beyond the northwest sea, north of the Red Water, stands Mount Zhangwei. There is a god there: human-faced, serpent-bodied, scarlet; its eyes set vertical and true. When it closes them, darkness; when it looks forth, light. It neither eats nor sleeps nor breathes; wind and rain attend it. It is the candle of the Nine Shades. It is called Zhulong, the Torch Dragon.
The candle of the Nine Shades. The lamplighter of the ninefold dark — that is me.
First, one mortal misunderstanding corrected: my eye does not make day and night. Sun and moon walk the sky, and day and night make themselves; they need nothing from me. My office is to light what sun and moon cannot reach — the Nine Shades: the long night of the utmost north; the ghost-city under the earth; the floors of the abyss. Wherever sunlight and moonlight cannot bend down, my gaze must bend.
Hence the ancients wrote that my body runs a thousand li. No boast. The lamp must reach too many places; a shorter body would not stretch.
For tens of thousands of years I lay coiled on Zhangwei, my gaze on its rounds through the Nine Shades, sharing the watch with sun and moon: they kept the bright places; I kept the dark. Three shifts, myriad ages, and never one error.
Then, three hundred years ago, the moon was taken into that mouth.
The mouth the Jade Rabbit Spirit described — from Zhangwei I saw it more clearly than she did. These vertical eyes see darkness best of all.
With the moon darkened, the watch-rotation broke at one corner: the human world's night — moonlight's own jurisdiction — became, overnight, an unmanned new province of the Shades.
The night-chaos of the world, you have met all along your road. Why do the foul things call their rolls at night? Why does the corrupt fire burn at night? Why do the shadows change at night? Because the dark lost its lamp — and only then did they dare stretch out their hands full length.
So I made a decision beyond my mandate: I divided my gaze, and gave half of it from the Nine Shades to the nights of the human world.
Every night-road my gaze has swept is dark in the honest way: dark, but concealing nothing. The traveller does not find it brighter — only, unaccountably, less frightening. That is my light passing through. The ghostfires mark the pits; the Firelight Beast walks the streets; the Lampwick keeps the camps — you light the world lamp by lamp. Mine is merely larger: half a moon's worth of stand-in, at best.
But three hundred years into the stand-in, I carry one difficulty I have told no one.
Zhulong neither eats nor sleeps nor breathes — so the book says, and mostly truly. But the book omits one line: Zhulong must blink.
Not from weariness. To renew the eye. The vertical gaze pours out like water, diminishing as it pours; only in one instant of closed eyes does the light circle back and refill. For myriad ages my blinks kept time with the celestial watch: while sun or moon held the sky, I closed my eyes and banked my light — and that one instant of dark fell harmlessly across the Nine Shades, where none could mark it.
Now the moon is gone. If I blink, the human world's night goes absolutely black for one instant.
One instant of absolute black — how much can those things accomplish in it? I dare not wager.
So for three hundred years I have pressed the blink to its limit: once a day in the old ages; now, one instant in seven days. When the light will not refill, I burn on regardless — and these vertical eyes, three centuries on, have dimmed from scarlet to dark red, like two furnaces of ember burning low.
Bifang, passing my mountain, looked at my eyes and wept. He said: Elder Zhulong — your lamp is running out of oil.
I said: out of oil, it must burn anyway. The old office of the Nine Shades, the new watch of the human night — neither can be set down.
He said: no one asks you to set them down. The company in the west is finding a way to take the moon back.
To take the moon back.
These eyes, tens of thousands of years old, went hot at the five words.
When the moon returns and the clear radiance shines again — when the night has its rightful keeper — I may retire to Zhangwei, keep my Nine Shades, and sleep the sleep of ages that I am owed — no. Zhulong does not sleep.
Blink, then. The one blink I am owed.
So I rose from Zhangwei and entered the Tower of Yao-Subduing — the tower stands near Vulture Peak, and from its crown my gaze spreads to cover the last stage of your westward road.
Friends: go west. Walk the nights without fear.
The dark above your heads is held up by me.
I ask one thing only: be quick.
How much longer these two furnaces of ember can hold — even I no longer dare to count.