The Classic of the Western Mountains, under Mount Huaijiang, records me: its god is Yingzhao, who governs there; his form is a horse's body with a human face, tiger-striped, bird-winged; he patrols the four seas; his voice is like the pomegranate-flute.
Mount Huaijiang is the Peaceful Park — the garden of the Celestial Emperor's lower capital. The human world calls it the Hanging Garden, one of Kunlun's three terraces, opening upward to heaven. I govern that park: horse-bodied, bird-winged, patrolling the four seas to gather fine seed from every quarter and keep the garden's immortal flora in bloom.
Let me recite the old holdings once, for the sound of it: three hundred grades of jade-blossom; seven hundred kinds of jasper-herb; the deathless tree; the luan-pearl tree; the sand-pear whose fruit proofs the eater against drowning; the ping-grass that cures weariness at a taste. And one bed apart, bred for transplanting below: famine-rice, plague-easing herbs, the well-side vine that no drought year can kill.
Of the numinous herbs of the ancient human world, three or four in every ten were carried down, stem by stem, from my beds.
The gardener's duty in four characters: breed the seed; succor the world. Heaven refines; earth receives. That park was a living seed-vault between heaven and earth.
Three hundred years ago, seven days before the black moon rose, an urgent decree reached the park: seal the garden.
Why? The decree did not say. Sealed by whom? The seal was genuine — in those days, they all still were. I closed the gates as ordered. Three days later, heaven went silent.
The sealing order proved to be the last order the garden ever received.
I kept the sealed park ten years. In the tenth, I committed the greatest insubordination of my life — and the act I regret least:
I opened the seed-vault, packed every immortal seed that could travel, and went patrolling the four seas — downward.
Why? Because a gardener knows one law written in no celestial statute, only in the soil: seed is a living thing, and it keeps time. Ten years vaulted, a tenth of its vigor gone; a hundred years, and the finest immortal seed is a husk. Heaven silent, its return date unwritten — had I kept the sealing order to the letter, I would have ended keeper of a vault of dust.
The order said seal the garden. It did not say let the seeds rot with it.
But cultivating immortal seed in the mortal world taught me a lesson three hundred years long.
In heaven, seed bathed in immortal dew and jade springs sprouts as a matter of course. On earth, immortal seed fails nine grains in ten. I blamed soil and water at first — changed both, screened frost, forced germination, exhausted a hundred techniques. The seed died all the same.
Until, in one mountain village, I set my last grain of famine-rice at the back wall of a family's kitchen — where the old mother kept, every day, one bowl of hot congee at the stove for refugees on the road.
Seven days. It sprouted.
And there I finally understood how immortal seed lives among mortals: it is not soil the seed answers. It is warmth. The small warmth of people tending one another passes through the stove, through the wall, through the earth — and the seed, below, hears it. Only having heard it will the seed consent to sprout.
Where hearts are warm, immortal seed lives. Where hearts are cold, immortal dew itself freezes on the ground.
Three hundred years, with the four seas for my garden. Wherever a charity-granary rose or a kindness was done, I buried a grain. Wherever a village rebuilt after ruin, I buried a grain. The sprouted, I enter in my register — above four thousand living plants now, scattered through the land, most of them taken by their households for nothing more than an unusually vigorous weed by the fence.
Lay my register of living sprouts beside Lady Nine-Tail's chart of the flourishing breath — and the bright points of the two maps coincide, mark for mark.
She measures the world's flourishing. I plant the world's warmth. One work; two systems of record.
And these three years, the densest new line of sprouts in my register runs east to west, extending. Along it the seeds break ground faster than anywhere in three centuries — one deathless-tree seed cleared the soil in three days. Even in heaven's own beds, that would be a wonder.
At the head of that line: you.
So I came. A horse's body with bird's wings carries a whole vault of seed.
I march west with the company, burying seed along the way as ever. Walk your road; do your work; pay me no mind — the work itself is the watering.
As for my private hope: the garden gate has been sealed three hundred years, and the key still hangs at my neck.
On the day heaven's gates reopen, I will return to the Peaceful Park, unlock it, and turn the beds —
and from these four thousand warmth-fed plants of the human world, choose the sturdiest, and carry a planting of them up.
Heaven's garden has lain fallow three hundred years.
This time, let it be the seeds of the human world that go up — to save the garden of heaven.