Ascension Is a Hook - Chapter 1
When the Gate Opened
My master, Master Xuanwei, had cultivated the Dao for thirteen hundred years.
He had never married, never had children. In all his life, he had loved no one and hated no one.
He often said that to attain the Great Dao, a person first had to pull himself out of the mortal world, inch by inch.
Root out family ties.
Root out desire.
Root out fear.
Root out everything he could not bear to lose.
When nothing remained but a clean body and a clean Dao-heart, he could go and meet heaven.
I believed him then.
So did the entire Xuanwei Sect.
Seven days before his ascension, the spiritual energy on the mountain grew thick as mist.
The old pine before the Patriarchs’ Hall put out new shoots overnight. Fresh water welled up in a dry well. Even the white deer on the rear mountain, so old it was close to death, grew a new pair of small antlers one morning.
Everyone called them omens of immortality.
The sect leader bathed, burned incense, and personally brought out the Ascension Bell, which had not rung for three hundred years.
At its first toll, the mortals below the mountain fell to their knees.
At its seventh, the sea of clouds churned, and radiant light spread for three thousand li.
At its ninth, the sky split open.
Everyone wept.
My eldest senior brother, Lu Xingzhou, stood beside me with reddened eyes.
“Little Brother, do you see? The Great Dao is real.”
I looked at the sky.
There was no gate up there.
Only a crack.
Beyond it lay a darkness so deep it was like a well turned upside down over the world.
A thin line descended from the dark.
At its end was a hook.
It was small, silver-white all over, curved like a crescent moon. A speck of something golden hung on its point.
Very small.
Like a grain of rice.
Like a medicinal pill.
Like the answer every cultivator had spent a lifetime dreaming of.
Master looked up.
His serene face suddenly changed.
It was not joy.
Not release.
It was hunger.
The hunger of something that had suppressed itself, endured for too long, and suddenly caught the scent of food.
I had never seen that expression on his face.
He took a step forward.
Panic stirred in me. Without thinking, I called out.
“Master!”
He did not turn.
The hook swayed gently.
His eyes followed it.
Then he reached out.
No.
Not with his hand.
He offered his neck.
Like a fish taking bait.
When the point went in, there was no blood.
Only a little pale golden light seeped from his throat.
His whole body jerked.
Cheers rose across the mountain.
“The gate of immortality has opened!”
“The patriarch is ascending!”
“The Xuanwei Sect has an immortal!”
I stood among them, cold all over.
Because I could see him struggling.
His hands clawed at his throat, knuckles livid. His feet kicked wildly in the air.
The line slowly tightened.
He was lifted, little by little.
White hair came loose. His Daoist robes streamed around him.
Like a fish pulled from the water.
Heavenly music sounded in the clouds.
But it was not music I heard.
It was the sound of a line drawn taut.
A hum.
Another hum.
As though someone beyond the water’s surface were reeling in the line.
Do Not Take the Bait
On the seventh day after Master ascended, the sect erected a monument to him.
Eight golden characters were carved upon it:
*Merit perfected. Ascended in broad daylight.*
Standing at the very back of the crowd, I stared at those eight characters and felt my stomach turn.
The sect leader, dressed in purple-and-gold ceremonial robes, offered incense himself.
As the smoke rose, even the mountain wind stilled.
Thousands of disciples knelt before the monument, foreheads to the ground.
Some wept uncontrollably. Some wore expressions of feverish devotion.
Others murmured:
“So immortality really is possible.”
“All our cultivation has been worth it.”
“The Great Dao never lied to us.”
That was the day I first spoke the truth.
“Jiang Zhao,” the sect leader asked, “you are the patriarch’s youngest disciple. Did he leave any words before his ascension?”
Everyone looked at me.
Twenty years after joining the sect, I was still at Qi Refining.
Everyone knew I was the least accomplished of Patriarch Xuanwei’s disciples. My senior brothers and sisters had reached Golden Core or Nascent Soul, while I still often went wrong merely drawing spiritual energy into my body.
They used to laugh at me. The patriarch had been wise all his life, they said; taking me as a disciple was the one blot on his record.
When Master heard, he never grew angry.
He would simply stroke my head and ask, “Jiang Zhao, why did you save that fish when you were little?”
“It would have died on the bank.”
“And what about you?”
I could not answer.
I was eight then. I thought he was asking about cultivation.
It took many years to understand that he was asking about life itself.
The sect leader was still watching me.
“Master didn’t ascend,” I said quietly.
Silence.
Some of the compassion faded from his face.
“What did you say?”
I raised my head.
“There was no gate in the sky. Only a hook.”
Someone laughed.
“Has Jiang Zhao gone mad?”
“He can’t cultivate himself, so now he says the patriarch didn’t ascend?”
“A hook? Does he think he’s fishing by the river?”
Lu Xingzhou frowned at me.
“Mind your words, Little Brother.”
I looked at him.
“You were there that day. Did you really not see it?”
He did not answer at once.
I stared into his eyes. For an instant, I felt certain he had seen it too.
Then he looked away.
“I saw the patriarch ascend with a smile.”
“He wasn’t smiling.”
“He was.”
“He was struggling.”
“Jiang Zhao!” His voice turned cold. “The patriarch’s ascension is the Xuanwei Sect’s greatest glory in a thousand years. You may be incompetent. You may be a coward. But you will not disgrace our master.”
The sect leader came to stand before me.
He did not scold me. He was not even angry.
He merely sighed and laid a hand on my head.
Spiritual pressure bore down.
My knees gave way. I fell to the ground before the monument, the sweet, metallic taste of blood rising in my throat.
“The heavenly manifestations on the day of the patriarch’s ascension were immense,” he said. “Your cultivation is weak and your soul unstable. It is only natural that you mistook what you saw.”
I looked up at him.
“Do you believe me, Sect Leader?”
He gazed at me with compassion.
“Jiang Zhao, the sect will see that your illness is treated.”
They locked me in the cold cave on the rear mountain.
There was no sunlight there, only a pool fed by an icy spring.
A silence talisman sealed the entrance.
I could not speak.
And no one wanted to hear me anyway.
Every seventh day, an old servant who swept the grounds brought me food.
He was very old, badly stooped, and moved as slowly as a dead branch about to snap.
The first time he came, I watched him from behind the talisman.
He put down the food box and turned to leave.
With a stone, I scratched four characters into the ground.
*There is a hook in the sky.*
The old servant glanced down.
After a long while, he crouched and used a withered finger to write a sentence of his own.
*Fish think the sky lies above the water too.*
I looked up sharply.
But he had already gone.
Three months later, they let me out.
The Xuanwei Sect had changed.
Its spiritual energy was far denser than before, thick as a pot of boiling soup. Disciples were breaking through at astonishing speed.
Seven outer disciples had reached Foundation Establishment. The inner sect had gained three Nascent Soul cultivators.
Even the sect leader said these were blessings bestowed by the patriarch after his ascension.
Yet every time I passed the Patriarchs’ Hall, I smelled something faintly rank.
Like fish.
One night, while the disciples guarding the hall slept, I slipped inside.
Master’s portrait hung there.
White-haired and white-bearded, he gazed benevolently toward a distant sea of clouds.
I knelt before it.
“Master,” I asked, “where did you go?”
A breeze blew in from outside. The candle flame flickered.
A drop of water suddenly seeped from the corner of the painted Master’s eye.
No—it looked like water.
And like ink.
The drop slid slowly down his face and stopped at his throat.
I reached out to touch it.
The portrait split down the middle.
Something fell out.
I picked it up. A fish scale.
Half the size of my palm, silver-white, with blackened edges.
Three characters were scratched into its back.
The strokes were crooked, as though someone in terrible pain had gouged them out one by one with a fingernail.
*Do not take the bait.*
I stared at them, chilled through.
Footsteps sounded behind me.
I turned.
Lu Xingzhou stood in the doorway. With the darkness of night resting on his shoulders, he looked like a sword about to leave its sheath.
“Little Brother,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
I slipped the scale into my sleeve.
“I came to pay my respects to Master.”
He glanced at the torn portrait.
“What did you find?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve never known how to lie.”
He came toward me.
I edged back.
“Did you see it too?”
He stopped.
Looking straight at him, I asked each word distinctly.
“On the day Master ascended, did you see the hook too?”
The hall was utterly still.
A little ash collapsed in the incense burner and drifted to the floor in flakes.
It did not look like ash.
It looked like scales scraped from a fish.
For an instant, uncertainty flickered in Lu Xingzhou’s eyes.
Then he raised a hand.
“Give it to me, Little Brother.”
“Why?”
“Some things will damage your Dao-heart if you look at them.”
I gave a small laugh.
“My Dao-heart? What if this thing we call a Dao-heart is only the instinct of a fish swimming desperately upward when it smells bait?”
His expression froze.
He struck at me with his palm.
I had no chance of dodging.
But just before the blow reached my chest, a broom scraped across the ground outside.
*Shhh. Shhh.*
The old servant stood beyond the door with his head bowed.
“It’s late,” he said. “Time to lock the Patriarchs’ Hall.”
Lu Xingzhou glanced at him.
For some reason, my senior brother—a cultivator half a step from Tribulation Transcendence—actually withdrew his hand.
As he reached the door, he spoke quietly.
“Jiang Zhao, stop looking into this.”
“Why?”
He did not turn.
“Because the harder you try to see the surface, the easier it is for the things above it to see you.”
