I refrained myself from grabbing her and lifting her into the air as she’d done me. Her head would have punched a hole in the ceiling. Instead I grinned wildly at her and clapped with my fingertips.
“Tomorrow morning the other gods and I are going to gather at Ao Guang’s rift and go through it the opposite way,” Guanyin said. “The unfortunate reality is that whatever defeated him is likely to chase him through the same pathway he retreated along.”
I winced. “And that path ends here.” An enemy strong enough to provoke an upheaval of the cosmic order had a red carpet leading to Earth. Forget “Earth”; it was right next door, in the pool. There was more at stake here than who got to rule Heaven. If this Yin Mo made it past the party of gods, then humanity was in deep trouble.
Guanyin patted my shoulder reassuringly. “It’ll have to get through some of the finest warriors of Heaven.”
“And you.” Guanyin as the last line of defense was more reassuring to me than placing my trust in some disembodied voices. “You didn’t check in on us when Quentin?
??s alarm went off.”
“I trusted you to take care of it on your own. I need to do that more.” She fidgeted nervously, making me confused and worried. After some hand-wringing, Guanyin mustered herself, looking more vulnerable than I’d ever seen before. “I also need to thank you.”
So that was it. “Hmmmmm?” I said smugly, wanting to enjoy this moment for as long as possible. “I thought from the way you reacted, you didn’t want to be in charge of Heaven.”
“Of course I want to be in charge of Heaven,” Guanyin snapped, finally bursting through the wall of embarrassment. “Every god wants that. Nezha tries to be a selfless golden boy, and Guan Yu pretends he’s too rough around the edges for the office, but they both want it. I bet even the Great White Planet wishes he wore the crown himself, rather than having to anoint a new mandate owner time after time.”
“They’re all on my watch list, by the way,” I said.
“What?”
“My watch list for secretly being evil and betraying us,” I clarified. “After what happened with Erlang Shen? Any god we meet, I’m on the lookout for the slightest hint they’re evil. As soon as they do, BAM! Ruyi Jingu Bang right to their kneecaps.”
Guanyin sputtered silently, but as far as I was concerned my logic was flawless. Fool me twice, shame on me.
“You’re getting me off course,” she said. “The point is, very few gods approve of me or my methods. It’s not only the Jade Emperor that I’ve antagonized. When you nominated me, you couldn’t have known my history with the other gods, the way they speak to me, the compromises I’ve had to make simply to deal with them.”
I saw the strongest god I knew slump her shoulders. I thought of the many times in the past where instead of unleashing her full power, she had to work around rules and limitations imposed by the Jade Emperor. That had to be more exhausting than using her talents to the fullest.
She rubbed at her eyes with her fingers. “When you constantly hear that you can’t do something, or that your goal is out of reach, that it’s wrong for you to have ambitions, and you hear that message over and over again . . . you start to believe it yourself. That’s why I blew up at you earlier. I couldn’t reconcile the truth of what you were saying with the lies I’d accepted for so long.”
When she dropped her hands she looked like herself once more. The Lady of Infinite Capacity. The veil had been lifted.
“I thought I lacked the guts to pursue what I wanted,” she said with a smile. “But you reminded me that I still have plenty to go around.”
Inner Me was deliriously happy, bouncing off the walls at the way she’d come around. A Universe led by Guanyin, where mercy and action and good sense reigned. The vision was sweeter and more intoxicating than any drink Ji-Hyun could have mixed in her bathtub. Outer Me shrugged, playing it cool.
“We all need a boost from time to time,” I said. “You know, you were pretty mean to me before, calling me a smarmy know-it-all. While you’re here, I think you should apologize for that, too.”
“Don’t push it. You still are one.” She reached behind her and produced a small, cloth-lined box.
“What’s this?” I said.
“A gift.” She opened the box so the contents faced me. Inside, lying on top a miniature velvet pillow, were two little oblong lumps of dark, glittery metal.
I picked them up. They should have been cool to the touch, but instead their temperature matched mine so closely that I could hardly tell I was holding them. The lumps were flat on the bottom, the short side. I turned them over.
One piece of metal had “Lo Pei-Yi” carved into it, in reverse. The other had the characters for “Shouhushen.” I was embarrassed to see that the correct way to write my title was different than the way I’d been imagining it. I had to brush up on my Chinese.
“These are chops,” I said.
“As you mentioned over the phone, you’re the Shouhushen of California on Earth,” Guanyin said. “We should have established your seal of office right away. This is long overdue.”
She swept aside a nearby pile of trash with her arm to reveal a coffee table that I didn’t know was there. With another sleight of hand, she yanked a scroll from thin air and rolled it flat on the glass surface. Next to it she put a small pot of waxy red ink.
My fingers shook as I hefted the first stone and dipped it into the ink. It was only a practice run on blank paper, and yet I was terrified of messing up my first-ever chop stamp. Pressing and lifting the lump of metal made a sticky, satisfying Crayola noise.
I didn’t look at the results until the second seal was also finished. Once I was done, two bright crimson squares of highly stylized characters sat at the bottom of the page.