Blood of the Fox

Chapter 3

The Heavenly Imperial Palace, the heart of the Heavenly Realm, was separated into the Inner and Outer Court. The Outer Court was the place where all the important decisions in the Nine Heavenly Realms were made and where the final judgment for conflicts and grievances between Gods and Immortals was meted down by the Jade Emperor.

By contrast, the Inner Court was for the Emperor's own family and the domain of his personal affairs. Here lived the the Emperors' wife the Pure Empress, his nineteen consorts and concubines, his three sons and four daughters, as well as an army of immortal servants to wait upon them.

Of all the Nine Realms, the Heavenly Realm was by far the one most imbued with spiritual energy, since it was the residence of immortal royalty, and hence a hundred years service there was equivalent to a thousand years cultivation elsewhere. That was what most of the harried maids and guardsmen and eunuchs who staffed the towering palaces and cavernous halls told themselves as they toiled day in and day out.

One of the first things Ruyi came to discover after she came to the Heavenly Palace was that she was never tired. Ting'er explained it was because of the strong energy given out by the Jade Emperor and the other immortals, some of whom had attained such high xiuwei as to rise to the rank of Gods and Goddesses.

The food - just fruit and sweetcakes usually - filled up her belly the way human food had never quite been able to. They were leftovers from the Heavenly Gardens, those things the harvest immortals had not thought well-made enough to serve to the Imperial family, but it was more than enough for Ruyi and the others. In the evenings they slept in a dormitory under with a window that looked onto a sky full of strangely shaped clouds and the occasional spurt of colorful lightning, and their sleep was always fragrant and peaceful.

Most of the servants, even those who had come from the other Nine Heavenly Realms, found their work satisfying and even enjoyable. But it was not so for Ruyi.

Very soon after completing her training to learn all the customs of the Imperial Palace she was informed she had been assigned to the palace of the Heavenly Empress. This was a shock since she was by far the least powerful and therefore the least useful of all the new maidservants and she had expected to get a menial job like sweeping the common gardens.

But the first evening as she knelt below the dais of the Empress who gazed down at her from a head weighed down by hundred of golden hairpins and jewels, she was to find out why.

"Why," The Pure Empress said in a voice that thundered through the Palace. "She doesn't look even a bit like Yunyang."

The Empress' eyes glowed with a red color, as though they were lit from within by an an internal fire. Her clothes were red too, as well as coral and of course the imperial gold. Behind her dais an enormous fan shaped carving showed the embrace of a phoenix and a dragon in a mural that seemed to move and shift.

That's right, Ruyi recalled. The Pure Empress is from the Phoenix Clan, from the Fire Realm. Her full title was the Heavenly Empress of Purifying Fire. She was the second Empress, after the Jade Empress who had ascended to the Endless Heavens twenty thousand years ago.

"Well she is only a part-fox, born outside the Panlin Forest." The woman who spoke was the Empress' body servant who went by the name of Lady Zimei. She stood by the foot of the dais and gazed down upon the kneeling Ruyi with derision. Zimei was also a phoenix and wore her red wings proudly, protruding from her back. It was considered unseemly to show one's uncultivated form within the Palace unless at important ceremonies and rituals, but some had been given express permission in order to perform their duties, such as the winged librarians who had the task of retrieving books from towering pagodas full of records, or the scaled fishermen who kept the Heavenly pools stocked with fish.