Chapter Fifty-Eight: The Epiphany of a King and Two Princesses

3. The third-three point on the Go board is a useless position, a mere bone with little meat, as modern Go proverbs advise against crawling along the third line or pressing on the fourth. Stones placed here can neither claim vast territory nor effectively expand influence; they are truly like chicken ribs—unsatisfying to eat, yet wasteful to discard.

Looking further, Guan Wen discovered before him not a single Go board, but dozens, hundreds, thousands—shadows flickering, endless and infinite. Everywhere his gaze fell, he saw the white stone on the third-three point, existing in the game with utmost awkwardness.

“So what?” the woman in red asked.

“As long as one breath remains in a person, there is always a chance for a spark to ignite and spread—don’t you agree?” the woman in white replied.

“The darkness is too strong,” sighed the woman in red. “We gathered the might of demon-suppressors from three lands, barely managed to defeat it, and sealed it in the abyss below. Three thousand demon-suppressors from Great Tang, one hundred twenty sages from the sixteen caves of the three mountains of Nepal, ninety-one guardian monks from Tubo... The same battle—we can no longer muster a second time. All the demon-suppressing experts accumulated across generations have perished in that fight. Through the long years, I have pondered: Did we truly save people, or did we harm them? So many charged forward and died, all obeying our command. In the end, can the result honor their pure hearts?”

All the boards trembled together. On each, black stones surged like a tide, dominating the field, while white stones teetered on the edge—besieged on all sides.

Guan Wen shook his head and sighed. If he held the white stones, he would have already surrendered.

“Sister, you are mistaken,” the woman in white said sternly.

“You are mistaken,” the armored general in black echoed. “In the battle between good and evil, there are always sacrifices. If we cannot uphold the Buddha nature in our hearts, we are no different from those fools seduced by darkness. No matter the losses, we ultimately achieved victory. Do you remember the day we swore blood oaths with all demon-suppressors atop Mount Everest? I believe, if it had been me, you, or Princess Wencheng who fell in that battle, none of us would regret it.”

“Indeed.” The woman in white nodded, gently extending her hand to pinch the white stone on the third-three point of the nearest board between her delicate index and middle fingers.

“No one lives forever; what matters is knowing why you die—dying for the right cause,” she said.

The armored general threw back his head and laughed: “Well said, dying for the right cause! I still recall, atop Everest, I declared to the snowy mountains and vast Tibetan lands: Heroes are born to change the world—ordinary people are changed by it. In twenty years, I reclaimed my father's territory, gained two wise companions in you both, won the support of Tang and Nepal, suppressed the demoness, and protected the land and rivers of Tibet. I have changed this world, poured out everything for Tibet, and can die without regret!”

As soon as the white stone left the board, the game changed. Black surged forward, uprooting the foundations and sweeping the corners clean, then encircling and crushing the central white dragon. In an instant, white perished, black triumphed.

“See, how important is a single third-three?” the woman in white murmured.

“What does it represent?” the armored general turned, looking at her earnestly.

“It represents an opportunity,” she replied.

This time, even Guan Wen was bewildered. “Opportunity” was too nebulous, belonging to philosophy and Buddhist reasoning.

“What do you mean?” the woman in red asked.

“The hexagram says—‘the deer calls, eating wild mugwort. I have honorable guests, and welcome them with lyres and flutes.’ That’s from the Book of Songs, ‘Deer’s Cry.’ It means: ‘The wild deer call to their companions, eating mugwort in the fields. I have dear guests, and greet them with music.’ I used two more hexagrams to interpret the first, four more to interpret the previous two, eight more to interpret the previous four, sixty-four to interpret the previous eight, and finally reached a conclusion. One day in the future, a guest from the East outside Tibet will lead the second battle. Amidst thousands of troops, the demoness will be slain in a single stroke. For Tibet, it is a favorable omen. But—” The woman in white paused, flicked the white stone from her fingertip, sending it flying through the boards, dislodging all the third-three white stones. At once, all games became terrifying scenes of black victory.

Guan Wen suddenly felt he had grasped the unique significance of that white stone—it was the trigger that set the whole board in motion, binding the fate of all to a single point.

That stone was the opportunity that changed everything. With it, white survives; without it, white dies.

“But what?” the woman in red pressed.

“It was clearly the triumphant avalanche atop Everest, yet beneath the surface lurked a quiet menace. White, using the third-three as a hidden soldier, turned defeat to victory and slaughtered the black dragons, but black still held a deadly move that refused to die completely. Why? Why? This hexagram is almost the same as the one I divined atop the highest eaves of the Potala Palace using the ‘Ghost Valley Divination—Listening to the Wind and Drinking Dew’ method. If this is true, the battle he leads is but a failed attempt, a mirage that leaves the demoness alive yet again. Tell me, why can’t we ever eliminate her completely? Is it as the greatest sage of Chang’an’s Lingyan Pavilion said—that she has nine lives, thirty-three substitutes, seventy-two transformations—”

The woman in white meant to explain to the others, but the questions she posed to herself multiplied, until she clutched her temples and could no longer speak.

She explained divination with divination, questions with questions—a most arcane field of mathematics and logic, like solving core puzzles with tower arrays and ring arrays, or equations with many variables. On the surface, it appears simple and solvable, but in truth, it is profound and eternally elusive.

Guan Wen reviewed her words from start to finish, feeling that divination was truly unfathomable. The hexagrams lay plainly before him, but depended entirely on the diviner’s mind—connecting, speculating, dissecting, and interpreting. The greater the mind, the wider the realm the hexagram revealed.

Suddenly, the woman’s hands dropped, and strands of gray-white hair appeared between her fingers.

The diviner’s mind always reaches its limit, while the real world’s myriad changes have no diameter—it's like measuring the earth with a ruler. Even if you used every ruler in the world, how could you measure it all? Forcing it only drives one mad. In that instant, Guan Wen felt the woman in white had reached her mental limit, teetering on the brink of collapse.

“Sister, your hair—!” cried the woman in red.

“I clearly divined the demoness’s form, devised the maximum strategy, encircled her entirely, yet she still escaped. I sense within her a force of utter yin, from which yang arises, and vice versa, cycling endlessly—why is that?” The woman in white was oblivious to the others’ calls, lowering her head in bitter thought.

Then, more hair fell from her brow—once jet-black, now pure white.

Guan Wen's mind burned, and he blurted, “She is but an intersex person—what is there to ponder?”

Modern medicine frequently encounters cases of intersex and dual gender; with Guan Wen’s knowledge, he saw nothing puzzling.

“Stop!” the armored general shouted.

The woman in white’s hair was turning white inch by inch, until not a single black strand remained.

Suddenly, Guan Wen recalled a story from modern literary history, in the Hong Kong author Liang’s ‘The Tale of the White-Haired Witch,’ where a beauty’s hair turned white overnight for love—not for Buddhist reasons.

“My dear, stop!” the general wailed.

The woman in white slowly raised her head, her face aging rapidly, wrinkles appearing on her once flawless brow.

“Look there—” Suddenly, a bitter smile spread across her face.

Guan Wen had seen countless bitter smiles, but hers mixed sorrow with despair, a haunting sadness, so intense that it struck him in the chest like a thousand-pound hammer, shattering his heart.

At that irreversible moment, she grasped the reason for their failure to defeat the demoness: for one who embodies both yin and yang, her vital energy must be severed completely—dual life, dual life, dual life...

That is a Go term: dual life is a way for stones to live, also called co-life or mutual life. In Go, an eye is a space surrounded by connected stones. Generally, stones with two or more eyes are alive, but even stones without two eyes but with breathing space, where neither side can fill the space nor remove the stones, are considered alive—dual life.

Guan Wen had trained under a master in the art of Go; dual life is a major defeat for the attacker, a great gain for the defender.

The woman in white used Go as a metaphor for the demon-suppressing battle. He half understood, but sensed he was nearing the heart of the matter and listened all the more intently, afraid to miss a single word.

In his vision, the distant mountains and rivers of Tibet began to change, gradually forming the shape of a woman lying face up toward the sky.

In his heart, he exclaimed: “Constellation Demon-Suppressing Map!”

Suddenly, he realized that the drawing of the constellation map did not come after the landscape, but after the demoness herself—the land of Tibet became winding and undulating because of her existence, hills rising, lakes sinking. Thus, the artist first painted the demoness, then marked all the geographical names upon her.

What they achieved was a dual life situation with the demoness—a grave error. They had not found her fatal eye, mistakenly believing what they saw to be her complete form. “Do you understand my words?” the woman in white asked.

The other two frowned, clearly not comprehending.

“If what we see is not her whole form, what is?” the woman in red asked.

“Blackness covers all. She comes from the far northern abyss of black water, skilled in manipulating dark clouds and swallowing black water, hiding her true form behind these. I believe the alluring surface of the demoness conceals a ferocious side—finding that half is the key to victory,” the woman in white answered softly.

The woman in red sighed, “But we have no strength left to fight again.”

The armored general echoed, “We poured all our power into a single thunderous strike—our only gamble, with no second chance.”

The woman in white lamented, “Thus, we owe a debt to the people of Tibet...”

None seemed aware of Guan Wen’s presence, each speaking to themselves, lost in a sorrow too deep for words.