After the great cataclysm, the world fades to gray, but inside me stands a theater.
At the execution grounds, they gouged out my eyes and flayed me alive. As I hovered near death, the Thousand Mechanisms Theater awakened. The first floor performs every art, the second houses celebrated performers, and the third locks away a “spectator” who looks just like me.
Beneath the stage sit Ghost-Hand Wang, Han Qiaoshou, and the Many-Faced Gentleman, teaching me tricks like hiding a real blade with the Three Immortals’ Cups, flooding a city with water from an empty bowl, and holding the sun and moon within my sleeve.
Dressed in a blue robe, I become “Qing Qi,” harvesting the audience’s shock and fear as “thunderous applause” and exchanging it for supernatural powers.
My sister’s soul clutches a puppet on the second floor and cries, “Brother, don’t go to the third floor.”
As painted-skin demons walk around wearing human faces, as the Tyrant of Color climbs out of a sea of paint, and as the “Sage of Painting” above higher dimensions turns its gaze upon us
I lift a porcelain bowl and tap my wooden clapper awake. “Ladies and gentlemen, today’s performance is called ‘Deceiving Heaven.’ Act One: A cicada sheds its shell on the execution block. Act Two: I play ‘myself’ and fool the gods!”
