The finest illusionist in the Council of Eleven, and one of the few members who did not lose control when Sha-Chi was poured into them at the Tianling Massacre.
As an illusionist she liked to draw enemies into the Discordance and destroy them there, inside an endless dream. But Menghua spent too long inside the Discordance, and lost the ability to return to the Wulin altogether.
A deer or a minister — who could tell them apart? Zhuangzi became a butterfly; who can say which he was? And even if this is not a dream, how much longer than a dream could it last?
This dream — did it cage the prey, or the one dreaming it?
Menghua stood at the very top of her craft in her day. Like Inanis, she was a master of illusion: she released Sha-Chi through a folding fan, and the illusion it raised killed enemies inside a dream with no end.
Unlike Inanis, Menghua gave herself over to exploring the Discordance until she had become a thing that lives only inside it. There are two sides to that. The gain is that her command of illusion, wards and the working of minds, drilled inside the Discordance, has no equal left; the price is that she lost her person in the Wulin, and can only act there by steering the minds of people who still live in it.
Menghua liked to gather endless Sha-Chi-illusion into her prized fan, Drunken Reverie, and scatter it as a whirl of pink petals. Anyone weak of will drops dead on the spot inside that sweet-smelling whirl, and does not move again.
A name that moved the Wulin
Menghua was born long before The Order existed. She was one of the great beauties of the Wulin, and fighters beyond counting wanted to kneel at her feet.
Beauties have always been proud, and Menghua was no exception.
To her, the crowds of the Wulin were ordinary people and nothing more — at best they might kneel; to lie down beside her was a fool’s fantasy. Most of the time, the Wulin was simply her plaything.
Treating the whole Wulin as beneath her naturally earned her enemies. Some tried to challenge her, and forgot one thing: Menghua was no vase. She was an Occult Arts adept, and one of the very few with the gift to study spellcraft and illusion side by side.
Meeting the King of Ten Thousand Evils
As her illusion work went deeper, a voice full of temptation appeared in her head, luring her into a slow intoxication. Menghua took it for the resonance between two people walking the same Occult path.
In time she was no longer satisfied with a voice and an apparition. She followed the clues it left until she came to a place of ancient trees, and the moment she stepped into the woods she lost consciousness. When she woke, the man in front of her finished her. He answered every fantasy Menghua had ever had about men — and yet when she looked straight at his face, some strange halo always left it blurred.
The man called himself the King of Ten Thousand Evils, and that blur meant Menghua could never see him truly, which only sank her deeper.
Through him a new world opened for her: the Discordance.
Inside it Menghua kept building her own illusions, and with the King’s help kept swallowing other people’s, back and forth, and her power climbed fast.
But staying in the Discordance too long cost her the ability to move freely in the Wulin — she had become a thing that lives only inside the Discordance.
Menghua could not accept it. She searched wildly for a way back and found none, and in the end she burned with it: her rage set the whole Discordance alight, and with the King of Ten Thousand Evils she swallowed other people’s illusions and caged their reflections, until out of their hands came a sect called the Ten Thousand Evils Sect.
For all she poured into it, she never found the way back. But by then she was strong enough to steer the wills of people in the Wulin and turn those she held into her mouthpieces.
In The Order’s thirteenth year word of the Tianling Summit arrived. Menghua hoped the mysterious the Heavenly Tome would hold a way back into the Wulin, so she steered a mouthpiece up Tianling Peak.
The summit turned out to be a trap. The Tianling Massacre put the Heavenly Tome out of her reach, and it changed nothing for her — her true body had never left the other world. After a period of silence she decided to join the Council of Eleven and study what survived of the Heavenly Tome with them.
Taking the Seven-Skills Lord
Once inside the Council, Menghua began looking for people in the Wulin she could use as pawns. An illusionist called the Seven-Skills Lord came to her attention quickly.
He had been framed for killing his master by a junior brother, and the rest of the sect had put him through the Endless Phantom Agony. Menghua looked at this young man being ground down by unending pain and held out her hand. She soothed his wounds with that beguiling voice of hers until he had the courage to keep living.
A year later his junior brother finally turned the sect over and, pleased with himself, came into the cell to kill him and close the matter. Menghua took the moment and pulled the Seven-Skills Lord into the Discordance.
Her illusions made him her loyal servant. She then set him the task of finding a way to bring her back into the Wulin, and sent him out of the Discordance.
Two women, one fight to the death
In The Order’s thirty-first year, on the Council’s decision, the Mask Riots broke out across the board.
Menghua already knew the name of The Order’s illusionist, Inanis, and decided to kill this old rival herself. She used illusion to raise the Golden Jade Pavilion again, out at sea.
It worked: Inanis came in person. And having killed Menghua’s mouthpiece in the Wulin, Inanis understood that until Menghua inside the Discordance was gone, the Council of Eleven could always come back.
So Inanis made her choice: throw away her own body, go into the Discordance, and fight Menghua to the death.
Time runs at different speeds in the two worlds, and within moments they had been cutting at each other for a thousand years in every corner of the Discordance. Their war sent out endless ripples and stirred the dead who had lain quiet there for centuries. But as it went on, the Discordance wore Inanis down and broke her apart, while Menghua — who had long since become part of the place — plainly had the upper hand.
In the end Inanis chose a way to take them both: she dragged Menghua with her into the Endless Kalpa.
The Endless Kalpa is where infinite sin settles. It is the most chaotic, most savage space in the whole Discordance, a vortex that turns and returns without end or edge. It is also the ground that shifts back and forth between the two worlds, and the only way to keep a mind intact there is to hold humanity in both at once. That is precisely the one place Menghua, who had dissolved entirely into the Discordance, was open — and one of her real reasons for joining the Council of Eleven.
In the end both queens died together inside the Endless Kalpa.