Mirror of Retribution

5^th Album of ChthoniC

 

On February 28, 1947 Taiwanese rose up against the oppressive and corrupt Chinese trustee government put in place by the allies following WWII. This event would become known as the 228 Massacre and would deeply pierce into the heart of Taiwanese society like a chilling wind. The events in late February and early March culminated in a brief period of Taiwanese control over their island. Then, on March 9, the 21st Division of heavily armed Chinese troops landed in the northern port of Keelung, sparking a bloody massacre of innocent civilians that continued unabated for weeks. The troops marched south and arrived in the central city of Taichung on March 13 under the cover of light armor and mounted machineguns. In a brave effort to resist the Chinese forces, several young people in central Taiwan formed a volunteer militia, known as the 27th Brigade.

 

Phuann Tsing-guan, was a young man from the Sing-Ling Temple, who, it was said, could traverse the veil between the worlds of Heaven and Hell. He was known as the most capable medium for channeling the ghostly Eight Generals who protected his temple. When his partners in the troupe left to join the rebels of the 27th Brigade in fighting back the Chinese invaders, Tsing-guan made a solemn pact with them that he would leave his earthly body in the basement of Sing-Ling Temple to enter into the spirit world and steal the Book of Life and Death from Hell’s deepest and most blood-soaked pits. His purpose was to wield the sacred book as a weapon to control life and death in the mortal world and to protect his comrades’ lives in the eventual defeat the tyrannical regime, which had brought murder and bloodshed.

 

Tsing-guan slipped between the worlds of life and death into the first layer of the Hell of the Mirror of Retribution, where he saw Taiwanese souls falling by the thousands into the void like a black rain. He was shocked to discover the brutality of the massacre was much more cruel and severe than he could ever have imagined. Moreover, those spirits, which had just suffered being flayed alive by soldiers’ bayonets and humiliated before execution, still had to confront the tortures of Hell; an endless labyrinth of blood-caked punishment and bone scraping horrors. Tsing-guan realized his responsibility to his people, a realization that ignited his Godly Destiny, an unearthly power allowing him to smash through the gates separating the ghostly levels from the darkest, blackest reaches of Hell.

 

Before Tsing-guan could retrieve the Book of Life and Death, the Ghost King from the Tenth Level of Hell sent his ghostly mob to Sing-Ling Temple to freeze Tsing-guan mortal body and prevent him from unleashing Hell’s power into the world. Tsing-guan fiercely fought the legions of gods and ghosts, which hurled their contorted bodies in his path.

 

By March 16 there were only 40 remaining members of the 27th Brigade, which had been hunted down and eliminated by the overwhelming Chinese force. They retreated back to Sing-Ling Temple to prepare for a final bloody confrontation with over 2,500 Chinese regulars.

 

With wars being waged in both the spirit and mortal worlds, ghosts howled in horror and delight at the death and pain around them. The event marked a cataclysm between the worlds as forces, living and dead, clashed in what is known on Earth and in Hell as the Last Stand at Oo-gu-lam.

 

The Taiwanese volunteers were eventually ripped apart by the Chinese military, which outnumbered them by a ratio of 60 to 1. Tsing-guan’s body of flesh, which lay in the basement of Sing-Ling Temple had survived the fighting unharmed, but his supernatural powers were revoked by the ghosts and gods from Hell for his intransigence. His soul returned to his body, but he was forbidden, at the risk of severe punishment, to return to the spirit world. Upon seeing the bodies of his comrades and family lying in the battlefield and his village reduced to ashes, Tsing-guan was devastated, taking his own life in a bid to re-enter hell. He hoped to reclaim the Book of Life and Death to avenge his friends and all the Taiwanese who died during the short-lived war of resistance. The tyrannical government also had to die.

 

As soon as his soul crossed over, Tsing-guan shot directly back to the Tenth Level of Hell. His anger blazed incandescent, radiating the full spectrum of his supernatural power. It was not enough, and Tsing-guan succumbed to the forces sent by the King of Hong-dou, the ghostly city, and by the King of the Charred Faces, who was actually one of the forms taken by Guan yin; the goddess of mercy. Tsing-guan was eventually subdued and stripped of his powers.

 

Tsing-guan had breached the sacred border between the mortal world and Hell, and therefore, the ultimate punishment was bestowed upon him. He was to become the Mirror of Retribution’s eternal guardian; the sole custodian of a massive polished glass, reflecting the evils committed by earthly souls in a searing grotesque spectrum, as they pass through Hell’s dreaded gates.

 

For the first ten years he gazed into the mirror at the deaths of his friends being tortured and killed by the tyrannical regime. In the first sixty years he gazed into the mirror at the overthrow of the tyrannical regime that had ruined his land. For another thousand years he gazed into the mirror as a new tyranny arose and became a blight upon the land. For another ten thousand years he balefully gazed into the mirror, glassy-eyed at the lingering demise of the human race. Still, he gazed into the searing images reflecting in the mirror for another one hundred million years as a new “life body” emerged onto the polluted grounds of the wretched earth. Tsing-guan gazed for one billion more years as countless souls passed through every manifestation of creature, between gaps of nothingness, until the six channels of transmigration finally came to an end. And, although there was nothing more to see in the mirror, he continued to gaze; eyes fixed on the void reflecting back at him.

 

After hundreds of millions of years, when time and space to reach a final accounting and collapse into one, when the last soul in Hell serves its final sentence, all the ghosts, gods and asuras disappear as if they never existed, Tsing-guan will continue gazing into the mirror as the last soul in the universe… slowly fading into the nothingness from whence we all came, in front of the Mirror of Retribution, until the end of his sentence is served and his reflection fades into shadow, and the shadow fades into the last memory of all that ever was, and the memory fades into a distant echo… and then…. Nothing.