It all started when the Watchers Sabrathon and Kochabiel informed Michael that a deranged human—a dark magician by the name of Jiang Xuande—had stolen a powerful grimoire from the Apokomistis Astaroth. Allow me to provide some background (per usual) so that you can understand what this means (before we angels got involved).
Demons are well-versed in black magics, and they also have a healthy understanding of white magics for, like the best of adversaries, they know the tools of their enemy. A few of the ancient ones consolidated their knowledge of black magics into books containing spells and magical secrets called grimoires. Grimoires are plentiful within the demon world and have varying degrees of potency. Every Apokomistis has at least one that he or she relies upon. Grimoires are most often books or scrolls or tablets, but they have been known to exist in other forms. Regardless of shape, they have often been sought by many human magicians for the vast knowledge and power that they hold, but in most cases, they are completely useless to mortals on account that most spells require demon blood to make them work.
(Incidentally, there is a white magic counterpart to the grimoire known as an ellamadus. As far as I know, the very few ellamadi in existence were either captured or destroyed by a few Apokomistai during the era that humans refer to as World War II. Remind me to tell you about ellamadi after we’ve wrapped up this tale.)
However, there are exceptions to most every rule, and if we return to the state of Qin, in ancient China, in the year 354 BC, this particular grimoire and this particular magician Jiang Xuande were a recipe for disaster.
Jiang Xuande was born in 421 BC, and he served as an astronomer and alchemist in Duke Xiao’s royal court from 361–354 BC. The Duke and his advisers all held an understanding that Jiang Xuande’s predictions were beyond reliable, and there were whispers that he had an army of spirits at his disposal to do his bidding.
This wasn’t entirely far from the truth. Jiang Xuande had nurtured a passionate quest for immortality from the time he was a young boy and had witnessed several members of his family succumb to smallpox. He was subsequently raised by his uncle, a doctor and alchemist himself, and he taught the boy the arts of using the elements and herbs to balance the body. However, Jiang was certain that the science of alchemy could be stretched so as to bestow immortality upon anyone who discovered its secret formula. It led him to dabble in black magics by means of a watered-down grimoire that he acquired through great difficulty during a trip to India.
Not many of the spells worked in the grimoire, but there was just enough information in it for Jiang Xuande to realize that it was useful. He wanted more, and so he used his little grimoire to summon a Nekudaimon by the name of Ninalla in the autumn of 368 BC.
Ninalla wasn’t pleased to have been summoned to serve a lower creature, but she sensed that Jiang Xuande’s thirst for immortality had the potential for too much fun for her to pass up. She answered Jiang Xuande’s call, possessing his pet cat, and pledged her services and wisdom to him under the condition that he volunteer his wife’s body for the Neku to use as a human vessel.
Jiang Xuande didn’t think twice about Ninalla’s proposition. He had long fallen out of love with his outspoken and barren wife Zhou, and he had begun to regard her latest failed pregnancy as a sign of an inferior stuff in her family history. He idly wondered if the metaphysical bond between the spirit of a demon and the body of a human might improve what was wrong within Zhou and endow her with the strength to bear him a healthy child when he was finished playing around with demons.
Ninalla had an agenda in mind as well. Serving a human gave her an excuse to escape the tyranny of serving Astaroth for a while (I’ll let you imagine how demanding a master an Apokomistis can be over hundreds of years). She knew that eventually Jiang Xuande would die and she’d be able to convert his possessions into capital that she could use herself, or rather, until Astaroth pulled rank as an Apokomistis and took them. Astaroth gave her Neku permission to stay with Jiang Xuande, understanding that his demon-dabbling made his soul all too pluckable when the time was right. Furthermore, she sensed that affairs in the state of Qin were nearing a steady boil.
Moments after Jiang Xuande gave his assent, Ninalla occupied Zhou’s body. Later that night, she taught Jiang Xuande how to make the some of the other, more grisly and powerful spells in the grimoire work through donating decent quantities of his wife’s demon-infused blood.
More about Jiang Xuande next week. Dominus tecum.
