Work Text:
Ghosts were drawn to the ring roads. There was nothing more alluring to a lost thing than a well-worn path, even one shaped like a wheel—a dragon eating its own tail, with no beginning and therefore no end. The five concentric expressways that radiated out from the Forbidden City, fanning through Beijing like ripples in a pond, attracted so many ghosts that even the common people could see them sometimes, especially children, especially at night. In daylight, the ghosts mingled with exhaust fumes and heat shimmers, barely visible. At night, they streamed alongside the lines of traffic like schools of luminous fish caught in a current, bobbing and weaving in the scattered glow of headlights. They were mostly harmless, newdead, easily shepherded elsewhere—for young cultivators, the ring roads were a training ground. But all those ghostly feet walking the same path did leave a sort of spiritual residue behind, and that residue bred yaoguai like bacteria, teeming in the dark.
Tonight’s was a child-eater. So yeah, Wei Ying was taking it personally.
The yaoguai had been prowling residential districts along the third ring, feeding on ghosts—mist and smoke, formless, satiating its cavernous hunger only for a moment—and children. Three victims in two weeks. A boy in Fangzhuang, two unrelated girls in Xiluoyuan, gone from their beds. It worked like angler fish, with a long, probing tendril that wormed its way into the victim’s head through their ear, turning their body to a puppet on ghostly strings. The body of one child was used to lure others to the yaoguai’s waiting jaws.
Wei Ying paused in the dark yawn of an alleyway, hunching his shoulders to hide the light of his phone screen. He tried again to call Lan Zhan. No luck. Yaoguai swamped the signals. Usually the talisman stuck to the back of Wei Ying’s phone case counteracted that, but tonight it wasn’t working. He didn’t know why.
Wei Ying [3:09AM]
Hey dont be mad but I’m in xiluoyuan and my compass is going crazy
[NOT DELIVERED]
[OUTGOING CALL FAILED - 3:12AM]
[OUTGOING CALL FAILED - 3:17AM]
He’d seen it—him, the kid—floating like a pale balloon in the bloody light of a neon restaurant sign. He’d tried to call Lan Zhan a dozen times in a row, darting down arterial streets clogged with push carts and clumped bicycles, boxes of wilting produce, plastic chairs, bins, and buckets, laundry fluttering overhead like crows on a wire. Blocky air conditioner units jutted from the windows, looking from below like gap-toothed mouths gnawing at the bruise-colored sky. None of Wei Ying’s calls or messages had gone through. He’d tried hanging back farther, hoping to get out of the yaoguai’s signal-jamming range, but he didn’t want to lose sight of the kid.
What he should have done was leave the area entirely so he could report the latest attack to the Jin sect office. Then, presumably, he would be ordered to sit on his ass until backup arrived, because Wei Ying was expressly forbidden from doing anything by himself.
But he didn’t have time to sit on his ass. The kid was still alive. Wei Ying had seen his eyelids crack like milk-skin, revealing the whites. Suspended in the pool of red light, bare feet dangling a stool’s height above the sidewalk, his birdlike chest had heaved with a stifled choke or scream. His tiny hands had twitched at his sides. Then the air had shifted, the city letting out a humid breath, hot wind ruffling Wei Ying’s ponytail—and the yaoguai must have scented him, because the boy’s body had jerked like a hooked fish and begun to float down the sidewalk, away from the neon lights.
Alive. Still alive.
Wei Ying couldn’t just leave him. Not with three others dead, devoured. The boy looked no older than five or six. He was wearing blue pajamas with some sort of blobby pattern. Planets, maybe.
Wei Ying [3:24AM]
[LOCATION SHARED]
[Sending….]
Wei Ying [3:24AM]
I’m going after it
Can’t wait for backup
Theres a kid
[Sending….]
Lan Zhan was going to be so pissed.
They weren’t on duty tonight. Wei Ying should have been at home, catching up on sleep. He’d told Lan Zhan he would try to catch up on sleep. For some reason, Lan Zhan had recently taken interest in Wei Ying’s personal circadian rhythms. Early on in their partnership, Wei Ying had learned to stop casually mentioning that he hadn’t slept in four days. Lan Zhan would get all pissy and silent—pointedly silent, an icy prickle, not normal Lan Zhan silent—which made sense considering they were night hunting partners, and if Wei Ying was off his game it could get Lan Zhan hurt. So that had worked for a while, but then Lan Zhan had started saying things like, That’s your fifth cup of coffee and Your hands are shaking.
Ha! Wei Ying had said to the second one. So they are! Good thing I don’t use a sword, right?
Lan Zhan hadn’t responded.
☽
Their partnership had been intended as a punishment for Wei Ying—this wild dog needs a leash, Jin Guangshan had said, lip curling—which in retrospect was extremely funny, in a horrible sort of way. The council hadn’t seemed to realize, or perhaps they just hadn’t cared, that assigning Wei Ying a babysitter was more a punishment for the babysitter than Wei Ying. The first month had been the worst, Lan Zhan’s dark eyes following him around the office like he’d expected Wei Ying to start vomiting blood or leaking resentful energy from his pores at any moment. Whatever Lan Zhan had heard, whatever Jin Guangshan had told him, it must have been bad. Wei Ying didn’t know the details, but he could imagine.
My reputation precedes me, he’d joked on the first day, like an idiot, and Lan Zhan’s mouth had tightened, expression frosting over like a window, made blank with ice.
☽
Wei Ying followed the floating boy down a hutong lined with short awnings and round-bellied clay pots, leafy vines crawling up the gutters. The boy’s limbs twitched every so often, as if there were an electric current running through his frame. His eyes slid open once or twice, all white, unseeing. As Wei Ying drew closer, tendrils that looked like long white hairs began to sprout from the boy’s mouth and nostrils, probing at the night air. Wei Ying shook out his ponytail on purpose this time, giving the yaoguai another a good strong whiff. The tendrils shivered, scenting him, and the main tendril—the one trailing from the boy’s right ear like a fat, ghostly root—went taut. Narrow bands of light pulsed along its length, starting at the boy’s ear and traveling down to where the tendril disappeared into the shadows.
That’s right, Wei Ying thought, sliding his phone back into his pocket. Either the texts would go through or they wouldn’t. Either Lan Zhan would come or he wouldn’t. Do I smell good? Bet I’d taste good, too.
Not strictly true. His body was marbled with resentful energy. But then, maybe a yaoguai would like that.
He traded his phone for his dizi, spinning it once in his fingers as he followed the boy out of the other end of the hutong onto a wider street. There was a construction site on the corner, the skeleton of an office building with two sides draped in plastic sheeting. A chain link fence paneled with plywood blocked off the construction site from the sidewalk. Wei Ying hung back and watched as the boy floated through a gap in the fence. He waited a few seconds and followed, ignoring the scrape of broken chain link on his shoulder, the way it tugged at his hair like ragged fingernails.
The site was dark and silent, the hulking forms of construction equipment scattered over the tire-tracked mud. The boy was hovering near the building, where the jungle gym of scaffolding met with thick concrete foundations. A wire-frame elevator rested nearby, waiting to haul construction workers up the side of the building come dawn.
“This is where you’ve been hiding?” Wei Ying muttered, skirting closer around an excavator. Mud sucked at his shoes. It had rained yesterday afternoon. Moonlight slid over the surface of each oily puddle as he passed. It had rained—he’d been out with Lan Zhan when it started, the two of them investigating another disappearance, another trace of chaos in an otherwise quiet apartment complex—old women huddling by the courtyard wall, staring first in suspicion, then appreciation at Lan Zhan’s good manners. The elegance he wore like a fine cloak, swirling around him. He charmed without trying. Wei Ying used to be like that, but these days his grin was a little unsettling, too sharp or bright, his eyes red-rimmed. Even the common people could sense that he spent too much time with blood on his teeth. Anyway, on the way back to the sect office it had begun to rain, cold fat drops speckling their shoulders and the pavement. They’d ducked under an awning and Wei Ying had shivered, then laughed, and Lan Zhan had said, Tea. Then he’d blinked, almost startled, like he’d forgotten they weren’t at the office and he couldn’t just get up and go brew a hot cup of tea—for Wei Ying, maybe. Cute. Cute, cute. Wei Ying wasn’t allowed to think it, but he’d thought it. He’d laughed again, helpless. Wrapped his arms around himself to keep the warmth in. He got cold so easily these days. Lan Zhan, I never would’ve guessed you’d be such a mother hen.
Hn, Lan Zhan had said, sounding unimpressed. He’d made a vague motion at the buttons of his beautiful wool coat. Do you…?
Ah?? Another laugh like a sparrow taking flight. His body reacted to Lan Zhan in strange ways. It wanted to leap; he wrestled it back. No way, no way, he’d said. I’m hardier than I look.
That had earned him a doubtful eyebrow twitch. Lan Zhan was so funny. It was wild that no one else seemed to realize how funny he was. To be fair, it had taken Wei Ying a couple weeks to figure out the various tones of his silences, like the hum in the air after a string is plucked, a sound that was the absence of sound, the trace resonance of an emotion. But even in the early days when Lan Zhan hated him—as opposed to now, when Lan Zhan manfully tolerated him—Wei Ying had been able to tell. The tones were different. The ringing not-sounds. The depth or flatness of Lan Zhan’s gaze. Once, after a conversation with a particularly obnoxious coworker, Wei Ying had barely been able to wait until the door swung shut to start cackling.
Lan Zhan! he’d said, a hand over his mouth. What’s that Su She guy ever done to you? Did he kill your cat or something? Oh, I thought I was going to die—‘Your opinion has been noted.’ Your face. Oh my god.
Lan Zhan had blinked at him, then looked away.
☽
The first time he’d seen Lan Zhan smile was two months into their partnership, on a street branching off the second ring road. It was midnight and a toothsome winter, the chill biting deep. They’d been tracking a yaoguai that took the form of a giant spider, her egg sac filled with human heads. Previous victims at varying stages of putrefaction, nasty all around. Wei Ying had been fiddling with his Compass of Evil, talking absentmindedly about—something, he could barely remember anymore. Probably a halfhearted rant about Jin Zixuan. He didn’t actually think Lan Zhan was listening. He was just talking to talk, as traffic rumbled past, as they followed the compass needle and the sticky wads of spider silk.
“—Oh,” he said, cutting himself off mid-sentence as the compass began to grow hot in his hand—an experimental talisman, his own design. He’d only burned himself twice and set his sleeve on fire once, which in his opinion was a stellar track record and in Lan Zhan’s opinion (communicated through a series of disapproving micro-expressions and follow-up questions) could use some improvement. “Lan Zhan. We’re getting close. I think—oh?”
It was embarrassing how breathy his voice came out. The little rise in pitch. Wei Ying cleared his throat, cheeks going warm as the compass. It was just, Lan Zhan was smiling. The smile was more in the narrowing of his eyes than the upturn of his mouth, but there was an upturn, if a subtle one. His mouth was a soft red crescent. He made sort of an amazing picture, that ducked-head smile into the folds of his scarf, a piece of hair slipping out of his neat bun, falling across his cheek. At night he was a heron in dark water.
He caught Wei Ying staring and his mouth flattened out.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying had said incredulously, unable to stop himself. “Am I entertaining you?”
“You said we’re getting close to the yaoguai,” said Lan Zhan.
“Ha! I totally was!”
Lan Zhan’s long strides grew longer. Wei Ying trotted to keep up.
“See!” he said. “Told you we’d start getting along! Are you done being so stubborn? Are you finally ready to admit I’m a very charming young man?” If he joked about it, he could pretend it was funny.
Predictably, Lan Zhan didn’t reply. His gaze sharpened, fixing on something up ahead—Wei Ying’s focus swung around, teasing forgotten. So it went. They exorcised the spider, retrieved the sac of rotting heads. To be identified. The stench was unbearable, gore and mucus dripping in a trail behind them, and still Wei Ying’s chest warmed when he thought of that smile.
☽
The scaffolding trembled under his feet.
Wei Ying knew, intellectually, that this was incredibly stupid. He should not be following the floating boy all the way up to the top of the half-constructed building, where the yaoguai was lying in wait. But he couldn’t just grab the boy and run—the root was still trailing out of his ear, its mycelia laced around his brain. Even cutting him loose could kill him in an instant. Wei Ying needed to get the yaoguai to let the boy go. In general monsters were not unlike dogs. If you wanted them to let go of a bone, the best way was to offer a piece of meat.
He was about three stories up now, skulking along the framework of platforms, walkways, and ladders attached to the building’s skeleton, steel pipes catching the moon and the dim orange city light. The higher he went, the darker it got, as the burn of the streetlights fell away. When he craned his neck back, the building was a black silhouette against the purple-brown sky, the boy a pale shape floating along the scaffolding two stories above. Closer to its source, the tendril was stronger and thicker. Pearlescent and fleshy as a tuber. Wei Ying had exorcised his fair share of child-eaters, anglers, puppet-makers, but he’d never seen one with such a long lure. There was something off about this, he could tell, though he wasn’t sure exactly what it was. But the fact that the talisman on his phone didn’t work, the fact that the yaoguai’s lure had reached through hutongs and across streets, all the way from the top of this building….
It was more powerful than it should have been. Even considering the recent feedings.
He climbed up the last ladder to the top floor of the office building, stepping off the scaffolding onto the bare concrete-and-plywood floor. The plastic sheeting covering the sides of the building rustled in the night breeze. Wei Ying shifted his grip on his dizi, wishing as he always did for his old sword. Even if the city ghosts he called forth with his dizi were more than enough to get the job done, there was something comforting about the ability to cut. These days he felt like a declawed cat. He could still defend himself, but it was harder, and his body kept forgetting he’d been blunted.
It was easier when Lan Zhan was there. Even in the beginning, they’d fought side by side like a sword and shield wielded by the same person, perfectly in synch. Like dancing, as silly as it sounded. Wei Ying could leave openings because he knew Lan Zhan would be there, covering them, with a bone-rattling guqin chord or Bichen slashing in a brilliant arc. And in return Wei Ying had guarded Lan Zhan’s rare openings fiercely, once throwing himself in front of a monkey yaoguai before its teeth could take a chunk out of Lan Zhan’s shoulder. The teeth had caught Wei Ying’s arm instead, and of course the monkey’s saliva had been poisonous, so there was a whole thing where he ended up collapsing and Lan Zhan had to half-carry him out of the riverside warehouse while Wei Ying babbled deliriously about soup and zombies and the puppies Jiang Cheng had had as a child, the ones he’d been forced to give up. He remembered the back of a taxi, Lan Zhan assuring the driver in a tight voice that his friend wasn’t drunk and wasn’t going to throw up. He remembered slumping against Lan Zhan’s chest and breathing in the clean scent of his clothes and skin and hair, listening to the sound of his heartbeat. He remembered focusing on that steady drum, the same impulse as when he and Jiang Yanli used to collect clam and conch shells in the shallows of Hong Lake and hold them to their ears, listening to the ocean, and six-year-old know-it-all Jiang Cheng had informed them witheringly that they weren’t hearing the ocean at all; it was just the rush of their own blood. Wei Ying remembered thinking about that, his mind addled by the monkey’s venom: a shell collected from a lake still carrying the rumble of the ocean, its mother. How all the shells in the world still carried that first sound. Blood or water, either one. And there it was again, pressed to his ear, the thump of Lan Zhan’s life.
Embarrassing. Looking back on it. Wei Ying was pretty shameless, but—agh. Luckily he’d been too out of it, at that point, to be babbling anymore. He’d mostly just drooled on Lan Zhan’s shirt.
Six months later, he really wished Lan Zhan were here. Even if it meant Lan Zhan would be pissed at him for going out alone in the first place.
Wei Ying smelled the yaoguai before he saw it, the stench of a monster overpowering the maple scent of sawdust, the fumes of chemicals and concrete. The boy disappeared around a pillar, into the deepening shadows. Wei Ying saw one of the shadows move.
There you are.
He raised his dizi to his lips. Yaoguai weren’t the only ones in this city who could make darkness stir.
☽
He woke in a white-walled room with murky lighting.
Nothing hurt, which made Wei Ying wonder if this was a dream. Usually pain occupied his body like furniture in a house. It felt empty without, unrecognizable as his own. All sounds echoed without joint-aches and muscle cramps to swallow them up; the occasional seize of his heart, a gasping engine clogged with the residue of resentment.
Nothing hurt. Wei Ying reveled in the strangeness of it. His head felt sloshy, full of water, his thoughts like disparate drops of ink. Floating, disconnected. It took longer than it should have to realize he was lying on his back, staring blearily at a white ceiling flecked with black marks, with a low-buzzing fluorescent light and the faint glow of a monitor screen above his…. Bed. Bed. Hospital bed.
Okay. He wasn’t going to panic.
When he looked down, the movement of his own eyes made him dizzy. Sure enough, he was lying in a hospital bed, an IV taped to the inside of his elbow. Fucking—morphine, painkillers, that was why nothing hurt. The hospital room was small and windowless, the bed beside him empty. He was alone. His body covered with a thin blanket, robin’s egg blue. He didn’t see any obvious injuries; all limbs were accounted for. But when he tried to move, a bone-scrape of pain broke through the haze of morphine. His ribs.
What had…?
He squeezed his eyes shut, cutting off the light. His throat clicked dryly when he swallowed, but there was no tube pressing at the back of his tongue, setting off his gag reflex. Okay, good. Lack of throat tubes was always a good sign. This wasn’t the first time Wei Ying had woken up in a hospital room with no memory of what had put him there.
Think. Think. Wasn’t he supposed to be good at thinking? The last he remembered was—
Dark street. Neon sign. A boy in planet pajamas. The construction site, a graveyard of machinery. The yaoguai lying in wait at the top, curled like a massive hermit crab among wooden beams and sheets of corrugated metal. Wei Ying remembered drawing his dizi, he remembered calling forth the city ghosts, so many from the third ring nearby. Slicing his palm open, letting his blood tinge the air. Meat for the dog. He remembered hoping his texts to Lan Zhan would go through. Sending, sending….
The door handle clicked and turned. Wei Ying expected a nurse, but it was Lan Zhan who slipped into the hospital room. He faltered when he saw Wei Ying awake, eyes flaring before his expression evened out. Steam wafted from a paper to-go cup in his hand.
“Wei Ying,” he said, crossing the room in three strides. “I’m sorry. I went to get tea.” He looked tired. Shadows under his eyes, a tension to his jaw that Wei Ying hadn’t seen for a while. He put the cup of tea on a side table, hovering almost awkwardly at Wei Ying’s bedside before saying, “Are you—I’ll get a nurse.”
“Wait!” Wei Ying grabbed Lan Zhan’s trailing sleeve, wincing when his ribs panged again. “Ah—”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan said tightly. “Don’t move. You have a concussion and two broken ribs.”
“But Lan Zhan, there was a kid, I don’t remember—I don’t remember what happened, where’s the kid, the little boy, is he—?”
“He’s alright.” Lan Zhan’s voice was so sure, Wei Ying’s grip relaxed before the words fully registered. “Shaken, but alright.” Lan Zhan’s eyes dipped, straying to the thin blanket covering Wei Ying’s body. “You… you were the only one injured.”
“Oh, good.” He let go of Lan Zhan’s sleeve, hand falling back onto the mattress. “Good, that’s good. Thank god. Where is he now?”
“With the sect. They’re in the process of locating his family.”
“Okay. Okay.” Wei Ying closed his eyes for a moment, fear leaching away. The boy was alright. Lan Zhan was here. It was alright. “Lan Zhan, before you get a nurse—what happened? How long have I been here?”
“Just a few hours.” He pulled a chair over and sat down beside Wei Ying’s bed, then withdrew Wei Ying’s phone from his pocket and showed him the time on the cracked screen. Seven a.m., and a whole lot of missed notifications that Wei Ying would deal with when his brain felt less like a water-logged sponge. “Wei Ying, I’m sorry. By the time I received your messages, it was almost too late.” His mouth thinned. “It was too late.”
Wei Ying felt cold. “But you said the kid was okay.”
“The child is fine. You, however, have two broken ribs and a concussion.”
“Yeah, you told me that part. It’s fine, Lan Zhan ah, just a hazard of the job. I actually feel great right now. Whatever drugs they’ve got me on are awesome. Two thumbs up.” The painkillers were starting to wear off, the back of Wei Ying’s head throbbing, but he wasn’t about to mention that before the nurse got here. Lan Zhan, for some reason, looked concerned enough already. “Seriously,” Wei Ying said. “I knew there was a chance you wouldn’t be able to come at all. I’m the one who went after the yaoguai on my own. Whatever happened wouldn’t be on you. Just me, okay?”
“You leapt from one of the top floors of the building,” said Lan Zhan. “I arrived just in time to see you hit the ground.”
Wei Ying closed his mouth.
A muscle flexed in Lan Zhan’s jaw. Okay, he was definitely pissed, and with good reason. Wei Ying knew he’d been reckless. He just hadn’t been able to not go after the kid. “You leapt,” Lan Zhan said again, “with the child in your arms. Your body broke his fall; resentful energy broke yours. I saw it rise in a black wave to meet you.” His eyes lifted to Wei Ying’s face. “I killed the yaoguai. Then I called an ambulance. You and the child were both unconscious. Wei Ying, your meridians….” He trailed off, and a lump of ice grew in Wei Ying’s belly. Nobody but Wen Qing and Wen Ning knew about his core. He’d managed to hide it from Lan Zhan this long, compensating with talismans and inventions and his dizi. Suibian had shattered the night Jiang Cheng lost his own core—that shitshow of a night—so no worries there. Wei Ying had been doing a good job, for six months, at pretending his refusal to get a new sword was born from arrogance rather than lack of ability. Lan Zhan continued, “Your qi was dangerously low. I tried to replenish it, but it was like trying to hold water in a sieve. Was it the yaoguai? Did it do something?”
He hadn’t figured it out. Wei Ying tried not to show his relief. “Well, it did seem unusually powerful,” he said, skirting an outright lie. “Like, my phone signal was blocked even with a talisman. Did it give you any trouble after I was, ah, indisposed?”
Lan Zhan shook his head. “It was an easy kill. One chord. I didn’t even draw Bichen.”
“Huh. I could’ve sworn I felt something…. I don’t know. My brain’s all fuzzy, Lan Zhan, I’ll be more helpful in a second.”
“No need,” said Lan Zhan. “Rest, Wei Ying. I’ll get a—”
He cut off abruptly. An odd flicker passed over his features, a facial twitch unlike his normal expressions. “Lan Zhan?” said Wei Ying.
Lan Zhan’s eyes rolled back into his head until only the whites showed. His spine stiffened but his shoulders slumped, muscles going loose, like a puppet propped up by a wooden frame. In the empty air behind him, between his body and the door, a shadow formed. It swallowed the bleak light of the hospital room, everything going dim even though the lights were still on.
“Get out of him,” Wei Ying said quietly.
“And why would I,” said Lan Zhan, but it wasn’t his voice. It was a silky, slithering thing, crawling out of his mouth like a toad spirit, the kind that laid its thousands of quivering eggs in a person’s belly. Wei Ying had seen the aftermath of a toad spirit more times than he would’ve liked. The hours of hatching, the expulsion of tadpoles from the body by any means possible. This wasn’t that—Lan Zhan was way too powerful to get possessed by a low-level toad spirit; his golden core would’ve burned it up upon entry—but the sliminess of the voice was reminiscent. So different from Lan Zhan’s own voice, which was soft and low and measured. Steady as a note on his guqin.
“Who are you and what do you want?” said Wei Ying. “Ah—before you start monologuing, please don’t. Just tell me the relevant information. I don’t need your life story.”
“You should be more polite,” said the thing wearing Lan Zhan’s skin. “This is a nice body. I’d hate to break it.”
Wei Ying held very still. He didn’t see his dizi anywhere in the room; Lan Zhan must have done something with it. He couldn’t move—fucking ribs—but he could whistle. If it came to that.
Fuck. Fuck. What kind of a ghost was capable of possessing Lan Zhan?
“You were there last night, weren’t you,” Wei Ying said, conversational. “It wasn’t the child-eater I felt—it was you, wasn’t it? The kid was a lure for me, and I was a lure for Lan Zhan. Why?”
The thing smiled, horribly and with teeth, with Lan Zhan’s mouth. “I wanted to make sure you’d listen.”
“Well, congratulations. You got me. I’m listening. Feel free to start making it worth it.”
“Little master,” the thing said. “We miss you.”
Ah.
So it was like that, then.
“Sorry,” said Wei Ying. “Can’t say I feel the same way. Especially since I don’t even know who you are. You don’t have very good manners, do you?” He shook his head, tsking, though his eyes never left the thing’s face. “Just get to the point, yeah? I’m very tired. I had a long night.”
“He’s awake,” the thing whispered. “I feel the burn and glow of him. He’s watching this. He is angry, yes. And frightened. I can taste it.” Its tongue darted over its bottom lip as if licking fresh blood from a cut. “He is worried I am going to kill you.”
“And are you?”
It cocked its head. “No.”
“Great. So what do you want.”
“We want you to lead us,” the thing said. “In return, we can give you revenge.”
“Revenge?” Wei Ying couldn’t help it, he laughed. “Revenge for fucking what? For all the things I did to myself? Nah, you’re too late on that one. You don’t want to give me revenge. You want me to help you crack the world in half and suck its marrow.”
“Little master, we can share the feast.”
“Thanks,” said Wei Ying, “but I’m done picking at bones.”
The thing regarded him with those sightless white eyes. Its features, Lan Zhan’s features, rippled as if in pain. His chest heaved once, twice, then he shuddered and doubled over, gasping. The shadow behind him disappeared as he forced the yaoguai out of his body, his core burning it off like mist at dawn. When he straightened up, his eyes were soft and dark again, if bloodshot. He traced a series of symbols in the air, a golden fizzle. Making sure the thing was well and truly gone.
“Lan Zhan,” said Wei Ying. He wanted to reach out, lay a hand on Lan Zhan’s wrist. He didn’t. “Are you okay?”
Lan Zhan nodded, face bloodless. “That was…. I didn’t sense it. Until it took over.”
“I don’t know exactly who or what it was,” said Wei Ying, before Lan Zhan could ask. “But if you were awake, then you know what it said?”
Another nod, slower this time.
“Then you know it’s after me, not you. It was using you to get to me.” Wei Ying took a steadying breath. “I know you need to report it to the sect. I’ll back you up. I’m—Lan Zhan, I’m sorry, it’s my fault. My past. I guess I thought—I don’t know what I thought.” That he was free? That it was over? No. Never that. But he’d been stupid and arrogant enough to think it wouldn’t follow him like this, and for that he could not forgive himself. If Lan Zhan had been hurt because of him, because some fucking yaoguai wanted war…. “As soon as I’m out of here, we can go to Jin Guangshan. We can—”
“No.”
“—tell him what—ah—what?”
Lan Zhan wiped a trace of blood from the corner of his mouth. “Wei Ying,” he said. “I do not want to go to Jin Guangshan. Whatever’s happening, I want to help you.”
“Uh. What?” Wei Ying bit back a nervous laugh. “No offense, but why on earth would you do that? I’m not exactly your favorite person. Or like, the best night hunting partner of all time.” He gestured at himself, lying in a hospital bed, like case in point. “Did you forget the part where my bullshit just got you possessed? I’m the problem, Lan Zhan. I don’t know what’s going on, but clearly it’s not safe to be around me.”
Lan Zhan’s brow furrowed. “You are one of the strongest cultivators I have ever met,” he said. “You have saved my life numerous times. You have demonstrated over and over that you wish only to help the common people. You are….” Wei Ying watched, fascinated, as the tips of Lan Zhan’s ears turned pink. “You are—skilled. No matter the circumstances, I do not wish to night hunt with anyone else.”
“…Oh,” Wei Ying said. He could tell he was making some sort of goofy, dumbstruck face, but his head was too foggy to try hiding it. Lan Zhan liked being partners. Lan Zhan didn’t want to night hunt with anyone else. Wei Ying had thought Lan Zhan only tolerated him, or sometimes found him slightly amusing, but—could this mean Lan Zhan… liked him? Like, as a person? Even a little? Maybe it wasn’t so crazy to hope that one day they’d be friends.
He swallowed.
“It’ll be dangerous,” he said. “Whatever’s going on, it’ll be dangerous. That wasn’t some random yaoguai. That was something big.”
Lan Zhan just raised an eyebrow, like: You think I don’t know? It was in me.
Wei Ying huffed a laugh, shaking his head—which made him flinch, dizzy, which made Lan Zhan half-rise out of his chair. Wei Ying waved a hand at him. “I’m fine, I’m fine. I just—okay. Okay, Lan Zhan. I guess it’s true what they say. You really do go where the chaos is.”
“This isn’t chaos,” Lan Zhan said. “It is your life.”
“You think there’s a difference?”
A considering pause. “Then perhaps it is true. What they say.” Before Wei Ying could reply, Lan Zhan’s phone buzzed. He took it out, and Wei Ying saw LUO MIAN flashing on the screen. “I should take this. She’s looking after the child.”
“Yeah, yeah, go. I’ll just, I’ll be here.”
“I’ll return with a nurse.” He swept out of the room. The door fell shut slowly behind him, offering a glimpse of the hallway beyond, fluorescent and linoleum and white walls.
Wei Ying leaned back into the pillows, heart pounding. Whether it was residual anger or adrenaline or something else, he wasn’t sure. Call it all of the above. Call it darkness stirring, in the pit of his belly this time. Call it teeth and bloodied claws. That thing had fucking possessed Lan Zhan. It had possessed Lan Zhan.
Big mistake.
I will let every monster in this city know, Wei Ying thought, staring at the narrowing rectangle of light where Lan Zhan had disappeared.
Whatever else you do, you cannot touch him.
END.