Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Mo Weiyu, you have wronged me,” he says softly, tasting bile on the back of his tongue.

A break in the clouds overhead casts a thready strain of faltering moonlight across Mo Ran’s broad shoulders, betraying the flinch that shudders down his back and rocks him off-balance. One foot slides outward to catch his weight as it shifts, and then he falls motionless once more.

The clouds shift again, hiding the moon from view and leaving both of them in snowbright darkness. Howling winds tear through the valley below, ricocheting off of sheer cliff sides and shoving at the sparse treeline, while twinkling icicles fall from the groaning tree branches in waves and shatter with a loud crash as they hit the snow’s frozen crust.

Chu Wanning swallows with some difficulty, coaxing moisture into his parched throat before he accuses, “You could’ve stopped me, but you didn’t. You never do. Not because you can’t, but because you choose not to.” He waves his free hand towards the distant, smoke-blackened horizon, his sleeves whipped into a frenzy by a sudden, violent gale. “That makes this your fault. Not mine.”

Mo Ran remains silent and still, his back stubbornly turned to Chu Wanning—whether in defiance or avoidance, he can’t quite tell.

“Mo Ran. Look at me.”

He doesn’t.

With a bitter huff of laughter, Chu Wanning collapses to his knees in the snow. Moisture and cold alike seep into his robes with alacrity, seeking out his bare flesh and biting down hard once they find it. Ironically, his legs are already too numb to feel that particular pain; his bloodied midsection, on the other hand, screams at him to the point of distraction. He curls up tight around it, keeping one hand fisted in his lap and the other on Huaisha’s scabbard, resting gently at his side.

Mo Ran’s head jerks to the side when he hears Chu Wanning fall, and his grip tightens around Bugui’s hilt. Several trails of fresh blood slowly meander down the narrow length of the blade and drip onto the snow, melting it into a pale pink pool.

Chu Wanning’s grip on Huaisha tightens reflexively at the sight, but he forces his fingers to relax as he says, “Fool that I am, I really did believe you when you said you’d never hurt me, you know—although I was never stupid enough to believe you when you said you loved me. Better to be half-right than completely wrong, don’t you think?” He laughs again, louder this time, the sound harsh and garbled. “Mo Ran. Stop looking at what I did. Look at what you did.”

At last, Mo Ran turns.

“There you are,” Chu Wanning murmurs. He observes Mo Ran’s familiar, tear-streaked face with perfunctory satisfaction. “Was that so hard?”

His shizun makes for a singularly pathetic picture: damp, disheveled hair falling over his face in a wild tangle, dark eyes shining through like a nocturnal prey animal peering fearfully out of the shadows, handsome features screwed up into a pained grimace. He’s trembling, and he tries and fails to hold back a sob as he chokes out, “I’m sorry. Wanning, Shizun is sorry.”

Chu Wanning shuts his eyes and allows the heavy exhaustion clutching at his shoulders to drag him down into a comfortingly blank void, the rest of the world fading away into distant wisps of ash and stardust that spool out far beyond his reach.

When he opens his eyes again and finds Mo Ran still apologizing, he realizes he has no idea what his shizun is even apologizing for. It could be anything. It could be everything. It could be nothing at all.

“I hate you,” he whispers, more to the hidden moon and the cloud-cloaked stars than to Mo Ran. “Shizun, I hate you the most.”

He says as much, but as he kneels in the snow and stares down at his own clean, unbloodied hands, he knows there’s only one person here he really hates, and it isn’t Mo Ran.

His shizun continues to mindlessly apologize, over and over again, with increasing desperation; Chu Wanning has nothing more to say to him.

In the distance, Sisheng Peak quietly burns to the ground.

Dawn does not drag him back out into consciousness, kicking and screaming all the while; that honor goes to the loud, angry voice of a dead man, shouting directly into his ear.

“Shidi! Shidi, wake up, I need your help with my—with our Shizun. Shidi, wake up. Wake up, Shidi.”

“...Xue-shixiong?” He slowly cracks one eye open, fearful, at first, of catching sight of his shixiong as he had last seen him: in pieces. The Xue Meng leaning over him is, however, wholly intact, and moreover, overflowing with liveliness; his beautiful face, screwed up in the special brand of disgusted annoyance he reserves for his older brother, is a sight Chu Wanning has dearly missed.

“Yes, yes, it’s me,” Xue Meng confirms impatiently. “Are you awake now? I need your help with something.”

Hesitantly—prepared for this bizarre dream to end the moment he makes a single wrong move—Chu Wanning gathers himself up into a seated position, pulling his blankets tight around his shoulders to preserve his modesty. Xue Meng leans back a little, but does not otherwise acknowledge the existence of personal space. “I’m awake. What’s going on? Did something happen to Shizun?”

“Things don’t happen to Shizun,” Xue Meng scoffs. “Shizun is always the one doing the happening. He’s truly a blight upon decent society; I’m starting to think we should forbid him from leaving the Peak altogether, if only to preserve our reputation.”

“Xue-shixiong, please get to the point.”

A faint pink flush spreads across the bridge of Xue Meng’s nose, and he clears his throat before explaining, “He’s off at one of those brothels again, and he hasn’t come slinking back in the middle of the night like he usually does. I’m not opposed, generally speaking, to watching him receive punishment for his wrongdoings, but I also don’t want our trip to Dawning Peak to be postponed. We’re supposed to leave in an hour!”

Dawning Peak. With sudden, awful clarity, Chu Wanning realizes exactly where and when his broken mind has transported him to.

Xue Meng stares at him expectantly, awaiting his reply. His head is cocked to the side in a distinctly birdlike fashion.

Chu Wanning nods and tries to look as though he’s processing this information for the first time, and not as though he’s reliving one of the worst weeks of his entire life with the ghost of his dead shixiong for company. He can’t help but stumble over his words as he says, “We should… we should go fetch him. From the brothel. And I will… talk to him? About it. About the brothel, I mean. And about Dawning Peak?” It’s not exactly what he’d said when he lived through this several long years ago, but it’s close enough in spirit.

Xue Meng squints at him in earnest confusion. “Shidi, are you… good? Did you not sleep well? Do you feel sick? Here, let me check.”

He sticks a hand out toward Chu Wanning’s face without waiting for any kind of approval. Chu Wanning slaps his hand away before it can land on his forehead; the subsequent guilt sets upon him in an instant. His previously deceased shixiong had always been overbearing during his frequent bouts of illness, but in a way that mostly spoke to the deep-rooted, unwavering kindness he undoubtedly inherited from Xue Zhengyong and Wang Chuqing.

How could he, Xue Meng’s murderer, deny him anything? Even if he hasn’t really, truly, miraculously risen from the dead, shouldn’t Chu Wanning be doing everything he possibly can to atone?

“Ow! Shidi, you’re so strong,” Xue Meng exclaims with reproach, clutching his hand to his chest. “I guess that means you’re fine, though. No offense, but you’re as weak as a kitten when you have a fever.”

The guilt flees him faster than it arrived; he slaps Xue Meng’s dangling hand once more for good measure. “Xue-shixiong! Out! Get out!”

“Huh? Why?”

He fights to keep the heat creeping across the tips of his ears from spreading onto his face. “I… I need to get dressed!”

“Shidi, we used to be roommates. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Chu Wanning can’t bring himself to raise a hand against Xue Meng again—even in a dream or an illusory realm or whatever kind of break from reality this is—but ending his own miserable existence is starting to sound more and more appealing. He avoids Xue Meng’s gaze by staring down at the blankets covering his feet as he mumbles, “You may have seen it before, but I don’t want you to see it again. Please, can you wait outside?”

In his periphery, he spies Xue Meng’s indulgent grin. “This shixiong could never turn down such a polite and reasonable request from his shidi. I’ll be outside whenever you’re ready!”

He bolts for the door, never content to move at a normal speed, but before he pushes it open, he pauses with one hand laid flat against the wood and glances back over his shoulder at Chu Wanning. “Uh, Shidi, there’s one more thing before I go.”

In lieu of elaborating, he continues to stare silently at Chu Wanning for an uncomfortable length of time.

“What is it?” Chu Wanning prompts at last.

“You might want to—well, it’s cold outside, is all. So you should dress—you should hurry up and get dressed, I mean! So I don’t have to wait as long! Okay, I’m going now, bye.”

Finally left to his own devices, Chu Wanning glances around the room, taking everything in. He hasn’t seen the inside of this room in years; even before he’d burned it to the ground, he hadn’t been able to stay here for very long. Mo Ran kept them constantly on the move, rarely staying in the same place for more than a day or two—partly to avoid the people hunting Chu Wanning, and partly to protect the people hunting him from Chu Wanning.

It is, unsurprisingly, an absolute mess.

He chews pensively on the inside of his cheek as his gaze falls upon a sea of unwashed laundry, haphazardly scattered scrolls, and various mechanical odds and ends. Frankly, it’ll be a miracle if he has any clean robes.

A small path has been cleared between his bed and the door, creating walls of miscellaneous floor-dwelling items on either side—undoubtedly Xue Meng’s doing. Chu Wanning has never in his life chosen to clear a path over picking his way through the sections of the floor he deems least hazardous.

The sight makes him smile, ever so slightly. He could never admit to it out loud, but although he hadn’t had time to dwell on Xue Meng’s death in its immediate aftermath, Chu Wanning nevertheless felt his absence keenly; this reunion with his shixiong fills him with a radiating warmth that sparkles out across his skin like scattered fireworks.

Whatever or whomever has granted him this temporary respite has blessed him far more than he deserves. He’ll take the horrors of Dawning Peak and Jincheng Lake every day for the rest of his life if it means he gets to have this back, just for a little while.

With a heavy exhale, he hops down onto the floor and rifles through piles of his disciple robes until he finds the cleanest set. He changes into them without thinking too deeply about it, but once he’s dressed, he looks down and realizes how incredibly strange it is to see himself wrapped in shades of blue again. After his last visit to Jincheng Lake, he started wearing white exclusively, and never once went back.

It’s not a bad kind of strange, necessarily, although it stabs at some small, wounded part of himself hidden deep inside his chest. His hands shake as he smooths down stray wrinkles, the dyed linen unbearably soft against his palms. Sisheng Peak’s colors don’t belong to him anymore—he has no right to them—but no one in this strange little dream will recognize him as an outsider; he may as well go along with it.

He pulls his hair up high and slides the hair clasp set out on his side table into place, and then he joins Xue Meng outside.

It’s bitterly cold. Xue Meng, now draped in a richly purple fur cloak, looks on with sympathy as Chu Wanning starts to shiver. “Ah, Shidi… I tried to… Oh, nevermind. Do you want to maybe grab a cloak before we leave? It’s way colder up by the lake.”

He’s shaking his head before he even realizes it, thoroughly committing himself to chattering teeth and numb extremities for the foreseeable future.

“Sure, sure, if that’s really what you want,” Xue Meng says, bobbing his head. “You packed one, though, right? For when we get there?”

“Of course I did,” he replies frostily, hoping his cool tone will hide how uncertain he is. He had certainly tucked a qiankun bag into his sleeves when dressing; its contents, however, remain a mystery to him. “I’m not helpless, Xue-shixiong; you needn’t treat me like a child.”

For some reason, this makes Xue Meng burst into laughter. Once his cackles have faded to barely-suppressed giggles, he says, “Ah, Chu-shidi, you never change. You’ll always be little to me, you know; I remember how small you were when you first came to Sisheng Peak.”

He stretches a hand out again—clearly aiming for Chu Wanning’s hair, this time—but he pauses of his own accord, regarding Chu Wanning with baffled surprise. “Did you and Shizun finally make up?”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s just… you’re wearing the butterflies again.”

Chu Wanning continues to stare blankly at him, frowning when he fails to elaborate.

Xue Meng flushes a vibrant red and blusters, “Not that I was paying close attention or anything! Everyone else noticed, too! You and Shizun had that fight about Butterfly Town in broad daylight, right at the top of the stairs, and after that, you stopped wearing the butterflies. You used to wear that hair clasp every day, you know—obviously, of course, everyone knew that, not just me—so it seemed like maybe there was a direct correlation between you not wearing it and that specific fight.”

With great unease, he realizes he has no recollection of this event whatsoever; his attempts to probe more deeply into his memories just leave him vaguely nauseous. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he refutes with a firmness he doesn’t feel. “You’re reading too much into it. I was in a hurry and it was convenient, and that’s all there is to it. It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with any sort of fight I may or may not have had with Shizun.”

“Right, right, of course.” Xue Meng goes quiet and turns to stare down the stone path, avoiding Chu Wanning’s gaze. Suddenly, he exclaims, “Hey, is that Lianzhen Elder?”

Chu Wanning turns to follow his line of sight, and finds that it is, indeed, Lianzhen Elder walking up the path towards them with a single disciple in tow.

The tension around them eases with Lianzhen Elder’s appearance; in more ways than one, he’s truly a breath of fresh air. He glides across ice and stone alike with the effortless, refined elegance of an immortal crane, and as sunlight reflects off of the snow around him, it affords him a blinding white halo, courtesy of his pale silver robes. His face, too, possesses a preternatural glow, illuminating his smooth, pale skin and the gentle lilt of his soft, full lips. Chu Wanning can feel the tips of his ears burning and his mouth going dry, his chest tingling with a small, stabbing pain, and for a moment, all he can do is stare and wonder, Has Shi Mingjing always been this beautiful?

Shi Mingjing greets the pair of them with a shallow bow, shocking Chu Wanning out of his stupor long enough for him to offer a deeper bow in return. “Good morning, young master, A-Ning.”

“Good morning, Lianzhen Elder,” they chorus.

He blushes a faint, pretty pink at the title, having only recently acquired it after spending most of his life as Shi Mingjing, or Shi-shixiong, or, to Xue Zhengyong and the other Elders, just Shi Mei. After quietly clearing his throat, he asks, “Are you ready to go? I haven’t seen Mo Ran yet this morning; will he be meeting us at the gate, do you think?”

Chu Wanning and Xue Meng exchange a wide-eyed, panicked glance; as much as they may both believe their Shizun deserves punishment for his transgressions, they also, in that moment, come to a silent agreement that Shi Mingjing must never learn of said transgressions, lest the knowledge tarnish his purity. Chu Wanning had believed himself pure, once—a long time ago—but Lianzhen Elder is truly pure, and to shock him in such a manner might affect his fragile cultivation.

Thinking back to a time when he was the one making excuses for his Shizun, and not the other way around, Chu Wanning answers, “No, he won’t be meeting us at the gate. He, um… that is to say, he’s… well, he…”

To cover for his faltering, Xue Meng jumps in with, “He went into town! To pick up stuff—things—supplies, I mean. There were a few more supplies he thought we would need that he couldn’t find on the Peak. So, we will definitely be meeting him in town. And he will absolutely be there!”

Xue Meng visibly preens at his own cleverness, and after glancing between Chu Wanning and Shi Mingjing with a sly look, he adds, “Actually, why don’t I go ahead and find him to see if he needs help? You know how Shizun is, haha, he probably got lost or something!”

Without bothering to wait for an answer, he takes off down the path, pausing only momentarily to call out over his shoulder, “You guys can just wait outside of town, and I’ll bring him to you, okay?”

And then he’s gone.

“The young master is always one to move quickly,” Shi Mingjing comments politely. “I suppose he’s quite excited for the trip.”

“Yes. He is particularly excited about the opportunity to acquire a holy weapon.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I don’t doubt that he’ll manage it.”

Chu Wanning knows with absolute certainty that Xue Meng will acquire a holy weapon; he even knows which weapon it is, and what Xue Meng will need to do in order to earn it. He does not say this to Shi Mingjing, however, fearing he would sound completely deranged. Instead, he asks, “Will you be making an attempt, Lianzhen Elder?”

At this, Shi Mingjing blushes an even brighter pink than before, but he nods nevertheless. “Yes,” he confesses, “I think… I may finally be ready.”

"Of course you are," Chu Wanning says, hoping to reassure him. “You’ve been working very hard.”

Shi Mingjing opens and closes his mouth a few times without saying anything; it’s then that his disciple finally peers out of his shadow and speaks up. “Chu-shixiong, you already have two holy weapons, right?

He stares at her in surprise. He may have, very briefly, forgotten she was there. “Yes, I do. Both are from Jincheng Lake.”

“Do you have any tips for us, since it’s our first time?”

Her wide, round eyes entreat him, and he struggles to come up with something that will encourage her—ideally without crushing her hopes and dreams. “Patience is key,” he says at last, cringing at his own inadequacy. Patience is key, but so is a strong spiritual core. Shi Mingjing may have improved by leaps and bounds in recent months (as reflected by his ascension to Elder), but his disciple has yet to experience similar growth, and Chu Wanning knows for a fact that she possesses little natural talent.

“Shixiong is so wise!” she exclaims. “I don’t think I’ll be able to melt it very much, but I’ll do my best to learn well from observing my elders.”

He has no idea what to say to that.

Shi Mingjing offers little in the way of conversational assistance; he’s watching the two of them like they’re a pair of kittens put in the same room for the first time, and he’s hoping they’ll become fast friends.

Chu Wanning can’t bear to disappoint Shi Mingjing, so he steels himself and says, “Song-shimei is wise as well. One must endeavor to be diligent at all times in order to grow.” After the beat of awkward silence that follows, he clears his throat and adds, “Shall we depart now? It would be impolite to keep Shizun and Xue-shixiong waiting.”

Shi Mingjing, apparently taking pity upon him, graciously swoops in. “You’re right, of course, A-Ning; if we take too long to join them, the young master may decide to leave without us. Let us bid farewell to Sisheng Peak for the time being; come along, Song Qiutong.”

It’s a bit jarring to hear Shi Mingjing refer to his disciple as Song Qiutong in the same breath he refers to Chu Wanning as A-Ning, but he probably doesn’t mean anything by it. He and Shi Mingjing have known one another for several years, after all, whereas Song Qiutong arrived at Sisheng Peak only a year or so ago.

Chu Wanning takes one last, longing look at Sisheng Peak before he follows after the master-disciple pair, taking in snow-capped mountain ranges stained with rich dawn hues. He wishes he could stay—wishes he could take the time to revisit the ghosts of his past—but he reminds himself, again, that this isn’t real, and cannot last, and if he steps too far outside of the invisible bounds, it might come to an abrupt end.

He’ll go meet with his shizun, instead: the man who refused to stop him, the man who refused to kill him, and the man who refused to leave him.

Something like hope blooms inside his chest, warm and comforting. In a way, he’s missed his shizun, too; he longs to return to the days when things were simpler between them.

He turns back to the stairs, and begins his descent.

There is a fire; something is burning.

This is nothing out of the ordinary. Where he’s concerned, there’s always a fire; more often than not, he’s the arsonist who started it.

The smell of it coats him like a second skin, clinging tight and constricting around him until he’s forced to grow smaller and smaller. When he thinks back on his memories of burning down the House of Drunken Jade, the eyes he looks out of belong to the Mo Ran he later became—bigger, taller, stronger—but he really was so tiny back then: an undernourished, underloved amalgamation of bones set at awkward angles in an abnormally shrunken frame.

With that same fire roaring around him once more, he’s rendered small, and weak, and helpless, and so angry he could die. For a few long, breathless moments, he finds himself trapped in a pocket of shadow, his eyes shut tight against the searing agony of acrid smoke and his hands curled into fists around recent, remembered violence. Screams waver through the heat, rising and falling and rising again as they ride on currents of tightly circulating air.

He recalls, faintly, that he came across a few of the screamers on his way here, to the darkness that does not burn; he had stopped to watch with grim fascination as the flesh gradually melted from their bones, but he couldn’t remember their names or what they had looked like with their faces intact. They were no one and nothing to him, just as he was no one and nothing to them.

A seed of guilt nests several layers deep within this memory, huddling beside him in the shadows like a baby bird fallen from its nest. He doesn’t regret the indiscriminate slaughter—not when he was born wearing blood on his hands; there’s no sense in fighting against what fate has planned for you.

The lies that followed, however, dogged his footsteps like bloodthirsty hounds until the day he died. He had wondered, often, if he could have chosen honesty then, and still found his way to family.

It hardly made a difference, in the end. He’s never been very good at holding onto the things that matter.

When the fire sputters out, his vision flickers, and he blinks hard against a sudden influx of bright light.

He brings a hand up to shield his eyes, but as he does so, he realizes his fist is clenched around something more substantial than a memory.

Mo Ran looks down and finds himself kneeling inside the charred, empty corpse of Loyalty Hall with piles of ash slipping through his hands. Grief rings through his ears with the clarity and resonance of chiming bells, wiping his mind clean of all thought.

He can’t bear it. He can’t live with it. He wishes, desperately, that he had been among those burnt away into nothing by the initial blast.

For Wanning, he survives; for Wanning, he bears the pain as it slowly cuts away at him, killing him by inches.

For Wanning, he would’ve kept bearing the pain. He would’ve done anything. He would’ve killed, tortured, died—he would’ve burned and slaughtered, again and again and again—whatever it took.

When Mo Ran says anything, he means it.

But there is always a fire, and something is always burning. He can’t bear it—he can’t bear it. He can’t keep moving forward with the very heart of him burnt out into nothing, and he won’t; he’ll turn back, instead, and chase after—

“Wanning,” he gasps, struggling for breath like the air’s been punched out of him. He’s tangled up in something—restraints of some kind—and his desperate efforts to breathe are greatly impeded by the heavy stench of incense pooling in his lungs.

He punches and claws and kicks his way out of the bulk of it, forgetting, momentarily, that he is a world-renowned cultivator with tremendous spiritual capabilities, and then, upon realizing he is not alone, he pauses and blinks his eyes open to look around.

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches a glimpse of dark hair and pale skin and long, elegant limbs, and he thinks, with his heart in his throat and relief beating a frantic rhythm against his ribcage, that Chu Wanning is here, and all the rest was nothing more than a nightmare.

Then he looks closer.

Shredded silk sheets dangle from his limbs and pool across the bed; a gaudy quilt embroidered with cheery little mandarin ducks has been kicked into a pile at his feet.

Beside him, Rong Jiu nearly rolls off onto the floor in a desperate bid to put distance between them.

Mo Ran catches him with one hand. Once he’s been righted, they stare at each other with wide, bewildered eyes.

For his own part, Mo Ran can’t quite believe what he’s seeing; Rong Jiu has been dead for longer than Mo Ran ever knew him. “Uh—sorry?” he says to this mysterious creature who may or may not be Rong Jiu’s ghost, or Rong Jiu’s reanimated corpse, or an extremely vivid hallucination of Rong Jiu.

Rong Jiu’s long, delicate eyelashes flutter as he breaks eye contact, directing his gaze towards the floor. “There is no need to apologize,” he says with a dismissive shake of his head, “this one was already awake. Did you… have a nightmare, Mo-gongzi?”

His life has been one long, unending, tormentous nightmare for the past decade or so, but he doesn’t really want to say that to Rong Jiu, and he knows that isn’t really what Rong Jiu wants to hear. As much as Mo Ran likes to think Rong Jiu didn’t hate his fucking guts, he’s well aware that their relationship was purely transactional in nature, and devoid of any genuine sentiment. “Haha, yeah, right, a nightmare! Yes, that is what I had. A normal, regular nightmare about, you know, normal scary stuff—like ghosts! Scary, scary ghosts.”

Mo Ran squints suspiciously at Rong Jiu, watching for his reaction to the word ghosts, but Rong Jiu remains inscrutably pleasant and mild. If he is an evil, ferocious ghost, come to take his revenge on Mo Ran in the Underworld for the crime of being kind of an asshole, he’s a very good actor.

Then again, acting was kind of Rong Jiu’s whole gig, and he’d been at it longer than most prior to his passing. Even in the here and now, Mo Ran can see the faintest of lines around his eyes and mouth, belying his true age beneath a painted facade of youth.

For Mo Ran, that had, admittedly, been most of his appeal. He wanted someone older and softer and sweeter, and Rong Jiu had fit that bill perfectly, although his close resemblance to Shi Mei had always made Mo Ran a little uncomfortable.

“It must be very difficult for Mo-gongzi, as a cultivator,” Rong Jiu says politely, “having to deal with so many frightening things.”

“It’s not so bad,” Mo Ran demurs, “but I appreciate your concern, A-Jiu.”

Obligatory pleasantries thus exchanged, they proceed to sit in awkward silence atop the ravaged bed, neither of them quite knowing where to take things from here. Mo Ran looks around the room, searching for something to comment on other than the weather; the carved window’s curtains are drawn, shielding the room against any hint of daylight, and if they’re actually in the Underworld, he has no fucking clue what the weather is ordinarily like.

A gleaming flash briefly distracts him as he takes notice of the copper mirror set against the wall opposite him. There’s something off about his blurry reflection, and for a moment, he thinks, Do I really look like that? Unfortunately, that’s not a question he can ask Rong Jiu without sounding like he’s well and truly lost his mind.

At last, his eyes catch on the distinctive black and gold robes scattered across the floor, and he breathes a sigh of relief. Just as he starts to say, “You know, I should really get going,” Rong Jiu says, simultaneously, “Did you want to stay for—”

Another uncomfortable beat of silence passes. Mo Ran breaks it with an obviously forced laugh, and quickly says, “I paid you in advance, right? Yesterday? Great, wonderful, fantastic. Good seeing you, Rong Jiu; I’ll just be going, then!”

Rong Jiu’s eyelashes flutter again as he blinks several times in rapid succession before slowly nodding in acknowledgement. “Yes, it was… a pleasure to see you as well, Mo-gonzi. This one bids you farewell; we hope to see you again soon.”

His hasty retreat is somewhat hampered by having to put the dirty, disheveled robes he gathers off of the floor right back onto his body (idiot that he is, he hadn’t thought to bring a change of clothes), but Rong Jiu politely refrains from further commentary.

Fortunately, no one else speaks to Mo Ran as he exits the Immortal Peach Pavilion; the few people he encounters either blearily pause to offer him a slight bow as he passes or duck out of his way, pointedly avoiding eye contact. Mo Ran winces each time he comes across the latter, knowing he must’ve made a real ass of himself the night before.

He finds a short-lived reprieve in the blast of frosty air and snow-laden dust that crashes into him the moment he steps outside—the sun has already tumbled over the horizon, so he must have mixed up his days and nights again—but before he can truly revel in it, someone runs headlong into his midsection, nearly bowling him over onto the ground.

Mo Ran rights both of them, and then stares down at the familiar face of his unruly little brother in stunned surprise.

Xue Meng scowls back up at him, his brow dipping in a haughty, superior fashion. Somehow, despite being several feet shorter than Mo Ran, Xue Meng manages to look down his nose at him. “There you are, you stupid dog! I’ve been looking all over for you for hours! And then, when I finally found you, the nice jiejies who work here told me you were sleeping inside, and they weren’t allowed to go get you! So I’ve just been waiting here, outside, in the cold, because obviously I can’t step foot in a place like that.” A faint flush colors his cheeks as he gestures toward the brothel behind Mo Ran. “Did you choose an… establishment this far away from Sisheng Peak just to screw with us?!"

Typically, Xue Meng’s unadulterated, indomitable obnoxiousness would preclude Mo Ran from finding his bashful display slightly adorable. After spending several years without this awful little creature, however, Mo Ran is reluctantly charmed; his reflexive scowl melts into a fond grin. “Obviously,” he agrees. “Our very own darling of the heavens could never sully himself with pleasures of the flesh. He’s as pure as the driven snow, and as uptight and repressed as a virginal maiden.”

Xue Meng turns downright apoplectic, and Mo Ran’s grin widens. His silly disciple fumes, rendered speechless, before he seems to collect himself. He affects a calm, collected mask, and says, “Whatever, old man. Were your pleasures of the flesh too distracting for you to remember our trip to Dawning Peak officially starts today, or did you just not care enough to show up on time? Either way, Shidi was awfully disappointed; he still expects better from you, even though you let him down every single time.”

Hearing Shidi from Xue Meng’s lips hits him like a blow to the head. He’d forgotten the sound of it—fondness and respect tied together into a neat little bow—and moreover, he’d forgotten how expertly Xue Meng used to wield it against him.

For a moment, he’s so caught up in the Shidi of it all, he doesn’t bother with whatever else Xue Meng said; it creeps up on him slowly, and then, all of a sudden, it tears the figurative rug out from underneath him.

Dawning Peak? What the hell?

It’s been years since the last time they visited Dawning Peak (which was also, incidentally, the first time they visited Dawning Peak). The Underworld doesn’t even have a Dawning Peak, as far as he knows.

He opens his mouth to ask Xue Meng for clarification, and then closes it; time and space seem to slow to a crawl around him as his brain struggles to connect the dots.

None of this makes any logical sense.

Xue Meng is here, seemingly alive and well, and standing in front of him right outside of what appears to be a very real Immortal Peach Pavilion—talking to him about Dawning Peak of all things—not together with him in the Underworld, even though Mo Ran remembers his own recent death with uncomfortable clarity.

Furthermore, according to this Xue Meng, Chu Wanning is also around here somewhere, miraculously risen from the dead.

Rong Jiu, Xue Meng, Chu Wanning, and Mo Ran himself—they should all be dead and gone. This shouldn’t be happening. It’s completely incongruous with the events that led up to his untimely demise, and it dawns on him that this is because the last time he lived it was so long ago it feels more like a dream than a memory.

Mo Ran may be a little stupid, but he isn’t a total idiot; he can put two and two together.

Obviously, he’s been reborn.

Chapter Text

Instead of listening to Xue Meng’s pointed complaints, hurled insults, and huffy pouting, Mo Ran tunes him out and contemplates the circumstances of his apparent rebirth.

The sheer, shocking thrill of it reduces a disproportionately large part of him down to a mindless, feral beast, digging its teeth deep into the tender flesh of this miracle and refusing to let go. Predictably, that part of him isn’t too keen on wasting its energy pondering how this could’ve possibly happened. What do the whos and the whys and the hows of it really matter, in the end? The only thing he can bring himself to care about is the outcome, and the outcome, in this case, is a second chance.

Some force of fate or destiny has delivered him back to a point in time before everything went to shit, and now he has the opportunity to fix it.

There’s so much he can change that it’s almost overwhelming in its enormity. Where would he even start? Was there a major, definable turning point—an event that set off a cascading series of ever-worsening horrors?

The Heavenly Rift, maybe? In its aftermath, the resulting casualties had been difficult to count; it’s entirely possible that one of those casualties made all the difference. Come to think of it, only a few months had passed between that event and Chu Wanning’s first attempts to delve into the Three Forbidden Techniques. He’d had a particular interest in Rebirth—which, incidentally, bears a remarkable relevance to Mo Ran’s current situation.

However, Chu Wanning had never mastered Rebirth within Mo Ran’s lifetime, and Mo Ran had unfortunately outlived him. Relevancy, in this case, can’t be equated to causation.

He has to be overlooking something. Somehow, all of these disparate pieces are connected, and for some unfathomable reason, he wound up as the sorry bastard saddled with the responsibility of pasting them together and arranging them into a single, discernible picture.

He’s a little worried that whatever or whoever chose Mo Weiyu, specifically, for this position really failed to think things through. They’ve put so many lives—too many lives!—in his hands, including Xue Meng’s. He feels the crushing weight of it like a yoke around his neck.

Xue Meng’s death had been a grisly, bloody, nightmarishly bleak affair. For a few years afterward, Mo Ran forced himself to reexamine the memory in close detail every time he thought of Xue Meng, hoping to absolve himself in some way by virtue of his proffered suffering, but this came with the unintended side effect of making him not want to ever think about Xue Meng. In the wake of this realization, Mo Ran chose to slowly forget Xue Meng’s death, piece by piece, until, at last, he could only remember it in broad, blurry strokes.

He still remembers when it happened relative to the catastrophe at Jincheng Lake, however, and therefore knows the time he’s landed in is at least a year or two off. Xue Meng’s cheeks are round with the baby fat he’d lost as he fully matured, and he hasn’t yet gained the easy confidence brought by bonding with his spiritual weapon.

Mo Ran observes his first and oldest disciple, his first and youngest and only brother, and permits a simple, unfettered happiness to fill his heart. If there’s a better miracle than this, he can’t imagine what it might be. He’ll do whatever it takes to keep it from escaping his grasp.

Xue Meng, oblivious to the extremely obvious series of emotions playing across Mo Ran’s face, has gone off on an unrelated tangent, fuming about—well, Mo Ran isn’t quite sure what he’s on about, given he hasn’t been listening to him at all. He catches a mention of some friend (or enemy?) of Xue Meng’s whose proclivities he finds intolerable, interspersed with insulting comparisons to Mo Ran, and decides he ought to redirect him back to more important matters.

“Where did you say we were going, again?” Mo Ran asks with feigned sheepishness, attempting to straighten the horrifically wrinkled collar of his outer robe as Xue Meng leads him outside the small town. Several dusty, travel-worn farmers stare at them as they pass by; they regard Xue Meng with open fascination and Mo Ran with narrow-eyed suspicion. None of them strike Mo Ran as familiar—in either a good or a bad way—so he offers them a friendly wave as a gesture of goodwill.

Xue Meng, still marching forward with as long a stride as his short legs can manage, swivels his head back over his shoulder like an owl to glare at Mo Ran. “Are you serious? Did you actually, genuinely forget? Mo—Shizun. I just told you.”

Mo Ran shrugs. “I don’t really pay attention when you speak. Usually, only about a third of what you say is actually relevant to me.” This, at least, is entirely true.

“You—! You—! How dare you!” Xue Meng stops in his tracks so he can glare harder. “If that’s how you’re going to be, I won’t tell you anything at all! You can ask Shidi when we get back to Sisheng Peak and find out the hard way.”

Apparently satisfied with Mo Ran’s sentencing, Xue Meng struts forward once more, his chin raised arrogantly toward the heavens.

“Mengmeng, don’t be like that,” Mo Ran whines, following Xue Meng so closely he’s nearly stepping on his heels. “Your shidi is already going to whip me to death after this—do you want him to whip all eighteen generations of my ancestors to death, too?”

“No,” Xue Meng begrudgingly concedes, “but only because you and I have the same ancestors.”

“I knew you’d see it my way.”

“Shut up. If you had a single brain cell left in your empty skull, you’d know—again, because I already told you—that we should be on our way to Dawning Peak. Right now, in fact. Shidi and Lianzhen Elder and Lianzhen Elder’s disciple, uh… Song… Song something, I don’t know—”

“Song Qiutong.”

“Oh, right. Anyway, as I was saying, Shidi and Lianzhen Elder and that Song Quitong girl are all waiting for us outside of Wuchang Town. At least, they were when I left; I doubt they’re still waiting around, given how many hours have passed.”

“Should we head to Wuchang Town, then?”

“Why are you asking me? Aren’t you supposed to be the shizun here?” With a scoff, Xue Meng speeds up like he’s trying to leave Mo Ran behind. In his haste, however, one of his feet catches on a divot in the unpaved road, and he nearly falls face first onto the ground; his pinwheeling arms are his only saving grace, sparing him from further humiliation.

Never before in his life has Xue Meng so closely resembled a panicked bird flapping its wings. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s beyond comical.

Mo Ran can’t help himself. “Mengmeng… are you trying to fly?” he asks, snickering and waving his sleeves to mock him. “It doesn’t seem to be working very well. Is your tail too heavy? Or is it your ego weighing you down?”

“How old are you?!” Xue Meng hisses, his tone venomous.

Older than you realize, Mengmeng.

It’s a sobering thought. “You’re asking too much of a man who’s just woken up,” he explains with newfound patience. “I have no idea what’s going on. You’re so smart and brilliant and clever; surely you’ve got a plan in mind.”

“Sure, I have a plan,” Xue Meng says snippily, “it just doesn’t include you. I’m going to take my horse and ride back to Sisheng Peak, and then I’m going to tell Dad how badly you fucked this up, and then he’s going to punish you while Shidi and I have a nice long rest, and then, tomorrow, we’re going to start this trip no matter what it takes. If I have to tie you up and toss you into the back of a carriage, so be it.”

Mo Ran, moved by the spirit of generosity, graciously and benevolently refrains from commenting on the bit about tying him up. Over the course of his many decades, he’s learned when to hold his tongue.

He maintains his magnanimous silence until they reach the far outskirts of town, where they’re met with Xue Meng’s horse—a beautifully dappled gray mare with big brown eyes and a long-suffering mien—hitched to the low-hanging branch of an elderly camphor tree. She noses inquisitively at Xue Meng’s robes as he unties her, and after a quick glance at his surroundings, he surreptitiously offers her an apple and a pat on her velvety nose. “I didn’t bring a horse for you, and you can’t share mine, so you’ll have to find your own way back,” he says, not bothering to turn back and look at Mo Ran as he speaks.

Mo Ran rolls his eyes. “I don’t need a horse. I can fly back on my sword.”

Xue Meng, having just swung himself up into his saddle, snaps his head around to goggle at Mo Ran. “Are you out of your mind? First Butterfly Town, now this absolute fucking disaster—Shidi is already going to be so upset with you, and you want to fly back to Sisheng Peak? On your sword?”

He takes a moment to absorb what is, on its face, a completely nonsensical series of questions. If he doesn’t have a horse and he doesn’t particularly want to walk, but he does have both a sword and the ability to fly on it, why wouldn’t he? And what does any of that have to do with Chu Wanning?

Xue Meng continues to stare at him with wide, bewildered eyes, his brows sharply slanted as though Mo Ran’s chosen mode of travel has somehow offended him personally.

Mo Ran is not, by nature, a clever man, so it takes longer than it should for him to muddle his way through a miasma of bafflement.

When realization finally hits him, it’s sharp and sudden and all at once, lighting up every corner of his brain like a flash of lightning: for most of his disciplehood, Chu Wanning had been deathly afraid of heights, and mortified when this fear left him unable to travel by flying sword. On particularly bad days, even the sight of other cultivators flying on swords could make him irascible, difficult to reason with, and prone to lashing out.

Naturally, he pinned the blame for these fits of temper on anything and everything else, up to and including flowers smelling too strongly, clouds forming shapes he deemed offensive, and Mo Ran existing in his proximity.

Mo Ran’s chest aches with nostalgia, and he has to swallow hard against the secrets trying to fight their way out of his mouth. He wants to tell Xue Meng, Yes, I remember, of course I do. I remember everything about Chu Wanning. Only, that was so long ago for me—that was before you died.

But he can’t say any of that, and he can’t explain how Chu Wanning overcame this fear out of dire necessity while they were on the run from most of the cultivation world, so instead he plasters on a painfully wide smile and says, “Don’t worry. I’ll land before he sees me, even if it means I’ll have to climb up all of those steps the old-fashioned way.”

Xue Meng’s raised feathers smooth back down, and he bobs his head once, mollified. “Good,” he says curtly. “I’ll be seeing you, then.”

With a click of his tongue and a gentle strike from his heels, his horse breaks out into a steady, even canter. Mo Ran watches him ride into the distance, growing smaller and smaller until he becomes a mere speck on the horizon, and then he tears his gaze away and summons Bugui.

“It’s just you and me again,” he murmurs, admiring the unflinchingly solid jet black of the blade. “Are you ready?”

Bugui is a sword, and therefore does not answer.

“Yeah, me neither,” Mo Ran agrees.

He allows himself to dawdle for a single moment more, his eyes caught in an intense staring match with Bugui’s intermittent bouts of pale, luminescent flickering, before he hops on and ascends rapidly. It only takes him a few minutes to catch up with Xue Meng; for the remainder of the flight, Mo Ran keeps pace with him, afraid to venture too far afield.

His imagination has treated him to thousands of variations on the theme of his imminent reunion with Chu Wanning, and yet, he can’t quite picture it. It’s too unreal an idea, blurry around the edges and indistinct at the center, as meltable and malleable as a piece of milk candy. He chews on it over and over again, but all he gets out of the endeavor is an aching jaw and a building pressure behind his eyes.

Will Chu Wanning really be that upset with him?

Well. Whatever the case may be, Xue Meng will make for a nice buffer—or shield, if necessary.

By the time they draw close to Sisheng Peak, the sky overhead has shifted from sun-kissed tangerine to a dark wash of turbulent blue. Mo Ran has to conjure a small orb out of his spiritual energy to see more than ten feet in front of him.

Below, Xue Meng and his horse slow to a leisurely trot, and Mo Ran follows suit. As they approach the stairs leading up into the sect proper, he starts to drift lower and lower, stretching out his hands to brush against the scratchy needles crowning each stalwart pine tree.

He and Xue Meng notice the pale figure standing in front of the gate simultaneously; they stop so abruptly that Xue Meng’s mild-mannered horse whinnies in complaint, and Mo Ran nearly flies into a tree.

It’s nothing like how he imagined it would be.

It had occurred to him, intellectually, that he would be seeing a younger Chu Wanning—and yet he had nevertheless pictured, in every imagining, the Chu Wanning he knew best; the Chu Wanning he spent every day with; the Chu Wanning he fell in love with: tall and sharp and strong, too fiercely proud to allow his back to bend in the face of a chill that rivaled his own.

Mo Ran had imagined a Chu Wanning who grew into himself under the worst of circumstances, and who nevertheless managed to forge from those circumstances a powerful, beautifully-honed weapon, more exquisitely sharp than any blade.

He had not imagined, could not have imagined, this shivering, plaintively hopeful teenager, holding himself at awkward angles and not yet self-conscious enough to pretend he’s completely unaffected by the biting cold.

He hadn’t imagined a Chu Wanning who could still look this vulnerable.

He can’t make out most of the finer details, but, well, it’s Chu Wanning. His mind automatically fills in the blanks.

To Mo Ran, Chu Wanning had always been a lovely, delicate porcelain figure set high up on a shelf, far out of his clumsy reach. In his last life, Mo Ran reached for him anyway, and wound up knocking him over, shattering him into a million pieces.

The phantom shards of agony burning a hole into his chest serve as a good reminder to treat Chu Wanning differently in this life—to respect him; to cherish him; to not cross the strict boundaries between shizun and disciple.

Wanning, Shizun won’t wrong you ever again.

At that moment, Chu Wanning looks up at him, and his gaze meets Mo Ran’s.

Mo Ran promptly falls off of his sword.

Chu Wanning, Shi Mingjing, and Song Qiutong wait outside of Wuchang Town for two hours before giving up on the idea of reuniting with Xue Meng and Mo Ran any time soon.

“They must’ve encountered trouble of some kind,” Chu Wanning says stiffly. Most of his face has gone a little numb after being subjected to the unrelenting bite of frosty winter winds, as have his woefully exposed hands.

“Yes, that must be it,” Shi Mingjing kindly agrees. Beside him, Song Qiutong sways from side to side, occasionally tapping her feet against the ground. Outside of the sect, she keeps the lower half of her face obscured by a veil of white silk, making it difficult for Chu Wanning to read her facial expressions. Her demure gaze reveals very little.

Abruptly, she pipes up to suggest, “We could take a walk through the market while we wait; surely by the time we’re through, they’ll have shown up.” She looks a little abashed when Chu Wanning and Shi Mingjing both turn to stare at her in surprise, but she doesn’t retract her suggestion.

Chu Wanning would rather crawl up all of Sisheng Peak’s three thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine steps on his hands and knees than walk through a market like today’s: filled to the brim and buzzing with as much activity as a beehive. “They could be in danger,” he points out instead of voicing his more childish objections. “Maybe we should go look for them. What if they need our help?”

This gives Song Quitong some pause. Shi Mingjing, on the other hand, counters him with, “They’re both powerful cultivators, A-Ning. I’m sure they can handle anything they run into without our help, even if it puts us a little behind schedule.” His tone is distinctly placating; as softly and warmly as Chu Wanning may feel for Shi Mingjing, he still has to fight the urge to bristle. With a polite, delicate cough, Shi Mingjing brings a hand up to cover his lips and adds, “We must also consider the possibility that Mo Ran and the young master may have been waylaid by the crowds. We would be remiss not to look for them in town.”

Shame smarts across Chu Wanning’s frost-burnt cheeks as he realizes how foolish he must sound, ignoring the obvious in favor of avoiding his own discomfort. A lifetime of horrors left in his wake, and yet he never ceases to be the most abhorrent, selfish monster in the world, truly undeserving of Shi Mingjing’s kindness and understanding. “Lianzhen Elder is correct. We should… we should go into town for a little while and conduct a brief search.”

He tries not to sound as though the words are being pried out of him one-by-one and largely fails at this endeavor.

“I’m glad you agree,” Shi Mingjing says, offering him a bright smile.

The two disciples follow him into town like little ducklings, one boldly forging ahead and the other bobbing along trepidatiously in his wake.

Wuchang Town’s afternoon market proves as treacherous as Chu Wanning feared. Strangers press up against them on all sides as the crowd ebbs and flows; he has to perform an elaborate dance in order to avoid excessive contact with any of them. At one point, he bumps into Shi Mingjing’s back, and retreats so quickly he winds up colliding with a pair of elderly women. They loudly admonish him for his clumsiness, and he stammers out an apology as the crowd carries him away.

After that, he keeps his stare firmly directed at Shi Mingjing, walking in step with him to avoid another such incident.

He has always, studiously and faithfully, appreciated Shi Mingjing from afar, and he has no desire to stray from that path.

Across the cultivation world, few have remained as famously pure as Shi Mingjing. Indeed, some have labeled him as the purest living cultivator; amongst the denizens of Sisheng Peak, this is a universally agreed upon fact. Perhaps, were he average looking and not a stunning, peerless beauty, known far and wide for his charitable and benevolent heart, his purity would be unremarkable, but Shi Mingjing is a crane standing in a flock of chickens. How could anyone overlook him?

Touching Shi Mingjing again might actually kill Chu Wanning. Even once, even by accident, transgresses so far beyond the pale as to warrant striking him down with heavenly thunder.

To see him restored from death is enough. He wouldn’t dare ask for more.

The three of them part ways once they’ve made a complete circuit, none of them having caught wind of their quarry. Shi Mingjing and Song Quitong have obligations to attend to now that it seems their travel plans will be delayed until tomorrow, so they plan to walk back up to the Peak.

Before they depart, Shi Mingjing assures him that neither he nor his disciple are bothered by this turn of events; he even goes so far as to add that he anticipated this outcome, given Mo Ran’s history.

Chu Wanning very carefully pretends he isn’t humiliated as he bids them farewell.

Once they’ve disappeared from view, he bites down on his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. It should’ve occurred to him to expect this outcome, too; he has a vague, scattered recollection of a similar delay taking place when this had actually happened. He has no excuse for making everyone wait around and waste their time when he knows better.

How can he be this bad at navigating a dream of events he already lived, all tidily parceled out for him in a linear fashion? His mind is more or less spoon feeding him; if it’s all imagined anyway, shouldn’t he be better at this? He owes so much to these people, more than he can ever repay in full (a sea of blood drawn by his hands), yet he can’t even offer his memory of their ghosts a modicum of decency?

He bites down even harder. He can’t actually feel the pain, but he can taste the bittersweet burst of iron on his tongue.

Chu Wanning waits in front of Sisheng Peak’s gate for his wayward shixiong and shizun far longer than any normal, rational human being would.

He waits as the sun wheels across the sky and as it sets behind him, casting a long, frigid shadow. He waits as the stars start to rise, blinking awake one by one and regarding him with impersonal curiosity. He waits as he grows colder and colder, past the point of pain, and then past the point of numbness, and then past the point of pain again. He shivers until his muscles and nerves give out, too exhausted to continue the weary work of forcing warmth to circulate through his body.

If he weren’t a cultivator, he might’ve frozen solid and left behind an ice sculpture for Sisheng Peak to remember him by. A bit of qi flushes his body with renewed warmth—and renewed shivering—but can’t dispel the cold in its entirety (at least, not without employing a truly excessive and wasteful amount).

Just as he’s starting to seriously consider giving up in the face of such dire straits, he catches the faint sound of hooves striking against the hard-packed snow of the forest path, filling him with tentative optimism.

Xue Meng breaks through the treeline first, looking gallant and dashing on horseback; he’s always had a remarkably good seat, and his black leather tack makes for a striking contrast against his silvery horse. Rider and horse alike glitter in the moonlight.

Chu Wanning breathes easier at the sight of him, a tightness in his chest he hadn’t previously noticed loosening. Having Xue Meng out of his sight for so long made it feel as though he may never reappear.

Trailing behind Xue Meng, dozens of feet in the air and balancing on a pitch black sword, is Mo Ran.

It hasn’t even been that long since Chu Wanning last saw him—no more than a day or two, at most—and yet, the familiar shape of him, robed in shadow save for his handsome face, sends a tingling sensation coursing through his entire body, as though each of his nerves is reaching out for Mo Ran, one by one. Without meaning to, he smiles the tiniest of smiles.

In the split second before Mo Ran’s dark, liquid gaze meets his, he thinks, Shizun, we haven’t been apart for very long, but this disciple has missed you.

Mo Ran’s eyes seem to widen, although it’s difficult to tell at this distance, and Chu Wanning experiences a brief moment of panic as he wonders, Is he reading my mind?!

And then Mo Ran falls off of his sword.

He crashes his way down through the canopy of steadfast evergreens, and rather than stopping to consider how much closer Xue Meng is, or how Mo Ran is an exceptionally skilled cultivator capable of surviving such a fall with minimal harm, Chu Wanning acts on impulse and leaps up into the air. Using qinggong, he’s able to catch Mo Ran before he hits the ground.

Unfortunately, Mo Ran is approximately twice his size and moving several times faster, so catching Mo Ran swiftly turns into colliding with Mo Ran. Limbs thoroughly tangled, they flip through the air, each obviously competing for the right to cushion the other’s fall.

Mo Ran ends up on top, which technically makes it Chu Wanning’s victory; however, his win is somewhat soured by Mo Ran crushing the life out of him, and the entire situation is made spectacularly awkward by the position they’ve landed in.

They’re firmly pressed together, front-to-front, with their faces no more than a whisper apart. It is, quite possibly, the closest they’ve ever been.

It isn’t as foreign a sensation as it should be; Mo Ran is too heavy for his blanketing weight to be comfortable, but he exudes a soothing warmth, the long line of his body like a giant censer.

They stare at each other, unblinking.

Chu Wanning knows, with inexplicable certainty (a certainty he feels down to his bones), that something is about to happen; equally, he knows that whatever this something is, putting a name to it falls far outside his current reach. He could never be so audacious—nor so shameless—as to ascribe a greater significance than this innocuous moment deserves.

“I caught you, Shizun,” Chu Wanning informs him very quietly, trying not to stir the air between them.

Mo Ran smiles, his eyes squeezed shut by the force of it, and then he says, just as quietly, “Wanning, if you caught me, why are we both on the ground?”

Chu Wanning’s temper catches and sparks as quickly as dry brush beneath a mercurial summer sun. “You—! Who’s the idiot who fell in the first place?! Mo Weiyu, you shameless scoundrel! How can this disciple catch you properly when you’re so—so ridiculously oversized?”

He snaps his mouth shut as soon as he’s finished speaking, cringing inwardly as he remembers he had never once called his shizun by his courtesy name during his brief tenure as a normal disciple, no matter how angry he may have been with him.

His worries are all for naught; Mo Ran, as he is wont to do, remains completely oblivious. Still, a restless, sourceless anxiety plagues Chu Wanning as he lies beneath Mo Ran, waiting for that nameless something to happen. He starts to wriggle in place, attempting to worm his way out from underneath his shizun; at this, Mo Ran jolts into action and hauls himself up into a kneeling position, his knees bracketing Chu Wanning’s thighs. He then clasps his hands in front of him and bends forward in an approximation of a low bow. “This lowly shizun apologizes for his excessive size, Wanning. Begging your forgiveness.”

Mo Ran sounds almost cheeky, as though he’s teasing Chu Wanning in some way. Confused and more than a little agitated, Chu Wanning wriggles even more ferociously, this time attempting to pull his legs up toward his torso.

Abruptly, they both become aware of the sound of someone crashing through the snow at a rapid pace, clearly headed in their direction. They turn to look as one, and catch sight of Xue Meng sliding to a stop several feet away. His delicate, princely face, already red from exertion, grows even redder, and he stares at them in slack-jawed surprise.

In unspoken agreement, all three of them allow several long, silent seconds to pass. Piles of snow slip off of tree branches all around them, filling the small clearing with a percussive, arrhythmic beat.

“Mo Weiyu,” Xue Meng says, forming the name as though it’s a mouthful of blood he’s spitting out, “Just what, exactly, do you think you’re doing with my shidi?”

Chu Wanning appears perplexed by Xue Meng’s question, his sharp sword brows curving upward in graceful confusion.

Mo Ran, on the other hand, understands what Xue Meng means at once. He leaps away from Chu Wanning as though his disciple has spontaneously caught fire, patting down the front of his robes for good measure.

He’s torn between the urge to strangle Xue Meng and the urge to sing his praises. As gratifying and comfortably familiar as it had been to find himself atop Chu Wanning, he had, perhaps, gotten a little carried away. In the heat of the moment, with the thrill of reunion rushing straight to his head, it was hard to remember that this isn’t his Chu Wanning.

Now, he allows the bucket of ice water that is Xue Meng to cool him off, and reason returns to him in bits and pieces. This is his disciple, his charge, his pure, untouchable white moonlight. This Chu Wanning is the pinnacle of inviolable innocence, and has never once done any of—that.

Examining this Chu Wanning with clearer eyes provides a growing list of obvious differences.

He’s a strange mixture of the old and the new, the familiar and the unfamiliar. His skin is smooth and unlined, permanent shadows absent from the hollows of his eyes; he’s dressed in shades of Sisheng blue that cast cool shadows across his face, softening his sharp features; his hair, held high at the crown of his head by a gaudy guan encrusted with butterflies, drapes over his shoulders and down his back in an inky black fall, uninterrupted by streaks of white; and on the whole, he lacks the haggard, haunted air that clung to him like a strangling vine for years, offering little reprieve.

He’s short as can be, and bristling all over with indignation—for Mo Ran, for Xue Meng, for the world. Frost has bitten teasingly across the bridge of his nose and over the sides of his sharp cheeks, leaving most of his face flushed a rash-like red, and he’s still terribly disheveled from the fall.

He is, without question or doubt, Chu Wanning.

He’s perfect. He’s the best thing Mo Ran has ever seen.

No matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop smiling.

Chu Wanning keeps shooting these strange, shy little glances up at him, his eyes flickering in and out of view from beneath a curtain of dark lashes, and all Mo Ran can do is smile at him like an idiot until his whole face hurts from the force of it.

By the time Xue Meng speaks up again, Mo Ran has completely forgotten he’s there.

“I’m still here,” Xue Meng points out.

“That you are,” Mo Ran agrees.

“So? What the hell were you doing just now, sitting on Shidi like—like that? Did you hit your head on every tree in the forest when you fell off your sword? And hey, speaking of which, how the fuck did you fall off of your sword? Did you fly into a bird or something?”

“Aiyah, Mengmeng, how can you ask this old man so many questions and expect him to keep track of them? The youths of today truly have no respect for their elders.” Mo Ran rubs a hand across his chin pensively. “One question at a time, please.”

“Xue-shixiong, don’t pay any attention to him,” Chu Wanning cuts in. “It was this disciple’s fault that Shizun fell on me when I was catching him; I neglected to consider how heavy he is. And Shizun fell off his sword because—” He stops and stares at Mo Ran expectantly.

Mo Ran is powerless against his adorably stern gaze, but the truth—something like, Because the last time I saw Chu Wanning, he crumbled to ash in my arms, so seeing him whole again knocked me off balance. Also, he’s ethereally beautiful—is not an option here. “Because I swallowed a bug,” he lies, smugly pleased by his own cleverness.

“Because he swallowed a bug,” Chu Wanning echoes with a sigh.

Xue Meng appears both convinced and incredibly revolted. “Mo Weiyu, you—ugh. Whatever.” He turns to fully face Chu Wanning and lowers his head in deference as he says, “Shidi, this shixiong apologizes for his lateness. It took longer than expected for me to locate Shizun. Have you… have you been out here waiting for very long?”

“No,” Chu Wanning refutes. His chattering teeth and increasingly obvious shivering betray him.

“Ah. Well. Sorry, again.”

“It’s nothing. No need to apologize,” Chu Wanning says shortly. “We should return before it gets much later.”

“Right! Yes, absolutely, we should head up right now. Immediately. At once.”
Xue Meng is falling over himself to agree, obviously desperate for Chu Wanning’s approval; Mo Ran isn’t faring much better.

Chagrined, he gestures for Chu Wanning to lead the way.