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Chapter Text

A-Qing shatters, and it hurts. It’s agony of a kind she hasn’t felt since she died. The phantom pain of the tongue that was torn from her mouth, a sensation captured and made eternal in the moment of her death, could not have prepared her for it.

A ghost can only feel pain as a dulled memory. After existing in this state for such a long time, she has nothing to compare to this. It tears through her like lightning. She’s coming apart, pieces breaking and splitting from each other as everything that might still be called her self disintegrates.

Somewhere beyond the sound of her own scream, she can hear Xue Yang grunt in pain. Bright, buoyant living energy is draining from him rapidly, even as his remaining hand still clings to the talisman he’d slammed into her incorporeal shoulder. A moment ago, it had filled her with satisfaction – after all this time, he will die. The monstrous hunger that had ruled her for so long had surged and made her bloodied mouth water with the promise of finally knowing satisfaction. She had been ready to lose her grip on this world and move on to the space between, where she’d down Meng Po’s soup in desperate gulps to wash herself clean.

She would leave the rest to Wei Wuxian, who had been so earnest in his grief for Xiao Xingchen and his determination to carry out her revenge. For the first time in so many years, she had felt something like hope.

Now, as she cries out with the pain of her very soul being torn to pieces, she cannot focus on anything else at all.

A nearby road.

The pain retreats slowly, then all at once, leaving only a distant throb behind. At the same time, an impossible weight crashes into her and pins her down on a ground that feels solid under her feet. She stumbles, and her arm jolts forward on its own. Her trusty bamboo cane slams into the ground and keeps her upright.

Colour erupts in front of her eyes. It doesn’t blind her, not like she remembers the sun once had whenever she’d stepped out of a dark room. She still blinks rapidly, trying to make sense of the blue and brown and grey she finds herself surrounded by. She’s heavy with blood and sinew, skin and bone. A heart beats in her chest. Her tongue twitches in her mouth.

A dusty road stretches out in front of her. People move on it, and they must be alive, though she can’t sense their life force. She sees knobby, sickly trees and high grasses and a thin film of mist hovering just above the ground in some places. The air she breathes is clear. High above in the sky, white clouds lap at the sun.

“Guniang,” a deep voice says behind her, and A-Qing whips around.

She holds her breath. She does not gasp. Her eyes, which are used to the colours and the humid air in a way her mind is not, do not water. But it’s a close thing when she sees the man who has joined her on the road, whose back is ramrod straight and who is dressed in jet black robes and whose cheeks are lightly flushed with the unmistakeable colour of life.

Song Lan leans back, startled by her sudden reaction. “If you really cannot see,” he says after some hesitation, “you should walk more carefully.”

She hasn’t heard his voice since that unfortunate day they first met. She had forgotten how crisp his pronunciation was. It makes him sound like he’s reading out a poem. Only very belatedly, she remembers to let her eyes go unfocused and stops gripping her cane like she’s holding on for dear life.

“Thank you, thank you,” she says. Her tongue shapes the words without issue.

Song Lan takes his fuchen from where it’s tucked into the crook of his arm and nudges her shoulder. The touch is gentle, and her body barely reacts to it. She thinks she can feel every groove in the wood.

“There are fewer people on the side of the road. It’s safer to walk there.”

She follows his guidance like she’d done the day everything fell apart. Now that her mind is readjusting to the sensations of a living, sighted body, the intensity of the déjà-vu finally registers.

A moment ago, she’s sure – the pain has burnt the memory into her like a brand – she’d been listening to Xue Yang die in the familiar, lifeless streets of Yi City. If she recognises this road correctly, she isn’t too far from that place, but it’s like all the years that separate this moment now from the one she just left behind have been erased at the snap of a finger. Like everything that happened, from Xue Yang’s betrayal to Xiao Xingchen’s shattering to the years she spent haunting the walls of her old home as a vengeful ghost, was only a bad dream.

Song Lan has left her by the roadside, evidently thinking her safe for now. His steps are sure and measured, the scabbard of the sword strapped to his back reflects the bright sunlight, and his heavy robes swing around his feet. She knows how those robes looked soaked with blood. Nothing in the world could convince her that it had been a dream.

Her feet carry her further down the road, trailing after Song Lan. Slowly, the reality of what’s happening to her takes solid shape in her mind. She’s back in that moment that changed everything, on the day before Xiao Xingchen died and she lost it all. Something has sent her here after Xue Yang disintegrated her spirit, though she has no idea what. Maybe this is how the unluckiest souls spend their afterlife: cursed to forever relive the worst of what happened to them in life.

If that were the case, she could do nothing that deviates from what she’s already lived through. She’d be a passenger in her own body, unable to do anything but watch the horrors she already knows are about to occur.

A-Qing purses her exhilaratingly corporeal lips and does something she’s sure she hadn’t done back then. She lifts her cane, swings it at the sky, and twirls around a few times, until her head is ever so slightly dizzy and some of the marketgoers send her curious glances.

Nothing stops her from doing so. She’s still where and when she was before, by the roadside on that thrice-cursed day, and she’s beginning to settle back into the sensation of being made of flesh.

Her eyes again zero in on Song Lan. He’s a few steps ahead, asking one of the passers-by about a blind daozhang, and A-Qing’s resolution hardens.

“Daozhang!” she calls out, almost like she had back then. “Why are you looking for that other daozhang?”

Song Lan freezes, and A-Qing’s chest tightens. His eyes, which she now knows used to be Xiao Xingchen’s, are wide and hopeful, and his voice wavers.

“You have seen him before?”

There’s no need to interrogate him. He might end up thinking her naive, but she knows his character. She’d trust him blindly.

Taking care to keep her gaze somewhere above his left shoulder, she clutches her cane in front of her chest and nods. “I’ve been living with a blind daozhang for some time! The sword he carries has frost flowers on it, right?”

Song Lan nods numbly, shakes himself, and responds with a strained, “Yes.”

A-Qing smiles. “We stay in a yizhuang not far from here. You can come with me, daozhang!”

“Thank you, guniang,” Song Lan says gravely. “Thank you.”

“Ah, you can buy me something as thanks,” she quips as she turns them towards the road. “Finder’s reward. I want some pretty rouge for my cheeks, daozhang. But you’ll have to pick the colour, because I can’t see!”

Too overwhelmed to respond properly, Song Lan hums vague agreement. A-Qing’s bamboo pole taps out the way ahead, and she lets it lead her down a path even a hundred years of horrors couldn’t make her forget.

The scattered trees with their gnarled bark look like old friends. The gates of Yi City are open, and though it had never been a busy town, there are people out on the streets, chatting and going about their days. Some of them have familiar faces, and one or two greet her when she walks past. She remembers their names. She doesn’t want to think about the fate they’d met at Xue Yang’s hands.

A fluffy cloud moves courteously to the side, letting sunlight shine down on them that warms A-Qing’s skin. Song Lan walks steadily behind her, and his solid presence soothes the parts of her that still feel brittle.

Over the years, she’d grown used to taking comfort in his company, and it seems like the habit hasn’t yet left her. Whenever Xue Yang had gone on one of his frenzied errands out of town and left Song Lan behind to guard Xiao Xingchen’s corpse, A-Qing had followed the subdued pulse of his resentful energy and sat by his side, sometimes for days at a time. After she’d been unable to save his life, she had owed him that loyalty. And it’d made things better, to know that there was one more soul who understood.

She can’t lead him to his death again. This might all be an illusion, some cruel trick played on them by the Gods. But if she’s willing to consider the Gods playing tricks on a petty nobody like her, it’s just as likely that someone in Heaven took pity on her. If it’s real, if she has really by some means been sent back in time, she can’t let this chance slip through her fingers.

She can change things. She can make Xue Yang pay and save Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan’s lives before it’s too late.

“Is the daozhang a friend of yours?” she asks innocently.

Song Lan hesitates, just like he had the last time. The answer seems to stick in his throat. “Yes.”

A-Qing inclines her head, pretending to think. “I guess he mentioned an old friend once.”

“He did?” Song Lan asks. Even in his clear voice, his disbelief sounds raw.

“Mh-hm,” she hums. It’s true, after all, even though Xiao Xingchen hadn’t talked about his former companion often. A-Qing never had found out exactly what had happened between him and Song Lan, but Wei Wuxian had heard the rumours people told about it. The memories that had become hers during the Empathy spell had filled in some blanks.

If things go well, she wants to hear the story from Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan’s own mouths this time.

“I’m A-Qing,” she adds while she leads Song Lan around a corner. “Why don’t you tell me your name, daozhang?”

“Apologies, guniang.” He stops, though briefly, to bow to her. “My name is Song Lan, courtesy name Zichen.”

“Good, good. It’s good to know what to call you,” she muses. “The man who lives with us, it’s been three years and he still hasn’t told us his name! He’s been mooching off two blind people for so long, but he still doesn’t even want to share who he is!”

She casts a subtle glance at Song Lan out of the corner of her eyes. His face has darkened.

“What sort of man lives with you and the daozhang?”

“A bad man! We found him dying in a ditch, and daozhang healed him and saved his life, and now he doesn’t want to leave! He’s mean to me all the time, and he always tries to skip out on his chores, and I know he’s shady because he never tells us anything about himself!” Gritting her teeth, she pitches her voice down to an irritated mutter. “Son of a pig and a lame donkey. Stupid, dirty, nine-fingered bastard! I hate him so much, but daozhang says we can’t throw him out.”

The thought alone makes her throat tighten and her flesh-and-bone arms tingle with fury. Her very limbs are urging her to move them, a feeling not unlike the resentful hunger that had driven all her actions for the past years, and she brings her cane down hard on the ground to relieve the tension. If she employs some creativity, she can imagine that she’s hitting Xue Yang’s head.

Beside her, Song Lan’s steps have become very stiff. “You say he has nine fingers?”

Instantly, her anger shifts into a vicious sense of satisfaction. “Yeah. But he never said how he lost that finger either!”

“How can you tell? You couldn’t have seen it.”

“Bah,” A-Qing spits and forces her brows into a frown to cover up how very proud she is that he’s picked up on her hint. “He’s lived with us for so long, of course I’ve noticed! Just because I’m blind doesn’t mean that I can’t notice things!”

Song Lan makes a noise of acknowledgement. With him walking behind her, A-Qing can’t properly look at him without giving herself away, and while she thinks she might drop her act soon once they’re all safe and Xue Yang is dead, the first person she tells should be Xiao Xingchen. So she keeps her eyes on the road and slows down her steps, falling behind just a little until she can make out the contours of Song Lan’s face at the edge of her vision.

He’s frowning heavily. The hand that’s carrying his fuchen is clenched hard around its handle, turning his knuckles bone white with the effort. Something about the sight sends a shiver down A-Qing’s spine.

She tilts her head in his direction, takes two careful steps closer to him, and lets her blank eyes go very wide. “Why are you asking, daozhang? Do you know that man?”

Song Lan twitches. The line of his mouth is thin and taut, but what he ends up saying is, “No. A mere twist of fate, I’m sure.”

He doesn’t elaborate, just keeps walking straight ahead, and it’s hard to tell from his stony face what he’s thinking. A-Qing takes the lead again, worrying at her lower lip. Her fingers itch with another one of those nigh-physical urges. She wants to cling to his sleeve, beg him to listen, and tell him everything she knows, so that he’ll face Xue Yang knowing about the corpse powder and take his head off before Xue Yang even gets to talk.

But there’s no reason why she would know Xue Yang’s name when Xiao Xingchen doesn’t. And he’d never believe her if she told him that this is not the first time she’s lived this day. She’ll simply have to hope that this puny seed of suspicion will be enough to steel his mind and give him an edge in the fight ahead.

-

They arrive at the yizhuang a little later than they had the first time around. Song Lan, who seems troubled in a more sombre way than A-Qing remembers him being, stops in his tracks halfway down the street, and when A-Qing looks up, she catches a glimpse of Xue Yang’s grinning figure as he steps into the yizhuang’s entrance.

The rage that floods her catches her off guard. She should be used to it – she’d spent years observing Xue Yang from the shadows, years during which her hatred of him had been the only thing keeping her tied to the living world. But somehow, seeing the crook of his mouth, his sharp canines, and the jovial swing in his step almost makes her vision white out.

When she catches herself, her heart is beating hard and Song Lan has gone pale as a sheet. Moving quietly in the way only a cultivator can, he touches his fuchen to her shoulder again and guides her closer to the yizhuang. Both of them wince at the sound of Xue Yang’s cackling laugh.

“Don’t speak,” Song Lan whispers. “This must be the man you spoke of. I know him.”

A-Qing doesn’t know if she could speak if she wanted to. She crouches down below the yizhuang’s shoddy window, clutches her cane to her chest, and breathes deeply to stop her head from spinning.

“Whose turn is it today?” says a voice, and all her resolve cracks like cheap pottery.

The words are muffled by the old walls, barely audible over the rush of blood inside A-Qing’s own head, but they send a wave of such warmth through her body that it feels like her heart stills. Tears well up in her eyes, and she hurriedly squeezes her lids shut to keep them from spilling. Her throat is tight. A childish impulse takes hold of her: she could jump to her feet now, run inside their yizhuang, and see him again. She could make up some sob story to cry about, and Xiao Xingchen would soothe her, pat her head, maybe even take her into his arms and let her cry snot and tears into his pretty white robes.

She wants nothing more. It’s a desire so overwhelming that this living body feels too small for it, and she for a moment yearns to cast off her skin and let all that she’s feeling leak out of her in swathes of resentment. But when she forces her eyes open again, they are almost level with Song Lan’s trembling hand around the fuchen, and that’s a grim reminder that she has to keep her wits about her.

“Come back, I’ll go,” Xue Yang’s grating voice calls inside the house. She’s almost missed the entirety of his stupid stick-drawing game. He sounds joyful in a way he hadn’t been in years in her own time, and his obvious glee at having fooled Xiao Xingchen is nauseating.

She holds onto that feeling and uses it to fuel the remains of her rage until her eyes stop burning. All she has to do is wait. Once Xue Yang is dead, she can come back here and spend the rest of the day talking to Xiao Xingchen. Nothing is going to take him from her ever again.

To the backdrop of Xue Yang’s playful mockery and Xiao Xingchen’s gentle laughter, she shifts around and cranes her head up to look at Song Lan. He looks back, his eyes wide and glossy, and unfreezes to tap the fuchen against her shoulder.

A-Qing follows him obligingly, first behind the house and then down the street, while behind them, Xue Yang whistles a jaunty tune as he leaves the yizhuang in the direction of the market.

Song Lan leads her to down two blocks of houses before he finally stops, takes a few laboured breaths, and turns around to face her.

“Qing-guniang,” he says. His pronunciation is sharp as a sword-edge again. “You said this man lived with you for years?”

“Three,” A-Qing confirms. “Why, daozhang? Who is he?”

Song Lan opens his mouth, clearly searching for words, then curtly shakes his head and presses his lips together. “He is a noted criminal,” he settles on saying. “A murderer and a cultivator of the demonic path. I’ve encountered him before. What has he done in the time he lived with you?”

“I told you, he’s been mean!” A-Qing pulls her shoulders up, making herself small the way she would if she were scared, and pitches her voice higher. “He lounges about all day, and he cheats the vendors at the market when daozhang isn’t watching. And he goes on night hunts with daozhang, hunting walking corpses and such.”

“He helps him?” Song Lan glances back up in the direction of the yizhuang. “Do they get along well?”

The question is rough around the edges, like it hurts him to even consider the possibility. A-Qing’s fingers tighten around her bamboo pole.

“Well enough,” she lies. “Daozhang laughs about all his stupid jokes, but daozhang’s a good man, and he doesn’t like all the cheating and how mean that guy is, so they disagree a lot too.”

If Xiao Xingchen later wants to confess to Song Lan just how much he’d liked their strange housemate, it will be in the safety of a world in which Xue Yang is a corpse being feasted on by dogs and crows. He surely wouldn’t be mad at A-Qing for lying if he knew it saved their lives, and for now, she needs Song Lan steadfast in his goal to kill Xue Yang.

She allows a few tears to spill out and wet her cheeks. “Song-daozhang,” she whines, stumbling closer to him on unsure feet. “Do you think we’re in danger? If he’s a murderer, do you think he’ll hurt us? What should we do?”

Her hand nearly brushes against his sleeve, and Song Lan pulls his hand back as if cut. A heartbeat later, he glares down at his own arm like it’s Xue Yang himself and smooths over his expression.

“Stay calm, guniang,” he says firmly. “I’ll take care of it. Go back home, and promise you won’t tell the daozhang any of what we just discussed. It would only disturb him unnecessarily.”

The blade of his sword – Fuxue, A-Qing’s mind provides, though she isn’t sure if she’d ever known its name before – gleams in the sun when he pulls it out of its scabbard. A-Qing bites her cheek and lowers her head to mask the flash of anticipation that runs through her.

“Yes, yes, of course,” she says. “Song-daozhang, you promise you be careful, yes? That guy is crafty, and daozhang always says he’s really quick in a fight!”

Song Lan, who has already fixed his black eyes on the street corner where Xue Yang had disappeared earlier, pauses and turns back to her, subtly lowering his head. “I’ll take care.”

With that, he steps onto his sword and takes off, a blur of black and silver in the sky. A-Qing watches until he disappears behind the shabby roofs of the surrounding houses, then tucks her cane under her arm and darts after him as quickly as her legs can carry her.

-

On his sword, Song Lan is much faster than her, but A-Qing has the advantage of knowing where he’ll find Xue Yang on his way back from his shopping trip. The few townspeople that aren’t at the market turn their heads when she rushes past, but she pays them no mind. The layout of these streets has become a part of her, and she weaves through their labyrinth effortlessly. When she reaches the little patch of forest where she’d watched Song Lan die on this day all those years ago, she jumps over knotty roots and fallen branches until the muscles in her thin legs ache and her ears pick up on the clang of swords.

The timing is still a little off, then. Last time, A-Qing had arrived before Song Lan and Xue Yang had started fighting, but this new order of events suits her fine. Maybe it’s just that this Song Lan hasn’t hesitated to attack.

“Speak!” Song Lan’s shout cuts through the heavy air. A bird flies up, startled out of its nest.

A-Qing hurries in the direction of the noise, and a moment later, she spots two dark-robed figures dancing around each other amidst the trees.

Song Lan is on the offence, keeping Xue Yang busy with one precise strike after the other. “You could have taken your revenge at any point. Why stay close to Xiao Xingchen for so long?”

“Can’t I just have some fun when I’m bored? It’s not like I had anything else to do!” Xue Yang’s cursed sword – Jiangzai, and how does she know this? – meets each of Song Lan’s attacks with a sharp noise while its owner ducks and twists out of range, sometimes escaping the edge of the blade by a hair’s breadth. Still, he’s grinning almost manically.

Quickly, A-Qing slips behind a large tree trunk and crouches down. Her teeth are digging into her lower lip; she’d hoped that Song Lan would go straight for the kill. Her crude plan might already have failed, and it makes her blood run cold.

“Why not spend a little time watching a skilled swordsman like Xiao Xingchen-daozhang nobly serve his community? I’m sure you can imagine, Song-daozhang,” Xue Yang continues nonchalantly, “that he has always tirelessly taken care of every threat he heard of. How fortunate I am to have a friend like that!”

A series of metallic clanks rings through the forest in rapid succession. It’s followed by a quiet, punched-out noise, and A-Qing scrambles to peek through a low bush next to her hiding place.

Xue Yang has disengaged and is casually twirling his sword in his hand, but one of his sleeves has been slashed to reveal a shallow cut on his upper arm. A few steps away from him, Song Lan levels Fuxue at him, ready to attack again.

“Make this short,” he bellows. A-Qing’s racing heart lightens.

“What, and if I say the right thing, you’ll let me live?” Xue Yang giggles. The next moment, he darts forward like a cornered snake, swiping at Song Lan’s legs. Song Lan reacts in time, but Xue Yang spins around easily to assault him with an onslaught of ugly feints and stabs.

“Did you know,” he lilts while Song Lan steadily parries him, “that when a person is poisoned with corpse powder, they’re pretty much indistinguishable from a walking corpse? Not even Shuanghua can tell the difference! And if you cut out that person’s tongue so they can’t cry for help…”

Xue Yang lunges. Song Lan’s lightning-quick response harshly knocks his sword to the side, but Xue Yang holds onto its hilt, follows the movement with his whole body, and jumps backwards. A flick of his wrist sends out a sword glare, which Song Lan only just manages to block.

Xue Yang lands a few feet away. He’s still grinning.

“I’ll let you fill in the blanks,” he calls. “What do you think, how many walking corpses has the helpful daozhang killed over the years?”

A-Qing digs her nails into the soft forest soil as she watches the blood drain from Song Lan’s face.

“You bastard,” he chokes out. “You filthy bastard.”

Fuxue seems to give off an eerie glow, which A-Qing is fairly sure is not reflected sunlight. Xue Yang huffs a laugh, but Song Lan is on him before he can say a word. He’s frighteningly quick. In a whirl of black robes, he moves through an unforgiving flow of strikes that leave Xue Yang no choice but to fall back step by step, and A-Qing realises with a bout of relief that he’s no longer holding back.

“You deceived him—” A ringing clash of metal. “You took advantage of his blindness—” Song Lan strikes again before Xue Yang can recover from the last one, piercing straight through his guard.

Xue Yang jolts backwards, but Fuxue’s very tip slices through the skin of his cheek. Even from a distance, A-Qing can see the dangerous gleam in his eyes that means he’s recalculating his strategy.

She knows what will happen next, and she’ll never forget what follows if she lets it. So far, Xue Yang had been all but digging his own grave with his taunts. Now, he leaps out of Song Lan’s range, wipes the blood off his cheek, and spits out his next words.

“And who’s the reason he’s blind in the first place, Song-daozhang?”

Song Lan startles. It’s subtle for now, and he’s got his sword back in attack position almost instantly, but A-Qing knows what to look for. The wave of grief that crosses his face is unmistakeable.

Xue Yang latches onto that sign of weakness like a leech.

“Funny that you think you can barge in here and make this any of your business,” he scoffs. “Last thing I heard, you told Xiao Xingchen you never wanted to see his face again! And now you dare talk to me like you’re still his friend—”

He’s cut off by a sword glare, followed by another strike of Song Lan’s sword. He deflects both. Song Lan keeps up his attacks, but his face is twisted in a pained grimace, and he’s slipping. Each blow in the barrage he throws at Xue Yang looks more desperate than the last.

A-Qing hadn’t really picked up on it the last time. To her untrained eyes, the whole fight had looked like a chaotic flurry of swords and billowing robes. But even from her patchy memories, Wei Wuxian had been able to tell that Song Lan had had the upper hand – had been the better swordsman and so close to winning several times – right until he’d lost his footing.

In a moment, Xue Yang will slip a hand into his robes to send out a cloud of corpse powder, and Song Lan won’t see it coming. It’s all going to repeat, only a little later in the day and a few steps further into the forest. A-Qing’s attempt to strengthen Song Lan’s resolve hadn’t been enough. Seven years of grief and resentment lodge in her throat, and she wants to scream.

She’s out of the bushes before she can really think about it.

“Leave him alone!” she shrieks at the top of her lungs. “You sick piece of shit! You dog-fucked slimy gutter scum!”

Both men freeze in the motion. Xue Yang’s wide eyes dart over to meet hers, then back to Song Lan, and for a moment, he looks puzzled. Then, Song Lan spins them around to put his own body between him and A-Qing and shouts over his shoulder, “Qing-guniang! Get out of here!”

A-Qing stubbornly shakes her head, but any words she might say to him die in her mouth. She can’t look away from Xue Yang’s face, which is twisting into a snarl she had seen only once before, shortly before Shuanghua had cut her tongue out.

His sharp teeth are on full display. What he’s doing with his lips can barely be called a grin, though the corners of his mouth are pulled up in a caricature of a smile.

“Look at that, if it isn’t Little Blind!” he calls, and there’s an edge to the cloyingly sweet cadence of his voice that cuts like a dagger. “Are you saying you’re in cahoots with the noble daozhang here? I’ve got to hand it to you, I knew you were a faithless little liar, but a backstab like this is low even for you!”

Without warning, he throws Jiangzai’s blade forward again, but Song Lan is there, parrying every blow before it can get anywhere near A-Qing.

Xue Yang isn’t even looking at him.

“We share our meals for three years,” he snarls, “and the moment some stuck-up asshole comes along and spews some lies about me, you take his side?”

“Shut up!” A-Qing screams back. “You lied to us! I always knew you weren’t worth the dirt under daozhang’s shoes, but you’re even worse than that! You’re a foul lowlife murderer and you’re fucked in the head, and I hope you die, I hope you never drag your grimy mug anywhere near daozhang ever again!”

Tears sting in her eyes now, which she can’t make any sense of. She should have gotten used to the sight of his face by now. Her half-baked plan to distract him is working. There is no reason for her hands to be shaking so violently.

At the same time, Xue Yang’s terrifying smile falters. “Where’s Xiao Xingchen, then? Didn’t he want to help his old friend? Didn’t you tell him who I am?”

A thin wisp of black smoke rises from Jiangzai’s blade and curls in tune with Xue Yang’s cold voice. That’s the only warning they get before he swings it at the ground, throwing up a cloud of leaves and dirt into Song Lan’s face. Song Lan’s sleeve blocks most of it, and he’s quick enough to dodge the sword glare that follows, but it’s enough to briefly break his guard of A-Qing.

“Qing-guniang!” he shouts again, more urgent this time.

A-Qing pays it no mind. She clenches her fists, stabs her cane at the ground, and shouts, “And what if I do? What if I run back right now and tell him? He’ll cut your head off himself, and I’ll dance on your grave, and—”

Xue Yang’s eyes go wide and wild. Song Lan jumps to stop him, but he’s too late. Quick as a whip, Xue Yang splits the blade of his sword in two. One half, he points at Song Lan to halt his attack, somewhere in the region of his throat. The other, he throws straight at A-Qing.

A hot, stinging pain shoots through her shoulder. It’s sharp in a way only a corporeal injury can be, muscle and sinew and blood vessels all screaming in unison, and yet, it’s nothing compared to the agony she went through when her spirit was torn apart.

A high-pitched cry escapes from her mouth all the same. A moment later, the split blade is wrenched out of her flesh again – Xue Yang has called it back just in time to stop Song Lan from taking his head off.

A-Qing presses her palm to the wound, trying to stop the blood from gushing out. The blade must have pierced her straight through, because she can feel something warm wet the back of her robes, too. It might have broken bone. The thought is sickening.

But she’s breathing just fine, and her heart is beating fast. She blinks to clear the tears out of her eyes and finds Song Lan, tall and straight-backed and furious, driving Xue Yang back with all his strength.

“Xue Yang!” he thunders. “My patience for you has run out!”

Xue Yang is fighting with two blades, and despite his impressive speed, he needs both of them to block Song Lan’s rapid attacks. The scratch on his cheek has wet half his face with blood. It doesn’t stop him from forcing his lips back into a grin.

“Stay out of this! Can’t you see this is a domestic dispute? If you want a say in this, where were you the past three years?”

“Stop talking!” Song Lan snaps and, in one brisk swing of his sword, cuts a hole in the side of Xue Yang’s robes and torso.

Xue Yang doesn’t even flinch. “Didn’t you want me talking before?” he spits back. His right hand draws a quick sword seal, and one of his blades flies out, spins around mid-air, and rushes right at Song Lan’s broad back.

A-Qing holds her breath, but she’s starting to understand why Wei Wuxian had thought so highly of Song Lan’s sword work. Fuxue slices through the air in one expansive arch, deflects the strike Xue Yang had aimed at Song Lan’s chest, then slams straight into Jiangzai’s other half.

It’s sent skitting over the uneven forest ground, and A-Qing throws herself forward to catch it. There’s a bit of her blood still on the tip of the blade.

Xue Yang bursts into laughter, like the loss of half his sword is one of Xiao Xingchen’s mediocre jokes.

“Come on, is that all you can do? I’d have thought they’d teach you better at your temple!” He barely sidesteps a lash of Song Lan’s fuchen, the ends of which whizz through the air like a thousand whips. “But then, your shifu wasn’t much of a match either when—”

The rest of his sentence dies in a gargling cough. He stops dead, smile still in place but eyes wide with shock. Fuxue’s blade is lodged deep in his chest. A-Qing catches a glimpse of silver where the tip juts out of Xue Yang’s back.

Song Lan’s knuckles are stark white around the sword’s hilt. Between heavy breaths, he gasps, “Do not dare mention him with your filthy mouth.”

Almost innocuously, Xue Yang blinks down at his own chest. “Hah. Song Zichen-daozhang.” He lets out a wet, rattling breath. “Really didn’t think you had it in you.”

Jiangzai’s other half falls to the ground, where it hits soft leaves and moss. Xue Yang’s black eyes gloss over, but they still flicker from tree to tree as if searching for something. When he finds A-Qing crouched on the ground, they go clear again. She holds his gaze.

His body sags forward. Song Lan winces and sidesteps it, pulling his sword free, and Xue Yang lands on the soft moss with a dull thump. Red blood drips onto the leaves from Fuxue’s blade. Song Lan is staring down at the sight, his face pale and entirely blank.

The wound in A-Qing’s shoulder throbs painfully, which is only just enough to shake her out of her stupor. As soon as she dares to move a muscle, though, her thoughts start racing. She pushes herself to her feet with the help of her bamboo pole – her shoulder protests loudly – and wills her shaky legs to move her closer to Song Lan.

“Song-daozhang!” she calls out. “Song-daozhang, is he—”

She can’t bring herself to say it, even after years of wanting Xue Yang dead. It’s fine; Song Lan would expect an ordinary girl her age to shy away from this kind of thing. Slowly, the panic drains out of her limbs along with all her strength, making her shiver.

Song Lan lifts his head. He’s so hoarse she struggles to understand him. “Yes. Guniang, your shoulder—” he starts, but the blood loss and the sheer force of her relief ring in A-Qing’s ears, and she has no time for his hesitation.

She’s on the next step already, thinking about what they’ll tell Xiao Xingchen. Maybe she can convince Song Lan to back her up and tell a bold-faced lie, something about a yaoguai that had attacked their housemate. Then Song Lan could pretend that he’d tried to help but arrived too late, and Xiao Xingchen would never have to find out that their housemate had been Xue Yang, and he’d never learn about all the people he’d killed.

He’ll mourn his friend. But A-Qing will be there to help him, and he’ll be happy to meet Song Lan again. Together, they’ll manage. Xue Yang is dead on the ground and won’t hurt anyone ever again, and it will be okay. She’s won. By the grace of whatever God decided to give her this second chance, they’ll be alright.

Tears are spilling from her eyes like water from a well.

Song Lan clears his throat. It sounds strangely distorted. “Guniang, you should sit down. I’ll treat your wound. I have bandages, and I should be able to stop the bleeding, but we’ll have to…”

He trails off, and a heavy frown settles on his brow when he looks off to the side. “What is—”

Something strange happens, then. A leaf that had fallen from a tree vanishes out of the air. A-Qing follows Song Lan’s gaze and is met with an incomprehensible sight: for all the time she’d spent blind, she doesn’t think she could ever have imagined the sight of nothing.

Song Lan whips back around in shock, but he’s only half there. In front of A-Qing’s eyes, he dissolves, alongside the trees and the moss and the blue sky and Xue Yang’s dead body on the ground beside them.

Frozen in shock, A-Qing tries to look down at her own hands, but she can’t move. Her hands tingle, then every single spot of her skin. She feels the weight of her physical body leave her, just before everything goes dark.

Chapter Text

A nearby road.

She doesn’t know how long it takes until gravity and physical sensation return to her. However long it is, and whether or not time is still real in the first place, she has no recollection of anything after watching Song Lan’s terrified face vanish from existence. She’s just hit with the feeling of being weighed down by her body again, and when the colours return, she’s back on the road.

The sky is still blue. The path is still dusty. The people who walk past are the same she’d seen just a shichen or so ago. It’s the same damn day again, the same godforsaken morning. Somehow, she’s been sent back a second time.

This time, instead of pain and confusion, the first thing she feels is rage. It makes her vision blur and her throat ache. Her nails leave sharp dents in the flesh of her palm. Mindful of the people on the road, she doesn’t scream or kick, but she wishes she could somehow tear through the fabric of reality with a swing of her bamboo cane.

She had succeeded. She’d seen Xue Yang dead on the ground, and Song Lan had been alive and not a corpse turned into a mindless puppet, and they’d been going to walk back to the yizhuang and meet Xiao Xingchen. She can’t come up with a single reason why whoever had sent her here would rip her from a world where everything had gone right.

“Guniang,” a clear, familiar voice says. “You should walk more carefully if you cannot see.”

It takes all her willpower not to spin around again and startle Song Lan, but she manages. The wood of Song Lan’s fuchen that touches her shoulder feels real. He’s whole and solid again when he steps in front of her, advising her to walk by the side of the road. A-Qing allows herself to look right at him to count all the minute twitches of his stoic face.

“Thank you, mister,” she chirps, and Song Lan nods to her before he turns back towards the road and his quest to ask the passers-by about Xiao Xingchen’s whereabouts. As always, his presence calms her jittery nerves a little.

At the very least, then, going back in time had brought him back too. Things have just been reset, just like they had been the first time.

It’s only that she doesn’t know why. Her cane stabs fiercely at the dusty ground while she wracks her brain for a reason. Had she died again and released her own soul to be picked up by whatever keeps dragging her back to this moment? She’d been wounded, the blood had soaked through the front of her robes, but it hadn’t felt like dying. Death is a lot more mundane than the eerie emptiness that’d claimed the whole forest around her. And she doesn’t think Xue Yang had hit anything vital in the first place.

It’s still the only idea she can come up with, so it’ll have to be good enough for now. The alternative – that there’s no reason at all, and she’s trapped in an endlessly repeating cycle of the same horrible shichen of her life – fills her mind with so much dread that her thoughts blur and her heart seizes, and she can’t have that. Maybe Xue Yang had poisoned his blade with something that causes a slow and painless death. She doesn’t know enough about poisons to say if that would be possible.

She hadn’t even had the chance to talk to Xiao Xingchen.

A few steps further down the road, Song Lan has come to a halt in front of a man A-Qing is seeing for the third time now. “Excuse me,” he says in the politely monotonous voice of someone who’s asked this question a million times. “Have you seen a blind daozhang carrying a sword?”

The ache in A-Qing’s chest is sudden and clear, and she winces at the memory of being torn apart from the inside. The muscles in her whole torso tense up in an attempt to keep her steps and heartbeat even. Slowly but surely, her legs move further down the road, following the guide of her bamboo pole.

She throws one more subtle glance back at Song Lan, who is thanking the passer-by for his help, even though he hasn’t told him anything useful. Maybe keeping him out of this whole mess is the kindest option. He seems fine, or at least his face doesn’t show any of the dejection he must be feeling after years of searching. A-Qing can find him later. She just needs to clear her head first.

She’s halfway to the yizhuang before she realises that her breaths come shallow and quick, and her hands are shaking like brittle autumn leaves. On wobbly legs, she ducks into an alleyway and breathes in deep, presses her lips together and her eyes shut, and lets all the air rush out through her nose again.

Her head falls back against the stone wall of some hapless family’s house. In the sky above, a small, white cloud splits from a larger one and continues on its way past the sun. It’s kind of pretty. She’d liked this kind of stuff when she’d still had eyes to see it with.

When she steps back onto the main street, the insides of her chest still feel like they’ve been scraped raw, but her legs have regained a modicum of strength. It’s more sheer stubbornness than true composure, but it’s badly needed, because as soon as she rounds the corner of the street that will lead her to the yizhuang, she almost walks head-first into Xue Yang.

So he’s been restored as well, which is just her luck. Gripping her cane so hard it hurts, she forces herself not to step out of the way. She hadn’t thought that she’d be that much slower on her own than she’d been with Song Lan. She’d expected to be able to hide and wait for him to leave.

Thankfully, Xue Yang doesn’t seem to be in the mood for mockery or stupid games and simply hops to the side before the cane can bump into him. His whole face lights up.

“Little Blind!” he trills brightly. “Back already?”

A-Qing stops in her tracks, straightens her spine, and pulls her lips into the kind of pout this body remembers using all the time. If she looks suspicious now, she might well end up dead, and while there’s a chance that would only send her back to the road she just came from, she doesn’t want to risk it.

“What’s that to you?” she grumbles. “I can go where I like!”

Xue Yang ignores her protest. “You got lucky on your trip to town? How many poor idiots did you rob blind this lovely morning?”

There is, in fact, a number of coins weighing down her pockets, though she doesn’t know anymore where exactly they’d come from. In any case, she isn’t going to give Xue Yang the satisfaction of hearing anything about it.

She sticks her tongue out at him. “No one at all! Daozhang says stealing is wrong and you know that!”

“Then daozhang should put you on a leash.” Stretching like a cat, Xue Yang crosses his arms behind his head and bends sideways to croon in her ear, “Any chance you wanna head down to the market today? There’d be more pockets to pick there.”

To stress his point, he wiggles the basket that’s dangling from his hands enticingly. A-Qing keeps staring straight ahead into the middle distance and hopes with all her might that he can’t tell how fast her heart is beating.

“No way. It’s your turn, and you just don’t want to go because you’re a lazy freeloader!”

Xue Yang sways back out of her personal space, but not before a huff of breath brushes her cheek that makes her hair stand on end. “Fine, fine. No need to get grumpy. You want anything?”

“I want you to fall down a hole and disappear!” she snaps, and Xue Yang breaks into giggles.

His hand comes down on her head. The touch of each finger sends spikes of ice through her skin and down her bloodstream, and he does a terrible thing: he ruffles her hair.

“See you later, Little Blind!”

A-Qing jerks out of her shocked paralysis, grabs onto her cane, and spins around to hit at Xue Yang’s legs. She’s too late. He’s already out of reach, waltzing down the road with the basket swinging happily in his hand.

She doesn’t dare to breathe until he’s out of sight. Still a little dazed, she follows the familiar street past the houses of neighbours Xue Yang had killed in another time and finally ends up at the yizhuang.

The door swings aside obligingly, and the scent of house dust and incense nearly chokes her. Inside, the yizhuang looks so different from the room where she had stood vigil over Xiao Xingchen’s corpse for so many years. The floors are swept, and the wood of the window shutters is brittle but not yet disintegrating. There is an earthen bowl on their little dinner table, which is empty now but used to be filled with nuts and fruit she and Xiao Xingchen would collect on walks through the woods. The coffin that had become her bed is there, and the one that had housed Xiao Xingchen’s eerily preserved corpse stands neatly closed in the corner of the room, awaiting the unclaimed bodies of deceased travellers.

A clattering sound drifts in from the side room, followed by soft, measured steps. Xiao Xingchen steps through the door unceremoniously, as he has done every day for the past three years.

His robes are a clean, unstained white. There’s not a spot of blood on the bandages that cover the hollows of his eye sockets. His neck is unmarred. A-Qing’s eyes cling to the faint patches of red that shine through the clear skin of his cheeks, and through a film of tears, she watches him smile.

“A-Qing?” he guesses. “Is that you?”

“Daozhang,” she says and knows instantly that she’s made a mistake.

A line appears between Xiao Xingchen’s brows, just above his bandages. “What’s the matter? You sound worried.”

She can’t help it. She bursts into tears.

“Oh,” Xiao Xingchen says. “A-Qing, what happened? Come here, try to breathe.”

One of his slender hands reaches out to brush her arm, and A-Qing takes that as permission to fling herself at him. He stiffens in surprise, but only for a moment; before long, he eases into the hug with a low sigh. One of his hands settles between her trembling shoulders, while the other finds her head, stroking her hair in rhythmic motions. A-Qing digs her fingers into the fabric of his robes and buries her face in his chest, where she lets herself dissolve into hiccuping sobs.

He’s so warm. If she focuses hard enough, she can feel the beating of his heart against her cheek. It’s an overwhelming reminder that this is not the cold, long-dead corpse Xue Yang had refused to bury, but her daozhang, who tells bad stories, picks mushrooms by the roadside, and can never get the noodle dough right. Her first friend. The man who’d been to her what she’d imagine a brother to be to a sister, and whom she hadn’t been able to save.

She’s getting a lot of snot on his robes.

“It’s alright,” he tells her. His voice has always had this deep, melodious timbre, which could soothe grieving villagers and her and Xue Yang’s moods alike. “Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

Her arms tighten around his ribcage, and she stifles a low wail against the collar of his outer robe.

“I’m so scared,” she confesses. “Daozhang, I don’t know what to do.”

His hand keeps patting her head, but she can hear the frown in his voice when he asks, “What are you scared of? Has something happened in town that I should know about?”

A-Qing’s heart stutters helplessly. Her tongue is heavy as lead in her mouth, so she stays silent and instead presses closer, until she can’t see or hear or smell anything but Xiao Xingchen. It’s so tempting to just stay here, let him comfort her, and pretend she’d never seen him bleed out on the floor of their home.

But Xue Yang is bound to come back from his shopping trip eventually, and she can’t leave her daozhang in his clutches. Now might be her best chance to act.

“I’m sure we can find a way to deal with it,” Xiao Xingchen adds encouragingly. “I’m here to help you now.”

A-Qing snuffles. “Daozhang,” she whimpers and finally unclenches her hands from his robes. “I have to tell you something. I’m not really blind.”

Xiao Xingchen’s hand on her head stills. “You— what?”

“I’m not blind, I never really was. I’m sorry, daozhang, I’m so sorry! I swear I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how, and I was so afraid you’d get mad!”

“Shh, stay calm.” He doesn’t step back from her, and his hand stays on her back. “I’m just confused. You can see?”

She makes a miserable noise of confirmation. Xiao Xingchen breathes out heavily through the nose.

“I— I don’t know what to say,” he admits, somewhat lamely. “Is that why you’re so scared? A-Qing, you know I would never—”

“That’s not it.” A-Qing’s heart has started beating so hard that she feels sick, but it’s time to snap out of her moment of weakness. Gathering all her strength, she drops her hands from Xiao Xingchen’s back and takes a step out of his embrace. “Daozhang, I saw something awful today. I need to tell you, and you have to promise me that you’ll stay strong, okay? We can’t give up, daozhang, even though it’s so scary.”

Behind the bandages, Xiao Xingchen’s whole face is scrunched in bafflement. “What are you saying? What did you see?”

“You need to promise,” A-Qing insists. Her fingers grab shakily at the fabric of his sleeves.

“Of course,” Xiao Xingchen says, almost as an aside. “Please tell me what’s wrong. If it’s as serious as you say, we might have to act quickly.”

Even now, confused and increasingly agitated, he still keeps his voice even. For all that A-Qing had known him as a lonely, melancholic man, he’d faced every problem and every night hunt with a subtle confidence that she’d thought unshakeable, right until it shattered in front of her eyes.

She holds onto his sleeves a little tighter and sniffles when he reaches out to clasp her hands instead. An offhanded promise was always going to be the best reassurance she’d get. Swallowing hard, she opens her mouth to give him a story that she hopes will keep most of him intact, and her mind blanks.

What had she said all those years ago, when she’d told Xiao Xingchen about Xue Yang? She knows she’d shown that scene to Wei Wuxian, and in her reckoning, only two or three shichen have passed since then. But when she tries to recall it, it’s like she’s stabbing blindly at a gaping hole in her memory.

No matter. There aren’t many things she could have overheard, and she’s sure she would have told a similar story in the past.

“That stranger,” she begins, “he went out today, right?”

Xiao Xingchen’s frown deepens, but he nods. “Yes, I asked our friend to bring Li-furen back her pickle jar.”

The last time A-Qing had visited Li-furen’s house, it had been inhabited only by the living dead. She doesn’t bother hiding the tremor that runs through her body, and Xiao Xingchen squeezes her hands.

“I saw him,” she says. “When I was on my way to town, I wanted to walk through the forest, and I suddenly heard voices. There were two cultivators there – they looked like they were part of some sect – and they were shouting and had their swords drawn, and when I got closer, I saw that they were talking to that guy. I hid behind a tree because I was scared, and they were saying horrible things—”

“A-Qing,” Xiao Xingchen implores. “Please, one thing at a time. What did you see?”

A-Qing sucks in a breath. “They were shouting at him that he was a criminal and a murderer, and that they were sent to hunt him down by the Chief Cultivator himself! There was some name I can’t remember, some family they said he killed. Then—” she lets out a sob “—then that guy pulled out a sword too, and they fought. He killed them both. I don’t know what he did with the bodies, I ran away because I was so scared.”

She snaps her mouth shut to keep more words from spilling out uncontrollably. The story might be made up, but there’s real panic rising in her chest, and she blinks rapidly to clear her head. In front of her, Xiao Xingchen is still as a statue. His hands are locked around hers in a vice grip.

“Daozhang,” she says, “do you think those cultivators were telling the truth? They said a name, too – they called him Xue Yang.” She pronounces it carefully, like she hasn’t cursed the name a million times before. “Do you know someone like that?”

The hands that are holding her own start to shake. Without thinking, A-Qing curls her fingers around them to keep them still.

“Daozhang.”

“That’s impossible,” Xiao Xingchen stammers. “You’re sure it was our – our friend that you saw?”

“I’m sure. Daozhang, you promised you’d stay strong!”

That seems to shake him out of it a little, even though it doesn’t stop the stain of red that starts to colour the fabric of his bandages. “Yes, of course. But the voice— no.” He shakes his head violently. “Why would he— All these years, Xue Yang wouldn’t have—”

“Have you met that Xue Yang before, daozhang?” A-Qing asks, and when Xiao Xingchen nods weakly, she steels herself and delivers the final blow. “Then you know what he looks like, right? That stranger only has nine fingers. Does Xue Yang also have nine fingers?”

A low, desperate noise escapes Xiao Xingchen’s throat. It startles him and he twists his head to the side to swallow it, but that does little to restore his composure when every one of his breaths comes out as a wheezy, panicked huff.

After she’d stood by and watched Xiao Xingchen open his own throat, A-Qing had come to hate nothing more than helplessness. It freezes her in place now and turns her whole body heavy as stone. With everything that happened after, she’d forgotten exactly how horrible it was to see him break like this.

“Daozhang, please,” she whispers. “What do we do now?”

Her words seems to have some effect. Xiao Xingchen winces and his shoulders tighten. There are two dark spots of blood above his eye sockets now, but he manages to straighten up, and his voice, though shaky, is clear.

“You have to run. Xue Yang is dangerous, so you can’t be near him. I’ll take care of him.”

A-Qing catches the meat of her cheek between her teeth and bites down hard. “I’m not leaving you! If he’s so dangerous, we both need to run!”

Xiao Xingchen shakes his head again. “I have to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone, and I have to know what his plan is. He wouldn’t have stayed here for so long without a plan. But I cannot risk your life.”

He’s so impossibly stubborn. It’s no wonder, she thinks darkly, that they’d all torn each other to shreds in the end, when this rundown yizhuang had been full of the most bullheaded people who’d ever walked the Earth.

“I’m not leaving you!” she repeats and yanks his arms forward so hard he nearly stumbles into her. “Never, ever. We either run together or I’m staying here with you, but I won’t let you do this alone!”

Xiao Xingchen purses his lips. “A-Qing, I know you’re afraid, but you have to trust me. He’ll be back soon. You have to go.”

He tries to shake his hands free, but A-Qing only holds on tighter. “I won’t go,” she snaps and stomps her feet. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realises that perhaps for the first time, she’s angry at him. After all, it’s hard to really trust him if the thing she can’t trust him with is his own life.

She’s almost grateful when she picks up on a vibrant tune of whistles out on the street and their debate loses all meaning.

The door rattles in its hinges. A-Qing loosens her grip, and in a blaze of white, Shuanghua shoots into Xiao Xingchen’s outstretched hand. With the final note still on his lips, Xue Yang steps into the room and is met with the same welcome A-Qing remembers from years ago: a blade piercing his stomach right below his ribcage, sinking in only about a cun’s length. A flesh wound.

The basket drops from his hand, and three apples roll merrily across the floor. Xue Yang’s bright grin vanishes.

“Daozhang,” he coughs. “What’re you doing? It’s me!”

If she didn’t know better, A-Qing could have believed the heartbroken shock in his voice. Luckily, Xiao Xingchen isn’t easily shaken.

“Xue Yang,” he says coldly, and A-Qing can see in the flash of Xue Yang’s eyes that he knows the game is up. “I am well aware of who you are. A-Qing, run, now!”

All her reflexes are screaming at her to do as he says and bolt for the door. Instead, she walks a few steps backwards into the room. “I told you I won’t!”

Xiao Xingchen clenches his jaw. “A-Qing—”

He’s cut off by Xue Yang’s sharp laugh. “What do you think you can do, Little Blind? Get the fuck out.”

There’s an ugly squelching sound as the blade sinks in a little deeper.

“Don’t talk to her,” Xiao Xingchen says warningly.

It doesn’t faze Xue Yang, who nonchalantly shifts his weight to his other leg, like the sword in his stomach is an everyday occurrence. “I’m on your side here, daozhang!” he complains. “What, just because you know my name now, you don’t want to listen to me anymore? I thought you liked my jokes so much.”

Xiao Xingchen flinches, but his feet shift into a steadier stance. “Quiet!”

Xue Yang just laughs. Blood is starting to darken the fabric of his clothes around Shuanghua’s blade. “How did you even find out? I didn’t think you’d notice anything at this point!” In stark contrast to his conversational tone, his eyes first lock on Xiao Xingchen with piercing intensity, then snap to A-Qing and pin her in place. “Or did Little Blind tattle? But what did I do that you’d pick up on?”

Goosebumps run down the length of A-Qing’s arms, from the nape of her neck all the way to her wrists. He’s already pinpointed the holes in the logic of this version of the day, she’s sure of it. It’s good that she won’t give him the chance to dig deeper into the matter.

“You know exactly what you did, you evil piece of shit!” she exclaims and spits out at the ground. “We should’ve tossed your corpse in a pig pen instead of saving your life!”

Xue Yang bares his teeth, but his attention is drawn away by Xiao Xingchen, who in one fluid motion pulls Shuanghua free and brings its blade up to hover as a gleaming barrier between Xue Yang and A-Qing.

“Three years,” he snaps. “Was it fun to deceive me for that long?”

The bloody patch on Xue Yang’s clothes is quickly growing larger now that the wound is open. It doesn’t deter him from finally stepping fully into the room and kicking the door closed behind him. The distant noise of the town is shut out, leaving the three of them locked in claustrophobic silence.

“Of course it was!” Xue Yang purrs. “You’re so naive, daozhang. You don’t even care to know who you’re sharing a bed with. I had the time of my life with you, really.”

The sweetness in his voice has A-Qing shivering, and she involuntarily takes a step closer to Xiao Xingchen, hiding behind his back. In response, Xiao Xingchen points Shuanghua’s tip at the spot between Xue Yang’s eyes. Xue Yang follows it with his gaze, and his nose twitches.

“Xiao Xingchen,” he says, “do you remember the story of the child and the candy I told you once? Do you want to know how it ends?”

Xiao Xingchen bristles. “No.”

The rejection only widens Xue Yang’s already manic grin. “I’ll tell you anyway. You can do anything you want with that pretty sword of yours, if you still blame me after.”

Frustratingly, Xiao Xingchen doesn’t move to stop him. He hadn’t the first time either – he’d used his sword on himself more readily than he’d pulled it on Xue Yang. With a creeping sense of unease, A-Qing realises that other than Song Lan, who’d been distracted and overwhelmed but fighting all the while, Xiao Xingchen had hesitated to truly attack Xue Yang in the first place. If he does that again, none of them are going to make it out of this in one piece.

But that’s what she’s here for. She might not be able to kill Xue Yang herself, but if she’d managed to help Song Lan win his fight, she can help Xiao Xingchen, too. Without Song Lan’s fierce corpse to protect him, Xue Yang doesn’t stand much of a chance once it comes to blows.

A surge of determined energy rushes through her body and drives out part of her stifling fear.

“Shut up!” she shouts from behind the safety of Shuanghua’s guard. “Daozhang said he doesn’t want to hear it, so shut your stupid mouth!”

Of course, Xue Yang just ignores her. His attention is entirely on Xiao Xingchen, even though his eyes are fixed on the curled fingers of his own mutilated hand.

“Y’know,” he says, “because that child wanted to eat the candy so badly, he didn’t care that he’d already been beaten. He still chased after that cart, but the man didn’t stop. He just took the driver’s whip and started beating the child even harder.”

A-Qing growls in irritation. She know this story and had already been too busy being scared to care for it the first time, so she really doesn’t want to have to listen to it again.

Darting forward, she grabs hold of the back of Xiao Xingchen’s robe and tries to shake him out of his inaction. “Daozhang, shut him up! You don’t have to listen to this! He’s just trying to make himself look pitiful!”

Xiao Xingchen shifts to better cover her with his body, but it’s Xue Yang who lets out a sharp laugh at her protest, his eyes narrowing in on her.

“Are you saying it isn’t pitiful? You know what it’s like for a street rat, so why don’t you tell daozhang the ending? Do you think the man stopped the cart?”

A-Qing huffs. Even if she didn’t know the story, the answer would be more than obvious. “Of course not!”

“Right, he didn’t!” Xue Yang agrees brightly, before she has the chance to say anything else. “He beat the child until he fell to the ground and had the driver spur on the horses. And the wheel of the cart ran over the child’s hand, crushing one of his fingers—”

Xiao Xingchen is shivering, ever so slightly, under his robes. With how stiff his shoulders are, A-Qing only notices it now that she’s touching him.

Exasperated, she cuts Xue Yang off with a wordless shout and levels her cane at him. “You’ve got some nerve calling daozhang naive, if you ever thought that guy would give you anything but a beating! Daozhang, don’t listen to his sob story, it doesn’t change anything about him!”

That, finally, makes Xue Yang’s smirk tighten in annoyance. His fists clench and his arms twitch like he’s about to jump and take a bite out of her. “I’ll cut your tongue out if you don’t stop shrieking!”

A-Qing jerks back, her heart in her throat and a bolt of phantom pain in her mouth. She almost misses the swift flash of of Shuanghua flitting forward and coming to a halt half a cun from Xue Yang’s throat.

Xue Yang’s gaze flickers down to the sharp edge of the blade, and he smiles. “Ah, daozhang. You do want to hear how it ends.”

“I don’t,” Xiao Xingchen says. “Tell me what made you stay with us for the past years. You could have killed me at any moment. Why wait so long?”

“I already told you, it was fun to fool you,” Xue Yang retorts and actually rolls his eyes. “The other story is way more interesting. Have you guessed already that that man was Chang Ci’an?”

Evidently, Xiao Xingchen hadn’t, too distracted either by his own fear or Xue Yang and A-Qing’s back-and-forth to make the connection. His grip on Shuanghua stays steady, but his stance falters and his voice loses all strength.

“You—,” he starts, chokes on it, and forces out, “There were over fifty people at Chang Manor. You didn’t take revenge on Chang Ci’an, you—”

“Fifty? He killed fifty people?” A-Qing interrupts. Xiao Xingchen’s silence is confirmation enough, and she tugs on his robes, pushing out breaths in ugly sobs like she imagines she would have, if she’d ever gotten the chance to really speak to anyone after discovering that a murderer had lived in her house for three years.

“I knew it,” she cries, spewing venom at Xue Yang over Xiao Xingchen’s shoulder, “I knew you were fucking crazy! Daozhang, please, just do something!”

“A-Qing, I need you to go,” Xiao Xingchen responds tightly, but he still doesn’t move to attack. “Xue Yang, let her through. This has nothing to do with her.”

Xue Yang’s grin has lost its juvenile ease. “And then what?” he asks. “You’ll kill me?”

Shuanghua draws back from his neck, but the position it settles in is almost more of a threat: its tip points straight at Xue Yang’s heart.

With only a bit of a tremor in his voice, Xiao Xingchen says, “I’ll do what’s necessary to cleanse the world of your evil.”

If she weren’t acting at being even more terrified than she truly is, A-Qing would cheer for him. At the same time, her limbs go taut and her skin tingles with an eerie premonition: she knows the look that crosses Xue Yang’s face, from the brief flash of hurt in his eyes to the cruel snarl that replaces his smile.

“Half a shichen ago, you were calling me your friend,” he sneers. “Are you always this fickle with your friends?”

Xiao Xingchen winces hard. His previously pristine white bandages have soaked through with red, and a single drop of blood starts to make its way down to his chin. It’s a sickening sight, but it can’t be enough for Xue Yang. He only ever stops when everything around him is in ashes and he has no chance of getting any of it back.

A strand of Xue Yang’s hair falls across his face, caressing his cheek, as he cocks his head and goes for the kill. “But you really shouldn’t call me evil when you’re just as bad as me. Xiao Xingchen, do you remember—”

A-Qing yells.

Her mind is blank of words for a moment, so it’s nothing but noise. All she knows is that this is the thing that cannot happen. This is how it all breaks beyond repair, this is how Xue Yang wins and some years down the line will lose his mind, and just like she had when it was Song Lan’s sword pointed at Xue Yang’s chest, A-Qing sees no other way out than to throw herself into the fray.

She does it physically this time. She strikes her cane at the ground, stomps out of her safe spot behind Xiao Xingchen’s back, and starts screaming the very first thing that comes to mind.

“How fucking dare you! Daozhang saved your worthless life!”

Xue Yang tears his eyes off Xiao Xingchen, startled enough to fall silent. A-Qing’s whole body lights up with determination. As loud as she can, she lets a torrent of words spill out of her mouth that she barely hears herself. She just can’t let him speak.

“You talk like that to the man who gave you everything he could for three years, even though he didn’t even know your fucking name! He trusted you, and you were lying to him from the start, and now you miserable little pig are trying to tell him he’s anything like you? This is all your fault!”

“A-Qing! Don’t provoke him!” Xiao Xingchen calls over her screaming, bluntly horrified, and bends to the side in an attempt to cover her again without letting Xue Yang out of range.

Xue Yang only squares his shoulders and shoots her a deadly glare. “Stay out of this, brat. This isn’t about you!”

Boiling rage clouds her mind at that – the implications, the sheer audacity to say she hadn’t been just as much part of this horror story as they had been. She welcomes it. It’s familiar still, the hatred that had been her spirit’s constant companion; letting it take over again feels like coming home. Hot blood shoots to her head and makes her feel invincible, and she screams so loudly her vocal chords ache.

“If you want daozhang to pity you, then you should be grovelling at his feet for forgiveness! But you never understand that. You just know how to wreck things and blame everyone else!”

“A-Qing!” Xiao Xingchen cries, but she’s already stepped closer. She’s seeing red.

“That’s why daozhang hates you! Because you can’t ever admit that you fucked up! You don’t even know what you’re fucking up while you’re doing it, because all you care about is yourself and your sick little games!”

“I’m warning you, Little Blind,” Xue Yang barks. “You’re getting me really angry right now.”

His sneering mouth is full of knives. But A-Qing is past caring about knives, urged on by the need to just keep going. She spits at his feet.

“You’re pathetic and disgusting! I wish that cart had run over your head!”

That does the trick. Xue Yang starts forward, his mad eyes blazing with all the ferocity of a demon’s mask. “You arrogant little bitch, you shut your fucking mouth—”

With her brain still muddled, A-Qing doesn’t manage to step back in time. Instead, Xiao Xingchen pushes himself between them. In one clean thrust, Shuanghua runs Xue Yang straight through.

Xue Yang’s face falls. All the furrows that his skin had twisted into over the course of their confrontation smooth out at once, and for just an instant, he looks like a little boy. There’s a light in his eyes that doesn’t dim despite the sword buried to the hilt in his heart. Blinking up at Xiao Xingchen, he slowly smiles.

“I guess that’s how we’re ending this, then.”

The minute twitch of his hand towards his sleeve pulls A-Qing out of her haze. She shrieks, her bamboo pole clatters to the floor, and with strength she didn’t know her thin, corporeal arms could muster, she grabs onto Xiao Xingchen’s robes and wrests his rigid body out of reach an instant before Jiangzai slashes through the air where he stood.

Xiao Xingchen must react on impulse, because his expression is so blank with shock that A-Qing can’t imagine he’s capable of much else. But he’s working with years of experience, and his command of his sword is impressively swift. He yanks Shuanghua free – blood spurts out of the hole in Xue Yang’s chest – catches Jiangzai’s blade, and sends it flying to the side, where it crashes against the closed side room door. Out of the same motion, he throws Shuanghua forward again.

Surely and reliably, it finds its target deep in Xue Yang’s guts. Grunting at the impact, Xue Yang takes a staggering step towards them, but he doesn’t get far. Around an ugly gurgling sound and a heavy trickle of blood that spills out of his mouth, he says, “Xiao Xingchen,” and his knees buckle.

A-Qing nearly keels over along with him, she’s so light-headed. In quick, high-pitched wheezes, she fills her empty lungs with air again and hurriedly wipes at her wet eyes. It’s the third time Xue Yang dies in front of her in about as many shichen, but her body still hasn’t decided on a way to feel about it.

Next to her, Xiao Xingchen makes a low noise. When A-Qing manages to look away from the blood on the floor, she finds that his lower lip has started trembling. His face is covered in bright red gore from his drenched bandages to his jawline, which drips streams of blood onto his white robes, and the bleeding shows no sign of stopping. If anything, it gets heavier in tune with his quickening breath.

Without warning, he falls to his knees. His hands start helplessly roaming the floor in front of him, and when he finds nothing, he crawls forward like a child until finally, his fingers bump into Xue Yang’s shoulder.

The high, feeble whine he lets out chills A-Qing to the bone. He pats at Xue Yang’s body, brushing against his face, his neck, the hole in his chest, uncaring that his hands are getting stained with blood. When they finally find the place where Shuanghua is embedded inside Xue Yang’s stomach, a strained wail escapes him, and his quaking fingers close around the blade.

He doesn’t react to it cutting into his skin. A droplet of red blood runs down Shuanghua’s edge to mingle with Xue Yang’s own blood, but Xiao Xingchen doesn’t pull back. He curls forward towards what is left of Xue Yang, and his whole body is wracked by loud, frantic sobs.

“Daozhang,” A-Qing gasps, horrified. All the relief she might have felt vanishes, leaving only a stiff cold behind. It’s hard to move even a single step, but she manages to half-walk, half-drag herself up to Xiao Xingchen and wrap her arms around his shoulders. “Daozhang, what’s wrong? Please say something!”

Blood drips onto her sleeves and the skin of her hands from Xiao Xingchen’s face. He shows no sign of calming down, even as she hugs him as hard as she can. His jaw is slack and his mouth open around sounds she knows will haunt her just as persistently as she had haunted this town. Her knee brushes against Xue Yang’s cooling body.

She should say something, console Xiao Xingchen in some way, but she doesn’t know how when she can barely understand what’s happening. She hadn’t planned for this. Her unsteady hands grab at Xiao Xingchen’s bloodied ones, and she’s only managed to pry the first of his fingers off his sword when she realises that the room around them is gone.

It gives her no chance to react this time. All she can do is hug Xiao Xingchen closer, grabbing panicked fistfuls of his robes, before the void takes him too.

Chapter Text

A nearby road.

A-Qing comes to, and she’s back on the road.

Once again, she’s back on the same fucking road.

Familiar clouds travel overhead. Familiar people walk by. Her bamboo stick is in her hand, there’s money in her pockets, and soon enough, she’s going to hear—

“Guniang. You should walk more carefully if you cannot see.”

A-Qing keeps herself from caving Song Lan’s head in with her cane. It’s not his fault. He hadn’t even been there to see it fall apart this time around.

“Thank you, thank you,” she says hurriedly, and if Song Lan notices that she sounds choked, he merely frowns and doesn’t comment on it.

Her head is still full of visions of Xiao Xingchen bleeding tears onto Xue Yang’s corpse, so she doesn’t look where the steady pressure of Song Lan’s fuchen guides her. For the first time, he might as well be leading a girl who is actually blind.

“There are fewer people on the side of the road,” he says in his usual crisp tone, and A-Qing clings to that bit of reliable familiarity until Song Lan has left her behind and she manages to wrest her thoughts into a somewhat coherent order.

All things considered, Xiao Xingchen’s meltdown is far from the first thing she needs to figure out. Any injuries he’d sustained from Shuanghua that time had been superficial, and it had perhaps been silly to think that he wouldn’t break down hard after learning the truth about the man he’d shared a life with for three years. She could’ve held him through the initial shock and then helped him back to his feet, if only she’d had the time.

No, what she needs to figure out is why the void had come back.

She hadn’t died this time, she’s completely sure of that. Jiangzai hadn’t as much as scratched her. It might still just be that all her ostensible second chances are limited to this one shichen and she’ll never be able to move beyond it, but there’s another, clearer common thread between the scene she’s just witnessed and the one she’d gone through with Song Lan in the forest.

It’s a possibility she hates to even consider, but the more she thinks about it, the more convinced she becomes that it’s true. If Xue Yang dies, everything disintegrates.

A-Qing kicks out at a pebble near her feet, clenching her teeth to keep herself from shouting in frustration. The solution to all her problems is so clear. Xue Yang has to die, then Xiao Xingchen will never find out about the people he was tricked into killing and Song Lan will never be turned into a fierce corpse. It probably wouldn’t be easy to bring them back from the gruesome collapse of three years of peaceful life, but at least they’d all be alive enough to try.

The ridges of her bamboo pole dig into the meat of her palm. Her vision is clouded with fury. Why, when she can change everything else, does it all refuse to continue once Xue Yang finally drops dead? Which cruel God would care enough about Xue Yang to punish her for killing him each and every time?

Not a God. The talisman, says a voice in her head that sounds a lot like Wei Wuxian.

A-Qing shudders. It hadn’t been uncomfortable to share a mind with him during the Empathy spell, but it apparently left a residue. Wei Wuxian had known about things like demonic cultivation and talismans and how to bend the world around him to follow his orders, and some parts of A-Qing’s story that she’d never understood herself had been perfectly clear to him.

Now, she remembers some of what he’d thought about when they’d been linked, even though she can’t make much sense of it. All she knows is that Xue Yang had thrown a talisman at her just before her spirit had been dragged back in time, and that a talisman created by a powerful demonic cultivator can do great and terrible things.

She refuses to believe that anyone in Heaven would give half a shit about the life of scum like Xue Yang. His death should make any God cheer with delight, not rip apart reality and force A-Qing to go back and try again. But if Xue Yang himself is at fault for this mess, he’d of course want himself to stay alive.

The joke’s on him, though. If it’s up to A-Qing – and it is; that last Xue Yang she’d seen, who had blanched in shock when Xiao Xingchen had drawn his sword on him, certainly hadn’t realised that a version of him had lived through that day before – she’ll find a way to leave him to rot in the dirt, alive but far away from her and her daoshi. It seems like she can try again and again, after all, and she’s spent years trying to bring him down before. One of those tries will be successful.

“Daozhang!” she calls, causing Song Lan to turn away from the man he always talks to. “Why are you looking for the other daozhang?”

It’s nice to see the hope on his face. It gives her a bit more confidence, too.

“You have seen him before?” he asks, and A-Qing skips up to his side to tell him about Xiao Xingchen and their shady housemate. She’ll want his help this time, if only to calm down Xiao Xingchen should it become necessary.

She doesn’t have a plan yet, but she’ll have come up with one by the time they’re at the yizhuang.

-

Xue Yang walks into the yizhuang, carefree as ever, and Song Lan freezes in his tracks. A-Qing allows him to lead her into earshot again and sits patiently through Xue Yang’s pointless game and Xiao Xingchen’s warm laughter. They hide out of sight while Xue Yang leaves for the market, empty basket in hand, and A-Qing dutifully waits to change much about the order of events until Song Lan has calmed down enough to speak.

This time, though, she doesn’t let him lead her any further away from the yizhuang than absolutely necessary, and when he’s done asking her how long Xue Yang had been with them and how well he gets along with Xiao Xingchen, she doesn’t bother keeping her voice down.

“Song-daozhang,” she whines, “who is that guy? Is he dangerous? What’re we going to do now?”

Song Lan throws a nervous glance towards the street they’ve only moved a few steps away from, but he barely stumbles over his answer. “He’s a violent criminal. He’s killed entire families before. Guniang, it’s safest if you go back to the daozhang, but don’t tell him what I said to you. He’d only worry.”

A-Qing gasps wetly. “What do you mean? Daozhang, where are you going?”

“I’ll take care of that man,” Song Lan says. His hand is already on Fuxue’s hilt. “Someone like him can’t be allowed to walk free.”

He moves to unsheathe his sword and take off, but A-Qing is faster. With a cry, she throws herself forward and wraps both arms around his heavy black sleeve, clinging to him like a child.

“But Song-daozhang, what about you? If you say he’s dangerous, we need to run, not go after him!”

Song Lan startles so violently it almost shakes her off. His face goes pale all the way down to the high collar of his robes, then slightly green, like he’s about to gag or pass out, and the muscles of his arm are unnaturally taut in her grip. In the privacy of her mind, A-Qing issues a silent apology; she hadn’t expected him to react this strongly. Maybe he cares a lot about propriety. It’s not like they ever had the chance to talk about things like that.

Unfortunately for him, she can’t let his discomfort deter her. “What if you get hurt?” she begs. “What if you don’t come back? What would I tell daozhang then? Please come with me and talk to daozhang, then we can all run away together!”

Curtly, Song Lan shakes his head. “I will be fine. I have fought that man before. I’ll find you once everything is taken care of.”

He makes a valiant attempt to step out of her embrace, but A-Qing only clings to him harder. Her plan is still in its infancy, but she knows she wants Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan to reunite this time before they decide what to do with Xue Yang.

She’s always been good at crying on command, and with the images of Xiao Xingchen’s bloody tears still fresh on her mind, it’s easier than usual.

“No! Please don’t go!” she wails. Tears spill down her cheeks, which seems to unsettle Song Lan even more. “That guy’s vicious, and he’s really smart! He’ll hurt you, and then daozhang and I are gonna be alone with him, and I don’t know what I’d do! You need to help us, Song-daozhang!”

“Guniang, please,” Song Lan implores. “I have to face him. You’ll be safe with Xiao Xingchen-daozhang, so if you would please let go—”

A-Qing just cries out again. She can’t tell him how wrong he is without confessing too much, and she’s running out of sensible things to say, so she resorts to babbling, sobbing out a stubborn string of “No, no, no!”

It’s a little humiliating even for someone used to throwing fits to get what she wants. Luckily, she doesn’t have to do it for long. Song Lan, who is still trying to escape her without taking unkind advantage of his superior strength, suddenly goes stiff and unmoving as a stone pillar, and A-Qing twists her head to find Xiao Xingchen stepping around the corner of their little back alley.

“A-Qing?” he calls. “Is that you?”

A-Qing flushes with pride, both of her daozhang’s exceptional senses and of his habit to go looking whenever something seems to be off. She’d been counting on him to hear them, and sure enough, here he is.

“Daozhang!” she exclaims and finally drops Song Lan’s arm. He steps out of her reach as if on instinct and shakes out his sleeve, but his eyes are staring unwaveringly at Xiao Xingchen.

“A-Qing, what’s happening?” Xiao Xingchen asks. A-Qing notes that he’s carrying Shuanghua by his side. “Are you hurt?”

With one last glance at Song Lan, who is frozen in place and makes no move to do anything silly like get onto his sword and flee the scene, she bounds up to Xiao Xingchen and latches onto his sleeve. His bandages are clean and white again, and she has to swallow down emotion.

“I’m okay,” she promises, though she keeps the pitch of her voice high and raw. “It’s just— I met someone! He said he’s your friend, so I brought him here.”

“My friend?” Xiao Xingchen repeats, puzzled. He doesn’t put up any resistance to being pulled along by her. “What do you mean? There isn’t anyone who’d…”

She can pinpoint the moment realisation dawns on him by the way the furrow of his brow smooths out and his lips part, ever so slightly, in astonishment. His legs stop moving at once.

Quietly, like he’s afraid the mere mention of his name might chase Song Lan away, he breathes, “Zichen?”

Immediately, his teeth click together and his cheeks go ashen, but Song Lan’s rigid shoulders sag at the familiar address.

“Xingchen,” he says, and Xiao Xingchen makes a small noise.

His hand, which A-Qing is still halfway holding, is clenching and unclenching in an erratic rhythm.

“Why have you come here?” he asks. It’s little more than a whisper. A-Qing has half a mind to groan and slap him around the head.

There’s no chance that Song Lan wouldn’t take that the wrong way. His tentative relief is gone in a wink, and he stiffly bows his tall head, almost as if in supplication.

From the few stories Xiao Xingchen had over the years ineptly shared with them, and of course from Xue Yang’s vicious taunts, A-Qing had pieced together that these two hadn’t parted on the best terms. She can’t remember any details – Xue Yang had said something about a fight, and there’d been the whole matter with Song Lan’s temple and Xiao Xingchen’s eyes, too – but it hadn’t been hard to figure out that Xiao Xingchen had been in a bad place when she’d first met him, and that he was never truly comfortable talking about his old friend.

She still hadn’t thought that their reunion would be this excruciatingly awkward.

She has no time for it either. Xue Yang won’t be gone for long, and things would definitely go awry if he walked in on Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan pussyfooting in circles around all their personal issues. By the looks of it, Song Lan is as aware of that as she is; he keeps glancing towards the street before his eyes are inevitably drawn by Xiao Xingchen again.

“I searched for you,” he says. “Since the day we parted. I have to apologise, for how I acted and what I said. I swear on my shifu’s memory that I will do so properly. But right now—”

His words stutter to an uneasy halt. There’s no way he can leave now without telling Xiao Xingchen about Xue Yang, though he still seems mulishly unwilling to do so. A-Qing decides to put him out of his misery and cut straight to the chase.

“Daozhang,” she says, interrupting whatever Xiao Xingchen was about to say. “Song-daozhang says he knows that guy who lives with us. He says he’s a horrible criminal, and that he’s dangerous. He was gonna go after him, but daozhang, if all that is true, you can’t let him go alone!”

She wants this fourth chance to be the one that works out and lets her keep them, for many reasons but most of all because she never wants to witness Xiao Xingchen break again. It’s more subtle this time than it’s ever been before; it’s just a confused deepening of his frown and a quiver of his lips, and maybe he’s still too caught up in having met Song Lan again to really understand what’s happening. To A-Qing, all those subtle signs are like cracks showing on the surface of a thin-walled teapot.

“What?” Xiao Xingchen stammers. “Zichen, is that true?”

Standing tall and straight in the centre of the alley, Song Lan clenches his fist around the hilt of his sword. Fleetingly, he glances away from Xiao Xingchen’s increasingly worried face and at A-Qing, who is glad that her blind act gives her an excuse not to meet his eyes.

In another world, she would’ve been just as reluctant as he is to tell Xiao Xingchen a truth that’ll only ever cause him pain. But that world hadn’t ended well for any of them, and she’ll take Song Lan’s concern over his violent death.

Ultimately, Song Lan gives in, closes his eyes in defeat, and sternly decides, “We shouldn’t talk about this here.”

That, A-Qing can agree with. She waves him along, and his long strides follow her around the corner and back onto the street. The door to the yizhuang is unlocked, and Song Lan steps over the high threshold glancing around the room, solemnly taking in the coffins, the low table, and the closed door to the side room.

Xiao Xingchen, meanwhile, lets himself be numbly dragged along.

By the time A-Qing lets go of him near the centre of the yizhuang’s main room, the cracks in his composure have deepened. While Song Lan’s eyes still linger on the empty bowl on the table, Xiao Xingchen’s hands are claimed by a familiar, nervous shiver.

“Zichen, please,” he urges. “Who is he?”

On instinct, A-Qing squeezes his hands and hopes fervently that she’ll be spared the sight of bloody tears this time. Over by the door, Song Lan looks nauseous again.

“Xingchen,” he starts. “You lost your sight. You couldn’t have known.”

If it’s meant to be soothing, it has the opposite effect. Xiao Xingchen pulls his shoulders up to his ears, tightly clenches his fist around Shuanghua, and begs, “Zichen.”

The way Song Lan deflates makes for a miserable sight. Every fibre of his body seems to fight him – there’s a tic in his jaw, and his arms shake, but there’s no going back now.

Haltingly, like each syllable causes him physical pain, he says, “Xue Yang.”

A-Qing has her arms around Xiao Xingchen at once, just in case, but he stays upright. Only his head sinks lower, so that he would be looking at his own feet if his eyes were still in their sockets. A single, quiet sob falls out of his mouth.

“How? How could I—” He shakes his head, cutting himself off. Under A-Qing’s hands, his back goes very still. “Zichen,” he whispers. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I swear I didn’t know, I—”

A tiny dot of red blooms on his bandages and sparks a deep-seated stab of dread in A-Qing’s guts. No matter that he isn’t crying and screaming this time; he’s spiralling again, and by the looks of it, Song Lan is too overwhelmed by the situation to do much about it. A-Qing makes the executive decision that they don’t have time for this.

Grabbing Xiao Xingchen by the shoulders, she shakes him lightly. “Why does it matter who he is? He’s only out to go to the market, right? He’ll be back soon! If he really is as dangerous as you say, we have to do something!”

There’s barely any reaction from Xiao Xingchen, who doesn’t even resist her manhandling him, but Song Lan straightens up again.

“Qing-guniang is right.” He takes a few steps closer to them, raises his sword and fuchen in front of his chest, and lowers his head. “Xingchen, please let me take care of this. I will go after him. You’re distressed, and I owe you as much.”

A-Qing is going to break his legs and lock him in the side room.

“What?!” she shouts. “No! We have to run away! Daozhang, you agree with me, right? We can’t just go after him if he’s dangerous, we need to get out!”

Still, Xiao Xingchen doesn’t react. Instead, a shallow crease appears on his forehead, and he says, “I don’t understand.”

Song Lan lets his sword sink. A-Qing tilts her head, and together, they wait with bated breath for Xiao Xingchen to elaborate.

He ends up doing so in clipped, stumbling sentences, but his voice grows stronger as he goes on.

“He’s been here for years. He fixes things around the house. He helps me on night hunts. Why would Xue Yang do that?” He lifts his chin in Song Lan’s direction. “Zichen, he could have killed me at any moment over the past three years, and he didn’t. What reason would Xue Yang have to keep me alive for that long?”

On reflex, A-Qing readies herself to protest and tell him that figuring out Xue Yang’s motives is utterly pointless when none of them would keep him from making an ugly, bloody wreck of all their lives, but the thoughtful frown that settles on Song Lan’s brow gives her pause.

“He must have had a plan,” Song Lan agrees. He doesn’t even sound hesitant, like he’s just confirming an obvious statement, and in a way, that is unsurprising.

It’s this question that had cost him his life once, laced with the curiosity that A-Qing had tried to subtly beat out of him on her first try. She hadn’t considered yet that it could also work in her favour. But if the world falls apart when Xue Yang dies, anything that might keep Song Lan from butchering him on the spot is worth encouraging.

“Then what was his plan?” Xiao Xingchen asks, a lot less collected than Song Lan. His jaw clenches, and he grits out, “I need to— I need to talk to him. Zichen, you take A-Qing and go. I’ll confront Xue Yang and follow you when this is settled.”

Leave it to her daozhang to come up with the most suicidally stupid option.

“Are you insane?” she shrieks. “I’m not leaving you here alone, no way!”

Fortunately, Song Lan is on her side this time. “Absolutely not,” he states. “He might already expect you to confront him eventually, and we don’t know if he’s made plans for that eventuality. You’d be at a disadvantage.”

When he isn’t thwarted by his own awkwardness or overwhelmed by emotion, his clear voice gives him an air of decisive authority that’s hard to argue with. Xiao Xingchen, stubborn man that he is, still tries, sucking in a breath to voice an unhappy, “But—”

Song Lan doesn’t let him finish. “Xue Yang is my responsibility, Xingchen. It’s the duty I owe to my shifu and to Baixue Temple.”

All of Xiao Xingchen’s protests die on his tongue. The fight goes out of him in one low, startled breath, and he stammers, “I know, I know. I wouldn’t stand between you and justice, I wouldn’t dare. But—”

He presses his lips together almost violently, shutting down any explanation he might have had. It’s clear that he’s trying to keep himself together, but chest is rising and falling with quick huffs that have Song Lan looking increasingly guilty.

With his track record, A-Qing wouldn’t be surprised if he just kept standing there, consumed by whatever convoluted web of concerns he’s made up in his head while Xiao Xingchen slowly cracks open, but when A-Qing subtly clears her throat, he drops out of his stasis at once. Still frowning deeply, he takes one more hesitant step towards them and softly says, “Xingchen.”

“It’s been years, Zichen.” Xiao Xingchen says it like a confession. “I have to know. I have to know why.”

Song Lan doesn’t disagree, but he takes his time to let his black, borrowed eyes trace all the little furrows of Xiao Xingchen’s expression before he decides, “We capture him. That way, we can interrogate him and then decide how to proceed.”

A lightness spreads through A-Qing’s chest that she hasn’t felt in years, helped along by the quickening beat of her heart. If she hadn’t just learnt that he wouldn’t appreciate the gesture, she’d be tempted to give Song Lan a grateful hug. There might be no way to get her daoshi to run away and leave Xue Yang to his own devices, but holding Xue Yang captive might be the solution to that problem. He’d be rendered harmless without dragging the whole world under along with him, and it’d give her some time to plan out her next steps. In a way, since killing him is no longer an option, it’s perfect.

She just needs to make sure that Song Lan doesn’t chop Xue Yang’s head off the moment they’re done with their interrogation.

On the spot, she can think of a number of things she could do to achieve that. Unfortunately, the most promising one is also one that makes her bristle and her guts twist themselves into knots. Against the resistance of a decade of pent-up resentment, she lets her eyes go wide and watery and flutters her lashes at an empty spot somewhere to the right of Song Lan’s solemn face.

“Song-daozhang.” She swallows hard. “Does that mean you’ll kill him?”

She hadn’t expected the jolt that runs through Xiao Xingchen’s whole body. He doesn’t make a sound, but a second spot of blood appears on his blindfold within moments, irrefutable proof that he’s more upset than he’s letting on. Song Lan stares at it in alarm.

“We’ll bring him to justice, guniang,” he explains, obviously distracted. “After what he’s done, there is no other choice.”

A-Qing gives a tiny, reluctant nod, but she makes her lip wobble and fear take over her expression, hoping that it’ll be enough for Song Lan to reconsider once he has Xue Yang at his mercy. She’s so focused on her act that she startles at the touch of a warm hand between her shoulder blades.

Xiao Xingchen pats her back in comforting circles, like it isn’t him who’s the closest out of all of them to falling apart. “A-Qing. I know you know him only as your friend, but he lied to us. Xue Yang is a monster. No matter what his intentions are, they cannot be good. I made the mistake of being too lenient on him once, and it’s my life’s greatest regret.”

Something about that seems to greatly displease Song Lan, whose face twists up like he’s bitten into a sour fruit, though he stays silent. A-Qing takes it upon herself to argue.

“But what if he’s changed?” she mumbles. “Daozhang, I was a thief before you met me. Isn’t it possible that he’s a different person now?”

The very words taste foul in her mouth, and considering the phantom pain of her torn-out tongue that had haunted her for so long, as well as the money that’s still weighing down her own pocket, she feels ridiculous. It does hit a nerve, though, if the stutter in the rhythm of Xiao Xingchen’s hand is anything to go by.

“We’ll find out,” he settles on promising. The bloody spots on his blindfold have grown to the size of quail eggs.

“There is nothing wrong with taking him to trial,” Song Lan cuts in. “I can promise that there are no witnesses alive this time who would drop their charges against him. But if we want to capture him at all, we have to move now.”

Xiao Xingchen all but startles to attention. “Of course,” he says. His grip on Shuanghua is firm, and all of a sudden, his whole body is taut with determination. “A-Qing, you stay here. We’ll come to find you once we’ve caught him.”

There’s no use in arguing, and doing so would only delay them further, so A-Qing simply makes a noise of agreement and drops her hands from Xiao Xingchen’s shoulders to cling to her cane.

“He’ll be taking the path through the forest,” she tells them. “He always walks there when he’s coming back from the market.”

Xiao Xingchen takes fleeting hold of her elbow to squeeze it. “We’ll check there. If he comes back before we can find him, don’t let him know what we’ve found out, and try to run away as fast of possible.”

“Okay, daozhang,” she chirps. It won’t come to that, she’s sure; she has no concerns about Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan’s ability to take Xue Yang down together. Still, she gives in to her urge to quickly hug her arms around Xiao Xingchen’s middle. “Be careful, okay?”

“We’ll be,” Xiao Xingchen promises. Then, he nods to Song Lan, and they leave the yizhuang side by side. The door falls shut behind them.

A-Qing counts down from fifteen before she yanks it open again and bolts down the street.

-

The forest is as deceptively peaceful as it always is on this day. Sunlight paints the rough path in a pattern of bright speckles that move with the leaves of the tall trees, and there’s birdsong all around. She pays it no mind, unable to focus on anything but the path ahead of her and how fast she can run until her lungs sting.

Breathing hard, she stops in the place where she’d once watched Song Lan die and looks around. The leaves on the ground are undisturbed, and there are no signs of a fight anywhere else, but when she turns around again, she spots a small wicker basket lying by the wayside.

It must have been flung aside in a hurry. Its contents are spread out over the forest ground: apples and green vegetables, a bottle of some sauce and a number of dumplings made of delicate white dough. The tree next to it bears a mark that looks like a sword glare.

It doesn’t take long until the sounds of clashing metal and harsh voices join that tableau. A-Qing skips over the fallen basket and hurries deeper into the trees. She can make out Song Lan’s gruff voice, followed by another clang and a bright laugh.

“How come you’re even here?” Xue Yang is shouting by the time A-Qing can pick up on the words they’re saying. “I thought you never wanted to see him again, Song-daozhang! What happened to that?”

Something crunches loudly. It sounds suspiciously like wood.

“Shut up,” Song Lan bellows, and A-Qing follows the sound of his voice towards a clearing between the birch trees that make up the majority of the forest.

“Is Song-daozhang having regrets?” Xue Yang crows. “What did the trick, then? Is it enough for the noble daozhang to consider forgiveness if his friends gouge out their eyes for him?”

This time, it’s Xiao Xingchen who responds with a furious snarl that’s quickly drowned out by Xue Yang’s renewed laughter. He’s as obnoxiously overconfident as always, but of course, he stands no chance in a fight two against one. When A-Qing finally catches sight of them, Xiao Xingchen has Xue Yang at swordpoint, and Song Lan throws out a long, sturdy rope, which wraps around Xue Yang’s body as if guided by an invisible hand.

Xue Yang goes down like a sack of bricks.

He lands on his knees with his head bowed in front of Xiao Xingchen, whose sword is now pointed at his chin. In her hiding place between the trees, A-Qing holds her breath, half-expecting him to throw off his bonds or spontaneously raise the dead to come to his aid, but all he does is burst into laughter again.

“Really? You want to take me captive? And here I thought Song-daozhang would wanna chop my head off nice and clean!”

“Be quiet,” Xiao Xingchen snaps, underlined with a warning motion of his sword. Xue Yang’s eyes sparkle in response.

“Aw, daozhang. Did you get attached? Can’t stomach killing your little friend? Should I be flattered that you think so highly of me?”

Xiao Xingchen’s jaw twitches. “You deceived me. I want you to tell me why. What were you planning, staying with us for so many years?”

Xue Yang giggles. Almost softly, he says, “Do I need a plan? Isn’t it enough that I felt like it? Xiao Xingchen, come sit down with me, and I’ll finish telling you that story from a while ago. The one with the child and the candy, do you remember?”

A-Qing is overcome with the sudden urge to bash her forehead against the nearest tree. Please don’t, she thinks desperately, but Song Lan comes to her rescue.

“Don’t test our patience,” he growls. With Fuxue drawn and its tip a mere cun from Xue Yang, he rounds their bound prisoner to join Xiao Xingchen’s side. “You have the chance to make your case, which is a generous offer for filth like you. Speak, before we change our mind.”

Inevitably, Xue Yang’s grin tightens and his eyes flit up to fix Song Lan with a venomous glare. For someone who dishes out as much and as savagely as he does, he’s really very bad at taking insults.

“There’s a you again then, plural,” he lilts. “That’s pretty funny, all things considered. Song-daozhang, has Xiao Xingchen here told you what he’s gotten up to with his housemate recently?”

Shuanghua’s tip wavers as Xiao Xingchen tenses up, but Song Lan, focused entirely on Xue Yang, doesn’t notice.

“Stop stalling,” he orders. “Speak.”

“But you might be interested in this!” Xue Yang argues. “Or don’t you care that your old friend here spent the last couple years with my cock up his ass?”

In one fell swoop, every bit of colour leaves Song Lan’s face. His legs stay impressively steady, and Fuxue holds its position pointed at Xue Yang’s collarbone, but his eyes anxiously flicker over to Xiao Xingchen, whose cheeks are about equally as ashen.

“Quiet,” he forces out, but his voice falters. “You’ve been asked a question.”

Xue Yang’s lips split into a grin that shows off all his unnaturally sharp teeth. “True, daozhang, I’m being unfair. You’ve had your cock up my ass plenty of times, too.”

A-Qing stifles a gag. For the sake of her own peace of mind, she’d always tried very hard not to imagine what exactly her daozhang and their housemate had gotten up to in their side room. She’s profoundly glad that she’s only getting any details now that her mind is entirely her own and she doesn’t have to share them with Wei Wuxian.

In the clearing, Song Lan takes a step forward and lifts Fuxue to the side of Xue Yang’s neck. There’s a tremor in his hands now, and his next words come out curt and uncertain.

“Your lies won’t help you, Xue Yang. Answer the question.”

Xue Yang simply meets his eyes and tilts his head to the side. “I’m not lying. Ask Xiao Xingchen-daozhang yourself if you want to know.”

To his credit, Song Lan doesn’t turn his head. He still doesn’t manage to keep himself from looking over to Xiao Xingchen with wide eyes, in a plea that must inevitably stay unanswered.

Xiao Xingchen stands still as the unmoving trees around them. The shame that locks all his limbs in place is tangible, even from all the way over where A-Qing is standing. Without a word, he hangs his head. It’s answer enough.

“Maybe that answers your question, too,” Xue Yang continues, evidently delighted by the scene in front of him. “Maybe I just didn’t want to go back to fucking whores when I could have a willing pretty daozhang at home. He’s incredible with his mouth, it’d be a waste to give that up!”

Fuxue jerks forward until its sharp edge is right up against Xue Yang’s neck. For a moment, A-Qing is entirely certain that Song Lan is going to slit his throat and she’ll have to start over. But with a deliberate roll of his shoulders, he reins himself in and limits his reaction to a furious, “Bastard. Shut your worthless mouth.”

Of course, Xue Yang pays his words no mind at all.

“Ah, maybe you know that already!” he exclaims, still grinning widely. As well as he can with his whole body bound, he leans to the side and presses his neck provocatively into Fuxue’s blade. In a sickeningly sweet lilt, he adds, “Hey, Song Lan. I’ve been wondering – did you ever have the guts to fuck him? Daozhang never said.”

Song Lan flinches hard. Fuxue moves with him and, involuntarily, slices through the thin skin of Xue Yang’s throat. A droplet of red blood trickles down to his collarbone.

Xue Yang draws back and lets out a roaring laugh. “You’re right, you’re right! It doesn’t really matter, does it? As far as sloppy seconds go, yours are pretty sweet!”

He’s utterly disgusting, which isn’t new. A-Qing still bites her tongue in frustration. She thinks she can see tears glisten in Song Lan’s eyes, and Xiao Xingchen’s bandages are stained deep red. If Xue Yang keeps going on like this, one of them is going crack and take his head off after all, and then all her efforts will be for nought.

Before he can keep digging his own grave, though, Shuanghua snaps up and stills right in front of the point between Xue Yang’s brows. Xiao Xingchen, previously all but curled up into himself, seems to have grown two sizes and towers over Xue Yang’s kneeling body. When he speaks, each of his words is ice cold and sharp as a knife.

“I never should have touched you. I’m disgusted that I did. My shame is mine to bear, and I will do so.” He takes a deep, laboured breath. “Now, you are going to tell me why you stayed, and nothing else. Otherwise, you’ll learn that our mercy is not unconditional.”

A-Qing is by now exceedingly familiar with the expression that settles on Xue Yang’s face. It never bodes well when his smile falls completely, and when his eyes harden, she knows what’s coming.

Xue Yang’s lips twist into a sneer. “If you’re sure that you want to know, daozhang.”

This time, no amount of screaming A-Qing does can keep him from saying his piece.

-

It’s quickly settled that they can’t stay in Yi City. In absence of Xiao Xingchen’s ability to stop crying for long enough to make a decision or speak much at all, it’s Song Lan who decides that they should set course for Gusu and ask for the assistance of the Lan Sect. They pack only the most important of their meagre belongings, and A-Qing leaves Yi City for the first time in so very long clinging to Xiao Xingchen’s back while he struggles to steer Shuanghua through the air.

They stop by a little stream, once Song Lan realises that Xiao Xingchen isn’t really fit for flying. As soon as they’ve touched ground and Song Lan has tossed a gagged Xue Yang off Fuxue to tie him to a tree, Xiao Xingchen crumples like cheap paper and throws up into a bush.

He keeps retching for a long time, interrupted only by desperate, gasping sobs. When he’s finally able to sit upright again, his chin is dripping blood and spittle. A-Qing rubs his back through it all.

They leave Xue Yang strapped to that tree, mostly because Xiao Xingchen cannot stop shaking in his presence. A-Qing’s offer to keep watch is rebuffed out of hand when the very suggestion of leaving her alone with Xue Yang sends Xiao Xingchen halfway into hysterics. In any case, Song Lan seems to be confident enough in the strength of his Immortal Binding Rope to let it take care of the job.

The stream is small but clean and surrounded by green, healthy grasses. In some places, a shallow dip in the terrain leads down to the water, and A-Qing carefully leads Xiao Xingchen to kneel down there. Song Lan pulls a clean cloth out of his sleeve that he dips into the water and presses into Xiao Xingchen’s hands. Silently, Xiao Xingchen starts wiping his soiled face.

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing he manages to say. He’s cried himself hoarse, so it comes out as a scratchy cough.

“You are not to blame,” Song Lan replies, at the same time as A-Qing calls out, “Daozhang, it’s not your fault! He tricked you! You didn’t know who he was, you couldn’t have known he’d do something that horrible!”

“You told me many times that you didn’t trust him,” Xiao Xingchen says tonelessly. “I never listened to you.”

All the air rushes out of A-Qing’s lungs. She feels cold as ice all over. “Daozhang,” she begs. “I didn’t know either. I didn’t trust him, but I— I didn’t think he was that kind of person.” Her throat tightens around a sob she doesn’t dare let out. “I thought he was a thief or a conman or something, not that he killed so many people!”

The words don’t even seem to get through to Xiao Xingchen. He just sits still with his head bent over the water, and a drop of blood drips into the stream.

“You’re kind to say this. But I endangered you. I did—” He takes a shuddering gasp. “All those people—”

A-Qing’s eyes meet Song Lan’s over Xiao Xingchen’s trembling shoulders – her own ugly secret had come out around the point where she’d run into that clearing screaming bloody murder at Xue Yang and hadn’t cared enough to keep up her act. Despite the serious bend to his mouth, which is apparently permanent and gives the impression that he’s perpetually pissed-off about something, he looks just as helpless as she feels.

With her hand rubbing rhythmic circles between Xiao Xingchen’s shoulder blades, she purses her lips and tries again. “I followed you the first time you went on a night hunt with that guy,” she confesses and struggles to ignore the low whimper Xiao Xingchen gives at that. “I thought it was weird that such a guy would do anything good, so I wanted to see what he’d do! But when I got there, all the bodies looked like they’d really been walking corpses. I thought he must’ve really been helping you then, and I never even told you I’d seen any of that.”

Xiao Xingchen starts weeping again, thick streams of blood spilling out of his soiled bandages, and A-Qing feels a tear trickle down her cheek in sympathy.

“Daozhang, if he fooled you, he fooled me too.”

“You’re not to blame for this,” Xiao Xingchen rasps, and Song Lan sighs.

“Neither of you is. Xingchen.” He says Xiao Xingchen’s name so very gently, like he’s speaking to a revered spirit. “You were deceived. What matters now is that we have the chance to make it right.”

At that, Xiao Xingchen jerks so violently A-Qing nearly pulls her hand back. “It won’t be right,” he sobs. “Nothing can bring those people back, Zichen. Nothing can bring your family back. How can I live with this? How is it fair that I’m still here when all those people aren’t, and I’m the one who failed them?”

“What happened to Baixue Temple was not your fault,” Song Lan cuts in. In contrast to Xiao Xingchen’s frenzied whimpers, the clarity of his words stands out even more. “And all I demand as satisfaction is that Xue Yang be brought to justice, in one way or another. I cast no blame on you. It would be unjust.”

A-Qing shoots him a grateful look, which he answers with an unsteady frown. Between the two of them, Xiao Xingchen’s sobs have turned into quiet gasps.

“It’s your right to bring him to justice as you see fit,” he finally says. With what looks like great effort, he straightens his back and puts his hands in his lap. “I shouldn’t keep you from that. I apologise. What happens to him is your decision alone.”

“You haven’t kept me from anything,” Song Lan tells him, baffled. “We agreed on the best course to proceed. I should ask you if you agree with handing him over to the Lan Sect to be judged.”

Xiao Xingchen falls quiet, almost scarily so, for a few of A-Qing’s racing heartbeats. Then, another wave of sobs wracks through him, and he curls into himself, breathing hard until he wrests himself back upright and regains some composure. It’s absolutely terrifying.

“I don’t know,” he says miserably. “Can we trust the Great Sects to do their duty?”

Shaken, A-Qing and Song Lan exchange another look. “I share your doubts,” Song Lan says slowly, still holding her gaze, “and you know I don’t speak lightly of trusting any one of the Great Sects. But the folk tales have nothing but praise for Lan Xichen. He is said to be merciful when possible but undeniably just.”

“Lan Xichen hasn’t lost anyone to Xue Yang’s cruelty,” Xiao Xingchen replies. “If it’s to be his right to judge in this matter, it’s because you entrust him with it.”

Song Lan falls silent. The flare of his nostrils is too tense for A-Qing’s liking, and Xiao Xingchen’s sudden determination to change their whole plan catches her entirely unprepared. She can’t let him convince Song Lan to kill Xue Yang now, not after they’ve already left Yi City more or less unscathed.

Hurriedly, she leans forward and digs her fingers deeper into Xiao Xingchen’s back. “But we still don’t know what his plan was!” she argues. “Why did he stay with us for so long?”

“To taunt me!” Xiao Xingchen exclaims wretchedly. “To use my hand to kill innocent people!”

A-Qing’s thoughts are racing, which is becoming more and more draining now that the sun is low and she’s more exhausted than she thinks she’s ever been before. It’s the knowledge that for now, she’s managed to let both Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen survive most of this cursed fucking day, that gives her the necessary drive to push on.

The idea comes to her abruptly, while Xiao Xingchen is still shivering from his last outburst.

“But he stopped doing that, right?” she says. “Daozhang, you haven’t gone hunting for walking corpses in years!”

Song Lan’s head whips around to look at her. “He stopped? Xingchen, is that true?”

Xiao Xingchen slumps over again, unable to hold himself upright, but he obligingly gasps out, “There was— In the beginning, they said there were a few villages claimed by walking corpses, and I believed—”

His words turn into a quiet cry. A-Qing pats his back, and Song Lan pulls out another piece of cloth that she takes and wets in the stream.

“In the beginning?” Song Lan asks, while A-Qing dabs the cloth at the blood seeping out of Xiao Xingchen’s eyes. “What does that mean? How long was he doing that for?”

Xiao Xingchen only whimpers. When he doesn’t respond for a while, A-Qing puts the cloth down and answers in his stead.

“Not that long, Song-daozhang. I don’t remember exactly, but it must’ve been just the first couple months or so, after he got better. Right, daozhang?”

She can’t believe she’s trying to defend Xue Yang. She’d honestly rather get up, stab him through the heart with one of the daozhang’s swords, and go through this whole ordeal again, but maybe she can hit two birds with one stone by reminding Xiao Xingchen that he’d only been tricked into something as horrible as murder for a short time.

Xiao Xingchen, though, refuses to be comforted. He shakes his head violently, digs his fingers into the soft river soil, and sobs, “What does it matter? He must have gotten what he wanted. Maybe he was afraid of drawing too much attention.”

A-Qing can rule that one out definitively; if Xue Yang had wanted to, he would have let Xiao Xingchen slaughter the whole of Shudong without a care in the world. But Xiao Xingchen is so caught up in his own pain that he’s imagining things, and anything he imagines is apparently plausible to him, if only it’s awful enough.

“He used me,” he rasps, “and I went along with it. I should have known, I should’ve asked questions about a haunting that terrible, but I didn’t! I let him fool me!”

“Xingchen,” Song Lan says. Very slowly and with a fair bit of hesitation, his hand reaches out to join A-Qing’s on Xiao Xingchen’s back. His touch startles Xiao Xingchen so hard he swallows his sobs.

A-Qing watches curiously as Song Lan’s thumb starts moving back and forth in stiff, inept circles.

“There’s no use discussing this while you’re still so shaken,” he decides. “You need rest – the both of you do. And Qing-guniang will need food. Will you help me prepare something?”

There’s a long moment of silence, during which A-Qing doesn’t dare to move or say a word. Then, miraculously, Xiao Xingchen moves his head in a tiny nod.

A-Qing lets out a relieved rush of breath. Across from her, Song Lan does the same. Between the single burst vein in his left eye and the slackness of his jaw, exhaustion shows plainly on his face now. Still, the pensive frown on his face doesn’t lighten, and when they help Xiao Xingchen to his feet and move to set up a campsite, he appears to be deep in thought.

-

Dinner is plain congee made out of the rice Song Lan found in his travel rations. A-Qing lifts the spoon tentatively to her lips, too aware suddenly that it’s the first time in years that she’s eating. But her flesh body’s stomach is growling, and after she licks up the first spoon trying to reacquaint herself with the concept of taste, she slurps down the rest of her bowl while it’s still piping hot.

The rest of the congee goes to Xiao Xingchen, although he spends a good while trying to convince Song Lan that he’s better off practising inedia. Song Lan has none of it, which makes him rise still a little higher in A-Qing’s esteem, and in the end, Xiao Xingchen eats in absolute silence, looking for all intents and purposes like he is the ghost who’d forgotten how to keep a body alive.

The sun is a blood-red disk above the mountains in the far distance by the time the travel dishes are washed and Xiao Xingchen can say a word again. A-Qing sits down on the makeshift bedding Song Lan had pulled out of some qiankun pouch, wraps her arms around her knees, and stares at the purplish sky until the first stars flicker to life between the few thin clouds.

The day ends without fanfare and leaves her and her daoshi, the stream and the trees behind. None of it dissolves into any sort of terrifying emptiness. It thoroughly kills her theory that whatever convoluted spell she’s under is tied to this day alone; she can move past that miserable first shichen just fine, and it’s starting to look like the spell gives her as much time for each of her second chances as she needs.

It really is Xue Yang’s death that breaks things, then. A-Qing groans, quietly enough that her daoshi don’t hear, and buries her face in her knees. She’d been hoping against hope that it might be something else, even if it meant being stuck in an eternal cycle of the worst moments of her life. But her first two tries really have nothing else in common, and she’s never been the type to keep denying the obvious.

She barely knows anymore how not to want Xue Yang dead. It had been her sole purpose for so long she can’t be sure who she is without it. All her instincts are screaming at her to do the deed herself this time. She could, probably, with Xue Yang tied up and powerless, and the part of her that hasn’t yet stopped being a resentful ghost craves it like a tiger craves meat. But she’s already come this far, and even though the very thought of letting him live makes all her muscles tense up, she’s nothing but not able to adapt.

The issue is that her time is running out. If the spell doesn’t give her a time limit, her daoshi do. Even if she does manage to convince them to take Xue Yang all the way to Gusu and have him judged there, there’s no way he wouldn’t be sentenced to death, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll even make it that far. She really hadn’t expected Xiao Xingchen to argue for killing Xue Yang without trial, especially since last time, she’d had to scream her lungs out to make him stab Xue Yang even in the heat of the moment.

This whole version of the world is hanging on by a thread, which mostly consists of Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen’s inability to explain Xue Yang’s behaviour for the past three years, and it’s not like Xue Yang himself is going to give them an answer that does him any favours. The moment Song Lan gives in and decides to prioritise his own revenge over his curiosity, which might very well end up happening because Xue Yang idiotically provokes him into it, they’re all fucked.

She needs Xue Yang gone, that much is clear. With the threat of imminent execution hanging over their heads, she might at least have one ally in that objective.

Resolve hardening, she glances over to where Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen have settled down by the river again, talking quietly but intently about something A-Qing cannot hear. While the congee had been cooking, Song Lan had thoroughly cleaned Xiao Xingchen’s hands and face of blood and soil, then pulled a spare outer robe out of his well-organised travelling supplies that Xiao Xingchen had put on in place of his own bloodied one. Now, they’re sitting side by side, not quite touching but close enough that their sleeves brush. They seem completely occupied with each other.

A-Qing gets to her feet as quietly as possible, then immediately abandons her illusions of being able to sneak off when Song Lan turns his head in her direction. It’s dark now, with only a sliver of daylight still lighting up the sky in the far west and the moon only just starting to rise, but the darkness is no match for the enhanced sight of a cultivator.

She blinks back at him, smiles tightly, and makes a show of dusting off her robes. Song Lan says something to Xiao Xingchen, and when she steps off the bedding and walks boldly towards the edge of the trees, he simply nods to her and turns back around.

She keeps going in that direction until she loses sight of the two men by the river. On the way, she picks up the bamboo cane she’d dropped when Xiao Xingchen had stumbled off Shuanghua. She might not need it, but she’s so used to carrying it that its weight in her hands is a comfort. With it stretched out in front of her, she changes directions.

The trees block out the rest of the light, and she has to blink hard to adjust her eyes to the darkness, but the tree they’d tied Xue Yang to is not too far from the place where they set up camp, and she finds it without much of a search.

Xue Yang is sitting almost leisurely, with his head tilted back against the tree and one of his legs stretched out in front of him. The Immortal Binding Rope is keeping his back unnaturally straight, but he somehow manages to convey the impression of a slouch all the same. When A-Qing steps out of the bushes, his eyes are on her instantly, gleaming like knives in the low light.

She hates her plan. It’s reckless, and if anyone else had made it, she’d call them stupid and slap them around the head. But she needs him gone, out of her and Song Lan’s sight and Xiao Xingchen’s presence, before one of the daozhang kills him or he makes things even worse than they already are. And she has to act now.

As fast as possible, she walks up to him, snatches the gag that’s holding his mouth shut, and yanks it off. Xue Yang takes a mad, sharp-toothed snap at her hand, barely missing her finger. A-Qing jumps back two whole steps.

Xue Yang gives a small giggle. “Little Blind!” he says, like he’s greeting a friend. “Hadn’t expected you to show up. Where’s Xiao Xingchen?”

At least he has his priorities straight. A-Qing scowls at him. “Far away from you. Did you think he’d just be fine talking to you again, you fucking asshole? He’s busy bleeding all over the place, if you want to know.”

There’s no real reaction save for a brief, irritated quirk of Xue Yang’s brows, but then, she hadn’t expected any. He never had cared about Xiao Xingchen hurting until it was too late.

“It’s rude to just leave someone in the woods, y’know,” he says. “I could’ve been eaten by a tiger! It’s not like I could defend myself, could I?”

“I hope you get eaten by a tiger,” A-Qing retorts. “Fuck, I hate you! I hate you so much! You and your ugly fucking face, and your bullshit fucking lies, and your screwed fucking crackpot brain. I wish you’d just fucking die!”

Agitated, she beats her cane against the soft ground with every word. The thing she hates most about him right now is how being around him makes her blood race and her skin break out in cold sweat.

Xue Yang’s smile takes on a sharp edge. “You wound me, Little Blind. And here I thought we were friends!”

“We aren’t anything,” A-Qing spits. “Bastard. Bitch. Foul sack of monkey’s piss.”

“Aren’t you creative!” Xue Yang praises. “You should teach Song-daozhang how to swear. He knows like, two bad words. It’s embarrassing.”

Song Lan had checked on him, very briefly, while the congee had been simmering, just to make sure that Xue Yang hadn’t somehow freed himself from his bindings. A-Qing can’t imagine he’d said much at all, not when Xue Yang had been gagged, but it had apparently been enough to leave an impression.

“Don’t talk about him like that,” she says, and Xue Yang huffs.

“You’ve known him for less than a day.”

She’s known him for years, even though most of those were spent in mutual silence. A-Qing decides not to mention that; Xue Yang doesn’t deserve to get any details, even though she’ll have to tell him some of it for her awful plan to have any chance of working out.

Instead, she shrugs indignantly and proclaims, “He got daozhang to stop crying. You only made him cry, so I know which side I’m taking.”

Xue Yang’s glower goes harsh and piercing at that, but A-Qing pays it no mind. Balancing half her weight on her cane, she lets herself sink to the ground and crosses her legs, like Xiao Xingchen would do whenever he’d meditate in the mornings. It gives her some illusion of composure.

“Anyway. I wouldn’t have to listen to your blabbering if I just wanted to tell you to go fuck yourself,” she begins and waves around the gag in her hands. Xue Yang’s eyes latch onto it, intrigued. “We’ve got to talk. So listen up, asshole.”

Miraculously, Xue Yang’s curiosity seems to win out over his innate need to make everything a thousand times harder than it has to be, and he cocks his head attentively. “What do you wanna talk about, Little Blind?”

A-Qing takes a deep, steadying breath, imagining that it resembles the kind of breathing exercise Xiao Xingchen used to do. Her daoshi are going to wonder where she went eventually. It’s now or never.

“You can’t die,” she says, and Xue Yang actually gapes at her.

“Huh, what happened to me being eaten by a tiger?” he smirks. “You don’t want me to die after all? Are you saying you’ll have pity on your old friend, brat?”

“As if!” A-Qing scoffs. “I’d kill you myself if I could! But I can’t, because you can’t die.”

Xue Yang raises a single brow. “I don’t remember cultivating to immortality.”

A-Qing clenches her hand around her cane. Her heart is racing so fast it’s dizzying. “There’s a curse,” she gets out. “I have no idea what it is, so don’t ask! But if you die, it all breaks. Everything goes blank, and we all have to live through this day again. So, you can’t die!”

Something interesting happens to Xue Yang’s face while she talks: his cruel little smile softens, and instead of the sharp glower, his eyes go wide with something like fascination. His thoughts are visibly racing behind them, and the way he scans her whole body is almost surgical.

“A curse,” he says.

A-Qing presses her lips together and nods. “A curse!”

“What the fuck kinda curse is that? And why would you know about it?” Xue Yang asks, and despite his amused tone, there’s not a trace of disbelief in his voice.

Of course – if he really is the one who’d made that talisman, even another version of him must be able to at least imagine its effects. She won’t tell him as much, though. It’d give him too much ammunition, and she can’t take more risks than she’s already committed to.

“I told you I don’t know!” she insists. “I just— I remember what happens! I don’t know why no one else does!”

“Yeah, I got that, you know nothing. I didn’t think you would, shut up.” Xue Yang flips back a strand of his hair that’s fallen into his face. “That’s why it’s fun – we get to figure it out! You’re saying you’ve been here before?”

He does, indeed, look like he’s starting to have fun. The very idea throws A-Qing off; what kind of madman would hear about a curse so strange it’s completely unheard of, one that’s tied to him and his own life, and think it fun? She, for one, wants to throw up every time she thinks about it too closely.

“Not here,” she admits hesitantly. “It’s different every time.”

Xue Yang’s grin has gone a little manic. “And it gets reset when I die?”

A-Qing’s already hammering heart skips a beat. She’s allowed her decision to be reckless to make her careless as well. Telling Xue Yang that the world lives or dies along with him is probably the worst possible idea.

“Not just you!” she corrects without missing a beat. “Daozhang’s died, and it all went to shit! Song Lan, too! The same thing happens. Everything disappears, and I wake up on this day again. So we’re all mixed up in this!”

Technically, it might even be true. She’s been spared having to find out so far, but if Xue Yang is the source of all this, it’d make sense that Xiao Xingchen’s death would trigger the same reaction as his own. She isn’t sure about Song Lan – probably not, though she’d never claim to fully understand the workings of Xue Yang’s fucked-up brain after he’d spent years in a deserted city with no one but a ghost and a silent fierce corpse for company.

If she dies – she doesn’t want to think about it. Would she be sent back to try again, while Xue Yang and her daoshi watch the world dissipate? Would it break the curse entirely and let her die for good, unable to change anything but able to move on? Or would she be stuck in this world until Xue Yang dies? If it’s the latter, she vows to haunt him again until he bites it and they’re both set free.

“If any of us die, it all ends! So don’t try anything, it wouldn’t work anyways!” she concludes. Her uncertainty doesn’t hamper the confidence she puts into those words; if anything, her frazzled nerves make her sound convincingly panicked. But Xue Yang has no more reason to trust her than she has to trust him, and the slight tilt of his head reminds her of a big cat stalking its prey.

“You’ve watched us all die?” His eyes are back to dissecting her to the bone. “Bet that was really interesting. How did it happen? Come on, I want details.”

It’s an unsubtle provocation, true to form to how he’s always acted with her, designed perhaps to upset her enough that she stumbles over her words. She’s still so familiar with that kind of thing that she doesn’t break eye contact, despite the thick lump that has formed in her throat. She has a lot of experience lying to Xue Yang.

“You killed Song Lan,” she lies, her voice venomous. Swallowing around the lump, she stares straight at the amused quirk of Xue Yang’s mouth. “And daozhang killed himself. He took his sword and cut his own throat.”

Xue Yang blinks. “Why’d he do that?”

“Because he couldn’t stand being around you anymore! He wanted to die rather than spend one more moment in a world that’s got you in it!”

The lump has grown to a size that’s making it hard to speak, and she has to look down at the grassy ground to calm herself. All the recent confusion must have turned her memories of Xiao Xingchen’s death hazy. As the thing that had most thoroughly tied her spirit to the world, they’d been so clear in her mind for so long that not recalling them in vivid detail feels strange now. Selfishly, she’s glad for it. She still remembers the sight of red blood gushing out of Xiao Xingchen’s neck, and that’s enough of a reminder of her purpose here.

When she glances up again, Xue Yang’s whole face has screwed up. His lashes are fluttering the way they always had when A-Qing beat him at games, shortly before he’d flick his index finger at her forehead and crack some joke about how having a good brain didn’t make her any less ugly.

It’s unexpected; the Xue Yang she knows never would’ve left an accusation like that unanswered, but once he’s done blinking, he just lets his head tip back against the tree.

“Alright, recap,” he says. “You’re saying you’re reliving a day, but the things that happen change every time. So you’re not stuck in a memory, you’re going back in time, and it’s all tied up with our lives. That’s batshit. I know exactly one person who’s got the brains to come up with a curse like that, and he’s been dead for years.” He lets out a cheery giggle, which shifts seamlessly into a baring of his teeth. “Why the fuck would I believe any of that?”

A-Qing flings the spit-soaked gag at Xue Yang’s shoulder.

“Because you’re gonna get killed!” she hisses. All this back-and-forth is a huge waste of time, and she does have a point to make. “Daozhang wants you dead, and Song-daozhang only hasn’t killed you because he wants to give you a trial, and even if you get a trial, they’ll execute you! You’ll die, curse or no curse! I’m just telling you why I won’t let you!”

“Xiao Xingchen wants me dead, huh?” Xue Yang laughs, evidently unbothered by either her urgency or the gag, which has flopped unceremoniously onto his lap. “How nostalgic.”

A-Qing grabs her cane and hits his outstretched leg with it, right on the knee. “What, you thought he wouldn’t? You tricked him! You made him kill people like it’s some kind of game, and you haven’t even apologised, you just mocked him! Why’re you always surprised when he’s mad about that?!” Xue Yang’s grinning mouth opens, but she cuts him off before he can make a sound. “Shut up, I don’t care! If you talk to him again, he’ll kill you, so you have to leave!”

“Did you miss the part where I’m tied to a tree?” Xue Yang demonstratively wiggles his whole body. His ties don’t budge. “Hate to break it to you, but Song-daozhang’s rope here is the good stuff. Can’t exactly gnaw through it. Or are you saying you’ll untie me?”

In the single ray of moonlight that’s made its way through the treetops, his teeth are stark white, and the guan that’s holding his hair up shines a little. She can’t see his hands, but one of his feet is bobbing lightly and betraying the slightest hint of impatience. If A-Qing concentrates hard enough, she can hear the distant gurgle of the stream.

She stays stubbornly silent. Xue Yang throws his head back and nearly chokes on his laughter.

“Are you stupid?” he asks, once he’s able to form words again. His eyes are glittering. “What’s stopping me from breaking your traitorous neck if you do that? Stroll into Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan’s little reunion and drown them both in the river?”

“I told you that you can’t!” A-Qing fires back. “If you kill any of us, it’ll just ruin things! And you don’t have a sword, and you’d never win two against one!”

Xue Yang shrugs. “Then I’ll have to be patient and pick them off one by one.”

The image is frightening, but maybe she’s gotten too used to being afraid lately, because the blood that should be freezing in her veins rushes to her head and turns her cheeks hot.

“I’d tell on you,” she insists, “and if you kill me, they’d notice. Only that the world would be broken, so it wouldn’t matter anyways!” Her breath hitches, startling her, and she purses her lips in an effort to calm herself. “I’m being really nice to you here, and only because I have to! I’ll let you go, and you’ll run away and just— go be evil somewhere else! Somewhere I’ll never see you again! I’ll make sure no one comes after you, but you have to leave. That’s the deal.”

Xue Yang, who has been snickering quietly all the way through her declaration, gives her one of his most sugary grins. “Alright, alright, calm down. I’ll do it.”

A-Qing crosses her arms, as best as she can with the cane still in her hand. “I don’t trust you.”

“Then why talk to me at all, you stupid brat?” Xue Yang complains. When she doesn’t answer, he sighs loudly and adds, “You’re right, I’m screwed. This was fun and all, but I wasn’t planning to let Song Lan cut my head off. I don’t really want to die just yet.”

Something rustles in the branches above. A bird calls, and A-Qing involuntarily scans Xue Yang’s face for any sign that he’s lying. It’s essentially impossible in the dark, when she can barely make out the thin wrinkles his smiles leave on his cheeks, and either way, it’s not like he’d give anything away even under the midday sun. She gulps down the tangle of fear that’s risen to the base of her throat.

There’s no predicting someone like Xue Yang. She might as well be rolling a die, or opening a cage holding a frenzied, half-starved animal. It might run for the hills with its tail between its legs, or it might rip her apart by the seams and lick up her blood, and there’s little she could do to change its mind in either case. She’s done everything she can to lower all the risks in her stupid, half-baked plan, and now there’s nothing else to do but finish what she started.

If he’s lying, and he kills her, he’ll die by Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen’s swords before the night is over. That, at least, she’s sure about, and it soothes the anxious ache in her chest. Dying might just send her back to try again, and even if it doesn’t, the journey that her soul would be sent on is one that’s long overdue. She’s been dead for too long to really be afraid of it.

In a way, she’d already made her decision when she came here.

“Okay,” she says and gets to her feet. “But you have to leave fast. They’ll notice I’m gone soon, and you’d die if you stay.”

Xue Yang rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I’ll go, promise. Don’t sound so worried, I’ll be fine.”

She slaps at his shoulder as soon as he’s within reach, which earns her another laugh. Kneeling down, she puts her cane aside and brings her shaking fingers up to the rope wrapped around the tree trunk.

If she were a cultivator, she imagines she could simply force the thing to drop to the ground with a burst of qi, or whatever it is that spiritual items react to. As it is, she has no chance but to dig her nails into the tight knot tied to the back of the tree. The rough texture of the rope leaves indents on her aching fingertips, and the tree bark scrapes against her knuckles. Still, the knot sits absolutely secure, unmoved by her jiggling and pulling.

The cool night air is starting to seep into her knucklebones. She’s about ready to give up and abandon her plan after all, when a rough pull on a piece of rope loosens the knot by a margin. One more careful tug frees up one of the ends of the rope. The blood in her hands thrums in tune with a low whistle inside her ears. She pulls the second end loose, and the rope slides off the tree trunk.

As fast as she can, A-Qing grabs her cane and leaps away from the tree. After a few steps, she spins back around and forces her legs into some semblance of a stance, her cane held in front of her like a spear.

Xue Yang twists and turns, shaking off the rope still wrapped around his wrists. Then, he flings the whole thing to the side, drags himself to his feet, and stretches his arms above his head.

“Ah, fuck. That’s better.” He rolls his shoulders. “Thanks, Little Blind. Now come here.”

A-Qing’s heart jumps up to the roof of her mouth. She brandishes her cane, but Xue Yang has already crossed the distance between them; with one deceptively slender hand, he grabs the end of the bamboo pole and pulls.

Her arms are yanked forward harshly. She lets go, nearly trips over her feet trying to stumble backwards, and fixes Xue Yang with a furious glare.

“Go away!” she barks. “I’ll scream and they’ll hear me! Just fuck off!”

Tears are already starting to cloud her vision. Of course, she thinks as Xue Yang tosses her cane carelessly to the side and advances on her, this was never going to go well.

Xue Yang huffs. “Then stop screeching! I won’t hurt you – I promised, right? I keep my promises! I just wanna have a look.”

A-Qing bites out a breathless “Hah!”, and Xue Yang waves his hand at her face, like her distress is a fly he could flick aside.

“You can’t tell me you’re under a fucking time-breaking curse and expect me not to check that out. Do you know how many people’ve tried to make that kinda thing? Come on, I just wanna see!”

“You’re lying!” A-Qing shrieks. There’s a tree behind her back, and she stretches her arm out in its direction to make sure she doesn’t run into it. “I won’t let you near me, ever! Rotten beast! Filthy rabid mongrel dog!”

Warm liquid spills down her cheeks. Her steps go uncoordinated in her attempt to get around the tree, and her foot catches on a stray root. She falls, landing painfully on the soil.

On her hands, she scrambles backwards, dizzy with fear. Xue Yang catches up with her easily, and her mind floods with the memory of a moment so similar to this – by the side of a stream not unlike the one she left Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan at, with the sun high in the sky and river pebbles cutting into her palms. She’s taking gasping breaths, each of them a sob and a cry at once.

Xue Yang’s four-fingered hand closes around her throat.

“Stay quiet, you little coward. We made a deal!” he hisses, and her vision clears only just enough to see his face right in front of her. Their eyes meet, and he smiles. “You know, I could have fun with this. I’ll make those pretty daoshi hunt me down for the rest of my life. Kill some people here and there – not anyone important, don’t want to get the Great Sects involved. Maybe I’ll cut out their eyes to make sure Xiao Xingchen knows it was me.”

In a stroke of desperate madness, A-Qing kicks out. Her foot connects with Xue Yang’s thigh, then her knee with his stomach, but he doesn’t even flinch. Only the grip of his hand around her throat tightens as he tries to keep her in place.

Xue Yang snarls. “Maybe I’ll start with you if you won’t stop squirming—”

A flash of blinding light cuts through the darkness, momentarily illuminating everything around them. It’s so dense it’s physical, and it slams right into Xue Yang’s side.

His hand is torn off A-Qing’s throat, and she gulps down air. Her legs are trembling so hard it knocks her knees together with every full-body shiver, but she manages to push herself up and wipe at her eyes. Xue Yang has landed in a crouch a few feet away from her, face twisted in a furious grimace.

He’s glaring daggers at Song Lan, who doesn’t hesitate to step protectively in front of A-Qing. Fuxue’s bare blade is drawn. In his other hand, the strands of his fuchen are swaying in the soft breeze.

“Xue Yang!” he bellows. “Get on your knees and surrender, and I might let you live!”

In a show of pointed defiance, Xue Yang slowly stands back up. “That’s funny, Song-daozhang. Little Blind just got done telling me that I’m gonna die for sure, no matter what.”

The mention of her unloved nickname shakes something loose inside A-Qing’s chest. Her legs move on her own, carrying her further away from Xue Yang, though she doesn’t dare turn her back on him.

Leaves and branches brush her shoulder, and her foot collides with something on the ground. When she looks down, she finds a spilled bowl of congee upturned on the fallen leaves.

“Attacking her is not helping your case,” Song Lan calls. His back and the austere knot in his hair are the only parts of him she can see, but he has his shoulders squared, like he’s trying to make himself into an impenetrable brick-and-mortar wall.

“You don’t even know what’s going on,” Xue Yang retorts. “You just barged in here.”

Song Lan lifts Fuxue higher. “Then enlighten me.”

Xue Yang’s melodious laughter rings through the grove. “I think you should ask Little Blind about that,” he says, sweet as honey.

The hair on the whole of A-Qing’s body stands on end. She can’t look at Xue Yang – he’s halfway hidden behind Song Lan, and her vision is swimming too much to make out more than vague shape of his dark robes. The tightness in her chest and the nausea in her throat have combined into a frosty, claustrophobic feeling that leaves no space for a single clear thought.

Unable to either steady or control her legs, she backs off further until her back hits the thick trunk of a tree. There, she wraps her arms around her middle and bends over, pushing her spine into the rough bark. She can’t stop crying.

Song Lan throws a single glance at her, but whatever he sees must convince him to leave her alone.

“I’m done with your games, Xue Yang. Surrender, and you’ll stay unharmed.”

“Ah, sorry,” Xue Yang sighs. His tone sends another wave of icy shivers through A-Qing’s body. “But I think I’m about done with you, too.”

Out of the corner of her swollen eyes, she sees Song Lan shift, just before Xue Yang lets out a single shrill whistle. At once, A-Qing forces her head to lift up and her vision to focus; what she finds is Xue Yang, upright and as tightly wound as a predator about to attack.

He’s unarmed. Upon capturing him, Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen had confiscated Jiangzai and found both the corpse powder and a truly ridiculous number of knives and daggers in his robes, alongside a single piece of candy. All those things are now safely hidden in a qiankun bag. But Xue Yang has never needed weapons to be a lethal threat.

The chill is the first thing that hits A-Qing. It’s a miracle that she can still feel any colder, but this is a different kind of cold – an icy feeling that creeps up her limbs through the very marrow of her bones. It’s familiar and foreign at once, and she can’t place it until she catches sight of the black wisps of smoke that cover the ground between the two cultivators.

The ghost rises out of the soil in complete silence. He’s a young man, about A-Qing’s age by the looks of it, and dressed in a tattered robe that must once have been fairly elegant. The red of his clothes makes it hard to tell, but the darkened patches around his chest and stomach look like bloodstains. His features are boyish and handsome, save for a big, putrid gash that splits his face diagonally in half.

In his hand is a simple sword that he immediately raises to strike at Song Lan.

Song Lan yanks Fuxue up to block the blow, but the shock sends him stumbling back. “What—”

“The dead of the Sunshot Campaign are everywhere, Song-daozhang,” Xue Yang calls. “They’re always happy to help.”

He’s hanging back, pacing almost leisurely between the trees, happy to let the ghost do the dirty work. But Song Lan has all the experience of a rogue cultivator when it comes to fighting hungry ghosts, and A-Qing doubts that a random spirit Xue Yang had pulled out of the ground could be anywhere near as ferocious as Song Lan’s own fierce corpse, or even as resilient as she had been in her years in Yi City.

Before long, Song Lan has found his bearings. The ghostly soldier – and that’s what he has to be, if he’d died in the war wearing clothes like this – showers him in blows at an inhuman speed, but Song Lan stands his ground, dodging and striking in tandem to keep the ghost busy.

“Qing-guniang!” he shouts, right after he redirects one of the ghost’s attacks to chop a heavy branch off a tree. “Get the rope!”

It hits her like lightning. Heat spreads through her body again, finally steadying her legs, and she frantically scans the surrounding trees until she spots the Immortal Binding Rope still lying in the grass. From the distance, it looks like the dead body of a snake.

She jumps over the fallen bowl on the ground and rushes forward, up to the nearest tree. There, she wraps an arm around the trunk and throws a paranoid glance back at the fight still raging behind her. She’s not scared of ghosts, that would be hypocritical. But she’s hyper-aware of Xue Yang’s eyes tracking her every move, and she still hasn’t fully shaken off the strange spell that had taken hold of her earlier.

Fortunately, even Xue Yang isn’t mad enough to get in the way of Song Lan’s sword unarmed. Their eyes meet briefly between the flashes of sword glares and the smoke that cloaks the ghost’s lanky form, and Xue Yang gives her a sharp grin. A-Qing sucks in a breath and runs for the next tree.

Behind her, Song Lan is using Fuxue to block and his fuchen to strike, thin strands of horse hair lashing out over and over and slicing through the young soldier’s incorporeal form. It’s the same highly skilled swordsmanship Wei Wuxian had admired in A-Qing’s memories, and the ghost hasn’t landed a single hit, but it isn’t giving Song Lan any chance to focus on Xue Yang, either.

“Call it off!” he calls, between two heavy strikes that make him grunt with effort when he blocks them. “Let this spirit rest!”

Xue Yang twirls his thumbs behind his back. “And have you stab me instead? Yeah, no.”

“I’m not here to kill you!” A-Qing can hear Song Lan grit his teeth. “You have questions still to answer!”

The next tree she ducks behind blocks Xue Yang’s face from view again, but she knows the smile that goes with the cruel laugh that rings in her ears.

“I told you everything, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t, and you know that!” Song Lan shouts back. There’s a loud, wooden crack, and any further argument he might have made is cut off by another grunt.

Mid-sprint, A-Qing whips around and is relieved to see him still on his feet, at a safe distance of the small tree that one of their attacks must have split in half. Immediately, the soldier’s ghost is on him again.

Whatever control Xue Yang has over it seems to be both doubling its power and keeping it in the fight. A-Qing has some, albeit informal, experience with ghosts, and the residue of Wei Wuxian’s knowledge in her head agrees that it makes no sense that Song Lan hasn’t been able to exorcise it yet. With the fuchen in his hands and all his know-how, a minor ghost like this shouldn’t be able to drive him back like that, step by heavy step while Song Lan barely has the time to do anything but parry.

A-Qing’s head starts spinning again. She’s close now, at least, and in a last mad dash, she throws herself forward and grabs the Immortal Binding Rope off the ground. Her ankle bends unnaturally at the effort, and she lands in a sad heap a few steps from the tree she’d just freed Xue Yang from.

It gives her a clear view of Song Lan’s suppressed flinch as the ghost’s sword whizzes past his ear.

“Stop!” A-Qing screams, and to her surprise, Xue Yang actually turns around. “Don’t hurt him! You can’t hurt him!”

Xue Yang’s eyes fix on the rope in her hands, but he doesn’t make a move to get it. “I can’t kill him, you mean. You can do a lot of hurt until someone is dead,” he grins. “But now that you say it – I might just try it out! Since you didn’t want to let me have a look, I’ll have to find out if you’re lying some other way!”

A-Qing lets out a frustrated shout. Her ankle lights up with a stabbing pain when she gets her feet back under her body, but she pushes herself up all the same. Limping, she hurries closer to the fighting pair, but it’s futile. She can’t see an opening she could use to throw the rope to Song Lan, and there’s no way she could capture Xue Yang herself.

“Song-daozhang!” she sobs out, and Song Lan meets her eyes. His face lights up at the sight of the rope in her arms, but whatever his plan was, he doesn’t get to carry it out.

A gentle gust of wind sweeps through the grove. It freezes the ghost in place with its sword still raised, and at the next lash of Song Lan’s fuchen, it drops its weapon. As if blown away by the breeze, the young soldier’s form blurs first at the edges, then dissolves into the thin air.

Song Lan stumbles, taken aback. His head whips around towards Xue Yang, and A-Qing’s stomach goes hollow with dread.

Xue Yang stands motionless, eyes blown wide and smiling mouth agape. Behind him, Xiao Xingchen stands tall and straight and looks ghostlier than the ghost that had been here a moment ago.

Shuanghua’s elegant blade has skewered Xue Yang straight through the chest, protruding from the spot of skin and robes that covers his heart.

“Xingchen!” Song Lan calls, pale with shock. Xiao Xingchen doesn’t lift his head. Underneath their blood-soaked bandages, the hollows of his eyes stay downturned.

The world starts spinning, and A-Qing suddenly knows that she can’t bear to watch this again. She drops to the ground and curls into a ball, knees drawn up to her chest and arms wrapped around them.

She closes her eyes. Through the buzz in her head, Song Lan’s voice reaches her, but she lets go of the rope and presses her palms to her ears to block it out. Whatever tense conversation her daoshi will have now – whatever backwards world they’ve ended up in this time, where Song Lan could sound so scandalised by Xiao Xingchen killing Xue Yang – is immaterial. In all the ways that matter, none of this has ever happened.

A-Qing stays where she is, blind, mute, and deaf by her own design, and waits for the weight of her body to drop away.

Chapter Text

A nearby road.

She comes to on the road. People walk past her with baskets full of produce in their hands. The sun peeks through the scattered clouds. Song Lan leads her to the roadside.

She knows how it goes, and she’s wholly and entirely sick of it.

-

She’s back at the yizhuang, crouched at the low dinner table with her cane resting on her knees, making stern eye contact with an earthenware bowl. After some contemplation, she’s decided that it’s ugly. Its walls are wonky, and the glazing is thin and patchy. The only decorations are some wobbly grooved lines that curve around the whole body of the bowl. Judging by their uneven thickness and the odd bumps that interrupt the pattern in some places, the potter had some serious trouble making them connect and failed to do so properly.

She can’t remember where this hideous thing had come from or how long it’s been here, but Xiao Xingchen is the exact kind of person who’d be sold a kiln waster and pay full price for it while thanking the salesman. Or maybe it had been here before they found this place – an heirloom passed down by the dead former guardian of this yizhuang whom they’d never met. Maybe the guy hadn’t been able to afford a better bowl.

Behind her back, standing in the space between the door and the first of the coffins, Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan are discussing how to handle the Xue Yang problem.

Her last try had been the best one yet. It might not have ended well, but she’d made it past sunset with all four of them alive, and since nothing ever wants to actually go well, she’ll mark that down as a success. So she’d brought Song Lan here again instead of letting him fight Xue Yang.

It had worked out as expected. He’d refused to abandon his plan of going after Xue Yang alone, she’d thrown a fit, and Xiao Xingchen had found them in the alleyway behind the yizhuang. Now, with the awkward reunion out of the way and Xiao Xingchen settled enough to talk while he cries blood into his bandages, they’re fighting over the next step to take.

“I have to confront him,” Xiao Xingchen is saying. “You should get A-Qing somewhere safe.”

“Xingchen,” Song Lan responds, pained. “He might have prepared for that scenario. It’s too risky. Please, let me take care of it. Let me do my duty.”

Perhaps “fighting” isn’t the right word. They’re disagreeing strongly but politely on who can be allowed to get himself killed in an effort to keep the other out of danger. If she’s learnt anything about them over the course of the past iterations of the same godforsaken day, it’s that it’s a miracle that they’ve made it to this age with only one pair of eyes lost between them.

“Daozhang,” she says. It comes out as a whisper. She can’t help it; she’s so very tired, and she’s been feeling strangely unmoored ever since she last returned to her body. “Do you have to kill him?”

Song Lan falls silent. His thoughtful frown tends to look like it should be on the face of a man twice his age who’s walked into a pile of cow dung. It’d be funny, if she still knew how to be in the mood to laugh.

“Guniang—” he starts, but the hitch of Xiao Xingchen’s breath interrupts him.

“A-Qing.” Of all things, he sounds pitying. “I’m so sorry. I know it’s a shock. He’s been with us for so long. But Xue Yang— he’s caused so much suffering. He has to face justice, no matter what that means.”

He’s trying and failing to get a grip, emphasising every word in a way that makes him and his pretty white robes look sanctimonious, but it’s hard to buy his conviction when he’s shaking so much. If A-Qing threw the ugly bowl to the ground right now, it’d be about half as broken as Xiao Xingchen’s voice.

Maybe he’s trying to convince himself.

In any case, it’s useless. Any smart response she might have had is drowned in a tidal wave of such fury that she has to grab onto the table edge to keep herself upright. It terrifies her for a moment – she shouldn’t be angry at Xiao Xingchen, he hasn’t actually done anything wrong, but she’s exhausted.

It grabs her by the throat, the ugly, primal wish that he were someone else. Someone who’d prioritise his own life in any situation, someone who wouldn’t have picked up a beaten-up stranger from the roadside in the first place, someone whom she wouldn’t have to work against every time she tries to save him. But of course, she thinks, that person she’s wishing would take his place could never have become her daozhang.

Her bonfire anger fizzles out with all the fanfare of a shitty worn-out flame stick. Sitting small and curled-up on the floor, looking up at Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan with their righteous principles and their expertise in cultivation and their complicated fucking history, she feels very alone.

Xiao Xingchen is crying again, or maybe he never stopped. Song Lan is doing a subpar job at being subtle about the glances he throws back and forth between Xiao Xingchen and A-Qing, but it’s hard to tell from his perpetually haughty expression what exactly he’s thinking. A-Qing snuffles, wipes her nose on her sleeve, and decides that she’s done trying to save them against their will.

There’s no rule that says she can’t tell anyone about her predicament. This whole mess had just seemed so unbelievable that she’d dismissed the idea out of hand, but it had worked fine with Xue Yang. And if there’s anyone who would always believe her, no matter how absurd the story, it’s Xiao Xingchen.

“Daozhang, you can’t,” she croaks, winces, and clears her throat. “You can’t kill him!”

Xiao Xingchen lowers his head, like he can’t bear to look at her even without eyes in his head. “A-Qing, please. If you knew what he’s done— what kind of person he is—”

“That’s not what I mean!” she cuts in. “You can’t kill him, because if he dies, we’ll all disappear too.”

He doesn’t even react, which speaks volumes about how out of it he really is. But Song Lan drops his helpless awkwardness at once, meeting her gaze with piercing black eyes.

“What do you mean?”

A-Qing digs her right canine into the flesh of her lip, thinking hard. She has one chance to make them understand, but she can’t come up with a single description of what’s been happening to her that doesn’t sound like a blatant lie, not when she still can’t even begin to understand it herself. All her theories and observations feel so feeble now that she’s supposed to put them into words.

This had been so much easier with Xue Yang. She’d never even doubted that he would get it.

“There’s something really weird going on,” she starts, which is at least honest. “Something got screwed up with our souls, or something – I don’t know, I don’t understand it. But when Xue Yang dies, we all disappear, and then I wake up again on this day.”

“You wake up?” Song Lan repeats. Confusion doesn’t suit his face. He looks like she’s offended him personally.

She presses on all the same. “It’s always the same day! It’s been a couple times now!”

Song Lan clenches his jaw. “That’s impossible.”

The anger is back in an instant. A-Qing snatches up her cane and gives in to the urge to hit something; it whacks against the table surface with a low thock.

“It’s not!” she grouses. “You people can fly and do magic and become immortal! That sounds impossible! Why is this different? Daozhang, I swear I’m not lying!”

She casts a pleading gaze up at Xiao Xingchen, who is still weeping steadily. Even so, he clenches and unclenches his hand a few times, purses his lips, and says, “I believe you. Zichen, I trust her. If she says something like that is happening—”

He trails off, but Song Lan’s frown eases up a little, and he directs an apologetic half-bow at A-Qing.

“I didn’t mean to doubt your honesty,” he says solemnly. Then, he holds out his hand to her. “May I?”

It takes A-Qing a moment to understand what he means, and even longer to realise that it’s not a gesture that makes any sense to address to a blind girl. He’d probably caught her out at some point and is just too polite or distracted to say. She finds that she doesn’t care. It’s not like she’d put a lot of effort into the act this time around.

Somewhat hesitantly, she uses her cane to help herself to her feet. Song Lan lifts his hand to the height of her forehead, and when she steps a little closer, he lets two fingers hover above the point between her brows, her heart, and finally above her belly. His eyes widen by a margin with every passing moment.

“There’s something,” he states. “Your qi is… unsettled may be the best word for it, but not in any pattern I recognise. The yin energy is much too high. Xingchen?”

A-Qing shivers. In all her efforts to piece together what that curse does and how it works and who cast it, she hadn’t even considered that it could have messed up something about her own body, or her soul, or any other pieces that might be left of her. But by his taciturn standards, Song Lan sounds terrified by whatever he found.

Is this what that last version of Xue Yang had been trying to look for? Would he have found anything that Song Lan can’t? She can’t ask him, and her mind still shies away from the very memory, but all her senses are briefly claimed by an echo of that last moment in her ghost town version of Yi City. It had felt like being torn apart. Maybe she isn’t fully one piece again.

She’s still caught up in it when Xiao Xingchen unclenches his fingers from Shuanghua’s scabbard, switching the sword to his other hand. His elegant fingers rise up to her head, and she swallows hard and bumps her forehead into his palm.

Xiao Xingchen only startles a little. His wide sleeve brushes against her cheeks, and he leaves two gentle, hesitant pats on the crown of her head before he moves his fingers down to the same spot Song Lan had checked. He repeats each of Song Lan’s motions – though he briefly touches the tips of his fingers to her forehead – shakes his head, and gently picks up her arm.

Three fingers press against her pulse point for a long while. It might be an illusion, but she thinks she feels a trickle of warmth travel up almost to her elbow. Just like Song Lan, Xiao Xingchen goes very tense.

“Too much yin, yes. And it doesn’t behave right for a simple imbalance. Something demonic, then? But why now? Why A-Qing?” His voice cracks. “Could Xue Yang have—”

The sound of that name startles a gasp out of her. She pulls her hand back, pressing her wrist against her beating heart. Xiao Xingchen swallows the rest of his sentence, and two absolute, unshakeable certainties pop up in A-Qing’s mind, bright like beacons in the fog that’s still muddling most of her thoughts.

Firstly, he cannot ever know about the talisman.

It’s not a problem if he suspects Xue Yang. He’s probably right, and it’s inevitable when Xue Yang is stuck in all their minds right now like an ugly maggot gnawing its way through rotting meat, but it has to be this new Xue Yang he suspects. The one who’s out at the market right now, unaware that his game is up and his three years of lies are over, not the one who’d watched Xiao Xingchen die and had torn out A-Qing’s tongue and whom A-Qing, with the help of Wei Wuxian and the sword of Wei Wuxian’s friend, had killed.

This cracked but living Xiao Xingchen can never know why that other Xue Yang had spent so many years going mad enough in Yi City that he might have broken time. That would be worse even than him finding out about all the people he’d killed.

Secondly, none of that will matter if they don’t make it past this day.

Automatically, her hands go to Xiao Xingchen’s wrist and clutch at his sleeve.

“Who cares?” she exclaims. “Daozhang, we can think about that later! Now, we have to get out of here! Xue Yang is gonna come back, and then it’ll all go to shit! Every time you fight him, it all goes wrong! Someone always dies! We have to just run away, daozhang, please. Nothing else works.”

She pulls insistently on his arm, dragging it towards the door. It doesn’t move him. Xiao Xingchen stands his ground, tense and mulish as ever.

“We can’t just leave.”

“Why not? Please, we can all leave together! We’ll go somewhere he can’t find us, and then we’ll just— be gone. We never have to think about him again. We can go far, far away, just the three of us. We’ll find another place to live, they’ll let us stay somewhere for sure.”

She can imagine it, more clearly than she’s imagined anything in a long time: herself and Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan in some distant place she’s only ever heard of, Tianzhu or Dongying or Nanyang, where not even the Great Sects could reach them and drag them back to deal with Xue Yang’s bullshit. The daoshi could night hunt and perform rites for people, like Xiao Xingchen had done in Yi City, and she could help them get by. She’d never thought about learning a trade before, but maybe she could.

Hope has her heart battering against her ribcage. She’s about to cry again, and it shows in her voice, but it’s an exercise in futility.

“Xue Yang is dangerous,” Xiao Xingchen maintains. “We have to confront him and keep him from harming more people.”

“Why?” She stomps her feet like a child. “Why does it always have to be you who fixes things?”

“It’s my responsibility. I let myself be fooled for so long,” he says, which casts a deep shadow on Song Lan’s face. “As long as we don’t even understand his plan, we have no way of telling what he’d do next.”

Below the soft fabric of his robes, Xiao Xingchen’s arm is all lean muscle, and it doesn’t even budge when she tries to shake it.

“But you can’t fight him!” she reminds him. “You’ll die, or Xue Yang will and it all ends anyways! It always, always, always goes like that!”

“If we try to capture him—” Song Lan starts to say, but A-Qing cuts him off immediately.

“That doesn’t work! It’s happened, and it went to shit, like everything else always does when Xue Yang’s there!”

It might be a lie. She doesn’t know anymore. If this try fails as well, she can still let them capture Xue Yang again and go about it differently. She could tell her daoshi about the curse instead of Xue Yang, or she could cry and sob about her stupid captive housemate until no one wants to kill him anymore, and maybe that would work. She doesn’t really care. What she’s certain of is that she can’t deal with all that now. Just this once, she wants to see if things could have been easy.

Her fingers go slack around Xiao Xingchen’s arm, slipping down his wrist until she’s cradling his hand.

“Daozhang, please,” she says and lets all the persistence drain from her voice, leaving only the fatigue behind. It makes her sound like a little girl. “Please, let’s just run away. It’s the only thing left. I just don’t wanna go back again.”

Xiao Xingchen shifts on his feet: a thrilling crack in his stubbornness. With his hand claimed by her, he can’t reach out very effectively, but he still raises the hand holding Shuanghua to press his knuckles to her shoulder.

“Breathe, A-Qing,” he tells her. “It’s alright. It’s all going to be okay.”

It’d be hard to believe even if she didn’t know for sure how utterly wrong he is. As it is, she almost laughs.

“No, it won’t be if we just stand here! If we go now, he won’t even know we’re gone until way later! But we can’t wait until he comes back, please.” She blinks wet eyes first at Xiao Xingchen, then, more effectively, at Song Lan. “Please.”

It’s Song Lan who gives in first. He looks her over so critically that it sparks a dull sense of misplaced shame deep in her guts, which only really disappears when he casts another glance at Xiao Xingchen that is twice as intense.

“You say you’ve seen this day before?” he asks her. “And every confrontation is doomed to failure?”

A-Qing nods. Still keeping her voice quiet, she pleads, “I don’t want that again. I just want you to be safe.”

Xiao Xingchen’s fingers close around her hand very tightly. His head turns towards Song Lan, and although he can’t see Song Lan looking back, a silent conversation seems to pass between them.

“We can turn back if necessary,” Song Lan says, and A-Qing knows she’s won.

She allows herself a single sharp exhale of relief while Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen soothe their own doubts about their decision. They’re not safe yet. Xue Yang is going to follow them as soon as he realises they’re gone, and if he manages to track them down before they can come up with a plan for how to deal with him, they’re probably screwed again.

Inside the yizhuang, where every speck of dust on the coffins carries Xue Yang’s fingerprint, it’s easy to hold onto that focus. Once they finally step out of the door, she scans the street five times over before she dares to breathe. It’s when she watches the walls of Yi City shrink to ant size below her feet that she can’t keep up the tension in her limbs anymore and slumps heavily against Xiao Xingchen’s back.

-

The path they take is erratic by design. For the entire rest of the day, they travel north-west, away from the Great Sects and the prosperous foreign lands people talk about. High mountain ranges appear on the horizon, and by the time they land in a small village on the foot of one of those mountains’ smaller cousins, A-Qing’s legs have gone numb from trying to keep herself upright on a sword.

She stumbles off Shuanghua with all the grace of a newborn foal. Xiao Xingchen catches her by the elbow, which helps to steady her until her head has stopped pounding and the high-pitched noise in her ears has retreated enough that it no longer sounds like every word spoken reaches her through three layers of thick blankets. As it turns out, flying looks a lot cooler than it feels.

In his endless, unshakeable pragmatism, Song Lan sets off immediately to find them an inn. The choice is made easy by the fact that there is only one, a shabby little place that looks more like someone’s oversized home. Having lived in a coffin for three and not at all for many more years, A-Qing couldn’t care less.

There are beds in the room they’re given. The innkeeper, an older man who seems thrilled to have two cultivators stop by but doesn’t dare to ask many questions, brings them rice and soup and stir-fried vegetables. The room isn’t big and the furniture isn’t polished or intricately carved like she imagines it would be in a truly fancy house, but the roof isn’t leaking, and the floorboards only creak a little. It’s probably the nicest place she’s ever stayed at.

It’d be a dream come true, if it weren’t for the threat of Xue Yang hanging over their heads like the blackest of thunderstorm clouds.

Xiao Xingchen starts weeping again at some point, and there’s no stopping him when none of them know if the blood that stains his bandages even behaves anything like real tears. There’s less wailing and vomiting than there’d been the last time, but he’s still cracked in all the places A-Qing by now knows so well. He picks listlessly at his rice, eating in bites of single grains at a glacial speed. At least, he eats what Song Lan and A-Qing place in his bowl without complaints.

It’s probably a good thing that the curse distracts him from drowning himself in guilt. Around mouthsful of food, A-Qing fields the barrage of questions her daoshi heap onto her, and while Song Lan asks most of them, Xiao Xingchen listens to each of her answers with unbroken attention.

Neither of them have ever heard of anything like what’s been happening to her. That obviously terrifies them, which only makes A-Qing a little nauseous; it’s not that she hadn’t already known that something is seriously wrong. After dinner, Xiao Xingchen checks all her meridians again, and his silence weighs heavy as bricks.

“Your soul is damaged,” he says, once A-Qing gets fed up with him and demands to hear his opinion. “It’s the only thing that makes sense, so it must be that. I can’t tell you more. The damage doesn’t match what I’ve seen in soul snatching victims. It feels too excessive for your mind to be this present. And your body is healthy; even the yin imbalance doesn’t seem to affect your organs.”

It makes a lot of sense, in a way that has A-Qing glaring at the floorboards. There probably isn’t anyone in this world who’s done as many fanatical experiments with damaged souls as her old version of Xue Yang had. Whatever rules there are for that kind of thing that Xiao Xingchen is familiar with, Xue Yang had probably rewritten them completely.

“Well, I feel fine,” she declares, and besides all the tension and her exhaustion, she does. “Don’t worry too much about it, daozhang.”

Telling him that is inevitably hopeless. Not one incense stick’s time later, he’s whispering intently to Song Lan about Xue Yang and whether or not they should go back to Yi City, and it’s only Song Lan’s remark that Xue Yang is most likely hot on their trail already that gets him to agree to rest for the night. A-Qing, who’s kneeling on her bed trying to figure out a good arrangement for the bedding, agrees loudly with that plan, and Song Lan meets her eyes with a weariness she feels in her bones.

The rest of the night is quiet. Song Lan gets the innkeeper to prepare them a bathtub, and the two daoshi leave the room, side by side but never quite touching, to give A-Qing her privacy.

For a while after they leave, A-Qing stands in the centre of the room and spins around in slow, tiny circles, never moving from that one spot. The quiet tap-tap-tap of her footsteps on the wooden floor is the only sound in the room. She takes in the furniture again and the shoddy planks that make up the walls. Now that there’s no immediate threat to panic about, a strange sense of emptiness has settled in her chest.

The water is warm, though not hot, and she runs her hand through it a few times before she peels off each layer of her clothes one by one. The sensation of air on her skin is strange, though her body doesn’t complain; she keeps forgetting that it hasn’t been through any of the things she’s seen in the past years.

Finally, she carefully picks apart her hairdo. It has been mussed up so badly by the flight that it’s a miracle it hasn’t already fallen apart completely. The hair itself is soft though, and only tangled in a few places that she can easily comb through with her hands. Amidst the sad remains of her updo, her fingers bump into the oddly shaped ridges of her hairpin.

Curious, she pulls it out and turns it in her hands. She doesn’t know where she got it. Its end is carved to look like the face of a fox, with a pointy little nose and a mischievous mouth. The ears are a bit uneven, and the eyes are wonky. She likes it, she thinks.

She sets it down by her bed, where she’ll be able to pick it up and run her fingertips over the carving at night. Then, she bathes more thoroughly than she’d ever done in her short life, digging dirt out from under her fingernails and scrubbing at her skin until it’s reddened and raw. When she steps out of the tub, she feels a little steadier on her feet.

She pulls her robes back on, since they’re the only ones she’s brought. While her daoshi clean all the dust and blood off their faces, A-Qing wanders the narrow hallway outside their room and wonders if she’ll be able to get a new set of robes, one that isn’t covered in patched-up holes, once they’re all safely out of Xue Yang’s reach.

That night, she sleeps for the first time since the day she died. She’d forgotten how it works, but her body remembers all too well; sleep takes her almost as soon as she’s lain down on her bed and closed her eyes. She doesn’t dream. All things considered, she doesn’t think she’d want to.

-

Song Lan wakes them early the next morning, before the sun has even fully risen above the horizon. The dim light and the unfamiliar ceiling are disorienting at first, but by the time she’s put the little fox pin back into her hair and is yawning her way through a simple breakfast, A-Qing has gotten used to her surroundings.

Her mind feels clearer than it has in a very long time, so she doesn’t lose her composure when Song Lan sets his spoon down against the rim of his bowl and announces that they need a more solid plan for how to deal with Xue Yang.

Xiao Xingchen drops his guise of poking at his uneaten food and straightens up. “There must be a way to capture him alive,” he suggests, and A-Qing promptly loses all her appetite.

“I told you that doesn’t work! Why can’t we just leave and start a new life somewhere? Xue Yang can go fuck himself for all I care! Why do we have to risk our lives just because of a piece of shit like him?”

Song Lan’s haughty nose wrinkles a little at her profanity, but he doesn’t comment. “He’s a danger to the world for as long as he isn’t apprehended,” he says instead. “Qing-guniang, it would be useful to know what outcomes you’ve already seen, so we can avoid those mistakes.”

A-Qing’s heartbeat picks up again, which is profoundly annoying after it had taken so long to calm it down last night. Quickly, she stuffs a spoonful of tofu pudding into her mouth to give herself one more moment to think.

She’d given her daoshi some details the day before – telling them about some of Xue Yang’s deaths, and in vague terms about their own, had seemed necessary to keep them from going after Xue Yang after all. Luckily, though, they’d been more interested in the workings of the curse itself than all the different versions of that damned day, so she has enough leeway to shape the story the way she needs to.

“Well, if you capture him, he’ll escape!” she lies with her mouth still half-full. “And what’d you even do with him? You can’t just keep dragging him along forever!”

“Most cultivation sects have the capacities that we lack to hold a lifetime prisoner,” Song Lan points out. “I don’t want to know how they might use a captive Xue Yang, but he’d be contained.”

His pinched frown takes a bit of credibility away from his suggestion. It’s hard to take it seriously if he himself looks so unhappy with it, and he doesn’t argue when Xiao Xingchen says, “Assuming that they’d sentence him at all.”

“It doesn’t matter,” A-Qing insists. “You’d have to fight him to capture him, and then again when he manages to get out, and one of you would die! It doesn’t work to confront Xue Yang! Just believe me when I say that!”

She puts all her frustration into that plea, and with how much of it she’d built up over the years, it comes out vicious. Song Lan’s eyes widen slightly in surprise, and Xiao Xingchen hangs his head. All of them go quiet. The clicking of A-Qing’s spoon against the bowl suddenly seems very loud.

She spoons another portion of pudding into her mouth. It’s laced with garlic and spicy oil that turns her tongue a little numb. She can’t tell if she enjoys it.

“Any curse can be broken,” Song Lan reasons eventually. “That should be true even for an unprecedented one like this. If we can break it, it would give us more options.”

They could kill Xue Yang, is what he means. The very thought is so tied to the sight of that freakish void by now that it makes A-Qing shudder. Even once she’s shaken off that initial reaction, it doesn’t sit quite right with her, no matter how tempting it should be to finally get rid of both Xue Yang and the curse that’s so dead-set on keeping him alive. In a way, this curse the only thing tying her spirit to this body. She doesn’t want to imagine Xiao Xingchen’s face if he broke it and A-Qing just vanished, leaving only an empty shell behind.

Still, it’s probably the only plan their daoshi are going to agree to that doesn’t involve fighting Xue Yang.

“Then we’ll break it!” she says, trying to make herself sound a lot more excited than she feels. “And afterwards, we can go after Xue Yang if you still want to. But it has to be after.”

She lifts the bowl to scrape the rest of the pudding into her mouth. Peeking over the rim, she finds Song Lan still frowning and Xiao Xingchen tapping the very tip of his index finger nervously against his spoon.

“I’m not sure,” he admits.

A-Qing sets her bowl down with a loud click. “Daozhang, it’s too dangerous! Please let’s all just be safe this time. Just until we figure out what to do.”

Just like the day before, pitching her voice into a high whine works wonders. Xiao Xingchen relents so thoroughly his whole body goes slack.

“Don’t be scared. If you say it can’t be done, I believe you. We’ll find a way to solve this.”

“Xue Yang is likely following us,” Song Lan adds. “If we leave enough of a trail to draw him away from any harm he might cause, it could buy us time.”

It’s too provisory a plan for A-Qing’s liking. Somewhere between being woken up by a trusted voice and having breakfast with her daoshi, her image of the life they could have has taken on a pretty concrete shape, and she must have left all the patience she’d cultivated over her years of haunting Xue Yang behind in Yi City. At least Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan look similarly dissatisfied.

They say their goodbyes to the innkeeper while the sky is still a little red. Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan don’t bother to hide their names, but they do give a warning not to let in anyone who comes asking after them.

This time, they dare to head off to the east, towards the seats of the cultivation sects they might have to ask for help. Having a destination will make them easier to track, which A-Qing supposes is the point, though they still avoid the larger towns like the plague.

The news they’re told in the inns they stop at seems promising enough. There’s no path of destruction trailing them, nor any odd occurrences that fit Xue Yang’s style. The fact that A-Qing needs to eat and sleep should put them at a disadvantage, but for whatever reason, Xue Yang doesn’t catch up with them. Every morning, A-Qing wakes to a new day in a new bed, in a world that still has her daoshi in it and that isn’t showing any signs of dissolving into thin air.

For three days, they continue on like that, stopping only when A-Qing needs rest. The scenery and local dishes change gradually, and they’re soon so unfamiliar to her that she’s certain she’s never been in this area before. Few of the names of cities and regions that Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan discuss mean anything to her. At some point, Song Lan mentions that they’re close to Yiling, and that’s the only name that stands out, though she can’t for the life of her figure out why.

There is still no sign of Xue Yang.

It should be a relief, and at first it is. Her heart gets a little lighter in her chest with every town they leave behind. They’re all still waiting for the other shoe to drop – Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan spend every waking moment that isn’t spent on travelling or curse-breaking debating whether or not they made the right decision – but the night after they turned their backs on the high mountains, the sight of a donkey snatching a hat right off a man’s head makes her laugh.

It’s such a small spark of joy, but it leaves a tingling sensation in her chest that she hasn’t felt in so long that she barely remembers it. It feels like a step towards something that could be good, even if she can’t say yet what kind of shape it’ll take.

Inevitably, it doesn’t last. While they get further away from Xue Yang, or at least closer to somewhere they might get help, and Song Lan apparently manages to shake off some of the shock all the recent revelations had left him with, Xiao Xingchen doesn’t get better but worse.

A-Qing tries not to pay it too much mind. She’s made her peace with the idea that he’ll be her cracked daozhang now, which is fine as long as he doesn’t shatter completely. But the second night after they flee Yi City, he still barely eats. His bandages, which A-Qing remembers had been clean for most of the three years that they’d spent in Yi City, are stained all the time now, no matter how often he changes them. In the days they spend on the run, he doesn’t laugh once.

Nothing can improve his mood, which she knows because both she and Song Lan are trying. The two daoshi talk a lot, mostly quietly and where A-Qing can’t hear, but she eavesdrops often enough to know that Song Lan has been trying to convince Xiao Xingchen that none of this is his fault. A-Qing does her part by spending as much time around him as possible.

On the second night, she leans her head against his shoulder and just sits with him in silence, hoping that it’ll be a comfort. In one of the small towns they stop at to buy supplies, she pulls him towards a little area on the street where some vendors have set up their stalls and describes their wares to him, interspaced with the kind of scathing criticism that’d always made him laugh on their market trips. During their nightly sessions of examining her meridians that have yet to yield any concrete information on the curse, she starts cracking jokes whenever one comes to mind, although she’s barely in the mood for humour herself.

Once or twice, she gets him to smile, and the look Song Lan sends her each time she succeeds is one of raw gratefulness, but she isn’t content at all. Her daozhang is easily amused and laughs about all the worst jokes. To see him this perpetually serious is uncanny.

At some point during the fourth night, A-Qing wakes from an uneasy sleep to a pitch-dark room and the sound of quiet, breathy sobs coming from Xiao Xingchen’s bed.

The sound sends thin needles through the skin of her limbs. She’s curled up on her side with her back to the wall, and cracking her eyes open gives her a dim but decent view of the room. It’s not big; they’re relying on Song Lan’s money, and he doesn’t have enough to afford anything truly lavish. But it’s furnished with three beds. On one of them, she can see Xiao Xingchen’s shoulders shaking arrhythmically.

A-Qing doesn’t move a muscle. She forces her breath to stay slow and shallow, hoping that he won’t somehow sense that she isn’t asleep. Her eyes water in sympathy, and maybe she should go over and try to comfort him, but something freezes her in place. She’s out of ideas for how she can help. Even trying to unclench her fingers takes so much effort it makes her dizzy.

A rustling sound on the bed across from hers saves her from having to make that decision. It’s too dark in that corner of the room to see much, but she can make out Song Lan’s large silhouette sitting up on the bed.

The crying cuts off abruptly. After a moment, Song Lan’s quiet voice breaks the claustrophobic silence.

“Xingchen?”

Very slowly, Xiao Xingchen uncurls from his fetal position. “Sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

Song Lan doesn’t respond. A-Qing thinks she can hear him breathe in deeply. Then, the bedding rustles again, and the floorboards creak quietly as he stands and crosses the room.

Framed by his undone hair and the high collar of his black robes, his face looks very pale in the little moonlight that falls into the room. One white hand reaches out towards Xiao Xingchen’s shoulder, but the gesture stays incomplete; Song Lan’s fingers flex nervously, and he drops his hand to his side.

Instead, he sits down on the very edge of Xiao Xingchen’s bed and folds both his hands between his knees.

“Talk to me,” he says. It sounds like a plea.

Xiao Xingchen has scooted up to the head of the bed, sitting in a sad little heap with his shoulders drawn up to his ears. There are two dark stains on his blindfold, visible even in the dark. He shakes his head.

“I don’t want to wake A-Qing, too. She needs the rest.”

“As do you,” Song Lan points out. He lifts his head, briefly, in A-Qing’s direction, and she presses her eyes shut and puts all her effort into staying very, very still. Song Lan turns back towards Xiao Xingchen. “You didn’t wake me. I wasn’t asleep.”

“I’m sorry,” Xiao Xingchen repeats nonsensically.

Song Lan sighs. “Don’t. It’s not your fault.”

Silence falls again. Xiao Xingchen pulls his knees up to his chest. Song Lan sends an inscrutable look up to the ceiling and carefully sets one hand down on the bed, close to where Xiao Xingchen’s slender fingers are picking at the bedding.

“Tell me what’s troubling you,” he says.

Xiao Xingchen’s throat bobs as he swallows. He opens his mouth a few futile times, then snaps it shut again with a frustrated pout. Finally, he settles on saying, “A-Qing.” She startles, almost hard enough to break her sleeping act, but Xiao Xingchen isn’t talking to her. “I don’t know if I can help her. There’s no precedent for this. It’s horrible to think of the things she’s seen.”

She feels like she’s falling. If she could get her limbs to unfreeze, she’d jump up and tell him she’s fine, that he doesn’t have to worry about her on top of everything else, but again, Song Lan beats her to it.

“She seems like an extraordinarily brave girl.”

“She is,” Xiao Xingchen agrees. “I fear it might not be enough.”

Song Lan wrings his hands. “I know. We’ll have to find a way to break the curse, sooner rather than later.”

He, too, sounds so worried. It’s a little ridiculous; if anything, it’s her who should be worried about the two of them.

“It’s the damage to her soul, too,” Xiao Xingchen continues. “Even if we break the curse, it won’t heal her. I thought she was acting normal before, but these past few days – I can’t explain it. She’s so distant sometimes.”

She hadn’t meant to be distant. Digging through her memory of the past days, she can’t find a single moment when she hadn’t tried to be as close as possible to him. Very quietly, she moves her hand to her face to clamp it over her mouth, stifling her quickened breaths.

“We don’t know the cause of that yet,” Song Lan reasons. “She’s been under a lot of stress. More than we can imagine, if we take the curse into account.”

Xiao Xingchen huffs a breath. “I know, I know. I hope you’re right. But if you aren’t,” he adds, and his voice goes thin, “I can’t help her. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen.”

He shifts, like he could somehow shed his skin like a snake and his fear along with it. Song Lan watches him with a deep frown on his face, but he offers no reassurance. That’s unsettling in its own, unique way, and A-Qing realises that apart from the little she’d picked up on of what had happened to her original Xiao Xingchen’s soul, she doesn’t actually know what it means when a soul is damaged. She’d just assumed that since she was walking around and still attached to a body, it couldn’t be all that bad.

She doesn’t get the chance to think about it much. Xiao Xingchen lowers his head, tilting it towards the wall so that the soft strands of his hair hide his face from both A-Qing and Song Lan.

“She didn’t trust Xue Yang, in the beginning,” he whispers. “I— I think that changed, he managed to win her over too, but those first months… I dismissed all her doubts, and now she’s paying the price for my ignorance.”

It feels like a blow to her guts, that he thinks of her that way.

Maybe Song Lan, who doesn’t know her well yet, would see her small body and her young face and think her fragile, but Xiao Xingchen should know better. She wonders if she’s overdone it with her acting this time around, made him think that her being scared means that she won’t be able to get back on her feet again.

If that’s the case, he couldn’t be more wrong. She’s always kept going so far. Even death hadn’t been able to stop her. An angry little tear rolls down her cheek and wets the thumb she has pressed to her cheekbone.

Across the room, Song Lan looks similarly troubled. “Xingchen, all you did was help a dying man. You couldn’t have known who he was,” he implores. “We’ll find a way to help Qing-guniang. There must be doctors with more expertise than us.”

It’s sensible, a real breath of fresh air. One day, A-Qing decides, she’s going to figure out what his problem is with touching people and make it go away so she can hug him. Her guts stop churning quite as hard.

Xiao Xingchen, on the other hand, merely lifts his shoulders higher, making himself even smaller.

“Shifu would know,” he mumbles. With how he’s turned away from the room, it’s hard to tell if he’s talking to anyone but himself. “She would know how to fix this.”

Song Lan grimaces. “I doubt she’d welcome us kindly.”

Like he never said anything at all, Xiao Xingchen breathes, “She was right all along. I never should have left.”

Song Lan flinches, hard. It startles Xiao Xingchen into finally lifting his head – his lips are twisted in a thin, miserable line, but at the very least, his bandages aren’t stained more than before.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I bear the lightest burden out of all of us, and you’re losing sleep over me. I’ll— I’ll go outside, maybe find a place to meditate—”

The blanket slides off his knees and the wooden bed gives a quiet creak under his shifting weight. He’s got his legs under his body already, sitting up straight and ready to leave, when Song Lan finally moves.

Reaching out, he closes his pale fingers lightly around Xiao Xingchen’s wrist. They slide down hesitantly to where Xiao Xingchen’s hand is still resting next to his knees and lift it gently off the bedding. With his jaw clenched and his shoulders in a straight, tense line, he pulls Xiao Xingchen’s hand into his lap to cradle it in both of his own.

Xiao Xingchen stays where he is, frozen in the motion.

Song Lan interlaces their fingers with a precision A-Qing would reserve for picking a wallet out of an armed soldier’s pockets. “You did nothing wrong leaving. I would have done the same,” he says. A long, quiet moment later, he adds, “Selfishly, I am glad you did.”

“After all I’ve caused?” Xiao Xingchen asks. There’s something bitter in it.

“None of it was your fault, Xingchen. You did what you thought was right.” Song Lan leans forward, elbows on his thighs and hands still wrapped around Xiao Xingchen’s. Looking off into the middle distance, his eternally angry face turns furious. “What’s the use of perpetually secluding yourself from the world only for the sake of your own enlightenment? To act through inaction is still to act. No amount of wisdom can be guidance for the world if you refuse to let the world touch it.”

Xiao Xingchen tilts his head, looking a bit like a songbird startled by some far-away noise. “Say you didn’t tell her that.”

“Not in as many words,” Song Lan mutters. There’s probably a story there, if Xiao Xingchen’s shifu, a woman who’d turned herself immortal, had managed to piss him off so much.

It doesn’t seem to upset Xiao Xingchen. If anything, he relaxes infinitesimally into their strange side-by-side on the bed.

“Zichen,” he says, and it’s still broken, but he puts a deep fondness into it that she’s only ever heard from him in the privacy of their yizhuang, when she or Xue Yang had done something to delight him.

She had sometimes wondered, after Xiao Xingchen and their housemate had taken to sharing a bed, if there’d been more to that ‘most intimate friend’ of his as well. The gentle way Song Lan holds Xiao Xingchen’s hand in his lends weight to that suspicion.

She wonders if they’ll be secretive about it with her, the way Xiao Xingchen had been when things had first turned romantic between him and Xue Yang. She hopes not. She doesn’t remember much of it, but she thinks she’d made it clear that she had never cared much about his preferences. Let her daozhang be a cut-sleeve; if anything, it had made her trust him more. And she’d only really started feeling safe staying at the house alone with Xue Yang when it had become clear that the person he took that kind of interest in was Xiao Xingchen.

With Song Lan, she finds that she wants them to rekindle whatever they maybe once had. If Xiao Xingchen could be with someone who’s so determined not to hurt him again, that would be good. He might stop being so sad all the time.

Over on his bed, Xiao Xingchen rearranges his long limbs. He tucks his legs neatly under his body and sways, subtly but unmistakeably, the tiniest bit closer to Song Lan. Halfway through, his motion comes to a stuttering halt.

“Zichen,” he repeats. The warmth is gone, replaced by a hollow tension. A-Qing’s stomach lurches.

Song Lan, who had been busy watching every twitch of their intertwined fingers, looks up at once.

“Xue Yang,” Xiao Xingchen says. There’s a tremor in his shoulders. Tonelessly, he continues, “Those years in Yi City, we… He was my lover.”

The silence that follows feels thick enough to cut.

A-Qing’s heartbeat had only just calmed down a little. Now, it picks up again, accompanied by a wave of irritation. She loves her daozhang, to the point where she’d readily repeat these awful few days a million times more to keep him safe. She loves him for his good heart, and for the fact that he’s honest to a fault. She still can’t make a lick of sense of why he’d tell Song Lan this in a moment like that, instead of burying it where it belongs: in the dust of Yi City, alongside the rest of their sham of a life there.

It’s too dark to really tell, but A-Qing had already seen Song Lan find out about that part of the story once, and she doesn’t doubt that his blood has drained from his face just as completely as it had when it’d been Xue Yang telling him.

Through clenched teeth, he forces out, “What did he do to—”

“I did,” Xiao Xingchen cuts in. “I courted him.”

Song Lan turns his face up to the ceiling. The whites of his eyes are eerily bright in the low light. There’s a moment where A-Qing thinks that he’s going to get up and leave, and then another where it almost looks like he’ll give up his stiff hold on Xiao Xingchen’s hand to pull him closer instead.

He does neither. He just stays where he is, unmoving, like he’s been turned to stone.

“You must think me repulsive,” Xiao Xingchen whispers.

“I couldn’t,” Song Lan says in a rush. Staring down at Xiao Xingchen’s fingers, or perhaps his own feet, he adds, “It wasn’t your fault.”

A-Qing waits for more. If she were still a ghost, she thinks she’d possess him and will him to say something, anything else. But she’s just a flesh-and-bone girl, and Song Lan stays quiet.

At least he still hasn’t let go of Xiao Xingchen’s hand.

For a very long time, they stay like that, with their hands linked and their shoulders five cun apart. From the safety of her own bed, A-Qing watches them until her eyes burn and a tired fog spreads through her brain, reminding her that she can’t have slept for longer than one shichen.

Her blood is bubbling with the urge to do something – walk up to them, maybe, and make them talk things through. But she wouldn’t know how to go about that, not without admitting that she’d listened in on a conversation that was never meant for her ears, and anyways, her limbs are just as stiff as her tongue-tied daoshi. The whole moment feels too fragile to break.

She keeps her eyes open for as long as she can. When they fall shut and she’s dragged back under by her exhaustion, Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen still haven’t moved.

-

The next morning, their journey takes them even further east. Her daoshi sit across from each other at the breakfast table, talking to each other and to her like their conversation last night had never happened at all, and A-Qing swallows every impatient question that would give away that she’d been eavesdropping. After the dishes are cleaned away and they’ve paid the innkeeper, Song Lan explains to her the itinerary of the day, and they step on their swords to fly up into a pink sky.

For the whole day, Xiao Xingchen is very quiet.

They land around sunset in a town in a lush little valley. It’s not large, only about the size of Yi City, but still larger than the villages they’ve been stopping at for the past days. The main street is lined with little shops and vendors’ stalls, and after she stumbles off Shuanghua, A-Qing drifts over to a little stall selling hair pins and combs.

They’re colourful and nicely worked, which means they’re nothing she could afford. In a time that now feels very far away, before she’d even set foot into Yi City or met Xiao Xingchen, she used to take her time walking past these shops and scrutinise their wares out of the corner of her eyes. She’d pick one favourite, and sometimes, she’d imagine coming back one day as a wealthy lady to buy it.

She hasn’t thought about that old game in ages. She turns the memory over in her head a few times, trying to remember what it’d made her feel. For the sake of experimentation, she tries to find a favourite among the accessories laid out on the table in front of her, but she doesn’t think any of them stick out to her.

With a small, disappointed noise, she turns away and hurries over to the other side of the street, where her daoshi are waiting for her. She likes her fox pin better than all those other ones, anyways.

The inn they end up in serves its food on the ground floor, in a dedicated tavern space that must be popular with locals. There are people sitting at most of the tables inside, chatting and laughing and playing games. The smell of wine and rich beef broth wafts through the whole room.

Some eyes follow their odd little group on their way to their table, but their interest passes quickly enough; apparently, the sight of two daoshi and a girl in rags isn’t as unusual here as it would have been in Yi City.

The hurried-looking man who takes their order still does a double take, and after he’s given them a recommendation of dishes, he looks curiously back and forth between Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan. His eyes linger for a moment too long on Xiao Xingchen’s bloodstained blindfold.

“The daozhang are just passing through?”

“Indeed,” Song Lan replies. He’s taken to doing most of the talking for their group, though A-Qing is getting the sense that he isn’t used to it.

The waiter is not turned away by the brusque reply. “We’re honoured to host you,” he says with a little bow. “What leads you to our town?”

“A night hunt,” Song Lan says. He’s not a great liar, but his curtness and the aloof tone of his voice make it hard to suspect him of lying.

The waiter nods knowingly, which suggests that he utterly overestimates his understanding of a cultivator’s life. “Ah, of course. It must be a busy time. Lots of strange things going on.”

“What strange things?” A-Qing mutters. “The daozhang are always busy. There’s always people who need help!”

“Of course, guniang,” the waiter agrees. The title comes a little hesitantly, so she glowers at him. He takes a hasty step back. “Ah, the daozhang probably know more about it than me. I thought there might be much to do, with those news coming from Shudong. But of course, I don’t know who’s involved in that investigation. There’s been no word of the Great Sects taking action yet.”

A-Qing’s heart skips a beat. Across the table from her, Xiao Xingchen lifts his head.

“Shudong?”

“Haven’t you heard?” the waiter asks, so surprised that he nearly drops his deferential posturing. “I’ve only heard the rumours, but it’s an awful story. They say a whole town has been eradicated. Just—” He makes a strange gesture with his hand. “Everyone. Women, children, elders. Not a single person left alive.”

The sharp, acidic taste of bile fills A-Qing’s whole mouth.

In a strained voice, Song Lan asks, “Can you tell us the name of the town?”

“Ah, no, daozhang, I’m sorry. Rumours are all I have,” the waiter says, just as Xiao Xingchen rises like a wraith from the table, blood already soaking through his bandages.

After that, things really get bad.

-

Xiao Xingchen falls apart for about one shichen.

It’s not too different from the breakdown A-Qing had held him through in the last version of the world. He throws up into a chamber pot in their rented room, which they barely manage to reach before he loses it completely. He cries almost without pause, to the point that Song Lan has to dig through their supplies for replacement bandages. Once he’s able or perhaps willing to speak at all, he rambles on, undeterred by Song Lan and A-Qing’s increasingly repetitive reassurances, about how all of this is his fault, and how if he, who knows Xue Yang best, had followed his instincts and confronted him, the people of Yi City would still be alive.

In a way, it’s just as bad as it had been the last time. In another way, it’s a hundred times worse.

He lists names. Not many, but A-Qing’s memory, patchy as it is after such a long time, fills in some blanks: the neighbourhood of their abandoned yizhuang, townspeople who’d taken pity on the good daozhang and his strange companions and lent them the tools they lacked and blankets for the winter.

She thinks she’d walked past a few of them on those familiar paths she’d taken, again and again, in and out of Yi City. Somehow, that hadn’t been enough for her to register that just like herself and Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan, these people had really been alive again.

She had gotten so used to the thought that they were all gone for good. The few of them that Xue Yang had kept around in his perverse ghost town had been dead more than alive. Unlike Song Lan, who she had somehow sensed could see and hear her even in his possessed state, they’d never reacted when A-Qing had reached out to them.

Her hands have gone clammy with cold sweat. She wants her daoshi to stop talking about this. In Tianzhu or Nanyang, it wouldn’t matter. No one in those places will ever hear those rumours. It could be just the three of them there, safe and far away from the whole rest of the world.

Xiao Xingchen, who’s kneeling on the floor next to her and still weeping blood, wraps his hands more tightly around her own. It’s how she realises that they’d been shaking.

Song Lan crouches down next to them. Clearly and well-pronounced as ever, he prompts, “Tell me about them.”

For one fleeting instant, A-Qing hates him.

“I don’t know if I can,” Xiao Xingchen whispers. “I shouldn’t even dare speak their names.”

“It helps,” Song Lan says. It’s a statement, not a suggestion. “Remember them. Carry them with you. Taking the time to mourn them will help you keep moving.”

Xiao Xingchen makes a horrible, choked noise, but it only takes him a few laboured breaths to find his voice again. Slowly but with all the determination of a very stubborn man, he launches into his first tale.

He talks about Li-furen, who’d been so grateful when Xiao Xingchen had performed the funeral rites for her husband without asking for anything in return that she’d kept bringing them steamed buns and preserves whenever she’d made too much. Qian Xiu and her children, who’d lived just across the street from the yizhuang and had been the first to make a point of greeting Xiao Xingchen whenever he walked past. Old woman Pei, who chalked her success of making it past the age of sixty in a town full of early deaths up to her consumption of turnips, and who’d fixed up all their clothes with her skillful hands because she, in her own words, wanted to bribe the handsome young daozhang into sticking around.

There are strange gaps in all those stories, where Xiao Xingchen talks around the role Xue Yang had played in them. Even so, his voice grows steadier and steadier. By the time he runs out of words, he’s sitting upright again, and A-Qing has cried a wet patch into the robes that cover his shoulders.

“Good,” Song Lan says solemnly, once it’s become clear that Xiao Xingchen won’t keep going. “Rest. You can continue later, if you need to.”

Xiao Xingchen lets out a shuddering breath. “It could have been prevented. I could have prevented it.”

A jolt runs through A-Qing’s body, and she pushes herself off Xiao Xingchen’s shoulder. “Daozhang,” she croaks. Crying has made her hoarse. “Stop saying it’s your fault all the time! I told you not to go after him, didn’t I? And we all talked about it, and we’re gonna figure out what to do about it!”

Her hand is still held firmly between Xiao Xingchen’s. Now, his fingers squeeze her gently, a warm, grounding pressure.

“You did nothing but try to prevent what you knew would end badly, to the best of your ability,” he says. A-Qing bites her tongue hard and stays very still, trying not to show how close she is to doubling over and vomiting into the chamber pot herself.

They relocate from their miserable spot in a corner of the room to the low table that’s sitting close to the window. Song Lan steps out briefly, leaving A-Qing and Xiao Xingchen to sit in silence. When he returns with two bowls of noodle soup in his hands and the waiter from before on his heels, they’re still the way he left them, only that Xiao Xingchen has placed his hands in front of him on the table, and A-Qing has wiped the salt and wetness off her face.

The waiter leaves in a hurry once Song Lan dismisses him, throwing baffled glances back at them. He leaves behind a small basin of water as well as the steaming bowls, and Song Lan produces a piece of cloth from his sleeve that he wets and hands to Xiao Xingchen. Then, he kneels down at the table and, to her startled surprise, turns to A-Qing.

“Eat,” he says. “I know it’s difficult. But it won’t help if you lose your strength.”

A-Qing looks down at her bowl. The broth is rich and oily and smells pungently of vinegar. White noodles peek out of the soup next to a few nicely arranged green leaves. She can’t think of anything less appetising.

“What do we do now?” Xiao Xingchen asks. He’s wiped most of the blood off his face and neck, though the blood-soaked fabric of his bandages still looks gruesome in the light of the night pearl Song Lan had lit and placed on the table.

“He’s trying to lure us in,” Song Lan states. “I don’t know why. Surely it would be easier to just follow us. But I suppose we are talking about Xue Yang.”

A-Qing lets her spoon sink into the bowl, watching as it slowly fills with broth. “If he’s luring us in,” she says, “that means we won’t go to him. Right?”

The spoon disappears between the noodles. She lifts it up again and pours out the liquid. Oil pearls on the surface of the steaming broth.

Song Lan shakes his head tightly. “We feared he might be prepared before. Now, we know that he is. I say it’s too dangerous. No one is helped if we get ourselves killed and Xue Yang walks free.”

“You’re right.” Xiao Xingchen’s voice is oddly strong now, stronger than A-Qing’s own, which is still raspy. “But something must be done. He has to be stopped.”

“He does,” Song Lan agrees.

A-Qing catches a particularly large splash of oil on her spoon and lifts it out of the broth. “But,” she says, “if it’s a whole town. Then the Great Sects will do something, right? They won’t just let him get away with it. And he can’t go up against all the great cultivators in the world, can he?”

“That depends,” Song Lan says, sounding frigid. “In my experience, the Great Sects base their actions on prestige more than on what is right. That Xue Yang is alive means that the Jin Sect has failed to execute him. Whether they take that as an incentive to act or to hush things up is anyone’s guess.”

Every single one of his words is dripping with bitterness. Even talking to Xue Yang, he hadn’t been this cold; it’d been mostly hot anger and choked insults then. A-Qing blinks up at him, but his stony face doesn’t give anything away.

“I have little trust in the Jin Sect either,” Xiao Xingchen throws in. He’s picked up his own chopsticks, though he hasn’t touched his food yet. “But they’re not the only ones. Zichen, I’m sorry, I haven’t heard much about the Sects in the past years. Is there no one who could help?”

Song Lan’s answer is reluctant, but it comes. “The Lan Sect seems the most promising. Lan Xichen is an upstanding man, and his brother has been making a name for himself recently. It is said he goes anywhere he’s needed, with little regard for the social standing of those who ask for his help.”

A-Qing perks up. The Lan Sect had been that last version of Song Lan’s pick, too, but this time, his pitch for them makes her feel inexplicably warm. Tentative hope curls into the space between her ribs.

“Then we’ll go ask that guy for help,” she says. “We can tell him about the curse, too. Maybe they have someone at that sect who knows how to break it.”

Xiao Xingchen gives a solemn nod. “That sounds like the best course of action. Now,” he adds and stretches a gentle hand out towards her, “eat. Zichen is right, it will do you good.”

He’s a hypocrite, her daozhang. He barely touches his own soup, picking instead at the vegetable toppings with shaky hands. But A-Qing is tired, and the memory of Xiao Xingchen sounding so very scared about her is still lodged deep in her chest, so she eats. It barely tastes of anything.

The dishes don’t get picked up, seeing that it has to be deep into the night already. Song Lan brings them to the kitchens himself instead. There’s no bath this time, but he does come back with more water to wash.

When she’s carefully pulling her fox pin out of her hair, a sudden wave of despair hits her like a kick in the guts. Uncontrollable sobs shake her whole body, no matter how often she tries to hold her breath to stifle them. The sound makes Song Lan look over at her in alarm, but it’s Xiao Xingchen who comes up to her and, without hesitation, puts a warm arm around her shoulder.

“It’s alright,” he tells her, wiping at her eyes with his sleeve. “You’ll be fine. You’ve made it through so much, and you’re almost at the end of it now. I know it hurts, but it’ll pass. You brave girl.”

“Daozhang,” she sobs out. She doesn’t feel particularly brave right now, not when she isn’t even able to stop herself from crying so utterly pointlessly.

“Try to sleep,” Xiao Xingchen says. “Tomorrow will be a new day, and you’ll need your strength. Can you do that for me?”

The tears lodge in her throat, cutting off her voice, but she nods. He’s right, after all. She’s made it through worse than this.

Song Lan extinguishes the night pearl once they’re all settled in their beds. The room is plunged into darkness, and for a moment, A-Qing is reminded vividly of how it had been to see nothing at all. She shakes off the thought. Curling up on her side, she closes her eyes and falls into a deep, exhausted sleep.

The next morning, Xiao Xingchen has hanged himself with his own blindfold.

-

Song Lan doesn’t speak until midday.

The first long, agonising shichen, he spends kneeling on the floor, wrapped around and bent over Xiao Xingchen’s lifeless body. He wails like a ghost until his voice gives out. After that, he croaks out shapeless screams that were maybe once meant to be Xiao Xingchen’s name. His face is red and wet with tears. When his hands don’t clutch at Xiao Xingchen’s white robes, they run frantically through his own hair, undoing his neat topknot and leaving behind tattered tangles.

A-Qing barely recognises him.

While he breaks down, she sits on the floor next to her bed with her knees hugged to her chest. Tears stream down her face that feel hot like blood. She tastes salt and something metallic. For a while, time loses any meaning.

She doesn’t know when Song Lan finally moves, but the room is bright with sunlight at that point. He gets to his feet, and he’s frightening. His swollen eyes are bloodshot, his collar is askew, and his lips are bitten red. Even as a fierce corpse, he’d looked more alive.

He still doesn’t speak. A-Qing watches motionlessly as he crouches down again and scoops Xiao Xingchen into his arms. Holding him like a precious thing, he carries him over to the bed and gently, reverently, places him down. Carefully, he folds Xiao Xingchen’s hands over his chest, pulls the blanket up to his waist, and brushes two gentle fingers over the unblemished skin of his forehead.

His hand trembles when he drops it to his side. Turning on his heel, he crosses the room with long strides, stopping in front of the dinner table by the window. There is a folded-up piece of paper sitting there. A-Qing has been holding an unrequited staring contest with it for a long time.

Song Lan picks it up carefully. He unfolds it. Holding it in both hands, he carries it over to his own bed, where he sits down heavily. His eyes flit hectically up and down to take in the words, and whatever he’s reading there makes him break into wailing sobs again.

Once he’s done ruining the rest of his voice, he picks up the letter from where it has ended up on the bedding. He smooths it over, folds it up, and finally slips it underneath the skewed collar of his robes, above his heart.

Then, he loses his mind.

A-Qing doesn’t know how to describe it any other way. Song Lan leaves the room without a word and without a care for the state of his hair and clothing. A short while later, he returns carrying a basin of steaming hot water.

A-Qing numbly watches him plunge his hands inside and splash his face, rubbing at his skin until it’s raw. Eventually, he gives up with a grunt of frustration and storms over to the other side of the room. Rummaging through his supplies, he pulls out cloth and soap and returns to the basin.

It’s like he’s trying to scrub his skin off. He doesn’t succeed, but only barely; A-Qing can see angry red patches all over his face. Once he’s finally done, he picks up a fresh cloth and returns to Xiao Xingchen’s bed.

He’s a lot more gentle with him. Like Xue Yang once had in Yi City, he cleans the blood off Xiao Xingchen’s face and dabs carefully at the ugly line on his neck. Every single one of Xiao Xingchen’s fingers is wiped with meticulous attention. Finally, Song Lan rights his robes and lays out his hair in an orderly curl.

After that, he goes back to the basin to scrub off the rest of his skin. He ends up staring at his reddened hands with so much fury A-Qing reflexively ducks her head between her legs. The motion seems to do something to him; he flinches, casts one single, helpless look at her, and finally, for the first time since last night, speaks.

“Qing-guniang.” Even his voice is unrecognisable. All his usual crisp elegance has been replaced with an ugly, scratchy rasp. “Please, stay here. I will take care of things.”

A-Qing stares back at him. She doesn’t think she can speak, but she can’t be sure. Her mouth refuses to open wide enough to let her try. But because he is Song Lan, and a part of her remembers how comforted she’d felt by his presence in Yi City, she forces herself to nod.

Song Lan leaves again, after half-heartedly tying up his hair and straightening his robes. The room goes very silent. Over on the bed, Xiao Xingchen rests peacefully, and if she tries, she can imagine that he’s sleeping.

She couldn’t say how much time passes until Song Lan returns, but when he does, she’s sore from having stayed in the same position for so long. Song Lan helps her to her feet, which immediately fill with angry pinpricks. Her back and shoulders ache something fierce.

In a twist of bitter irony, they take Xiao Xingchen’s body to a yizhuang. Song Lan had arranged for it, so there is a coffin prepared when they arrive. The yizhuang’s guardian, a tall middle-aged man with deep furrows on his forehead and a kind face, takes Song Lan aside to talk over the logistics: funeral arrangements, the most auspicious timing for the burial, the placement of the gravesite and the matter of the upkeep of the grave in a place where the deceased had no friends or family.

It’s so familiar that it’s surreal. She can almost hear Xiao Xingchen asking the same question in the same gentle voice. The memory makes her eyes water, and she has to step away. Following the tapping of her bamboo cane, her legs move on their own, coming to a halt only when she reaches the foot of the coffin.

Xiao Xingchen looks as ethereal as he had in life. Song Lan had replaced his bandages with clean, snowy white ones. Below, the corners of his lips are quirked slightly upwards, almost like he’s smiling. He looks like he had in Yi City that last day of A-Qing’s years as a ghost – through Wei Wuxian’s eyes, she’d seen for the first time how Xue Yang had carefully laid him to rest, and even the placement of his arms and the serene look on his face had been the same.

Her hands find and clench around the rim of the coffin. A single tear drips onto the back of her hand. Distantly, she hears Song Lan reassure the yizhuang’s keeper that he can perform the burial rites himself. The reality of the situation finally starts to sink in.

Xiao Xingchen is dead, and the world keeps spinning. Nothing has dissolved. A-Qing is still in an unfamiliar town somewhere near Yiling, not back on the dusty road that leads to Yi City.

She’d been wrong, then. It’s Xue Yang’s death that breaks things, and only his. Xiao Xingchen can die just like he had the first time around, and the world doesn’t care any more than it had back then.

Something hard touches her arm, making her flinch. She looks up and, through a film of tears, meets Song Lan’s red eyes. His fuchen rests against her shoulder in some semblance of a comforting touch.

“We can stay here until the funeral,” he says. “To keep watch over him.”

A-Qing nods. She hasn’t spoken yet, and she doesn’t now. She feels like her voice has left her entirely.

Song Lan takes her silence in stride. “I have some more arrangements to make. It won’t take long. You can call for the guardian if there is anything you need.”

Reluctantly, she nods again. It’d be better to be around him, and she can’t imagine that he’d turn her away if she asked to come along. But the part of her that’s still a vengeful ghost refuses to leave Xiao Xingchen’s side.

Song Lan gives her a gentle nudge with his fuchen, then turns towards the exit. A-Qing doesn’t watch him leave. Instead, she returns to the position that comes more naturally to her than walking, or breathing, or all the other things her body is so used to: stood at the foot of Xiao Xingchen’s coffin, she holds vigil.

-

As he had promised, Song Lan isn’t gone for long. The door opens for him quietly, and he crosses the high threshold with care. He’s dressed from head to toe in coarse white cloth, like a widow at her husband’s funeral.

In his arms, he’s holding a basket filled with another stack of folded fabric, which he walks over to give to her. “Here. It’s what I was able to afford. You may choose how much of it you wear.”

With effort, A-Qing unclenches the fingers of one hand from her bamboo cane and takes the basket. Inside is another full set of mourning robes, made similarly to Song Lan’s own.

She changes into them in a side room of the yizhuang, once she can convince her legs to move away from the coffin. The fabric is rougher on her skin than her own cheap robes, which had been softened by wear, and the sash Song Lan had gotten her is thin and simple. After some consideration, she leaves the fox pin in her hair. For some reason, she can’t bring herself to take it out.

When she steps out of the side room with her old clothes bunched up under her arm and the empty basket in her hand, Song Lan is sitting at a small table near the entrance and staring at the letter he’d found in their room that morning, clutching it tightly in both hands.

A-Qing walks over to him, puts the basket down on the floor and the clothes into the basket, and sits down.

“Song-daozhang,” she says. It takes her two tries to get the words out. “Can you read it to me?”

A whole range of emotions crosses Song Lan’s face. Ultimately, the one that settles is a deep, resigned sadness.

“This should not be your burden to bear.”

A-Qing wraps her arms around herself, digging her nails into the meat of her shoulders. “I want to know what he said! You don’t need to protect me!”

Song Lan closes his eyes. He sets the letter down in front of him, aligning its sides perfectly with the table edge. It’s written in Xiao Xingchen’s careful, ever so slightly lopsided handwriting, and from what A-Qing can see, it isn’t long. Song Lan’s fingers trace the characters with an aching tenderness.

“Please, Qing-guniang,” he rasps. “Do not make me say these words aloud. Not yet.”

The pain in his voice silences her protest. She swallows hard; if she’s honest with herself, the thought of hearing what’s written there, Xiao Xingchen’s last words in this world, makes her taste bile. She just wants to know, in case the world resets again and she gets back to that road, what had gone wrong.

Song Lan shifts on his knees, and A-Qing looks up from where she’d buried her face in her knees. He’s picked the letter up again.

“This part pertains to you,” he says and clears his throat. In a halting, wretched stutter, he reads out, “I hope that you and A-Qing will find solace in each other. She was a great comfort to me when I was at my lowest point, and I will forever be grateful to her. If I may ask one more thing of you: please take care of her. She is an extraordinary girl, and I would hate if she were left alone.”

Then you shouldn’t have left again, A-Qing thinks, which is such an awful thought that she flinches away from it. Involuntarily, she seeks Song Lan’s eyes, as if he could have somehow read her thoughts. He meets her gaze, but all she can find in his expression are grief and solemn determination.

“I want you to know that I will,” he says. “For your own sake, as well as his.”

She has no words left to thank him. If she opened her mouth now, she imagines that all that’d come out would be screams. She might as well be tongueless again, sharing a lonely space inside a yizhuang with a fierce corpse, only that the streets outside this yizhuang are bustling with people going about their afternoon errands and the people of Yi City are dead.

In place of words, she stretches her hand out across the table and touches the tip of one finger to Song Lan’s white sleeve. He tracks every single twitch of her fingers, but he doesn’t pull away, and that’s comfort enough for her.

They’re both crying again. She’s so tired of being miserable.

-

The next day, A-Qing wakes on a bedroll on the floor of a yizhuang, a few steps away from Xiao Xingchen and across from where Song Lan has his eyes closed and his legs folded in a lotus position. Immediately, she buries her face in the bedroll and spends a while soaking it through with tears.

The guardian brings them some simple breakfast, which A-Qing eats without tasting much and Song Lan doesn’t touch. Afterwards, Song Lan finally combs and re-does his hair and leaves again, promising to be back soon.

Alone in the yizhuang, A-Qing inevitably drifts back to the coffin. Xiao Xingchen’s peaceful expression hasn’t changed, and something about it agitates her. Her bamboo pole hits the solid dirt floor with a loud bang.

“Why, daozhang? Why do you always leave us?” Her hands shake uselessly at the walls of the coffin. If she had the strength to crack stone, she would break it into pieces. “You didn’t have to do it the first time, either! I was still there, you know? I was waiting for you. And Xue Yang had brought back Song-daozhang already, so he was mourning you too!”

Xiao Xingchen, of course, doesn’t answer. He just lies there with that infuriatingly calm look on his face and that quirk of his mouth, so stupidly close to the smile that she’d spent the past days trying to get out of him, and all the rage drains from her in one fell swoop.

“I’m sorry,” she stutters. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to be angry at you.”

Her own small hands on the coffin go hazy behind the wetness in her eyes. She blinks it away furiously, but it’s no use; Xiao Xingchen’s corpse is turning into a blur of white and black.

“I miss you,” she sobs. Her knees give out shortly after, and she curls up with her back to the coffin, staring out into the air.

At some point, Song Lan returns. He still doesn’t quite look like himself in his white mourning robes, but A-Qing imagines she’d get used to it if she were to stay with him and try to comfort him, the way Xiao Xingchen had wanted.

“I have sent word to the Lan Sect,” he says by way of greeting. “I described what we know about your curse and told them where to find us. I hope Lan Wangji will prove to be as honourable a man as rumour makes him out to be.”

He waits a moment for a reply but seems unperturbed when he doesn’t get one. A-Qing watches him trudge wearily up to the table, hands flexing nervously with every step, and comes to an overdue decision.

“Song-daozhang,” she says, and Song Lan’s head swivels around to look at her. His look of surprise makes her realise that she hasn’t spoken this clearly since last morning. At once, her vision clears up, and her body feels more solid that it has in nearly two days.

For good measure, she wipes the tears off her face, grabs her cane, and pushes herself to her feet.

“Can we talk about something?” she asks. Song Lan nods without hesitation and sinks down at the table, crossing his legs. A-Qing stumbles over to join him – her legs might feel real again, but they’re still weak from disuse – and sits with her bamboo pole resting securely in her lap.

“What is it?” Song Lan asks.

Her nails tap out an erratic rhythm on the wood of her cane, but the fog is finally gone from her head. She can talk in full sentences again.

“It’s about the curse,” she begins. “Every time Xue Yang dies, the world ends. It all goes blank, and I go back to Yi City on the day you show up there. It’s all exactly the same, every time – you’re there, and daozhang’s there, and everyone in Yi City. Every time he dies—” she clenches her fists around the cane “—I get to try again.”

Song Lan sits up straight as a pole. Watching the realisation dawn on his face fills her chest with a bubbly, warm tingle. “I understand,” he says and stands up.

He makes a beeline for his bedroll, where he’d left most of his belongings. In quick, succinct motions, he straps Fuxue to his back and picks up his fuchen to tuck it into the crook of his arm. A-Qing is left gaping at him from down on the floor.

“Now?” she asks, and Song Lan turns to her, looking every bit the part of a soldier leaving for war.

“There’s no use wasting time,” he reasons.

A-Qing gulps. “Okay,” she says and tries to coax her fawn legs into letting her scramble back up. “Just— Let me—”

“Qing-guniang,” Song Lan cuts in. “You should stay here.”

She stops with her hands on her cane, halfway through straightening her spine. “But—”

“You’ve seen enough. Let me do this.”

Her hair stands on end at the idea. She vividly remembers Song Lan kneeling on the forest floor, gushing blood from his mouth and the wound in his chest, while Xue Yang cackles and twirls his hair around his finger. But this is a different world, and a different Song Lan. If he goes to fight Xue Yang, he’ll come prepared.

Tentatively, she nods. “But you have to promise me you won’t let anything happen to you, Song-daozhang.”

Song Lan lowers his head. “I won’t.”

His eyes stray from her face over to the coffin. His chest expands with a deep breath, and he turns to walk the few steps up to Xiao Xingchen’s resting place. A strand of his hair falls over his shoulder as he bends his head down low.

She should give him a moment to say goodbye, probably. He’d never really gotten the chance in her own time, what with the things Xue Yang had done to him and to Xiao Xingchen’s corpse. It’s hard to say goodbye to someone who’s been made the subject of increasingly convoluted experiments, all of them with the slightest chance of succeeding in actually bringing him back.

If Xue Yang’s talisman hadn’t ripped everything apart, her old Song Lan could’ve gotten this chance as well. Really, she can’t be sure that he hadn’t; for all she knows, there might be a second Song Lan out there somewhere, who’d been freed from Xue Yang’s influence by Wei Wuxian and left alone in the ruins of Yi City. But that introduces the possibility of there being a third and a fourth and a fifth Song Lan, who’ll have to deal with picking up Xiao Xingchen’s pieces after Xue Yang’s death and A-Qing’s own disappearance, and that’s too upsetting to think much about.

The back of her neck prickles uncomfortably at the very idea. Spooked, she slinks over to her current Song Lan, who won’t be current or possibly real for much longer, and peeks cautiously up at his face.

Unsurprisingly, he’s crying, but it’s something calmer than the desperate grief she’s been getting used to seeing on him.

“What is it?” she asks, biting her lip.

“There are so many things I should have told him,” he says. He runs his hand gently over the side of the coffin, then blinks the tears out of his eyes and looks at her. “Will you stay with him?”

A-Qing nods. She can’t imagine doing anything else.

“Thank you,” Song Lan says. His voice cracks a little, but he manages to straighten up again, cast one last look at Xiao Xingchen, and turn towards the door.

He’s almost crossed the whole of the room before A-Qing realises that she absolutely cannot let him leave like this.

“Song-daozhang!” she calls and bolts after him. “When you fight Xue Yang, you should tie something over your nose and your mouth! He’s got that kind of powder; if you breathe it in, it kills you and it turns you into a fierce corpse. He can control walking corpses, too. They’re way more powerful than normal ones,” she adds, although she shouldn’t know the power level of a regular walking corpse – Wei Wuxian’s knowledge is coming in handy again.

Song Lan stops in his tracks with one hand on the door. Bemused, he takes in all of her frantic babbling, but he must decide not to ask how she knows all this. It’s not like it matters anymore.

“Understood,” he says.

A-Qing swallows. All of a sudden, her heart is in her throat again. “And no matter what you do, don’t give him the chance to talk. Don’t ask him questions or anything. You can’t let him distract you.”

That last point, she underlines with a loud thump of her cane.

Song Lan gives her a solemn nod. Then, he lifts his fuchen in front of his chest with both hands and bows down deeper than anyone has ever bowed to her in her life. “I won’t fail. I swear it.”

She watches him go, until his tall head disappears in the crowd of townspeople drifting by on the street outside. There are tears rolling down her face again, but crying barely registers anymore. She’ll see him again, in any case.

The door falls shut, and her legs predictably carry her over to the coffin again, where Xiao Xingchen lies undisturbed. It feels odd, that all she should have to do now is wait. There’s no journey ahead of her, no daoshi to herd out of noble sacrifice, not even a bath to take. Just her and a corpse, which in a lot of ways feels like she’s come full circle.

At least it gives her time to think.

Briefly, she considers what she’d do if Song Lan failed after all, but she guesses Song Lan had already made that decision for her: she’ll wait for the Lan Sect, and then she’ll let that sect leader’s brother skewer Xue Yang like a pig over a fire. So far, it’s been much easier to doom each version of the world than to save them. The problem, as ever, will be trying not to doom the next one.

Xiao Xingchen stares up at her with his pale, eyeless face and his serene smile. It hasn’t even been three nights since he died, so his soul shouldn’t have left this world for good yet, if it still exists at all. She can’t shake the sense of wrongness that overcomes her every time she looks at him.

It just makes no sense. A curse created by Xue Yang should be designed to save Xiao Xingchen, too. Otherwise, she can’t imagine why he would’ve made it in the first place.

“Daozhang,” she sighs. “I really need an idea how to fix this.”

He stays quiet, but that’s fine. A-Qing takes her cane in both hands, holding it straight so it points up at the sky like a stick of incense in an offering bowl, and spends the rest of the day making plans.

-

Around the shen hour of the next day, Xiao Xingchen’s corpse dissolves, along with the rest of the world.

Chapter Text

A distant road.

The fog in her head is worse this time around. Sound and colour and sensation all erupt around her, and her legs keep moving on their own, but nothing she sees feels familiar. For a horrible moment, she knows neither where nor who she is. Then, she spots the tip of her cane bumping against the dusty gravel, and it all comes back to her.

It’d worked, then. She’s back on the road. Somewhere in the town ahead of her, Xiao Xingchen is alive.

Something firm touches her shoulder.

“Guniang. You should walk more carefully if you cannot see.”

She doesn’t spin around, but it’s a close thing. “Ah, sure, sure,” she mumbles. If she angles her head just right, she can see Song Lan’s black robes, his strong fingers around the fuchen, and a glimpse of his stern face.

“There are fewer people on the side of the road. It’s safer to walk there,” he tells her. She kind of wants to cry.

“Thank you, daozhang,” she says and means it with all her heart.

If her voice is a little too thick or her eyes a little too wet, Song Lan either doesn’t notice or doesn’t want to put her on the spot. He moves on as he always does, walking up to that passer-by whose face A-Qing remembers so well now.

It’s good to see some vigour in his steps again, as well as the healthy shine of his pristinely kept hair. He doesn’t deserve what she’s about to do, but she doesn’t feel too sorry about it. This day has never caused him anything but grief and suffering. If he gets to sit this one out, he might be happier for it.

“Excuse me,” he asks the passer-by. “Have you seen a blind daozhang carrying a sword?”

The man shakes his head, apologising that he can’t help, and A-Qing takes her chance.

“Daozhang!” she calls. Careful to keep her steps measured, she walks vaguely in Song Lan’s direction. “You’re looking for someone?”

“I am,” Song Lan replies. “Have you heard of a person like that?”

“Ah, you’ll have to describe them to me!” A-Qing says brightly. “But you helped me, so I’ll help you if I can!”

“Very well.” He bows courteously to the passer-by, who makes his escape down the road towards the market, and regards A-Qing with a befuddled sort of scepticism. “I am looking for a cultivator. He is blind, like you are, and his sword is engraved with frost flowers and famous for its beauty. He used to wear white robes, though I don’t know if he still does. He is extraordinarily good-looking. If he did come by here, I assume he would have been helpful to the people around here, either by night hunting or through some other means.”

It’s a great description, and obviously one he’s rattled down many times before. Hearing it, anyone who knows Xiao Xingchen could have pointed Song Lan towards him. It’s kind of a miracle that he hadn’t walked right in on their confrontation with Xue Yang during that second try of hers.

A-Qing taps her index finger against the side of her mouth, feigning contemplation. “Ah, no. I’m sorry, daozhang! I’ve lived in this town for a couple years now, and there’s no one like that here.”

Song Lan’s face falls, just a little. “He might have passed through,” he tries, but A-Qing shakes her head.

“We’re so far away from anything important, we don’t have any cultivators here! Whenever there’s one passing through, everyone’s talking about it for weeks, and if he’s blind, I for sure would’ve heard about it!”

“I see.” His expression has settled on resignation, but he gives her a shallow bow nonetheless. “Thank you, guniang. You might have saved me precious time.”

With that, he turns back towards the road and heads off – away from Yi City, maybe towards one of the larger towns that are so few and far between here. It does hurt a little to see him go. It reminds her a bit too much of the last time she’d seen him, even though he’ll be fine this time and she’d thought this decision over thrice.

“I hope you find your friend, daozhang!” she chirps after him, which is not a lie. She just can’t let him find Xiao Xingchen now.

She has to figure out how the curse works, and much as she loathes the idea, there’s only one person who can help her understand it. Getting Song Lan involved now would ruin all her chances at having a conversation she’s afraid she really needs to have.

It feels good to finally have an actual plan. Her mind is still muddled enough that she, after Song Lan disappears behind a hill, spends a little too long watching patches of clouds drift by before she fully comes back to herself. Once she does, though, her limbs start tingling with energy, and she hurries down the road as quickly as she can. Song Lan was right: there’s no use wasting time.

The path to the yizhuang is as busy as it always is on this day. She passes neighbours and townspeople who are all alive and well, and this time, she makes a bit of a point of trying to attach a name to each face. She manages it for about half of them, which really isn’t too bad.

Further away from the main streets everyone takes to get to the market, the crowd thins out, until she might as well be walking through her old ghost town. On a side street she could’ve sworn was part of a shortcut she’s walked a million times before, she turns left and comes face to face with a dead end.

She blinks at the rough brick wall, which is topped with a roof and thus probably part of a house. She took a wrong turn. That hasn’t happened to her since the first year she lived here with Xiao Xingchen and Xue Yang.

As a ghost, she’d walked these streets for so long that she’d come to literally know them blind. She shouldn’t even have to watch where she’s going. She’s pretty sure she hadn’t on multiple occasions in all the past iterations of the world, and she hadn’t once lost her way. For some reason, that she had now frightens her more than the prospect of talking to Xue Yang.

She tracks backwards out of the dead alley and back onto the side street, glancing around. There are houses she thinks she recognises, and she tentatively follows her gut instinct further down the road. As she goes, the facades do become more familiar, and finally, she catches sight of a street corner she’s sure she remembers.

The yizhuang is just down the street from there. Confident again, she speeds up her steps. It must have been a one-off thing, just a brief lapse of her stressed-out mind.

When she reaches the yizhuang and throws the door open, Xue Yang is on his way out with an empty basket in his hand.

“Huh, look who’s back already,” he drawls. He’s entirely relaxed, a far cry from the twitchy man she’d stupidly freed from an Immortal Binding Rope. A-Qing’s stomach still does an ugly somersault.

Behind him stands Xiao Xingchen, smiling happily with a light flush on his face. “Welcome back,” he says, and that’s a jar of worms she absolutely won’t be dealing with now.

“Are you leaving?” she demands, crowding in on Xue Yang.

His brows tick up in surprise. “Yup. Off to the market. You want anything?”

Stomping her feet, she puts on her very best little-girl whine. “No, you’ve got to stay here! Daozhang, can’t you go?”

Xue Yang throws a brief, baffled glance back at Xiao Xingchen, who steps closer with a worried frown.

“Did something happen?” he asks. He sounds so gentle, like he had when he’d been drying her tears in an inn room. She’s not thinking about it.

“There’s just—“ she starts and kicks out at the floor again. “Ah, it’s so fucking stupid! This ugly bitch! I swear, if I was a ghost, I’d haunt her to the end of the world! All she does is sit on her ass all day, and then she calls me names and says I’m ugly!”

She’s used that cover story before, she’s pretty sure. That’s how she knows it’ll work, and indeed, Xiao Xingchen’s frown lightens and Xue Yang expressively rolls his eyes. It’d offend her if she weren’t throwing a fit for the sake of it, but of course, she can’t reply to a reaction she’s pretending she can’t even see.

Instead, she flutters her lashes at them pathetically. “I’m not ugly, right?”

“Like a mutt with a donkey for a father,” Xue Yang retorts without missing a beat.

“Don’t be mean,” Xiao Xingchen chastises. “You’re very beautiful.”

“But you can’t even see, daozhang!” she complains, brandishes her cane, and stabs it in Xue Yang’s direction. “You! You’ve got to help me! I wanna go through all my clothes, and I want to make them all pretty, and do my hair, and then when I see that girl again, she won’t say anything!”

Xue Yang gapes at her in open bewilderment. “Hah? Why me? What do you think I’ll do other than call you ugly again?”

“That’s why it’s got to be you!” she insists. “Daozhang’s way too nice, he’ll just say that I look pretty no matter what!”

“I could dress you up like a hungry ghost and you wouldn’t even notice.”

“I’d notice!” She sticks her tongue out at him. Since he’s a lost cause, she turns to Xiao Xingchen again, pitching her voice even higher. “Daozhang, will you go to the market? Just for today! Please!”

He ducks his head, stifling a low chuckle. “Alright, alright. I’ll leave you to it,” he says and steps up to Xue Yang. He’s still smiling ever so slightly, and his fingers are almost teasing when they nudge aside Xue Yang’s hand around the handle of the basket.

Xue Yang doesn’t let go. “We just said that it’s my turn.”

“We can switch, you can go tomorrow,” Xiao Xingchen replies serenely. “Try to cheer our A-Qing up a little.”

He says it in that voice of his that A-Qing hasn’t heard in so long – the one that implies that he will not budge on his decision, because whatever they’re fighting about doesn’t truly matter and he’s wisely and in good fun chosen the path that’s best for everyone. You can argue with that voice, but unless you can convince him that the point you’re making is serious, you don’t stand a chance.

Predictably, Xue Yang caves. “Your fault if she ends up blubbering ‘cause she can’t stand to hear the truth,” he mutters. He drops the basket and uses his newly free hand to poke his index finger at Xiao Xingchen’s chest. “They’ll have apples at the fruit stall already. Bring some?”

“Oh,” Xiao Xingchen says, delighted. “I’ll try to find them.”

Xue Yang sighs. “Don’t get scammed again, daozhang. That guy who sells them is a dirty cheat. He’ll try to make you pay full price for shit that’s half-rotten.”

“I’ll do my best,” Xiao Xingchen promises, which probably means that he’ll come back with a basket full of the smallest apples in the province. A-Qing feels a brief hint of involuntary sympathy for the resigned twist of Xue Yang’s lip.

“Right, off you go,” he lilts, herding Xiao Xingchen out the door. A-Qing makes room for them in the doorway and heads over to the table, pretending not to see the quick kiss Xue Yang presses to Xiao Xingchen’s lips.

She takes a seat. The bowl on the table is still hideous, but it could be a good match for a handful of wonky apples. The door falls shut, and Xue Yang spins around to narrow his eyes at her.

“Okay,” he says. “Now, what do you want, you little liar? You don’t seriously expect me to believe that sob story bullshit.”

A-Qing places her hands on the edge of the table in front of her. Her nails are bitten, and there’s a tiny scar on the third knuckle of her right hand that she’d forgotten about. She’s still nauseous, but there’s no going back now, so she just gets it over with.

“Xue Yang,” she spits out and watches his face fall.

It’s kind of gratifying. His eyes go round as rice bowls. The tic in his jaw gives her the exciting feeling that she’s finally seeing him actually afraid, but he recovers quickly.

“What did you say?” he hisses. “Where did you hear that name?”

“I know who you are, bastard,” she says. “You can’t fool me.”

Xue Yang’s whole body shifts, taking on that predatory tension that instantly makes her feel like a prey animal cornered by a tiger. His grin slowly spreads across his face again, baring all his teeth.

“You’ve got to be really stupid, sending daozhang away just to tell me that,” he croons. His hand is already hovering at his sleeve.

A-Qing scrambles back, lifting her hands up in front of her head. “Stop! I won’t tell daozhang! I promise I won’t, I just wanna talk to you!”

Miraculously, Xue Yang does stop. He drops his empty hand, Jiangzai unsummoned, tilts his head, and frowns. “What exactly have you heard about me?”

“I know what you’ve done,” she says dismissively. “Baixue Temple and the Chang clan and all. That’s not the point!”

That seems to startle Xue Yang almost as much as her saying his name had. His cruel smile relaxes by a margin, turning into something very nearly genuine.

“You’re a ruthless one, aren’t you,” he marvels, which has implications that make her want to puke but probably aren’t worth arguing over now. “What’s your point, then?”

A-Qing swallows, steeling herself for an explanation that doesn’t actually get any easier, no matter how often she gives it.

“This isn’t the first time I’m living this day,” she begins. That’s probably the best way to get to the gist of it.

Xue Yang blinks. “Say what?”

“I’m under a curse. Or something like that. It keeps sending me back to this morning.”

“What the fuck,” he says, with feeling. “That’s a weird one even for you.”

A-Qing’s shoulders tense, and she leans forward again, slapping both her hands down on the table.

“No, listen!” she barks, because she isn’t going to let him tell her she’s lying about any of this. “This is a bad day! Daozhang figures out who you are, and it all goes wrong every time, no matter what I do about it! One of you always gets killed! I’ve been through this day five times already, and every time you die, everything dissolves and I end up back here.”

It’s far from the best summary, but it’s enough for his eyes to zero in on her. It’s that dissecting scrutiny again, the same kind she’d seen on his face when she’d told him the first time. On some level, he believes her. His strange brain is probably already coming up with theories.

“Assuming that you’re not lying out of your absolute ass,” he says and saunters over to her. “Why’re you telling me that?”

“Because you made the curse! A different you, the first one. I want you to figure out how it works.”

Xue Yang drops down heavily across from her at the table, where he lounges with one leg stretched out and his other knee propping up his elbow.

“I made a curse that breaks time?” he giggles. “Why the fuck would I do that?”

She purses her lips and clenches her fists. She needs his help, so she’ll be as honest as she can be. That doesn’t mean she has to be nice about it.

“Because it all went to shit,” she snarls. “The first time – the actual first time, before all this curse stuff – daozhang found out who you are and confronted you. He wanted to know why you stayed with us for so long. He didn’t even really fight you. But you just had to tell him about that trick you pulled with the walking corpses.”

Her voice cracks, which she swallows down furiously. Xue Yang’s face goes through another alarmed journey as he, presumably, realises what she’s talking about and that he’s no longer the only one in possession of that particular secret.

“I told him, huh?” he huffs, failing at sounding nonchalant. “What’d he say about that?”

Below all the vague confusion, there’s a hint of actual curiosity in that question. She wishes viciously that she could stomp it to death under her feet, and decides to try just that.

“He killed himself,” she says. “Not you – he still didn’t even try to kill you. He just took his sword and cut his own throat, and then he bled out. Right there,” she adds and points at the spot where Xiao Xingchen’s body had dropped to the ground.

Xue Yang pauses. His whole body just freezes, except for his eyes, which blink exactly thrice. He’d looked the same when he’d been tied to a tree, grappling with the same piece of information.

“You tried to bring him back,” she tells him. “But you didn’t manage, because daozhang was so fucking sick of you and your bullshit that he broke his soul. He just— ripped himself to pieces so he could never come back to life.” She has to swallow again to keep her voice steady. “I ran away, but you came after me and killed me, and then you went mad.”

“How’d you know that if you were dead?” Xue Yang cuts in. His usual singsong has gone oddly monotonous.

Her chest constricts around a sick sense of satisfaction, which she allows herself to feel in every single one of her veins.

“I haunted the fuck out of you, you pile of dog shit,” she spits. “You tried to fix daozhang for— years. Five or ten or so. It was seriously scary. You put him in a coffin and did something so his body wouldn’t rot, and you carried his soul around all the time. You did experiments on it, I think, but none of them worked. I heard you just wailing sometimes, like you were the ghost. You were really, really fucked up.”

Xue Yang’s upper body draws back imperceptibly, like he’s recoiling from something venomous, but his voice stays even. “That doesn’t tell me why I’m supposed to believe you’ve been going back in time.”

His persistent refusal to engage with anything she’s said is almost admirable. A-Qing rolls her eyes and lets out an indignant puff of breath.

“Well, you died! But before you croaked, you did something to me. You slapped some talisman on me, and then the next moment I was back here on this day.”

A hint of that piercing look returns to Xue Yang’s black eyes, and he finally unfreezes. He rearranges his limbs so that he’s bent forward and has his elbow on the table, holding up his chin. The whole motion is stilted and nothing like his usual fluid agility.

Like he’s testing out the taste of the words on his tongue, he says, “You’re trying to tell me that in some other – what, version of time? – I spent a decade just trying to resurrect Xiao Xingchen?” He barks a laugh. “You’re bullshitting me.”

He might just be the dumbest person in the world.

“Test it, then!” A-Qing demands, because she’s here to get information out of him, not to get him to have some kind of revelation. “You can tell if you check my qi, right? I dare you to prove I’m lying.”

“You know what,” Xue Yang replies, “I think I will.”

He pushes himself up, just enough to scoot around the table. A-Qing is seized by the instinct to get out of his reach, to jump up and flee this room and this town and run until she can find Xiao Xingchen at the market and hide behind him. Holding her breath and clenching her hands around the bamboo cane in her lap, she manages to stay still.

Xue Yang reaches up and, without preamble, presses his one five-fingered hand to her forehead. She winces after all at that, which earns her a scoff. The tips of his fingers are cool and oddly rough. In quick succession, he moves them to the space above her heart and to her abdomen, just like Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan had when they’d checked her body for the curse. She’s already holding out her wrist when he reaches for it.

“Huh,” he says. A-Qing fidgets nervously.

“What?” she demands. “What is it?”

Xue Yang pinches her. “Gimme a moment. Been a while since I dicked around with that kinda thing.”

He presses his fingers to her pulse point a little longer, then moves them up her arm in a straight line. Finally, he drops her wrist and pokes the tips of two fingers right at her heart. After a moment, he lets out a low whistle.

“Wow, Little Blind. Your soul’s fucked.”

A-Qing tries very hard not to let her breath hitch. “But— but I’m sitting here and I’m talking, right? I’m still me!”

“Yeah,” Xue Yang agrees with sparkling eyes. “That’s weird!” His fingers dig into her chest a little harder, until it’s almost painful. “You’re like, a couple hundred paper scraps held in place by a really ugly teapot. And you’ve got parts missing, too. Shit, how are you sitting here?”

Panic spreads through her chest again, converging right where Xue Yang’s fingers are resting. That sounds a lot more concrete than the vague assertion that her soul is damaged, and she really isn’t liking what that damage is turning out to be.

“I don’t know!” she says, defensive. “I said you were doing some shit with shattered souls ‘cause of daozhang! Can you get off me now? I don’t wanna catch whatever disease you’ve got that makes you so fucked in the head!”

She tries to squirm away, but Xue Yang just clicks his tongue and continues his investigation.

“Shut up.” Following his own advice, he sits in uncharacteristic silence for a bit, moving his fingers across what she assumes are important parts of her meridians, before he returns them to her heart and frowns. “Yeah, I made that. You’re not lying.”

He has the audacity to sound stunned by it. She picks up her cane and gives his knee a violent shove with its tip.

“Course I’m not!” she snaps. “I told you so!”

Xue Yang ignores her in favour of tapping his fingers at the centre of her forehead instead. His lips spread into a slow, amazed grin. “That’s the most batshit convoluted fucking piece of demonic cultivation since the Ghost General. And I made that why? To resurrect Xiao Xingchen?”

The disbelief in his voice very nearly has her groaning out loud. “Yeah! Gods, you’re such a pain in the ass. You really just never get it.”

“Get what?” Xue Yang asks.

“Well, I’m not gonna tell you!” A-Qing declares. “What about the curse? How does it work?”

“Not a curse, dimwit,” Xue Yang corrects and flicks one sharp nail at her forehead. A-Qing thinks about biting his hand.

“What else is it, then?”

“Something really crazy!” he grins, like that wasn’t obvious, and at last gets out of her personal space to scoot back around the table. There, he stretches his limbs out in a casual sprawl and shrugs expressively. “Fuck if I know how it works.”

“What!” she exclaims and kicks out at him in frustration. Her leg is a little too short to reach. “You’re useless! If you made it, you can figure it out!”

Her frustration seems to delight him; laughing brightly, he makes an exaggerated show of pulling back from her failed kick. In the same motion, he reaches into his sleeve and pulls out a single wrapped piece of candy.

“I’ve got some idea!” he assures her. “There’s some similar shit in Wei Wuxian’s notes, but he never messed with time.”

A-Qing freezes. “Wei Wuxian?” she asks, dumbfounded.

Xue Yang perks up like a particularly prideful cat. “Worked with his notes for a while,” he preens. “In a way, he taught me everything I know!”

It doesn’t even seem to cross his mind that she might have asked because that name means nothing to her. A-Qing replays their entire conversation in her head, but she’s certain she hadn’t mentioned Wei Wuxian, just in case that giving Xue Yang his name would endanger him. She’d left Song Lan out of her story for the same reason, so she wouldn’t have slipped up.

“Don’t talk like that’s special. I don’t even know who that is,” she lies, to test the waters.

Xue Yang stops in his endeavour to unwrap the candy. “Are you serious? The Yiling Laozu. Even you have to know about the Yiling Laozu.”

Not for the first time, she’s immensely glad that she’d spent most of her first life learning how to keep a straight face. “Well, I didn’t know he had a name!” she protests, keeping her voice as bratty and unaffected as possible to mask the fact that her heart just stopped.

The worst thing is that it makes sense. There’d been something in Wei Wuxian’s memories that had loomed over every single one of his thoughts, not unlike the horrible memories of Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen’s deaths that A-Qing’s ghost had been fuelled by, but it had been shrouded in so much sadness and shame that she hadn’t gotten a clear view of it. Much as she’d love to call Xue Yang a liar or come up with some ridiculous speculation like that there might have been a second Wei Wuxian versed in demonic cultivation, it fits too well to deny.

She’d had the Yiling Laozu in her head. That thought alone should give her goosebumps, but she’s having a hard time reconciling the man who’d listened to her story, mourned Xiao Xingchen, and promised to carry out her revenge with the monstrous grave robber who people say killed three thousand people in one night.

But then, she supposes, the Xue Yang who’s currently lounging at their dinner table and had not one incense stick’s time ago kissed Xiao Xingchen goodbye while reminding him to buy apples isn’t very much like the man who’d dug out her eyes and driven Xiao Xingchen to suicide either.

Absentmindedly, she chews on the inside of her lip. Maybe that’s another thing she shouldn’t think about now.

There are more important things to take away from Xue Yang’s little boasting session. If Wei Wuxian really was the Yiling Laozu, then he’d died years ago. Something must have brought his soul back in that other time and allowed him to live again, which is close enough to what Xue Yang’s talisman did to A-Qing.

“I’m guessing Sacrifice Summon,” Xue Yang muses and pops the candy into his mouth. “Most stable way of transporting a soul to a place it doesn’t belong, at least in theory. But that’s replacing one soul with a different one, and also the caster gets scrapped from the universe, so that can only be the base of whatever you’ve got going on. Though I guess tying a soul to its own body is a loophole – can’t really sacrifice what you’re trying to summon. Shit, there could be sentient fierce corpse stuff in this as well.”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” A-Qing grumbles truthfully.

Xue Yang laughs. “Yeah, figured.”

There’s a lull in their bizarre exchange, during which A-Qing picks at the loose threads of her threadbare clothes and Xue Yang sucks noisily around the candy in his mouth. She’d hoped to have more information by now, but maybe that’d been naive. At least Xue Yang has any idea how to figure out the curse, or whatever else he suspects it to be. It just means that she’ll need to stick around this world for a while longer, at least until he’s explained enough of the curse’s workings to her that she can find a way to get around it.

Across from her, Xue Yang sucks the candy to the side of his mouth and gives her a deceptively relaxed smile.

“Hey, Little Blind,” he says. “You said I died in the end. How’d that happen?”

It’s maybe the second worst question he could ask. Fortunately, she’s spared having to scramble for an answer by the sound of the door opening.

Xiao Xingchen steps through, holding the full basket in one hand. There are some apples, small and strangely shaped, peeking out from between cabbage and watercress. He must be able to sense their presence, because his lips immediately spread into a smile.

“Daozhang!” A-Qing calls and jumps up to meet him.

Xue Yang stays where he is, but his eyes cling to Xiao Xingchen like he’s grown a second head. His thumb taps idly against the stump of his pinky. None of that wariness shows in the casual way he leans back and trills, “Welcome back! Did you get the apples?”

Xiao Xingchen smiles wider. “I did, but I don’t know if you’ll like the quality. Are you done with your… thing?”

“All done!” A-Qing proclaims. “That bitch’s gonna eat her words when she sees this! I look pretty, right?”

She spins around a few times, letting the hem of her robes fly up as if they were a pretty noblewoman’s ruqun made of pure silk. Xue Yang rolls his eyes but gives her a quick, sharp smile.

“Prettiest girl in the village, sure. You’re gonna break hearts.”

“Ah, I’m glad,” Xiao Xingchen says. He reaches out to briefly pat A-Qing on the head, which she allows happily, then turns to Xue Yang and holds out the basket towards him. “My friend, will you help me put all this away?”

Xue Yang’s eyes snap down to inspect the produce, no less warily than before. “Why, did you forget where what goes in the kitchen?” he quips.

It’s a bit meaner than he usually is with Xiao Xingchen, but Xiao Xingchen doesn’t seem to mind. He just chuckles to himself and retorts, “Hmm, maybe I’d enjoy some company.”

Xue Yang stares at him. Very briefly, he glances over at A-Qing, who shrugs and decides to leave them to it for now. She traipses over to her coffin, which she hasn’t slept in for so long but which is as good a place as any to mull over everything she’s just learnt. Behind her, Xue Yang pushes himself up from the table.

“If it’s just that,” he hums. On his way to the side room, he brushes his unharmed hand along Xiao Xingchen’s waist.

-

The rest of the day is distressingly normal. It’s almost like there’s nothing special about it at all.

Mulling things over doesn’t get her any further in devising a plan, so she gives up and spends her time following around Xiao Xingchen and trying to avoid Xue Yang. That proves difficult, because Xue Yang is sticking to Xiao Xingchen like a particularly nasty tick, sharing little touches that they think private.

Seeing Xiao Xingchen this carefree should be a badly needed comfort. It’s all she’s been working for, and something she’d for so long thought she’d never have again. She’d forgotten how teasing his comments could be and how he half-heartedly hides his face when he’s overwhelmed with laughter. It should be good.

Instead, her skin crawls every time Xue Yang’s fingers playfully tug on Xiao Xingchen’s robes or curl around his wrist to guide his hand. If she could scream at Xiao Xingchen that those same hands had cut out her tongue and thrown poison into Song Lan’s face, she would do so in a heartbeat. But that would break things, and she still needs Xue Yang to tell her about the curse.

So she drifts from one corner of the yizhuang to the next, cataloguing all the little details she doesn’t remember, now and then exchanges a few venomous barbs with Xue Yang, and listens to Xiao Xingchen talk about topics like the birds he’d heard on the way to the market or whether they already need to do the laundry again. She hadn’t been aware anymore that people could care about these things.

For the first time since she’d gotten used to being made of flesh again, she feels like a stranger in her own skin.

Xue Yang at least keeps throwing her wary glances and hides a couple of pointed remarks so expertly between all his prattling that they manage to curdle A-Qing’s blood while going over Xiao Xingchen’s head. Xiao Xingchen, on the other hand, treats her like she belongs here.

He talks to her about things that had happened only yesterday for him and half a lifetime ago for her. He scolds her gently and ineffectively for her profanity. Most disorientingly, he asks her what she would like to eat and promises to make one of her favourites when she gives no clear answer. Other than the candy he used to give her every morning, she can’t remember having a favourite.

The sun goes down at an ordinary time. Xue Yang helps with the cooking, which results in Xiao Xingchen’s soft laughter chiming through the yizhuang for the entire duration that the rice simmers. They sit down with a simple meal at the dinner table, and Xiao Xingchen starts piling vegetables into her and Xue Yang’s bowls with frightening accuracy for a blind man.

“I will be off night hunting tonight,” he says conversationally. “One of the vendors at the vegetable stall told me about trouble that has come up a few villages south from here. A few graves have been disturbed, and they found the bodies inside with their skulls clawed open.”

“Ohh, a fangxiang. A classic,” Xue Yang lilts. Xiao Xingchen smiles very warmly when he insists that he come along.

The apples aren’t the best, but Xue Yang cuts bunnies out of them all the same. A-Qing holds the one he hands to her between her fingers for much too long. When she finally bites into it, it’s crunchy and slightly sour, and Xue Yang has wrapped his arms around Xiao Xingchen’s middle so shamelessly that Xiao Xingchen’s face is flushed dark and she doesn’t register chewing and swallowing the rest of the apple.

She’s embarrassingly glad when when the dishes are washed and Xiao Xingchen retrieves Shuanghua from the side room to leave for his night hunt.

“Be careful, daozhang,” she tells him, as light-hearted as possible.

Xiao Xingchen ruffles her hair in passing. “A fangxiang is nothing too dangerous. We’ll be back soon.”

“I’ll get him back home in one piece, don’t worry,” Xue Yang quips on his way out. She really doesn’t know what to make of that one.

The bedding of her coffin is the most comfortable thing she’s lain down on so far. Strangely enough, the hard bedding in those nice inn rooms is no match for straw and rags, but no matter how rigorously she presses her eyes closed and tries to fall asleep, the anxiety of the past days doesn’t leave her.

Throughout the whole night, her sleep is too light to give her any rest. In erratic intervals, she wakes to clammy hands and the absolute certainty that Xue Yang is about to kill her in her sleep. When she drifts off again, somewhat soothed by the silence telling her that Xiao Xingchen and Xue Yang haven’t yet returned, her dreams show her images of Xiao Xingchen’s dead body and Xue Yang bleeding out from stab wounds.

She’s startled awake from one such jumbled, directionless dream by the sound of footsteps on the beaten dirt floor and voices whispering in the doorway. Her hands fly up to clutch at the collar of her robes when she recognises Xue Yang, but he isn’t talking to her, and his tone is bright and giggly.

“Come here. You’ve got something— there.”

Xiao Xingchen’s subdued laughter follows, then abruptly cuts off. There’s a long beat of silence. When he speaks again, his voice is a little breathy.

“What’s gotten into you today?”

“What, do I need a reason to get my hands on you now?” Xue Yang needles. “What do you want, a philosophical treatise? Are you that sick of me already?”

“No, of course not. Just, you’re very—” Xiao Xingchen makes a small noise, which quiets quickly and turns into a low hum. The wood of some door creaks. A-Qing shuts her eyes, like that’d do anything, and tries very hard not to put any pictures to the sounds.

When she was still alive, she’d yell at them to get a room whenever she got sick of their flirting. It usually only made Xue Yang more obnoxious but embarrassed Xiao Xingchen enough for it to work anyways. She guesses she could do that now – just raise her voice and shout that she can hear them. It’s just that a part of her is still so caught up in bloody dream images that the idea of drawing attention to herself is frightening.

“Shh, not here,” comes Xiao Xingchen’s hushed voice, sparing her the effort. “A-Qing’s asleep.”

“We really should marry her off, don’t you think?” Xue Yang replies sweetly, but she can almost hear the unhappy twist of his mouth. “She’s getting to that age. There’s that matchmaker a couple towns over that found a girl for Wu-furen’s ugly third-born, maybe we should call her up. Get Little Blind a rich husband and her own house.”

“She’s too young to get married.”

Xue Yang scoffs. “Bah, by a year or two. She’ll get on our nerves about it soon enough.”

She nearly snorts out loud at that, despite her fear. There’s nothing that’s been on her mind less than marriage. At least if Xue Yang’s making plans for her wedding, he might not be planning to cut her throat tonight.

The room has gone silent again. There’s no rustling or creaking anymore either. All she can make out if she focuses is the quiet sound of breathing.

Eventually, Xiao Xingchen’s low voice asks, “Do you think me selfish?”

Another beat of silence, followed by Xue Yang’s stunned voice.

“Where’s that come from?”

“Because I don’t want her to leave,” Xiao Xingchen whispers. “You’re right, she’d be better off living with her own family than in a yizhuang with two strange men. I can offer her so little. She deserves so much more than this, but— I’d miss her terribly.”

A-Qing’s breath catches in her throat. She tries to picture it: leaving this yizhuang, maybe even Yi City as a whole, to live a different life with different people. Her scattered mind dully recalls some ridiculous dreams she’d had when she was younger, something about finding a respectable young master who’d marry her, give her all the riches in the world, and leave her alone to do what she wanted with them. She struggles to even see the appeal of that idea now.

No one would want to marry a malnourished poor girl with half a soul, anyways. Xiao Xingchen is getting worked up over nothing.

“You know I’m joking, hm? I don’t think you could be selfish if you tried, daozhang,” Xue Yang says, for once agreeing with her. He clicks his tongue. “Enough of that bullshit. C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up. There’s guts on your sleeve, I’m pretty sure.”

The door to the side room opens and closes with a soft click. The wood and the brick of the walls swallow up the rest of their conversation, and A-Qing falls back into an uneasy slumber.

-

She wakes again not long after. Her eyes are gone and the stump of her tongue is spilling blood into her mouth. Panic fills her from her tight chest to her fingertips, which hectically grasp for purchase in the straw she’s lying on. It takes her far too long to realise that she can’t see because the room is dark, and the fluid in her mouth is just saliva.

She lies there gasping for a while. Her heartbeat is too quick to even think about going back to sleep, and even after it’s mostly calmed down, the spike of energy that the shock had left behind wakes her up the rest of the way. Her limbs are itching to move. Sighing to herself, she pulls her body up on the walls of the coffin and climbs out into the yizhuang’s main hall.

A bit of moonlight falls in through the window and dimly illuminates the silhouettes of the furniture in the room. A-Qing grabs for the bamboo cane leaning against the coffin all the same. Its weight feels right in her hand, and she stretches it out in front of her to tap out a way around the room.

Under her bare feet, the floor is cool and rough. She navigates a path through the coffins, peeks briefly out into the barren courtyard, and smells the late summer air. It’s getting colder, she thinks, or perhaps it’s been cold at night for a while. It’s not like she’d remember.

She’s got parts missing, Xue Yang had said. That feels about right overall, but it’d also be a good if terrifying explanation for why she has to walk so carefully to avoid stubbing her toes against a coffin, or why she’d gotten lost in her own home town. She can’t tell yet if it’s just that her soul had taken damage from Xue Yang’s talisman or the fact that she hadn’t been alive for so long, or if she’s losing more or herself as time goes on. Either way, it won’t make fixing things any easier.

Her nervous pacing takes her past her coffin bed again, then up to the side room where Xiao Xingchen is probably still alive. The sound of voices behind the heavy door startles her. She stops in her tracks and holds her breath, but she can’t make out more than faint mumbling.

She should let it go and go back to bed, before they hear her and Xiao Xingchen starts worrying and asks why she’s awake at this time. She’s never been very good at doing what she should.

The wood of the door is brittle and badly polished. She keeps her fingers still so she won’t catch any splinters and presses her ear against the rough surface.

In the room behind, Xue Yang’s voice is low but very intense. The wood vibrates with it, just enough for her to understand his words. She catches the tail-end of a sentence she can’t make sense of, but the next one is clear enough. In a tone she’s never heard him use before, he murmurs, “You’re mine, daozhang, you know that, right? You can’t leave me. You can never leave me.”

Bile rises to her throat. She hasn’t heard her Xue Yang speak in a while, but here he is – less ragingly mad than she’d known him, a tamer version of the man she’d haunted. There’s a sweet edge to his wild voice that throws her off. Still, it’s close enough.

Briefly, she’s almost certain that Xiao Xingchen is dead and she could open the door right now to find Xue Yang drawing arrays around his body in soot and blood. But he speaks next, and inexplicably enough, she can hear that he’s smiling.

“I won’t,” he soothes. “My dear friend.”

“If you leave,” Xue Yang continues, “I’ll track you down and lock you up somewhere. So don’t even try.”

It’s a horrifying thing to say. Xiao Xingchen laughs.

“I won’t, I promise! How could I?” He sighs gently. “I never even dared to ask you— Ah, no.”

He falls quiet. Of course, that isn’t acceptable to Xue Yang, who demands, “What?”

“I shouldn’t,” Xiao Xingchen answers. It’s quiet for a moment, before he inevitably gives in to the piercing scrutiny Xue Yang is doubtlessly turning on him. “It’s just, with the things you said—“ He hesitates. “I never dared ask you to stay.”

He’s speaking so softly that A-Qing has to repeat the words to herself thrice to piece together the few snippets that she’d caught. By contrast, Xue Yang’s baffled reply is much too loud.

“What, stay here? Why the fuck would you even need to ask that? Where else would I go?”

“Well,” Xiao Xingchen says after another long pause, “at first, I thought you’d leave once your injuries were healed. And when you didn’t… I suppose I always thought you were waiting for the right day.”

“You’re being weird,” Xue Yang rightly points out. “I’ve been here for three years, daozhang.”

Xiao Xingchen heaves another deep sigh. “I know, I know. I’m sorry. But it would be unfair to you to demand that you settle for a life like this just because I want you to. I know it isn’t much.”

Silence, again. A-Qing clenches her hand to keep it from trembling.

“Ask me,” comes Xue Yang’s sharp voice.

A heavy exhale, and Xiao Xingchen whispers, “Stay? Please stay with us.”

“Yes. I’m not going anywhere. You’re never getting rid of me, Xiao Xingchen. I’ll be there to desecrate your corpse.”

She wants to throw up. All the failed experiments Xue Yang had conducted on Xiao Xingchen’s body and soul, she’d only ever heard from a distance, too afraid to go near him to catch any details. The vague memories still clog her mind until it feels like her brain is about to spill out of her eye sockets.

Xiao Xingchen’s corpse had been pristine and without a single sign of decay when Wei Wuxian had seen it. She doesn’t know if that counts as desecration.

Inside the side room, Xiao Xingchen laughs again, unbothered by such a disturbing promise. It’s a thick sort of laughter. She winces when it’s interrupted by a single breathy sob.

“What’s going on with you?” Xue Yang asks, sounding at the same time anxious and offended. “I just said I’d stay.”

Xiao Xingchen’s laughter peters out. “It’s not that. I’m happy.” His voice is very warm. “I’m so lucky to have met you.”

A-Qing pulls back from the door. Hot, salty tears are running down her face and dripping down her chin. The ground feels like it’s cracking and vanishing from under her feet.

It takes a very long time for her to fall back asleep.

-

The next morning, A-Qing wakes disoriented and drowsy to the faint scent of ginger and a piece of candy lying on the side of her coffin. She snatches it up like it’d disappear if she waited for a moment longer, then stares at it for a long time until Xiao Xingchen emerges from the side room and calls her to breakfast. Apparently, she’d slept in.

Xiao Xingchen is in a fantastic mood. Over breakfast, he tells her a fumbling tale about the night hunt, which isn’t very coherent or interesting but that he seems to have fun with. At each of Xue Yang’s much more poignant interruptions, he breaks into giggles. He also has one hand on Xue Yang’s arm for pretty much the whole morning.

After they clean up and A-Qing puts her hair up with her by now familiar fox pin, Xue Yang announces that he’ll head out to the market early to make sure to get better produce than Xiao Xingchen had managed yesterday.

A-Qing bounds over to the door immediately.

“I’ll go with you!” she declares. “I wanna go buy some pretty rouge so I can look nice!”

“You look nice anyways,” Xiao Xingchen says. Both she and Xue Yang ignore him.

“Get your shoes on and hurry, then,” Xue Yang tells her. “The good stuff isn’t there forever.”

They head out into a clear late morning. The fluffy clouds of yesterday have scattered into thin, frayed scraps that creep across the blue sky lethargically. Qian Xiu from across the street is out and about, hauling a large bucket of water towards her front door. She greets them in passing, and Xue Yang, who had poisoned her in another world and turned her and her family into living facsimiles of the dead, waves cheerfully in return.

They weave through street after street that should be a lot more familiar than it is, A-Qing trailing after Xue Yang’s energetic steps. The patch of forest that he leads her to, at least, she could draw from memory if she’d ever learnt how to use a brush. Stepping under the tree cover alone puts an odd metallic taste in her mouth.

She knows what she’s planning to say. It goes against every single one of her instincts, but it’s the only solution she’s found, and the night before, she’d stared up at the ceiling from the safety of her coffin and decided that it’s worth a try. The words are on her tongue the moment they leave the last houses of Yi City behind and are truly alone in the little forest.

Of course, Xue Yang beats her to it.

“Right.”

He stops abruptly in his tracks, spins around, and gives her a bright grin. The part of her that’s still expecting him to pull out Jiangzai and murder her in cold blood flinches back, but she pays it no mind. There’s something about his voice that makes her perk up.

Because he’s horrible and his main objective in life is to antagonise her, he takes his time cracking his neck and adjusting all his limbs into a slouched performance of indifference.

“Didn’t get much time to think last night,” he says and leers, because he’s also disgusting, “but I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

“About the curse?” A-Qing presses. Her fingers tighten around her cane. “What, keep going! Tell me!”

“Again, it’s not a curse, stupid.” Xue Yang takes one deliberate step to the side, then another, settling into a languid saunter. The grocery basket dangles happily from his hand. “Y’know, what I was thinking about that doesn’t make sense – why does it fail when I die?”

A-Qing frowns. “Because you made it, and you wanna stay alive.”

“Wrong,” he says and grins wider. “That’s not how it works.”

Her stomach makes a small swooping motion. She’d been so sure about that particular mechanism of the spell. If Xue Yang can die after all without breaking things, it’d throw her entire new plan into disarray.

But Xue Yang goes on, unperturbed by her sudden tension. “At least, I’ve got no fucking clue how I’d pull off putting in a condition like that, and seeing that I made it, and the work on this by the looks of it wasn’t even done, I don’t buy that theory.” He shoots her a piercing look. “Also, if you’re right and it’s all meant to bring back Xiao Xingchen, why not set his survival as a condition as well? I’m not that sloppy.”

“You don’t know that,” she mutters. “You were pretty insane back then.”

But he’s right. They’ve both picked up on the same flaw in the logic – maybe it’d be a plausible setup to create for the boastful, cheery Xue Yang in front of her right now, but even with her soul torn to pieces, she still remembers Xue Yang, the mad ruler of a ghost town who’d apparently faced down the Yiling Laozu for half a chance at resurrecting a years-dead man. More readily than Xiao Xingchen’s life being of no meaning to the spell, she’d believe that he would have prioritised it over his own.

Xue Yang huffs a laugh. “Yeah, evidently. But if I was good enough to fucking break time, I wasn’t that stupid. So that got me wondering, if it’s not a failsafe, what is it?”

He stops and spins to pace in the other direction, levelling his chin at her expectantly and looking incomprehensibly like a teacher waiting for his pupil to give some bullshitted answer he can scold them for. She’s not going to play along with that.

“Just get to the point!” she snaps. “Do you know what it is?”

The corner of his mouth twitches dangerously, but he takes her protest in stride. “I’ve got a theory,” he announces. “What if the whole thing’s an array?”

Given the way his eyes sparkle, that’s supposed to be some sort of revelation. A-Qing tilts her head and furrows her brows in confusion.

“What’s the difference?”

The sparkle subsides. “Lots of things. Shut up. Sacrifice Summon’s an array, so it’d make sense for this to be one too.” That still means very little to her, which he must pick up on. Twirling a strand of hair around his index finger, he ploughs on, “Thing is though – an array’s pretty straightforward. You draw it, you power it, it does its thing to whatever’s inside it, and then you scrub all the blood off the floor. We’re not inside a drawn anything.”

She’s completely lost now.

“So why—” she begins, but Xue Yang cuts her off sharply with one finger pointed straight at her forehead.

“Unless it’s anchored to time somehow instead of space. Which is fucking insane.”

“You can’t draw on time,” A-Qing argues.

Xue Yang grins like a maniac. “I didn’t think you could either! But you’re kinda living proof right now that you can. Gimme that real quick.”

That’s the only warning she gets before he leans forward and snatches her cane right out of her hands.

“Hey!” she yells and makes a grab for it, but Xue Yang’s already gotten out of her range. With his foot, he clears a patch of the forest ground of leaves and uses the tip of the cane to draw a straight line into the dusty soil.

Still grinning widely, he instructs, “Imagine this is time. We’re in here—” He draws a large circle on top of the line. “That’s the array. We know about a few of the components it’s made up of. You’re one – that’s probably what that talisman did, throw you in as the last piece to finish the circle. You always go back to the same day, so we’ve also got a stable starting point – here.”

He draws a cross over one point where the circle intersects with the line. A-Qing stares at it, imagining it as the moment Song Lan approaches her on the road. To the right of it, where the line continues past the circle, should be her life in Yi City, and within the circle, all the failed versions of reality she’s been through so far. Her eyes fix on another stretch of line peeking out of the circle on the other side.

Xue Yang taps the end of the cane excitedly at his messy drawing. “And now we get to the fun part! A curse is a curse, but an array’s a bunch of little pieces all set up in a circle, and if one part’s missing, the entire thing crashes. That means that for this whole setup to work, the whole array has to be in place. Got it?”

She nods. “Yeah, sure.”

“But we know it isn’t, ‘cause it keeps breaking. And that’s really fucking weird, because if you told me the truth, this thing’s really damn stable right up to the point where I bite it.”

A-Qing lets everything he’s said so far run through her head again. “Then you’re part of the array too?” she guesses.

Xue Yang glances up at her. His brows lift almost appreciatively. “Not the worst thought you’ve ever had,” he admits, “but can’t be. I don’t get sent back, right? I don’t remember shit about all the stuff you talked about, and my soul’s fine too. What I think is that we need an end point.” He scratches another cross into the dirt, on top of the other intersection of line and circle. “Which has to exist already, because otherwise we wouldn’t be standing here, but it also doesn’t, because otherwise the array’d be stable no matter what.”

It tracks with his drawing. She blinks at the little cross that’s apparently the end point, which definitely exists in the grand, roughly sketched scheme of things, but doesn’t yet if she looks at it from the perspective of some point on the line within the circle, which is probably where they are now.

It’s also completely nonsensical. In her experience, things either exist or they don’t.

“That makes no sense,” she accuses. Maybe Xue Yang is fated to kind of lose it around this point in time, no matter what else happens.

“It does though,” Xue Yang insists, looking every inch the madman. “Imagine – and if I’m right about this, I’m a fucking genius and Yiling Laozu can kiss my feet – that time isn’t linear. At least not inside the array. It all exists at once, the start point and the end point and all. But if you break one of ‘em – if you make it so that the end point can never be created – that’s a paradox. The array’s broken, so everything that’s been made by it can’t exist.”

A-Qing gives the sketch another sceptical once-over. “And what does that mean?”

“That I’m a master of demonic cultivation, that’s what it means. Do you get how crazy this is?” Xue Yang giggles like a little street boy who’s been given a whole bag of candy and a manor on top of it. “I need to make the end point, is what I think is up. If I die, there’s no one who can complete the array, so it fails. Kind of flattering, isn’t it?”

It’s not exactly easy to wrap her mind around. She still thinks he might be mad. But if she bends common sense in the way Xue Yang seems determined to do, all the increasingly bizarre points of his explanation line up pretty well with everything she’s seen.

She blinks at the two crosses on the sketch. Start point and end point, although if Xue Yang is right and all of time somehow exists at once, neither of those names are very accurate and they’re just two more anchor points of an array she can’t see.

She wonders at which point between all his efforts to fix a shattered soul her old Xue Yang had decided to spit on the laws of heaven itself, and whether he’d ever thought he’d actually use this thing.

“That doesn’t explain why it sends me back,” she muses. “Or what’s up with my soul.”

She’s prepared to be regaled with another, even more outlandish theory, but Xue Yang just shrugs expressively.

“Yeah, haven’t gotten to that part yet. My guess is, you’re shattered. Every little time-line here—” he draws a handful of lines into the circle, parallel to the first one that represents time “—gets one piece of your soul. And if the line breaks, that piece probably dies, which would explain why you’ve got parts missing. No idea why that’s happening, though. Probably some kink in the spell that the other me didn’t manage to work out.”

After all the weird but near-perfect explanations for every detail of her predicament, such a half-baked guess is utterly disappointing.

“So you don’t know?” she exclaims.

Xue Yang straightens up, quirking up one brow at her irritation. “You’re running a tighter ship than the Jin here, brat,” he huffs. “If you want me to figure out how to break time, in detail, you’ve got to give me more than a day. You’re lucky I’m having a whole lotta fun with this.”

Reluctantly, she guesses that’s reasonable. If she goes through with her own plan, she even has the time to wait for him to figure it out, although with everything she’s learnt, it might be worth finding out if there’s an alternative.

“You’re the one who has to make the end point, then?” she asks, a bit more pleasantly. “There isn’t anyone else who could?”

“The thing breaks when I die, so nope,” Xue Yang answers. “Apparently, everyone else’s too stupid to figure it out. Or maybe it has to be the same caster – I don’t wanna know how much blood’s in this thing. Probably knows me pretty well.”

He spins the cane around in his hand to poke it lightly at her shoulder. The persistent grin on his face sharpens to a needle-point. “What, are you saying you’d kill me off if it didn’t have to be me?”

Swallowing hard, A-Qing grabs the cane and pulls it out of his hands. There’s no good answer she can give to that, so she simply goes on asking, “What happens if I die?”

Xue Yang cackles, but he lets her get away with it. “No idea. Something for sure. Could just send you back again. Could break the array for good. Do you wanna try it out?”

He takes a quick step forward over the sketch on the ground, precise enough not to disturb it. A-Qing flinches and jumps backwards, hugging her cane tightly to her chest, but Xue Yang just stops where he stands and throws his head back with laughter.

Blood rushes to her head, warming her cheeks. “Fuck you!” she snaps, which only makes him laugh harder.

“Little coward,” he croons when he’s finally calmed down. “C’mon, let’s get daozhang his vegetables before he sends out a search party.”

Just like that, he leaves the sketch behind and turns back to the beaten path. A-Qing throws it one last glance, but it probably won’t make sense to any other passer-by, so she leaves it where it is. Hurriedly, she follows to catch up with Xue Yang’s bouncing steps.

Her brain is full to the brim with thoughts, all thrown into disorder by what Xue Yang had said. She gives herself one more moment to reconsider things, just to make sure her decision isn’t the wrong one after all.

No matter what Xue Yang says, if he really is right, there is a chance, however small, that someone else could finish the array. Maybe if she told her daoshi everything she knows now, they could figure it out, or maybe she’d have to wait for Wei Wuxian to be resurrected in this world again. It’s hard to believe that the Yiling Laozu himself couldn’t somehow reverse engineer an array based on his own work.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. All of those vague possibilities hinge on getting Xiao Xingchen to that point not only alive but as unbroken as possible, and she’s already made tentative peace with what she has to do to keep him that way.

She picks up her pace, jogging up to Xue Yang’s side.

“I’m not gonna tell him, you know?” she says. Xue Yang’s head whips around to stare at her, but she keeps her eyes firmly fixed to the ground. “We— we can do this, right? We can just keep going like this. You just have to promise that you won’t hurt daozhang! No telling him who you are or what you made him do, and no pulling any other nasty shit like the walking corpse thing!”

She underlines the last point with an angry stab of her cane at a pile of leaves. Xue Yang watches her do so in slight bemusement. His reply is just the slightest bit delayed, though he doesn’t seem to notice that himself.

“I only do what I think is fun,” he drawls. “This is pretty fun so far, so why change anything about it?”

A-Qing sighs. She guesses that’s a deal, if a decidedly shabby one.

She falls back again. That they have a truce doesn’t mean that they have to be friendly about it to the point of skipping through the forest side by side.

Xue Yang just keeps walking at his own pace. The swinging of the basket by his side is hypnotising. They’re getting closer to the part of the path where Song Lan should have died yesterday, which in this time looks entirely ordinary. Shortly before they pass it by, Xue Yang throws a single, amused glance over his shoulder.

“Oh, and, Little Blind? If you want people to think you’re blind, maybe don’t stare so much at the pictures they draw.”

It’s like he’s poured a bucket of ice water down her back.

“Get fucked by a pack of dogs!” she shouts, striking at the back of his legs with her cane, but he easily sidesteps every attack.

“You little liar!” he crows, laughing loudly. “You really had me fooled for three whole years! New you is getting sloppy, though. If you keep glowering every time daozhang feels me up, it’s gonna get suspicious.”

Her whole face is hot with shame, all the way down to her collarbone. He’s right, which is the thing that throws her off the most. The only excuse she has is that she’d let her act slip so often lately that she isn’t used to keeping it up anymore. It’s still not reason enough to have fallen into his trap like a naive child.

“Don’t tell daozhang!” she demands, hurrying forward again to get a good look at Xue Yang’s face. “I won’t tell him about you either, so you shouldn’t tell him about me!”

Xue Yang simply grins. “Oh, don’t worry. I don’t give up on blackmail material that easily. You should be grateful, really. If I weren’t pretty sure that it’d break this whole time-line, it’d probably be the smartest thing to just butcher you and throw you to the dogs.”

She hits him for that again. This time, the strike lands right below his knee, and he retaliates by grabbing her cane again and trying to twist it out of her grasp. Not so easily deterred, A-Qing holds onto it, which results in her being dragged along like a stubborn dog on a leash.

They’re still tussling when they reach the edge of the forest and the busy stalls of the market peek out from between the trees. A-Qing is out of breath and the palms of her hands ache from grabbing her cane so tightly, both of which are such inconsequential problems to have that she finds a sick sort of joy in them.

“I really want rouge,” she grumbles, although she isn’t sure that she does. “Buy me some.”

“Buy it with your pickpocketing loot,” Xue Yang retorts, but once they’re stood in front of a little makeup stall with dumplings and fresh vegetables in their basket, he haggles the vendor down to half price for her.

It’s when they’re on their way back, walking again through the little forest towards where Xiao Xingchen is probably wondering what’s been taking them so long, that A-Qing thinks of one more question to ask.

“Why send me back?” she wonders out loud, trusting that Xue Yang will know what she means. “Why not himself?”

“This thing is experimental as shit. Maybe I didn’t want to shatter my own fucking soul,” Xue Yang guesses and shrugs. A-Qing considers pressing, but he looks vaguely bored, and there’s no getting Xue Yang to think longer than necessary about things that don’t interest him.

It’s probably the best explanation she’s ever going to get, so she’ll have to accept it as true.

-

Naturally, she never should have expected things to work out. This time, it at least takes two more days until everything goes to shit.

A-Qing spends those days tentatively dipping her toes into the most shallow edges of normalcy. Xiao Xingchen and Xue Yang have a routine and plans for the rest of the week. They involve things like laundry and dishes and performing burial rites for the Tang family from one town over, whose grandfather had recently died. Xiao Xingchen is currently trying his hand at making his own pickles. Xue Yang has been stung by some strange bug that’s made him unable to sit still and has thus decided to remodel the whole courtyard. A-Qing, who for the life of her can’t remember what her plans for this week had been, mostly hangs around and helps them with their things.

With Xue Yang knowing that she isn’t blind, she’s got too much on her plate to really get bored. Their blackmail material effectively cancels each other out, but her best excuse to avoid doing chores doesn’t work anymore, and she gets stuck grumbling her way through hanging up the laundry while he throws jabs at her from where he’s pulling out weeds like he’s carrying out a family annihilation.

Secretly, she’s kind of glad to have a reason to keep her hands busy. The third morning she wakes to a piece of candy on the side of her coffin, her skin doesn’t feel too tight for her anymore, and she’s on the verge of believing that this time, she might have figured things out.

Around midday, Xue Yang interrupts his work in the courtyard to announce that he’s going to town to buy more ink and paper. Xiao Xingchen gives him a puzzled little frown – they’re rarely in need of those particular things in this house – but A-Qing had found him bent over a page of crudely scribbled diagrams the night before and simply raises her brows at him. Xue Yang grins at her in response and promises to bring her a souvenir.

It makes her just a little nervous. Xue Yang with full knowledge of the situation is dangerous; she’d known that when she’d decided to tell him everything. There’s an off-chance that he’s working on a way to alter the array that’ll allow him to kill her off after all and do away with the one person who could foil his so-called revenge on Xiao Xingchen. She still hasn’t been able to sleep well.

It’s probably not enough of a risk to break their truce over, though. This is the closest she’s ever gotten to success, and if Xue Yang’s speculation about the condition of her soul is right, she doesn’t know how many tries she still has. If she keeps failing, there might not be anything left of her.

With that thought sitting heavily in the back of her mind, she decides to enjoy the chance to spend some time alone with Xiao Xingchen, especially because he seems delighted when she attaches herself to his arm as soon as Xue Yang is out the door and asks what they’re going to do with their afternoon.

For the past days, he’s been radiating deep contentment. A-Qing can’t tell if it’s new or if she’d simply forgotten how happy he’d been in their rundown little yizhuang, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s worth preserving either way.

They take a little stroll around the neighbourhood, to check in on some of the sick townsfolk Xiao Xingchen has been doing his best to treat and, according to Xiao Xingchen, to clear their minds by breathing in some fresh air. The latter objective leads them to the little stream most of the town does its laundry at and where A-Qing remembers she used to spend hot summer days with her feet dangling in the cool water.

Xiao Xingchen ends up kneeling by the riverside, one hand stretched out to dip into the current. It can be hard to tell from his calm face, but she thinks he’s deep in thought.

“I’ve always thought this water carries a very pleasant sort of energy,” he muses after a while. “It’s unfortunate that the feng shui of the landscape doesn’t give it much of a chance to do good.”

A-Qing can’t do more than hum in response. The only piece of feng shui she understands is the logic that underlies Xiao Xingchen’s careful layout of their yizhuang, and even that has gone hazy now that she isn’t in one piece anymore.

They head back home under the golden afternoon sun. Xue Yang is still out, so Xiao Xingchen busies himself making some of the medicine people had asked for, and A-Qing tries her hand at dabbing her new rouge on her cheeks. She’s not very good at it, but she likes how it makes her look a little more alive.

It takes a little while longer until Xiao Xingchen emerges from the kitchen again and calls for her.

“Our friend is taking his time,” he says. She can tell that he’s trying very hard not to frown. “Would you go look for him? You know the paths he likes to take better than I do, and I’d hate for him to miss dinner.”

A-Qing pushes herself off the side of the coffin she’d been lounging against. Xue Yang is most likely fine. Nothing around them would still exist if anything serious had happened to him. Still, she doesn’t want to worry Xiao Xingchen, so she chirps, “Sure, daozhang!” and heads out the door.

The sun is still up and still golden. She follows the street that leads to town at a leisurely pace, feeling the warmth tickle her faintly painted cheeks.

It’s not until she turns the third corner to be faced with an empty street that anxiety starts making the backs of her hands prickle. Once it does, though, it doesn’t stop. Her legs move faster on their own, and when there’s still no one but neighbours to be seen around the next corner, she breaks into a run.

She runs like there’s a ghost after her. She can’t tell why; her whole body has flooded with panic on a gut feeling alone. But if she’s worried over nothing, she’ll be fine. If the nausea that’s clinging to her throat is right, she has to be faster.

She reaches the edge of the forest with a tremor in her hands and an ache in her legs. It’s pure intuition that’s led her here, and perhaps not even that. She’s just so used to bad things happening in this place that she struggles to imagine them happening anywhere else.

She doesn’t stop running until all she can see are trees. The first thing she hears over the rustling of the leaves, before any birdsong or the quiet movements of small animals that had been everywhere around here just two days ago, is the sickening sound of metal meeting metal.

It’s coming from deeper between the trees, and she doesn’t hesitate to follow it.

She should have expected this. She never should’ve let her guard down. Of course, a man like Xiao Xingchen, who helps where he can even if he tries to keep a low profile, is known outside the walls of Yi City. Of course, someone in some nearby town would eventually tell Song Lan where he is.

Snippets of furious shouting follow her, taunting the infuriatingly human speed of her short legs. She can’t hear much of it over the clashing of swords and the rush of blood between her ears, but she recognises the voices all too well.

Her panicked head is spinning. Had Song Lan seen Xue Yang in town and followed him? Had he seen him leave the yizhuang, like he had the first time around, and waited for him? Or had he taken the same shortcut and run into him right here?

It doesn’t matter. All her jumbled thoughts stop at once when she spots a glimpse of black robes between the trees.

“You dare speak of them!” comes Song Lan’s furious voice, finally close enough to understand. “You dare sully their names with your filthy mouth!”

“I dare! Should I tell you how they all begged for their lives, too?” Xue Yang’s cruel cackle answers, and A-Qing’s aching throat vibrates around a desperate whine.

She dodges two trees, throws her cane to the ground, and barrels through the undergrowth with no care for the twigs and thorns that catch on her clothing, and with no better plan in mind than to put herself between them and yell for all their lives.

She’s too late.

Fuxue sinks into Xue Yang’s chest with an ugly squelch. Xue Yang’s grin freezes in place the very moment she catches sight of it, and she screams.

“Song-daozhang! No!”

A stray root in her way trips her, and she lands harshly on her hands and knees, pain shooting through her palms and the joints of her wrists. Only a step away from her, Jiangzai’s blade is bedded on the fallen leaves. Song Lan, sword still raised and buried deep inside Xue Yang, whips around.

His cheeks are wet with tears. When he finds her, his eyes widen in horror.

Does he recognise her? She can’t tell. Her own eyes are drawn in by the dark, wet patch that forms around the sword in Xue Yang’s chest.

Xue Yang gasps a single laugh. She looks up at him, unable to find any more words to say, and he grins at her. “See you in the next one, Little Blind! Make it count, yeah?”

Song Lan goes ashen, the way he had when he’d died by Xiao Xingchen’s hand not far from here. His eyes flicker back and forth between her and Xue Yang, but whatever he’s trying to piece together, he doesn’t get the chance. Xue Yang reaches for the back of his sash and with what must be his last strength pulls out a gleaming dagger.

Song Lan flinches back, but before he can even pull Fuxue out, Xue Yang has reached up. In one clean cut, he draws the blade across his own throat.

Song Lan doesn’t have the time to get out of the way. Xue Yang collapses halfway against his chest, spilling red blood all over his dark robes. A-Qing screams again, louder and higher than she thought she was capable of, and Song Lan looks up, meeting her eyes.

His horrified face is the last thing she sees before everything dissolves.

Chapter Text

A nearby road.

She squints at the colourful world around her taking shape. Disoriented, she forces her spinning head to take in the road ahead of her, which fills her with a sense of dread that it takes her a moment to place. The memories return to her in a slow trickle: her name, Yi City, Xiao Xingchen and Xue Yang and Song Lan, the look on the latter’s face just a moment ago, when Xue Yang had said his goodbyes to her.

She comes back to herself just in time to recognise Song Lan’s voice.

“Guniang. You should walk more carefully if you cannot see.”

She could wring his fucking neck.

She’d been so close. She’d made it through not one but several days with Xiao Xingchen not only alive but happier than she’d maybe ever seen him before. They had the whole evening planned out – Xue Yang would’ve come back, and they would’ve had dinner, and there would’ve been candy on her coffin the next morning, and Xiao Xingchen would’ve smiled at her over breakfast.

And maybe Xue Yang would’ve ruined it all by being too on edge not to fuck things up with Xiao Xingchen or too much of an idiot not to fuck with the array. But for a few precious days, she’d had her life back. There’d been so many things she hadn’t even realised she’d missed.

Her mouth is very dry. She doesn’t protest when Song Lan leads her to the side of the road, and she thanks him as she always does, but it’s half-hearted. Her mind is already rattling, trying to grab onto as many threads of thought as possible and weave them into something resembling a new plan.

Song Lan leaves her to move up ahead, approaching the nearest passer-by. She could just send him away again, go through the whole dance with Xue Yang one more time, and make sure that she’s on time to stop Song Lan from killing him.

She kicks that idiotic figment of her wishful thinking aside alongside a pebble that bumps against her foot on the road. All that would do is start the whole cycle again, with Song Lan determined to bring Xue Yang to justice and Xiao Xingchen ripping himself to shreds over his own misplaced guilt. She’s just so damn dizzy, feeling like she’s hovering two feet above her own head. None of her ideas make much sense to her at all.

She gulps down the faint anxiety that’s threatening to take over her whole body. Whatever part of her soul she’s lost this time, she’ll for better or worse have to deal with it. She’s still in a body and still able to talk and think and move. There’s no reason to give up yet. She’s not a coward.

“Daozhang,” she calls out, because if Song Lan is going to show up no matter what, she’d rather have him right where she can see him. “Why are you looking for that other daozhang?”

Song Lan turns around, face full of the kind of hope she’s determined not to lose.

“You have seen him before?” he asks, and A-Qing cocks her head at him.

“Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t.”

She puts him through an interrogation again this time. He probably doesn’t deserve it, but it soothes the fury in her bones to see him squirm a bit.

-

The objective is clear: Xue Yang must live.

Ideally, he’ll live in some place where A-Qing can tell him about the array and persuade him to create its missing piece, in a world where Xiao Xingchen can be happy again and Song Lan isn’t a mindless corpse. All things considered, that’s an ambitious goal, but she finds that she’s increasingly unwilling to settle for less.

As always, it’s the way to get there that’s the problem. A-Qing wracks her mind over it all the way to the yizhuang, between her usual chat with Song Lan and the occasional lapse in her awareness of her surroundings. Those are new and worrying – it happens for the first time when Song Lan follows her through the gates of Yi City and she suddenly forgets who he is or where they’re going, and again shortly after they watch Xue Yang enter the yizhuang. Song Lan has to guide her steps almost all the way up to the window.

While she kneels underneath that window, letting the sound of Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen’s voices wash over her, she gives that new and horrible development one precious crumb of her attention. It’s the last thing she needs while she and her companions’ lives still depend on every advantage she can get. Ultimately, though, it’s just one more piece of evidence that the number of her second chances is limited, and that she has to get this over with before she has no more soul left to spare.

Inside the yizhuang, Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen finish their game. Song Lan hurriedly draws her out of sight and into the alleyway, and Xue Yang leaves for the market with the same swing in his step that he’d had on their little excursion to the woods not too long ago.

She has one more moment to dig her nails into the flesh of her palm, clearing up most of the haze that’s still hovering at the edge of her consciousness, before Song Lan turns to her. His pale cheeks are a harsh reminder that he’s going through all this for the first time.

“Qing-guniang,” he presses. “How long has that man lived with you and the daozhang?”

“Three years,” she answers and forces her eyes to widen in fear. She’s come up with around a thousand ideas, but none that she thinks have any chance at working out. She has to act on gut instinct. “Daozhang, you know him? Who is he? Has he done something bad?”

“Calm, guniang,” Song Lan replies, which means she’s done a good enough job sounding rattled. “He’s a very dangerous man.”

She makes her breath hitch. “He is? Daozhang, how do you know that? Are you sure it’s really the same guy?”

Song Lan’s lips press together in a thin line. “I have encountered him before. He— he has committed crimes of the worst kind. If he’s here now, I fear what his plans are, so you must tell me: what has he been doing in the time he’s lived with you?”

“He’s just been around!” She hugs her cane closer to her chest, pulling her shoulders up and ducking her head. “I don’t know, he’s fixed up the roof and all the broken furniture, but he always tries to get out of doing the dishes. He fights the vendors at the market when they bully me and daozhang because we’re blind. He goes on night hunts with daozhang too, hunting yaoguai and such.”

Every word only deepens Song Lan’s already heavy frown. “He helps him? Guniang, do he and the daozhang get along well?”

“Really well,” she answers truthfully. “I— I guess he makes nasty jokes all the time, but daozhang thinks they’re funny. He was happy to have another cultivator around, I think, because I don’t understand much about that, and daozhang’s always so sad when he’s on his own.”

Something about that gives Song Lan pause, and he throws a deeply troubled look in the direction of the yizhuang. The alarm in his black eyes is more pronounced than it normally is at this point of the day. It sparks a faint, intrigued tingle in A-Qing’s guts.

“You both have been deceived, guniang,” Song Lan says, squaring his shoulders. “Go back inside and stay with the daozhang, you’ll be safe with him. Do not tell him any of what I just told you. I will take care of everything else.”

He almost manages to get back his usual confidence, but A-Qing’s been through this conversation too often by now to miss the slight waver in his voice.

She doubles down. Thinning her voice out until it’s barely more than a whimper, she takes half a step backwards. “Are you going to hurt that man?”

Song Lan actually hesitates. Confusion makes his whole face convulse strangely. For one exhilarating moment, she thinks it might work and she might be able to create a Song Lan who not only accepts not being able to but doesn’t want to kill Xue Yang. A Song Lan like that would be the greatest help she could wish for.

But nothing ever works out in her favour, and his confusion clears up at soon as it came. He closes his eyes, taking a deep breath. When he opens them again, they’re full of sorrow.

“A few years ago,” he begins, “that man attacked my temple. He killed every single person who lived there. He tortured my shifu for days.” He swallows, fixing up the crack in his voice. “It’s my duty to ensure that he’s brought to justice.”

There isn’t anything she can say to that. All her irrational anger at him dissipates at once. Song Lan’s too proud a man to give more gruesome details than what’s necessary, but the little he says alone seems to cause him physical pain. Faced with even a hint of that kind of grief, she’s outmatched on every count.

“Okay,” she breathes. She doesn’t have to pretend to be shaking. “Just— be careful, Song-daozhang.”

“I will,” Song Lan promises. He draws Fuxue, clenches his jaw in determination, and takes off into the sky.

She lets him go. If the fight between him and Xue Yang is pretty much inevitable, it might as well happen now. His dark-robed silhouette disappears behind the roofs of the houses, and A-Qing breaks into a run.

She doesn’t have much time before Xue Yang gets back from the market and Song Lan confronts him, and this time, her messed-up soul might decide to stop working at all and slow her down. The faster she gets to the forest, the more time she’ll have to come up with an actual plan, and the higher the chances will be that she’ll actually make it work.

She’s halfway down the street when it hits her that she’s going to fail again.

It’s not a slow realisation. It punches her straight in the chest, nearly making her stumble over her own feet. Somewhere between here and the yizhuang, the desperate ideas she’s been trying to dig up since the first time she got sent back to the road have run out. No matter what she does, she keeps drawing blank after blank.

She can go to the forest, like she had the first time, but she doesn’t actually know what she’ll do there. From helping Song Lan win the fight to letting him know that he Xue Yang can’t die, from getting Xue Yang captured to getting him on her side, she’s tried everything.

She could jump in, beg Song Lan not to kill Xue Yang, maybe tell him about the array, but she doesn’t see how that would solve anything. Song Lan wants to see Xue Yang punished by any means, and Xue Yang had proven the last time around that he’d rather die and take everything else with him than try to appease Song Lan. A-Qing can’t change either of those things. She doesn’t even know if she could manage to keep them both from murdering each other if it’s just her standing between them.

A worst-case scenario takes shape in her head, one she’s abruptly astonished she’s so far avoided: herself and Song Lan poisoned with corpse powder, moving only at Xue Yang’s whim, and Xiao Xingchen dead and shattered again as soon as he inevitably finds out. It’d take years for anyone to find them who could take on Xue Yang, and it’s all too possible that they wouldn’t win without her help.

Her legs come to a stuttering halt. On the other hand: if she does nothing, she’s sent Song Lan to his death. Her sole companion. The man who hadn’t hesitated to risk his own life and break the world just to give her another chance at fixing things.

All of a sudden, she wishes desperately that Wei Wuxian were here.

It’s ridiculous – she barely knows him, except for the part where they’d been the same person for a while. It’s just that after all those years she’d spent clinging to the world, hoping against all odds that she could one day see Xue Yang defeated and her daoshi set free, he’d come in and solved things.

He’d have an idea for how to fix things now. Better yet, he could figure out the array, maybe stabilise it without Xue Yang’s help or erase it altogether. He’d listen to her and believe her, no matter that she’s a little girl without a family or a name, just like he had when she’d been a ghost on top of that.

There’d been something about the way he’d followed her to the yizhuang and asked her to tell her story that had cut through all the old resentment and made her feel warm for the first time in years. It’d reminded her so painfully of the first time she’d met Xiao Xingchen.

A teardrop tickles the tip of her nose, and she flinches out of that completely pointless train of thought.

She doesn’t need Wei Wuxian. Why should she settle for second best?

She turns on her heels and sprints back up the street, so fast that the rush of wind past her ears dries the wetness on her face and cools her skin. The yizhuang’s door opens for her as easily as it ever has. She leaps over the threshold, looking around frantically.

“Daozhang!” she calls. A quiet clatter from the side room answers, accompanied by Xiao Xingchen’s voice.

“A-Qing? Are you back already?”

He steps through the door on light feet, smiling ever so slightly. Her chest tightens around a stinging ache.

She doesn’t want to break him again. If she could, she’d never tell him about anything that’d hurt him and keep the carefree version of him that she’d spent the past days with around forever. She’ll miss him terribly.

“Daozhang,” she repeats and wills herself not to cry again. “You need to come with me, now!”

Xiao Xingchen’s arched brows furrow. “What do you mean? Has something happened?”

This is already taking too much time. Every moment they stand here gets them closer to Song Lan’s bloody death.

She darts forward, grabbing onto Xiao Xingchen’s arm. “I’ll tell you on the way! Come on, fast, we can’t be too late!”

At once, Xiao Xingchen’s whole demeanour shifts. His back straightens, his jaw tightens, and his thin lips twist into a determined scowl. Quick as lightning, his hand sketches out a rough summoning gesture, and Shuanghua leaps into his already tightening fist.

“Lead the way,” he says.

She loves him fiercely.

He lets himself be pulled over the threshold and onto the street. His strides are long enough that she normally has to jog to keep up with him whenever he’s walking quickly, but today, she’s running ahead and he’s much too slow. A-Qing’s heart beats on her tongue.

“Come on,” she begs. “Daozhang, please, we have to hurry!”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Xiao Xingchen speeds his steps up. His hand grabs onto hers, and he squeezes. “A-Qing, what’s happening?”

She can feel tears pooling in her eyes again, which is really getting old. There’s no way around telling him. It’s better if he’s prepared, anyways.

“Daozhang,” she chokes out and uses his grip on her hand to pull harder, “I met a man on the road. Another daozhang. He was asking after you, so I talked to him—”

“After me?” Xiao Xingchen cuts in, alarmed.

“He said he was your friend! So I brought him here to meet you, but then he saw the guy who lives with us.”

She pauses as they round a corner, thoughts racing. Xiao Xingchen’s expression has gone entirely blank, so he probably already suspects that Song Lan is here. The way she brings up the topic of Xue Yang might make or break this time-line.

It’s probably best to just take the plunge and bear the fallout. Talking about the array would slow them down too much. Right now, they need to save Song Lan and focus on nothing else. It’s all too muddled up with what had happened the very first time anyways, and in the end, Xiao Xingchen would just blame and worry himself to death again.

She’ll see how far she gets without it; she can still tell him and Song Lan later if they try to kill Xue Yang. Knowing them, they might even want to keep him alive until they have all their answers.

“A-Qing,” Xiao Xingchen implores, so she’s been taking too long.

They round another corner. They’re still so damnably slow.

In a rush, she rattles down, “He said that the guy is a bad man, and that he recognised him because he’s met him before, and that he’s killed a lot of people. That daozhang said he’s from a temple, and that that guy killed everyone who lived there and tortured some of them. Daozhang, do you think that’s true?”

Xiao Xingchen stumbles, which absolutely won’t do. A-Qing catches his weight with both arms, digging her fingers into his robes and hefting him up by his upper arm. With all her strength, she pulls him forward.

“Daozhang, don’t stop! We have to keep going!”

His legs start moving again, though they seem to be doing so on their own. Crack after crack is starting to show on his elegant face. “That’s not—” He makes a choked noise. “A-Qing, are you sure?”

“I told you what the other daozhang said!” she insists. “He looked really scared!”

“But that can’t be. Why would he—”

They’re losing speed again. Xiao Xingchen doesn’t even notice; his hand is clammy with cold sweat and no matter how hard A-Qing pulls, it doesn’t shake him out of it.

Her throat convulses around a frustrated sob. “If that guy’s really so bad, we have to do something! That other daozhang went to fight him, but he’s all alone! We have to get there before they hurt each other!”

That, finally, has an effect. Xiao Xingchen blanches. The little specks of blood that have appeared on his blindfold make him look a little like his eyes have gone wide in shock.

“Zichen,” he breathes and finally starts running.

-

Xiao Xingchen hears the fighting noises long before she does, before they even get to the forest. A-Qing can tell because his brows knit together suddenly and he doubles his speed. She’s dragged along, trying her damnedest to keep up with him. Now that he knows what’s at stake, he hasn’t stopped for a single moment to catch his breath.

He weaves through the trees with an ease no one would expect from a blind man. A-Qing clings to his hand harder, ready to pull him back just in case his senses miss something, but he pulls her out of the way of branches and low-lying shrubs more often than she gets to adjust his path. His precision is infallible.

Finally, A-Qing’s ears pick up on the first metal clangs. They can’t be far, then; Song Lan and Xue Yang have ended up almost in the same place as they had the first time.

A whirl of black robes appears in the distance between the trees. By the looks of it, Song Lan is still upright and blocking each of Xue Yang’s attacks. A-Qing’s heart lightens at the confirmation that they’re not too late, then drops again when she realises that Song Lan is falling back.

It was a while ago now that she had Wei Wuxian in her head or watched this particular fight, so she can’t be sure if what she’s picking up on is accurate. The trees in their way don’t make it any easier. But Song Lan’s strikes and parries are as fast as they’re uncoordinated. The slashes of his sword come in quick succession, and none of them land. At the same time, Xue Yang swoops in at every opening Song Lan gives him, forcing him into parry after parry.

They’re on time, then, but only just.

Xiao Xingchen’s jaw tightens. Shuanghua’s blade unsheathes halfway from its scabbard, but he must be too far away to be able to attack. A-Qing spurs her aching legs on to carry her faster.

Xue Yang’s bright voice reaches her over the rustling of the trees, pitched into an almost boyish singsong.

“Who was the one who said there was ‘no need to ever meet again’?” he’s asking. Around her hand, Xiao Xingchen’s fingers tighten like a vice. “Wasn’t that you, Song-daozhang? He listened to you and vanished from sight after digging out his own eyes for you, so why’ve you come shuffling around here now?”

Fuxue slashes at him in an angry, expansive arch, but Xue Yang sidesteps it easily. Twirling around to get Jiangzai back into attack position, he bites out a laugh.

“Aren’t you just making it awkward for everyone involved? Do you agree, Xiao Xingchen-daozhang?”

A-Qing startles hard enough to lose her grip on Xiao Xingchen’s hand. But Xue Yang is still a quarter of a li away from them and probably too busy with Song Lan to pick up on anything else in his surroundings through his qi sense alone. He can’t have seen them coming.

Song Lan doesn’t have the presence of mind to come to the same conclusion. She can see a part of his face now: it’s twisted in a pained grimace. Stunned, he looks up – away from them, in the direction Xue Yang has pointed his vicious little chin at. He loses his footing.

Xue Yang’s hand is already reaching into his robes. Jiangzai is clouded in wisps of smoke, about to carry out that fatal strike, and Xiao Xingchen leaps.

He draws Shuanghua mid-air. There’s a clash of metal as Jiangzai is knocked aside, and Xue Yang stumbles back. His mad grin falters. Xiao Xingchen lands between him and Song Lan on light feet, robes billowing around him as if caught by a soft breeze.

It’s a sight A-Qing had always admired whenever Xiao Xingchen had allowed her to come along on a night hunt. It doesn’t matter now. She can’t take her eyes off Xue Yang’s damn hand, which for all that he’s staring wildly at Xiao Xingchen is still halfway stuck inside his robes.

“Daozhang, hold your breath!” she screams, but Xiao Xingchen’s sudden appearance has already given Song Lan the chance to catch his bearings. Like a lion dancer moving in tandem with his other half, he darts out from behind Xiao Xingchen and strikes.

Fuxue’s tip slices a bloody gash into the back of Xue Yang’s hand. In the same blow, it cuts neatly through the fold in Xue Yang’s robes that he’d been reaching for.

Xue Yang snarls and yanks his wounded hand back, narrowly avoiding the powder that scatters to the ground. Instinctively, A-Qing stops in her mad dash and jumps several steps back, but it’s just that – a scatter. The corpse poison rains to the leaf-covered ground, harmless as dust.

Shuanghua and Fuxue settle in two gleaming parallel lines.

A-Qing stumbles heavily against the tree closest to her daoshi. Her heart is hammering painfully against her chest, and her lungs don’t quite want to keep in any air. The muscles of her left calf throb with a stabbing pain. Gasping for breath, she searches for Xue Yang’s face.

Held at swordpoint by both daoshi, he glances at where the powder lands just a few cun from the tips of his boots. His hand twitches and Jiangzai along with it. Before he can make a decision to strike, though, Xiao Xingchen steps over the poison on the ground and drives him back further.

Xue Yang hesitates, almost long enough for Shuanghua to stab at the skin above his collarbone, but he doesn’t go through with whatever idea he’d had in mind. He takes two obliging steps backwards and, with an ugly sneer, raises Jiangzai to point at Xiao Xingchen’s face instead.

“Daozhang,” he trills sweetly. “What a nice surprise. Here to help me out?”

Xiao Xingchen’s tone is frigid and unforgiving as a winter day. “Xue Yang.”

Xue Yang’s upper lip quirks upwards, letting the tips of his canines peek out. “Ah, you figured it out! What happened, did Song-daozhang here tell you? But why are you so late to the scene, then? No, can’t be that – did Little Blind snitch?”

His eyes flick over to bore into A-Qing’s own. She winces but forces herself not to look away. Her nails dig into the bark of the tree, and she holds his gaze. Xue Yang’s head tilts imperceptibly in what might be either a half-hearted provocation or an unvoiced question. There’s something nervous about the twitch of his nose.

All that goes unnoticed by Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan, who had both frozen in place the moment Xue Yang said Song Lan’s name. Song Lan is the first to move. Without dropping his guard, he takes a tentative step closer to Xiao Xingchen.

“Xingchen—”

A shiver runs through Xiao Xingchen’s whole body at the sound of his voice. All his steady confidence leaves him at once.

“Zichen,” he gasps. “I— I’m sorry. I swear I didn’t—”

“I know,” Song Lan cuts in. “He deceived you. You are not to blame.”

The he in question mimes an exaggerated gagging motion, prompting both daoshi to straighten their swords again.

“Aww, what a heart-warming reunion. Isn’t that nice to hear, that Song-daozhang doesn’t blame you for once?” he sneers. “You know, Xiao Xingchen, we were just talking about how embarrassing it is for him to show up here when he’d been the one to tell you to get lost. That’s what happened, right? Didn’t you tell me about that once?”

“Shut up,” Song Lan chokes out. Fuxue trembles in his grip, which – considering the way Jiangzai is still poised for attack and the ground is still covered in corpse powder – sparks an uneasy quiver in A-Qing’s guts. Xue Yang’s tense as a scorpion ready to strike, and just like a scorpion, he’s thrice as dangerous when cornered.

Not to mention that if he really does attack both Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen at once, he’s unlikely to make it out alive.

Fortunately, Xiao Xingchen isn’t as easy to distract. His lip curls furiously, and he snaps, “Three years. You stayed— three years. Was it that much fun to lie to me?”

The tension in Xue Yang’s shoulders relaxes marginally. “Of course it was!” he croons. “Are you kidding me? You’re hilarious! Song-daozhang, did you know that I never even gave Xiao-daozhang a fake name? He just never asked.”

If he’s trying to unnerve Song Lan even more, he’s failing pathetically. The very instant Xiao Xingchen flinches, he’s settled back into a steady stance.

“Don’t distract,” he growls. “You have one more chance to explain yourself. What were you planning?”

If she weren’t so busy clinging to her tree and staring at every little twitch of Xue Yang’s muscles, A-Qing would roll her eyes. It all always comes back to that question. She’s getting bored of it, though she supposes she can’t blame her daoshi for asking; it’d confused her too when she’d lived this day for the first time. It’s just that her years of haunting a Xue Yang who was slowly but surely losing his grip on any semblance of sanity had made the answer too obvious to worry much about. Wei Wuxian had thought so too.

Right now, at least, her daoshi’s curiosity is working in her favour. It’s Xue Yang who’s the problem, because for a street kid who should’ve learnt the hard way that swallowing your pride is sometimes the only way to survive in this world, he’s infuriatingly unable to stop digging his own grave.

Case in point, instead of finally dropping his sword in surrender, he fixes Song Lan with a sharp glare.

“Shouldn’t you know that better than anyone, Song-daozhang?” He laughs, turning back to Xiao Xingchen. “You made me pretty mad back then, Xiao Xingchen! Killing all those monks was fun, but I wasn’t done with my revenge.”

Song Lan sucks in a breath. “You filthy—”

“Liar!” A-Qing shouts, before he can provoke Xue Yang into saying anything worse. “What kind of revenge is getting someone groceries?!”

It doesn’t have much of an effect. Song Lan stays where he is, but Xiao Xingchen’s rock-solid stance is starting to falter. Lifting Shuanghua higher, he says, “If you wanted revenge, you could have killed me at any moment.”

Xue Yang blinks at him in what looks like genuine confusion. “Why would I? That wouldn’t have been half as fun as watching you be so very sweet with me.”

Xiao Xingchen falls silent, and Xue Yang takes one more step backwards, twirling Jiangzai leisurely around his wrist.

“But I’m a reasonable guy. Come on, get Song-daozhang out of here and sit down with me. I’ll tell you a story, and if you still think it’s my fault after, then you can do to me whatever you want.”

He’s probably lying. Then again, he’d been so adamant to tell Xiao Xingchen the story about his hand in two time-lines already, and she’d never really figured out why. Sensing an opening, she beats her bamboo cane loudly against the tree and shouts.

“Put your sword down, then! I’m not going near you if you’re still stabbing that at people!”

Xue Yang glances up, locking eyes with her again. A-Qing lets her gaze bore into him, hoping that being stared at by a blind girl will throw him off enough to at least consider doing what she says. Her daoshi want to hear Xue Yang confess to something. Xue Yang wants to tell a story. None of that is going to fix things, but if they talk, they’ll be too busy to murder each other.

Xue Yang weighs Jiangzai in his hand. He doesn’t drop it. Instead, Xiao Xingchen takes another shaky step forward, and he twirls it up into a rigid defence position.

“Is that the only reason?” Xiao Xingchen’s voice is cracked with fury. “You enjoyed watching me trust you so much that you would keep up the farce for so long? Just to— to make a fool out of me?”

Xue Yang’s eyes fix on him again, and his smile hardens.

“You also give great head,” he drawls with a pointed look at Song Lan, who goes ashen but whose searching glance at Xiao Xingchen doesn’t seem to give him the answer he’s looking for. Xue Yang laughs. “Don’t be like that, Xiao Xingchen. You enjoyed it too, didn’t you?”

“You monster,” Xiao Xingchen rasps. “You disgust me.”

A jolt goes through Xue Yang that A-Qing feels in her own bones. Her last two tries had spared her from seeing this particular flash in his eyes, but even now that it isn’t directed at her, it still makes the base of her tongue throb painfully.

“I’d be careful with accusations like that, if I were you. I don’t think you can talk.” He twirls Jiangzai again, but with a determination that lets it cut through the air like it’s slashing through limbs. “Wasn’t it you who spent three years fucking the man who butchered your dear Zichen’s temple? Song-daozhang, what would your shifu say if he knew you still want to call him a friend?”

He really always has to ruin things. Two large red stains have appeared on Xiao Xingchen’s blindfold. A-Qing kicks out at the tree in rage.

“Shut up! Daozhang, just gag him or something, you don’t have to listen to this!”

Neither Xue Yang not Xiao Xingchen pay her any mind. A horrible sinking feeling spreads through her chest at the realisation that she has no idea how to stop what’s coming next.

“You act like you’re so much better than me, but you’re a hypocrite,” Xue Yang presses on. “You’ve got just as much blood on your hands as I do.”

Xiao Xingchen seems to shrink in on himself. A pained line appears between his brows, but before he can reply, Song Lan steps in front of him and growls, “Baixue’s demise was your fault, Xue Yang, and yours alone.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” Xue Yang says dismissively.

Song Lan’s face clouds over like the sky during a thunderstorm, and A-Qing realises with a start both that he does know, and that Xue Yang hasn’t figured out just how recklessly he’s playing with fire.

“Shut up! Shut up, you braindead idiot!” she screams, frenzied and beating her cane at the ground in front of her, but of course, Xue Yang just laughs.

“Xiao Xingchen, don’t you remember when we—”

Fuxue nearly slices straight through his cheek. Xue Yang jumps back and brings up Jiangzai just in time to catch the blow, actually caught off guard for once. His confusion doesn’t last long; out of the same motion, he lands in a light, nimble stance.

Song Lan just strikes at him again.

“Enough!” he shouts. “You’ve said enough!”

Their swords collide head-on. The noise stings in A-Qing’s teeth, and in front of her, Xiao Xingchen shifts in alarm.

Xue Yang has to leap out of Fuxue’s way, only to land straight in the path of Song Lan’s fuchen. The long strands of horse hair lash out at his arm, leaving frayed cuts in the fabric of his robes. Still, Xue Yang doesn’t stop talking.

“What, are you scared, Song-daozhang? Don’t you think he should—”

“Quiet!” Song Lan roars. “I have no more patience left for you, Xue Yang!”

He’s panicking, if his broken voice is anything to go by, but while it had made him sloppy earlier, it just spurs him on now. He’s a single, furious whirl of black, determined not to give Xue Yang a single inch, and it’s working. Between the metal sounds and all the rapid dodges and parries, Xue Yang doesn’t get out another word.

His mocking smile has turned into a baring of teeth. His eyes stray for just a moment from Song Lan to find Xiao Xingchen, who’s placed himself protectively between the fighting pair and A-Qing. His head is turning from side to side, trying to follow the fight, but he doesn’t do anything to stop it.

The next one of Song Lan’s blows hits. Red blood gushes from Xue Yang’s arm. He doesn’t flinch, but he turns on Song Lan with a maniacal growl, slashing Jiangzai straight at his heart.

It’s a close thing, but Song Lan parries.

“You’re going to pay for the deaths you caused, now!” he snarls back and lashes out again.

He, too, is going for the vitals. Fuxue narrowly misses Xue Yang’s neck, barely saving them all from miserably dissolving into the void.

“Song-daozhang, wait!” A-Qing shrieks, darting forward. “Wait, you can’t kill him!”

Xiao Xingchen’s strong arm catches her before she can get anywhere close to them, but Song Lan, for a single moment, actually pauses.

It doesn’t last long. His hesitation gives Xue Yang chance enough to get back on his feet. Instantly, he retaliates with a nasty blow that swishes right past Song Lan’s ear.

“You’re gonna kill me in front of a little blind girl?” he hisses. “How noble of you!”

He hasn’t finished speaking before Fuxue darts forward again and nearly stabs his eye out. A-Qing wails, shaking wordlessly at Xiao Xingchen’s sleeve. It’s useless. Without any chance to break the fight up herself, she might as well not be here at all.

“Daozhang,” she gasps. Xiao Xingchen only pushes her back harder.

“A-Qing, run! This is too dangerous for you.”

She sobs. “Daozhang, you can’t let them—”

But Xiao Xingchen has already dived into the fray. Shuanghua’s very tip snatches up Jiangzai from where it’s almost succeeded in piercing Song Lan’s guard. It’s a light touch, accompanied only by a quiet scraping sound. Xue Yang still stumbles back like he’s been stabbed through the heart.

Song Lan casts one relieved, almost reverend look at Xiao Xingchen before slashing straight through the robes over Xue Yang’s ribcage.

A-Qing drops to her knees. Her fists dig up grass and soil from the ground. She wants to cry out, but there’s no real use in that anymore. She’s failed again.

Xue Yang is fighting for his life, and no matter how pitifully she cries or how close she could maybe come to getting Song Lan to doubt his conviction that Xue Yang must die, he’s making Song Lan do the same. Xiao Xingchen moves between them almost whimsically. He’s a lot more careful than he’d be with a yaoguai or a walking corpse, drawing back immediately after every intervention, but he gets between every single one of Xue Yang’s strikes that threatens to hit its target.

It’s two against one, and without either corpse powder or old ghosts dragged out of the ground, they’re not evenly matched. Only Xue Yang’s sheer disregard for the wounds that have started to litter his body gives him an edge. He does not let up.

“Xiao-daozhang,” he snarls, though he still hasn’t attacked Xiao Xingchen even once. “I was going to tell you something! Don’t you remember—”

Fuxue pierces his stomach. It’s shallower than the clean stab that A-Qing had witnessed in that last time-line, only about as deep as her hand is wide, but Xue Yang chokes on his words. Staggering back, he lifts Jiangzai with one hand and presses the other hard to the gushing wound. His eyes are very red.

The rest of the scene blurs behind a film of tears. She’s sick to her stomach. Whimpering, she folds her arms over her head, presses her eyes shut, and chants senselessly.

“Stop! Stop, stop, stop!”

Over her own sobs, she hears the dull sound of knees hitting the ground, but she doesn’t want to look up. The blood in her head is already rushing so fast that she feels detached from her body, so it’ll be easy enough to wait for the array to break and pull her back again. She’ll just have to hope that there’ll be enough left of her the next time around to come up with a better plan.

She could try to grab Song Lan right off the road next, she thinks. If she got some time to really talk to him, she could explain everything, and the damage to her soul could show him that she isn’t lying. It’ll be hard to convince him that Xue Yang shouldn’t be killed or locked away, but she’ll just have to insist as hard as she can that having him stick around is the only solution.

A loud metal clang rings through the air and startles her into opening her eyes.

It takes her a moment to make sense of the scene in front of her. Xue Yang is on his knees, as she’d expected. Jiangzai is lying a few feet away from him, abandoned between the leaves. His hands are both folded above his stomach now, trying and failing to hold the blood in. Bright red is dribbling down from between his fingers. A drop of blood is trickling out of his left nostril, too.

Song Lan is tall and straight-backed in front of him. He’s holding onto Fuxue, but its tip is pointed at the ground. There’s a bit of blood running down the blade. Song Lan’s eyes are very wide, and his face is very pale.

Between the two of them stands Xiao Xingchen. His back is turned to Xue Yang, and Shuanghua is raised at Song Lan in a parry.

The moment A-Qing gets her eyes open, he drops his arms and starts trembling like an autumn leaf.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes. He sounds shaken to his bones. “Zichen, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

His voice gives out, but his lips keep shaping those words over and over. Song Lan stares at him, stunned to silence. Tentatively, he lets Fuxue sink.

Xue Yang chooses that moment to keel over.

A rush of energy floods A-Qing’s veins. She drags herself to her feet, crying out as she goes. It’s an inelegant scramble of arms and legs; she barely gets herself upright at all, but she makes it over to them. Next to Xue Yang’s body, she crashes to her knees again and grabs frantically at his robes.

They’re slippery wet. There’s a hole in his guts. His chest, though, is still arrhythmically expanding with weakening breaths.

A-Qing lets the tears spill down her cheeks, casts her eyes desperately up at her daoshi, and wails like a child. “He’s still alive! Daozhang, we have to do something!”

Xiao Xingchen jolts. Throwing Shuanghua aside, he spins around and drops to his knees. A-Qing grabs his hands to bring them to Xue Yang’s wound, and he makes a low, agonised noise.

Song Lan is left staring at them helplessly, but he doesn’t interfere.

The moment Xiao Xingchen’s elegant fingers brush against the wetness spurting out of Xue Yang’s stomach, his entire demeanour shifts. His shoulders, which had been drooping in despair before, tense up into a straight line. Unwaveringly, he reaches up and unties the bloodied bandages around his head.

Blood is smeared all around the hollows of his eye sockets. A-Qing has never seen them this clearly before, and she can barely look away. His lids sag over them, hiding the empty spaces below, and his long lashes are caked with blood.

A strong hand curls around her wrist, and she looks down to see that he has balled up the bandages and pushed them to the wet patch on Xue Yang’s robes. Gently but decisively, he pulls her hands in to cover them.

“A-Qing, put your hands here. Press as hard as you can,” he instructs.

She has no choice but to obey. Even through the bandages, Xue Yang’s body is oddly squishy beneath her, and her fingers struggle to find purchase in his blood-soaked robes. Her hands are stained red immediately. Blood gets under her nails and into all the little wrinkles on her palms. But she presses, just like Xiao Xingchen had said.

Xiao Xingchen’s own hands are running up and down Xue Yang’s body, settling in quick succession on his chest, his ribcage, his side and his belly, just below A-Qing’s hands.

“Heart is fine,” he mutters to no one in particular. “Lungs are undamaged. Liver is ruptured. That’s not good. Large intestine—”

Xue Yang’s head twitches. A-Qing glances over just in time to see his eyes flicker open. They’re glossed over and very dark, and they don’t quite seem to know what to focus on. After a few weak attempts to look down to where their hands are working at his wound, they squint hazily at Xiao Xingchen.

Xue Yang’s mouth falls open around a soft exhale.

“Daozhang,” he says and smiles.

Xiao Xingchen freezes up. “Quiet,” he snaps. Two of his fingers press quickly against the spot between Xue Yang’s brows, and Xue Yang’s eyes roll back again. He goes out like a light.

A-Qing gapes, but the wound is still throbbing in tune with Xue Yang’s heartbeat, so he’s just knocked out. She’d never seen Xiao Xingchen do anything like that. She hadn’t even known he could.

His hand slides back down to nudge at hers, probing at the wound. With one deep breath, he steadies himself again and returns to his investigation.

“He’s losing so much blood,” he murmurs. “Qi is— troubled. I’ll need to—”

A gentle warmth spreads through the body under A-Qing’s hands that’s much more pleasant than Xue Yang’s hot blood. It tingles a little on her slippery palms. In this body, she’d never really sensed qi this clearly, so whatever Xiao Xingchen is doing must be very strong.

She doesn’t know how long they stay there, after that. The blood on her hands gets sticky and disgusting, which she guesses is a better sign for Xue Yang’s life than the wetness. Xiao Xingchen keeps moving his hands and passing qi, and nothing starts to dissolve. Through all that, Song Lan hovers behind him, watching them in utter confusion.

Eventually, Xiao Xingchen stops his qi transfer, pulls his hands back, and unties the sash of his own robes.

“Well done, A-Qing,” he says. “You can let go.”

She does as she’s told. Her hands come away entirely covered in red. For a lack of better options, and because she doesn’t want to stain one of her few robes, she wipes them on the ground.

Carefully, Xiao Xingchen manipulates Xue Yang’s body so he can wrap the sash tightly over the wound and around his middle, above Xue Yang’s own damaged one. The bandages stay where they are, glued to Xue Yang’s wound by all the clotting blood. Besides the little droplets of Xiao Xingchen’s blood that had spilled onto the sash from his bare eye sockets, the fabric stays white.

A-Qing breathes out heavily. The panic that drains out of her body leaves all her limbs cold, and she rubs her bloody fingers together to warm them up. Going by the deep frown on Xiao Xingchen’s face, they’re not out of the woods yet, but at least Xue Yang is no longer bleeding like a skewered pig.

“I have to bandage this properly,” Xiao Xingchen sighs. He’s holding out his red hands delicately in front of his chest. “Maybe sew it shut. I need my supplies.”

“I can run and get them! What do you need?” A-Qing says, although the idea of running all the way to the yizhuang and back on her already aching legs is not her favourite one.

Fortunately for her muscles, Xiao Xingchen shakes his head. “We need to get him home.”

He reaches out again and starts to slowly manoeuvre Xue Yang’s unconscious body into his arms, jostling him as little as possible. Behind him, Song Lan moves for the first time since Xue Yang passed out.

“Xingchen—” he starts. He’s got Fuxue still drawn, and he bends down quickly to pick up Shuanghua, which makes A-Qing’s heart thud uncomfortably exactly twice before she realises that he’s merely carrying them over.

Xiao Xingchen tenses up, but he doesn’t lose his focus. “No flying,” he dismisses with a short tilt of his head in Song Lan’s direction. “It’s too much movement.”

Instead, he slides one arm under Xue Yang’s shoulders and the other under his knees. He moves like he does in a fight; every little bend of his limbs is deliberate. Raising Xue Yang’s legs just a little so his body ends up lying in his arms in almost exactly the same position as before, he rises to his feet.

Xue Yang’s head hangs limply down where Xiao Xingchen’s upper arm doesn’t quite manage to catch it. Despite all the work they did to keep his blood in his body and his qi flowing, there’s no colour left in his cheeks. He looks like a corpse. But his bandaged stomach rises and falls faintly, and the world is still vibrant and solid around them, so by some damn miracle, there’s still hope for this version of things.

Xiao Xingchen steps forward, adjusts Xue Yang’s body in his arms so he doesn’t get shaken up too badly, and starts walking off in the direction of the town. A-Qing sticks close to his heels until they’ve made their way past the first trees and Song Lan still hasn’t moved to follow them.

Twirling around, she finds him stood where they’d left him, next to the spot on the ground that’s coloured red with Xue Yang’s blood. He’s staring after them blankly, like his face hasn’t decided yet whether it wants to glower or weep. He’s also still holding Shuanghua, which is just rude if he’s planning to be left behind.

A-Qing bites back a groan. It’s always something with the three of them.

“Why’re you just standing there?” she shouts over her shoulder. “Come on!”

Song Lan shudders. Two deep worry lines appear on his forehead, but at the same time, something shakes lose, and he steps forward to follow them home.

-

They’re a strange procession walking into town. A-Qing sticks close to Xiao Xingchen, who despite carrying Xue Yang’s weight walks as if on clouds. Song Lan follows after them awkwardly, three steps behind. None of them speak.

Not long after they leave the last trees behind, A-Qing’s consciousness gives out again. She stops and stares blankly at houses she doesn’t recognise, at two strange men walking beside her and the lifeless body held in the white-robed one’s arms, and at her feet, which don’t look like they belong to her – whoever she might be.

It lasts for little more than the blink of an eye, but when she comes back, goosebumps spread down both of her arms. She’d been hoping that this new side effect of her broken soul wouldn’t stick around after she had a chance to settle into her body again, just like the fog in her brain that has mostly disappeared by now. That it’s back now isn’t good. It makes her want to do very pointless things, like curl up on the ground and cry so that Xiao Xingchen can pat her head and dab the tears off her cheeks.

Given that Xiao Xingchen is busy carrying the man whose life he has to save to keep the remains of her soul from tearing themselves apart any further, she guesses she has bigger problems to deal with now. Avoiding the concerned look Song Lan gives her at her sudden stumble, she gulps down her fear and marches on.

The streets between the forest and the yizhuang are never very busy, and since most of the town is either still out at the market or keeping their doors shut against the omnipresent dust, they’re accompanied only by eerie silence. It’s only when they round the final corner that they’re met with the sight of a few neighbours on their ways home, and a few heads lift in their direction.

Every pair of eyes locks instantly on Xue Yang’s prone body in Xiao Xingchen’s arms.

The closest belongs to Qian Xiu, who’s carrying a basket of produce up to her front door across from the yizhuang. At once, she drops the basket and hurries over to them.

“Daozhang!” she calls, making Xiao Xingchen wince. “What happened to him?”

She’s a small woman with a gentle, round face, and A-Qing can’t remember ever seeing her scared. She is now, gaping openly first at the subtle patch of red that has bled through Xue Yang’s makeshift bandages, and then at Xiao Xingchen’s bare eye sockets, which are still steadily weeping blood.

Xiao Xingchen’s lips part, but he doesn’t say a word. His steps slow down but don’t stop, and his chin twitches nervously in the direction of the yizhuang.

A-Qing puts herself between him and Qian Xiu, pushes gently at his back to keep him walking, and declares, “There was a fierce corpse in the woods! He tried to fight it, and daozhang and Song-daozhang here took care of it, but it got him really bad!”

“A fierce corpse this close to town?” Qian Xiu gasps. She throws one brief look at Song Lan, whose discomfort is one step away from cultivating sentience, but the rare sight of a stranger in town doesn’t seem to matter in the face of the unconscious man in front of them. Turning to Xiao Xingchen again, she asks, “Daozhang, can we do anything for him?”

Xiao Xingchen still doesn’t answer. He finally stops only a few steps away from the yizhuang’s door, obviously itching to go inside. A-Qing is about to cut in again with some made-up errand, or to dismiss Qian Xiu’s offer of help entirely, when Song Lan steps up to her side.

“Herbs to stop the bleeding,” he says. “Baiji and sanqi. We’ll need new bandages to dress the wound, too.”

Qian Xiu throws a quick glance at Xiao Xingchen, who breathes out thickly. After a moment, though, he nods, and Qian Xiu drops into a quick bow. “I’ll see what I can find, daozhang!”

She hastens across the road towards her own house, where her groceries are still lying right in front of the door. A-Qing doesn’t watch her go. She follows after Xiao Xingchen, who shoulders open the door to the yizhuang.

They enter accompanied by Qian Xiu’s frantic calls for her youngest daughter to come quick and run to the market to help the good daozhang. Song Lan is the last to step cautiously over the high threshold, and the last of Qian Xiu’s words are swallowed by the door falling shut.

Xiao Xingchen makes an immediate beeline for the side room. A-Qing hurries ahead to open the door, and he carries Xue Yang through. She follows them past the little kitchen, where the dishes of this morning are put up to dry and a large bowl of rice is sitting abandoned on a counter. Further back, the bed is unmade and as rickety as it’s ever been. The wood creaks quietly under Xue Yang’s weight when Xiao Xingchen gently puts him down.

Besides the time of day and Song Lan’s presence in the other room, it all feels very much like a déjà-vu of the day they’d first come here.

Just like he had been back then, Xiao Xingchen is entirely focused on healing his patient. The only sign that anything is off is the blood that’s by now wet his entire face.

“A-Qing, go get some things from the kitchen for me,” he says, and A-Qing jumps at his request. It takes her longer than it should to find the herbs and medicines he lists, considering how often she’d helped him fix the various creative ailments of people living in a town more prone to accidents than perhaps anywhere else. But she does find them, and Xue Yang is still breathing when she returns to his bedside.

There’s a knock on the front door while Xiao Xingchen is busy trying to push a round pill past Xue Yang’s slightly parted lips, followed by low voices and the sound of footsteps. Song Lan steps in cautiously, hovering in the doorway like he isn’t quite sure he’s allowed to enter.

“The lady brought bandages. She said her daughter would come later with the rest,” he says. A-Qing waves him over impatiently, and he carries the stack of white cloth up to them to place on the foot of the bed. “I added what I found in my supplies, too.”

Xiao Xingchen’s hands still on the side of Xue Yang’s face. “Thank you,” he whispers.

He returns to his task, lifting a small cup of water to Xue Yang’s lips to wash down the medicine and holding two fingers to his throat to make sure his reflexes work well enough to make him swallow. Song Lan sticks around and stares intently at Xue Yang’s blank face.

“If there’s anything I can do,” he says.

“Nothing at the moment,” Xiao Xingchen replies. Song Lan nods and turns around, closing the door behind him as he goes.

“A-Qing,” Xiao Xingchen says into the subsequent silence. “I need to surge the wound and change the bandages. Can you hand me what I need?”

It’s a disgusting type of work. The hole in Xue Yang’s stomach isn’t wide but reaches deep, and it immediately starts bleeding again when Xiao Xingchen removes the clotted clump of bandages above. They have to take the sash and robes underneath off, which have gone leathery tough with dried blood and reveal a lot more of Xue Yang’s torso that A-Qing ever wanted to see. But she helps anyways, passing Xiao Xingchen tinctures and wet cloths and everything else he asks for.

At some point, they jostle Xue Yang hard enough to wake him up. His eyes aren’t any more focused than they’d been in the forest, and his body is too weak to move, but he makes a solid attempt; as soon as he spots Xiao Xingchen, the muscles around the wound tighten and he flinches back by a cun.

“Don’t move,” Xiao Xingchen says sharply. One of his hands presses down on Xue Yang’s chest.

Xue Yang’s eyes flick down to it like he’s put a dagger through his heart, then up again to inspect A-Qing as well. She sticks her tongue out at him.

Groggily, he frowns at her and returns his gaze to Xiao Xingchen. “Daozhang,” he sighs. “You look so pretty like this.”

He must be really out of it to talk this softly to anyone. A-Qing decides to give him a pass for it and for calling Xiao Xingchen pretty when all his ethereal features are smeared with blood, since he did just almost die, and although Xiao Xingchen goes stiff as a board at the compliment.

“Xue Yang,” he snaps. “Be quiet.”

“Huh,” Xue Yang comments, entirely ignoring the order. “Thought you wanted to kill me.”

His lips shape a weak, idiotic smile. He’s about to say more, even though A-Qing doesn’t know how he’s talking at all and not screaming in pain, but this time, Xiao Xingchen doesn’t even respond. He just jabs a finger at his forehead, sucks in a breath, and knocks him out again.

A-Qing watches silently as Xue Yang’s head sags back onto the bedding and his lids fall closed over hazy black eyes. A fresh trickle of blood makes its way through the dried smears on Xiao Xingchen’s face.

“Daozhang,” she starts and trails off. She doesn’t really know what she wants to ask.

Xiao Xingchen grabs a thick band of fabric off the stack of bandages. “I think I can manage alone from here.”

She wants to protest, but he’s using one of those voices again that aren’t to be argued with, and her temples are aching with exhaustion. So she reaches out instead and briefly touches her hand to his shoulder.

He gives her a wobbly smile. “Go rest. You did well.”

“Just shout if you need something,” she tells him. He quickly squeezes her fingers, and she staggers out of the room on shaky legs. On her way past the kitchen, she snatches up a cloth and wets it with water to finally rub the blood off her hands.

In the main hall, Song Lan is sitting against the wall by the table, back hunched and knees drawn almost up to his chest. For a man as tall as he is, the pose is ridiculous. He looks like he’s trying to fold all his long limbs away and disappear completely.

A-Qing slides down the wall across from him until she ends up in a similar position on the floor. For a while, they just look at each other in silence.

“Daozhang said he doesn’t need more help,” she says eventually. “So I guess it’ll all gonna be fine.”

It’s a bold statement for reasons he can’t understand, and she flinches away from it the moment she says it. A warm flutter has spread through her chest that she doesn’t think she can examine just yet. Her body has gone limp, out of exhaustion more than anything else, but it still disturbs her. There’s still too much that could go wrong.

Song Lan purses his lips, but he doesn’t voice his thoughts on whether Xue Yang being alive qualifies as everything being fine. In his carefully poetic tone, he says, “I am sorry for causing you distress.”

Not for hurting Xue Yang, but she hadn’t expected that. She doesn’t know if she wants him to be.

“It’s okay, Song-daozhang,” she chirps. “I’m not mad at you, and I don’t think daozhang is either. We can all figure this out together.”

He doesn’t respond, but his expression softens ever so slightly. Whether or not he believes her, he doesn’t argue, and that’s good enough for her for now.

-

Xiao Xingchen stays in the side room for a long time. A-Qing checks on him as often as she can without feeling pathetic or upsetting him too much, just because her mind keeps filling with images of him and Xue Yang both dead and bled out on the bed. The fact that Song Lan is still holding Shuanghua is one of the few things that calm her down a bit.

Song Lan watches her stick her head through the door to the side room the first time she gives in and checks, and when she drops back down to the ground, reassured that Xiao Xingchen is just quiet because he’s passing Xue Yang qi and not because he’s dead, he gets to his feet.

He leaves Shuanghua on the table. A-Qing closely tracks the hand that picks up Fuxue.

“The corpse powder,” he says once he catches her staring. “I will go and clean it up, before anyone’s harmed by it.”

That probably is a good call. She’d forgotten about the stuff already.

She still lets her eyes go very large and blinks up at him. “You’ll come back, won’t you, Song-daozhang?”

He comes to a halt on his way to the front door. Her heart sinks when he hesitates, but he ends up inclining his head towards her in a gentle nod.

“I will.”

She believes him, in part because she doesn’t have much of a choice. She’s too tired to follow after him, and she can’t leave the yizhuang in case Xiao Xingchen needs her help. So she lets him go, watching from her spot on the floor as he steps outside into the sun.

Not long after he leaves, a knock on the door makes her jump up. She hurries over to the door, half-expecting Song Lan to have returned already. But it’s just Qian Xiu’s daughter, who pushes a stack of various fresh and dried herbs into her hands as soon as she opens the door.

“The daozhang asked for these,” she says.

The herbs all look good and useful, though Xiao Xingchen will be the judge of whether or not they’re the right ones. A-Qing adjusts them in her arms so she won’t drop any, then turns her eyes on the girl in front of the high threshold and looks her over.

Qian Feng is about her size but a little younger than A-Qing herself had been when she died. She remembers that she’d always found her a little strange, because she never left the house much and hid behind her mother whenever they met her on the street, but at least she’d never made fun of A-Qing or Xiao Xingchen for the blind thing.

Xue Yang had turned her into a living corpse and shut her up completely, so A-Qing hasn’t thought about her in a long time, but she guesses that sort of thing could matter again if one of her second chances ends up working out.

She shakes herself. There’s still a lot to be done before she can afford to be that optimistic.

“Thanks,” she says and takes a step backwards into the yizhuang. Qian Feng stays where she is.

In a low voice, she asks, “Is your friend going to be okay?”

A-Qing raises her chin. “Sure. Daozhang’s taking care of him, and he’s a tough one.”

It’s not technically a lie. If Xue Yang dies after all, their neighbours aren’t going to hear about it before the time-line falls apart, and this conversation won’t have happened in the first place. So she might as well appease this girl and let her believe that besides some trouble with fierce corpses, everything is normal.

Qian Feng nods. “That’s good,” she says and spins around on her heel to run back to her house. She really is a weird one. But perhaps the girl with half a soul and most of the brain of a resentful ghost can’t talk.

A-Qing kicks the door shut. She carries the herbs over to Xiao Xingchen, who’s moved to sit on the side of the bed with one hand pressed to Xue Yang’s wrist. He takes them gratefully and assures her that things are looking up when she asks, but he still doesn’t follow her back to the main hall.

A-Qing sits back down on the ground and waits.

Song Lan returns not long after. He opens the door after a gentle knock and looks around the room, deflating a little when he finds that she’s the only person in the room. In one hand, he’s holding the bamboo cane she’d dropped in the forest and never picked back up.

“I burnt the powder,” he tells her. “I also found this. I think it belongs to you.”

He holds the cane out to her, and A-Qing jumps up to snag it from his grip. She hadn’t even noticed that she’d lost it, but now that she has it back, it fits into her hands like a missing piece. Experimentally, she beats it at the ground a few times.

“Thank you, Song-daozhang,” she trills.

“You’re welcome,” he replies. His sombre expression turns a little curious when he watches her play around with the cane, which she shouldn’t have been able to see or take from him so confidently if she really needed it as an aid. He definitely doesn’t believe she’s blind anymore, but he must have decided against asking about it.

Since he doesn’t care anyways, she gives him a blatant, assessing once-over.

He’s still very pale. There’s a thin, scabbed-over cut on his cheek where Xue Yang had probably gotten him in their fight. Alive and dressed in clean, still impeccably folded robes, he looks a little out of place amongst the haphazard furnishings that had accumulated in this rundown place over the past few years, but A-Qing can’t help but think that it’s not too bad. After all, it’s a place of the dead just as much as it is the home of three not very tidy people, and Song Lan’s modest hairstyle and the strict cut of his clothes suit that just fine.

She had missed him, that last time around.

“Song-daozhang,” she muses, “will you stick around now? You were looking for daozhang for so long, you’re not just going to leave again, right?”

Poor Song Lan’s face contorts even further, caution and confusion mixing in a way that ultimately just makes him look constipated. He’s probably scanning her for some hint that she’s trying to obliquely tell him to fuck off and get out of their lives. It must be hard for him to piece together the part where she’d cried over the man he nearly stabbed to death and the one where she keeps asking him to stay.

She looks up at him innocently. He can think her strange if he wants to. The feeling is mutual, and it doesn’t mean they can’t get along.

“That is not my decision to make,” he finally says. He throws a quick, unsubtle glance at the door to the side room, looking unbearably sad under all his sternness. Then, he purses his lips, and his eyes harden. “But the matter of Xue Yang has to be resolved.”

It puts a bit of a damper on her already wavering mood. “Right,” she murmurs. She wanders back over to her stretch of wall next to the side room, where she sits back down chewing on her lip. “I just think that daozhang really missed you.”

He says nothing to that. A-Qing watches him simply stand there for a while, but it gets boring quickly. Whether he and Xiao Xingchen can mend things between them won’t really matter if Song Lan insists on putting his sword through Xue Yang again.

She tears her eyes open until they water. In a hushed voice, she says, “You aren’t gonna kill him, right?”

Song Lan looks at her again. She blinks, and a tear trickles out of the corner of her eye, perfectly timed.

He sighs deeply. “I think that decision has been made.”

Unhappy as he sounds about it, he wouldn’t lie about that sort of thing. A-Qing sags against the wall; it’ll all depend on Xiao Xingchen, then, and whether he’ll stick to his decision.

Song Lan settles by the table again, though he folds his long legs into an orderly lotus pose this time. A-Qing decides to mirror him and put her cane in her lap. Neither of them says another word, but that doesn’t worry her. Sitting in silence with him is still so very familiar. Her strained muscles relax a little more.

They stay there for a while. A ray of sunlight creeps through the window at some point, and she watches dust dance just above the ground, illuminated to look like tiny gems. Song Lan’s breathing is quiet and very rhythmic. Periodically, she almost dozes off listening to it.

Finally, the door to the side room opens and Xiao Xingchen steps out.

He’s a complete mess. His face is so colourless that he almost looks like his own corpse, save for the red blood smeared all over it. His hands are clean, but there’s blood on the hems of his sleeves and spattered all over his robes, too. Two dark rings have formed under his drooping lids, making him look haggard, and without the sash around his waist, his robes are in disarray.

A-Qing perks up, shaking off her fatigue. “Daozhang! Is he okay?” she asks, although she damn well knows that Xue Yang is. Her spirit still feels very solidly connected to her body.

Xiao Xingchen gently closes the door behind him. “He’s asleep. He’ll make it.”

She lets out a loud, relieved huff and drops her head back against the wall. Xiao Xingchen, meanwhile, stays exactly where he is, hand still pressed flat to the door. On the other side of the room, Song Lan is watching him with an inscrutable expression.

“Zichen,” Xiao Xingchen breathes. He drops his hand to his side, where it flexes around nothing, half-hidden by his bloodied sleeve. When Song Lan doesn’t reply, his breath quickens. “Zichen, I’m sorry. I don’t know— What can I say to you?”

It’s such a miserable little question that A-Qing is hit with the sudden urge to beat someone up with her cane, just for making him sound that way. It’s a stark contrast to the tentative calm that had settled in her chest. But Song Lan already looks sick to his stomach, and something about the pathetic curl of his brows make her want to beat someone up in his stead as well, so it all cancels out.

She pulls gently on the hem of Xiao Xingchen’s robes instead, and he breathes out shakily.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats in Song Lan’s direction. He’d been so confident just a short while ago, when he’d surged Xue Yang with sure fingers, but all that confidence has drained out of him completely. His eyes have started bleeding again. “You— you have a duty to your shifu. To the people who raised you. I shouldn’t keep you from it, not after all I’ve caused.”

Song Lan straightens up. “You are not at fault for what happened at Baixue Temple,” he says curtly. “I meant that.”

Xiao Xingchen shakes his head. He steps forward, only to come to a halt in the middle of the room, where he stands like a misplaced piece of furniture. It had taken a while this time around for him to start coming apart by the seams, but it looks like it can’t be fully avoided after all.

“I gave him reason to target you,” he whispers. “It never would have happened if it weren’t for me.”

“Daozhang, that’s ridiculous,” A-Qing scoffs, too harshly. Being gentle about this had been easier the first few times she’d had this conversation. “You couldn’t have known that.”

It still does something, even though it’s not kind enough to soothe him. Xiao Xingchen winces lightly, and she can see on his face that he doesn’t believe her. But instead of arguing, he simply shakes his head again, dislodging a drop of blood on its way down to his jaw.

“Even so. He’s a monster. No one has the right to stand between you and his life, Zichen, and I—” He chokes on his words. Very quietly, he asks, “How can you stand the sight of me?”

Song Lan squeezes his eyes shut. His knuckles are white where he’s got his hands clenched hard around his own knees, and his whole face is twisted into a pained grimace. He takes a deep, steadying breath.

“I spoke in anger before,” he states and opens his eyes. “I will not do so again.”

“I’m sorry,” Xiao Xingchen repeats. “I’m so sorry.”

“Xingchen,” Song Lan says. It’s so loud in the quiet room that A-Qing flinches, cutting like a blade, but in the end, his voice stays even. “I don’t want your apologies. If I’d had the chance, I would have refused them the last time before receiving a gift I can hardly stand thinking about. Whatever suffering you’d cause yourself to appease me, by whichever means, I do not want it.”

A single, clear tear rolls down his cheek. He wipes it quickly with the back of his hand.

Xiao Xingchen has been frozen in place with both arms hanging limply down his sides. A-Qing wants to go up to him and pat his back, but she’s too busy holding her breath. There’s a weight to everything Song Lan just said that she understands too little of to interrupt, especially since Song Lan doesn’t seem to be done.

Swallowing heavily, he unclenches his hands to fold them in his lap. “There’s only one thing I ask of you,” he says and pleads, “Help me understand.”

Xiao Xingchen’s hands twitch. For a moment, A-Qing thinks he’s going to sink to his knees and burst into sobs. But instead, his face hardens and he ducks his head, hiding his eye sockets from view.

“It’s shameful to say,” he breathes.

He doesn’t continue. He just stands there in silence, across from Song Lan, whose hands clench again in his lap. His eyes drop down from Xiao Xingchen’s bloodied face, and fleetingly, they meet A-Qing’s own. His disappointment is palpable. She gives him a small shrug.

Song Lan breathes out slowly and very deeply. It loosens something in his rigid shoulders, and his face clears up, his frown vanishing almost completely. Quietly, he stands up from his strict lotus pose, pats the dust out of his robes, and walks up to Xiao Xingchen.

“Qing-guniang,” he says. “Would you bring a bowl of water?”

A-Qing tilts her head at him in confusion, but he seems to have a plan. Not too long ago, she’d been in a strange bed wishing she could possess him just to make him speak a single word to a Xiao Xingchen who’d been suffering for days. Water seems like an improvement.

She sneaks into the side room, taking care not to make too much noise, though Xue Yang is still unconscious on the bed and probably wouldn’t hear her in any case. His middle is wrapped with clean bandages that he, by the looks of it, hasn’t bled through.

They’d used up a lot of water to clean that wound before Xiao Xingchen had bandaged it, but there still is enough to fill a small bowl. When she returns to the main room, Song Lan has led Xiao Xingchen over to the table and sat down by his side. He smiles tightly but gratefully when she sets the bowl down in front of them.

“Thank you.”

A-Qing nods, traipsing back to her spot next to the wall, and Song Lan pulls a small, clean cloth out of his sleeve. He wets it in the bowl. Touching one hand very carefully to Xiao Xingchen’s shoulder, he lifts the cloth to Xiao Xingchen’s face.

“May I?” he asks, and Xiao Xingchen stifles a sob.

“You shouldn’t,” he says. Song Lan hesitates, nearly letting the cloth sink again, and he amends, “You don’t have to.”

“I consider it a privilege.” Song Lan stresses every single word.

The cloth dabs at a deep red spot on Xiao Xingchen’s cheekbone. It comes away stained, but Song Lan keeps going, undeterred. Gently, he wipes off first the dried mess sullying Xiao Xingchen’s cheeks. The cloth is ruined by the time he takes the last of the blood off Xiao Xingchen’s elegant jaw, and he sets it down gingerly on the table.

Xiao Xingchen takes a breath and straightens up, but Song Lan just pulls out another cloth to wet. This one, he brings up to Xiao Xingchen’s empty eye socket. With meticulous care, he runs it across his water line, lifting the lid ever so slightly to clean what he can without causing any pain. Fresh blood soaks into the cloth as he goes, but once he’s done, Xiao Xingchen has stopped crying.

Cleaned of the blood, the sight of his bare eye sockets is a lot less gory. His lids still sag too much to fool anyone nearby, but A-Qing imagines that if you saw him from a distance, you could think that his eyes are merely closed.

Song Lan places the second cloth next to the first one and pulls out a third to wipe his own hands. He seems to have an endless supply of them.

“That I sent you away that day is my greatest regret,” he says while the white square of fabric runs through the gaps between his fingers one by one. “It taints me. If what you did is truly shameful, then we are both ashamed.”

Xiao Xingchen’s breath hitches again. “You were—”

Song Lan interjects before he can get out another word. “I was wrong, and I was cruel. I will not grudge you again.”

Xiao Xingchen’s fingers tap out helpless patterns on his blood-spattered thighs. “How can you say that? You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“I know you,” Song Lan says simply, like that’s the only thing that matters. Immediately, Xiao Xingchen’s shoulders tense as if he’s going to cry again, and Song Lan casts his eyes down, turning a little sheepish. “At least, I hope that after all I’ve done, you will still allow me to.”

“You’ll always know me,” Xiao Xingchen says. He leans closer, almost but not quite brushing his shoulder against Song Lan’s, and A-Qing quietly pushes herself up onto her feet.

It doesn’t look like she’s needed here. It remains to be seen if Song Lan is going to keep his word – she remembers his horrified reaction all too well whenever he’d learnt about what exactly Xiao Xingchen and Xue Yang had been getting up to in this yizhuang – but she’s not too worried about it. The man she’s met in all the past few versions of reality is a loyal one, even when his head isn’t full of metal designed to make him so.

Also, there’s a limit to how much sentimental drivel she can listen to without throwing up in her mouth a little.

The two of them are so wrapped up in each other that they barely notice when she slides the door to the side room open. Only Song Lan glances up with a questioning frown, which he drops as soon as she gives him an encouraging little smile and he presumably realises that entering a room with Xue Yang in it isn’t much of a risk when Xue Yang is too weak to move.

He turns back to Xiao Xingchen, and A-Qing slips through the door to make sure that all this isn’t just the prelude to the next disaster.

-

Xue Yang doesn’t so much as move a muscle when she enters. He’s laid out on the bed in the exact same position she’d last seen him in, on his back so not to disturb the wound. His head falls limply to the right, and there’s not a single line on his face. She might be imagining it, but she thinks his cheeks look a bit less pallid than before.

In all their years of more or less voluntary cohabitation, she’d only ever seen him asleep in the early days, when he’d still been recovering from his injuries and prone to falling asleep at random times during the day. Once he’d healed up, he never did more than doze in her presence, and he had an uncanny habit of startling awake whenever she’d try to sneak into the kitchen in the morning.

After things had fallen apart, she hadn’t gone near him anymore, not even when he was asleep.

A-Qing briefly and very childishly considers digging through his things to find his inkstone, grinding a bit of ink, and drawing something stupid on his face.

In the end, she takes mercy on him, but only because he nearly died today, and because she needs him on her good side. Even so, she does indulge in pinching his slack upper arm.

“Wake up, asshole.”

The only reaction she gets is a light wrinkling of his nose. For a moment, she wonders if maybe Xiao Xingchen’s little knockout spell makes it so that he can’t wake up at all, but then his nose twitches again and he groggily opens his eyes.

It takes some effort, but she keeps herself from jumping back a step on reflex. Instead, she crosses her arms in front of her chest and stares down at him until he’s woken completely, scanned the whole room with hazy eyes, and finally frowns up at her.

“Where’s daozhang?” he asks, because of course he does. His words smear together in a croaky mumble.

A-Qing kicks out at the side of the bed. “Can he go out for one moment without you wanting to cling to him? Fuck, you’re exhausting!”

Xue Yang coughs out a laugh. “Pot, kettle.”

“Shut up,” she snaps. If he can mock her, he’s awake and conscious enough to deal with the important things. “I gotta talk to you.”

“Man, and here I thought you’d come to cry over my corpse before someone slits my throat.”

He attempts a sad mockup of his nastiest grin, and A-Qing rolls her eyes. “You’re not a corpse if you’re alive, idiot. Now listen.”

She lets herself flop down on the foot of the bed, far enough from him that she doesn’t brush against his legs. He immediately tries to kick her, which she quickly retaliates by warningly poking his shin with the end of her cane. Before he can start any more nonsense, she announces, “We’re inside an array.”

Xue Yang lifts his head to gaze sluggishly around the room again. “Huh? Nah we’re not,” he slurs.

“Yes we are. You explained it to me,” A-Qing retorts haughtily. “We’re inside an array that’s drawn on time. Don’t ask me how that works, you’ll have to figure that one out yourself. But it’s made so that I got sent back to today from years in the future. The you from that time made it, but he didn’t make it whole. There’s a piece missing, some kind of end point that still has to be drawn, and you’re the only one who can figure out how to do it. The spell’s usually stable, because time isn’t linear and so the end point kind of already exists, but if you die, there’s no chance that it’ll ever be made and the whole array breaks. Because it’s a paradox.”

She takes a breath. “So you can’t die. If you do, everything just disappears, like it never existed in the first place, and I get sent back to this morning when Song Lan shows up here, and also I lose a piece of my soul every time that happens. This is…” She quickly counts on her fingers. “…the seventh time I’m living this day.”

That should be the gist of it. Everything else, they can talk about when there’s time and she isn’t vaguely expecting Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan to walk in on them. She stares down at Xue Yang expectantly, waiting for him to put two and two together and tackle the problem with however much he can currently muster of his usual manic focus.

Xue Yang stares back, lifts his brows nearly up to his hairline, and drops his head back onto the bedding.

“Daozhang makes one hell of a medicine, I’ll tell you that.”

A-Qing lets out an undignified squawk. “No, you have to listen to me! And you’ll remember what I say, or this is all going to go to shit again!”

“Kinda feels like it has already,” Xue Yang admits, gesturing at the stab wound in his stomach. “Song Lan still want to kill me?”

She pauses, thinking of the pair of daoshi in the other room and Song Lan’s curt words about decisions.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” she says. Even if she’s right, though, nothing is set in stone yet, and there’s about a hundred things that could make both Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen change their minds. She pokes her cane at Xue Yang’s leg again. “That’s the point – you’re alive right now, and you have to stay that way.”

Xue Yang reacts to that brave attempt to get them back on track with an asinine giggle. “Aw, you care about me.”

Heat rushes to A-Qing’s face. “Shut up!” she spits. “I told you, if you die, the array breaks!”

Xue Yang giggles again. “The array that’s drawn on time and that a different me made in the future, but also kinda in the past.”

“That one!”

At least he heard what she said well enough to understand what’s going on, even if all it makes him do, instead of actually realising what’s at stake, is close his eyes and sigh.

“I’m too fucked up for this,” he states blearily.

“You’re such a fucking asshole,” A-Qing growls and lets out her frustration by hitting his shin hard enough to bruise, until he opens his eyes again and half-heartedly tries to bat away her cane. “We can talk about the array part later! What’s important now is that you don’t fuck things up even more. We all have to survive this, do you hear me?”

“Even Song Lan?” he grumbles.

A-Qing fixes him with a sharp stare. “If you get Song Lan killed, daozhang’s gonna kill himself, and then you’ll go mad trying to fix him, but you won’t manage because he’ll shatter his soul. That’s how it happened the first time.”

“Huh,” Xue Yang replies. Finally, the corners of his mouth tilt down. A puzzled wrinkle appears between his brows, and while he still looks halfway caught up in some drug- and pain-induced daze, he recovers a bit of the piercing gleam in his eyes. “Daozhang killed himself?”

“Twice.” A-Qing clears her tight throat. “So you can’t make him do it again this time. Daozhang doesn’t want you dead right now, but if he thinks you’re dangerous, he’ll kill you anyways, so you have to act like you’re not a bad guy. I don’t know, make him think you changed or something, that you don’t want to kill people anymore. Be nice to him. And you can’t ever tell him about the thing with the walking corpses.”

Xue Yang stiffens. “How do you know about that?” he hisses, pulling his smile into that snarl that still curdles her blood.

It’s easy to shake off the fear, though, when he’s half-dead on an unmade bed and his hair is sticking up in all directions like a particularly unkempt bird’s nest.

“I heard it in another time-line!” she trills. “Weren’t you listening?”

Xue Yang eyes her sceptically, but her flippant answer must convince him that she’s not about to go tattling to Xiao Xingchen. Tentatively, he settles back into the bedding. “And I’m supposed to believe you why?”

She scoffs and sticks out her arm at him. “Here. Test my qi or something.”

He has to rearrange himself a bit to get a comfortable grip on her wrist. A twist of his hips punches a single, low noise out of him, so he really has to be in a lot of pain. His fingers are way colder on her arm than they’d been the last time around, too.

Sharp nails dig into the skin above her pulse point and tickle uncomfortably when they run up the stretch of her arm not covered by her sleeve. Xue Yang watches his own movements with a pinched frown.

“Oh, yeah,” he says eventually and drops his hand. “Shit. How’re you sitting here?”

That’s a question she still doesn’t have an answer to, and now that he’s asking, it’s tempting to tell him about the new lapses in her consciousness and the memories she’s lost. He could probably figure out a clearer picture of what’s going on if given the time. Maybe he could find a way to fix it, if that sort of thing can be fixed.

But that can only matter if she gets to keep any part of her soul at all, so she bites the inside of her cheek and waves at him dismissively.

“Doesn’t matter right now. Did you hear what I said?”

Xue Yang grimaces. “Be nice to daozhang,” he parrots. “Don’t tell him about the corpses. Don’t kill Song Lan. Fuck, I hate being told not to do things, you know that? What do I get out of that?”

“You get to stay alive, dumbass!” A-Qing snaps. She winces at her own volume and throws a quick glance back at the door, which fortunately stays closed. Still, she takes a deep breath and lowers her voice. “If you promise not to make it impossible on purpose, I’ll help you. If we try really fucking hard to make this work, we can maybe keep living here. You won’t die or be locked up anywhere, and nothing has to change. We can still stay in this town and have a roof over our heads and go shout at mean guys at the market, and daozhang’s still gonna give us candy. We just need to get daozhang and Song Lan to agree that it’s best to just… keep you around.”

Xue Yang looks at her like she’s lost her mind. Her cheeks flush again. She can’t even argue, much as she’d want to. If she thinks about it for longer, the whole plan starts looking so ambitious it makes her woozy. She has no idea how she’s supposed to get Song Lan and Xue Yang to live together without strangling each other, for one, though she guesses that it’ll be up to Song Lan to decide whether he wants to stick around.

Hunching her shoulders, she turns away from Xue Yang and hides her hand in her pocket. This all doesn’t feel like the best option to her either, not when Xiao Xingchen is still crying his bloody tears in the other room and probably won’t ever be as happy as she’d seen him on her last try. But it’s the only option she can think of that’ll let them all stay alive, without any more disastrous secrets hanging over them than absolutely necessary. She’ll just have to trust him to find a way out of this that he’ll be okay with.

Her fingers in her pocket bump into something made of soft fabric. Inside, there’s something small and hard, so it’s a money pouch, which she vaguely recognises had been there the last few time-lines as well. Next to it, she finds a small, paper-wrapped piece of candy. Her fingers close around it tightly.

Xue Yang’s foot nudges her, making her glance up. He’s still frowning at her.

“Last time I saw Song Lan, he stabbed me in the guts,” he points out.

“I’ve got a plan for that,” A-Qing says. “Daozhang saved your life, so he still likes you. Once he’s calmed down a bit, I bet he’s gonna ask you why you stayed with us again. Or Song Lan will, I don’t care.” She shrugs and pokes the end of her cane in the direction of Xue Yang’s confused face. “You’re gonna tell him that you didn’t have any big evil plans, that you’re here because you want to be and because you fell in love with him.”

Xue Yang’s eyes go wide. “Hah!” he belts out, like the idiot he is, and starts cackling hysterically. “What the fuck. Who’s been reading you romance stories?”

A-Qing doesn’t deign to validate that display of shameless stupidity with any sort of attention.

“I don’t know what he’ll do when you tell him that, but I don’t think he’ll kill you,” she says over Xue Yang’s continued laughter. “Then we just have to, y’know. Figure the rest out.”

“Sounds complicated,” Xue Yang drawls, once he’s calmed down a bit.

“Complicated’s way better than everyone dying!” she grouses. She pulls the candy out of her pocket and turns it in her hand, staring down at the plain wrapping paper. “I just— You have to play along. You can’t fuck this up. Please.”

Xue Yang snaps his mouth shut. The obnoxious grin stays on his face, but it’s been stunned into losing all its bite. “Please” is not a word she’s ever used with him before.

The candy wrapper crinkles between her fingers. She stubbornly refuses to look at anything but the crude paper folds. She hasn’t eaten one of these in a while. All the ones Xiao Xingchen had given her in the last time-line, she’d hoarded in her pockets for some reason she can’t really pinpoint herself. She doesn’t think she remembers the taste.

Xue Yang huffs loudly. He’s looking at the candy too, but when she dares to check, his face has cleared up and shifted into a lazy smile.

“Tell me more about the array thingy,” he slurs, which sounds a lot like his version of conceding a point.

A-Qing pulls her legs up so she can fold them on the bed. “I dunno much about it. You didn’t say much about how you figured it out,” she tells him.

“Eh, I’ll figure it out again,” Xue Yang says easily. She’s inclined to believe him.

“You made a sketch of it,” she offers. While she’s still thinking about how to best recreate that sketch with only her cane and the bare floor at her disposal, for a man who might or might not think she’s blind, her fingers unwrap the candy, and she pushes it into her mouth.

Chapter Text

Yi City, the yizhuang.

The corpse is looking very peaceful inside the coffin. His hands are folded neatly over his belly, fingers interlaced. The robes they’ve dressed him in are his nicest ones, and they’d been a pain to get on him with his body already taken by rigor mortis. A-Qing had done up his hair with a nice guan she’d found in his things.

Old man Zhang had unexpectedly died last morning, and because his wife has been dead for years, no one had found him until the afternoon, when Gu Zhiyong from next door had noticed that he hadn’t left on his usual midday walk. Zhang Mei, his daughter and only living family, is probably already on her way from her husband’s house a few towns to the east and should arrive sometime this evening.

In the meantime, A-Qing is stuck with the task of keeping an eye on the corpse. It’s not like anyone’s expecting old man Zhang to get back up, not after two daoshi had settled his spirit and a demonic cultivator had stuck a bunch of protective talismans around his coffin. But you never know in this town, and A-Qing doesn’t have much else to do with her time.

Xue Yang and her daoshi are out moving mountains – literally, though Song Lan still isn’t convinced they’ll be able to do it. Xiao Xingchen has set his metaphorical sight on a hill that’s doing something unfortunate to the way qi flows in and out of the town. His proposed solution is to level it and put it somewhere else.

A-Qing still doesn’t know enough about feng shui to really get it, but she doesn’t share Song Lan’s doubts. If anyone can manage to move a mountain through sheer obstinacy, it’s Xiao Xingchen and Xue Yang.

She stretches her arms above her head until her joints pop and her muscles throb with a pleasant strain. Old man Zhang doesn’t comment, being a perfectly uninteresting corpse, so she takes the liberty to leave him where he is and go back to weeding the herb garden nestled into a corner of the courtyard, right next to where Xue Yang had recently cobbled together a new bench for their little fire pit.

The garden, which is full of useful plants like ginseng and baiji, had been Xiao Xingchen’s idea, but since he’s better at making things out of plants than growing them, it’d become A-Qing’s garden over the course of the years. She’s found that it’s sometimes easier to learn new things than reacquaint herself with skills that she’d had in her first life, and while her fingers have gotten slower than they used to be at snatching purses out of pockets, they’ve gotten pretty good at weeding.

She’s assembled a little pile of uprooted grass stalks next to the bench already. They’re a stubborn enemy all year round, but there’s something satisfying about ripping them out of the soft soil before they can steal all the nutrients from her chives.

It’s an overcast day but fairly warm. While her hands close around and pull out the intruders encroaching on her tidy rows of plants, she entertains the thought of heading out to town later. Xiao Xingchen had asked her to make a round, when he’s back to watch over old man Zhang himself, to get some medicine to a few townspeople.

She could make a bit of a trip out of it, drop by the stream and skip a few stones or pick some mushrooms in the forest. Maybe she could look for new make-up or a pretty parasol to go with her nicest set of robes. If she gets really lucky, Qian Feng from across the street will be out as well. She’s always fun to antagonise.

Her consciousness hasn’t lapsed at all this week, so she’s overdue. That’s a bit worrying; it’s awkward to suddenly stop dead in the street and gape senselessly at whoever ends up waving their hands in front of her face in concern. But she’s stopped giving up on trips to town just because some traveller might get spooked by her. After ten years in this town, most of its inhabitants forgive her her little oddities.

The last of the weeds joins its fallen companions on the pile. A-Qing picks all of them up to toss them on the compost heap, so they’ll have a chance at being useful to her after all. Then, she wipes her hands and checks on the corpse again, which predictably hasn’t moved.

A commotion inside the main building interrupts her contemplations of old man Zhang’s tidy beard. Familiar voices reach her, muffled by the walls, and she snatches her bamboo cane from where she’d put it up against the side of the coffin and scurries over to the house.

When she opens the door, Xue Yang is in the middle of a characteristic bout of theatrics. He’s halfway hanging off Xiao Xingchen’s sleeve, crooning in his ear with no regard for his personal space.

“Daozhang, you’ll protect me, right? What would you do without me? You know Song Lan’s too squeamish to do any of your ditch digging for you!”

Xiao Xingchen shakes his head in exasperation, but he’s smiling. “Calm down. We don’t even know why he’s here.”

“Ah, but if he’s here for me, you’d protect me?” Xiao Xingchen just sighs, and Xue Yang drops his sleeve to round on Song Lan. “Oi, Zichen! You like me too much to let that guy kill me, right?”

Song Lan bravely refuses to make eye contact with him or entertain any of his melodramatic nonsense. He’s carrying a basket of vegetables, so they’ve made a detour to the market. A-Qing strolls over to them, frowning lightly.

“Who’s killing who?”

“No one is killing anyone,” Song Lan says, sounding very tired.

Xue Yang ignores him. “Little Blind!” he calls and blinks large eyes at her that, considering his age, are patently ridiculous. “You wouldn’t let anyone murder me, would you? I still need to stabilise all this. If I die now, it’d just kill the timeline!”

Song Lan looks up from his basket, and Xiao Xingchen winces a little. A-Qing and Xue Yang had had to tell the two of them about the array eventually, in the interest of getting them all through that first bleak year of the timeline alive. They’ve both by now chipped in on Xue Yang’s efforts to finish the final piece, but they still go very serious whenever the topic comes up.

A-Qing doesn’t share their sensitivity, so she simply taps her index finger against the corner of her mouth and pretends to think.

“Hm. You said you’ve almost got it, so maybe we can get someone else to finish it!”

Xue Yang smiles sharply. “Won’t work. I’ll just start the whole thing up again if I have to. I’ve got one of those talismans on me at all times.”

“Liar!” she accuses, although she wouldn’t put it past him. He’d been far too thrilled when he’d finally managed to reverse engineer the original talisman. Song Lan, who must have come to a similar conclusion, has gone a bit green in the face.

“Why, it’s the perfect failsafe,” Xue Yang argues. “We all know how to make everything work out perfectly now, right?”

He directs a bright grin first at A-Qing, then at Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen. Both daoshi reply with identical unhappy frowns. To the two of them, who’d cried a lot of tears over the years and who’d never seen the carnage all of this could have easily turned into, it probably doesn’t feel like everything had gone perfectly.

“Again,” Song Lan settles on saying, “no one is getting killed.”

Xue Yang seems to take that as an answer to his previous nagging, because he blows Song Lan an exaggerated kiss. A-Qing groans.

“What’s he going on about, anyways?”

“Rumour has it that Hanguang-jun has arrived in town,” Xiao Xingchen responds and helpfully takes the basket from Song Lan’s hands, just in case he needs them to fend off Xue Yang.

A-Qing pauses.

“Who’s that?” she asks slowly. Something about that name makes the back of her head itch.

Xue Yang raises his brows at her, the way he does when he wants to goad her into starting a pointless fight. “Hanguang-jun. Lan Wangji, the Second Jade of the Lan Sect. Goes where the chaos is.” He gestures expansively at himself. When A-Qing doesn’t react, he rolls his eyes dramatically. “How’ve you lived with two righteous cultivators for so long and still don’t know anything?”

He visibly braces himself, shifting into a light, dancing stance that’ll get him out of the vengeful path of her cane if she decides to throw it at him, but he doesn’t get his fight. She’s far too distracted by the overwhelming sense that whatever she forgot is important.

She gets these moments sometimes, when she can tell that a gap in her knowledge has the shape of something she’s lost. It had taken her some time to recognise the feeling, but she’s gotten pretty good at it by now. This is not that; there’s none of the gaping emptiness in her brain that usually tells her the thing she’s looking for is gone without return, vanished alongside some shard of her soul.

The name definitely rings a bell. This is something that can come back to her.

She turns it over and over in her head, muttering to herself with little care for the bemused looks Xue Yang is throwing her.

“Hanguang-jun, Hanguang-jun…”

A memory surfaces from deep inside her damaged mind: that title spoken in a voice, clear as a bell and chipper as a mischievous schoolboy’s, that had for a short but very important time belonged to herself. A gasp escapes her.

“Wei Wuxian!”

She’s out of the door before her companions have a chance to react. Xue Yang shouts something after her, but she’s gone, flying down the street through the mist that is so common for this season, past the startled faces of well-known neighbours on their ways home from the market.

When she spots a figure in black robes chatting animatedly to old woman Pei in front of her shop of creepy paper effigies, she doesn’t hesitate, neither for reasons of propriety nor for the icy glare of the white-clad cultivator by his side, to throw herself into his arms.