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Shen Wei doesn’t know how long he stands in the alley, staring at the buildings around him and trying to absorb the difference in the world and the feeling of sunshine on his skin, before a man approaches him.
The man is wearing a purple coat, has pepper and salt hair and striking eyes.
He does not look happy to see Shen Wei.
“Are you the Black Cloaked Envoy?”
Shen Wei dips his head in a nod, unsure why this man would know who he is and yet greet him with such hostility.
“Zhao XinCi, Chief of the SID,” the man says, gesturing at himself. “We’d better go in, you look ridiculous standing on the street dressed like that.”
Shen Wei raises his head, looks at the man, and freezes. He looks familiar, looks almost like...
But he knows it’s not his Kun Lun. Not the Kun Lun that came to him at a crucial moment, saved his life, and then was cordial and friendly, became the first person who had actually tried to get to know Shen Wei for himself rather than as the persona that he projected instead.
Not the Kun Lun that gave Shen Wei his name and said he’d see him again before disappearing.
There is some familiarity to his manner, but it’s distant, probably just wishful thinking on Shen Wei’s part.
Shen Wei buries the hope that the prediction will come true, buries it deep down inside of himself where he keeps all of his impossible dreams. It has been ten thousand years, the Regent told him, since he last walked above the ground of Haixing. The chances that he would actually find his Kun Lun after all that time aren’t enough to think about and not what he’s here for anyway.
He follows this man, Chief Zhao, into a brick building. The inside is as fascinating as the building’s outside had been, every detail of how the rooms are made up as unfamiliar as this man is.
He waits respectfully as the man fusses with a small rectangle that emits light, muttering to himself about someone named Lin Jing being off for the day and having to make Shen Wei’s new identity himself.
He more or less ignores Shen Wei as he works, only acknowledging him when he needs to ask a question, so Shen Wei pokes around the room a little bit. Occupying himself by looking through a sheaf of glossy papers that are folded together and thrown carelessly on the table. He doesn’t really understand the purpose of the words written inside, they seem to be observations on the lives of people, but there are also pictures. He stares at them, shocked to see how lifelike they look, as if the moments had been frozen in time, rather than painted, and he rubs his finger across one, trying to figure out how something so detailed could be painted without a trace of the paint on the page.
“Lin Jing should remember to hide his gossip rags better in the future,” Chief Zhao comments. “I should dock his pay for the month.”
Shen Wei wants to ask him how the paper is made, how the pictures are created, but Chief Zhao turns back to his light box before he can, so Shen Wei goes back to looking through the papers as he waits.
It doesn’t take Chief Zhao long to finish what he’s doing, apparently he had already completed most of the work, only needed to finish filling in details about Shen Wei’s appearance. Then he gives Shen Wei some clothes and tells him to change so he can take a picture.
Shen Wei dresses, surprised by the lightness of the fabric, the softness of it. The clothes are too big, the white shirt too baggy to settle properly on his shoulders and the waistcoat over it not much better, although it hides the oversized shirt a bit. Once he’s changed, he presents himself back to Chief Zhao, who gives him a critical look. “Well, at least you look like a graduate student with no money,” he says, one eyebrow raised. “That collar is really too loose though.” He takes the pin from his own collar and hands it to Shen Wei. “Here, pin it closed and then stand up against that wall and look at me.”
Shen Wei does as told, standing against the white expanse and looking at Chief Zhao as he holds up a small device to his face, pointing it at Shen Wei, then he scowls, lowering the device again. “That hair is ridiculous, we really should cut it if you want to be taken seriously.”
“Cut it?” Shen Wei asks, reaching back to gather the long mane of his hair where it lies against his shoulders into a tail, thinking back to the two Dixingren he had encountered when he first arrived back on Haixing. They had very short hair, much like Chief Zhao did. “Like yours?”
Chief Zhao shrugs. “Your choice. Let me find a pair of scissors, I’ll see if I can do a basic cut and we’ll worry about taking you to the barber shop later.”
“No need,” Shen Wei says. He closes his eyes, picturing one of the paintings in the papers he had been looking through, and feels a sensation like an itch over his scalp for a moment before he raises his hands, patting at his hair to feel its new length. “Will this work?” He asks, opening his eyes to find Chief Zhao scowling at him.
“I guess that’s one way of doing it,” the Chief says, before raising the device up again. “Okay, stand still and look at me.”
There is a click, and then Chief Zhao takes the device back to the light box and continues his work in silence.
“Shall I change back out of these clothes?”
Chief Zhao looks at Shen Wei over the top of his glasses. “Keep them. You need to look normal and I don’t want them back anyway.”
Shen Wei doesn’t know what he’s done to make this stranger look at him as though he is a criminal, wonders if he could have somehow insulted him in the past, but that is impossible. This man couldn’t have been born when Shen Wei was last on Haixing. Perhaps he offended his ancestors in some way.
Shen Wei is trying to come up with a way of asking if that is the case in a tactful manner, when Chief Zhao stands up away from the desk, holding a stack of paper, which he hands to Shen Wei.
“There’s your identification, your enrollment paperwork, everything you should need to live here on Haixing. I have a contact at Dragon University, they have an opening for a biology professor there,” he breaks off, raises his eyebrow at Shen Wei. “The Justicar informed me in his message that you are able to learn quickly, that it is your ability as a Dixingren, is that correct?”
Shen Wei nods, picking up the small card that rests on top of the papers in his arms. It’s thin like paper but stiff, slick, harder even than the glossy pages he had held before, even though it is also slippery they way they had been. Printed on it he sees his name and his picture.
“Good, we’ve already had books delivered to the apartment, reading them should give you a fundamental understanding, if you’re really that capable. We’ll have to work on getting you clothes later. Let’s go, I have a meeting this afternoon, I’ll take you to the apartment first.”
Shen Wei gathers his robes up, piling them on top of the papers, and hurries to follow Chief Zhao.
The ride to the University is not far but it is stiffly silent, Shen Wei sitting uncomfortably in the carriage as Chief Zhao operates it. He wants to ask how it works, but Chief Zhao’s stony expression deters him. He’ll have to summon the Justicar later to have someone give him a run down on some of the modern technology that he isn’t familiar with.
Once they arrive, Chief Zhao ushers him up to an apartment, unlocking it before handing Shen Wei the key. “This will be your home while you live on Haixing,” he says. “For however long that is.”
Shen Wei looks up and down the corridor, at one identical door after another, and thinks that he will have to find some way to mark his door before he leaves again, because he may not be able to find it again later if he doesn’t. He’d never really had a home as such before, staying in caves or tents, very occasionally in larger encampments with permanent structures, but he’s never had to find his way around a place where everything looks the same. He feels a wave of longing for the simplicity of using trees to identify his way, of being able to see the sun and use it as a compass. He hasn’t been here long, but he’s noticed that often the sky is blocked, the only trees seem to be ones cultivated more for a change in scenery rather than the wild forests he grew up with. Instead, there are huge block structures, and mazes of hard paths that wind endlessly, with no way to see their true direction as they curve around yet another building and out of sight.
“Okay, so, let me explain a few things about modern technology,” Chief Zhao says, calling his attention back to the present.
-----
Shen Wei watches the door close behind Zhao XinCi, leaving him alone in the apartment. He breathes a sigh of relief as the sense of wrongdoing that he had been receiving from the Chief has left with him before he turns around in a slow circle to observe the inside of his new home, his first permanent home.
The impression of being enclosed in the small space makes his breath come quickly, feeling as though the walls are closing on him. He closes his eyes, digs his hands into his legs to try to distract himself from the sensation, but the darkness of his eyelids makes it worse and he finds himself jerking them back open, staring around to make sure that the walls haven’t moved.
They haven’t, of course, because they have no reason to, and he keeps staring at them until he can manage to get his breathing under control again.
Once he does, he can feel exhaustion hit him all at once. He needs to read the books that Zhao XinCi provided, prepare to actually teach this subject that he’s been assigned as a cover identity, but he feels his attention wavering despite his best efforts. Instead he decides to explore the apartment again, looking into the refrigerator, seeing all the food in little packages kept there, experimentally turning the stove on and off a few times, and then moving to the bathroom.
Zhao XinCi had showed him how to turn on the water and change the temperature. It is an unfamiliar concept to bathe by standing under a stream of water. The only times he’d done that before were during rain showers, and the one time that he found a waterfall during his search for his brother. But the prospect of bathing is too tempting to ignore, so he vanishes away his clothes, letting his hair grow back to its true length again, feeling the tile cold against his bare feet, and turns the water to a lukewarm temperature, stepping into it and shivering at the feeling of the water hitting his body.
The water is clean and he fiddles with the controls, changing the type of stream and then the temperature of it until he’s made it warm enough that he can see his skin pinking under the heat. It’s amazing what the Haixingren have come up with, how much of an improvement over bathing in a cold stream this is. He takes a cloth that was hung over a bar inside the tiny room and coats it in the liquid soap from one of the bottles on a shelf. It smells sweet and artificial, nothing like the hard, rough bars of soap that he had sometimes been able to get his hands on in the time before. It is slippery too, feeling almost like a film over his hands as he begins to use the cloth to wipe down his body.
He is clean already, one of the powers that he had learnt early on being how to make his own body and clothing clean of dirt or mess. But that doesn’t stop him from wanting the feeling of washing away the dirt that he had woken up in, the feeling of wanting to wash away the grime from that very last battle, the last thing he can remember before he fell into the earth and woke up ten thousand years later.
At first it is pleasant, the cloth he’s been provided is rough but pleasing against his skin, the soap perfuming the air of the room. But as he scrubs, he thinks about how, even though he is clean, it feels like he is still scrubbing the dirt away from his skin.
When he had woken up it had been cold. He had felt like the weight of the world was pressing down upon him, the image displayed on the inside of his eyelids a loop of first Kun Lun and then Ye Zun disappearing, one to the sky and the other into the ground, both of them lost to him.
There is no way for him to estimate how long he spent watching that image again and again in his mind, the feeling of abandonment washing through him, pressing into him as much as the world was pressing into him.
Eventually he had tried to open his eyes, to dispel the image of the only two people who had ever known him leaving him within minutes of each other, but when he had opened them it was as dark as it had been with them closed. Darker, because now he was trying to see outward instead of inward and finding that it was as if light had left the world completely. He had tried to move his hand, to raise it to his eyes and check that they were indeed open, and then he became aware that the pressure he felt wasn’t simply pressure, but actually some form of substance that covered him, made it so that he was unable to even move his fingers, much less raise his arm to his face.
He lay there a long time after that, trying to determine the best course of action.
He thought that he was probably buried. That somehow he had been entombed in the earth but protected, perhaps by the Hallows as a parting gift as they had taken away his lover and his brother, but kept him alive. But would it be better to just continue to lie where he was, to close his eyes and stay still and let the world continue to move around him as he lay buried deep within it?
Eventually the urge to move had grown to be too much, the urge to check to see what had changed and how, to see if he could find Ye Zun, if he might in turn be found again by Kun Lun the way that Kun Lun had promised on that night under the stars.
He had moved his hands as much as possible, shifting the dirt around them until he could move them up and down, now touching the bottom, now touching the top of the grave in which he was buried. Then side to side, using his power as much as he dared although he didn’t have anything that would work specifically for this purpose, just pushing it into the soft spaces in the dirt and trying to enlarge them.
The process was interminable. Once he started he didn’t stop, but it seemed to go on for eternity before he was even able to move his hands close enough to touch his sides. And to make matters worse, he could feel something tugging on the sleeves of his robe as he attempted to move, as if something was holding him down. Something more than just the dirt itself.
Still, he had chosen to dig himself out, and short of choosing to stop, there was nothing to do but continue. So continue he did.
He dug and dug and dug, shifting the dirt and feeling it sometimes shift back against him, falling into the places where he had created space and burying him again. Every few minutes he would have to shift his position, push the dirt under him so that he was moving up a small layer of dirt at a time.
He had made it a few layers up before the tension of what was caught on his sleeves became too much and he had to shift around until he could explore them with his hands, finally finding little tendrils of fiber grown through the cloth of his robe. Some of them were thin and easy to snap when he pulled on them, but some were thicker, fibrous, and he had to tug harder and harder, feeling his skin tear as he did. Once he had snapped through a few handfuls, he found that he was able to move his arms more freely. He kept exploring, finding the same threads through the body of his robe as well, tracing them through the fabric into the dirt below him, above him, before he finally understood that they were roots. Almost every part of his robe that was folded on itself rather than lying against his arms or body was grown through with them, pinioning him to the spot that he lay in.
He shivered, wondering how long he had been lying under the earth, if the roots were from a tree that had grown over him as he lay there.
It was hard work to continue snapping the fibers, the skin on his fingers rubbing raw until they bled with cuts from the tension. He gave up trying to heal them one at at time because there were always more fibers to break through. He couldn’t sit up, still buried under the earth as he was, and he couldn’t move his arms far, so he had to make do, using the strength of his hands to do the work instead of leveraging his arms against them.
He made as much progress as possible before he returned to digging, then went still as a thought occurred to him.
He remembered the earth opening in front of him, catching on to Ye Zun’s hand as he fell, and the lurch of his stomach as he lost his grip, as Ye Zun fell away from him through the gaping hole that had opened in front of him.
And he remembered the feeling of helplessness, hopelessness, knowing that Kun Lun had disappeared, gone into that strange hole in the sky that the hallows had opened. He didn’t understand the words that Kun Lun had said before he had been taken, didn’t know what they had meant, but he knew that for a brief moment of his life he hadn’t been alone, he’d not only had his didi but also this strange man who was so full of smiles and life, and who had hinted that one day he might leave as mysteriously as he had arrived, but Shen Wei had never expected that it would be so abrupt a parting.
And into the vacuum of having that brief moment of happiness taken away rushed despair. He didn’t want to be alone again, didn’t want to go back to being only known as the Black Cloaked Envoy, to being nothing but a mask and a warrior and a leader, to no longer be known to anyone as a man with a history and a future, with wants and desires and dreams.
So when the earth continued to yawn towards him, he remembered letting himself fall into it without resisting, welcoming the black pit that externally reflected the one that loss had cracked open inside of him.
But he didn’t remember anything after falling. He felt panic overtake him, felt as if the ground was closing in on him from all sides, swallowing him again, deeper into its depths. He didn’t know which way he had fallen, if he was lying on his side or his stomach or his back. The feeling of panic was overwhelming, spreading through his chest, his stomach, into his limbs until they felt weak and tingled in fear. Without knowing which way was up he didn’t even know which way to dig, where to teleport himself, couldn’t draw his power into a cohesive enough form to send it through the dirt to see what he could sense around him as the fear paralysed him.
He lay there, in a grave that was who knew how deep, feeling dirt rush into his mouth as he gasped against the waves of panic.
He didn’t know how long the attack lasted, long enough that his mouth filled with mud and his head swam with dizziness but he didn’t black out. He could hear his breath, high and loud in the utter silence around him, reflecting against the dirt above his face and warm against his face in the freezing cold of the earth.
Eventually reason returned to him and he remembered a story he had been told once of a warrior who had fallen deep into a snow drift on a mountain. The woman had also not known which way was up once she had stopped falling, had lain in terror until she had the idea to spit. The spit had fallen back to her face and she had known that she had to dig up, that gravity would work no matter how far down she was buried.
Shen Wei tried to work up the moisture in his mouth to spit but found that it was dry, thick with mud from his saliva mixing with the dirt around him. He felt fear thread through him again, felt his mouth dry even more from it, but then he realised that he might not be able to spit but he would be able to grasp a handful of dirt. It would work the same way, as beholden to the law of gravity as moisture would be. It took no work to find a loose handful, grasp it, and then raise his hand up and open it, feeling the dirt fall away, down, in the opposite direction of the one that he had been digging.
Shen Wei sighed in relief, he was digging in the right direction, and facing in the right direction, and he found renewed strength as he began scrabbling at the dirt again, feeling it fall onto him before he brushed it off and under him.
He dug until he was exhausted, until his already bloody fingers were caked with mud and blood and his fingernails tore away, his flesh beneath screaming in pain as it was exposed to yet more dirt. He dug and dug and then all at once he felt the dirt above him collapse onto him.
At first he thought that he would have to start again, begin by first making a space for himself, and then kicking and squirming and clawing his way up. But then he registered something different, something new that he hadn’t felt since he woke up.
The air somehow reaching through the ground was warmer than the ground around him, its scent clean as it filled his nose, his mouth, his lungs.
He wasn’t sure how he had been able to breathe underground, didn’t know if it was some kind of ability that he didn’t know that he had or if it was something to do with how he had survived for so long underground before he woke up, but the air filling him now was different, almost making him giddy with the freshness of it.
He paused, realising now that the ground above him wasn’t so heavy, wasn’t so oppressive as it had been. He wanted to push up through the last layer, hoped that it would be day, that he could feel the sun on his skin after so long in the dark, but his instincts told him to check to see if there were enemies around first. Too many years of survival on his own had taught him to be wary and so he pushed his power out, feeling it rise through only a thin layer of dirt and spread into a wide space above him.
There, on the edges, he could sense energy, sense what felt like Dixingren approaching him.
He should be on Haixing, and he had negotiated the exile of the Dixingren himself, they shouldn’t be anywhere around and he felt a moment of sorrow as he realised that his treaty with the Haixingren must have failed.
Perhaps that was why he had woken again, his duty was yet undone and he was being called back to it even after so much time buried.
He called his energy back and exerted it instead on changing his appearance, first healing his fingers, repairing the skin and the nails, healing the scrapes he had earned against rocks and roots on his face and arms as he dug. Then he repaired his robes, sensing where they had rotted, molded, been eaten through by insects as he lay insensate under the ground. They were little better than rags when he started but he knew how to send his energy though the threads again, weaving them back together, twisting the fibers of the threads together again so that they became one again.
Lastly, he set about expelling the dirt from them, and from his skin and his hair which had become rotten and matted through with the dirt that he had rested in. If he was to wake for battle again, then he would rise as the same Envoy that had disappeared and hope that his image alone might be enough to avoid bloodshed.
Once all of that work was done, he finally shifted through the last of the loose dirt above him, feeling it fall away easily as he sat up into the bright light of the day, blinking against the sunshine and seeing men running towards him, shouting a greeting.
-----
Shen Wei comes back to himself in the shower to a burning pain in his stomach. He looks down and is shocked to find a raw spot there under his fingers, where he has rubbed his skin bloody with the soft cloth and slippery soap.
The rest of his of his chest, stomach, thighs, and arms is pink and red with similar abrasions and he shivers as he suddenly acknowledges the stinging of the icy cold water that is falling into his flayed flesh.
He had been so caught up in the memory of his waking that he hadn’t even noticed the water going cold, but it is freezing now, feeling like being caught naked in the rain of a winter day, each drop stinging him as hit falls against his skin.
He shivers under the water and feels like he could keep scrubbing. Feels like he’ll never be clean again, as though the dirt has become a part of his skin, of his flesh, and like he’ll feel it in each of his pores for the rest of his life, even though he knows it is no longer there because he removed it himself.
He reaches a shaking hand to the knob of the shower, twists it until the water turns off again, and then steps out, the tile feeling wam against his feet. There is a towel hanging from a bar next to him and he grabs it, using it to blot away the water that still clings to his body, seeing the white cloth turn red with his blood from the many raw spots that he had rubbed into his skin.
He is too tired to heal himself right now, his hands shaking as he reaches back to grasp at his hair.
It’s wet, dripping freezing water down his back, his sides, his arms, his face as he tips his head forward. He knows it’s clean, knows that he has rubbed the slick soap through it more than once, but under his fingers it feels grimy, as though it is caked in mud, and he finds that he can’t stand it any longer, that he can’t stand the feeling of it being matted and filthy again. He drops the towel to the ground and searches through the drawers of the bathroom but doesn’t come up with anything that will be suitable for cutting it.
He doesn’t want to simply magic it away, the way that he would have in the past, but to actually cut it off, cut it away. Maybe that will keep him from feeling the dirt still enmeshed in the strands.
He pads to the kitchen, his feet slipping on the floor, and his search there yields a drawer full of knives.
It takes him a long time, a fair amount of pain, and four different knives, but finally he has hacked his hair short enough that it is too short for him to cut any more without cutting into his scalp. He would keep going, but when he rubs his fingers through it, he finds that it’s short enough that he doesn’t feel like it is filled with dirt anymore.
Still, even being clean, his hair short and drying in uneven spikes of fluff as he kneels on the hard floor of the kitchen, he feels unsettled. As though he somehow still hasn’t left the ground, even though it is so clear to him that he has, that he has passed into a world that is completely beyond anything that he could have imagined.
Shen Wei finds himself doubling over, coughing, his arms wrapping around his stomach as he coughs and hacks, feeling his throat scraped as raw as his skin, moisture filling his eyes as he keeps coughing.
When he opens them again, blinking to clear the tears away, he can see the bright red spray of blood mixed with the black of mud across the white tile in front of his knees.
So this is the last of it, he thinks, even after all that work of cleaning himself on the surface, he will have to expel the rest of it the hard way. He wonders if this will be enough, if he can choke the rest of it up from inside of himself, or if in this way he will never be free from the ground. If everything will always taste of the dirt from his own grave.
He climbs to his feet, opening the cabinets, searching for the biggest basin available, then pushing it under the tap and filling it to the brim with water.
He dips his head, sipping from the bowl as if it was a stream or lake, the cold water soothing against his raw throat as he swallows it, before lifting it out of the sink. Another coughing fit seizes him before he can move to a more comfortable area and he sinks to his knees, the water spilling over as he tries to control it while he sets the basin down on the floor and then collapses next to it, curling onto his side as he coughs up blood and spit and mud from his lungs, wrapping his arms around himself and shivering on the cold tiles.
He knows he won’t die from this, knows that the only way to be rid of it is to let it continue until it’s done. If he didn’t die from battle, didn’t die from being buried for ten thousand years, didn’t die from the loss of his little brother or the only person who ever tried to know him, then he can survive this pain, this loneliness. He can survive in this unfamiliar world and perform the duties that he was raised from his grave to fulfill.