Chapter Text
Unbidden, a curl of flame snakes around his wrist as he steps out into the cold. Cai Xukun closes his fist tightly, and the fire retreats before anyone else can see.
The driver helps him unload his luggage from the trunk of the car. Xukun sends the man off with a quiet thanks and drags his bags into the nearest building—the dormitories. It is already bustling with activity inside, and heads turn his direction as he enters.
It’s Cai Xukun . He recognizes the whispers by the shapes of their mouths if not the sound. The dragonling .
He ignores the talk and smiles politely at the few that make eye contact with him. Stomping the snow off his boots at the entrance, he approaches the desk set up in the middle of the foyer, where two young women in masks covering half their faces sit with pens and clipboards.
“Name?” one asks him.
“Cai Xukun,” he replies. “Dragonling. Not affiliated with any company.”
They find him on their papers and check him off. The woman on the right fishes through a large, compartmentalized box for a key attached to a square of plastic bearing a number1. It’s handed to Xukun with instructions to find his room, deposit his things, and head to the Amphitheatre thereafter.
Cai Xukun is halfway to the stairs when he hears a voice call his name. He stops, turns, and sees a boy, looking no older than sixteen or seventeen, approach him with his own bags.
“I think we’re in the same room,” he says cheerfully. The boy is round-faced and dimply, and upon closer inspection Xukun thinks that perhaps he’s older than he appears. “I saw the number on your key—I got room one, too, but I didn’t want to go up alone.”
“And you are?” Xukun asks. A part of him that he has long since shunted to the side still cares that he sounded too blunt.
The boy—Xukun thinks now that he may be an imp or elf—breaks into a grin and extends a hand. “Oh, I really forgot to introduce myself, didn’t I? I’m Qian Zhenghao. I’m from Younger Culture Research.”
“Cai Xukun.” He returns the gesture. “It’s nice to meet you.” A pause. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Qian Zhenghao follows him up the stairs to the third floor, where all the rooms are located, huffing under the weight of his luggage and heavy winter coat. Xukun considers helping until he feels heat rising beneath his palms and quelling that becomes his only concern.
It’s been nearly two years since iQiyi first announced plans for NINE, or the Neo-Initiative Expedition , and only a little less time since Lin Chaoze first began working their asses into the ground in preparation. You Zhangjing stands now in the room he’d spent the last year in, giving the place one last sweep before they go.
It feels a little silly to him to be so sentimental—they have Lin Yanjun for that, after all—but he supposes he could allow himself a little silliness when he is approaching such a crossroads.
The night before, he’d called his sister back in Malaysia, and their conversation is a reminder that his life in Shanghai has been far too comfortable. Here, where dozens of species lived together in a bustling metropolis, no one seems to care about any unsavoury lineages. Back home is a different story.
“We’re all waiting for you.” A familiar voice gently pulls him out of his thoughts. “Does saying goodbye to this place really take half an hour?”
Lin Yanjun stands in the doorway with his arms crossed, cheeks dimpled in a knowing smile. You Zhangjing returns it.
“It’s a big building,” he retorts, “and don’t pretend that you’re not the most emotional of us all when it comes to these things.”
Lin Yanjun doesn’t cry easily—but Zhangjing can tell when he’s feeling.
“I’m not the one holding us up, though,” says Yanjun. He flicks off the lights behind them as Zhangjing joins him at the door. “What do you say, You Zhangjing? Are you ready?”
Zhangjing doesn’t feel ready, but he knows that he is. Even if he isn’t, he has to be, and he promises himself that he won’t disappoint.
“It’s too late to say no,” he replies. They begin heading down the hall. “What about you, Lin Yanjun? Are you ready?”
His best friend turns to meet his eyes. Yanjun’s gaze is even more intense than it usually is; to Zhangjing, that is both reassuring and worrying.
“Yes,” says Yanjun. “I’m ready.”
At the front steps of the building, the remainder of their little team, Trainee18, waits for them. They’re impatient. Lin Chaoze, in shotgun, is their leader, and the most impatient of them all. They say that imps live their lives fast-paced, and Lin Chaoze is as quick as they come. It is for good reason that he is nicknamed “the Whirlwind.”
“The Frontier will have been explored by the time you guys were done,” he complains. “And Gao Maotong will have grown up.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Yanjun returns easily. “How could Maotong ever grow up?”
“I heard that!” A voice comes from the back of the van, where their two youngest members had taken up occupation. Gao Maotong sticks his head and shoulders out the passenger window, all the lanky angles of a dryad. He is one of two dryads on the team—the other is Lu Dinghao, who is presently harassing Li Ruotian, a sprite, over something most likely trivial. The scene is so familiar and so comforting that Zhangjing needs to quash the hot tears that threaten to well up in his eyes when he thinks that this may be the last time he sees Trainee18 like this.
“Are you ready to leave this?” He nudges Yanjun with his elbow. “I don’t know if I am.”
He doesn’t know if any of them are, really—it’s hard to imagine eighteen-year-old Gao Maotong facing the unknown dangers of the Frontier or soft, caring Bei Honglin killing monsters without blinking an eye, but they’ve done it hundreds of times in practice. What would be different?
Yanjun is silent for a moment, and for some reason Zhangjing’s afraid that he would say yes. Instead, he is met with a soft sigh and, “We have to be.”
He gets into the car and Zhangjing follows suit.
Fan Chengcheng hardly has any time to put his things down on the floor of his new room when they are whisked off to another place called the Amphitheatre. When they arrive, he isn’t sure if the pounding in his chest is from the running or the nerves—his best guess is the latter. It wasn’t much running, if he compares it to training.
He hears the leader of his team, Zhu Zhengting, bark out orders at the rest of them as they settle themselves in the waiting room. It is a simply furnished place, sleek and practical like the rest of the campus, Dachang, that they now call home, school, arena.
Chengcheng follows Justin’s example and ignores whatever is coming out of Zhengting’s mouth and crosses to the mirrors that line one of the walls. At first glance all he sees is an agitated youth. A little longer and that agitated youth is him, with shifty eyes and sweaty palms, all nerves nerves nerves that he can’t control.
“Hey, it’s gonna be okay.” Justin sidles up to him, draping one arm on his shoulder. Chengcheng would never admit it aloud but he wishes he could be like Justin, wishes he could be so talented, so confident, so carefree. “This isn’t the end of the world, you know.”
Chengcheng can only nod and Justin moves away after a moment, but not without shooting him one last concerned look.
Chengcheng keeps worrying.
The rest of his team are practicing their parts, and that’s what he should be doing, too, but he can’t think of anything aside from how thoroughly inadequate he will be come time for their audition. He will let down Zhengting, who has worked so hard to make sure everything is perfect. He will let down Justin, who has supported him tirelessly through the months they prepared for NINE . He will let down Wenjun and Quanzhe and Xinchun, who are as desperate for this chance as he is. He will let down Zeren, who only ever wanted the best for their group.
What is he doing here, anyway?
He looks at his group in the mirror. Zhu Zhengting is stretching, warming up long, graceful limbs. Bi Wenjun dozes off a little; they all know that, like the rest of them, he hardly slept the night before. Ding Zeren has his crow familiar on his shoulder and is talking to it, too quiet to hear.
Justin is sprawled out on the couch, drinking water. Chengcheng makes eye contact with him, and he gives him a wide grin and a thumbs up. Chengcheng's lips twitch up in a poor attempt at a return.
After some time, there's a knock on the door. A woman's voice is telling them to follow her. Chengcheng moves mechanically with the rest of his group, sees Zhengting fix Quanzhe's collar, Zeren let his familiar go, and Xinchun wring his hands, a nervous tic. Justin is at his side again.
"You don't look so hot," Justin comments. "Chill out."
Chengcheng laughs humorlessly. "You say that as if it's easy."
Justin shrugs. "Things are as easy as you make them for yourself."
Not when others are doing everything they can to make it difficult , Chengcheng thinks.
Justin seems to read his mind, as he has been prone to doing lately. “It doesn’t matter what people say about you, Chengcheng. What can I tell you to convince you?”
“Tell me— promise me —that they won’t fucking harass my family about me and maybe it’ll help,” he snaps, and immediately regrets it. Justin doesn’t deserve his anger—Justin deserves everything good this world has to offer but Chengcheng has nothing to give him. He shakes off the hand—Justin’s—on his shoulder and walks up to where Wenjun is too busy toying with his yoyo (apparently a good luck charm) anxiously to talk to him.
The entire group falls into silence then, following their guide through the maze that is Dachang. All the plain, minimalistic halls look the same to Chengcheng, and he vaguely wonders if he would be able to find his way out of this place if left to his own devices.
At some point in time they are ushered into a small, bright room where they stick little sheets of paper with letters on themselves and Chengcheng is still too wrapped up in his anxieties to care. He follows the rest of his team and slaps a B on the nametag they give him, when in reality he feels maybe just confident enough for a D, if that’s what the letters mean.
“Fan Chengcheng, are you listening?” Zhengting asks him. Chengcheng nods twice for yes, although he missed a good chunk of what their leader said about their group introduction. “At least look the part.”
“Sorry,” he mumbles. “Can you go over how we introduce ourselves again?”
Zhengting sighs, but doesn’t sound impatient when he explains again. “We’ll just all bow on my count and straighten on my count, too. Then we introduce ourselves one at a time. Keep the facts basic. Don’t want our competition knowing too much about us right off the bat.”
“Got it.” Chengcheng tries for his signature bounce when he says that, but he can tell by the reactions of his teammates that it falls flat. He adds a “we’ve got this” to repair the atmosphere, which only seems to get tenser. Damn it .
“Chengcheng, are you okay?” Zeren asks him. The other members crowd in with their own concerns, and Justin’s worry stands out the most of all. More guilt claws at Chengcheng’s heart when he remembers the way he talked to him and he doesn’t know what to say.
It turns out he doesn’t need to. At Zhengting’s signal, they all close the distance between them and all of a sudden Chengcheng feels arms around him and someone—he thinks it’s Quanzhe—leaning into the crook between his neck and shoulder and someone else’s skinny limbs—Xinchun’s, probably—squeezing tight enough to cut off his circulation.
“Hey, guys,” he chokes out. His vision swims with something warm that isn’t tears, he swears. “I’m okay.”