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Chapter Text

Yin Yu exhales, rounding his breath so that the frost cloud that blooms into the chilled air is large and rounded at the edges. He sucks his breath back in, but the cloud remains before him, slowly dissipating back into nothing. He breathes out and wonders if his breath can fill the small shed as though it were a dense fog curling off of melting snow. The plywood of the cabin digs into his back, small splinters sticking out and pricking away at him like the uncertain hands of an amateur acupuncturist. It is damp, leaving his clothes to stick wetly against him before freezing upon his skin. His toes are numb, and when he tries to curl them within his canvas shoes, they creak slowly and ultimately do not move.

The wind batters against the walls of the shed, terrible sobs as it begs to be let in. Its wails grow in pitch, a hysterical fear clipping at the edges before it settles and, having been scorned, begins shouting in anger and rattling the walls once more. Everything within the shed is wood and rusted metal, all too heavy to be stirred by the wind’s tantrums from where it slips inside from between the cracks of the warped panelling. The loose strands of Yin Yu’s hair from where they are not tightly threaded within his braid swat across his face, but he makes no move to tuck them behind his ears.

He grips his wrist, short and unevenly cut nails digging into his skin enough to leave behind red crescents but still absently enough that the crescents fade back to nothing after a few seconds have passed. His sleeve is rolled up to his elbow, and the hairs on his arms stand on edge. The cursed shackle is heavy on his wrist, seeming to tighten and tighten until the circulation is cut off and his hand tingles numbly like thousands of bees buzzing beneath the skin. He is distantly aware that this is just a consequence of the cold, but it feels more satisfying to blame his discomfort upon the shackle.

Jian Yu lies perpendicular to him. A ratty brown cloth that is more holes than fabric is placed over his legs and torso and tucked partially beneath him so that the wind does not simply whisk it away. No blood remains in his lips, leaving them disturbingly pale in contrast against his tanned skin. The sunken and purple smudges beneath his eyes make his face appear as though it is slowly collapsing in on itself. Yin Yu has not bothered to close Jian Yu’s eyes, and tiny snowflakes now crystalize along the bottom rim.

There is no beauty in a corpse.

It had begun as a cough, a sniffle. Yin Yu did not know exactly how it had begun because it was something so ordinarily mundane that neither had paid it any much attention. Then the cough had worsened, minutes after minutes of awful hacking noises while Jian Yu held one of his arms out in front of him, perhaps telling Yin Yu to stay away or to ask for support. The fever was predictable and while inconvenient, still neither thought much of it. It was the winter. People fell ill often. Jian Yu was sick and then delirious then wracked with pain then dead, each step following the next always with the assumption that he would recover quickly and be back on his feet. When the fever only rose, Yin Yu took it as a good sign that the fever must break soon. There were no herbal remedies to scavenge for, all being killed by the winter chill, and he could not waste their meager water supply on making a hot compress to lay upon Jian Yu’s forehead. They sheltered themselves within this shed out on the edge of some rich family’s estate. The lights to the servant quarters were just barely visible from where they lay, keeping the night unnaturally bright. One of the servants had seen them once, come to retrieve an iron lantern from one of the shelves. She stared at them in silence, and Yin Yu stared back. Then she left and was not seen again, choosing to keep their secret quiet. Maybe Yin Yu could have asked if the family she served could spare some medicine, if she could slip out a single small vial hidden within the pleats of her skirt. But Yin Yu had not asked this of her, and she did not offer it herself. And so Jian Yu had died at some point while Yin Yu was asleep, burdened and killed by the mundane and cureable.

Yin Yu grasps his wrist tighter, twisting the skin and feeling the edges of his bones bite back. The skin shifts back slowly when he releases it, ill from dehydration. It distorts the design of the shackle slightly like water trickling over a canvas, but eventually the design too restores itself. His head feels dizzy, thoughts dissipated so only a tight emptiness pressing in upon his skull remains. He stares down at his feet, and the shape of what is before him blurs out of focus. He is too tired to will his eyes to see properly. He tries to curl his toes again.

At first, they do not move. Then slowly, slowly as though each toe was composed of thousands of joints, they curl down. The rough canvas of his shoes chafes over the knuckles. He uncurls them and wiggles his ankle. He curls them again. Then he curls his finger, bends his neck from side to side, scrunches his face. Tiny movements until his body parts feel as though they are a part of him rather than him and his body existing as two separate concepts, drifting distinct from one another.

He stands, and it feels less like a climax than it should after all the effort that went behind being able to stand. Now that he has stood, it feels like something easy, and there is a disappointment in that. Yin Yu walks the few paces that separate him from Jian Yu, and this feels easy too. He bends his knees slowly and leans forward, grabbing Jian Yu’s waist and arm to sling him over his back. Even with his knees braced, Yin Yu still stumbles slightly beneath the weight. Jian Yu, after a day, has already begun to stiffen, lying like a plank over Yin Yu’s shoulder rather than relaxing down against him.

Yin Yu tries to budge the door open with his hip, and when this does not work, he kicks it once then twice before it swings open. He manages to slip his foot into the doorway before the wind can slam the door shut once more.

The afternoon light is jarring. The blue of the sky is warm and full, absent of even the wisps of clouds. Sunlight reflects off the frozen dew drops that cling to the grass, and the world sparkles so brilliantly that even the halls of the emperor would be embarrassed to be held in comparison to it. Yin Yu does not see it as he walks, grass crunching beneath his steps. The dirt sinks into mud beneath his weight and tries to drag him down, clinging desperately to the soles of his shoes. With Jian Yu lying heavy over his shoulders, he sinks further.

They reach the edge of the treeline, what must be the end of the estate’s property, and the ground here is more soil rather than mud. The thick branches and dense overhang of pine needles also helps to obscure him from any watchful eyes peering out from the manor.

Yin Yu lets go of Jian Yu who proceeds to slam against the ground with a dull thud, limbs twisted unnaturally while his torso remains rigid. Yin Yu kicks slightly at his limbs to try and settle them into something more comfortable, but ultimately it does not matter. A line of dirt is smeared over Jian Yu’s cheek from where it is pressed against the ground. Yin Yu swallows, blinks, and then walks back to the shed. He returns with a shovel in hand, rusted so that flakes of metal fleck off and stick to the palm of his hands. After a few minutes of walking along the edge of the forest and nudging at the dirt to test for the denseness of the soil, he swings the shovel up and buries the head into the dirt. It creaks, and for a moment he thinks that it will simply snap in half beneath the force of digging, but then he pries it out and swings again. The ground is partially frozen, and the deeper he tries to dig, the more it feels that he is hitting uselessly against stone. The metal of the handle being pressed into his grasp is blisteringly cold, and the skin around his nails crack until small droplets of blood bead like precious jewels.

It is dark by the time Yin Yu finishes digging, or at least by the time he gives up on continuing. Not too long has truly passed since he first began, but daylight during the long months of winter lingers like a startled intake of breath. Orange had rushed over the landscape before retreating quickly to be replaced with a smoky blue and now black. His fingers shiver against the shovel, and he drops it with more force against the ground than he intended. He walks back over to where he left Jian Yu and picks him up. Yin Yu tries to lower Jian Yu into the hole with the somber ceremony a burial calls for, but his grip slips since he can no longer feel his hands, and Jian Yu slumps into the hole, head hitting against the edge. Yin Yu kneels beside him, carefully rearranging his limbs to make him fit, but in the end, the hole is not quite long enough for Jian Yu to lie straight out. He is curled partially on his side, knees and arms tucked in toward his chest, chin pressed down. It is like a child as it falls asleep, perhaps clutching a favorite toy against its chest. The first shovelful of dirt hits against Jian Yu’s shoulder and tumbles down to either side. Only after Jian Yu has been mostly covered, only some of his hair still visible, does Yin Yu wonder if he should have stripped Jian Yu before burying him in order to not waste his clothing. Yin Yu swallows down the thought and tosses another pile of dirt into the grave. When it has been filled, it doesn’t quite sit level with the ground around it, sunken by a few centimeters. The turned soil also is a stark contrast to the packed, frozen earth beside it. Yin Yu hits it with the back of the shovel a few times in an attempt to pack it, but it does not seem to have any visible effect.

Yin Yu wanders along the treeline once more until he comes across a medium-sized stone. One side of it has already been shorn smooth. He takes it back with him to kneel beside the grave and, using another smaller stone he found, begins scratching into the surface. The characters slowly emerge against the stone as unsteady white lines, some scratched more deeply than others while some were barely visible and cramped together. His wrist aches, but the repetitive motions keep blood flowing to his hands. The knees of his pants have become soaked through from where they are pressed into the soil.

When the name is finished, Yin Yu presses his thumb against each character, first Jian then Yu. He swallows, staring at the stone as Yu seems to stare back at him. Jade. The same character that is in his own name. He looks down at his hands, pale enough and with blue veins clearly visible through it that the description of jade would certainly apply to him, yet he sees no beauty in it, only someone who cannot embrace death for all that it trails beside him. Yin Yu would fit comfortably in the grave, just slightly shorter than Jian Yu is. Was. He sets the stone on the soil above Jian Yu’s head.

There is no incense for him to light, so he can only bow his head. No prayers come to him. He does not know to whom he would even offer his prayers, so he simply goes through the motions of pressing his forehead to the ground all the while his mind remains empty. It is easier like this.

He sleeps that evening in the same spot Jian Yu had lain beneath the same blanket. His sleep is not peaceful, not free from plaguing memories and recollections, but it is calm. He holds still, breaths nearly even, silent. He learned soon after his banishment that Jian Yu was a light sleeper. He never made any complaint or even comment when night after night he was kept awake by Yin Yu’s screaming and choked sobs. But Yin Yu noticed his blood-shot eyes and poorly concealed yawns, so Yin Yu learned to be silent.

Morning breaks across the landscape, and it is too piercingly bright. It slips within the shed between the wooden panelling and cuts at Yin Yu’s face like a fine knife until he is forced to open his eyes. There are not many personal items that remain, but he packs away the blanket and the meager supply of food into his bag. He has to shield his face when he finally pries the door open, the early sun reflecting off a fine sheet of snow that must have fallen some time during the night. It leaves the world to appear incomplete, a painting a flighty artist forgot to even begin. His steps do not sink too deeply into the snow, but it does leave behind distinct footprints so that anyone who bothers to check will know that there had been someone hiding away in the shed.

The grave, distinct from the surrounding earth the night before, has now disappeared beneath the snow. Yin Yu wanders slowly in the general direction he remembers it to have been, eyes trailing to catch upon anything that may reveal its location. There, a stone sticks partially above the snow, the peak of the temporary headstone. Yin Yu approaches faster, though he does not know why he does not take his time. Some snow is dusted on top of the headstone, and he bends over to brush it away, hand pausing just a few centimeters above it when he notices a flickering light behind the stone. He reaches and grasps it in his hand, lifting it up so that it is at eye level with him. It is a cyan flame, dancing lightly in his palm as the wind tugs at it. No warmth radiates from it. It is a ghost fire.

Yin Yu’s hand begins to shake as though the fire was too heavy for him to hold onto. Tears slip down his face, the first time he has cried since Jian Yu’s death. There is no release in death, even now, Jian Yu’s resentment tethers him here.

“I’m sorry.”

Tendrils from the flame curl around his fingers as though desperately seeking to burn him. Yin Yu clenches his hand into a loose fist around it. His cultivation is weak, but he has enough spiritual energy to put out the flame and allow Jian Yu to finally find peace.

Flame still in hand, he returns to the shed where he retrieves an old oil lantern. He slips the ghost fire inside, and after a minute of watching how its light spills through the metal slats, he ties it to his belt so that it sits against his waist. The tattered blanket, he picks up from the ground and shakes half-heartedly to rid it of the dirt it has accumulated. He covers his head with it and wraps the loose ends around the lower half of his face and neck until only his eyes and the slightest fringes of his hair remain visible. When he steps back outside, it does little to protect him from the biting wind that whisks low over the snow, but it is better than nothing. He breathes slowly through his mouth, letting the warm air accumulate and prickle a fine sweat over his chin.

Each step he takes through the snow is like tripping into a rabbit’s hole. The snow caves beneath him, splitting apart and at times sinking him down to his knees. His hands fan out in front of him, trying to keep himself upright as he takes another step forward then another and another. A trail tracks out from behind him, appearing to have been traced by a wounded animal stumbling ever closer to its own death. The snow splits apart once more, and pain lances through Yin Yu’s ankle. His shoes are soaked through, toes that would be numb if they were not so unbearably cold. His ankle feels like a fresh knife wound each time he tries to shift weight onto it, but the pain itself is a welcome alternative to the numbness that pervades the rest of his body.

Yin Yu’s muscles ache as the snow drags against him. His hips and knees strain as he moves forward, revealing an age that he bares that his youthful features hide. Muscles in the small of his back burn with each twitch of his torso. He clenches his abs and tries to keep his breaths shallow. It helps. The path he takes goes along the outskirts of the town, never quite entering into it fully, but close enough that he can see the silhouettes of bodies moving and the muffled sounds of crunching footsteps as people hurry to and fro.

Sunset falls across the landscape, and everything stretches with orange shadows as though fire had come to melt everything away. The world is reduced to a limited palette of only blues and oranges, and Yin Yu himself is blurred to become only a shadow against the snow. As day settles once more into night, he feels hollow to realize that he has only made it to the other edge of the town. Not that it ultimately matters how much he travels each day. He has no destination in mind, no place he has to reach. Still, it feels better to be in a hurry to get somewhere, even if he is not certain of where that somewhere is.

The path continues on past the village, distantly trailing off and disappearing over the arching horizon. There is no certainty that he will reach another village if he continues his slow trek through the night, no guarantee that there will be anywhere for him to sleep aside from curled upon the snow and exposed to the open sky overhead. Instead of continuing forward, he walks closer toward the town, brushing his way between the thin alleys formed from old buildings sinking in toward one another. He comes to a stop in one alley, wide enough that he is not especially cramped on either side but still narrow enough that the wind, for the most part, sweeps past it.

Yin Yu kneels and begins digging into the snow with his bare hands, shuddering as his fingers begin to turn a shiny pink. The lantern at his waist swings with each movement, casting its green light in shifting patterns against the opposite wall. When the hole he has dug is large enough to at least partially fit him inside, he stops digging and curls himself as best he can within it. After several minutes, uncontrollable shivers wrack endlessly through his body so he appears like a maiden overcome with grief. Though unable to die, there is no pleasantry to be found when left upon death’s doorstep. He will not freeze to death should he remain in the snow as he is now, but he will certainly suffer as though he had.

Minutes creep slowly past, clustered with too many seconds that make them heavy and drag. He is tired and cold and cannot fall asleep. He blinks his eyes open after what feels like hours have passed, but the world remains just as dark as when he first closed his eyes, and he feels a certainty aching in the swollen knuckles of his hands that the night will be a long one. The door to an inn swings open, and muted yellow light floods across the snow before being quickly snapped away as the door is shut once more. Yin Yu tries to settle his breathing, matching it against the first few snowflakes that begin to drift down from the sky, but it only makes his breath come out as short gasps. He waits for the door to the inn to open again, but it does not.

His legs nearly collapse beneath him as he climbs out of his hole and stands. He holds still, letting the moment bleed by until his body feels solid beneath him. The door to the inn swings outward easily, and a gust of cold air slams against his back, sending him to stumble inside. A few eyes are cast his way, disgruntled that the warmth brought by the stove in the corner was temporarily mitigated, but the attention turns from him quickly.

For the most part, the inn is empty, most of the residents likely having already retired to their beds for the evening. All that remains are a group of men huddled in the corner together, wine jars cluttered on the table between them, and two women on the other side of the room, one seemingly asleep with her head in her arms while the other slowly runs her fingers through her hair. There is some clattering coming from behind a screen partition, perhaps the innkeeper or a chef tidying up for the evening. Yin Yu settles himself close to the group of men, body angled so a passing observer might believe him to be a part of their group. He unwraps the blanket from around his head and lets the warmed air sweep over his face, a flush settling itself over his cheeks.

“I don’t care! It’s a bad idea!” one of the men at the table snaps loudly.

“It’s not a bad idea, just a risky one. But there’s no other way, we have to--”

“We don’t have to do anything!” He slams his hand against the table, one of the jars of wine tipping over and rolling across the wood. No wine spills from it, having already been drunk dry. “It’s just not worth the risk, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll even be able to get what you went to the gambling den for.”

“The Lord of Ghost City, that Crimson Rain Seeking Flowers, he honors the deals he makes. If he promises you a lifetime of good fortune if you win against him and you win, then it’s a lifetime of good fortune. No loopholes, no twisting your meaning, no sudden take-backs.”

“And if you lose?”

“Like I said, it’s a risky idea. You ask for something big, you have to offer something big. High risk, high reward. That’s just how things are.”

“What if he can’t even do it? What if A-Li is too sick for him to help? None of any of the doctors can do anything for her, so what can a ghost do?”

“You’re thinking about this wrong. The Supremes, they’re basically gods. Hell, more than gods because they don’t have to chase after the good favor of their worshippers. The gods are all worthless at this point. I’d rather have my fun while alive rather than trying to ascend. But the point is that the Lord can do anything, grant anything. There’s no wish outside of his power.”

A woman full of scowls and clad in a stained apron rounds around the screen partition and sends a glare toward the men.

“Keep your voices down!” she barks, doing little to modulate the volume of her own voice. “There are people sleeping upstairs!” The men grumble but nod, turning their faces into their cups. “You!” she says, pointing a crooked finger, the sort that seems to have been broken several times over the years, at Yin Yu. “Are you going to buy anything?”

He considers lying. It is warm in the inn, and he is just now starting to be able to feel his fingers again. “I don’t have any money.”

She scoffs. “Out! Out! If you’re not gone by the time I get back then I’ll throw you out myself!” And then she disappears back around the screen partition.

When Yin Yu exits the inn, the shock from the sudden drop in temperature goes for a moment unnoticed, the memory of the warmth still clinging to him. The dissonance passes quickly, and the soft whine that slips from him is like that of an animal gnawing its own limb bloody. The sound is buried beneath the high pitched wails of the wind. Snowflakes begin to flurry and fleck against what little skin of his face is bare. They cling to the tips of his lashes and obscure his vision in white.

Stumbling, he returns to his alley. The hole he dug has been partially filled once more by the falling snow, and he kneels before it, withdrawing handful after handful as the snow continues to fall and tries to erase his work. When it is deep enough, he crawls within the hole once more and allows the snow to blanket itself over him. He unloops the lantern from his belt and draws it to be held tightly against his chest. No heat radiates from it. If anything, where the metal presses against his wet clothes, it seems to almost be colder than it was before. He curls tighter around it to ensure that the wind will not come to snuff the flame out.

The night is deep, and the world is cold. Yin Yu drifts to sleep like the last drops of molasses slipping from a bottle. Buried in snow with a fire licking at his chest, Yin Yu freezes to death.

Ice cracks from his limbs like bones in a fire, sliding from him in sheets as he slowly rises. The morning is nearly as dark as the night that came before it, all the people and buildings existing as mere suggestions of dark smudges against a darker sky. Yin Yu walks toward where the sun will rise, destination now held in his heart. Ghost City is not necessarily in the east, nor is it necessarily in any direction. Since it is only arguably a part of the mortal realm, its relationship with existing in any one permanent space is tentative at best. Its gates simply drift haphazardly through the realm, though they inevitably will always be found by those who seek them. More often, they are found by those who do not know where the gates lead and by the time they realize where they have found themselves, it is too late to leave.

As the sun begins to rise over the horizon, its light catches upon the snow and blinds Yin Yu, so he is forced to walk with his eyes nearly shut. Hours pass with the sun slowly trailing overhead to mark them. There are no trees or mountains before him, and any fields that may have run alongside the path are buried, leaving it to appear that he has remained in place despite how much he has been walking. It is only once night begins to fall again does the silhouette of a city shimmer in the distance.

People, or more likely ghosts, sweep past him, chattering and laughing as though they were spending a careless night among friends. One ghost, humanoid if not for how its eyes were much too large for its face, stares at Yin Yu as it passes. It cranes its neck nearly one hundred and eighty degrees to continue watching him. It blinks slowly. Yin Yu does not blink back. He is aware suddenly of his own identity. Within a city of ghosts, chaotic and malignant as the antithesis to the heavenly realm, certainly a heavenly official would not be welcomed. Even rejected from heaven as he was, there must be something that lingers upon him that will tell all the ghosts that he does not belong. He grabs at his wrist, pressing down as though he can feel the cursed shackle through his sleeve.

He will become someone else while inside the city. A servant forced to gamble at his master’s behest. A scholar seeking a rare scroll that he has been told can be haggled for in one of the back alleys. A young man looking for a bit of adventure before he has to settle and take over his father’s business. Someone lost, someone who did not mean to be here. Someone who is desperate and willing to gamble anything in exchange for what he needs. These excuses sit on his tongue as he passes through the gates to the city, tensed and fully expecting some sort of guard to suddenly manifest and drag him to the side, demanding to know what his business here is. He passes through without anything out of the ordinary occurring, simply another part of the bustling crowd. Seen as nothing more than another desperate mortal come to make a desperate gamble.

Despite the crowds swarming against one another like a festering insect mound and the pathways within the main market seeming to twist and change shape every few minutes, the gambling den is not that difficult to find. It is as though the den is part of the heart of the city, everything pulsing so that all the things within, the blood, inevitably find their way there. It is imposingly tall and garishly bright red. The walls glisten beneath the lights of the city, appearing to be freshly painted. There are roughly hewn plaques to either side and above the doorway, but no matter how long Yin Yu stares at them for, he cannot make out what the calligraphy is meant to say. Perhaps it is some sort of ghost language. Ghosts stream in and out of the doors, so the doors are never given a chance to fully swing shut. More ghosts linger just outside, knocking against one another as they try to peer within. Yin Yu moves through them easily, in some instances literally as they do not make room for him, and he walks straight through their incorporeal bodies.

The inside of the gambler’s den is just as chaotic as it is outside. Tables are set up throughout with ghosts crowded tightly around shouting bets at one another so that all the voices overlay until nothing is distinguishable save for that it is loud, loud, loud and beats against Yin Yu’s ears. He can feel the noise as a pulse behind his eyes. People knock against him, and someone to his side lets out what sounds to be a shrill laugh but could just as easily be a scream. There is a second floor above the first, balcony exposed if he were to look up, but the floating lights overhead force him to shield his eyes and look away.

There is soft carpeting beneath his feet that is red, and he tries to not contemplate for too long whether that is the color it was originally. Large curtains hang down from the ceiling, and pillars the berth of old trees tower up past the second floor. They too are red, but just slightly off from the same shade that it manages to be even more clashing and garish. A ghost brushes past him, holding a platter above its head. Yin Yu catches its arm before it can disappear back into the crowd, jolting it so a few gambling chips slide from its platter and to the ground where they are quickly trodden under foot.

“Where is the Lord of the city?”

One would think that beaks are not capable of sneering, but the ghost still makes a remarkable job of displaying its displeasure. It lets its long tongue hang from its mouth, showing off the jagged teeth that run along the edges.

“Hua Chengzhu isn’t at the Gambler’s Den this evening.” Then it yanks its arm free and stalks off before Yin Yu can ask more.

Yin Yu hesitates in place, glancing around the den again quickly as though the Lord will suddenly manifest before him. When he does not, Yin Yu feels his shoulders go tense, and he flees from the building back out to the street. There is no point of being in the gambling den if the Lord is not there. No one else can grant him what he wants. No one else is powerful enough to. Except perhaps… But that has not been an option since the day of his banishment. Yin Yu resigns himself to wait another day.

There is nowhere to sleep in Ghost City. None of the ghosts themselves require sleep, so where there would normally be inns or other places to rest for the night, there is instead an abundance of pleasure houses. The alleyways are also rarely empty, some unscrupulous deal being haggled in the shadows. Other times, even when the alleys appear to be empty, there is a pressure, a presence that hovers on all sides and dissuades even the most weary of travellers from shutting their eyes. Even if one were to find a dark corner somewhere to rest their head, the market remains in full swing no matter the time of day, and the racket clatters in tired heads like a rusty bucket down stairs. So Yin Yu does not sleep. He does not particularly need it, but there is something humanizing to it. It is certainly steadying as it allows him to better track the passage of time. Perhaps, more than anything, it allows him relief from having to be present.

He does not sleep. Instead, he wanders through the city, allowing himself to become lost within it. Then he finds his way and then he becomes lost again. He wanders all of that first night and the ensuing day. He returns to the Gambler’s Den in the evening and is told once more that Hua Chengzhu is not there, so he leaves and goes wandering. The pattern continues for a week with the Lord of Ghost City never seeing fit to grant the den his presence. Yin Yu almost does not mind the wait. There is no snow within the city walls, and the tight press of bodies keeps the air persistently warm. He is beginning to lose his way less often, so perhaps even the city is coming to not mind him.

On the ninth evening, before Yin Yu has a chance to corner one of the gambling hall attendants and ask them if Hua Chengzhu is there that evening, an attendant that he recognizes from several nights before catches his eye and gestures to the far left wall. There, a crowd is loosely circled around a middle-aged man and a young woman. The man is dressed in yellow silks with nearly every square-inch covered with intricate embroidery. He leans forward, hands not quite pressed against the table but hovering above it. His back is to Yin Yu, expression hidden, but the line of his figure appears tense. The woman holds no such tenseness in her body, being draped leisurely in an almost throne-like chair and letting one of her legs kick over the armrest while she rests her head in one of her hands. In her other hand, she idly spins a saber.

The man reaches forward to one of the three cups, hand trembling. He pauses for a moment, then with a sudden decisiveness, flips it over.

“Bad luck,” says the woman.

“Please, Hua Chengzhu, Oh Venerable One. Let me try again. I can offer an even bigger gamble, just let me try again!” The man knocks the cups over, and Hua Chengzhu frowns, her expression bordering between reproachful and angry. A hiss passes through the crowd.

“No.”

He opens his mouth to continue pleading, but two attendants sweep in and seize his arms. Even as they drag him away, the crowd parting around them, he continues yelling, desperation clawing at him until blood begins to seep from his eyes. Once he is no longer in the hall, the crowd stirs excitedly then settles after a minute.

“Who’s next?” She seems to not even pay attention as she speaks, more focused on brushing her hair to the other side. A small braid with a red pearl at the end falls across her face, and she tucks it behind her ear.

Yin Yu pushes through the crowd, nearly stumbling when he finally breaks through and into the open space surrounding Hua Chengzhu. She does not look at him until he has settled in the chair across from her, but even then, it is little more than a glance.

“What did he gamble away?”

“The fortune of his eldest daughter’s marriage.” Using her saber, she begins cutting her long nails into points.

“And what did he want?”

“Twenty more years of successful business deals. How boring.” She looks at Yin Yu now, really looks rather than just the short glance she cast toward him before. Her eyes are dark, irises and pupils indistinguishable from one another. “Are you going to gamble something, or do you intend to continue to waste my time?”

“If I win, you will restore my former place within the heavenly realm and I will have all my worshippers returned to me.”

He has thought over these words, what it would be like to say them. Whether he would feel powerful, invoking himself as a god. It feels only like any other sentence he might say. Neutral. Flat. Unimportant.

“And what will I get if you lose?”

This, too, he has thought over, wondering what could be equivalent to a place in the heavens. “You may have all of my memories.”

“No.” She sits up, rearranging her billowing red robes to lie elegantly around her. Everything about her is red. Her robes, her lips, her cheeks, smudged beneath her eyes, the pearl in her hair, the huadian on her forehead. “That’s an unbalanced deal. No matter the outcome, you would benefit.”

“You think I would be happy to lose all my memories?”

“Yes.”

Yin Yu holds his hands still, careful to not allow himself even the slightest amount of fidgeting. The crowd shifts behind him, swaying in interest to see how the gamble will turn out. Hua Chengzhu traces a swirling pattern across her neck while she waits for him.

He reaches to his waist, untying the lantern from his belt. He settles it gently on the table between them, keeping his fingers between the wood and metal to reduce the sound of them hitting against one another. The light inside dances, patterns swirled onto the wooden table, inscribing upon it an illegible story. The cyan light appears out of place against all the red.

“If I lose, I will give this ghost fire to you.”

She reaches out and balances her index finger upon the top of the lantern, slowly tilting it from side to side to watch how it stretches the light. Her gaze is lowered, expression passive.

“So, if you lose, this ghost fire will be mine to do with whatever I want?”

“Yes.”

“That could be fun. Perhaps I could eat it as a snack. I’ve heard ghost fires are good palate cleansers. But that would waste it too quickly I think. I could torture it for quite a while. Ghost fires are rather resilient, and I have some new techniques I’ve learned about recently. Or if I gave it a bit of spiritual energy to boost its power, it could serve as my eternal slave. And if I ever get bored, I could simply destroy it. Whatever unfortunate soul you found in this lantern would never be able to reenter the reincarnation cycle if I did that.” She stops tilting the lantern and pauses to stare at Yin Yu. He is not certain that he has seen her blink at any point during their interchange. “How does that sound?”

Jian Yu would have wanted for Yin Yu’s status as a god to be restored. He tried all those years ago to sacrifice himself in place of Yin Yu, surely it is only befitting for him to do so again. Yin Yu swallows and does not look down at the lantern, maintaining his gaze focused upon Hua Chengzhu’s face. He thinks of what he should say. She is waiting for a response. He cannot open his mouth, cannot look down at the lantern.

Hua Chengzhu lets another minute pass before she leans back in her seat, leaving the lantern standing between them.

“I can’t accept your gamble.”

Yin Yu accepts the statement passively, then repeats it in his head again and again and again until it rings like the aftershocks of a gong in the early morning. Tears begin to stream down his cheeks, his hands shake.

“Is it not enough then? Jian Yu’s soul is not worth godhood? What more could you want? What more is there to give? Is it my soul? My soul is not worth any more than his. Is it a hundred souls? I do not have that many to give. What is it? Tell me. Tell me. Tell me!”

He is standing, hands braced against the table. His teeth are bared, revealing him to be a cruel beast, frightened into lashing out when confronted with something stronger than it. Tears fall, and is only fair that his eyes should be red to match everything else within the gambling den.

Hua Chengzhu waves off the attendants when they step forward to subdue him. Instead, she rises and leans over the table. She takes his hand in her own, lightly placing a handkerchief in his palm.

“I can’t accept your gamble because I cannot grant what you have requested of me should you win. I cannot restore someone to godhood. I cannot return his worshippers. It is not within my power.”

If Yin Yu did not know better, he would think that she sounded sad.

Chapter Text

“I really can’t thank you enough.”

Yin Yu lingers in the doorway, finding that it would be impolite to leave quite yet but feeling that he has already stayed too long. The young mother across from him takes a step forward, closing the distance that he just created between them by stepping back. The youngest of her two children, a boy of three years or so, clings to the hem of her skirt, kicking at the ground so that small clouds of dust swirl to life. She bats at her son’s head with the back of her hand, and he pauses for a moment before resuming his fidgeting.

“You’ve really helped us so much by getting rid of that ghost. None of the local cultivation sects thought it was worth their time to come help for what they saw as such a small haunting, and all the other rogue cultivators that came through always demanded so much money that I just couldn’t afford. That you didn’t turn me away when I asked for your help, I really am so thankful.” She worries at her lip and glances to the side. Her house is small, only two rooms divided by a curtain hung in a doorway. Dried strands of garlic and peppers hang down from the ceiling, the bright reds bringing color to the otherwise drab interior. “I wish I had something more that I could give you.”

A pouch of dried chilis had already been pressed insistently into Yin Yu’s hands along with a small bundle of herbs. It was a nice sentiment, though the usefulness of the gifts was belied by that he could not afford any food to eat the herbs and peppers with, nor did he have a kitchen of his own in order to prepare any of the ingredients.

“It’s fine. I didn’t agree to help you because I expected payment.”

“I know, I know.” She waves her hand to dissipate the notion but still looks as though she wishes to say more. Yin Yu takes another step back, his foot now halfway over the threshold of the doorway. He takes another step back. One more step and he will have retreated enough that politeness will no longer entreat him to continue the conversation.

“Wait!”

Yin Yu pauses, weight balanced over one foot as he was ready to complete his escape. The older of the two children, a girl of about six, crashes into his legs. She takes a step back and brushes at her skirt, attempting to fix it from where it was knocked askew seconds before. Her face is flushed a bright red.

“These are for you!” She holds out a small bouquet, stems slightly bent within the force of her grip and petals slightly crumpled from their crash into Yin Yu. “As thanks!”

Yin Yu takes the bouquet from her gingerly, holding it lightly against his chest. He has even less use for these flowers than he does for the chilis.

The mother walks forward with her son shuffling behind her. She rests her hand on top of her daughter’s head and smiles down at her.

“I can’t help but think that people aren’t truly individuals. Of course, each of us is an individual, but we exist together as one great whole. I think we understand ourselves and everyone else better when we allow ourselves to ask for help and rely on others, even if we’ve been coerced into thinking of ourselves as burdens.”

Yin Yu hums, not really registering her words. She tucks some of her hair behind her ears and tilts her head. She has closed the space between them again, and Yin Yu is left to wonder if she intends to continue to pursue him into the street.

“Perhaps, would you like to stay with us for lunch?”

“I need to be going.”

Yin Yu gestures vaguely behind himself as though some grand excuse for why he needs to leave immediately right now will manifest in the sky.

“Oh, alright. But if you ever find yourself nearby again, please don’t be a stranger. I would be happy to share a meal with you.”

Yin Yu nods, waves before realizing that he is still holding the bouquet in his hand, and darts off without another word, his quick pace away from the home bordering on a light jog. It may come across as rude to flee so quickly, but he does not turn around to check what sort of impression he actions have left.

After a few minutes of wandering around vaguely lost, this particular part of the town being relatively unfamiliar to him, he comes upon a road he recognizes and is able to follow it until he comes to one of the main market streets. The bustle of the late morning has already passed, and the merchants that remain lean back in their stalls or crouch on the ground, large straw hats pulled low over their eyes to shade them from the sun. One man is lying beside a wagon filled with dried seaweed fished at the beach that borders the town. His hands are pressed over his eyes, and breaths leaving him slowly and steadily in and out. The man does not notice the child who brushes past and leaves with two bundles of the seaweed held in her arms and a third shoved into a pocket stitched into the front of her skirt. Yin Yu continues walking.

He is flagged down a few moments later by a young man. This man stands behind a table, crudely drawn talismans stacked in relatively orderly piles before him. The piles are pinned down in the center with small pebbles to prevent them from being away by the light wind. Still, the yellow slips of paper flutter in a desperate attempt to escape.

“How’d the exorcism go?” The young man leans across the table, smile bright and genuine, shining like a beautiful rock at the bottom of a pond.

“It wasn’t an exorcism. No one was possessed. It was fine. The ghost was put to rest easily enough.”

“I bet my talisman helped, right? The ghost probably felt the talisman’s powerful aura and decided to play nice!”

“I didn’t take one of your talismans with me.”

He pouts and fiddles with the stack of talismans in front of him. “Even if you don’t think my talismans are any good, it wouldn’t have hurt to take one with you.”

Yin Yu glances down at the talismans again. In all honesty, they are so poorly drawn that Yin Yu would not have been entirely surprised if they managed to summon a malevolent spirit rather than repel one. Any cultivator who purchased a stack of these deserved any misfortune the talismans brought to them. To be fair, however, there are plenty of non-cultivators that are worried about ghosts but could hardly tell the quality of the talismans they are buying, and it would not be fair to hold them accountable for the practices of a skivvy businessman. Yin Yu makes a mental note to destroy all these talismans at some point before he departs from the town.

“Do you know of other jobs in this area that would require the interference of a cultivator?” Yin Yu asks instead of continuing to picture how he will go about his future arson. Actually, arson might activate some of the talismans. Maybe it would be better to try dissolving them in a water bucket, they certainly look flimsy enough.

“Not off the top of my head? I only knew about the situation with Huang Boren and the thing with Tui-jie because they kept coming to my stall to ask for advice and purchase protection talismans. I can try asking around a bit and get back to you.” He rubs the back of his head and bears a soft frown as though something displeasing passed fleetingly by in his mind’s eye. “I don’t really see much good it would do you though. You keep taking jobs without any pay. Sooner or later, you’re going to end up on the streets or just starve to death. Who’s going to help you?”

“If I come back in two days, do you think you could have a list of people put together by then?”

“We’re a pretty small town, I can’t imagine that we really have that many problems that would warrant a cultivator. I’ll ask around, but no guarantees that I’ll have anything for you.”

And, well, that seems to be how it is everywhere Yin Yu goes. These small towns will have a couple people cheered to be visited by a cultivator, eagerly showing him the source of their haunting. More often than not, the issue turns out to be only a door letting a draft through or a neighbor sneaking in and stealing vegetables. Still, they tend to be grateful for the help, and he tends not to mind since it gives him a way to pass the time. But eventually, there is nothing more to do around town, and the people begin to recognize him and greet him with cheery smiles and waves. That is when he knows to begin making his way to the next town.

This cycle could be thwarted in part if Yin Yu were to visit one of the larger cities. Regardless of how long one spends in the city, the veil of anonymity can never be fully parted with every person passed in the busy street existing both as someone who has been confined to the city their whole life and someone who is just visiting for the day. Resentment also lingers heavily in back alleys and the homes of the rich, a never ending well from which cultivators can draw work. Yin Yu did spend some time in a city, and he does pass through them often on his way to elsewhere. As for why he chooses not to linger…

There had been a temple for the god Qi Ying. Yin Yu did not know why he entered. The inside was beautiful and ornate, lavish decorations dripping from the walls while the wooden ceiling was carved with coiling dragons. The statue at the very center of the temple was impressively intimidating as it glowered down at the worshippers that passed by its feet. Yin Yu had stared at it. He had imagined toppling it. As the statue hit the granite floor, the head would snap off and roll forgotten to the side. The sword it held would be crushed beneath the weight of its own body. It would certainly bear an ill omen to witness the statue of a god being toppled. Yin Yu breathed in. His fingers twitched. He breathed out. He turned around and left the temple.

Now, he offers the young man selling the talismans a curt nod as thanks and continues down the street. He is not sure exactly where he is heading, but he allows himself to continue forward simply for want of anything better to do with his time. He kicks at a small stone in his path but misses and is rewarded with a cloud of dust being kicked up instead. It settles over the top of his shoes. What used to be black canvas has since faded to an ashen gray. It has been too long since he last washed his clothes. His hair, too, only disguises how matted it has become with grease because of the tight braid he wears it in. Dirt is smudged along the underside of his jaw, and if one were to not look too closely, it could pass for the beginnings of stubble.

He is nearing the end of the market street, but rather than it being relatively empty as few vendors set up their stalls in this section, a crowd is formed and blocking the way forward. He slows as he approaches, linger just a bit away from the edge of the crowd. They are formed into what can pass for a half-circle, watching whatever it is at the center. Yin Yu cannot see what is attracting their attention. The bodies are pressed too tightly together for him to peer through, and he has no interest in attempting to squeeze his way through the crowd simply to see the latest curiosity.

“Well? Who’s next? Who cares to challenge me?” A jovial voice bursts forth followed by a round of hearty laughter. The crowd shifts, jostling the shoulders of the people beside them as they attempt to cajole one another forward. “Who wishes to test their strength against the might of a former heavenly official?”

Yin Yu pushes through the crowd to reach the front, trampling over feet and pressing his hunched shoulders into stomachs. He does not pause to apologize until he reaches the inner circle of the crowd. At the very center with a wide empty space around him stands an older man. His face is weather-worn with deep wrinkles creased into a smile. He holds a sword loosely, confidently in his right hand while his left hand brandishes another sword toward the audience, challenging them to accept it. He is no one that Yin Yu recognizes. A brief glance toward the man’s wrists reveal nothing as they are covered by long sleeves. The man begins pacing in a wide circle, prompting the crowd to back up further.

“Do you know the tale of the Demon King? That Crimson Rain Seeking Flowers who challenged thirty-three heavenly officials? Let me tell it to you now! This beast came to the heavenly officials and threatened that if they did not fight him then he would go and hunt down their worshippers one by one. So of course, to protect their devout worshippers, the heavenly officials agreed to fight him. Alas, they should have realized that a demon such as him would never be an honorable fighter. He used only the most underhanded tactics in his battles, but it would, of course, be the heavenly officials that prevailed over him each time! Bitter and unwilling to accept his defeat, he came down to the mortal realm and burned down every last temple of those thirty-three heavenly officials. All the worshippers that the heavenly officials had so valiantly sought to protect were afraid to see the temples burn and were quick to abandon their gods. And so the gods fell from the heavenly realm! Not because they had lost a great fight but simply because they had lost the faith of those that they fought so hard to protect!”

He brandishes his sword as he paces as though accusing each person in the audience of having abandoned their gods. “Fallen from the heavens, here I stand now before you reduced as I am. But make no mistake! My strength is still above that of even the strongest of cultivators! So who wishes to challenge me? It is a single silver piece for entry, and if you can best me, then you can have everything within this pouch!” Hands still gripping the two swords, he can only twist his hip to reveal a pouch tied at his waist. The jagged lines pressing through the fabric of the pouch make it clear that it is heavy with coins. The offer of cash more than anything the man said before stirs the crowd.

Yin Yu steps forward, not much, but enough that he is distinctly no longer within the mass of the crowd.

“I’ll fight you.” The man turns to look at him, grinning widely. “Only, I don’t have any silver pieces.” Yin Yu holds out the couple copper coins he has upon a red string, the rest of the string sparse enough that the coins slip about easily.

“Well then! I like your spirit! Does anyone wish to sponsor this young gentleman and cover the rest of the entry fee?”

More murmurs arise from the crowd, then, “I will!” The young man from the talisman stall bursts through, holding another handful of coins. He comes to stand across from Yin Yu, pressing the coins against his chest. In his surprise, Yin Yu does not hesitate to accept them. “Just be sure to split the prize with me when you win.” The young man winks then retreats once more. As quickly as the coins came to him, they are taken away as the other man plucks them from Yin Yu’s hands and deposits them into the pouch. In return, he passes one of the swords to Yin Yu.

It is, surprisingly, not an entirely terrible sword. It is certainly heavier than the swords he normally prefers, and it is slightly unbalanced as the hilt was forged with too much metal, but it is altogether not the worst sword he has ever fought and won with. He swings it a few times to get a sense for its weight and reach. Satisfied, he rolls his shoulders a few times and cracks his neck. It has been several decades at this point that he has held a sword in his hand. Just as long since he has fought with one. But it feels so natural to have a sword once more, his muscles tensed with excitement and his fingers twitching along the hilt.

Yin Yu and the man walk to opposite sides of the half circle, each watching the other and cataloguing their movements. Between one instant and the next, the fight has begun. Then, before even a full minute has passed, Yin Yu stands with the sword still gripped in his hand while the man lies upon the dirt road, his sword knocked a meter or so away. The fight was unsatisfying, hardly even a warm-up. His fingers tap out the same rhythm again and again along the sword hilt.

The man pushes himself upright, trying to hide how he is favoring his right leg. His expression flashes with anger before settling back into a wide smile. “You have incredible skill as a fighter! With moves such as yours, it’s likely only a matter of time before you ascend and receive the heavens’ official blessing!”

The crowd, satisfied with the brief fight and the amicable ending begins slowly dispersing, making their way back to wherever they had been originally heading toward. Once most have left, the man grabs Yin Yu’s arm, his grip tight enough to be bruising. His hand is large, fingers wrapping all the way around Yin Yu’s bicep. When Yin Yu looks up at him, gone is the jovial smile, instead replaced with the snarl of a hound ready to crush a smaller animal’s skull within its mouth.

“Who are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play an idiot. Was it not enough the humiliation Crimson Rain Seeking Flowers dealt me? Now some new up-start heavenly official thinks he can make a fool of me too?”

“You think too highly of yourself if you believe you can only be defeated by a heavenly official.” Yin Yu pries the man’s hand from his arm. “I’m just a rogue cultivator.”

“Like hell you are.”

The young man from the talisman stall is hovering awkwardly a bit away, waiting for them to finish speaking, so he can receive his reward. “You were telling the truth when you said you were one of the thirty-three heavenly officials that Crimson Rain humiliated?”

“You didn’t know that already? So you would really stoop so low as a heavenly official to challenge random mortals to fights just for a bit of money?”

“Like I said, I’m just a rogue cultivator.”

The man opens his mouth to respond, likely to continue arguing but is interrupted by the young man from the talisman stall scampering forward.

“Sorry to interrupt! But I need to get back to my stall. I can’t leave it unattended, you know how in demand my talismans are. So if you could give us the money pouch like you promised, I’ll just be on my way.”

Yin Yu and the man stare at him in silence, but after a moment passes, the man unloops the pouch from his belt and tosses it. The young man catches it against his chest and sets about quickly counting out the contents into two piles. When finished, he pours the coins into his own pouch and passes the rest to Yin Yu.

“I’ll see you in two days with that list of names, yeah?” He sends a cheerful final wave to Yin Yu before taking off back down the road.

Yin Yu weighs the pouch in his hand, feeling it roll over his skin and in between his fingers as the coins shift. This is more money than has been in his possession for a long time. Even a single silver coin would have been more than anything he had owned for several years. The man watches the pouch, eyes drawn to it in the same way eyes are drawn to a burst of color quickly passing by. He wears no other pouches upon himself, at least no others that are visible. It is possible that this man, in his hubris, was gambling with all his monetary possessions.

“Would you want to join me for lunch?” Yin Yu holds up the pouch almost mockingly. “My treat.”

He agrees, and Yin Yu, being unfamiliar with any of the restaurants in the town, trails half a step behind him as they walk. They come to a finely decorated restaurant, there being an open balcony on the second floor where a couple patrons dine and can look out to the street below. A quick glance at even the exterior of the building makes it clear that this is one of the nicer establishments. They are seated quickly at a small booth in the back of the room, a curtain partially drawn to obscure them from straying eyes.

Yin Yu makes no effort to hide his scowl as their food begins arriving. Plate after plate of fresh fish, seared fish, steamed fish, glazed fish are all placed before them. Then follows trays of dumplings and meat buns, steamed vegetables and ground pork. Yin Yu practices remarkable self restraint when a whole roast chicken is set on the table between them. It would seem that once the money was no longer in his hands, the man had no problem with spending it. He eats with a careless refinement, body relaxed into a casual slump while still careful to not spill anything upon himself or the table. Yin Yu eats at a much more sedate pace, placing items into his rice bowl and slowly picking away at it.

It has been a while since he has had the opportunity to eat a full meal, and after he has taken a small sampling from each of the dishes, his stomach begins to ache. He sets his bowl down on the table, and lays his chopsticks across it.

“If you were truly formerly a heavenly official, why demean yourself in the way you do? Even if you were to continue with the gambling, would it not be better to conceal your identity?”

The man pulls a fish bone from between his teeth, holding it before himself to inspect the needle-point that it comes to. He discards it upon one of the now empty serving plates.

“When I lost in my battle against Crimson Rain, the belief of my followers did not waver. Even when Crimson Rain went and burned every last temple I had to the ground, that belief didn’t waver. The thing was, my followers did believe in me, but they no longer saw me as the indomitable force that they had seen me as before. More than that, my followers became afraid. If Crimson Rain could burn down all these temples, could he not just as easily come and burn all my worshippers? So rather than construct new temples and risk his wrath, they decided to still believe in me in their minds while not outwardly expressing their worship. It was not a terrible idea. I remained as a god for another decade after all my temples were destroyed. But the thing about mortals, is that they so easily forget what is not directly before them. And so I lost my place in the heavens not because of any grand betrayal but because of simple forgetfulness. Without my temples, people forgot to worship me, and that eventually came to forgetting me altogether.

“What you said about my actions being demeaning, you aren’t wrong. It is demeaning, it is often humiliating to parade myself as some sort of side-show attraction. But in doing so, I preserve myself in the minds and memories of those who watch me. They remember me. It has been so long since I lost my place in the heavens. The other officials that fell with me have long since faded, unable to preserve themselves. Yet here I remain. In the end, this gives me more time to once more return to my former strength, redeem myself against Crimson Rain, and return to the heavens where I belong.” He begins stacking the empty plates upon one another and putting them to the side, clearing the space between them.

“At least the fate I received was better than that of some others! I got the drama and excitement of the most powerful ghost king burning thousands of temples to the ground in a single night. It is a story that will be passed down for centuries to come. Better than the cruel fates that are quickly forgotten. Just think of that martial god of the west. Killed without remorse by his own martial brother.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Have you not heard the tale of Martial God Qi Ying and his shixiong?”

“I have. What did you mean by killed without remorse?”

“Well, if you heed the tale, the martial god of the west met his end after he tried to kill his shidi and was banished. In truth, he was already dead before then. A god is only a god with the belief of his worshippers. Qi Ying steadily stole all the worshippers from his shixiong until there was no one left to believe in him. It was a slow death, but an inevitable one. He would have been forced to watch and realize that his end was coming just as his shidi continued to grow in power. And did that shidi stop to feel remorse? Stop to consider that he was killing his shixiong? I think not. Or if he did, then he simply didn’t care.

“In the end, gods are nothing without people to believe in them. We are nothing without people to remember us.”

Yin Yu spins his empty tea cup upon the table simply for lack of anything else to do. The cup, empty save for the slightest dregs at the very bottom, leaves behind wet spirals across the wood. If Yin Yu tilts his head so that light strikes just slightly differently, the spirals are rendered invisible.

After that, the meal is concluded with little exchange between them. They part in front of the restaurant, the man lingering out of a misplaced belief that if he impresses Yin Yu enough, he may be allowed to return to the heavens quicker. Yin Yu lingers out of a misplaced sense of solidarity, but it is bittered when he thinks back upon the man’s words. He spares no backward glance as he walks away, does not feel guilty about the coins that now weigh down his pocket.

The man had told him his name at some point during their conversation. Yin Yu did not recognize it and does not bother to remember it.

Qi Ying, martial god of the west, killed his brother. Yin Yu imagines Quan Yizhen, bloody sword in hand, standing above a body rendered unrecognizable from the violence it was met with. Can he be blamed for the death he caused? It is known that there is never enough space within a single domain for two gods. The sun would not be blamed for the moon losing its place in the sky when day replaces night.

The wind traces gentle fingers across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. He breathes in, and it is bitter with salt and rotting seaweed. He does not feel as though he is dead, though he is not sure what being dead would even feel like. Whether it would be that different from how he is now. He brushes his hand against the lantern at his waist, the green fire nearly invisible against the bright light of afternoon.

Can he be alive if enough people believe him to be dead? As a god, he was founded upon belief. Has that truly changed since he was cast from the heavens? Yin Yu, martial god of the west, is dead, people said. Killed by his own shidi, they continued.

The buildings of the town become sparser and sparser the farther he walks. The dirt path begins to crunch underfoot as it becomes sprinkled with sand until the path disappears altogether and Yin Yu is left with a beach stretching out to either side. It is a pale white, and with the cool wind whipping out from across the waves, he is reminded of the depths of winter. He continues walking forward, the heels of his shoes sinking into the sand and making his ankles hurt as they are bent backward too much. The sand is pushed out behind him with each step, and he feels as though he is not moving at all.

The ocean churns a deep black, decorated along its edges with a delicate lace. Yellow foam clings to the line between the beach and the water, looking as though the ground was infected and beginning to ooze pus. A line of brown seaweed stretches several meters across the sand, small brown bulbs sprouting from it. Yin Yu steps over it. He stops when he reaches the wet sand, the water stretching toward him in a thin sheet before retreating. Occasionally, the water reaches him and dampens the soles of his shoes.

It would not be pleasant to walk into the ocean, at least not at first. The water, even at the peak of summer, remains chillingly cold. It seeps through skin and circles around bones, delicate crystals of ice forming within the blood. The waves, too, would be unpleasant as they battered him again and again. Knocking him down in an attempt to drown him even before he has reached the ocean’s depths. But perhaps it would become comforting as he made it out into the distance where the ocean curved over the horizon. His head would eventually slip beneath the water as his arms grew too tired to keep himself afloat, and he would sink slowly, slowly to the bottom. Would he be able to die as water flooded into his lungs, or would he be eternally crushed beneath the pressure of the bottom until he could finally walk his way through the depths and back to dry land?

Yin Yu takes a step forward. Left behind him are a pair of footprints that quickly fill with water. He takes another step forward. His hand rests upon the lantern, the metal cool against his skin. In his mind, he pictures the black water swirling around his waist, seeping in between the metal slats, and extinguishing the small fire within. He does not take another step, instead sinking down to his knees.

“Crimson Rain Seeking Flowers. Hua Chengzhu.” Yin Yu bows his head. “I--” he begins, then stops, uncertain of what he wishes to say. “Hua Chengzhu!” he repeats, calling even louder. There is no echo, and the ocean swallows his voice quickly. “Hua Chengzhu!”

Rain begins to fall. It is warm as it lands upon his scalp and drips down his forehead and cheeks. More rain falls upon his shoulders and the backs of his hands. It strikes against the wet sand, rain mixing with the shallow water and creating ripples and ripples that overlap until nothing can be distinguished from anything else. The rain blurs the air in front of him, and as he looks out, it clings to the tips of his lashes and quivers within his vision.

He opens his mouth as if to speak but says nothing. The rain slips over his lips and drips into his mouth, metallic and warm. He closes his mouth and swallows.

“The blood rain seems like a bit much. Does it follow you everywhere you go, or do you whip it out just for special occasions?”

Yin Yu stands. Wet sand falls in sheets from his pants and tunic. More still clings persistently to the fabric. He turns his back to the ocean. Hua Chengzhu stands across from him, a red wax umbrella held above his head, so he remains untouched by the blood rain. Less than a minute has passed, yet the beach, formerly a bright white, has become awash in deep red. Yin Yu can taste iron in his mouth as he breathes in.

Hua Chengzhu is presenting himself as a man this time, clad in a red hanfu with black embroidery rather than the silk hufu he had worn before, and a curved sword is hung at his waist. One of his eyes is also hidden beneath an eyepatch. It remains the same, however, that a small braid brushes against his collarbone and is tied at the end with a red pearl.

“Do you think meeting with you on an empty beach warrants a special occasion?”

“I’d like to think I’m special.”

Yin Yu cannot quite make out Hua Chengzhu’s expression through the rain, but he imagines that he is raising his eyebrow in mocking judgement.

“Why did you call me here?”

Yin Yu wants to blurt out, wants to demand in return, “Why did you come? Why did you answer?” He does not ask this. Instead, he says, “Did I need a reason to call you here? Could my reason not simply be to show the power I wield? I called for the most powerful ghost king, and without a moment’s delay he appeared before me.” Yin Yu laughs. It sounds hollow to his ears, so he laughs harder, loud enough to not be drowned out by the rain.

“Is that it?” Hua Chengzhu’s voice is sharp, anger licking over his words. Perhaps this was not the wisest idea, but Yin Yu cannot bring himself to care. He imagines himself impaled upon the curved sword and held aloft, his blood dripping down the hilt and mingling with the blood rain. “If you knew what was best, you would be afraid of me. Don’t think yourself special just because we have met before or because I deigned to appear before you now because I was bored. You should fear me. You should respect me. I am the Supreme Ghost King Hua Cheng, Crimson Rain Seeking Flowers. I have burnt the temples of thirty-three heavenly officials in a single night. You, a single lost god, are nothing when compared to me.”

“Ha! And I am Yin Yu, head disciple of the Qing Quan sect. I rose to the heavens at only nineteen, and I have fallen back to earth.” Tears cut clear lines through the blood on his cheeks. He smiles wider and can taste more blood in his mouth. “I am the martial god of the west. I have caused and witnessed death. My name has been invoked as a war cry. There are no temples of mine left to burn, and I do not fear you.”

Before his words have fully faded into silence, he runs forward, movements too quick to be seen as anything more than a black blur. When the moment settles again, Yin Yu stands across from Hua Cheng. The sword that the man from before had given him is held tightly in his hand while the tip of his blade rests just below Hua Cheng’s eye that is not covered by his eyepatch. A thin line is traced out from the tip of the sword, and small beads of blood begin to well up and drip down Hua Cheng’s cheek to parallel Yin Yu’s own tears.

Hua Cheng watches him, expression tense and pupil shrunk to a slit. He continues to hold his umbrella above his head so that no rain drips upon either of them. Had Yin Yu chosen to angle his sword only a few centimeters higher, Hua Cheng would not be able to watch him now. From the way his eye flickers down to the blade, it is clear that he understands this. Yin Yu presses down slightly on the sword, causing another bead of blood to drip down, before withdrawing and letting the sword hang loosely at his side.

Hua Cheng’s thin lips are pursed together, his brow furrowed into a glare and perhaps something else. “Even if you had succeeded in blinding me just now, in the fight that would have followed, I would have won.”

“Of course you would have won. But you would remember me.”

Chapter Text

It rained recently, and the ground has decided to retain the memory of the rainfall within the mud. At first Yin Yu tries to tiptoe between the driest patches, careful steps occasionally replaced with light hops when the next driest patch is just slightly too far away. He gives up when, despite his best efforts, mud still cakes itself in heavy clumps upon the bottoms of his shoes. The grasses that sprout from the mud are huddled together in clumps, bright green patches scattered about on the forest floor. The air is thick with the scent of mud and rotting leaves, leaving behind something almost sweet on the tongue.

Yin Yu nudges a branch out of his way and twists his body to the slide to slip past another. The sun is high in the sky, but with the thick tree cover, the forest is slightly chilled and cast in a cool blue light. Yin Yu feels almost like a child fleeing from his chores for the day to have an adventure instead. Leaving familiar places for places unknown. Leaving places unknown for places more unknown. Birds chirp, each with their own melody, so in listening to it, it sounds like a stuttering echo.

White flowers with leaves larger than petals are peppered around the base of a tree. Also at the base, there are a few twigs propped together into a cone with dried leaves, a string, and a small piece of fabric placed inside. A branch rustles as a bird suddenly takes flight. The remnants of rain that were being kept within the leaves high, high up at the top of the tree sprinkle down with the movement and scatter lightly upon the ground. A few droplets land on his head and slip down his forehead.

Yin Yu is following after another set of footprints. They are smaller and much narrower than his own, but they sink deeply into the mud, the other person not having been trained on how to keep their tread light as Yin Yu had. At one point, one of the footprints sinks nearly a foot down into the mud. Yin Yu takes a moment to imagine how they must have stepped forward, heart jolting in their chest as the ground proved less solid than anticipated. They would have struggled to pull themselves free, perhaps their shoe coming free from their foot with a loud squelch as they finally stumble forward. The mud would come up to their calf, and they would wonder whether there would be any point to even putting their shoe back on. In the end they would, simply out of concern for stepping on a sharp twig or rock along the forest floor.

The air seems to melt and becomes damp. Only a few moments later, a light rain begins to fall. It is not heavy enough to leave Yin Yu drenched, but it is just enough for discomfort. He shivers slightly as the water slips over his skin, leaving raised goosebumps in their wake. He unwraps the scarf from around his neck and drapes it over the top of the lantern at his waist to protect it from the rain.

He walks faster, slipping with every couple steps. His hands are held slightly out before him both to help balance himself and to catch him should he fall. He continues following the other footsteps. As he watches, they fill with water to become shallow pools. Some of the footprints are washed away by the rain entirely.

The rain droplets hitting upon the leaves sounds like a mind humming with too many thoughts. It is almost disquieting to see the verdant green become even brighter in contrast to the darkened, damp tree trunks. Yin Yu walks faster.

There is a small temple, visible between the parting of the trees. It seems to have once been painted red based on the few pieces of peeling wood that retain the color, but the paint has otherwise all been scrapped away. Part of the roof also seems to be missing, replaced with a hastily constructed blanket of thatched hay. There is no door in the doorway, and where there may have once been a placard, there now remains only a rectangle of bleached wood. Yin Yu hesitates to approach further, reluctant to enter any domain, no matter how run down, that is connected to the heavenly realm.

The rain soaks through his shirt and slips down his loose collar, running a path down his back. His bangs, usually framing either side of his face, are plastered against his forehead. He is not welcomed within the heavenly realm. That being said, there hardly seems as though there would be any god that would notice someone entering a temple as worthless as this one.

Yin Yu steps over the threshold, trailing water across it, and comes to stand within the temple proper. The way the interior is structured seems more akin to an entryway as though the temple had once been made of multiple rooms and halls. Now there seems to only be this one. Water drips steadily upon the floor, the thatched hay not quite a perfect fix for the hole in the roof. What he was not expecting was for the interior to be warm. A small fire is sputtering in the corner with a teapot placed above it to heat. Yin Yu flexes his fingers, not having noticed how stiff they were until some of the chill was leached from them. He feels suddenly out of place within the temple, water continuing to pour down his figure and form a small pool around his feet. The water soaks through his canvas shoes, ensuring that he will be walking with wet, squishing steps for the next week.

A young woman stands before a decrepit statue in the middle of the room, carefully arranging a few lit incense sticks around it. She glances over her shoulder at the sound of Yin Yu’s footsteps and offers him a cordial smile before returning her focus to the statue. Yin Yu looks at her feet. The one on the left is splattered with speckles of mud while the right is covered completely. More mud is speckled along the hem of her skirt. After a moment’s hesitation, he approaches to stand beside her. Silently, she hands him one of the unlit sticks.

He holds it loosely in his hand, not entirely processing that he has it. Instead, his attention is focused on the statue. It is derelict and worn just as the rest of the temple is. The detailing on the creases of the clothing have eroded, so the figure seems to be clad in an amorphous stone mass. The figure is twisted with one leg raised and both hands gripping the hilt of a hefty sword. A few of the fingers are missing. Perhaps more notably, the statue is lacking a head.

“Who is this temple dedicated to?”

The smoke from the incense drifts into his face and makes his eyes water. He tilts his head back and can see soot stains upon the ceiling.

“The martial god Yin Yu, martial god of the west.”

Yin Yu’s grip on the incense stick tightens. He lowers his hand and drops the stick upon the table. He turns to look at the young woman, neck twisted enough that even from the corner of his eye, he can no longer see the statue.

“Why bother worshipping at a temple dedicated to a fallen god? No prayers said here will be answered.”

Annoyance pinches the corners of her lips, and she ignores his question, turning instead to walk over to the fire. There, she carefully removes the teapot and pours the water into a lacquered clay cup. She sits on the ground, mindful to avoid the wet patches, and holds the cup within her hand, not drinking from it. Rather than continue to stand in front of the statue and pretend that he does not see it, Yin Yu crosses the room and settles himself across from her, his back propped up against the wall. He sits partially upon a wet patch, but he cannot tell the difference while his clothes and skin still remain soaked.

“I’m just curious.” He watches her fingers flex against the cup. “There’s no point in praying if you know no one will come answer it, let alone hear it.”

“Praying,” she starts, then pauses. She brings her knees close to her chest and balances the cup on top of them. “To me, praying isn’t really about asking for anything. It’s not about expecting someone else to come fix everything for me. I don’t think I’d even want someone else to come and fix everything for me. But there’s a comfort in not being alone with my problems. If I say them aloud here, I can pretend that Lord Yin Yu has heard me. Some things are better to not be left alone with, but I don’t really want to burden others with them.” She laughs, the sound flat and mocking. “Anyway, I’ve heard that the other martial god of the west occasionally comes and beats up his followers. I’d rather not risk subjecting myself to that.”

She takes a sip from the cup before balancing it on her knees again. Steam rises from it and flushes her face. A few beads of sweat run down the side of her neck.

“You know, so many people see it as a bad thing when a god loses their position in the heavens. And maybe it is bad for the followers because now their god won’t answer their prayers anymore. It reveals that the figure they worshipped maybe wasn’t as infallible as they had thought. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing for the god. It might seem like it at first, but it might end up being a relief. Who’s to say that it isn’t better to just be here in the mortal realm?

“If you look at it like this, what if one day I was offered to become one of the emperor’s mistresses? I would never go hungry, I would get to wear only the finest of garments, I wouldn’t have to go out and work in the fields. But there would be too many expectations placed on me about how I should and shouldn’t behave or what I should or shouldn’t do. A concubine might have a rich and easy life, but she wouldn’t have the freedom to lie in the grass and watch the clouds. And if I had been a concubine but lost the emperor’s favor and had to return to this village, of course I would be upset just because I would feel like I had failed in some way. But in the end, I would get more time for cloud watching. I really think that there is a contentment to be found in not striving for greatness. I’d much rather just be.”

Yin Yu stares down at his hands, not bothering to acknowledge what she just said.

“Why is the statue missing its head?”

She clicks her tongue and glances over her shoulder as though to confirm that the head really is missing. “There are some people who come to this temple every so often and destroy parts of it like stealing wood from the walls or smashing part of the roof in. They think that it’s bad luck to have a temple dedicated to a fallen god. Or maybe they’re just angry that it’s dedicated to Yin Yu and not someone else. As if they’d be any more likely to get a prayer answered by a god rather than asking a rock for help. It was probably one of them that knocked the head off at some point.”

“Do you know who the people are? That way you could stop them from continuing to destroy the temple.”

“Even if I did know who was doing this, how could I stop them? Regardless, I’d rather not know who it is. I know it has to be someone from the village, and I don’t want to have to look someone in the eye and know that they’re cruel enough to keep destroying the temple that I keep trying to patch up. I’d rather only know the best qualities of people when I speak with them, not the worst.”

“That’s naive.”

“Maybe. Yeah, probably.”

She ducks her head and returns to taking tiny sips from her cups. Yin Yu leans back more fully, pressing his back firmly against the wood as he feels loose splinters prick at him. They fall into silence, each choosing to pretend that the other is not there. The sound of rain outside grows heavier as though the clouds above were a small child that had tripped and spilled all the pebbles they had collected within their fists. Despite the empty space where the door should be, the smoke pouring from the fire is not doing a particularly good job of dissipating. The air within the temple gradually grows hazy, faint swirling patterns discernible if one stares for too long and lets their eyes unfocus.

After a while has passed and the rain shows no sign of lightening any time soon, Yin Yu stands back up and paces with slow, measured steps around and around and around the single room of the temple. There is not much to take in. There is an empty alcove in one of the walls, and there is the table in the center of the room behind which is a pedestal with the statue on top. There must once have been other stands in the room, memory of them visible by which patches of ground are several shades lighter than the rest, but they have since been removed or stolen. A broom lies propped up in one of the corners, and after Yin Yu has passed by it several times, he takes it and begins half-heartedly sweeping the floor. A dense pile of dust collects quickly, and he brushes it to sit beside the threshold. Then he sets about collecting a second pile. By the time he has finished sweeping the entirety of the room, there are seven piles of dust all neatly aligned in a row.

The young woman has shifted to the other side of the fire, so she can watch Yin Yu work. At one point or another, she pours herself a second cup of water from the teapot. Yin Yu returns to the pedestal with the statue on it and kneels down. The pedestal is raised above the ground slightly, enough that Yin Yu can fit his hand into the gap, though it scrapes against the skin on the back of his hand. He pats the ground, feeling for something. He retracts his hand, brushing it and the accumulated dust on his pant leg. Changing positions, he lies flat on his stomach and reaches beneath the pedestal again. The corner of his metal lantern is digging sharply into his hip, and with his face pressed so close to the ground, he can feel dust being stirred and coating him with each breath he takes. Eventually, the tips of his fingers brush against something, and straining his reach just the slightest bit further, he curls his hand around the object and retracts it out from under the pedestal.

In his hand is a small stone head. The expression is contorted into a snarl, and the features are nearly demonic in how hideous they are. It is a quite flattering depiction of a martial god. Yin Yu tries to rub the dust from it, but the rough texture of the stone only leads to the dust getting stuck within the creases that line the face. Giving up after a few moments, Yin Yu places the head upon the severed neck of the statue, tapping it this way and that until it can balance without him holding it. He circles around the front of the table to look at the newly restructured statue. It looks nothing like him.

The young woman rises from her spot beside the fire, setting her cup down with a click, and walks to stand beside him. She picks up two of the unlit incense sticks from the offering table and, after lighting them, hands one to Yin Yu. The two of them in tandem wave the sticks and bow respectfully before she plucks his stick from his hand and places both of them within the incense burner. She then presses her hands together and bows her head, resting the tip of her fingers against her forehead. Yin Yu glances at her out of the corner of his eye before copying her motion.

He hesitates then, not knowing what to do. It would be useless to offer a prayer to himself, but there would equally be no point to pray to any other god. It would feel too final to offer a prayer to another god while standing within what is perhaps his last temple. For praying to not be about expectation, but rather to just not be alone. Since having lost his place in the heavens, he has made it a point to never linger, to never know anyone. There was Jian Yu. Other than him, the person he has met the most is Hua Cheng. It feels fitting in a way, but he does not know why. It also perhaps should make him feel sad that his closest acquaintance is someone he has only met twice. He lowers his head further, breaths shallow so that he does not breathe in too much of the smoke. His fingers shake, and he thinks of ghosts.

The rain eventually abates just as day is falling into evening. Deep blue, nearly black, bleeds into a warm orange, and in the center where the two colors meet, as though the sky cannot decide what it wishes itself to be, there is only gray. Yin Yu leaves the temple without acknowledging the young woman. Over the span of those several hours, she never once offered him water from her teapot despite how he noticed she had a second cup in her skirt pocket. He does not particularly care.

The earth, now turned to mud, sinks beneath each step he takes, urging him to succumb to the atrophy of rotting leaves along the forest floor. The ghost fire within the lantern flickers brightly in contrast to the descent of night, and the light catches upon the raindrops that cling to every surface. It makes the raindrops glow a bright green as though the leaves upon the trees had all been encrusted in jade.

He walks without direction, so it should come as no surprise that he finds himself standing before the gates of Ghost City. He hesitates only a moment, listening to how the loud shouts and music within the city are muted at this distance. When he does cross through the gates, the Ghost City that lies before him manages somehow to be even more chaotic than the previous time he was there. A group of ghosts are all dancing in a circle, spinning and stumbling their way through a song that none of them quite seem to know the words to. Stalls tightly pack the street and are even stacked upon one another, some emerging from angles that seem physically impossible. The vendors within all shout their wares and snatch at the clothes of passers by to grab their attention. Someone belches a line of fire over the heads of the crowd, and they all duck and shout before laughing and continuing on.

Yin Yu winds his way through the crowd, taking his time looking at each stall even as people knock against him as they rush by. One of the vendors snatches at Yin Yu’s scarf, forcing him to pause and turn. The vendor grins at him, still holding Yin Yu’s scarf in one of his hands. The vendor has two tusks sprouting from his mouth, and a wide snoutish nose. His skin is oddly oily, and it glints disturbingly under the light of the warm fires that are scattered about everywhere.

“You wanna buy some of my pig’s blood cakes?”

Yin Yu’s eyes linger on the vendor’s nose, then on the vendor's pointed and floppy ears. He tugs the end of his scarf out of the vendor’s hand and tucks it more securely within his clothes.

“No, thank you.”

A couple more vendors try to stop Yin Yu to entice him to buy their wares. The foods grow increasingly unrecognizable with each stall until Yin Yu is almost certain that the noodles within one of the bowls of soup are just cut up strips of fabric. One of the other vendors tries to sell Yin Yu a pan flute that begins screaming and spitting out blood before he even has a chance to reach for it.

While Yin Yu is standing before a stall, admiring a few pieces of glass work with fish swimming within them, there is a light tug on the hem of his robes. He looks down to find a child of perhaps six or seven, his hair neatly smoothed back into a braid and his clothes neat without a single smudge of dirt.

“Gege,” the child says, tilting his head to the side slightly and blinking his wide eyes in such a fashion as to communicate that he is both adorable and not a threat. “Will you buy me a bowl of tang yuan?”

Yin Yu stares at him, and the child stares back, eyes getting progressively wider and more glassy with each passing second.

“Okay.”

The child smiles brightly and offers Yin Yu his hand. It is tiny within Yin Yu’s own and surprisingly cold. It does not take them too long to find a stall selling tang yuan, and after purchasing two bowls, Yin Yu idly rolling his few remaining coins between his fingers, the pair slips out of the busiest section of the market and settle themselves on the porch of some home. Yin Yu passes one of the bowls and a spoon to the child, and they sit in silence together as they eat.

The strong ginger flavor of the broth burns the inside of his mouth but also settles directly beside his heart and serves to warm him from the inside out. He bites into one of the colorful balls, vaguely displeased to find it filled with sesame paste. He eats another. After all the balls have been eaten and his spoon struggles to scrape up any more of the broth, Yin Yu raises the bowl and tips it into his mouth. The child has already finished his broth and is now slowly eating the balls one at a time.

“You’re rich enough that it really should have been you paying for the tang yuan, not me.”

The child looks up, spoon paused halfway to his mouth. “What do you mean, Gege?”

Yin Yu leans back and stretches his legs out before himself. “Hua Chengzhu, that’s a genuinely terrible disguise. Did you actually think I wasn’t going to recognize you?”

The child, Hua Cheng, glares at him. “What’s wrong with my disguise? No one would expect a ghost king to walk around dressed as some child. You probably just go around accusing everyone you meet of being me.”

Yin Yu barely stops himself from rolling his eyes, then decides that Hua Cheng is not deserving of that degree of respect and rolls his eyes at him. “Your tunic is the exact same shade of red that you always wear, the hems are embroidered with butterflies which are your trademark, and you literally have the coral pearl in your hair which you, again, always wear. If you had wanted to fool me, you should have worn green or something.”

“I still don’t think this is a bad disguise. So far, you’ve been the only one to recognize me. I’ve used this disguise plenty of times while in Ghost City, and none of the residents have ever known who I was. You’re just too observant and too suspicious of everyone you meet.”

“Everyone knew who you were when we were walking through the market together. It’s just that all the residents are too polite to call you out. They figure that if they humor your antics, the more likely it is that they’ll win your favor.”

Hua Cheng remains silent, but disagreement still sits on the down turn of his lips. His displeased expression, when coupled with the childish face he still wears, comes across as a pout. For a moment, Yin Yu almost feels endeared to him as though he were speaking with one of the young disciples of his old sect.

Yin Yu pushes himself up from the porch and walks a few paces forward before glancing over his shoulder to where Hua Cheng is watching him and aggressively eating the last of his tang yuan, stuffing the little balls inside his mouth in rapid succession, so his cheeks bulge like that of a chipmunk.

“I’m going to continue walking around the market. Are you joining me?”

Hua Cheng glares but still rises, gathering both his and Yin Yu’s empty bowls in his hands. They walk back to the tang yuan stall to return the bowls. Yin Yu is silent simply for lack of anything to say. Hua Cheng remains silent because he is preoccupied with chewing his mouthful of tang yuan. The vendor acknowledges them with a nod when they set down the bowls but quickly returns to the line of ghosts pestering him.

Yin Yu and Hua Cheng slip into the crowd together, continuing to wander idly as Yin Yu pauses whenever something catches his eye. As he hesitates in front of a stall claiming to sell fish balls that look suspiciously similar to human eyes, he notices a problem: namely, Hua Cheng is no longer beside him. He looks around himself, then turns in a full circle as he tries to get a glimpse of the bright red tunic through the crowd. It is to no avail. The bodies are packed too tightly together and all wearing painfully eye-catching colors, so he has little chance of seeing a single small child through it all. An inexplicable panic begins welling up within him, making his lungs feel as though they are beginning to calcify. He takes a deep breath, then another, then sets about retracing his steps. Finally, as he reaches a juice stall that they had passed by several minutes before, he finds Hua Cheng.

Hua Cheng stands beside the stall, feet shoulder width apart and arms crossed over his chest. It would look intimidating if he were wearing one of his other skins, especially with his curved sword strapped to his hip, but in his child form, he only looks rather silly.

“It seems that you got separated from me in the crowd.” Hua Cheng glares at him. “It’s understandable since you’re so small right now. It can be disorienting to have all these legs moving around you.” Hua Cheng glares harder.

The solution, in the end, is for Hua Cheng to ride upon Yin Yu’s soldiers. Hua Cheng makes a point of harshly tugging on Yin Yu’s hair each time he wants to go to a stall, and in retaliation, Yin Yu pinches Hua Cheng’s legs. Yin Yu accepts his defeat only after Hua Cheng kicks Yin Yu’s collarbone with the heel of his foot, and Yin Yu knows with a grim certainty that he will be sporting a bruise there for the foreseeable future.

“What holiday is Ghost City celebrating right now anyway?” Yin Yu asks as they stop before a stall selling paper lanterns.

Hua Cheng passes the vendor a handful of coins, taken from his own coin pouch rather than Yin Yu’s, and in return receives a rather beautiful white paper lantern. Faint cloud patterns are decorated upon it, visible only when inspected closely. Hua Cheng clutches it against his chest, careful that his fingers do not crease the thin skin.

“Mid-Autumn Festival.”

“But it’s nowhere near autumn?” Yin Yu considers that it is a possibility that he has entirely lost all sense of time, but he was fairly certain that the seasons are currently shifting from winter into spring.

“The residents felt like celebrating it. Who am I to stop them from having a good time just because the dates are a bit off?” The dates are more than a bit off, but Yin Yu decides to not comment on that.

They continue walking. A while passes without either of them particularly paying it much mind.

“I’ve been thinking--”

“Nothing good comes from doing that.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Yin Yu starts again, “About the way I perceive things. I’m so focused backward on what was, how things used to be, who I used to know. And I look back so much that I never take the time to look forward and consider what will be or what could be. I’ve passed a century or so now as a mortal, but it still feels that I never expect the next day to arrive. I’ll wake up tomorrow, and I’ll find myself within my palace realizing this was all a bad dream. Or maybe I expect that when I go to sleep, I won’t wake up at all, having frozen to death in the snow.

They pause in front of a stall selling various opera masks. Yin Yu plucks one with a white circle covering most of the face and holds it in front of his own, feeling how it rests upon his cheekbones and presses against his forehead. Hua Cheng pulls the mask away from Yin Yu’s face, discarding it to the side. Hua Cheng holds up various masks in front of Yin Yu’s face as he continues talking, leaving his words slightly muffled.

“This way of thinking has become too fundamental to me. If I were to try to change it, if I were to look forward to my future, that Yin Yu who does that would not be the Yin Yu I am now. My present identity, I would have to leave it behind. At least some of it would have to be left behind.”

“And is that a bad thing?”

“Not necessarily.” Yin Yu cannot quite see out of the eyeholes of the mask Hua Cheng is currently holding in front of his face. He pauses. “It depends on what I value about who I am now. But it might be better for me to create and become that new identity. This new person, I could give him new motivations and dreams. Better ones. And if I can play the part of this new person well enough, maybe eventually it will become true and that new identity will simply be who Yin Yu is.”

They return to walking through the market, Hua Cheng using one hand to tug on Yin Yu’s hair and guide him as one would a mule while his other hand holds the white lantern. Eventually, rather than leading him to another stall, Hua Cheng urges Yin Yu down an alley, then another and another until the sounds of the bustling market are distant and the streets are only lit by the warm lights spilling from the slatted windows of the homes they pass by. Even then, they do not cease walking. They reach the very edge of Ghost City, and still Hua Cheng urges him onward.

The land is perfectly flat here. It is dry and firmly packed with deep cracks running along it as though he stood in the middle of a vast desert. Each step Yin Yu takes deeper into the Ghostly Realm, the more he can feel the constraints of reality slowly bleed away. The sun begins to set even though night had already fallen several hours before, and the landscape is cast in a deep scarlet. It slips away after a few minutes to be replaced with the faded blue of dusk. The few trees that grow from the cracked ground like broken fingers lose all their leaves at once, and the leaves begin bubbling until they settle and become a river running across the ground. One of the cracks widens to allow the water to run within it.

They stop in front of the river, watching silver fish swirl beneath the water before being whisked away by the current. Their reflections falter and shudder as though uncertain of what form to take. At his waist, the ghost flame glows brightly and leaves everything drenched in its green light.

Hua Cheng jumps lightly down from Yin Yu’s shoulders and crouches to splash at the surface of the water. The few fish that had remained scatter quickly out of fright. Yin Yu unties the lantern from his belt and opens the small door, its old rusted hinges shrieking no matter how slowly he moves it. He reaches in and cups the small ghost fire gently within his palm, pulling it out to hold the fire at level with his sternum. He kneels beside Hua Cheng, setting the now empty lantern upon the ground.

“Would you help me disperse Jian Yu? I want to make sure that it’s done properly, so he can reenter the reincarnation cycle.”

“I can.” Hua Cheng’s head is turned toward Yin Yu while Yin Yu stares down at their reflections within the river. “You’ve carried him with you for a long time. Are you really prepared to let him go?”

“Of course not.” Yin Yu feels distant from himself, wills himself to be distant or else he will feel everything too much, too strongly. His lips feel numb, and he presses them tightly together. His choice should feel more significant, but he only feels flat. “But it’s time to let Jian Yu move on. I’ve kept him here too long. I need to accept that.”

Hua Cheng takes the ghost fire from Yin Yu’s palm and cups it between his two hands. His fingers, so small in this form, cannot quite fully curl around it, and the light of the fire spills through like rays of the sun. Yin Yu is not sure what he expects from a soul being dispersed. Perhaps it will shatter into millions of glittering pieces, or it will grow and swell incredibly brightly before imploding in on itself. Instead, Hua Cheng grips the fire a bit tighter, and between one breath and the next, the ghost fire disappears. Hua Cheng and Yin Yu are plunged into darkness, suddenly deprived of their only source of light. Yin Yu blinks a few times while waiting for his eyes to adjust.

They cannot quite see one another in the darkness, each reduced to silhouettes. Yin Yu holds his breath and tightens his hands into fists, willing himself to remain blank.

“Are you happy?” Hua Cheng asks. Then, softer, “Are you okay?”

His breath gasps from him, and he chokes as he breathes it back in. Tears drip down his face, and even as he opens his mouth to respond, he cannot. He bites down on the palm of his hand in order to remain silent. He is not certain how much time he allows to pass before he can speak again.

“I don’t think that it’s a matter of being happy.” His voice shakes, and he breathes in. “It’s not about if I’m happy now but whether or not I can be hopeful that my future will have happiness in it, that I’ll be able to find happiness in my life maybe not right now but that eventually it will be there. I’ll let myself be sad this evening, but I’ll become someone new tomorrow. Maybe the person who I am tomorrow will be happy.”

Hua Cheng laughs, and it is unburdened and carefree. Yin Yu cannot see his face, but he imagines that he is smiling. “You’re taking my question so seriously. But I think you’re wrong. The person who you are right now can also have a future with happiness. You don’t have to change yourself in order to receive things that make you happy. The world likes being balanced. You’ve already suffered enough, so from now on, you should only be allowed to be happy, right?”

Yin Yu snorts and wipes uselessly at the tears that continue to stream down his cheeks. Something clicks and sparks, and the white lantern that Hua Cheng has been carrying is lit. The delicate patterns, originally only visible when the lantern was inspected closely, stand out prominently when backlit by the candle within.

Hua Cheng stands, holding on to the bottom of the lantern, and oh so carefully, tosses it upward, so it begins floating higher and higher toward the sky. Before it becomes little more than a speck in the distance, Hua Cheng lowers his head and presses his hands together in a silent prayer. A minute passes, and the lantern disappears, so they are once more left in darkness.

“What sort of god could the Ghost King be worshipping?”

Yin Yu can hear Hua Cheng shift and walk closer, can hear the smile behind his words.

“The lantern is dedicated to Yin Yu, the martial god of the west who will always be remembered.”