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Street cats disappear almost as often as street kids do. That’s been the way of things since Xue Yang’s parents tossed him there to find his own way.
He feels a kinship with the street cats. They are both disposable. Both targets.
Even as a kid, he knows nothing good happens to the cats (or kids) who disappear.
People, he has quickly learned, are violent at their core.
(He hugs his hand close to him when he sleeps. It isn’t covered, yet. It will be many years before he hides it under a glove. The look and smell of his mangled fingers, constantly infected by the filth that clings to every inch of these streets, are a shield against the weak-stomached. His enemies look at it and see weakness. He looks at them and sees fools who think they can survive here without knowing every possible horror.)
(There is no question which of them will last.)
Xue Yang understands why those unable to hurt other humans might lower their standards to animals. He knows the urge to inflict a little violence on things smaller than yourself. The need to control something. But he knows, also, that such violence is only the start—the power, once tasted, is something you’ll chase forever.
He’s never been a big man. Never had the food needed to grow tall and strong. But he doesn’t need it. Even early, even young, he knows his capabilities.
He started small, just like every other street-born sociopath. But he didn’t fuck with cats. They’d never fucked with him, after all—they kept their distance, as all smart souls should. But the ragged street mutts who stole his food and lashed out, snarling, when he tried to move them from his corner? They got what they deserved.
Still, he never bothers with cats. When he sees other street-rats trying to lure the frailer strays away, he makes it his business to scare them away. When he sees cats trusting enough to go up to strangers, he makes it his business to teach them the error of that trust. He’s territorial, guarding his small corner of the city with an openly feral unpredictability.
So yeah, he saves a few cats. Just for practicality’s sake. Other people killing on his territory is a bad look.
A few of the cats stick around, knowing safety wherever they can find it. They keep the rats down, which is always welcome.
(And if, sometimes, he talks to them, sometimes reaches out to stroke the soft, narrow triangles of their skulls, the softness of their ears—then that’s his secret to keep. As long as no one sees, it doesn’t matter.)
Some cats disappear after straying too far from his sharp gaze. Quietly, not like the ones who get killed for sport or experimentation, the ones he has to bury or burn. These other cats just leave and don’t come back—and really, he should be used to that. But it grates across his nerves. Sometimes, they disappear in the wake of fancy men in fancy robes who turn heads as they passed, men who seem far too fortunate to be interested in stray cats. Sometimes they disappear with no forewarning at all, but his growing golden core pulses with the wrongness.
It shouldn’t bother him. Death on the streets is as likely to be quiet as it was to be loud and messy. And he hears from the others that this was how cats were—they don’t like to show weakness. Don’t like anyone to see them die.
But those cats live in his corner. Those cats belong to him.
The stories all sound like bullshit—old wives’ tales by people who aspire to cultivation without the effort of building a core. But then, cultivation sounded like bullshit when he first heard of it, too—it was just a bullshit he was desperate enough to believe in.
The cats that remain stare out at him in those dark nights. He sees a lot of things in those bright stares, none of them good.
Most interestingly, he sees the spark of cultivation. His fingers run over fur that is still silky, even here down in the dirt, and he feels the thrumming energy beneath the rolling purrs—golden cores coiled as small as balls of thread, calling to his own.
He understands, in that moment, why the cats disappear. He doesn’t understand the why yet. That will take many years of learning, many stolen scrolls in Wei Wuxian’s chicken-scratch script. But he understands enough.
To cultivate a golden core is to invite death. But it’s a different sort of death to the death he sees on the streets—smarter, more subtle, more elegant. For now, he is content in knowing that his cats are dying at the hands of cultivators—and that he’s on the path to learn, as his cats are, what sort of dark delights can be enjoyed by the cultivators flying on their swords high above the streets.
***
It’s been a long time since he watched his Daozhang die. A long time with no progress. Xue Yang is out of ideas, and he’s getting...‘desperate’ is not a word or feeling he will admit to. But. His need is scratching straight out of his skin.
It takes a while for him to remember the cats. But one night as he lies, unsleeping in the coffin house, trying to stay as silent as his Daozhang beside him—he remembers eyes in the dark.
Golden eyes with tiny, golden cores.
The understanding hits him all at once. Why the cats disappeared when the cultivators passed by. Why their coats were always glossy, their bodies always supple, in defiance of a street that tore apart everyone who stayed too long.
Cats have lives to spare. He’s seen it—the near misses. The cats that revive from wounds that should be fatal, or dodge lethal ends entirely. The cats he buries, or burns, only to have them walk into his street corner the next day and rub against his leg.
When he was younger, he didn’t know what to do with this information apart from be envious of it. How lucky they must be, to be able to come back from the dead.
But that was when he was younger. Now, with the news of the returned demonic cultivator Yiling Lazou still ringing in his ears, the memories hit differently.
So he collects cats. Nine of them. Kills them. Nine of them.
(Clean ends, because he remembers his roots. Clean ends, because he doesn’t know if those strays he saved are enough to cover all this blood on his hands, or if he’ll have more yet to pay. Clean ends, because it’s not like he can enjoy it, anymore.)
(Death feels different, now that Daozhang lies still and unwaking. Even blood looks different to him now.)
And if Xue Yang uses their bodies to build a trail that leads any curious cultivators straight to him, then he can pretend this is rational. He can pretend that this is all part of a plan, and he’s not trying street tricks to bring Xiao Xingchen back.
Nine feline lives for one human life.
He offers the sacrifice.
Nothing happens.
Nothing that he can see, at least.
***
The cultivation of cats doesn’t care for the impatience of humans. It is a slow power, a power meant to be sipped like cream from the top of milk, a power that stretches luxuriously across so many lives.
Life is for sleeping in sunbeams and patiently stalking pray.
Cat cultivation acts in its own time, at its own pace.
Months later, Xiao Xingchen wakes slowly in the coffin, warm with his own body heat. Yawns. Blinks, before the tremble as his eye muscles try to stop the lids collapsing reminds him that’s unnecessary.
He gets out and stretches to his full length. His “full length” is longer than it used to be. He notes the sway of a long tail, shifting the air as it swings. He feels the soft velvet of ears poking out from his hair: the skin hot, the ears twitching at the touch.
He smells blood, but cannot feel it on his skin or taste it on his tongue. He traces his neck, and finds the slash there, but long healed-over—the scar tissue a different temperature to the rest of him, a different weight on his body to the rest of his skin.
It is, he thinks, the difference in weight Song Lan must feel in his eye sockets. It’s cultivation, a skin-tingling wrongness where a power other than his own has intervened.
“Song Lan.” He wants these to be the first words he says. They come out hoarse, cracking, but they come nonetheless—formed by a clumsy, bone-dry tongue.
Xiao Xingchen thinks of Song Lan, thinks of tongues, and sobs—dehydrated, dry noises more like his body trying to purge its own insides.
Song Lan. After everything—after everything, after giving up his eyes—Song Lan was dead. Corrupted into a walking corpse. Because Xingchen didn’t have his eyes to see the horrors he was creating.
Xiao Xingchen walks through a coffin town quieter than he has ever known it to be. So far from the home he built.
It takes days for Xingchen to methodically feel his way through the city--hands shaking as he checks every shape on the ground, only to find paper mannequins.
The tail is not so different to the canes he’s used. When it connects to something, he feels the tail send a tactile warning. Even his ears are sensitive, flicking against the doorframe and warning him to duck lower.
He finds an odd, spicy congee in the house of a woman with a shattered mind. It is stale, but it is enough to wake his confused body. She brings him water, tells him of the other cultivators who’ve passed this way, of the noise and the fighting.
He tests his cultivation, reaching out to heal her. Instead of his core, he finds sharp-edged pieces that spark wildly—fragments. After a lifetime of breezily excelling, the absence is an ache deeper than the marrow in the bones.
But, he keeps searching the quiet coffin-maker town.
He only finds one true, cold corpse. His little friend, arm gone, clothes a blood-stiffened mess. Xue Yang.
He ignores the body until he’s done sweeping every corner of the empty city. Returns. Grabs the bloodstained robes in his hand, shakes.
His tormentor’s corpse does not respond.
His friend does not respond. His fingers are curled tight along a long-rotten wrapped candy.
Xingchen wants answers. He doesn’t want this, this sudden return to the living world, this empty and unwelcoming place in a body that no longer feels like it belongs to him. He hates this.
Is this how Song Lan felt, waking up with someone else’s eyes?
Jiangzai, awful little blade that it is, is the only sword he can find. Shuanghua is nowhere he can find. Only this nasty creature, which fits in his hand too easily, the spirit not just unresisting but eager.
Jiangzai whispers, joyfully, of all the blood it has seen.
Jiangzai tells him of the taste of A-Qing’s tongue and lifeblood. He finds where A-Qing is buried, cries for her, but finds no trace of her soul.
Another ache tears open inside of him—for their little house together. For the sweet, whip-smart girl who looked out for him without any regard to her own safety.
(For the little friend, who took care of him.)
Jiangzai sings of the thousand cuts that killed the last of the Yueyang Changs. Of how long Chang Ping bled for.
For you, for you, a punishment for abandoning you, Jiangzai pulses, its energy dark and fever-hot.
Lastly, Jiangzai tells him of the cats. The energy here is dull, uninterested. Necessary, it pulses..
“Necessary why?” Xiao Xingchen asks.
Jiangzai pulses, unable to answer.
Xingchen runs his hands through his air, strokes the ears newly there. There weren’t many cats up in the mountains where he learned, but he’s always been well-read—he knows the stories of cats, dodging death and resurrecting themselves after it.
Baoshan Saeren adored them as symbols of longevity. She even kept a few, in her private residence, thick-furred warriors as large as dogs.
He knows a little of the cultivation innate to cats. And even if he hadn’t known, when he sleeps, he feels golden eyes watching him—and he knows there are answers there, waiting.
Judgement, too, in those unblinking gazes. Because he still has a way to go along this path, and he will have a lot to atone for at the end of it.
“Jiangzai,” Xingchen says. “We are going to need to find more cats.”
Jiangzai croons in his hands, the blade almost vibrating.
***
Xingchen can’t look at Xue Yang’s corpse. Even if he still had eyes, he wouldn’t. When Jiangzai whispers to him, the voice is almost familiar.
Xiao Xingchen sighs, and reaches into the space where his golden core should be. Nothing there anymore. Fragments.
But beneath that, like something thrown into a fire that refused to fully burn, there’s something stranger. More feral. Angry and predatory. A tangle of tails and teeth and claws, hissing and yowling.
It doesn’t feel like demonic cultivation.
But then again, it wouldn’t, would it? Not anymore. Whatever power this is—demonic cultivation, or just the cultivation of cats—it’s part of him now too.
In the space where his core once was, nine fragments of nine cats gaze out with eyes shining. He knows every step of the cultivation that brought him back. Replicating it will be trivial.
All he needs now is the cats.
XXC walks out of coffin town with Jiangzai in hand, already listening for strays yowling. Beneath his skin, nine stolen lives stand ready for the hunt.
It will be interesting, his little friend getting with ears & a tail. It will be terrible, his tormentor returning. It will be many things. A start. A step forward.
For now, that’s enough.