Chapter Text
“You’ve been waiting seven hundred and ninety-nine years. He’s probably gone and died or something. Do you really want to spend the rest of eternity alone?”
Hua Cheng took a sip of his tea while he considered throwing He Xuan out of his house, out of his city and into the freezing sea where he belonged. The only thing that stopped him was the fact that He Xuan would probably like it. He only ever came up here every century or so in fear of Hua Cheng making good on his threat to drain his sea and kill all his fish if he heard so much as a whisper of a rumour that he was planning to run off with his debts unpaid.
“He isn’t dead,” said Hua Cheng. “I’d know if he was dead.”
The painted silk lanterns hanging from the ceiling highlighted the arch of He Xuan’s eyebrow as he asked, “How?”
“I’d know.”
He Xuan rolled his eyes. “Fine. So he’s just bumbling around out there waiting for your destinies to collide. Sure. But why do you have to be miserable in the meantime? Why not find someone, or several someones, to keep you company while you’re waiting?”
“No one can compare to him.”
“I’m not saying pick any idiot you find wandering around the streets. You have to choose carefully. Be selective. Filter out the noise.”
“I’m hearing, ‘put a lot of effort into finding someone I don’t even want.’”
“I’ll do it,” said He Xuan, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the dining table. “You tell me what criteria are important to you, and I’ll do all the work of finding the person who fulfils them. How’s that sound?”
Hua Cheng looked He Xuan up and down suspiciously. He didn’t look like he was bullshitting him. “Why?”
“Why can’t one ghost king help out another ghost king out of the kindness of his heart?” At Hua Cheng’s withering look, He Xuan sighed, and added, “okay, so I haven’t got this century’s payment together yet. But why don’t you think about what will be more fun for you - draining my sea and killing all my fish, or watching me run around trying to find a fuc- friend, for you?”
“Please?” he added pathetically, after Hua Cheng had been weighing the options silently for a good minute.
Hua Cheng waved his hand. “Fine. Go ahead. Having you waste your time up here would be safer than letting you go back to whatever nefarious plot you’re up to in your cave.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe I should ask that god you have locked up in Nether Water Manor.”
“Yin Yu.” He Xuan waved him in from where he was skulking in the corridor. “Brush and paper, please. You have any selection criteria in mind, yet?” he added to Hua Cheng.
It was the kind of thing would require a lot of thought, perhaps multiple lists and diagrams, if Hua Cheng was taking it seriously.
“Must be a spoilt brat,” Hua Cheng threw out randomly. “Must be utterly incapable of looking after themselves. Must have no useful skills, except ones that might be useful to me.”
“Like what? Silver smithing? Butterfly breeding? Blood-rain cleaning?”
Hua Cheng narrowed his eyes at him. “You offered to do this.”
“Okay, okay.” His brush jerked across the page. “Anything else?”
“No. Actually, one more - must look good in coral.”
“What?”
“I’ll leave it with you. Hua Cheng rose from the table. “You have a month. If I don’t find myself reasonably entertained by the end, I’ll feed you to your own bonefish.”
“You’re already setting me up to fail,” muttered He Xuan, scribbling ‘coral???’ at the bottom of the page.
“Nonsense. Yin Yu.” Yin Yu popped up out of nowhere. “You can help Black Water Sinking Ships on his fool’s errand if you pity him enough. You can even take money from the household account. There,” he said graciously to He Xuan. “I’m giving you every chance.”
He Xuan rolled up his sheet of scribbles with a lift of his chin. “Fine. You don’t think this will come to anything, but you’ll see. There’s got to be at least one person in the world more interesting than your beloved Crown Prince. Let’s hope that after I find him for you, you stop being such a pain in the- I mean, you might finally be happy.”
“Mark your words, Black Water.”
Xie Lian held up the flyer, and squinted at it through the eye-holes of his mask. Beneath the words ‘Join the Selection! Be the Ghost King’s Bride!’ the sweeping eaves rendered in wobbly black ink matched the silhouette of the building in the distance. Paradise Manor. The Ghost King’s home.
He pulled the strap of his travelling sack more firmly onto his shoulder, gave his worn white robes a half-hearted dusting with his hands, and walked on. He’d never been to Ghost City before, and so far, nothing about the jostling crowds and raucous cacophony around him had made him regret not coming sooner.
It looked like the most direct route to the manor was through the main market street. Xie Lian sighed, and let himself get swept into the gauntlet of shouting stall vendors. There was no rushing through. Xie Lian could barely keep himself from bumping shoulders with someone with every step he took. Did Ghost City look less strange normally, when everybody wasn’t wearing some form of animal mask on their face? He probably wouldn’t find out anytime soon - the Ghost King had mandated that everyone within the limits of Ghost City must mask their face for the duration of his bride selection, on pain of horrible and unspeakable punishment, and it appeared that not a single soul dared disobey.
“…ghosts, monsters, humans, maybe even gods in town for this,” he heard from the crowd around him, as he pushed his way through. “It’s not every lifetime a ghost king goes looking for a bride.”
“My cousin’s already tried. Went right up to the manor, got to stay for one night then they told her to leave in the morning. What kind of test was that?”
“She pretty?”
“Ugly as sin, but he couldn’t have known that, the masks stay on even inside the manor.”
“Hello darling.” Xie Lian jumped as an elbow landed on his shoulder. He followed the arm up to the smirking tiger mask. “You hoping to be our Chengzhu’s bride? I’ve got some love potions that might help.”
“Oh, no, thank y-”
“What about some nice brain tonic?” said another voice, tugging him from the left. “Makes you smart as Kongzi. Our Chengzhu’s got great respect for book-learning, you know.”
“Marvellous invention, but I think I’ll manage without-”
“What about my love potion? Guaranteed to make yours as big as-”
Xie Lian hurried down the street before he could hear any more. He came to the steps up to a great stone bridge over a lake, across which Paradise Manor gazed back at him serenely. Well, he’d come this far. He could only go on.
It was with this sense of inevitability that he soon found himself knocking on the Ghost King’s door.
A small window in the gate opened. “What do you want?” a thin voice demanded.
“I’m here for the um…bride selection test?”
The gate opened, apparently of its own accord, but then Xie Lian caught the glow of a little ghost fire hovering in the shadows. Without saying a word to him, it drifted inwards, leading Xie Lian through a grand entrance hall, a jade-tiled courtyard, and through a labyrinth of corridors, until they came to a nondescript door. Like the front gate, the door swung open on its own, revealing a small bedroom.
The room was clean and sparsely-furnished, though Xie Lian could tell from a glance that each piece of furniture was well-made. A wooden bed, a chair, a narrow table with a water jug and candle, and a chamber-pot. It would all have been rather typical of a guest-room at an inn, if not for the bedding. While the bed-frame itself only came up to Xie Lian’s knee, it was piled so high with layers upon layers of feather-stuffed bedding that there was even a small stool by the foot of the bed, in anticipation of Xie Lian having to climb to get on top of it all in order to sleep. A ghost custom? Xie Lian couldn’t fathom what else it might have been for.
“The selection shall begin in the morning,” said the ghost fire behind him. “You shall sleep here tonight. The door will not open until the morning.”
On that ominous note, the ghost fire left. The door swung closed behind it. Curious, Xie Lian went over and tried to open it - it wouldn’t budge. Powerful magic at play here, indeed.
Xie Lian crossed the room again, put his travelling sack down on the chair, and removed his outer robe. He suddenly wished he’d thought to ask about a bath, but there was no one to ask now. Oh well. If nothing else, at least he’d get a comfortable night’s sleep out of this adventure. He set his mask down on the table, and blew out the candle.
He did have to use the stool to get on top of the mountain of bedding. It was so soft he sank downwards considerably once all his weight was on it. He slipped underneath the blanket laid on top, half-crawled, half-rolled to the middle, and settled with a poof onto his back.
It was nice. Xie Lian had had few creature comfort in the past few centuries - he was lucky to sleep indoors at all, and even then, always on the floor - but this brought back memories of silk sheets and perfumed pillows at Xianle. A long time ago, now.
He pulled the blanket over his shoulders, and closed his eyes. A little while later, he found himself rolling onto his side. Just for a bit, then again onto his back. His eyes blinked open. What was it? Maybe comfort was like rich food - if you tried it again after a long time without, it didn’t sit well.
Xie Lian laughed. How silly. He closed his eyes again, determined not to open them this time until morning, and lay still.
Meanwhile, in the private apartments of Paradise Manor, Hua Cheng watched He Xuan and his little army of ghost fires at work, and wondered what he’d gotten himself into. They were all hovering over He Xuan’s immaculate scale model of the building, the one complete with enchanted dolls representing each ‘competitor’ drifting around, tracking the movements of their real-life counterparts. He Xuan, the idiot, appeared to be taking this ridiculous ‘bride selection’ completely seriously. That reminded him -
“When did this become a ‘bride selection’?” he asked, folding himself into a chair.
“Since I decided ‘ghost king’s best friend audition’ sounded pathetic,” said He Xuan without turning from the model. “We have a reputation to maintain, you know.”
Did they? That was news to Hua Cheng.
“And forcing the entire population of Ghost City wear masks is in order to…?”
“Ensure anonymity,” He Xuan answered. “Don’t you know how many people want to be a ghost king’s bride? One of the ones we failed this morning was an official from the Middle Court. People like that wouldn’t come if they thought all their respectable friends would find out about it. And we want as many people as we can get. Out of all the candidates I’ve seen so far, not one looks likely to pass my rigorously-crafted selection process.”
“There doesn’t seem to be much of a selection process, from what I’ve seen so far. Only a lot of strangers sleeping in my house.”
“That’s because we’re only on Phase One,” said He Xuan testily.
“Oh, of course, Phase One. How could I not have known?”
‘Phase One.’ Ridiculous. This whole production was getting out of hand, for something that was destined to come to nothing. Hua Cheng watched a new doll spawn outside the model’s front gate. That was one more stranger under his roof. Thankfully, He Xuan seemed to get rid of most of them before they required any feeding, making space the primary expense, and Paradise Manor had plenty of that.
Hua Cheng watched the gate open for the doll, and only distantly registered that He Xuan was explaining, in great and unnecessary detail, the intricacies of Phase One.
“A what under the bedding?”
“A bead,” repeated He Xuan, his eyes tracking the movement of the new doll through the miniature courtyard.
“And that tests what, exactly?”
He Xuan straightened, pulled a familiar roll of paper from his robes with a flourish, and recited, loudly. “Criterion one: ‘must be a spoilt brat’.” He rolled up the paper and put it away.
“…”
He Xuan sighed, and waved his arms. “Imagine you’re the kind of parent whose life revolves around your little baobei. You boil chicken soup for it every day. You pick every bone out of its fish. You wrap every inch of it in your finest silk. You think such a parent would let their darling sleep on anything but a perfectly flat bed?”
Hua Cheng reflected on his cold, chicken-soup-less childhood, and silently conceded that He Xuan might know a little more about spoilt brats than he did.
"Anyway, we’re nearly done with this stage,” He Xuan went on. “Assuming the pass rate remains consistent with the average tonight, by morning we’ll have more or less one hundred candidates for Phase Two. That reminds me, I have to check that Yin Yu’s gotten things ready.”
He swept out of the room with his ghost fires, leaving Hua Cheng alone. He got up, crossed the room to the model, and watched the new doll being led through the labyrinthine guest quarter. All the dolls wore masks, corresponding with their real-life counterparts. Hua Cheng bent down to inspect the new doll’s mask - a ferret? A weasel?
Weasel, Hua Cheng decided. He watched as the weasel-doll was left alone in the guest room, tried the door, found it locked, retreated, and decided to put itself promptly to bed. Hua Cheng couldn’t explain what it was about a doll with a weasel’s face tossing and turning on a pile of bedding that was so enthralling, but somehow he was still watching it when He Xuan came back.
He Xuan took a glance at the weasel-doll. “Having favourites already?”
“Hardly.” Hua Cheng straightened up. His eyes landed on the ox-headed man beside He Xuan. “Is that Yin Yu?”
“Yes, Chengzhu,” came a small voice from behind the ox head. “Lord Blackwater kindly gave me this mask.”
“What, you didn’t think I’d allow ourselves the same anonymity I so graciously offer to all the candidates?” Hua Cheng replied to Hua Cheng’s arched eyebrow. He twirled his hand in the air, and put on the turtle mask that had appeared in it. “Do you want one? I’ve got an octopus one lying around somewhere.”
“I’d sooner wear your entrails.”
Xie Lian woke with a wince. He rolled from his side onto his back, and hissed at the sharp pain that lanced up from his hips. His head throbbed. His eyelids were so heavy. What an awful night’s sleep.
He blinked blearily up at the ceiling beams, then lifted his head to look around the room. Still dark, but he could make out the room around him. Clean. Sparsely-furnished. Paradise Manor.
Bride selection.
He sat up, ignoring the lingering pain, and jumped down from the bed. By the time someone came through the door, Xie Lian was waiting in the chair, fully-dressed and face masked.
It wasn’t a ghost fire this time, but an actual person - or actual ghost, Xie Lian supposed, with a fleshed-out body dressed plainly in black robes. His face was covered by a mask shaped like a ox’s head.
“You’re awake,” said the ox-head.
“Good morning to you too,” said Xie Lian with a smile.
“How did you sleep?”
“Very well, thank you.”
The ox-head nodded. “You have failed to pass onto the next round of the bride selection. Please gather your belongings and leave the manor at once.”
He disappeared without closing the door, before Xie Lian could even think to jump out of his seat and ask what he’d done wrong. He stared at the empty doorway for a moment, then dropped his head and laughed.
It wasn’t as if he’d really thought he could be the ghost king’s bride. At least he’d come and tried something new. That was worth something, wasn’t it?
He gathered his belongings by slinging his travelling sack onto his shoulder, and made his way out through the courtyard. Morning in ghost city didn’t look much different than the night. Perhaps the darkness sat less oppressively in the sky, and the air felt a bit warmer.
The front gate stood open. The wide black lake beyond lay calm and still, dotted distantly with strings of red reflections from the lanterns hung on the streets on the opposite shore.
Xie Lian was just about to set off down to the bridge, when a ruckus just off the path caught his attention. He approached the bushes there to investigate, and nearly stepped on a cracked rabbit mask lying on the ground. Then he heard the distinct sound of crunching bone.
“Thrown out after one night?” growled a voice in the shadows. “Useless. You’re useless. We would have had more luck sending in a monkey!”
“I’m sorry,” whimpered another voice, lower to the ground. “I’m sorry, I’ll…I’ll try again, I’ll a different mask and try a-” A vicious kick cut him off.
“Do you think we haven’t tried that? It won’t work!”
“I’m sorry, I’ll do anything…”
Xie Lian had heard enough.
“Alright,” he said loudly, stepping through the bushes and clapping his hands. “Enough of that. Leave him alone.”
A small mob of masked ghosts whirled around to face him.
“Who the hell are you?” one with a frog’s face demanded.
Xie Lian made a face. He never knew how to answer that question. “I am…or I was a candidate for the bride selection. I only lasted one night, too. It isn’t as easy as you think, you know. They don’t even tell you what they’re looking for! Were you meant to sleep a certain way? Make up a morning poem? Anyway.” Xie Lian cleared his throat, realising this was not the time to vent. “What I’m say is, it’s not the fault of that young man you’ve got down there. Let him go.”
That was about as well-received as Xie Lian had expected. His fists always seemed more eloquent than his mouth when dealing with people like this. In less than two minutes he’d knocked every one of the thugs groaning onto the ground. He stopped to pick something up from behind him, and went over to the shivering young man.
“Here,” said Xie Lian, handing his rabbit mask back to him. “Don’t want to be caught without that, do you? Are you alright? I’m going into the city, if you’d like to follow me.”
“My, how kind of you.”
Xie Lian froze. That hadn’t come from the rabbit man. He looked over his shoulder, and saw a youth clad in red behind him, arms folded.
“I’d like to think anyone else would do the same for me,” said Xie Lian, turning to face him.
The youth bared his teeth. “Gege would be disappointed.”
“I’ve been disappointed before.” Xie Lian hesitated, rather entranced with the first human face he’d seen since coming to Ghost City - but turned back to the rabbit man, and put an arm around him to help him up. “Come on, let’s get on our way.” The man only whimpered.
“Who are you?” asked the red-clad youth behind him.
That was the second time Xie Lian had heard that question this morning. “I thought the masks were so that no one would have to answer that question.”
The youth shrugged. “I’m not wearing one.”
Indeed, he wasn’t. Xie Lian took a look at him again, a proper look, and had to admit he liked what he saw. He was handsome, that youth, with sharp eyes and a clever mouth. His robes were expertly tailored and dyed deep red.
“Then may I ask who you are?” Xie Lian asked instead.
“I live in the manor,” answered the boy easily. “Gege can call me San Lang. I heard you saying you’d failed the bride selection.”
“I did,” Xie Lian admitted. “The ghost king must have very particular tastes.”
“Or very incompetent servants.” He nudged one of the thugs Xie Lian had taken out with the tip of his boot, and looked up with a grin. “Listen, wait here, alright? Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
He darted off, leaving Xie Lian with the rabbit man whimpering on his shoulder. One of the thugs groaned, and tried to sit up. Xie Lian put him back down with a swift kick.
“That man,” rasped the rabbit man eventually. “He…”
“I think he’s gone to help us,” said Xie Lian. “Or I hope he has, anyway. He said he’d come back. How are you feeling?”
“His face…”
But San Lang reappeared before rabbit man could finish his sentence.
“Good news, Gege,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve spoken to one of the examiners - it appears they’ve made a mistake. You were meant to pass to the next stage. They’re very embarrassed. Come with me back inside, I’ll set everything right for you.”
“Oh,” said Xie Lian, taken aback. “Well…yes, I suppose I should then. Thank you. But what should I do about…”
San Lang clicked his fingers. Seemingly at once, a tasselled palanquin borne by four skeletons came through the bushes.
“Take this man to the city,” said San Lang to the skeletons imperiously. “Leave the others where they are. I’ll deal with them.” An ominous note ran under the words, one that disappeared once he turned his attention to Xie Lian again. He was very handsome when he turned the charm on, Xie Lian couldn’t help but notice.
“Well then, Gege.” He stretched his hand out towards Xie Lian. “Shall we?”
Xie Lian stared at that hand for a blank moment. He hadn’t failed? The notion was so strange to him he almost couldn’t believe it.
San Lang only waited patiently.
Why was he hesitating? But maybe the real question was, why had he come in the first place? What reason did he have to go back?
Xie Lian had no answers. But when he reached out, and felt San Lang’s fingers wrap around his own, he felt that he might have been getting closer to finding some.