Chapter Text
Regret was a funny word.
Unfamiliar and obnoxious in its execution, relentlessly pressed into his hands by those who know ‘better’ with a seemingly endless sense of entitlement. Foolish and naive in its concept and ultimately a privilege that he’s never known.
‘Regret’ sounded so nice to those high-minded enough to have a real choice when shit hit the fan. Those who didn’t have to choose between living through the night and eating what meat could be scavenged from the closest corpse. When you know if you don’t eat, if you don’t fight to be able to eat that vile meat, then in a day or two you’ll be the next corpse.
The twisted moral hypocrisy of those who had never known real hunger daring to look down at him and insist that he should regret eating .
It was maddening and aggravating to hear again and again, a pointless repetition based on their own insistence that they are the arbiter of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Utterly insignificant sentiments that would have killed him much sooner.
It would suit them if he had died earlier. They didn’t actually care if he lived , they just wanted him to regret as though regret would feed him. As though he could survive on regret.
When he was four years old, he learned what it was to become completely alone in the world. When he was seven, he learned what the cost of naivety was. When he was ten, he learned how to be powerful. When he was twelve, his strength was recognized.
He would never forget the day the smiling man had found him. He remembered the smiling man from a few years back when he would help his mother at the brothel. He remembered being jealous of the smiling man for having both family and food. He remembered hating the smiling man for always being dissatisfied.
The smiling man spoke words of honey, assuring him that his strengths would be rewarded. That, now that he, the smiling man, had power, he would use it to empower those less fortunate than him. The smiling man had wanted more and he stabbed, betrayed, and murdered until he attained it. He learned from the smiling man that the only way to thrive was to follow his example.
So he did, he listened to whatever the smiling man told him to do. Learned whatever he was told to learn. Killed whoever he was told to kill. He’d say whatever the smiling man told him to. The smiling man thought that rape was great revenge, and he agreed that it was one of the most horrible things ever, so the smiling man must be right.
When aiming for revenge, the smiling man taught him to always give far more than you were given. That it was the only way to survive.
He was fifteen when he finally learned he’d only ever been a tool.
A conveniently naive moron who would commit atrocities freely and happily so the smiling man could keep his hands clean of it all.
The smiling man asked him to ‘regret’ his actions before he sent him to die.
He refused.
Not once would he regret it. If he regretted, if he looked back at the trail of meat and bodies and death and even his own naivety–
He wouldn’t be able to survive.
Asking him to regret was asking him to die. Which was, ultimately, what the smiling man wanted from him.
It was just a prolonged reflection of his idiocy when he was seven. Some adult approached him, looking good and sounding charismatic, and told him what to do and assured him if he was just a good boy that he would finally be rewarded. It took a few years this time but ultimately, the result was just the same.
Why was it he was the one who was always asked to regret things? Why wasn’t the bastard who sent him to his death ever asked to regret anything?
Why wasn’t that person asked to regret looking at him so coldly, as though he were some sort of disgusting beast?
Why was he always wrong in everyone’s eyes?
It didn’t matter, ultimately he would show everyone just how much they should regret . He’d use all the lessons the smiling man taught him to expose their hypocrisy. To expose that on the inside, they were all just as ugly as he was.
To show them in a way that they would finally understand that they were disgusting . That everything was disgusting. That ultimately everyone was nothing more than rotting meat a few days away from being scavenged by animals and street children alike.
He just wanted them to see it.
To taste it.
For them to know .
He was sixteen when he learned what ‘home’ felt like. It was more than he’d ever been able to even dream of. Even his time living the ‘lavish’ life with the smiling man had only ever been a hollow imitation with his single peer being the only true solace.
But home was something different. Something deeper. Something so full and something so precious and something he would kill anyone or anything to protect. ‘Home’ dulled his senses and weakened his heart. ‘Home’ taught him real fear.
He was eighteen when he learned the true incarnation of ‘regret’. The final form of the emotion that everyone always tried to force down his throat until he vomited it back up out of sheer indignant rage.
How to express these layers of ‘regret’?
It would be easy to start from the beginning. When that person found them and once more looked at him with cold eyes full of disdain. This time they weren’t his own eyes. This time there was real hate in that gaze. This time, those eyes promised, he would die.
Was regret the moment he watched with satisfaction when those cold eyes glazed over with obedience and he felt something so empty at the sight that he couldn’t help but kick the corpse?
Was regret the moment the sword clattered to the ground, blood spilling everywhere just like crimson tears, the shattered pieces of the soul dissipating into almost nothing while he screamed?
Was regret when he learned she wouldn’t come home, that she was the one who brought that person here, that she’d trusted that person , a complete stranger, more than she’d ever trusted him even after all the years they spent together and when he learned that she hadn’t even given up betraying him, begging anyone who would hear her out to come and kill him and he got so mad– he just got so mad –
Was regret her body, torn asunder by the animals, just meat once again?
He swallowed what might have been regret though. Every moment of it. Every spiraling minute of it. Because he needed to live. He needed to move forward. He needed to fix this .
He was going to fix this. No matter what it took.
He was twenty-one when he met his new benefactor. Another one who smiled. Another one who lied. It didn’t matter. Nothing did. He was desperate and his benefactor wanted revenge on the smiling man.
It was a funny realization for him to have, just at the time, that ‘home’ made him forget all about the vengeance he otherwise would have wrought on the smiling man. ‘Home’ did to him what everyone seemed to think regret would.
It was funny enough that he howled with laughter and accepted the deal. His chance for revenge only to tell where a few body parts were buried and a few secrets divulged? It was hardly a deal even worth thinking about it.
But he learned negotiation from the smiling man as well and he knew how to ask for more , how to aim for everything that no one thought he’d ever deserved.
The liar would be able to get him that powerful ally, the one he needed to regain his ‘home’. The one who could work miracles. All he had to do was follow a few rules, work with the smiling man once more, provide information–it would be easy .
It was easy.
He was twenty-five, the same age the smiling man was when he first picked him up off the streets, when his wishes were granted and the liar proved that he was good on his word. Thirteen years after he’d been chosen to recreate the master's work and finally he’d meet the master behind it all.
Only that what he’d asked for was more than he could handle.
Xue Yang lay dying with his detached arm lying nearby, the last candy Xiao Xingchen ever gave him resting in the palm, and slowly bled to death.
He finally allowed himself in those terrible final moments to feel regret.
He was dying, there was no point in rejecting the emotion so fiercely anymore. If regret meant death and he was already dying, what was the point in fighting so hard against it all this time?
He learned, in the chaotic agony of death, his body tossed into a pile of other corpses to be used for the very same experiments he’d once been known for, that he’d known regret his whole life.
It had been his constant companion.
He’d never wanted to eat the flesh of his mother. Four and starving and locked into that tiny shack with her rotting body. He’d never wanted to murder or steal or cheat. But he learned to laugh about it all.
Back in that horrible little room with the smell of her body and the taste of her blood on his tongue, he learned to laugh.
Laughing made it all better . No matter what anyone did to him or what he did to anyone else, he laughed because laughter made regret weaker. Made it a muted voice in the back of his head that he could suppress and suppress and suppress until no one ever believed he had any feelings of regret at all.
Until even he believed his own laughter.
The joke of his life, twenty-one years after he’d learned to laugh, was that he had always been the fool worth laughing at. Always too naive and too easily tricked, even tricked by his own foolish laughter.
He regretted it all.
Every miserable minute of it.
He regretted being alive in the first place.
The only thing he didn’t regret was ‘home’, even if he regretted the majority of his foolish mistakes he’d made while there.
The resentful energy swirling wretchedly among the corpses embraced his own, a welcome friend, and he laughed one more time as his life left him, finally recognizing that the resentment he was always able to draw from like a bottomless pit was nothing more than ‘regret’.
I turned it into my strength.
He couldn’t say that he didn’t regret finding that strength at all.
If he hadn’t been smart, if he hadn’t been talented , the smiling man never would have sought him out. He would have been just another forgettable and useless street rat. He never would have learned the empty victory of revenge either.
The smiling man taught him to avenge yourself against anyone who ever made you feel small. So he did. Over and over and over again–
It never felt good.
He still laughed. Because laughter was all he knew what to do. Laughter was better than any shield. Better than any mask. No one knew how he felt inside, they only knew his vicious laughter and assumed.
He’d be happy to let them keep assuming into the next life.
Except–
…except…
The resentful energy swirled around his miserable corpse in waves of regret, a million different voices using their strength to claw at the living with vicious alacrity, and soon he would be one of the masses. Just another voice of many screaming for revenge or retribution or perhaps just screaming.
Just screaming the way he’d always wanted to when he laughed instead.
Except if he died like this, his home truly died too.
She was broken, he broke her in another fit of rage when she betrayed him once more and he regretted it. He regretted every horrible minute and she was gone .
He was gone too.
And that person …
They were all gone and dead and he would join the cloud of resentful energy alone, a hollow existence among so many.
It would be better to be shattered and gone –
He just wanted to go home .
The one thing that set Xue Yang aside from the mist of other ghosts clouding the world with their growing and powerful resentment and regrets was that he was once a human who knew how to control them all. Becoming one of their ranks didn’t cause this understanding to vanish, only to deepen . To know what it truly was to be this energy. To understand just why they screamed the way they did and just how each and every one of them regretted the way he did.
That his regret, so much stronger than the others, gave him more strength than hatred even could. Hatred was a seething and exhausting emotion that disappeared with enough despair. Regret haunted even those beyond feeling anything else.
Regret, a funny emotion that he’d always hated the sound of, had turned out to be an emotion so terribly powerful that he could choke the world with it.
And he wouldn’t accept it.
Xue Yang had always assumed that regret would make him weaker. Too weak to survive and too weak to thrive. What he’d entirely missed was how powerfully he hated regret.
He would not accept it.
He could fix this.
He had to fix this.
Thirteen years was a long time to go swirling in regret after regret after regret and he wanted each of those regrets gone . From the moment he'd been taught how to properly touch resentful energy the screaming in his head had never stopped. He’d never been able to fully calm down.
Resentment, as so many warned, destroyed your temperament and left you a shell of what you once were.
Thirteen years seeped in it and he didn’t even know who he was without it anymore.
Thirteen years.
The Yiling Laozu returned after thirteen years just the same, as though the gulf of time between life and death meant nothing at all. He came back just as powerful as ever and facilitated Xue Yang’s death with ease.
Was time really such a difficult bridge to cross? With all this powerful resentment around him and regret inside of him?
Was he really nothing more than a powerless particle of smoke with a cackling scream, a pile of meat among so many others, and an insignificant existence who could never fix anything?
Was he really as worthless as his many benefactors over the years had perceived him as? Nothing more than a temporary tool to be used and thrown away to rot into nothing but a shadow?
His strength curled around the resentful spirits and they screamed out of fear because of what he could do. What they felt he could do.
There were around twenty corpses piled up in what used to be his laboratory before he became one of them. There were around a hundred souls all coiled around his own and screaming endlessly.
He could feel their regret, so strong. So intense. So absolute.
Xue Yang learned a lot from Chang Ci'an, the day that the man left him for dead with a necrotic hand and so many broken bones inside his destroyed body. He learned that the naive are used and the clever always win.
He learned many things from Jin Guangyao in the years he spent under his vengeful tutelage to become a weapon for his own revenge. He learned that you have to be greedy and willing to betray anyone in order to succeed.
He learned quite a bit from Nie Huaisang, those scattered meetings spent collaborating to their mutual enemies' downfall and ultimately his own at the hand of his very own granted request. He learned the best liars will always win and the desperate were just as foolish as the naive.
With all his knowledge, it would be child’s play to coil the hearts of the damned to his command. To prey on their weakness the same way his own weakness had been abused since his earliest memories. It would be so easy to use each lesson from each of them to make him more tyrannical, more powerful, just as terrible as they all were except somehow worse .
Because he was always ‘worse’ by the mere nature of his own existence being ‘disgusting’ and ‘vile’.
Xue Yang learned a lot from Xiao Xingchen and A-Qing in those precious short years spent at home.
Learned how compassion healed the gaping hole inside of him far better than revenge ever had. Learned how to prioritize two lives to be as high as his own. Learned how the barest memory of those beloved moments gave him strength to struggle every day, no matter how hopeless and miserable it was because he needed it back. Learned that he could work beyond any sense of reason when he was working for them.
Xue Yang learned from Song Lan…
Learned a great many things.
But most of all, when his own final breaths left him and he finally let regret conquer his heart, Xue Yang finally learned from himself the lesson he wished he could have internalized so much sooner.
He had no desire to be like any of them. He didn’t want to succeed in life because he was more ruthless than Chang Ci'an, more manipulative than Jin Guangyao, more cunning than Nie Huaisang–
He wanted to succeed as himself .
The regrets he carried were his own. No matter who had influenced him, no matter who he’d learned from, he was the one who chose to follow their lead. And he was the one who had to live with the consequences of choosing to behave as they did.
If he was the only person left to carry the crushing weight of regret, he would like, at the very least, for those mistakes to be his own. Not the echoes of what others modeled for him.
He didn’t want ‘himself’ to just be nothing more than their echoes. As though he’d never been real at all. Even his worst and most heinous mistakes were ultimately exactly what he’d watched Jin Guangyao do to his own ‘beloved people’. Trick one into murdering the other and watch as it destroyed them both on the inside. As though he were nothing but the smiling man's cheap copy.
It was funny how in the end, the one least suspected would lead to his downfall. Xue Yang had been felled by A-Qing, underestimated all this time. And just like her, Nie Huaisang would come and avenge those taken from him.
It left Xue Yang without a real sense of identity, only the regret and knowledge that he had chosen to be an echo and therefore, every mistake was his own. To blame those he copied would be foolish, especially when he could have chosen to copy anyone else .
He could have chosen to be himself .
He wanted to have his own shadow.
He wanted to be that. Nothing more, nothing less, just to be Xue Yang . To find whatever his own strength was, not the strength borrowed by those who used him like a tool, but the strength that was all his own.
A strength that the people who waited for him at home might be proud of him for.
But he didn’t have the time to draw on that strength because he didn’t even know what it was yet, and in the swirling haze he only had so much time.
So he drew upon the strength of the man who taught him what compassion truly was and how it could be utterly incredible and reached out to each and every soul around him with a question rather than a command.
Wanna go back with me?