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Sizhui has not yet been in Lanling for a xun when Lan Xichen suggests that since Lan Zhan has no reason to remain in the Cloud Recesses, he might join him at the upcoming cultivation conference in Baling.
Since the fall of the Wen, the conferences have become common affairs—each one a chance for the major sects to come together to eat lavish food, gossip, night hunt for pleasure, and prove to each other how perfectly nonthreatening they are. Leaders who once devoted their time to honing their sects’ cultivational approaches or dispatching disciples to help the common people are now entirely dedicated to the mincing diplomacy of ensuring nobody thinks they are trying to become the next Wen Ruohan. Lan Zhan has little patience for their delicate manners and pretended feebleness; he is ashamed that insular inter-sect politics have drawn the attention of most cultivators away from the needs of the wider world.
Lan Zhan is in the library when Lan Xichen makes his suggestion. He is restoring a burnt scroll, patching the tattered edges with a film of ricepaper. It is peaceful, careful work. He is not glad to be interrupted.
Lan Xichen invites him to the conference, and Lan Zhan replies, without any pretense at considering the offer seriously, “No, thank you, ge.”
“There will be many cultivators there,” Lan Xichen says coaxingly. “You could meet someone, A-Zhan.”
“I do not wish to meet anyone,” Lan Zhan says, focusing intently on the scroll.
“Ah, of course not. But wouldn’t you come to represent the sect, at least?” Lan Huan asks.
Lan Zhan has missed Sizhui deeply since he left to train with Jin Ling under Luo Qingyang, who has served as the acting Jin sect leader for the past thirteen years. Now he misses him in a new way—if Sizhui were still here, Lan Zhan could give his regular excuse for avoiding any work that would take him away from the Cloud Recesses. My son needs me, he could say. I cannot leave him.
Now he finds himself without a valid excuse. The lack of any reasonable escape from his brother’s invitation makes him feel trapped, panicky.
“Drinking, netting low-level monsters, boasting about the past—is this what it means, to represent the sect?” he asks, more bitterly than he meant.
Xichen’s face smooths out into a mask of perfect blandness. He ducks his chin, smiling slightly.
“Of course,” he says. “How silly of me, to attempt to draw you away from the true work of representing the sect, which, according to your irreproachable habits, must happen only between the walls of this library.”
Has Xichen ever been cruel to Lan Zhan, before? Has he ever spoken to him so rudely? Lan Zhan does not think so. The shock of it is like the icy chill of the cold springs at mao shi.
Before he can respond, Xichen is whirling around and gliding from the library, his trailing sleeves fluttering in the furious breeze of his departure.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
Lan Zhan does not sleep well that night. The air in the Jingshi is humid and stifling. The familiar pain in his back spreads and creeps down his side, curling around the edge of hip and making his right leg go numb and heavy. Lan Zhan has seen many doctors since his back was lashed with the discipline whip until he was cut and bleeding from his neck to his waist. Most have been skillful, sympathetic. But none have understood that the numbness is worse than the pain—it makes him feel that his leg is not really his, that it is, instead, an alien limb clumsily attached to his body against his will.
Lan Zhan works his fingers down the muscle of his thigh, but even when he digs his nails in, there is no sensation. The deadness of his flesh makes him nauseous.
He tries to distract himself with meditation, but his mind whirls. Was Xichen right? Is his disdain for most of the sect-affiliated cultivators hypocritical?
While they have gathered in their banquet halls and dressed themselves in fine silks and arranged political marriages between their children and ignored the needs of the farmers and craftspeople and merchants, he has hidden himself in the Cloud Recesses and ignored the needs of anyone but Sizhui.
He does not regret the time he has spent caring for his son. He has made many mistakes in his life, but raising Sizhui is not one of them.
Yet—it is true, perhaps, that he has avoided the world. That he has excused his ignorance and carelessness as a parent’s dedicated focus. That he has allowed himself to turn away from others’ suffering, from the injustices he once swore to fight against.
He thinks of a clear night sky, a paper lantern warm and fragile between his palms, a drift of golden lights reflected in gleaming eyes. A body pressed close to his, a bounding laugh and a dizzying smile. A promise.
Wei Ying, he thinks. Am I still someone you could be proud of? Or have I failed you?
I fear I have become lost without you.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
He leaves at dawn with his sword, his guqin, his cane, and little else. He writes two notes: one to Lan Xichen, and one for Lan Xichen to send to Sizhui.
Lan Xichen’s says: I am sorry. I have left to represent the sect. I will go wherever chaos is, and attempt to bring peace and order.
Sizhui’s says: A-Yuan, I am going on a trip. I will meet you in Lanling for the mid-autumn festival, as we planned. Until then, listen to Luo Qingyang and be patient with Jin Ling. I will write often. I love you.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
Lan Zhan cannot fly standing for any length of time. Uncle knows this, and Xichen, and Sizhui—but he has kept it hidden from the rest of his sect. He prefers not to let the elders know how much their punishment continues to impact him.
For years, he had thought his back might eventually heal enough for him to fly again as he had before. But the tightness of his scars and the numb clumsiness of his leg make it difficult for him to respond rapidly to shifts and currents in the air.
Recently, he has been practicing a new method—holding his cane horizontally and tilting it, rather than his body, to balance himself. He is growing more comfortable with this adaptation, but it is still a work in progress. The bruises on his knees and ribs are evidence of his falls. He feels something like pride when he looks at them. He was not beaten by the discipline whip; he will not be beaten by what it left behind.
Still, he needs something more than his sword and his cane and his own two feet for the journey ahead. He does not know how far he will have to travel to find the chaos he is seeking.
In Caiyi, he bargains with a tailor who offers him a plain set of dove-gray cotton robes and a stack of coins in exchange for his layers of white silk.
Dressed in his new clothes, with his hair bound in a leather tie and his white ribbon wound securely around his wrist, he looks like any ordinary scholar or musician. When he enters the stable the Lan sect sometimes uses, the owner studies him dubiously, as if he cannot believe that such a plainly dressed man would have the funds for one of his horses.
In the end, Lan Zhan proves his assumption right. Not because he does not have enough to pay for a horse, but because he notices an old donkey in the furthest stall and immediately decides that she is perfect. The donkey’s legs are stocky, her belly is round, and her nose is white with age.
When Lan Zhan approaches her, she whuffs at him and continues chewing her hay in a bored and mildly disdainful manner. She seems like an animal who will not balk at chaos.
“This one,” Lan Zhan says to the stable owner, reaching out to touch the feathery tufts of hair at the edge of her tall ear. “I will pay whatever you want.”
•◦◌◌◌◦•
He calls the donkey Xiao Pingguo, because she stops just outside of Caiyi to nibble pink-blushed apples from a wild tree and refuses to move along until all the lower branches are bare.
“Are you stubborn?” he asks her, and she makes her same unimpressed huffing sound and twitches her ears.
“Good,” Lan Zhan says, feeling a vast kind of boldness, a wild sense of freedom, come over him. The sky is wide and smooth and blue. The dirt road ahead of him stretches further than he can see. “Good, Pingguo. I am stubborn, too.”
•◦◌◌◌◦•
They travel slowly. Xiao Pingguo cannot be rushed, and Lan Zhan does not mind the pace. He learns that he likes traveling. He likes wandering with no clear goal. He is sad only rarely, only when the road grows steep and they climb into the blue opal of a cloud, or when they stop to spend the night beside a river that reflects all the pinks and golds of the setting sun—when the beauty of the world strikes him all at once, and he turns to his side, or looks behind him, ready to share it, the words, Look, Wei Ying, already waiting on his tongue.
Then his heart feels full of a longing that is bigger than the whole world, which holds so many lovely things, but does not hold Wei Ying.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
First they go south to Tingshan, which is wetter and greener than Gusu. Lan Zhan stays in an inn for a night, mostly so he can sit quietly in a corner of the dining room, drinking a pot of weak green tea and listening in on the conversations of the people around him.
Most are engaged in ordinary griping or the common gossip of every farming town—a man complains to two friends about his neighbor’s ox trampling through his rice paddies; a group of young women argue good naturedly about which of them will marry first; a white-bearded man gives his grandson rambling advice over too many bowls of wine.
Lan Zhan thinks that maybe there is nothing for him here, until he hears a server inquire politely after a customer’s sister’s health as he sets a jar of wine and a bowl before him. The man shakes his head, his mouth drawn tight.
“Not well,” he murmurs. “They’re still following her everywhere. She doesn’t eat, she doesn’t sleep. She says he’s punishing her.”
Lan Zhan waits until the man has finished his drink, left a few coins on his table, and is about to leave before stepping neatly in front of him, blocking his path out of the room.
He holds his jade token with its white tassel out before him like a protective talisman as he introduces himself as a cultivator of the Lan sect.
“I can help your sister,” he says plainly.
“Ah, um,” the man says, half bowing, “thank you, gongzi, but I—I make wooden things, bowls and spoons. I cannot pay you what your services are worth.”
“There will be no cost,” Lan Zhan says, disturbed by the thought of a cultivator’s aid being considered a luxury commodity, something only accessible to the privileged.
“Are you sure?” the man asks. “Truly, I am not rich.”
Lan Zhan nearly smiles. “Neither am I,” he says—which is not a lie, in this moment; he has already spent the bulk of the money he brought from the Cloud Recesses on Pingguo. “I promise I have no interest in accumulating wealth. I only want to help.”
The man sighs and his bunched shoulders sag.
“It’s the bees,” he says. “They won’t stop shouting at her.”
•◦◌◌◌◦•
Xiao Pingguo spends the next morning eating apples and radish tops in the inn’s stable while Lan Zhan goes to meet A-Ding, the woman who is being haunted by bees.
It takes him less than one shichen to trace the origin of the swarm back to her childhood friend. He had loved her for her whole life, and had asked her to marry him with no doubt that she would agree. Though she had never shown interest in marrying him, he felt she owed it to him to accept his proposal because he had always been kind to her.
When she had rejected him as gently as she could, he had flown into a fit of rage and run into the woods like a rampaging animal, only to die after being stung by a cloud of frightened bees whose hive he had disturbed.
His vicious spirit had infected the bees, and they had found the woman in her home and begun to torment her day and night, buzzing around her head and shoulders, whining and shrieking at her in the dead man’s voice that she was ungrateful, stupid, ugly—that she would never marry, and would die alone and miserable.
Lan Zhan disperses the man’s spirit with his guqin, and the bees drop out of the air, exhausted and quieting, their whirring wings folding in and their little antennae drooping as they hit the ground.
A few manage to land on A-Ding’s hair and arms, clinging pitifully to her, and she strokes their fuzzy backs with a rueful expression.
When Lan Zhan offers to direct them back to the forest, she shakes her head.
“They have been as tormented as I have by this ordeal,” she says. “My partner grows beautiful flowers—I will take them to her garden. They can rest there, and then go wherever they like.”
Lan Zhan helps her scoop the sleepy bees into a woven basket—somehow, they remind him of the rabbits in the Cloud Recesses—while she tells him the story of how she fell in love with her partner, the gardener. It is a long tale, involving a misunderstanding that persisted stubbornly through exchanges of poetry, gifts of flowers, and tender embraces.
“I thought she was just being nice,” the woman laughs, “and she thought we had been courting for months! Isn’t that awful, Lan-gongzi?”
Not so very awful, Lan Zhan thinks. I let my Wei Ying’s whole life pass without telling him I loved him. But he does not want to break her cheerful mood, so he simply shakes his head.
“You both know, now,” he tells the woman.
“Oh, yes,” she says, her face glowing. “Now we both know it’s real.”
•◦◌◌◌◦•
From Tingshan, they work their way north again, heading towards Moling. The fields around them are open and grassy, bright with wildflowers and darting songbirds. Xiao Pingguo is fatter and slower than ever after her rest in the inn’s stable, but she sniffs the warm, pollen-scented air eagerly as she walks, and Lan Zhan thinks she is glad to be back on the road again.
He pats her neck and rubs the backs of her ears.
“Me too,” he tells her.
There is a polished wooden spoon and a jar of hair oil scented with rose petals in his qiankun pouch, and a lightness in his heart.
When he writes to Sizhui that night, from his camp beside a rushing stream, he tells him the story of the haunted bees and ends his letter with the words: The world is large, but I have done some good in it, today. I love you.
When he dreams, he is walking with Wei Ying through a garden filled with flowers and humming gently with bees. The air is perfumed. Wei Ying’s hand is held tight in his own.
There is nothing unspoken between them.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
Along the way to Moling, Lan Zhan hunts down a dangerous kudzu yao, liberates the uneasy soul of a laborer whose bosses had been too cheap to give him proper burial rites, and helps rebuild a medicine shop which had burnt down in a fire. He rescues a small black cat stuck in a tree, buys fried dumplings and red bean buns for a mob of scruffy street children after they try to steal his qiankun pouch, and exposes a number of false cultivators selling counterfeit talismans.
He goes wherever there is turmoil or wickedness. Sometimes he is needed as a cultivator, and sometimes all that is required of him is to lend his strength, or to offer a bit of kindness, or to listen. Lan Zhan is glad to be whatever people need him to be. He is glad to be useful.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
When they are not far at all from Moling, Lan Zhan begins to hear strange rumors about the Jiang sect leader—about Jiang Cheng.
Immediately, he is concerned. If the stories have spread this far, it is likely that they are more than just rumors. People say sect leader Jiang has become reclusive, that he spends his days lurking around the docks of Lotus Pier instead of performing his usual duties, that he orders eerie music to be played for him at all hours of the night.
And, most oddly, that he has fallen in love with a giant carp.
When Lan Zhan hears this last peculiar claim, he cannot stop himself from interrupting the storyteller making it.
“A carp?” he says, and the storyteller glares at him and says, snidely, “Yes, a carp. A carp as long as a person, with scales like jewels.”
A girl in the audience turns and peers curiously at Lan Zhan.
“Everyone knows,” she says. “Sect leader Jiang says no one can fish in his lakes. The fishermen are all very sad.”
“No one can fish…because of the carp?” Lan Zhan asks.
The girl sighs. “Everyone knows,” she repeats.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
They drop south, turning their backs on Moling.
Even as he urges Xiao Pingguo onwards, Lan Zhan is not sure he is making the right choice.
Yunmeng is half a xun’s ride to the west. What will he do when he reaches it? It is forbidden for any affiliated cultivator to enter another sect’s lands without being invited by that sect’s leader. It would be indecent of him to steal into Jiang Cheng’s territory, especially for the purpose of checking up on his mental fitness.
But if something is wrong with Jiang Cheng, if he is cursed or haunted or unwell, and his strange decisions are impacting the livelihoods of all the fisherpeople in Yunmeng, then it would be wrong of Lan Zhan to ignore the issue simply for propriety’s sake.
He rides as hard as Xiao Pingguo will tolerate for the first two days, and on the third wakes in so much pain that he cannot leave his bedroll. The muscles in his back clench and spasm, sending bolts of anguish crackling along his spine and out across his shoulders.
Lan Zhan is accustomed to this pain. He makes himself breathe and tries to loosen his muscles as much as possible, fighting against the natural instinct to tense and brace against each wave.
The spasms continue through the afternoon, and Lan Zhan sweats and stares up into the hot sun, his eyes watering. He bites the inside of his mouth to blood, and can only moan when Xiao Pingguo stands over him, curious or concerned, snuffling at the top of his head with her cool damp nose. The smell of her coarse fur is comforting—dust and crushed ferns—and she stays close to him, chewing placidly, nosing at his hair periodically.
At some point, the pain lessens to a dull throbbing, and Lan Zhan is able to sleep. When he wakes, it is late in the evening—the sky is plum colored and winking with the first thin stars, and Xiao Pingguo is asleep at his side, the movement of her ribs deep and slow.
For a moment, all he can feel is regret for the lost day. And then he is angry at himself, furious—he should have known it would happen this way. Of course the pain would come, and would be worse than it has been in years. He has left the Cloud Recesses and all his careful routines behind. He has pushed his body as if he is the self he was before the discipline whip almost killed him.
Under the anger there is a sense of distant pity for his body, one he often feels after an episode of pain. Not pity for himself. Just for the flesh his self inhabits.
These bones are innocent, he thinks. These muscles, these tendons, these sorry ligaments. They did not ask for any of this.
Slowly, he drags his body into a useable shape. He crawls on his knees through the cool wet grass, moving tentatively, considering the cost of each action.
He drinks a few mouthfuls of water. He crawls back to his bedroll.
He thinks again about the lost day, about the way his pain made him absent from the world.
A day is a small loss—Lan Zhan can bear it. He has borne so much worse.
Pingguo snores. Lan Zhan closes his eyes. Tomorrow is waiting.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
In the end, it takes Lan Zhan four more days to reach Yunmeng. Each day is slow and frustrating; the aches of his are body stretched thin over his desire to hurry, to make up for wasted time, to become busy and useful again.
But Lan Zhan forces himself to do everything carefully, even when it feels unnecessary. He uses his cane whenever he stands, trains Pingguo to kneel so he can mount and dismount more easily, and stops often to stretch.
Each evening, Lan Zhan finds a small town where he can trade coins and stacks of simple cleaning talismans for a soft bed and a warm bath. Before sleeping, he soaks in the hottest water he can tolerate until it goes lukewarm and his fingers are wrinkled and his very bones feel as pliable as cooked wheat noodles.
The one good thing about his slow pace is that it allows him time to gather more information about whatever is going on in Yunmeng.
The rumors have sharper teeth, this close to the Yunmeng border. Every market he passes through is humming with gossip about sect leader Jiang’s obsession with his beloved fish, which has doomed the fisherpeople and the lotus farmers and all the boatbuilders and net weavers to poverty. Now nobody is allowed to use the lakes at all—even traveling across them is banned.
In a restaurant where all the food is too spicy for him to swallow, Lan Zhan overhears a group of silk merchants wondering boldly if sect leader Jiang has gone mad, if he has been possessed by some dark force.
“Wasn’t he raised with that boy?” one of them asks in disgust, and Lan Zhan pays quickly and hurries past their table, not wanting to hear what they might say about that boy.
Passing by a gate behind which courtesans flutter their fans and study their potential customers, he catches a young woman giggling, suggesting to her companions that sect leader Jiang has had to take a fish for a lover since he could not find a wife.
Lan Zhan is briefly offended on Jiang Cheng’s behalf, before he remembers that Jiang Cheng would likely find his sympathy more offensive than the courtesan’s comments.
Not all of the stories are merely cruel or salacious. Some are actually disturbing.
Lan Zhan makes a habit of questioning every child he meets—most are surprised and pleased to have an adult listen seriously to them, and are eager to tell him about what they call the monster in the lakes.
“I thought it was a carp,” Lan Zhan says to one round-faced boy, and the child scoffs.
“It’s a monster,” he replies. “It ate up all the fish, and now it’s hungry for people.”
It seems that only children are brave enough to call the thing in the lakes a monster, but in the next town, Lan Zhan hears whispers that a number of cats have been snatched from the banks along the water, leaving only pawprints behind in the silt—so monster is probably the right term.
A carp, a monster, a fair sect leader turned suddenly capricious—Lan Zhan turns the pieces over in his mind, trying to make them fit together.
At least he can be certain he will find chaos in Yunmeng.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
When Pingguo scrabbles up to the flat top of a low bluff and Lan Zhan sees Yunmeng spread out below him for the first time, all he can think is that it is too beautiful to be home to a monster.
There is more water than land—lakes spilling into lakes like a series of silver coins melting together. Graceful buildings perched on the edges of the water like resting dragonflies, their forms reflected and wavering in the gently rippled surface. Whole networks of docks and floating pavilions stretching out towards the center of the lakes, where the water is such a deep green it appears almost black.
And everywhere, lotus flowers. White and pink and palest yellow, their buds heavy and waxy.
As he and Pingguo make their way in towards the center of Yunmeng, winding through the narrow marshy passages that lead between the lakes to Lotus Pier, the sweet green scent of the lotuses builds and thickens, filling Lan Zhan’s lungs. The air is moist and alive with little breezes, with mayflies and biting insects that pierce him behind his ears and leave tacky black streaks of blood down his neck.
Snakes and turtles and frogs slither away from Xiao Pingguo’s steady approach, disappearing into the reeds or slipping back into the murky water with a splash.
The sun is always hot and huge and low. Lan Zhan’s face and hands burn, then peel, then darken.
He should hate the heat, the sweat gathering in the creases of his robes, the incessant hum of the insects, the brackish boggy smell. But he does not. To hate this land would be to hate life itself, in all its abundance and messy persistence.
To hate it would be to hate the place Wei Ying called home.
He can imagine him here so clearly. Tiptoeing towards a log lined with basking turtles, his eyes brilliant with mischief, a net held behind his back. Napping in the dappled shade of an ancient cypress after a swim, his feet streaked with silt, his hair damp and drying in waves. Bounding after a hunting kingfisher, calling for Lan Zhan to look, look.
Here, with Lan Zhan. Here and as vibrant as the lakes and marshes of Yunmeng.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
Lan Zhan must finally admit to himself that what he is doing cannot be described as anything but spying when he makes his secret camp in the shadowed woods across the lake from Lotus Pier.
He makes a tent by draping an oil-treated cloth over a low, nearly horizontal branch and weighing the edges down with stones. He arranges his bedroll under the simple shelter, then builds up walls of leaves and light branches around the whole structure to disguise it.
For good measure, he tucks a few silencing talismans in among the greenery and slips one between the straps of Xiao Pingguo’s halter.
He cooks a simple dinner of ground millet and bitter wild greens, then stations himself at the edge of the water.
The sky is darkening and a cool evening wind is kicking up small waves on the surface of the empty lake.
On the opposite shore, Lotus Pier stands tall. It has been rebuilt to its original splendor, complete with gauzy banners that flutter in the wind and red-glazed rooftops that reflect the last rays of the setting sun.
But it appears to be as deserted as the lake it floats on.
Lan Zhan watches as the sky darkens and the silhouette of Lotus Pier’s main complex blurs into the forest behind it. The moon rises, half-full, and traces a silver path along the docks—but there is no sign of a monster, or a massive carp, or even Jiang Cheng himself.
Hai shi is nearly finished and Lan Zhan’s eyes are hot and dry with tiredness when he sees a string of lanterns floating above the longest dock. He squints, leaning forward, and realizes that the lanterns are hanging from long poles, and the poles are being carried by six servants dressed in midnight-blue robes.
Each one of them is carrying a large, shallow basket in their arms.
As Lan Zhan watches, they reach the end of the dock and, one by one, kneel down and place their baskets in the water, giving each a little push so that it glides smoothly out towards the center of the lake.
Then they turn and walk swiftly back along the dock, their lanterns bobbing in a line.
Lan Zhan tries to spot the baskets in the water, but they are too small and the lake is too dark.
Nothing else happens until just as he is settling into his tent to sleep—a large splash echoes across the water and is followed by a sharp smack, as of a body hitting the surface from some height.
Pingguo whickers uneasily, and Lan Zhan lies awake for a ke longer, straining his ears for any other sounds, trying to calculate if the noise was too loud to have been made by an ordinary fish.
But the night is as quiet as any night filled with insects and frogs can be, and Lan Zhan is asleep before the singing starts.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
The following night, Lan Zhan observes the same pattern: the servants march with their lanterns to the end of the dock and send their baskets out into the lake, where they disappear into the dark water.
He waits until midnight, listening, but there is only the lapping of the water against the pebbled shore.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
Lan Zhan eases into a strange new routine—he spends his days meditating and writing to Sizhui and weaving flowers into Pingguo’s mane. When he is well enough for it, he practices using his cane to balance himself on his sword, though he cannot lift above the trees for fear of being seen.
He watches the sluggish trickle of visitors into and out of Lotus Pier and observes the lake for signs of spiritual disturbance, but there is nothing noticeably strange.
In the endless quiet heat, his mind wanders often to Wei Ying. The lines between the present and the past blur easily here as they rarely do in the crisp, ordered world of the Cloud Recesses, and sometimes he almost sees Wei Ying in the sunlight, the flicker of his red ribbon, the dark blur of his robes.
One afternoon, he comes upon a nest of ants and drops down to greet them, peering at the delicate movements of their legs and antennae with a child’s pure joy, and he can almost hear Wei Ying laughing at him.
He finds his spirit split open anew by every tiny wonder in Yunmeng—the gentle unfurling of the lotuses, a deer watching him from the forest around his tent, the moon’s path on the still water.
He feels more at peace than he has for thirteen years.
And then his body begins to crumble, sagging under the long slow days of dreaming and the long dull nights of watching. It is as if his muscles have only been waiting for the right opportunity to give out.
There are no spasms, this time, but the ache in Lan Zhan’s back grows until the pain is like a sound, a pitched whine he cannot escape. His right leg becomes too weak to bear his full weight, and it takes him a quarter shichen to walk from his tent down to the water’s edge, dragging himself along with his cane.
Night after night, he watches the same servants carrying the same string of lanterns, delivering the same baskets. His spine aches. The cries of the cicadas in the trees and the frogs in the mud echo harshly inside his skull, grating at his nerves.
On one night, a full xun after his arrival Yunmeng, he is so furious at the lack of change—the lack of signs about whatever Jiang Cheng is keeping in his lakes—that he strips off his robes and stumbles into the cool dark water, his feet sinking deep in the velvety silt.
You cannot hide forever, he thinks to the monster. He falls forward into the lake, swimming fiercely until he can no longer touch the bottom and the strip of shore near his camp looks blurred and shrunken.
At last he stops, gasping for breath, and rolls over to float on his back and stare up at the black uncaring sky.
Nothing happens—no monster swims up from beneath him with open jaws; no gleaming carp leaps into the air to tempt him.
After a while, Lan Zhan swims back to land and sits in his wet clothes, watching the water, hardly blinking, daring something to emerge.
And then—something does. The servants have already come and gone, the baskets have already disappeared in their mysterious way. The night’s expected choreography is over.
But now something moves near the Lotus Pier docks, gliding smoothly. A round, dark, glossy shape, as shadowy as the water.
The shape pauses before the end of the longest docks, and then there is a flurry of motion and Lan Zhan realizes that the shape is a head, attached to a humanlike body—a body with arms, with hands, hands that are gripping the edge of the dock and arms that are hoisting the creature up. Lan Zhan takes it in in flashes—its pointed face, its pale back plastered with a wet mat of black hair, its coiling garnet-and-onyx tail.
Its tail.
So this is Jiang Cheng’s monster.
Effortfully, it arranges itself so that it is perched on the dock with the bulk of its tail trailing into the water. Lan Zhan knows that it is dangerous, that it is likely evil. But there is something lovely and fragile about the way it tips its face up towards the moon, as if it is bathing in the silvery light.
It rubs at its throat with one hand and begins to sing. The song is eerie, wordless, an inhuman lament.
But Lan Zhan knows it. It is his song. The one he composed for Wei Ying.
Is Lan Zhan dead, then? Has he drowned in the lake? Is his body cold and heavy, already tangled in the weeds and the murk?
He presses his palm to the gray pebbles under him, shifts his spine so the knotted pain in his lower back sparks. He is on the beach. He can still hurt. He is not dead.
He hunches his shoulders and rests his chin on his knees. Closes his eyes. Listens.
Wei Ying?
•◦◌◌◌◦•
In the morning, Lan Zhan convinces himself that the creature on the dock was just a dream. No one in the world besides Wei Ying has ever heard that song, and Wei Ying is gone.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
And yet, hai shi finds Lan Zhan waiting at the edge of the lake, chilled and sick with senseless hope.
It is the start of yin shi and he is almost asleep when he hears the slap of a fin. He opens his heavy eyes in time to see a vast ripple in the lake and a darting form swimming away from it, gliding just under the water. The creature breaks the surface near the docks and pull itself up to sit, shaking its head and spraying a mist of droplets from its sodden hair.
Again, it sings without words. Again, Lan Zhan knows the melody by heart.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
The creature comes the following night, and the one after that. Each time, Lan Zhan grows more certain that it is not a monster, not a creature, but instead his own Wei Ying.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
When the next night comes, Lan Zhan steps onto Bichen, holding his cane horizontally at waist-height.
“I will be back,” he tells Pingguo, who only snorts at him.
Then he flies out over the water, gliding just above the heavy lotus buds. The night is calm, and it is easy to balance himself. When it is time to turn towards Lotus Pier, he shifts the weight of his cane and Bichen’s point swings smoothly into position.
He lands at the plain side entrance he has seen the servants use when they bring the baskets out each night, and presses himself flat to the wall beside the doorway to wait.
Lan Zhan does not have to wait long. As soon as the sky is fully dark and the moon has reached its peak, the door creaks open and the six servants come rustling out, each one carrying the usual hanging lantern and large round basket.
Now Lan Zhan is close enough to see that the baskets are gently steaming and to smell the rich scents of ginger and chilies and grilled fish wafting from them.
“Hurry,” the first servant says to the others, looking nervously over her shoulder to gauge their progress.
“Or what?” snips the third in line, “He’ll bite off our fingers?”
The first servant shudders visibly. “Don’t say that,” she says. “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t!”
Lan Zhan waits until the sixth servant has turned to shut the door behind her before he whispers a silencing charm and taps her lightly on the shoulder. She freezes immediately, letting out a muffled groan of fear, then a noise of confusion at her inability to part her lips.
“Do not worry,” Lan Zhan says, stepping around to face her. “I will not hurt you. I only want to take your place.”
The servant blinks at him with round and uncomprehending eyes.
“Let me borrow your lantern, and carry your basket, and I will give you this,” he offers.
He presses his carved jade cloud ornament into the girl’s limp hand and takes the lantern pole and the basket from her unresisting grip.
The other servants have already stepped out onto the longest dock, and Lan Zhan hurries to join their procession.
On the water, there is no sound but the slap of their slippers, the nervous rasp of their breaths. Lan Zhan’s heart is thudding in his chest, and his palms are sweating—he is more afraid than they are, though his reasons are different.
“Stop,” the first servant hisses, and they all freeze in their line.
The first servant crouches and pushes her basket into the water before turning away and scurrying back towards Lotus Pier.
The others follow, one by one, and then it is Lan Zhan’s turn.
His basket is piled high with crisp-fried tofu and spiced skewered meats coated in glossy chili oil. He kneels at the edge of the dock and guides it gently out into the water.
As it floats further away from the dock, he takes the lantern from his pole and blows out its flame, leaving himself alone in the near-perfect darkness.
He squints at the dim shape of his basket, waiting for—yes, there it is. A pale hand creeping over the rim, searching for a tender piece of meat to snatch.
Lan Zhan sends an arch of blue light from his fingertips to the hand on the basket. He can feel the moment the binding/bonding spell locks into place—a tug on his own spiritual power, a twitch that says he has caught—someone. Something.
Lan Zhan tugs back, wrapping the string of energy around his palm.
Whatever is on the other end—not Wei Ying, he cannot dare to think that it could be Wei Ying—thrashes in the water, stirring up a pale foam of bubbles around the length of its body.
It is strong, but Lan Zhan is stronger. He reels it in, pulling steadily even as it resists, even as it twists and splashes, making a piteous whining sound.
He glimpses the filmy red fins flaring from its forearms, the sharp dark nails, the gills gashed into the sides of its long neck.
His mind flickers between two understandings—monster and Wei Ying.
The blue binding string sizzles and snaps. A wave of lakewater swells and sloshes over the dock, soaking his robes. Then something wet and slick and heavy is upon him, pushing him back hard so that his skull thumps against the wooden dock.
Cold fingers wrap around his face, covering his eyes.
“Don’t look, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying orders.
•◦◌◌◌◦•
It is Wei Ying. Really, Wei Ying.
The voice is Wei Ying’s voice. The wriggling is Wei Ying’s. The hands on Lan Zhan’s face are Wei Ying’s, though they feel impossibly smooth and cold, and he will not remove them.
“I might scare you,” he says. “Lan Zhan—it’s been so long! I’m not the same as I was.”
“You will not scare me,” Lan Zhan tells him. Wei Ying. Wei Ying! He wants to see him, to hold him, to watch him breathe.
“You don’t know that!” Wei Ying says. “I have teeth—biting teeth, and my skin is gray, and I have a tail. I didn’t want you to find out like this, I had a whole plan. Jiang Cheng was going to invite you here for a night hunt, and I was going to swim up through the lotuses with petals in my hair, and you were going to see me—" he pauses, and swallows, and says, "—and fall in love with me right away, like in a poem.”
Under Wei Ying’s chilled fingertips, Lan Zhan’s eyes flood with hot tears.
“Oh,” Wei Ying’s voice says. “Oh, no, no. Okay, Lan Zhan—you want to look? You want to see how bad it is? I’ll let you. You can. Hey, stop that. Stop crying. You—”
He pulls his hands away, and there he is.
The shape of him is different—his eyes are flecked with gleaming red sparks, his nose is flatter, and his dark lips are parted around a mouth full of needle-fine teeth. But he is still Wei Ying. He ducks his chin as Lan Zhan studies him, his wet eyelashes falling sweetly on his ashy cheeks.
“Pretty bad, huh?” he asks hoarsely, and Lan Zhan shakes his head.
“Wah, Lan Zhan, don’t lie to me,” Wei Ying scolds, flicking his tail against Lan Zhan’s shins.
Lan Zhan shakes his head again.
“You have changed,” he says. “So have I. But Wei Ying—there is no change that could stop me from loving you.”
•◦◌◌◌◦•
Wei Ying kisses him, and Lan Zhan kisses back, pressing up into him until his cold mouth warms.
“I came back for this,” Wei Ying pants into his mouth. “For you, Lan Zhan. I came back from the dead just to see your face again.”
•◦◌◌◌◦•
Wei Ying pulls him into the water, and for the first time Lan Zhan notices how much lighter his body is in the lake, how much more fluidly he can move when he is not on land.
They float together, Wei Ying’s tail twitching lazily to hold them up.
“How did you come back?” Lan Zhan asks, and Wei Ying explains.
“I was in a kind of waiting place,” he says. “A ghost land. But I knew I couldn’t stay—I had to get to you. So I wandered everywhere, searching for a way out. And then I found a place that was like the xuanwu cave—bigger, but otherwise just like it. Do you remember how we escaped that one? It was the same in the ghost land cave—I saw a stream of water flowing to the outside world, carrying lotus petals on it. And so I dove into it and let the current pull me where it wanted, and when I came up into the air I was here, and Jiang Cheng was shouting at me and also crying, and I was alive again but like this—with a tail, and gills, and a mouth full of teeth I kept cutting my cheeks on.”
“And so you waited here, where Jiang Cheng could feed you and keep you hidden?” Lan Zhan asks.
Wei Ying must hear the secret jealousy in his voice.
“I wanted to come to you,” he says, clinging tighter to Lan Zhan’s shoulders. “But how could I, er-gege? A-Cheng was so lonely. I even had to steal some cats for him, to keep him company.”
He chuckles softly, sadly, and Lan Zhan waits for him to go on.
“Once I thought you and I would travel everywhere together,” Wei Ying says. “Righting the wrongs of the world. But I'm trapped, now.”
Lan Zhan thinks of how far he has come to find Wei Ying, to hold him here in this silver lake under the brightening sky. He thinks of the path he is still building for himself, the one that curves and loops, allowing space for rest and wonder. Allowing time for slowness and imperfection.
“A long time ago, you told me you would choose a single log path through the dark, if it was right,” he says, and Wei Ying nods, nuzzling his cheek against Lan Zhan’s.
“I was not brave enough to follow you, then,” Lan Zhan continues. “I am now—Wei Ying, there is water flowing through every town and city in our world. What is a river, if not a rare path for those who are bold enough to travel it?”
Wei Ying tips his head back and laughs in delight. The fragile edges of his gills flutter.
“Do you mean it?” he asks.
“I mean it. I will go wherever you go,” Lan Zhan tells him.
“Where first?” Wei Ying wonders.
“Lanling,” Lan Zhan says. "There is someone there who will want to see you. And then—anywhere. Anywhere we can go together.”