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Luo Binghe hadn’t actually died.
Now, he knew that everyone thought he had, which was both fortunate and unfortunate, as it meant that when it came down to it, no one thought to check on his grave, but it also meant that no one thought to check on his grave. Not even the wives that would have helped him.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Xin Mo was collected, melted into raw metal that he knew would never stay pure during the war that raged across the lands, leaving him with that tie finally severed inside him. Meng Mo had gone, fleeing when he realized that he would be dragged down with him if he didn’t, and eventually, where his palace had once stood had been cleaved a path straight to the Endless Abyss, a tether that couldn’t be undone.
It was a horrible thing, what had been done, and the fight left everything trembling and breathless for long decades as the last few desperately clinging threads of the different realms finally collapsed. Heaven was cast adrift, out of reach of mortals entirely, and the Endless Abyss with its new road redirected the might of it from fissures across the lands to one place, one pool of qi. One person.
Luo Binghe slept, uneasy and unwelcome, in a state near death for decades, then a century, then another still as what remained banded together to properly survive their mistakes. All that time, the Endless Abyss poured into him, much as Xin Mo once had, as once he’d done for others with every successive wife.
And then one day, it stopped, and a new war came, taking what had been a ruin above him and turning it into a battlefield anew, but they’d chosen poorly, and this time, it was too much for the laden lands, too much for the cultivators that remained to try to free the souls of the dead. The gravity of a place that had been given too much.
The wake of that battle was what finally let Luo Binghe take his first breath in, by then, centuries. It let him breathe through that horrible deathlike state where he dreamed but was trapped inside himself and freed him to dream properly, to reach outward. Not that it did him much good, surrounded by the dead as he was. Still, when people came to this place, were tormented by those souls, he could soothe them, calm them so their deaths weren’t quite so terrible. Sometimes, he could steer them back out.
These instances let him slowly, almost leisurely, become reacquainted with his body, and he didn’t know how long he’d been down there, well below the ground of the palace that had been collapsed upon him, once. Still, one day one of those souls returned. It was an odd one, truly, come thrice to this place where most only ever ventured once, or calmed from the outside in.
The oddity was enough for curiosity, and curiosity was more than he’d felt in so painfully long that he simply had to venture out, to know what it was that was reaching for him, had been tugging at his qi like a child at his skirts over and over again over the span of what must have been years.
He was in no pristine state, of course, his clothes beautiful, but tattered with time at the edges even under their spelled embroidery, and while his jewelry was intact, it was askew. Then again, his hair was longer than it had been before, needing extra loops to twist the curls up away from his face, meticulous to ensure the tangles wouldn’t worsen. He could see the claws, delicate but obvious on his hands, and doubted his eyes were any less blatant.
He looked like what he was, and as a Heavenly Demon what he always would be. There was too much inside him to hide behind humanity, now, and the very act of trying would be near impossible without reshaping himself. What would even be the point of such a thing?
No.
He just ensured he was covered enough as he shook away the last of the grave dirt, rich and fertile for all the dead and the caustic nature of the qi that had suffused it so long, and ventured out to see exactly who it was that came to this place of the dead and made a home for themselves, clearly wishing to remain.
He might even permit it.