Work Text:
Is it possible to resist forever?
The only thing that still troubles Jingliu is that she didn't resist for long.
Is it possible to come to one's end peacefully?
The flesh cursed by Abundance has never known peace.
Juicy fruit of destruction, Mara is a paradigm , a timeline looped into eternity.
The flesh cursed by Abundance seethes and begs to soothe and pacify the soul that has fallen into a forewarned fate.
Jingliu wanders aimlessly; her clothes are wrapped haphazardly, her hair is tangled, and her silhouette is stark white not due to pale skin at all – her face bears exhaustion and a bitterness that distorts her features.
Jingliu doesn't quite know where she's going. Her body feels not her own, moving without her knowledge, without the will or command of her brain – all the consciousness of the poor warrior is like glass, shattered into fragments of memory and shards of personality – and it seems to lead her past familiar planets and the untrodden Milky Way.
She is furiously disgusted with herself and her past, with Jing Yuan, with that unfortunate youth who became the man who survived the loss of his friends and her.
Terrible, horrifying, scary Jingliu.
Jingliu who has drunk Mara to the dregs.
The claws of the curse – pinching, twisting, tearing – is Jingliu.
Mara is everywhere – "there is no moon in the sky, you are its slice, painted not with silver!" – and everything irrevocably withers when Mara's icy breath burns her ear: "Yaoshi bless you, know this is the price exacted for eternal life.".
"Jingliu, Jingliu, Jingliu!" it escapes in a distorted voice, widens, and flies far away.
She laughs and chokes on her own name, holds her head, stops, trying to regain composure, but one palm has noticeably grown a crust of Abomination, and scales can be felt through the glove's fabric. She allows herself to breathe, drops her burning, wet face into her palms, plunges into adrenaline and the absence of the expected oblivion. She feels so bad – "you're not abandoning Xianzhou, you're just saving yourself; it's not your fault you mowed down so many warriors, it's Mara's fault, Mara, Master!" – but she continues to walk, terrifyingly cold and weakened, restores her wavering, dazed gait, and corrects the trajectory of her faltering steps, thinking through her leaden head with a drifting, murky consciousness.
"Save me."
They say she is from the Geniuses Society.
No genius can possibly save her.
They say the scent of rot and death follows her. They say she is a monster who meets with others, who hosts the dead. They say she does this for the worst purpose imaginable – to ascend to the Eons, to overcome life, to find herself where lives are created.
What a cruel madness: to try to become a God, to try to soar among the Gods, to wish for her own ruin. Jingliu would wish no one such a fate – neither in death nor in life.
They say she knows how the human body works, and – there are rumors – not even half of her research adheres to moral norms, but from personal knowledge..
..oh, Ruan Mei would understand her.
Jingliu meets her here: on the edge of space, far from the fleet, on the darkest floor of the famously self-absorbed Herta's station. Far from home it has led, subtly brought, guided past dolls with mechanical fillings, past unsettling lights, past the voracious Swarm, created by unknown hands; past a laboratory strewn with plum blossoms that gleam silver without moonlight, and look like perfectly ordinary flowers, yet something about them is wrong – a faint, familiar burning. Everything here is unnatural and caricatured… A greenhouse, no less.
In the air – an unusual lightness and sweetness.
It is quiet here: in the Isolated Zone, there are no people who could pay attention to the damned, dusty, and forgotten soul who has come here for reasons unknown. Flowers grow everywhere, powdery plum petals shed without the wind's touch, and among them, artificial lamps cast their rays. A welcoming, pleasant place, and as welcoming and pleasant is Ruan Mei: such individuals – the following pattern dictates – hide the most abominable evil within themselves..
The connection between them stretches like a trembling string, and somewhere within, in their very nature – a blessing from fate: not to avert one's gaze from the Genius, the enemy of humanity.
Mortal, gifted with intellect, blessed with knowledge, with a monstrous heart – as stone-hard and stern as a carved statue, as Jingliu is Ruan Mei.
The strings shimmer under her fingers, giving birth to sound, and ruan's quiet melody is almost deafening to Jingliu – unbearable, like to a rabid beast. Pink and red mingle in Jingliu's eyes, a bright, oppressive sign of her affliction – there is no iris, no pupil at all, but there is a wildness, a bloody liberation. Beneath her fingers, the instrument's strings falter.
Jingliu looks at Ruan Mei's profile, outlined by the light and appearing slightly blurred, elusive, melting away, and finally, speaks with a welcoming inclination.
Jingliu looks at Ruan Mei's profile, outlined by light and appearing a little blurry, elusive, melting, and finally speaks with a welcoming nod, putting on a formal demeanor. It doesn't matter how ugly, inhuman, or bad she looks due to her illness.
"Setting aside the rumors about you, they say you are a biologist?"
"A scholar, a scientist," comes the detached, businesslike reply—thinking about it seems both simpler and yet sends shivers down the spine. Aren't you afraid, the bringer of plague? Why, Ruan Mei?
Jingliu had heard more. Jingliu had seen more, Jingliu sees now: plum blossoms reach for the ceiling with a speed unnatural for ordinary plants, the plums grow, spread their branches, and carpet the floor with petals. Ruan Mei is not surprised by her arrival, pays no attention to the uninvited guest in her abode, turning halfway. And Jingliu suddenly realizes her thoughts are once again turning to the past.
Strings snap.
A hoarse laugh echoes in response.
She is a monster, she is sick, she is dead, she will burn hot and bright, and her skin will be consumed, leaving nothing of her but a vast, terrible wound.
"It's only a matter of time before a strong person like you falls," Ruan Mei rises cautiously from behind the table, perhaps deliberately, deceptively slowly, so that the monster doesn't latch onto her delicate throat. Self-preservation, the basic instinct of a victim—to retreat, flee, and hide; for her, these are almost indifferent concepts.
"Do you know me?" Jingliu sounds vulnerable-wounded, angered, almost breaking from the way her heartbeats falter, the way everything twists inside, almost falling from how acutely sounds, colors, smells resonate, how the Abomination truly looks behind the impenetrable glass of the capsule, but a blink—and the capsule is empty.
"Judging by your attire, I dare assume your home is in a place that values culture," and her voice sounds enchantingly soft, sympathetic, but her eyes are cold—the air grows cold too, stinging the skin, chilling the blood, and everything that is ice, ugly, sharp, and deadly, everything that is Jingliu. A wild, temperature contrast—dizzying, tangibly emotional, intoxicating, exciting, and seemingly tinged with pity. "What is the visual description of the illness?"
"Mara... They say you can help."
Flowers blacken and crumble, never reaching the ground. Along their stems, along the trunks of plum trees, along walls, along test tubes and equipment, stars of frost bloom unstoppably, and Ruan Mei leaves this phenomenon unnoticed, and Jingliu does not understand whose ice has been set in motion, does not understand why she endures the silence, but feels the vessels pulsing between her ribs, pumping living blood, like a stifled heart beating – abruptly and strongly.
Save me, if you can.
Save me so I can return home.
"The price of salvation is the price of birth."
Jingliu takes a sip of darkness and flounders in the sky-blue eyes turned towards her, sees her reflection, refracted in the laboratory light, healed by her, corrected, and, yielding to the outstretched hand, catches Ruan Mei's palm, clings to it, but, taking a step, does not hold on and finally falls, not metaphorically but quite tangibly, physically into her arms, clutching her shoulders painfully, burying her face in the hot neck.
Are you salvation, Ruan Mei?
Will you help, the Bringer blossoming plums?
"I dare not beg," Jingliu blinks, trying to clear away the nightmare, her own distorted voice. The flowers are black and wilted. "Your methods, they say, are effective, and I will agree to any."
In the way Ruan Mei tilts her head, in the coldness she exudes, she perceives an elusive similarity, the probability theory of her own end, and the magic of numbers.
Mara reshapes her inside out.
Nothing is visible, neither black nor colored. Will it remain "nothing" in her eyes? So be it.
"There is a way, will you go for it?"
The plums send roots into her with arteries and veins.