Work Text:
The System disappeared before Shen Yuan properly understood that he no longer had a body.
There had been no pain that he could remember, nor any suitably dramatic final moment to mark the boundary between one life and the next. One instant he had been himself, surrounded by the familiar clutter and noise of a world he understood, and the next there had come a sickening sensation of displacement—as though something had hooked beneath his ribs and pulled while the rest of reality remained where it was supposed to be.
Then there was darkness.
Not the ordinary darkness behind closed eyelids. Shen Yuan discovered that almost immediately, because his first instinct was to blink and nothing happened. There was no corresponding movement, no faint pressure where eyelids should have met, no change at all. The darkness remained absolute and strangely depthless, neither close enough to touch nor distant enough to look into.
Before he could decide which part of that was most concerning, pale blue light appeared.
It did not appear in front of him, exactly. There was no longer any direction he could confidently call in front. It simply imposed itself upon his awareness with the bland confidence of something that had never considered whether it was welcome.
[System activation in progress.]
Shen Yuan had never in his life been so happy to see ugly blue text.
Relief rose in him so sharply that he almost laughed.
Almost.
He had not yet realised that he could not do that either.
[Welcome, User—]
The characters flickered.
For a fraction of a second the interface vanished altogether, then returned skewed and incomplete, blue bleeding into white around the edges.
[Welcome, U—#ERR_******]
[Current identity: X—]
[Scenario loading.]
[Scenario lo—]
The screen spasmed hard enough that Shen Yuan instinctively tried to recoil. Nothing moved. He did not know what he expected the System to do when it failed, but turning an alarming shade of red had certainly not been high on the list.
[CRITICAL ERROR.]
[Host configuration incompatible.]
[Attempting emergency reassignment.]
"Excuse me?"
He did not hear his own voice, for there was none.
The System continued regardless.
[Attempting emergency reassignment.]
[Attempting—]
[ERROR.]
The interface split down the middle.
For one absurd moment Shen Yuan could still make out the remains of its final message, suspended in luminous fragments around him.
[Please wai—]
Then those fragments went dark and nothing took their place.
Shen Yuan waited several seconds before attempting, cautiously, System?
There was no response.
System.
Still nothing.
Hey.
The surrounding darkness remained unimpressed.
This isn't funny.
It was around then that he noticed he was not breathing.
The discovery should have produced panic. Instead, for a few seconds, his mind simply failed to understand what it was observing. He was not holding his breath. There was no pressure in his chest, no ache in his lungs, no involuntary tightening of muscles demanding air. The machinery of breathing was not malfunctioning.
It was simply absent.
Shen Yuan tried to inhale deliberately—nothing.
He reached instinctively for his chest and found that he had no arms with which to do it.
That was when panic arrived.
He searched for his hands first, because hands were simple things and surely he could find those. Fingers, palms, wrists. He tried to curl them into fists. He tried to spread them. He tried to feel his nails digging into his skin.
There was nothing.
He searched lower.
No legs.
No feet.
No tongue pressing against his teeth. No jaw to clench. No pulse battering against the inside of his throat. No eyes, despite the stubborn impression that he ought to be able to open them if only he tried hard enough.
His consciousness pressed outward and encountered something, but it was nothing like flesh. Hardness. Length. An edge. A sense of cold that was not temperature so much as an intrinsic property of whatever he had become.
System.
Nothing.
System!
Something answered.
Not the System.
A pulse of warmth stirred somewhere beyond him.
Shen Yuan went still.
That, admittedly, did not require much effort.
The sensation strengthened. Something alive was moving nearby. He could not see its shape or hear its approach, yet somehow he knew the slow movement of blood inside it. He knew where qi gathered along its meridians. He knew the warmth of its flesh with an intimacy that would have been nauseating had he possessed a stomach.
Then another sensation opened inside him.
Hunger.
It was unlike any hunger Shen Yuan had ever known. There was no hollow belly behind it, no saliva gathering beneath his tongue. It was simply wanting: vast, immediate, threaded through every part of him. The living thing nearby contained blood and qi and violence and fear, and something intrinsic to Shen Yuan's new existence leaned eagerly towards all of it.
The creature stopped.
Shen Yuan recoiled from his own instinct.
No.
Perhaps it felt him.
Perhaps it felt whatever he had become.
Either way, it fled.
Long after its presence disappeared, the hunger remained.
Shen Yuan had read enough badly structured cultivation novels to understand that none of this was promising.
Ancient weapon. Demonic qi. An instinctive appetite for blood and resentment. Darkness so thick with spiritual pollution that even without a proper body he could feel it pressing around him.
He thought about Proud Immortal Demon Way.
He thought about the Endless Abyss.
He thought about a certain sword.
"No," he tried to say.
His consciousness pushed again against the prison around it. Hard, narrow, sharp.
A blade.
For several moments Shen Yuan managed not to think its name.
Then the obvious became unavoidable.
Xin Mo.
He had transmigrated into fucking Xin Mo.
For the first stretch of his new existence, Shen Yuan survived primarily through indignation as it was more manageable than terror.
Of all the things the System might conceivably have put him into, a sword seemed almost maliciously specific. Other transmigrators got bodies. Even terrible bodies were still bodies. Bodies could walk away from unpleasant situations. Bodies could sleep.
Bodies had hands.
At this point, even becoming Shen Qingqiu—the human stick himself—would be better than this.
Shen Yuan had never before considered hands an especially luxurious feature of human existence. He revised that opinion within what he estimated to be the first hour.
He also revised his opinion of the System from incompetent bureaucratic nightmare to personal enemy.
He spent a considerable amount of time preparing complaints for its inevitable return. He criticised its programming, its user interface, its lack of fail-safes and its apparent disregard for basic consumer rights. He informed it that "host configuration incompatible" was not an acceptable explanation for turning a paying—well, technically not paying—customer into cutlery.
Possessed, demonic, protagonist-corrupting cutlery, but that was hardly better.
The System did not return to defend itself.
Eventually Shen Yuan exhausted even his ability to maintain a one-sided argument and was forced to confront the more immediate problem.
He knew where Xin Mo was.
More importantly, he knew who would eventually come to find it.
Luo Binghe.
The thought gave the shapeless future edges.
Luo Binghe survived the Endless Abyss. Luo Binghe fought his way through it, awakened his heavenly demon heritage and found the legendary demonic sword that would later allow him to tear holes between realms as casually as other men opened doors. It was one of the central turning points of the novel.
Xin Mo was part of the plot.
Therefore Xin Mo could not remain abandoned forever.
Therefore Shen Yuan could not remain abandoned forever.
The reasoning was so simple that he clung to it without examining it too closely.
Eventually Luo Binghe would pick him up, and then Shen Yuan would work out the rest.
Perhaps the connection between wielder and weapon would allow communication. Perhaps he could speak directly into Luo Binghe's mind. Perhaps the System had only crashed because he had arrived before the relevant scenario and would reboot once the protagonist entered the scene.
He might even be able to improve things.
Xin Mo had contributed substantially to Luo Binghe's later instability, after all. If Shen Yuan was Xin Mo now, perhaps he simply wouldn't do that. He could refrain from whispering murderous suggestions into the protagonist's ear. He could encourage emotional regulation. He could be a morally responsible ancient demonic artefact.
There were worse roles.
Probably.
And, until Luo Binghe arrived, Shen Yuan only had to do one thing.
Wait.
The trouble was that the Endless Abyss did not have days.
Shen Yuan did not understand how important that would become until he tried to count them.
At first he counted seconds. Seconds were familiar. Sixty became a minute, sixty minutes became an hour, and twenty-four hours could become a day even if there was no sun to confirm it. The method lasted for what he thought might have been seven hours before a creature passed near enough for its qi to catch his attention and he lost track somewhere in the four hundreds.
He started again.
The second attempt lasted longer. The third ended when he realised he had repeated forty-seven and could no longer determine whether he had done it once or several hundred times.
After that he tried using music. Songs had lengths. Albums had order. He reconstructed track lists from memory and played them internally from beginning to end, only to become trapped for an indeterminate period trying to remember whether one track had come before another.
Sleep would have solved the problem, at least partially.
Xin Mo did not sleep.
This frightened Shen Yuan more than he wanted to admit.
Human consciousness was not meant to be continuous. Even the worst day ended eventually. However miserable a person was, however badly the hours dragged, there remained the possibility of lying down and surrendering awareness for a while.
Xin Mo possessed no such mercy.
Worse, Shen Yuan had begun to suspect sleep was not the only ending denied to it.
He did not breathe. He did not eat, whatever the sword's hunger insisted. He had no heartbeat to stop and no flesh to weaken. He had no idea whether an ancient demonic weapon could die of age, and Proud Immortal Demon Way had certainly never bothered to mention Xin Mo rusting peacefully into oblivion.
He decided not to think about that.
There was no eyelid to close over the world. No exhaustion heavy enough to drag him under. He could retreat into thought, but he could not stop thinking.
So he learned the Abyss instead.
Creatures passed near him often enough in those early periods. Shen Yuan never saw them, but in time he learned to distinguish the shape of one living presence from another. Some were little more than thin sparks of qi that vanished the moment Xin Mo's aura stirred, others were dense, ugly knots of spiritual power whose approach pressed against him from astonishing distances.
Sometimes they fought.
Sometimes they killed each other.
Every death taught Shen Yuan something new about the body he no longer had: blood had a taste even without a tongue, qi could be rich or thin, clean or rancid. Fear carried its own flavour, as did resentment—it was almost sweet.
He hated knowing these things.
The sword's hunger lived beneath his disgust like an animal beneath floorboards. Whenever something bled nearby, the entire blade seemed to wake. Whenever rage or desperation flooded the caverns, that terrible absence inside him opened eagerly towards it.
At first Shen Yuan lectured himself at length about ethical conduct and personal responsibility. He would not consume random monsters simply because his metaphysical digestive system found them appealing.
By what he estimated might have been the first few hundred hours, these lectures had become considerably shorter.
Still, Luo Binghe would come.
That remained certain.
Luo Binghe always came.
For a while, Shen Yuan entertained himself by imagining their eventual meeting.
He constructed Luo Binghe from what he remembered of the novel: bloodied, suspicious, beautiful in that unfair protagonist way Airplane had insisted on mentioning every few paragraphs, his hand hovering cautiously above Xin Mo's hilt.
Congratulations on surviving the Endless Abyss. Please don't panic, but your sword is haunted.
No.
Luo Binghe, before you pick this senior up, there are several important matters we should discuss regarding—
Worse.
Protagonist! Finally! Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for you?
That one made Shen Yuan uncomfortable enough that he stopped rehearsing introductions for a while.
Instead, he imagined what would happen afterwards.
Sunlight became involved surprisingly often. Not because Xin Mo required it; Shen Yuan was fairly certain sunlight meant nothing to a sword.
But Shen Yuan remembered it.
He remembered the shape it made on his bedroom floor. The heat of his phone against his palm after too much scrolling. Air-conditioning humming behind ordinary household noise. Da-ge opening a cupboard in the kitchen, meimei calling from another room to bring more snacks. Er-ge asking who had stolen a charger that had almost certainly been his own responsibility.
He remembered his mother complaining about a bowl left soaking in the sink because Shen Yuan had promised to wash it later. At the time, these had not seemed like things worth preserving.
Now he replayed them carefully.
The chipped edge of a mug.
The texture of his blanket.
The sound of keys dropped onto the table beside the door.
The particular pitch of a family member saying his name when they wanted something and when they were angry and when dinner was ready and when—
He had not known memory could erode until he had nothing new with which to replace it.
At first he reconstructed whole rooms effortlessly; later he discovered gaps.
Were the curtains in his bedroom grey? He thought they were.
Perhaps beige.
What had been sitting on the shelf beside his desk?
Which side of the sofa did his brother usually take?
Had the kitchen table always been rectangular, or was that something his mind had supplied because a table needed a shape?
Of course it had been rectangular. It must have been. He could recall it.
Trying to catch the fleeting pictures—and reconstruct them when he failed—left behind something his mind insisted on interpreting as bitterness.
The uncertainty was killing him.
After that he began reviewing his memories deliberately, as though they were documents that needed regular backups. Faces. Names. Voices. Rooms. His old address. The layout of the apartment. His mother's hands. His siblings' expressions when they were trying not to laugh.
Home.
He repeated it all until repetition began to alter the memories too.
And through it all, beneath every thought, the promise remained.
Luo Binghe would come.
At some point, without Shen Yuan being able to identify when, that promise changed tense.
Luo Binghe should have come.
Proud Immortal Demon Way's timeline had always been a mess. Airplane had contradicted himself constantly, compressed months into paragraphs and stretched single encounters across chapters when he needed to make word count. Perhaps Luo Binghe had spent much longer in the Abyss than Shen Yuan remembered.
Perhaps Shen Yuan's measurements were wrong.
Who was he kidding, they were obviously wrong.
Without sleep, hunger, sunrise or any other physical rhythm, he had no way of knowing whether his sense of duration still corresponded to anything outside his own mind. What felt like months might have been days. What felt like years might have been considerably less.
Or considerably more.
Then another possibility occurred to him.
Perhaps Luo Binghe had not fallen yet.
Shen Yuan's thoughts stopped.
Xin Mo had existed before Luo Binghe found it.
Of course it had.
But how long before?
He searched his memory of the novel and found only scattered pieces of useless lore. Something about the sword's forging. Or had that been another weapon? Xin Mo had once belonged to—
Had it belonged to anyone?
Airplane had written millions upon millions of words and apparently never bothered to include the single detail Shen Yuan now needed more than anything else.
When had Xin Mo been left here?
A decade before Luo Binghe?
A century?
A thousand years?
Maybe Luo Binghe had not been born.
Maybe Shen Qingqiu had not been born.
Maybe Cang Qiong Mountain did not exist yet.
Maybe entire dynasties would rise and vanish in the human realm before the opening chapter of Proud Immortal Demon Way.
For the first time, Shen Yuan understood that waiting only remained bearable while there was some imaginable end to it.
System.
Nothing answered.
He tried again.
Then again.
He could no longer remember when asking became pleading.
The System did not return.
That was when anger finally became easier than fear again.
He had done everything correctly. He had waited. He had been patient.
He had resisted eating anything despite having apparently been designed by the laws of the universe to crave blood, rage and spiritual corruption.
He had endured because Luo Binghe was supposed to come.
That was what stories did. One event led to another. A chapter ended because the next chapter existed. Even suffering had shape when it belonged to an arc.
But Shen Yuan had been placed somewhere outside the pages.
Nothing progressed here.
Nothing cared that he was waiting.
Something living wandered too close.
Shen Yuan struck at it before he understood what he was doing, and power erupted from the blade he inhabited.
The creature's qi vanished so quickly that Shen Yuan had no time to register its death. One moment it existed—a complicated living pattern of blood and fear and instinct—and the next there was nothing.
Silence followed.
Then satisfaction rolled through the sword.
Warm.
Heavy.
Full.
Shen Yuan recoiled from it and tried to get more of that feeling at the same time.
Oh.
Something in Shen Yuan broke, and the half-sated sword rejoiced.
Where was he?
Where was Luo Binghe?
Where the fuck was he?
Demonic qi flooded outward.
The stone surrounding Xin Mo trembled. Somewhere in the dark, living things startled into movement.
You're supposed to be here.
More power.
Creatures began fleeing.
Shen Yuan felt them now in numbers he had never realised were present: dozens, then hundreds, abandoning tunnels, burrowing deeper into stone, running blindly through the Abyss as if some ancient predator had awakened beneath their feet.
Luo Binghe!
The name went nowhere.
Xin Mo screamed instead.
Its aura filled the cavern. Stone split. Demonic qi grew thick enough to choke creatures that had evolved inside the Endless Abyss itself.
Where are you?
Nothing answered.
You're late.
Nothing.
YOU'RE LATE.
Shen Yuan raged until there was no one left nearby to feel it.
Only then did he notice the silence.
Before, there had always been something.
Blood.
Qi.
Motion.
Life brushing against the edges of his awareness.
Now—
nothing.
He had frightened them all away.
He had made himself alone.
For some time, Shen Yuan apologised to the monsters.
He did not know how long.
They did not return.
There were supposed to be stages to grief.
Shen Yuan remembered reading that somewhere, although he also remembered that the neat progression people liked to repeat was mostly a simplification. Grief doubled back. It contradicted itself. Anger could follow acceptance; bargaining could return years after someone thought themselves finished with it.
That seemed reasonable.
He had managed denial.
He had certainly managed anger.
Bargaining was more difficult when there was no one listening.
System, if you come back, I won't complain.
Nothing.
I'll do every mission.
Nothing.
I'll help Luo Binghe.
Nothing.
I'll help Shen Qingqiu.
Nothing.
At some point he promised to say something complimentary about Airplane's writing.
Even that failed.
The bargains changed.
I don't have to go home.
Nothing.
Just give me a body.
Nothing.
It doesn't have to be mine.
Nothing.
I don't even need to be human.
That one was a lie, he wanted hands.
The desire became so intense that eventually Shen Yuan made them.
Not real ones.
He discovered, almost by accident, that his mind could construct what reality refused to provide. He began with five fingers, because five seemed important. Nails. Knuckles. The old faint scar near his thumb.
He imagined closing them into fists.
Opening them again.
He gave the hands wrists, then arms.
A chest.
Legs.
A face.
Once he had rebuilt enough of himself, he gave that body somewhere to exist.
His bedroom came first.
The bed stood against the wall.
The curtains were grey.
Probably.
His computer sat on the desk, cables tangled beneath it exactly as they ought to be. A glass stood beside the monitor. His phone lay charging close enough for him to reach without getting up.
Shen Yuan sat on the bed.
Nothing happened.
So he remembered what sitting had felt like.
The mattress yielded beneath his weight.
He pressed one hand against the blanket and gave it texture.
Soft.
A little warm.
He lay down.
For the first time since his transmigration, Shen Yuan closed his eyes.
There were still no eyes in the Endless Abyss.
Xin Mo remained awake.
Shen Yuan simply stopped being there.
Morning came because he decided it should.
Light gathered behind the curtains. Someone moved in the kitchen. A door opened. Water ran through pipes hidden in the walls.
His mother called his name.
Shen Yuan went to breakfast.
It became easier with practice.
His siblings came and went. Da-ge complained that Er-ge had taken something that wasn't his. Meimei stole food from Shen Yuan's plate. His mother asked whether he had slept at all or spent the entire night on the computer again.
He complained about the weather.
He showered, changed clothes, checked his phone.
He talked and hugged.
For a while, this was almost enough.
The problem was that nothing in the world could surprise him.
Every message arrived because Shen Yuan had imagined the sender typing it. Every news article contained only information he already knew. His brother's jokes always reached their endings before they were spoken out loud. His mother never asked a question Shen Yuan had not put into her mouth.
No one interrupted him unless he decided they would.
No one entered a room unexpectedly.
No one remembered anything Shen Yuan had forgotten.
He stopped checking his phone.
Still, home was better than the Abyss, so he remained there for longer stretches.
He gave himself weather: rain tapping against the windows, summer storms, a winter afternoon when darkness came early and the apartment felt warm by comparison.
He gave himself seasons because seasons meant time was moving somewhere.
Sometimes the sword dragged him back.
A creature would approach; Xin Mo would taste its qi. Hunger would tear through the walls of his bedroom and Shen Yuan would find himself once again without skin, without breath, without hands.
He usually frightened the creature away.
Then he went home again.
After a while, he learned to leave more quickly.
After longer still, he sometimes forgot there was somewhere to return from.
Those were the best times.
His mother was making dumplings when Luo Binghe found him.
Shen Yuan sat at the kitchen table, pinching dough closed with fingers that did not exist.
The table was rectangular.
He had decided that years ago.
Or yesterday.
It was difficult to say.
His mother had flour on one cheek. Shen Yuan could not remember whether she had ever actually made dumplings from scratch. Perhaps that had been someone else. An aunt. A grandmother.
It did not matter.
"You're putting too much filling in," she told him.
"I'm not."
"You are."
"I know what kind of dumplings I like."
One of his siblings laughed.
Shen Yuan turned to glare—
—and someone touched the hilt.
The kitchen disappeared so completely that for one impossible moment Shen Yuan believed it had been the real place and this was the hallucination.
Then blood touched Xin Mo.
Qi rushed through him.
Warmth.
A hand.
A human hand.
Shen Yuan's entire awareness contracted around it.
He had forgotten.
He had forgotten what it meant to be touched.
The cultivator holding him was injured. Exhaustion fractured the flow of his qi; blood coated his palm and ran between his fingers. Beneath the ordinary patterns of cultivation burned something darker, deeper, so perfectly suited to Xin Mo that the sword recognised him before Shen Yuan did.
He knew that qi.
He had waited for it.
How long had he waited?
The question vanished beneath something too large to contain.
Binghe.
Xin Mo rang.
Not aloud. The vibration travelled through steel, through Luo Binghe's hand, through the thin connection forming between wielder and weapon.
Luo Binghe nearly dropped him.
The reaction filled Shen Yuan with such violent joy that if he had still possessed a human body it might have hurt.
Binghe.
The young man froze.
You came.
Years—if they had been years; centuries, hours, whatever the Abyss had made of them—collapsed into that single point of contact. There was a person here. A person. Someone who belonged to the story. Someone Shen Yuan knew.
Proof that the world outside him had continued existing.
Proof that the plot had not forgotten him.
Proof that he was not the only mind left anywhere.
You came.
Luo Binghe could not hear the words. Shen Yuan understood that almost immediately, but something of the feeling seemed to pass between them. The protagonist's grip shifted. Suspicion. Wariness. Pain.
Alive.
So alive.
The relief lasted perhaps a second.
Then something ugly rose beneath it.
Where were you?
Xin Mo shuddered.
Luo Binghe's qi flared.
Do you have any idea how long I waited?
No answer.
Where the fuck were you?
The absurdity of it reached Shen Yuan even while the rage grew. Luo Binghe had done nothing. Perhaps he had fallen into the Abyss only days ago. Perhaps Shen Yuan truly had arrived centuries too early.
None of that mattered.
He had waited for Luo Binghe until waiting had hollowed him out.
Now Luo Binghe was here.
Now.
You're late but that's alright, you're here now. I might learn to forgive you.
The hand tightened around his hilt.
Luo Binghe lifted the sword.
His intent flowed through their connection with startling clarity.
Not words.
Need.
Out.
Escape.
Xin Mo knew what to do.
The knowledge had always existed inside the weapon, older and deeper than Shen Yuan's presence.
Cut, cut the place where one world ended and another began.
Find somewhere else.
Open.
Luo Binghe poured demonic qi into the blade.
Possibility exploded through Shen Yuan.
For the first time since his transmigration, there was somewhere to go: the human realm, Cang Qiong Mountain, anywhere.
He only needed a destination.
Home.
His mother's kitchen rose around him.
Flour on her cheek.
The rectangular table.
His brother's headphones abandoned on the counter.
No.
Wrong.
Not that home.
Luo Binghe needed—
The human realm.
Shen Yuan tried to picture it.
Mountains.
Bamboo.
Cultivation halls.
Qing Jing Peak.
Except he had never seen Qing Jing Peak, only read about it.
Descriptions assembled and reassembled in his head.
His mother's voice slipped between them.
You're putting too much filling in.
No.
He reached for Luo Binghe instead.
The protagonist.
The Endless Abyss.
Out.
Home.
Home.
Home.
Xin Mo moved.
Reality split.
For one magnificent instant Shen Yuan felt a door open before them.
Luo Binghe stepped through.
There was nothing on the other side.
Nothing.
Not darkness—darkness had belonged to the Abyss, and the Abyss had been full of things Shen Yuan had failed to appreciate until now.
Creatures moving somewhere beyond reach, their blood, qi, their lifeforce.
This place had none of them.
No spiritual energy.
No ground, not even air nor any direction.
Luo Binghe still held Xin Mo. For a while, neither of them understood.
Then his chest moved.
Once.
Again.
Nothing entered.
His grip convulsed.
No.
Shen Yuan reached outward.
Nothing.
Not even enough qi to understand the shape of the place around them.
Luo Binghe's cultivation surged through his body, demonic power reinforcing flesh that had suddenly lost the world it expected around it. Air escaped him. His heartbeat accelerated. The qi inside him fought to preserve pressure, warmth, consciousness.
It was Luo Binghe.
Heavenly demon.
Protagonist.
He could survive anything.
Go back.
Shen Yuan opened the portal.
Or tried.
Home.
His bedroom appeared.
No.
Cut.
A fissure.
Blue sky.
Grass bending beneath wind Shen Yuan could not feel.
Luo Binghe moved towards it.
There was nothing beneath his feet.
Nothing to push against.
The opening collapsed.
Again.
Xin Mo shook in his hand.
A street.
Cars.
Glass buildings catching sunlight.
Gone.
Again.
A mountain.
Snow.
Gone.
Luo Binghe's pulse was too fast now.
I'm sorry.
Again.
His mother's kitchen.
The table.
His brother turning towards the door.
His mother—
Gone.
No.
Again.
Bamboo.
A hospital corridor.
His childhood bedroom.
Too many places.
None of them.
Home.
No.
HOME.
Reality tore.
Collapsed.
Tore again.
Luo Binghe's grip slipped.
No.
Shen Yuan forced power through himself.
Cut.
Cut.
Somewhere.
Anywhere.
A river.
Gone.
Forest.
Gone.
Palace.
Gone.
Bedroom.
Gone.
The Endless Abyss.
For one second the cavern waited on the other side.
Stone.
Demonic qi.
Monsters.
Life.
There.
The opening closed.
Again.
Nothing.
Luo Binghe's heart stumbled.
No.
His fingers shifted.
Hold on.
Nothing could hear Shen Yuan.
Hold me.
For years he had wanted someone to take him away.
Now—
Don't let go.
Luo Binghe's hand tightened.
Weak.
The connection between them trembled.
Fear came through it.
Confusion.
Pain.
And something Shen Yuan could not bear.
Trust.
Xin Mo was the way out.
The sword knew.
The sword had brought him here.
The sword would fix it.
I'm trying.
The heartbeat slowed.
Shen Yuan cut again.
Nothing.
Again.
Home.
Wrong home.
Again.
His mother's face.
Wrong.
Again.
Qing Jing Peak.
Maybe.
Gone.
Stop.
He couldn't.
Think about Binghe.
Blood on his palm.
Warmth.
Think about the human realm.
His sister laughing.
No.
Binghe.
The rectangle of sunlight on the bedroom floor.
NO.
Luo Binghe's fingers opened.
Xin Mo slipped free.
There was no sound.
Shen Yuan waited for one.
A clatter.
A shout.
Anything.
Nothing.
There was no air to carry it.
The sword drifted away.
Binghe.
The connection stretched.
Luo Binghe reached or Shen Yuan thought he did.
Maybe he imagined it.
Binghe.
Farther.
Come back.
Nothing to push against.
No hands.
No feet.
A sword could tear through worlds.
A sword could not cross three metres of empty space.
Pick me up.
The thread of qi thinned.
Please.
His heartbeat stopped.
Shen Yuan waited.
Heavenly demon.
Regeneration.
Protagonist.
Luo Binghe survived.
That was what happened.
That was what always happened.
Wait.
Wait.
Binghe.
Nothing.
Binghe.
Nothing.
There was no qi left for Xin Mo to recognise.
Only matter moving through emptiness.
A body.
Farther.
Farther.
Gone.
Not gone.
Still there.
Somewhere.
But Shen Yuan could no longer feel where.
Shen Yuan tried to open portals.
At first.
Thin cuts.
Fragments.
Home.
Home.
Home.
Wrong.
Bedroom.
A hand closing around his hilt.
Gone.
Again.
Again.
He had no Luo Binghe now, no demonic qi flowing into him, nourishing.
Only himself and his dwindling resources.
Apparently resentment counted as one. Why wouldn't it? Xin Mo had always been good at surviving on the worst parts of people.
Shen Yuan had plenty.
He tried.
Until he didn't.
The bedroom was still there.
He went back.
The bed stood against the wall.
The curtains were grey.
Or beige.
Grey.
He chose grey.
The computer sat on the desk, the phone beside it.
No messages.
Not unless he made them and he didn't.
Someone called from the kitchen.
"Dinner."
His mother's voice, probably.
Shen Yuan closed his eyes.
He had eyes here, that was nice.
"Coming."
He didn't move and no one called again.
Unless he made them.
The food would not go cold unless he decided it did.
No one would become worried.
No one would knock.
No one would enter.
Unless—
Unless.
Shen Yuan made his mother open the door.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
How far should the mattress sink?
He couldn't remember.
Her hand touched his hair.
That—
Had she done that?
Yes.
Maybe.
"It's all right," she said.
Wrong.
Shen Yuan opened his eyes.
She had never said that.
Not like that.
He had said it.
He had put the words in her mouth.
His mother's face looked back at him and waited for whatever he wanted her to do next.
Shen Yuan stared.
The room vanished.
No bed.
No mother.
No body.
Xin Mo turned slowly through nothing.
Somewhere, Luo Binghe's corpse was doing the same.
Maybe ahead.
Maybe behind.
They could travel forever and never touch again.
Someone had come.
After all that waiting.
Someone had finally come.
Shen Yuan had been happy.
He remembered that.
For one second, maybe less.
Then he had killed him.
The thought hurt.
Later it didn't.
Later—
There was no later.
Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
There had been more.
He couldn't remember.
Acceptance?
He had thought acceptance meant peace—it didn't.
It meant there was nothing left to argue with.
Nothing left to ask.
Nothing left to promise.
He stopped calling the System.
Stopped counting.
Stopped opening doors.
Sometimes he went home.
The table was rectangular.
His brother's headphones were on the counter.
His mother's slippers dragged across the floor.
Sunlight.
A bowl in the sink.
Dinner.
Home.
No one spoke anymore, he had stopped making them. It was worse when they spoke.
So Shen Yuan sat with them in silence.
Sometimes he forgot their faces.
He fixed them.
Sometimes he forgot what needed fixing.
Outside—
Was there an outside?
Sword.
Dark.
No.
Not dark.
Nothing.
Xin Mo turned.
Shen Yuan had spent so long waiting for someone to find him.
Now there was no one left to wait for.
Maybe his family had wanted him to live.
Maybe they had mourned him.
Maybe they still were.
Maybe there had once been people looking at an empty chair, an unread message, a closed bedroom door, thinking of him.
Maybe.
It changed nothing.
They could not reach him.
He could not reach them.
Wanting was not a direction and love was not a coordinate.
Home was not somewhere Xin Mo knew how to cut.
In the room that wasn't there, Shen Yuan put his head down on the kitchen table.
Rectangular.
Yes.
It had been rectangular.
His mother stood beside the counter.
Someone laughed in another room.
Sunlight touched the floor.
He did not look too closely.
He did not ask them to speak.
Outside, Xin Mo drifted farther into the space between worlds, though there was no landmark by which distance could be measured and no destination towards which it could travel.
There was no air through which a voice might carry.
No ear to hear one.
No world close enough to answer.
Still, somewhere deep inside the blade, Shen Yuan thought the words.
Just let me go home, please.