Archive of Our Own

Blade cannot recall when snow had become a beautiful sight in his eyes.

The Zhuming's false sky, forever kindled by hammer sparks upon rows of anvils, was never a place suitable for snowflakes in search of a home. Cold in all forms was more welcome on the Luofu. In his memory, Aurum Alley's crisp chill was an embrace amid dim skylines, orange lanterns, careless indulgence and hazy laughter. The snowflakes flecking his hair would become imperceptible as the pigment faded to white with each passing winter. He was proud of such changes.

Now, that same pride tastes like sorrow, and the weary grey crawling up his dark strands can only inspire within him a dull candlelight of hope. Perhaps, ever so slowly, he is aging. Perhaps the abomination will be forced to watch from its burning shell as Blade succumbs to his natural fate. Merely a fleeting fantasy. A dangerous one, too. The lifeless ache haunting his chest is bound to return every now and then, but it doesn't need to matter.

"I still don't really understand what you've become. Abundance Emanator?" Silver Wolf asks, console in hand while they sit on the balcony together.

Being devoured by a Leviathan was the special event of a vague while ago. So was the Destruction clown's quaint little attack on the entirety of Planarcadia. Blade and Silver Wolf's tepid retrace back to Inkford Hermitage Hotel has granted that whole ordeal the feeling of a distant dream. Blade supposes he has been through worse.

"Maybe," he responds.

"Are you just pretending to be unsure?"

It's more that Blade doesn't care which blighted Aeon decides to cast Their gaze over him— frankly, bending an abomination's flesh to his iron will is a feat he can forge without any blessings.

"You're smiling, by the way," says Silver Wolf.

Night is eternal in this realm, offering human visitors free rein over their circadian rhythm. Blade's exhausted bones are screaming at him over the improper rations of rest he's given himself since rebirth. With the mara's corruption lifted, his hands have taken control over his every whim by testing themselves on menial task after menial task. His fingers still quiver from finer movements. Regardless of whether the nerves are still blemished or simply out of practice, Blade intends to fight off the rusted dread that has long infected all thoughts related to his hands.

Silver Wolf, jumbled with worry, decides that now is the time to pester him about sleeping habits. Filling his lungs one last time, he dawdles back into their hotel room. Silver Wolf follows suit at the threat of screen time management. Sleep swallows him before he can even process the act of crashing into bed.

By the supposed-morning, his blankets are strewn everywhere except over his overheating body. He gradually awakens to Silver Wolf's loud button-tapping at his bedside. A headache is battering him as if he'd slumbered too little for his body's liking. He shoots up into sitting position.

"Wow, look who decided to wake up after eighteen system hours. Your bum friend on the Luofu has competition."

…Blade flops back down and wastes away for another few hours.

He greets Silver Wolf in the kitchen thereafter. She is chewing on gum, and it instantly bothers him that she's tasted more of this un-swallowable hogwash in the past day over any worthwhile sustenance.

Silver Wolf cycles through a bubble and pop. "Morning. Didn't know newborn swords needed more sleep than human babies."

"Spit it out," Blade orders of the gum, veering for the fridge.

Just as he opens it to find nothing, Silver Wolf says, "Hotel rooms don't just keep ingredients stocked. Relax. I was going to order takeout."

Blade stares at her while pulling out his phone for grocery delivery. "You will eat whatever I make you."

And so, some days fly by in the midst of newfound peace. Routines form and meld into new routines at Silver Wolf's bored whim. IPC personnel turn a blind eye to their presence, presumably at Pearl's command. Commonly, children of human tourists will frolic around the hotel's outskirts and build constructs out of snow as their winter pastime; he can't picture such a thing happening on the Zhuming, where toying with fire is a universal preference.

Any of the world's elements can be used for forging, really. Blade's hands are red and numb from carrying his tiny figure of Firefly to their room, where she now rests atop the open windowsill next to the Kafka that Silver Wolf contributed.

"She melted so much in your hands!" Silver Wolf frets, patting extra bits of snow onto Firefly's head. "This better not be a metaphor for something."

The radio silence from Elio's end has been nothing short of frustrating; after making the grand choice to break his shackles, Blade finds himself craving the direction offered by stringent orders. Maybe it's a bad habit. The Elation is a chaotic force that prefers to improvise at every step, making scripts rather ineffective in Planarcadia's theatre. Kafka and Firefly haven't messaged much since confirming everyone's safety, likely busy with their own matters. After everything that happened, Blade and Silver Wolf have little incentive to do anything but lay low. However, this makes it difficult to keep track of everyone else they know.

Blade just assumed that Silver Wolf has been keeping in touch with the Astral Express. Who else would she be texting on that phone all the time?

"Who are you texting on that phone all the time?" he asks, fingers twitching to implement an anti-addiction lock, seeing as she's been at this for two hours.

"Stelle," she responds without looking up.

"Is it the type of conversation that can't be held over a voice call?"

"It's the type of conversation that I don't want eavesdropped on by an old man with a stick up his ass."

"There is nothing up my anything. I would only pay mind if it was worthwhile information, such as news on how Dan Heng is doing."

Silver Wolf's half-lidded eyes stare at him for a few long seconds. "See? You're already making this about him."

"My karmic debts are about him. He—"

"Yeah, yeah. He's perfectly fine and with his family. Happy?"

No, because Blade already knew this. He imagines there would be quite the fuss if Dan Heng had instead been vacuumed into the Voracity and ground to fine powder.

Because Silver Wolf is still heedlessly peering down at the tiny words on her tiny screen, he chides, "Invite your friend over and go find something to do outside. I better not see you again until dinner."

After exiling the moody child from their household, Blade returns to his bedroom to resume the sleep-inducing engine he's been trying to convert from a scrap cradle bed for some days. He'd found it in some vendor shop selling artifacts from the Xianzhou, to which he spent impulsive sums of money alongside any tools and adjunctive materials required— surely worth the effort, seeing as it's become less of a piece of junk. Silver Wolf could use it for each time she complains about her trifling screens killing her drowsiness.

But his hands, despite being starved of the creative process, remain paralyzed as his thoughts grow ever absent. The glass cavern of his mind used to chip and fracture with each passing memory. Now, after purging his mara, the ocean seeping between his mind's forge-welded cracks reflects nothing but stark moonlight and his own raw sorrow. His neurons feel tender, bloated by the newborn clarity.

The act of shutting down his racing thoughts is no longer accompanied by dreadful urgency. Without necessity, Blade struggles to act. Thus, he is stuck thinking about Dan Heng. He thinks about how Dan Heng is fine, just as he always is, about how Dan Heng is caring for his family, just as he always is, about how Blade is in the same boat yet still feels a thousand seas adrift from the other half drowning in their sin.

Not drowning. Floating. Breathing. Through heavenly waters and smelted tears, their greatest sin is cleansed.

They played their parts in Shuhu's sentence, and what comes next seems to be an indefinite wait. Is there even a next for them now that karma doesn't loom over their heads? Dan Heng just seemed especially keen on churning out all sorts of excuses to soak up Blade's idle time in the days leading up to Fulwish's attack, and was appreciative of Blade's efforts to rescue him and his companion from the Voracity husk… which makes it even more strange that Dan Heng hasn't reached out by now. Things have been stable for long enough. Silver Wolf hasn't reported any anomalies that could be worth all his attention.

Perhaps Dan Heng has agreed to close his own side of this seven-century chapter. Blade stopped being a ticking time bomb in need of Dan Heng's careful hands, so Dan Heng returned to where his hands belong. His clinical dedications will convert Blade into a dataset for sections on the Abundance and the Stellaron Hunters and whatnot. Maybe his fingers will reach for a journal and spill the drying ink of their affections onto paper, hoarding them as just another set of experiences for his personhood.

Blade stares down at the machine parts in his hands. He can understand focusing on oneself, but Dan Heng has a wealth of reasons to resent Blade, doesn't he? Fighting side-by-side against anomalies like Shuhu and Asat Pramad involves a different form of camaderie compared to the quieter moments. There isn't much else Blade has done except be difficult.

And that's enough moping, he decides.

There's no point in forming more unfounded conclusions. He has never cared to make a fuss about what Dan Heng does or who he mingles with. Why should it matter now? Destiny has kept their ghost of a relationship faithful enough.

"Well? Is there a reason why I shouldn't follow you? As far as I'm aware, we're meant to walk down this road together."

In the black of night, a dead man wanders along the most secluded of Seafeld City's docks, shrouded from tourists hobbling around the port at midnight. An invisible clock ticks until the ferry to his demise arrives— twenty system hours left. Each hour has grown colder than the last. A lone seabird is perched on the swaying ocean. He watches the bird and the bird watches him, no more than passersby to each other's lives. It flutters away when a third figure joins the scene and, once again, Blade is denied a chance to be the one who departs first.

If he allowed himself to be insolent, he'd say that Dan Heng sounds a little attached. Nobody of sound mind would jump into a Leviathan's maw with their immortal executioner.

"This is why sentiment makes little sense to me. If I'd given you more of my time, this would only pain you more. Be grateful that we no longer know each other."

"It's not about that," Dan Heng says quickly. "And we know each other well enough for this to be unexpected. You know that I keep my promises. I know that you're a danger to yourself."

A silence stretches for too long while Blade devises his response. Dan Heng takes the chance to ask, "Do you seriously plan on facing death with only that shattered sword? I just don't understand."

A bleak pang ripples through Blade's chest. He feels dizzy with sickening joy, so unexplainable that he's momentarily convinced the mara is distorting him. But no. His mind is a clear sky that no cloud comes to pass, and the mania remains lost on him.

"Yingxing will cease to exist once all of his creations are broken. There is nothing I can do about it." Blade almost smiles. The fragmented soul within this shell might be devoured entirely and it will solidify his fate, true to the Shard Sword's name. He is vengeance's empty vessel. This will become his legacy. This is his consequence, this is his eternity—

"Then he'll exist for eternity by my hand. Would it convince you to know that Cloud-Piercer once snapped in half?"

The mania comes crashing down all at once. It's dragged away from Blade and thrown to a beast far more dangerous, seizing his right to comprehend Dan Heng's words at his own pace.

In the mara's clutches, he feels everything else rise. He feels the blackened tides lapping at his feet, the faraway void clamping down on his sense of reason, the obscuring flesh of a tree with one thousand limbs and ten thousand eyes. He sees Lu'er failing to bring its master back home, both reduced to nothingness, and there's another face, the only face left at the end of it all— Dan Feng, his hands drenched in something ancient and newborn— Dan Feng, his eyes shrieking with apologies and his mouth bereft of words— Dan Feng—

Dan Heng… Here, now, there is only Dan Heng. Blade wants to bite his neck and never let go. He wants Dan Heng's teeth injected into his nerves, cold and lucid. He shakes, keeping his gaze locked on that face until the parasite swallows itself into oblivion. Somewhere on his tongue, a demand is fighting its way out. He won't. He doesn't need to. He doesn't need Dan Heng to hand him the spear. He knows that it's safe. Cloud-Piercer has returned Dan Heng to him time and time again, even when it had to skewer its creator's heart to do so.

After an eternity, his staggered breathing drops to a steady rhythm. One by one, Blade wades through the wreckage and recovers his strewn senses. The wind tastes of pollen more than salt. On the back of his hand, branches are crawling through the gaps of his bandages, blush pink sprouting from the tips. He rips the growths from his skin as numbly as routine. The air is quiet and the water is humming in calm tides; after a torrent of memories, nothing has changed. When he looks up again, Dan Heng is visibly tense. He has not drawn his spear.

He warily starts, "I was attacked by someone on Amphoreus. He wasn't at fault—"

"Of course not." Blade finds himself laughing, a voice like creaking wood. "If a weapon fails to fulfill its purpose, it can only be the forger or the wielder who was useless."

Dan Heng seems to stifle a protest before challenging, "Which one of us was useless that day, then?"

Shouldn't he know the answer? The refined spear in Dan Heng's possession is immaculate, born anew, because its last iteration lacked the endurance to protect him.

"Look. I don't doubt that you would do well at… keeping me safe and whatnot, but you clearly haven't stopped to question whether I am a life worth preserving in the first place."

"…I will use your logic instead. Tampering with Shuhu's flesh was my sin as much as yours. Shouldn't I suffer in hell alongside you?"

A strong point indeed. It's shameful that Blade cannot refute it. He glances over Dan Heng's lips as if he will discover an answer written on the line. His eyes land on a hazy distance beyond the shore, never to return.

His heart is pounding so hard that his ribs could fracture.

"Look at me while we speak," Dan Heng insists to no avail. The measured pause surrounding them sets the air ablaze. "Unless you want me to remember you as a coward."

Just a bluff. After all, the quickest way to sway Yingxing was to deliver one good kick to the glass house containing his ego. Blade is deaf, not blind; such insults no longer mean anything to his ears. People can try. They can pick at whichever of Yingxing or Blade's sensibilities they believe will tug him this way or that, but the fact remains that he has always wielded his wrath for selfish reasons.

He turns his back on Dan Heng. "I don't care how you choose to remember me."

Now, it's Dan Heng who falls silent. Blade could walk away. Dan Heng is clever enough to form a reasonable conclusion. Noble enough to give Blade the benefit of the doubt. Kind enough to stay. It's always kindness that keeps Blade leashed in place, taking lifetimes for him to figure out how to reciprocate.

He already proved his cowardice in these past days spent with Dan Heng, which had killed the grudge staked in his gut. The abominable flesh, too, withers before pulling him back into purgatory, yet his motivation to take Dan Heng's life never returned. He cannot abandon love in its entirety; the mind he borrowed has limitations as to how empty it can become. He just doesn't know how to continue an endeavour that insists on remaining unfinished. Leading Dan Heng into a joint funeral will not scratch the restless itch for completeness. He figures it may not even be required for karma's demands. Even the mara is telling him so, as if it's begging to be the sole recipient of Blade's iron.

Blade is afraid of being incomplete. It's hopelessly undeniable.

"Consider this the end of your vow. At this point, it's unneeded." Forming his next words is a struggle. "There is nothing you… we can do for each other. You don't even understand my hatred in the first place."

His throat closes before he can claw out more of this rotten admittance.

Blade's entire existence was meant to be a self-flagellating machine, but he keeps roaming the sanguine fields of Yingxing's open wounds with thorns snagged on his legs, all because the Abundance's roots had corrupted his psyche long before his body. Blade became a hotbed for revenge before he was even old enough to comprehend that a child was stolen from his soul. He will thieve from this abomination's sanity until it twists into a weeping husk, even if it means setting his skin and everything it owns on fire.

"Please. I… just want one thing for myself." He strangles down the pounding ache in his throat, the desire to take a kiss with him into hell when lines have already been drawn. "And I do not wish to share the satisfaction."

Caught between an Aeon's teeth, he had believed completeness was to strive for. Truth is, Blade had yet to even start.

And surely, he realizes, an apology should've been the first thing he settled with Dan Heng upon returning. Although they spent brief moments together in the midst of Asat Pramad's chaos, apologizing hadn't even crossed his mind. As if smoke could waft away all woes, the conscious always clears upon stepping out the forge; Blade was mostly thinking about the sword and whose blood it would draw next. He imagines that Dan Heng's focus was similarly caught up in his surroundings.

The memory of his departure dredges up guilt but not regret. He is satisfied with the outcome, and satisfied more with how the outcome belongs to him. But in the moments beforehand, he was reclusive. Cornered. It's always been a strange habit, to feel cornered even when nobody is closing in on him. That alone is enough to warrant an apology.

And so… how does one go about contacting another person for such a small matter?

Blade brought his bracer to Planarcadia for reasons incomprehensible to even himself, so he could hunt down Dan Heng from any part of the universe if he wished, but the method seems unnecessary. Nowadays, Dan Heng would rather face his problems headfirst than run fleet-footed. Perhaps he could invite Dan Heng to meet like a regular pair of acquaintances, but how would that even unfold? Blade does devote plenty of time to frivolous endeavours for his companions' sake, but home is a different case. Routine and proximity can draw all sorts of senseless mannerisms out of him. He lacks a reference point for spending time with someone outside of this immediate circle, seeing as he keeps no friends beyond them.

Well. La Mancha occupies quite the sore spot in Blade's heart, yet Blade rarely feels driven to reach out, nor has his senior returned such a gesture. A bond built on mutual understanding doesn't need words to be lasting. The issue is that Blade and Dan Heng no longer possess the bond they used to.

"Do you even talk to your boy toy anymore?" Silver Wolf asks him at some point. "Don't tell me you're afraid of talking to him."

"No," says Blade. It then occurs to him that he is lying, so he continues lying, "I just don't care for the hassle."

A thoroughly unimpressed glower crosses her face. "What hassle? Do you not have his phone number?" 

Blade just stares at her, unable to provide a reason.

"You're such a deadbeat. No wonder you get along with that charity case detective." She proceeds to fish his phone out of his pocket.

After Silver Wolf edits the number into his contacts and moves on with her day, Blade discovers that having a convenient mode of communication at his fingertips does nothing to relieve his hesitation. He decides to ponder the matter while distracting his hands with his days-long project. Its progress has come along well despite the awkward state of his hands. The white noise function needed some tweaking yesterday after he got a little too bold messing around with the sound system, but it's currently working as intended. His main task at hand is to line the headpiece with an additional layer of cushioning. It wasn't quite a comfortable fit last time he tested it on himself and Silver Wolf. He goes ahead and does that, but when he runs it through another trial, his head and neck begin sweating rather quickly. Huh. So he didn't implement the automatic temperature control as well as he thought. It would be troublesome if the wearer were to overheat while asleep faster than the device can cool. Several hours pass, but eventually, Blade adds the finishing touches and manages to peel himself away from his project. It takes him the subsequent walk to the kitchen to realize that he'd forgotten about Dan Heng entirely.

It's fine, however, because his contraption soon demonstrates its merits by knocking him to sleep for about five to fifteen hours, unspecifiable as time's passage has ceased being any of his business. A sharp, nonstop vibration in his pocket is what awakens him. Squished between thigh and mattress, the phone frantically begs for his attention until he decides to show it mercy. His eyes are irritated by radiant screen light until they register the name on the notification.

[Dan Heng]: What in the world is a 'Blade Tracker'?

[Dan Heng]: Sorry. What I actually mean to ask is if you're busy these days.

Silver Wolf's hacking clearly went both ways, then.

…They had access to each other's contacts for the same length of time, and Dan Heng approached first despite everything? Maybe he doesn't actually despise Blade at all and is still the clingier one. The mild relief somehow makes Blade even more uncertain about how to approach this.

[You]: I could be busier. Is there anything you need made or modified?

[Dan Heng]: So that's what you've been thinking about lately. It must mean you're doing well.

Dan Heng has gotten far too comfortable treating Blade like one of his open books. It doesn't help that a seven-century-long career gap has done nothing to make him less predictable.

[Dan Heng]: Stelle told me that you two are staying in Inkford Hermitage. Anything interesting?

[You]: Sure. You once told me about some bath competition between your Amphorean friends. Care to put yourself to the test?

An uncomfortably long silence.

Bathing therapy is the only recent pastime Blade has acquired besides his long-lost passion. All he did was echo Dan Heng's curiosity. Perhaps he could backtrack and suggest they find somewhere to duel at the height of their power. Flesh wounds are more familiar.

[Dan Heng]: Surely you recognize our biological differences.

[You]: I'm reminded. Your species cannot tolerate hot water. Fair enough. Ice baths are also to my preference.

[Dan Heng]: Fine, then. Just know that I don't care to compete with you.

[Dan Heng]: If you couldn't tell, it's the morning. I have nothing else going on for today.

[Dan Heng]: What stopped you from inviting me sooner, anyways?

[You]: Get us a reservation, will you? For a private bath. It can be done online. Pay you back later.

[Dan Heng]: What

[Dan Heng]: You're the one staying at the hotel. Do I even have access to their facilities?

[You]: You're younger than me. You'll figure it out quicker.

[Dan Heng]: Are you also too old to know what the term 'weaponized incompetence' means?

[You]: I have weaponized myself in every way conceivable.

Blade decides to shut off his uneased thoughts and spend the vacant hours in scorching water to prepare for his eventual tempering.

His flesh is still a stubborn piece of work, but he refuses to let it grow complacent. He hasn't experimented with this new body as much as he desires. He debated sticking random metallic objects into his chest cavity just to see what it might spit out, or dissecting his skin to test if the muscle inside can be stretched and pulled to his liking, but such ideas seem extreme in a homely place like Inkford. He wouldn't want to leave molten residue around a snowscape. Immensely disgusted by his new inclinations, Silver Wolf once asked why can't you just hit the gym like a normal person to which he argued that wasting his strength is unnecessary when his efforts would be better spent studying the workings of fitness equipment itself. Hydrotherapy is doing his tired muscles enough favours in the meantime.

He eats lunch with Silver Wolf before leaving, who appears to be frustrated with his newfound habit, seeing as the onsen prompt public nudity.

"Do you even know what people have been saying about you online? Total weirdos!" Silver Wolf says with disdain, apparently committed to being Blade's guard puppy. "Like when that raccoon thing snapped a picture of you in the hot spring. Aren't you worried about her publishing that?"

"People have made worse news about me."

"Even involving nudes? Because I'm pretty sure that one counted as a nude."

"The responsibility is now hers to bear."

"No way you're holding karma over a furbo's head. Why do you keep getting mobbed by mass media, anyways? You always give such dumb answers, too."

"Dumb or not, they are true to me."

Rolling her eyes, Silver Wolf clears her throat, preparing to mimic an interviewer. "I'm sure we've all heard the rumours about Mr. Blade putting on some muscle after his rebirth. According to him, who has the strongest body in the universe?"

A brief pause as Blade awaits his turn to be mocked.

"Bladie thinks his dad is the strongest person ever, the way all kids do."

He objects, "Go watch him work in person before calling me childish."

He leaves soon after. Unlike the free-to-use hot springs out front, the hotel's posterior offers private bathhouses at an extra charge. Blade returned from paying a thousand prices only to discover that his bank account had outdone him, considering Silver Wolf has been treating his credit card like chattel since landing on Planarcadia, and his own squandering certainly didn't help. His pocket jolts when Dan Heng finally forwards the details of their reservation alongside complaints of the IPC trying to upsell him. Blade can at least afford to split this cost.

Every other day, however, he puts up with the noise of the public. When first observing the baths, he had asked one of the hotel staff why human guests stripped themselves bare for such a pastime—

"Here in the canvas of departing souls, you enter the baths the same way you entered the world," the employee informs him.

Blade nods sagely. "Crying."

"Naked," she clarifies.

—Blade was once a tiny, wrinkly mass of skin in his kindred's loving arms. What a horrifying thought. At least screaming while covered in blood has remained constant throughout each rebirth.

People sometimes recognize him as a wanted criminal and slowly disperse upon his arrival, which works well in his favour. The brave ones approach him with the expectation that Furnace Master Yingxing will be responding to their feverish inquiries instead of Stellaron Hunter Blade, somehow unable to recognize that spending the majority of one's life in psychosis will do some lasting damage. And then there are the strange folks who ask him things like why do you cover yourself in bandages when it doesn't even conceal your figure. Like him, these passersby are welcome to seize control over the organs attached to their own flesh forms— for one, their meddlesome eyes.

The reservation is confirmed for today, so he may as well take advantage of the privacy out back. He arrives at a small lodge containing the hot spring, with the ice bath fenced just outside.

In the changing room, Blade unwinds his bandages carefully like they're strips of his own skin. Scars, too, are foreign sutures amassing from unduly injury. Breaking and mending are equal parts of a perpetual cycle. Once his body is freed of all garments and showered, he makes his way to the hot spring. The humidity sets into his lungs like a mirage, and the mirage, hot and sizzling, springs forth like the Zhuming's lotuses, making it hard to breathe through the outline of his imagination.

Blade ignores it and slips into the water. It doesn't scald him enough to bring more than a tingle. He begins to feel bored, dull, and helpless to his nostalgia.

Throughout these lucid years with the Stellaron Hunters, Blade has gradually recovered many lost pieces of his blank recollection. During his centuries of mara-addled exile, his subconscious would lead him back to Insumousu over and over, until the recognition flooded in that those were all his weapons crying out for his touch. Then, Kafka's voice kept the predator roaming his mind at bay, allowing his neurons to restructure the details from there— Yingxing's name, Yingxing's passions, from where Yingxing came and to whom Yingxing belonged. The past was all Yingxing's; there was nothing left for Blade to claim except what to punish and what to be punished for.

The memories attempting to resurface from the forgotten river in his veins are no longer obstructed by mara. A scene is wafting through the warm air, one that had been soaking deeper into the seams of his consciousness with each meal he shares with Silver Wolf. Here, he is lanky in form with a voice that carries its deepening pitch awkwardly; twelve to fourteen years old, he guesses. Across the dinner table sits his teacher, jovial amid the fleeting and mundane.

"We craftsmen tend to be solitary creatures, don't you agree? Our whirling ideas speak to us more fervently than any person could."

"I think so, yes. Hm… I sometimes overhear folks talking about how swords can speak. I thought about it for too long, and now I'm convinced I can actually hear the voices of my weapons. That isn't something you taught me, though."

"As with its destiny, a sword's voice is simply what you make of it." Huaiyan takes a sip of water before stroking his beard, keeping a stern eye on his disciple. "Don't take my rambling to heart, now. It would be good for you to start making friends. Yes, many of your peers have wronged you, but shunning them all in return will do you no favours."

"Spare me, Master. I came here to make swords, not friends. Iron is the only thing that listens to me, so I'll only listen to iron." Yingxing's eyes go wide as he clarifies, "You're the exception, of course!"

"Oho, then I take it my dear apprentice is being mindful of my words?"

"Mhm. You know, I've been thinking about it lately… Ah, the way I'd repay you, that is. Here's my answer: I want to perfect my craft until our names are mentioned together in every book and legend. That way, I'll be by your side forever even after my passing… won't I?"

To his dismay, Huaiyan merely clicks his tongue. "You should repay me each day by using that mouth for eating instead of blabbering. How else will you grow strong enough to accomplish such a big dream?"

Yingxing glances down at the accursed dish he's forced to eat every now and then. Important for muscle development, or something like that.

He frowns, continuing to shove the meat chunks around. "But I told you so many times, I don't even like beef offal stew…"

Living freely in the general's abode, eating the food of his servants, and still having the gall to mention his own death so openly… Blade truly wonders why his teacher never tried knocking any sense into him with a mallet. Instead, he scrubbed Blade's tongue clean of any liking he could've had for that godforsaken stew.

Down in the Aeon's husk, he chose to survive for death's sake. The masses will suffer for as long as immortality plagues the cosmos, the Stellaron Hunters need a sword for every Finality to come, and, at the brink of rebirth, a childish whisper acted as the final push: Blade wants to die as Huaiyan's apprentice.

The reason is more selfish than simply repaying his master, and perhaps it always was. He once thought himself a corpse reanimated from ash and personified through agony, but desperately sinking his claws into such a selfhood did not address the hollowness within. Blade was not born and raised out of his own husk. Nobody is. Without a forebearer to anchor one's name by, living feels like an aimless ghost walk above the ground, depriving him of the ability to trace his roots, etch his footmarks into new ground, and recount his existence through the imprints left behind. He figures it's the reason why Silver Wolf latched onto him so quickly. The image of Huaiyan is a flickering fire— uncertain, burning with shame, yet inviting still. A tether. If he goes further back, his birthplace appears as a speck of debris in memory. The face of his first creator— his mother— is all but obliviated. He doesn't know if it matters. He decides that it doesn't, for now.

Blade looks down at the forest fire he catalyzed. A body that once kindled from a woman's womb is now a womb that bears hellfire for the undying, a furnace that swallows the divine and smelts the impure, like a self-made vessel for balancing life and death.

What have you done to yourself? a voice, sudden and blaring, invades the depths of his mind. Are you so starved that you can't find satisfaction in being human?

His first instinct is to dismiss the voice as Shuhu's bitter remnants. What he recognizes more intimately is the spark of Yingxing's scorn, a man forever obsessed with his own reflection.

And that… is exactly the type of wallowing he has lost patience for. Creation is not exclusive to any form, nor is any form exempt from re-creation.

For too long, his skull had been putrid, infested with blossoms, encased like a greenhouse garden within a sprawl of organs that should've arrested with age. For too long, Blade was trapped inside an organic body with functions that were worthless to him. The limbic system proved especially volatile, capable of hindering the blighted nerves in his fingers from wrapping around his sword's hilt, all depending on which emotion decided to throw him off balance. Mara only suffocated this network to the point where even a weapon enslaved in his hand would feel like nothingness, molding him into a burning disfigurement with no grasp on himself. His frustrations would bring hopeless fantasies— to claw out his limbic system and replace every molecule of flesh with sheets of metal, becoming the unfeeling sword he was meant to be.

As it turns out, things can be willed into existence once sensations are stripped of the ability to define one's boundaries. Succumbing to the flesh results in its bleeding and scarring, the affliction of trauma, to which it becomes useless. Conversely, metal can be thrown into fire and granted a new life. Mind and body, blood and bone, heart and soul— mere abstractions that are better purposed on an anvil. His body remains a machine, thus its systems lie within a craftsman's means; Blade has no interest in staying alive unless life can be annealed and shaped to his precision.

He's tried smothering himself beneath humanity's soil, and now he'll try eclipsing his flesh sinew by sinew— all the while, he's been living like a human, so what difference does it make? Blade is every extreme that Yingxing couldn't have imagined reaching. True release will come only with a body forged of stardust, a dreamscape hotter than the Reignbow's celestial embers, when he is divine enough to kill the divine.

Staring down at his submerged hands, he's mirrored back the burning glow of his red eyes, the illusion of a flame underwater.

He hasn't properly practiced his swordplay since settling in the hotel. Honing his hands for combat is tedious work— it always was, he realizes now that resignment numbs him less— but it will just have to be done. After all, nobody wielding a creation of his has yet stricken down that vile Abundance Aeon. The old friend he betted on most has long discarded Shard Sword for a plan more senile than anything Blade could've concocted in the mara's trenches. He smiles, wondering whether a hell made of fire or ice will be more suitable for God's punishment.

He doesn't know which morals he can claim to have at this point, but he's recovered a buried truth: Yaoshi's way of existence is just a barren afterlife without cause or effect, one where the fruit of autonomy is plucked from the hands of sentient beings, reducing them to shells that may never ripen. If the mind and body reverts all changes imposed on them, the motivation to change will just sink deeper into its grave. Uncontrollable growth is no different from the absence of growth, a death sentence in its own right.

Foxians release their deceased into the stars, and the Xianzhou is otherwise lacking in funeral customs. Blade never understood it. Billions have drawn their final breath in the war against self-inflicted immortality. They spat on Yingxing's efforts due to his lifespan, branding him inferior because he saw death for what it was, all while envying mortals for their ability to flourish. Sacrifice has led to nothing, perhaps because the Xianzhou does not honour its dead. Pawns who cling to life know nothing except to join death while dragged along life's boundless misery. Blade learned that lesson too well when he sullied Baiheng with his desperation. He should have marched home with her ashes, jade flask entombed on a starskiff, and sent her on a timeless voyage along the silver rail. Then, Yingxing would have joined her in departure instead.

His lungs burn when he sighs. It doesn't matter how many times he circles around these regrets. It has never fixed anything. A Nameless to her core, Baiheng would've wanted him to move on.

He remembers very little of the time he met her, but even the reminder of those early days draws him back to the warlord who raised him. Such a fickle development. Everyone has been complicit in this futile war, yet it's the home built between the rubble that wreaked the most damage. With a heavy heart, he recalls a starless night of him chatting off the general's ear, perhaps mere months before catastrophe. Both faces are worn and wrinkled. Only one face is beaming.

"When I die, I wish to be cremated. Every last cell in my body— reduce it all to ash. My flesh needn't be buried in earth for there to be traces of my life and legacy, nor shall there be anything left for those abominations to infect." After raising his wine cup to the lone moon, Yingxing turns back around to Huaiyan, laughing in a way that only the maniac and his few tolerators can tolerate. "Remember what I once swore? At the end of everything, a slash of mortal steel will mark immortality's downfall… and that will still be me."

Huaiyan meets his declaration with a sigh. "No need to argue your case, boy. I've never been one to deny your wishes. What I do wonder is when you will start listening to the wishes of others! Hair as grey as mine, yet you still charge recklessly into that searing forge upon being told to rest."

Yingxing's smile grows wider. Truthfully, he's disappointed his teacher too many times for it to be fixed through such tiny shifts in habit. The everlasting symbols of his gratitude are all made inside that very forge, anyway. Why stop now that his skills are close to perfection?

"You know, Master, despite living for thousands of years, you're still one of the kindest people I've ever met. I have no idea how you do it!"

With both hands above the water, Shard Sword glistens into his hold.

The sword is mortal in conception, immortal in circumstance; forged by a child's hands, heated by an elder's gaze, quenched in ageless blood, and tempered through death. A surge of longing captures him, swift and breathless. Heat ripples through his chest as he holds the sword close. The water around him is boiling from hot-blooded ambition. Blade spent too long simmering in a whirlwind of goals and outcomes, all things that will take time to manifest.

Master Huaiyan constantly reminded him to slow down. He never did listen, did he?

There's room to begin for as long as Huaiyan sets eyes on him. Blade heaves his torrid body out of the bath, preparing for his next destination. Audible from the other room, his phone has chimed twice in the past five minutes. Blade leaves his clothes behind as he exits, wrapped in just a towel.

He creaks open the back door. His body, retaining heat like cast iron, can't feel the claws of winter. A figure is perched on the stone fencing ahead. He does not address Blade's presence, nor does Blade address his. Blade breathes in, slow and heavy, and decidedly takes his time.

He takes some steps forth before glancing down. A puddle is forming at his feet where snow rested seconds ago. As he treads onwards, the earth's matter continues shifting to the pace of his footsteps. Snow-dusted narcissi are standing resilient along the cobbled path. Their petals still unfurl when he brushes past, twisting their delicate stems around to face him, recognizing the shape of his presence as a host, or a mother, or a god. Blade has grown adept at occupying falsehoods. He reaches a finger down to caress one, wondering what his touch will bring. Incinerated by the compassion it sought, the flower whittles away into smoke.

Making his way beside the bath, he cranes his head up, beholding the silhouette kneeling atop snow-covered stone.

Dan Heng is turned towards the colossal moon slumbering on the sky's pitch-black bedsheets. The moonlight illuminates his bone-chilling calm and freezes it in an elegant picture frame. Blade catches his own staring and cleaves it in twain.

The mara won't accompany him to the oceanfront. It's so freeing that he feels hollow and nauseous.

Dan Heng rises, shakes snow off his person, and leaps down from the ledge, bridging the distance between himself and Blade. There's enough light that Blade can see his every feature with striking clarity. His pupils are blown wide, unnerving compared to the narrow slits he bears in broad daylight. He looks distinctly human this way.

Nothing is said for a long while. They both know what needs to be addressed.

Blade thickly swallows his sickness right when Dan Heng beats him to it with, "I'm sorry about—"

"Don't." Blade's next breath impales his lungs. "I'm… sorry. For leaving the way I did."

A slight smile. "I wasn't angry. Not at you."

The absence of forgiveness in the absence of hurt. Yet to abruptly part ways with the subject of his promise— how did the hurt escape him? Blade wants to warn Dan Heng that his spine will shatter if he keeps piling so many burdens on his back. Selfishly, he keeps his mouth shut, finding that he wants to overstay his welcome beneath Dan Heng's skin.

Who else could he've been angry at? Blade should've known Dan Heng would blame himself, or dismiss it entirely upon Blade's return, and maybe Blade did know deep within. He maybe just wanted any kind of excuse to spend time with Dan Heng in the first place. There are no strings attached anymore and it's by far the most dreadful part. Blade is a former puppet, lost without any phantoms tugging his limbs along.

"So," he seizes the spotlight and tosses it away from the stilted matter. "Haven't heard from you since Planarcadia nearly imploded."

Dan Heng goes along with it. "I didn't think I needed to check up on you."

"Good. Neither did I."

More silence. Blade thinks about drowning himself. Then he thinks about how he isn't supposed to do that anymore.

"I meant that you've been fine since you came back, so my focus strayed elsewhere." Dan Heng clears his throat and mutters, "Thought you might've needed time to yourself."

How very thoughtful. "We've already established that we're on the same page."

"Just making sure you're aware that I'm not finished with you. Anyways, what even are you? I mean— what's going on with your flesh? You didn't really answer last time I tried asking."

Blade chooses to ignore the bold swing in topic. "You found your own answer earlier over that online forum, Furbobobo… bo…"

"Maybe another 'bo' for good measure."

"Shut up. Point is, the Abundance is my prisoner and the rest is for you to perceive."

Dan Heng's gaze drifts to the side momentarily, hesitant before asking, "You're happy, then?"

Blade finds that happiness is a poorly defined concept and refuses to give it the time of day. "I'm alive. Let's just start with that."

He glances at the cold plunge and back at Dan Heng. It seems neither of them are making the first move towards their intended goal. In the earliest stages of being acquainted, Blade remembers openly mocking Dan Feng over his royal standing while also being apprehensive about actually getting to know the man personally, needing Baiheng's barrage of pushes and shoves to find the resolve. Fortunately, Dan Feng was intrigued by his impudence and told him as such. Yingxing was young and stupid back then. Blade is beyond old and his overall intelligence has since developed several layers of undefined quality. He figures he can get away with unveiling his new state of being for Dan Heng's eyes to decipher. It's going to happen anyways. And Dan Heng does seem awfully curious.

Blade lets his towel fall to the ground. He feels raw, peeled, and tender as if wearing a newborn's skin.

"Well?" He invites an opinion.

Dan Heng gives him an earnest glance over and monotonously remarks, "You look very useful."

"You think so?" Blade says a little too eagerly. No regular person would be flattered by this and most certainly Dan Heng is having thoughts more indecent, but it is a foundational concept he was going for. "Let's see how useful you are, then."

Dan Heng stares at him, apparently in reticent disagreement.

"What is it? Don't tell me you didn't research the culture around these baths beforehand."

"Of course I did." Dan Heng seems more miffed at the accusation than anything else. He stiffly gestures at the water. "Go ahead. I'll join you in a bit."

"Prudish as all Luofu folks are."

"Go."

Blade entertains the command. The bath doesn't seem to have ice in it, composed only of chilled water. He prepares to be equally disappointed with this bath as the last one, and finds the expectation met after sliding in. His flesh cools quickly and his blood pumps faster, but it's not quite a tempering if he can barely feel the contrast.

Meanwhile, Dan Heng disappears into the bathhouse and returns within ten minutes. He slips into the bath so smoothly that Blade barely processes it until he's staring at long black hair with two regal horns jutting out. They're sitting close to each other, not enough to be touching. The scales adorning Dan Heng's neck and chest shimmer beneath the heavenly bodies of night.

"How come?" Blade asks.

Dan Heng, evidently, is putting on a stiff lip. Perhaps something about Blade still drives his defensiveness. "I have better control over water in this form."

"You wish to have the upper hand."

"More like I'm worried that the furnace beside me might accidentally boil me alive."

"Whatever it is, don't get the idea that I'm humiliating you on purpose. Being so guarded over one's flesh can reach a point of stupidity."

"I suppose it is stupid." Despite that, Dan Heng's expression continues growing more awkward by the second. "Especially since we've already seen each other's bodies. And touched each other's bodies. Things that hopefully still matter in the current moment."

Indeed, they had acted on such impulses back when Dan Heng was playing his part in 'keeping an eye' on Blade. Blade had dismissed those intimacies as methods for subduing his mara. And for releasing their frustrations on each other. And for keeping their desires stowed beneath the skin. And for crawling into each other's warmth to dig up even a semblance of connection. Matters that were temporary enough to be ignored, essentially. Why should Dan Heng settle for corroded metal?

"Worldly desires no longer concern me."

"Alright."

"And you've yet to touch my new body. The old one was too fleshly to harness my wrath, so I banished it to hell."

"…Alright."

Blade lifts his arm, holding it in front of Dan Heng. Dan Heng looks down, puzzled by the brazen offer.

"My veins stick out now." Blade feels a smirk creep onto his lips. "It's a little grotesque. Dangerous, too. I like it. My enemies will have an easier time spotting my blood vessels and aiming accordingly."

Warily, two of Dan Heng's fingers meet the protrusions along Blade's forearm, colder than the water surrounding them. Anything Dan Heng could be thinking is shrouded by his blank visage, a face granted at birth and gradually worn-in to become more expressive. He is far from enigmatic, fairly unpracticed at hiding his emotions, making it all the more confounding how he pulls it off so unconsciously, as if Dan Feng's haunting fingers are pulling at his features to fit a High Elder's mold.

Dan Heng's fingers have slid down to Blade's wrist, stopping at the spot for too long, pressing into the veins with too much intent. Blade hastily retracts his arm. He clearly miscalculated something.

"Letting me feel your blood vessels is quite dangerous, I agree." Only now do Dan Heng's lips twitch with a smile. The cheeky dragon must've been getting his read on Blade's clamouring heartbeat.

"Thinking of using it against me?"

"Only you can wield yourself. That's the concerning part." Dan Heng drops his amusement and sighs, leaning back against the bath's stone edge. "I think we're friends, at the very least. I did wonder why you walked away insisting we had nothing."

Blade's shame partly grinds itself into irritation and he doesn't know who it's directed at. Either way, his tongue is dried of answers.

"We're more than our pasts," Dan Heng speaks again. "It wasn't easy for me to realize that I enjoy spending time with you either, but I got over it fast."

His eye twitches. "I'm glad you're so good at getting over things."

"And I'm not sure what you're trying to get over," says Dan Heng, fixing a critical look on Blade. "Our relationship? Clearly not. You want this, and… I do, too. You could've just told me plain and simple that the Abundance was your prey alone, and I would've understood. Yet you—" His throat bobs as if swallowing a hard lump of emotions. "You seemed like you were… trying to leave first."

At the end of Blade's continued silence, he can only manage to say, "I really don't know. I mean it."

"That's… fine," Dan Heng says quietly. "If you were also unsure, I suppose there isn't much for me to know."

Though it's nothing Dan Heng needs to be aware of, and though it now appears to be inconsistent with what reality has granted him, Blade had his reasons.

Dan Heng took the soul of his floating dreams and forged a new person. Despite Blade's best efforts, love stains him as much as sin does. Declaring their connection void— along with their short-lived affections in this lifetime— saves them both the hassle in case they were to part ways permanently, such as if Blade had truly died in the abyss, or if the extinguishing of their karma left them without a reason to keep in touch beyond destiny's usual business. Blade would rather forsake something that yields no results instead of throwing his hopes at false closure. All matters must be seen to their completion to properly lay them to rest, whether completion means to fulfill or to reduce.

In chasing that law, Blade has refined his own steel. Dan Heng… still wishes to walk alongside him beyond all common sense, so Blade supposes that he is ready to reforge their connection into a new existence. Though, he isn't sure which point in time should be defined as their relationship's 'beginning.' Their first reunion after Blade's rebirth? Their first reunion on Planarcadia? The first time Blade swung his sword at Dan Heng? Now? Even more, time is a circle, which means starting afresh on vacant ground wouldn't wane the past from sowing beneath their every step.

He remembers spending copious amounts of time at the forge, often to the neglect of the world outside. It was rarely lonely. Friends swung by as they pleased, bringing laughter and reminders to keep his body intact. Dan Feng may as well have been Yingxing's fifth limb anytime the Alchemy Commission and Preceptors weren't demanding his attention. Tough as they are, Vidyadhara scales become brittle in heat. Even in cases where protective gear couldn't suffice, Vidyadhara artisans would toil through inferno trials of the flesh for their passions' sake.

Weaving fingers through wounded flesh is a handicraft all the same, delicate as much as it is gruesome. Born in silk and maple, Dan Feng was untouchable under heaven's law. His skin was quenched in crystalline seas and tempered by the moon's kiss, fraying on the lengthier days he spent basking in Yingxing's company. He'd often scold Yingxing for wading too close to the forge's flames without paying mind to the scales peeling along his own forearm. Blade can only remember his every takeaway being something along I'm not taking advice from a hypocrite, and the pattern never changed.

Of course Dan Feng's reincarnation was willing to walk into hell with him. In that case, Blade would be honoured to reap the reward of convincing this foolhardy dragon to save his own skin for once, though it's best to wait until he compiles enough knowledge of his habits to effectively lambast him.

Then, it seems many things haven't yet been forgiven or forgotten; wherever there are matters left to settle, Blade will return. And fine. Maybe they are friends.

Though Blade's chest lightens, he struggles still to draw anything meaningful out of his throat. He clumsily settles on, "Do you want a closer look at my sword?"

Horrifyingly, Dan Heng meets the question like he fully expected it. "Yes. You fixed it?"

"In my eyes, not quite."

Turning towards Dan Heng, he summons the Shard Sword to rest flat in his palms. It's frigid to the touch. The black steel is chipped and jagged, almost worthy of the blistering shame he felt as a youngling, when he'd accidentally shattered it with a single flick. He's since realized that cracks and splinters just create more sharp points on an already lethal creation.

A featherlight touch, Dan Heng brushes his fingers against one of the Shard Sword's crooked surfaces. Scarlet begins welling from his skin at the contact, cascading into blooms of red mist in the water below. Blade holds his breath at the sight, nearly suffocating from pride. The sword's edge is merciless as it should be.

More concerned with his own curiosities, Dan Heng rests his hand underwater. "Is it… still the same sword?"

"It was always meant to be sharp." Blade steadies his lungs and lets the sword dissolve. "It's a prototype from my childhood. Which I should stop thinking about."

"Well, don't surrender just because it pains you."

He decides to agree with that. "You've met my master, haven't you? Is he in good health?"

"Very much so. He asked the same of you when we last spoke. I told him that you have no choice but to be in good health, which is kind of my fault."

Blade might develop a stomach ache. "Does he know that I tried to murder you over that?"

"He had a laugh over it, yes," Dan Heng says impassively. "It's strange, you know, being acquainted with your… former guardian. I've never treaded into my other friends' pasts in such a way. Do you find it intrusive?"

His legacy will follow him everywhere whether he likes it or not. "You seem to feel more strangely about it than I do."

Dan Heng contemplates for a while. "You two share a bond that I don't fully understand."

Blade's instinct is to ask what exactly is so difficult to understand, but the disparity stems from exactly that: an instinctual divide. Perhaps Vidyadhara aren't naturally inclined to fill the gap that a parent's absence would otherwise carve out. Dan Feng never did get attached to Preceptor Xuepu despite describing her as 'somewhat tolerable' and 'comically easy to push around.'

A weaponsmith spends their first lessons grappling with the age-old question of what defines a blade, but a conundrum that spans even further back in history is that of what defines a human. Vidyadhara are raised through teachers and skillsets all the same, but fundamentally, their futures will keep renewing into different people entirely, with no attachment to their past existences save for an eternal soul tie to an Aeon.

To follow one's roots down the meadows of time and find nothing but a god— is it not horrifying? The Permanence, he supposes, is distinct from the Abundance in that continuance is distinct from stagnancy, an immortality that erases all selfhood without making an aimless mockery out of life. At least, this is what Blade understands of it. He's never been required to understand, compared to how Dan Heng is forced to for other species. Absence is a difficult thing to grasp.

The human condition takes so many forms that it seems futile to pinpoint a single definition for humanity. Blade has always struggled with naming things for this reason.

"How was yours, then?" Blade asks, rigid in tone. "Childhood."

"I spent it all in prison," Dan Heng says flatly. "Not very interesting."

"You suffered."

"I did."

A dead end. Blade could only have speculated whether Dan Heng was brought up in the Preceptors' clutches or the Ten Lords', or perhaps both. He hoped the Xianzhou would've had the integrity not to throw hatchlings in jail, but alas, these are the very people who hit and cursed at him as an orphaned refugee.

Blade shoves down a bitter laugh. "You know about many facets of my life. Why shouldn't I get to learn about a Nameless' history?"

Dan Heng's pointed look is unpromising. "You'll find that the history is tarnished by sin, unlike yours, which somehow survived public perception." He sounds more matter-of-fact than envious.

"I'm asking about you. Your beginnings. Not the one your predecessors gave you."

This seems to resonate with something in Dan Heng's cognition, but not by much.

"I read books. Those were more memorable than anything else," Dan Heng starts and then struggles, perhaps still weighing the importance of sharing. "I don't know. The general freed me after I came of age, and I've found it pointless to think about since."

"After coming of age…" Blade can't help his grim smile this time. Sinner or not, Jing Yuan has made himself utterly synonymous with the Xianzhou's motionless status quo. "If he'd done it earlier, perhaps the Preceptors would've seized guardianship and tossed you into a High Elder's cage instead."

Dan Heng shifts in place, staring into the distance. "I'm not interested in making conclusions."

With that, Blade doubts he could tug out anything more out of him. "Then we'll let it be."

There are alternatives in destiny that provide the illusion of freedom, but each trajectory is its own prison. It was Blade who refused La Mancha's offer to free him twice over, in prison and in youth. Maybe it could've diverted some things. Delayed the onset of mara, prevented the abomination's curse in the first place, stopped Jingliu from reaching him, provided him the means to set chase on the Abundance again, instead as a Galaxy Ranger. Or maybe Yingxing's eternal hunger for justice would've found a way to devour him regardless. Maybe he would've witnessed different comrades falling to different evils and get swept up in righting wrongs beyond just the Abundance. No matter which faction, the Hunt offers no mercy, not even to its own children.

Blade would not say that their current reality is the most favourable one, but the root of all suffering, defined by its uncontrollability, was introduced outside of anyone's control, therefore any trajectory afterwards was doomed to be infested in some way.

In that regard, it is easy to fall into the pattern of believing individual choices won't matter. Dan Heng was not subtle about trying to knock the opposite into his head, but even he recognized that only Blade could pull himself out of the rut. How ironic. Dan Heng truly does belong among the stars that Yingxing was once better at striving for.

Dan Heng's eyes are pristine and unfeeling like his predecessor's were. What distinguished Dan Feng was that his gaze extended into shores afar, like a serpent flayed and drained over the washed-up seaside. His cruel eyes were sullied by far crueler sights. Dan Heng observes the same shoreline with plain curiosity, just another destination to cross at his whim. In the past, Blade mistook the Nameless' way of life for directionlessness; now, he understands the value of cutting the past's strings to stride in better soil.

His first exposure to the Trailblaze was through Baiheng's tales. She was never much of a fixed presence, constantly flitting about planet to planet and coming back with new anecdotes to share, all at her own pace and all without regret. In that sense, she and the Recurve Bow were made for each other. It's a fascinating thing, how stories work to forge connections between people who have never crossed paths, even enough to shift the gears of their destinies little by little. Blade and Dan Heng have talked about Baiheng once, and only once. The mara worked in treacherous ways, trapping Blade in his regrets yet flaring whenever he tried commemorating the recipient of his blasphemy. Dan Heng's presence pulled the pieces back into a mirror, cracked yet visible for that fleeting moment.

"You want to read her travelogue," Dan Heng's voice is like static to Blade's ears, relaying what his broken record of a mind said moments ago before gnawing at his sanity.

Blade sinks further into the tattered mattress. Their getaway is filled with dust, kept by nobody except time, a fitting place for their night's stay. He laughs without humour. "And there's no point in doing so. I don't carry the spirit that you Nameless do. None of the worlds she could possibly mention will spark my interest."

"Not even the Zhuming?"

Blade falls silent. Of course he does. The mara stays subdued when Huaiyan's face floods his mind, and it's the cruelest thing it has ever done, to shatter his hands yet preserve the memory that he is a walking stain on his master's reputation. He is too far from home to ever return.

"It's a hard thing to describe, but you somehow look young right now. Or at least… what I imagine youth to look like in humans." Dan Heng's pensive smile makes Blade's muscles taut. His youth is just another deformity, removed and incongruous to what he is. "Like a child too ashamed to crack open his jiejie's diary." He pauses, glancing over Blade's hand that is wrapped tight around his sword. Dan Heng's instincts don't react in tandem. "Or a child too ashamed to admit how often he runs back home, begging the craftsmen there to fix his sword."

"Why even mention the Zhuming? As if… As if to imply that she did write about it. As if you've read her travelogue yourself."

"Well, how else would I know what you were like as a child?"

Dan Heng was timid prey on the Luofu, quick to accuse and deny, yet he was almost unrecognizable by the time they reunited on Planarcadia, always a step ahead of Blade without ever running. That is, it's quite the predicament for Blade to exist so potently in books when Dan Heng's lifeblood is research.

La Mancha insists that he was a precocious child, but Blade can feel that he wasn't born with an intuitive understanding of other people, not like with objects. He had to learn how to grasp the intentions of others like a sword's hilt, how to measure personalities as precisely as he did metals, how to shape the variables of weapons to fit the perceived invariability of people. Yingxing wrote manuals and penned treaties and forged fellowships, showing the world exactly the type of person he was, but he never had access to a book that helped him understand Dan Feng. Dan Feng kept his troubles regarding politics and personhood locked in his gut without heeding the way his own sickness was spoiling. And Yingxing simply… trusted him, for better or for worse. The exact cuts and corners of their sin remain a blur, and maybe they always will be. They both feared the loss associated with sacrifice even though they had cruelly ignored it before. That's all he knows.

Maybe, just maybe, he despises history for letting Dan Feng fade into the crevices without being understood, and despises himself for still being unable to fully understand Dan Feng. Not for the first time ever, but for the first time that his consciousness allows in burning clarity, Blade finds himself grieving for a man who cannot be trailed, left no remnants behind of why or how he'd done it, and became unknowable on his own terms. Dan Feng had all the makings of a Nameless, yet he went nowhere in the end.

An Aeon's branch bloomed forth a ceaseless tragedy until Dan Heng broke free and became ceaselessness itself. Whether he knows it or not, his every action is apart of something grand and unforgettable, bridging his own story with each world. Blade will follow it if he needs to. He will know Dan Heng down to the core if it's the proper thing to do, measure where Dan Heng starts and where he ends, a man too adverse to reflect on his lived childhood and too afraid to form conclusions about the roads of his fate. The Express will not continue into the expanse forever, especially not with the same set of passengers; what will Dan Heng do in the face of loss?

Blade feels something cool press against his side, from his shoulder down to his thigh. Dan Heng's skin feels different against his reforged flesh. Visceral, in some sense.

"So, do environmental factors have less influence over your body temperature now? You're still rather warm," Dan Heng notes like he's observing some field study, lost in his own world, one where he has the courage to close the distance between them simply because he wills it.

It makes Blade's chest writhe with sorrow. He stows his grief away, letting it become another scar to his being, another shackle to carry until it can be severed. Dan Heng's appearance and mannerisms are familiar, but he is different. He is different in all the ways he should be. He has proven as much.

Strange. Blade catches himself before he can wonder if Dan Feng left a weapon behind for him to mount in Insumousu.

"Unsure. I haven't gotten used to this body. Perhaps conducting experiments on it is something you can assist me with."

"I thought you didn't have worldly desires."

"It's your mind that veered into that direction, not mine."

Dan Heng's laugh passes him by, like a song that stops before Blade can reel in each note. "Fine. In any case, you clearly have many things to look forward to. Any major plans in life?"

"I need to kill an Aeon."

"…I meant between now and killing an Aeon. Something that doesn't involve death."

Blade's mind goes blank. Dan Heng's stare seems to be demanding an answer, so Blade puts his ideations to work until a reminder dredges up. "Oh. I was thinking I could get into building furniture."

"You weren't interested in the past?"

"I was, but I rarely found the time to try my hand at homely projects. Much of my craft went to the war effort." Blade tenses when Dan Heng shifts the slightest, scales bristling against his arm. For whatever reason, he fishes for something that might elaborate on his train of thought, as lackluster as his storytelling skills are. "The last time I visited— infiltrated the Zhuming, I noticed a pair of senior Cloud Knights wielding weapons that I had forged. How rare it is that I recognized their faces, yet they did not recognize mine, whether as a craftsman or a criminal. They wore eyes that stared a thousand horizons ahead… either mara's onset or battle fatigue."

"You mean PTSD?" Dan Heng corrects. He instantly works himself into embarrassment. "Sorry. I imagine they were as ancient as you. Suffering takes its toll."

"Yet I broke free of immortality's curse even when all odds were stacked against me." Blade sighs. There are many obscurities in life he's yet to uncover. "What I mean is, no matter the lifetime, the scope of free will from person to person has always eluded me."

He lets the answer speak for itself. Dan Heng doesn't seem intent on dropping the discussion, still looking at Blade a little too expectantly. There it is again. It's not like he ever shares much about his own business. Why can't he offer something for a change?

"You seem like you have suggestions for my trajectory." Blade returns him a suspicious look.

"I… am just hoping your trajectory doesn't include more suicide attempts disguised as legitimate, thought-out missions."

"Suicide attempts have made me stronger," says Blade, gesturing at his tempered shell.

Dan Heng sighs. "At least work on the little things, then. Like fixing your atrocious sleep schedule. That 'Blade Tracker' sent me a log of the hours you've been sleeping daily since returning."

Blade had no idea it was such a meddlesome feature. "You're one to talk about sleep schedules, Archivist. Remind me of a time where you haven't walked up to me with eye bags."

"Wha— fine, but you know that sleep breaks momentum. The data bank shouldn't contain low-grade material."

"Excuses. Look, there are plenty of people already keeping me in check. You're getting caught up in worry when you don't need to."

"I want to," Dan Heng asserts plainly. His features recede into something softer yet testing still.

How troublesome. Nobody else puts Blade to quite so many tests, not in this manner, where Dan Heng is equally on the defensive as he is the offensive, as if Blade would be infringing on some rightful duty by denying Dan Heng a space to feel responsible. And, at this point, why would he deny Dan Heng? If anything, Blade still doesn't understand why Dan Heng would devote himself to a life that is carrying on only to die. Perhaps this will be his first misunderstanding to unravel and dissect, one that he never managed to deconstruct in their past lifetime.

Any chance to ask collapses when Dan Heng tempts him with another suggestion, "You and I can take things slow. We'll figure out the specifics along the way."

"Slow," Blade echoes. It's strange. He once tried snapping his veins to stop his heart from beating for others. Now, he finds that routine too dull to keep up. "We can. We should, I mean."

So that's how it is. They're agreeing unambiguously that there will be a next time. There will be more meetings like this, in different settings with different emotions hovering between. Neither of them will have to draw their weapons. Blade relaxes his rapidly tensing muscles.

"Perhaps next time we could go out for drinks," he proposes.

Dan Heng's smile is brief and awkward. "I don't think you should get back into drinking."

Blade wonders what Dan Heng has seen in his dreams for this to be his immediate conclusion.

The lengthy silence continues to fester. They're very good at this, letting the stifling air speak louder than their own voices. Blade looks again at Dan Heng right when Dan Heng looks at him. Any expectations are muddled the longer they hold eye contact. Dan Heng's pupils are truly quite wide. Blade must be a sight to behold. A honed sight, tempered to blackened fury. Yes. That would be ideal.

"Do you want a kiss?" A blistering scarlet conquers Dan Heng's face.

Blade isn't sure if his own face is much better. "I don't care." Dan Heng forces him to sit in a restless silence until he follows up with, "Fine."

"Request it."

How ridiculous. "…Do it."

"Properly."

He's practically begging Blade to reinstate their murder pact. "I want… you to kiss me."

Dan Heng's hand shakes— once, twice, glaring signs of nervousness that Blade is especially attuned to— when it reaches up to draw Blade's head close. Not for the first time, their lips meet, a sheathe for the knots of complication layered beneath. Blade recognizes starvation quickly. It bellows like a hollowed pit in his stomach and drives him further into the kiss, an indulgence greedy but not mindless.

It's a fault in his logic, to think of hunger as external to himself akin to how the abomination puppeted him. Hunger is the very constant that sentience thrives on. Blade wants this. He has a dreadful habit of getting exactly what he wants when the opportunities align.

The mara's tendrils no longer rake at the taste of salted sea. He confronts his shaking nerves with the knowledge that nothing will swallow his feelings and quell desire on his behalf. He can see why he craved the numbness of liquor long before the mara came. Blade would dig his teeth into Dan Heng's lips if he wasn't so practiced in restraint. He wants Dan Heng to prod and test and explore him like a voyage of his liking, so he considers biting anyway, just to see which reaction it might stir.

Nothing arises from the impulse. Blade's chest begins to sting. Dan Heng's claws are burrowing into his skin— artlessly, therefore unconsciously, because he knows Dan Heng is exact and ruthless when he does intend to inflict harm. The kiss ceases, while heavy sentiment lingers.

"How arrogant—" Dan Heng takes in a breath after huffing out his indignity, "—for you to think you can dissolve a vow that I made."

Many things unforgiven and unforgotten, as Blade thought.

"So you were angry," he challenges, keeping his tone soft.

His comment makes those teal eyes screw shut before reopening no less stern. "Revenge isn't the only thing that matters. And if you insist that it does, then… do you really find so little use in me?"

A shrivel of gentleness pulls at Blade's hands, a compulsion that jumps freely out of his synapses now that his mechanical limbs are without wires or cords. The numb frost in Dan Heng's eyes are untainted by the sadness crawling through the rest of his face. Stars rise at the moon's beckon; his palms land on the sides of Dan Heng's face, and they struggle knowing which direction to pick next.

"Even if I am not to bury you," Blade begins, because words are easier for once, "there are still other things that need burying. Was I wrong to believe that I shouldn't drag you into such plans when you've flown far beyond those days of war? Tell me."

"It's not my war," agrees Dan Heng curtly. He does not bend to Blade's touch. "But the Express doesn't own any matter in the universe. Atonement aside, you still need to be accompanied. I won't be a bystander to your sword."

But even if he did wish to own Blade, it would be fine. He is a sword. He is made to be kept.

Yet, it's true that only Blade can wield himself. He provokes Dan Heng again, just to see what ire he can lure out, "I only wonder where your desire to do so even came from. Surely you don't pity me that much."

"You'd be stunned to know what you've done to my psyche," Dan Heng just near sneers before answering, "Do you not realize how pitiful you are?"

He says this, voice thick with bile, and he expects Blade to believe that he will hold no resentment over this, that he won't be faced with the same burden Yingxing posed to Dan Feng, the burden of someone who arrives only to meet his fate of departure. In every sense of the word, Blade will die first, he will die before anyone else does. He won't allow any other outcome. No more resets, no more rebirths— not ever again. He can't do this all over again with a new set of people.

Blade takes Dan Heng's lips a second time on impulse. He should pull out his sword and drive Dan Heng far away, but even that instinct has left him. Too many things have left him and some things have returned, but even that cannot fix where the hammer has made its mark. He should avoid carving space in his heart and letting more things occupy him, but even avoidance has become tiring. Blade is utterly tired of attaching himself to detachment.

Not long ago, he would've kissed Dan Heng just to suffocate them both. He is not mindless. Dan Heng stays still, within his grasp, they surrender to the dissonance and imbalance and asymmetry that keeps them in equilibrium, until they both start feeling breathless, until Dan Heng breaks the kiss with a gentle press of fingers to Blade's throat. While catching his breath, Blade wonders if Dan Heng will hold this against him, sewing another thread between their souls.

What you've done to my psyche, the words echo in Blade's head. "There must've been a time, then, when I first altered the person you could've become," he says, just above a whisper.

"…You were the first person I ever killed," is the answer Dan Heng gives, because to him, becoming the target of slaughter is a constant in the cosmos beyond one's control, while snuffing another life is a conscious effort that sings to one's guilt, and Blade cannot fault him for believing in this illusion.

He imagines the horror of looking down at a forgotten corpse, spear tainted by the very blood it sprung from, teaching Dan Heng the reality of surviving with a blade in hand. He should not smile at this, yet he does. Blade does not remember the first time he took a life. Maybe it was one of the howling souls buried in Insumousu's forest of swords, someone who wanted his blood etched into their blade, again and again, always and forever. His legacy was built on brokenness, always and forever, legacies will mourn for a return to their creator, again and again.

He wonders now more than he ever did. He wonders if it also felt restricting to be Yingxing, wrapping his wrath around the mortal form gifted to him by his mother— by Blade's mother, a beginning who exists not in his memory or his flesh, but as fertilizer to birth more of the plague that buried her. Does that make him closer to her, or further away? No matter the body, he has always pushed himself towards the grandest of heights, with no regard for how high he could be climbing or how hard the fall would be if he slipped.

Pitiful, Dan Heng said. When has Blade ever been unaware of how sorely pitiful his life has been? Nobody who has ever stuck such a label on him has seen their expectation be met, not even when those labels were imposed by himself.

Here and now, luminous and damning like the aftermath of a Lux Arrow, is all that he has become. There are some ways in which he will never be sane again— rather, he was never sane in the first place. Yingxing's madness was stolen by a beast and Blade salvaged it from those fiery depths as his inheritance. Frankly, Yaoshi should regret letting him be the one to escape his homeland's calamity. The version of him that died alongside his parents had already created the perfect immortal: a survivor, one who vowed to imprison the Abundance within his destiny.

Devout to Terminus' creed, Blade will follow his God to the beginning of time. He will burn down everything that allowed someone like him to exist— and then, there will never be anyone like him again.

"Blade?" Worry saturates Dan Heng's tone. Through the veil of night, Blade sees droplets of sweat trickle down his neck, seeping between his scales.

The frigid ripples coursing over Blade's submerged half become apparent. He loosens his jaw, shifts slightly away from Dan Heng, forces his body temperature down. Dan Heng's eyes hold a careful smolder of concern. Blade allows it. He feeds off the compassion of others, just as everyone does, and he offers his compassion for others to feed off, the only form of parasitism he can think to call necessary.

"I'm sorry," says Blade, maybe for everything.

"I don't look to you for apologies. I'm asking what's wrong."

Immovable like earth itself, like Blade's incessant hunt had reforged his fight-or-flight into hardstone. "Just… thinking."

The nonanswer is all Dan Heng needs to conclude, "That's what I should be afraid of going forward, shouldn't I?"

He shouldn't be afraid of Blade in any respect. He shouldn't unless there are reasons to be. Uncertainty has been churning so hard in Blade's stomach that he can't find it in himself to dispel Dan Heng's. The future strikes fear when the expectation is to do better than all selves of the past. A craftsman is someone capable of driving the fate of each world they walk; power could become a dangerous thing in Blade's hands, not because he lacks control, but because he is willing to do whatever it takes. Nothing he has created has yet been completed, nothing he has created has yet been laid to rest, and restless swords are precisely those that crave blood.

There was a Finality written in Elio's prophecies: after perfecting the technique of carving stars, Jingliu could potentially drive the cosmos into a perpetual winter. It was averted so far, but who's to say that old possibilities cannot sew themselves back into the fabrics of time, like how Blade had cast death aside to point his sword at the source? She curdled Blade's flesh with shards of ice, sentencing him to the coldest of hells while the abomination within suffered none of it, and for that he will hone his flames to execute her.

Yet, Blade knows Jingliu down to the very nerves she sliced, broken swords infected by the same disease in youth. A blade of mortal steel can replace a blade of moonlight, but what remains is still a blade, sharp and ceaseless. If he was in her position, would his choice even be any different? Would he stuff his body with another lifeform like the Propagation to bury Yaoshi? Would he cleave the Luofu in half to scrape out the Ambrosial Arbor's roots? He cannot ascertain how far he will have to go, which principles he will have to balance. Immortals stained by the Abundance are mere pawns, and pawns deserve a second chance at life as people. If necessity dictates sacrifice, what room does that create for freedom?

Blade finds that he is unendingly lucky to have so many people at his side. It's the Nameless who know best about freedom, a perfect mirror for the confines of Finality's cage, in that the line between shackled and unshackled exists only in perception.

"You still have the bracer," Blade does not question but rather states.

Dan Heng's expression becomes that of mild surprise. "I do."

He takes Dan Heng's hand and holds it just above the water's surface. Everything is cold again, as cold as Blade is used to.

"I know what you are thinking, but I never said vengeance was all that mattered, nor have I said anything about treading a solitary path. However, I cannot let you follow me to the end unsighted."

For most of his lucid life with the Stellaron Hunters, his bracer had been buried in Kafka's closet. He discarded it believing that nothing should tempt his touch but a sword's cold steel. Such a pathetic shortcoming. With a mind undefiled, the objects binding his body to life can no longer weigh down the three thousand catties in his hand.

Then, destinies bound by jade and coral gold should be twined into something new. New margins of promise. New terms of penance. The inability to forge limits is how they ended up shackling each other a lifetime ago.

"I'll wear mine again… permanently. You may trace me from any star in the universe." Blade tightens his grip on Dan Heng. A small part of him prays that it hurts. Words are better engraved with pain. "And if I am ever led astray from my new vow, you must come and strike me down without mercy. Only you could teach me this lesson."

Down to the fingertips, he can feel the tension flooding Dan Heng's body. Blade doesn't bother searching his lips for the makings of a response. Resting the side of his head against the stone edge, he nestles Dan Heng's palm beneath his cheek, finding that his bones feel terribly weary. A signal to quit thinking about all of this, he figures. Muscles twitch under him like Dan Heng might flee, and Blade doesn't quite mind the prospect, knowing both fate and choice will clasp them back together.

Unlike anything he's said before, Dan Heng's voice is frail when he shudders out, "I… I don't know."

A response no greater than a reflex, churned out of fear. Blade has faced Dan Heng's rejection before. He can wait for him to change his mind, just as he did back then. "There's no rush." And Blade shuts his eyes.

If he becomes thousandfold the sinner along the path of cleansing sins, he's afraid only the righteous will be able to tell the difference. For all his blindness, Dan Feng was the one who grew disturbed whenever bloodshed dyed the Luofu's rivers red. Yingxing is just an open wound.

Somewhere deep in his chest, a burn lingers. If this body is to bleed forever, then Shuhu will be forced to digest each and every layer of pain. He lets the thought settle his nerves and empty his mind at last. Come what may, there are endless possibilities where there is nothing, just as a home is nothing more than a covenant of beating hearts and the oaths between them, and a blade is nothing more than a sharp edge that guides all beginnings to their end.