Chapter Text
人物异类，狐则在人物之间。幽明异路，狐则在幽明之间。仙妖殊途，狐则在仙妖之间。故谓遇狐为怪可，谓遇狐为常亦可。
Humans and beasts are of different kinds, but foxes are between humans and beasts. The dead and the living walk different paths, but foxes are between the dead and the living. Gods and monsters travel different ways, but foxes are between gods and monsters. Thus one could say to encounter a fox is strange; one could also say it is ordinary.
- 紀昀, 《阅微草堂笔记》
Ji Yun, Jottings from the Thatched Cottage of Careful Reading
一
ONE
In the end, his mother’s body weighed less than nothing. Her little fox body, white at the muzzle, whittled down to skin and fur and bone, could have fit into his two cupped palms; only her tail – that long, splendid tail she had been so proud of, that had just started to split into two at its very tip – spilled out from his arms, the faded rust-brown of old blood.
Meng Yao had almost stopped believing her. His mother, the hulijing: but every woman in the brothel had been called a hulijing, at one point or another. The words no long held even a ring of truth. Instead, his mother had stayed stubbornly human right up to the very end, so human that Meng Yao began to doubt himself. Had he really once curled up beside her, and helped her brush her tail until it shone? Had he truly begged her to use her fox magic to whisk them far away from this place?
Now, carefully cradling his mother’s dead body, Meng Yao remembered. In the flickering lamplight, her tail had gleamed red-gold. Not a trace of that colour remained; her pelt, once so glossy and so lustrous, felt like it would come apart in his hands.
“Even foxes have to live in this human world. There’s nowhere else I can go,” she had said, in a voice so soft that the cicadas could have sung over her. But it had been a winter’s night, just like this one, and the cicadas were dead or sleeping. So Meng Yao heard every word.
“But you, A-Yao,” she’d continued, pressing her palm to his cheek, “you aren’t chained here. You’re better than this. Better than foxes and whores.
“You must cultivate. You must cultivate. Cultivate, and become immortal, like your mother never will.”
She had been right. She hadn’t even reached two tails; nine would’ve been an impossibility. Was an impossibility, now, as Meng Yao wrapped her body in white cloth, folding away her thin limbs, covering her faded face.
He carried her out into the streets, and then further out, almost beyond the city limits. When it became clear that she was dying, the brothel had thrown her out for the final time. The only room Meng Yao could rent was on the periphery of the city, nearly into the surrounding woods – and it was these woods he walked into now, with his mother curled into his arms.
He walked for a very long time. The night was cold, and it was dark, and perhaps he should have been scared; but his mother was with him, his mother the hulijing, and he knew she wouldn’t let any harm come to him. This was the only thing she could do for him, now.
At last he came to a small clearing, bathed in silver by the waning moon. Standing at its centre, he realised that he hadn’t even brought a shovel.
It was only then that he began to cry.
Much later on, as he watched over the excavation of the Guanyin temple, seething with monks and cultivators holding bright torches aloft, he thought of that night. How he had shook, and wept, and wept, holding desperately onto his mother’s body; how he had howled to the gods, begging them to turn him, too, into a fox – a fox, or some wild thing that knew only how to run, far away from here, beyond human regard or scorn.
But neither heaven nor earth were moved. In the end, he dug her grave with his own two hands, and knelt before it, alone.
二
TWO
“Son of a hulijing,” the man muttered, venomous, loud enough for those sitting around him to hear. He scrubbed at his hands, the cup of tea Meng Yao had presented to him pushed to one side, as if the stain of Meng Yao’s fox blood was something that could be transmitted by mere touch.
No one else had been brazen enough to say anything. With Chifeng-zun and Zewu-jun both sitting in the room, they held their useless tongues; their disgust, of course, was still almost palpable, but Meng Yao was used to that. The name-calling, too, he was used to, so he didn’t worry about his smile slipping and simply moved on to serving the next man.
The next man scarcely acknowledged him, but his lips pressed together in sneering amusement, and he took pains to avoid even the slightest contact with Meng Yao’s hands. The next man after him, and the next: even the politest of cultivators could only manage a vague gesture of thanks, meeting his eyes with clear discomfort before completely dismissing him.
Meng Yao’s hands were very steady. He offered cup after cup of tea, to these worthless men who possessed not even a fraction of his mother’s elegance and fox grace, who spat the word hulijing like they spat the word whore – as if the very taste of the word befouled their repulsive mouths.
Meng Yao would cut their tongues out, given half the chance, and offer them to his mother’s grave.
He would have to wait a long time for that chance. Eventually, it would come – years into his tenure as Chief Cultivator, long after Nie Mingjue’s death – but for now he was nothing more than Sect Leader Nie’s deputy, and he could only do his job.
Sometimes his job was a little easier, though: when Sect Leader Nie’s brow unknotted just a little, his stern gaze softening as he commended Meng Yao on a task well done; or, like now, when Lan Xichen caught his eye and smiled at him so gently that Meng Yao came as close to fumbling the teacups as he ever had.
“Thank you,” Lan Xichen said, his long fingers brushing against Meng Yao’s own as he accepted his cup. It was the heat of the tea that lingered, Meng Yao told himself, not the warmth of Lan Xichen’s touch on his skin.
Meng Yao bowed his head, feeling an answering smile curl, unbidden, at the corners of his mouth. He did not hover and fawn over Zewu-jun like a lesser man would; but, as he served the next cultivator, he allowed himself a single glance at Lan Xichen, taking in how he brought the cup to his parted lips and tipped it back without hesitation. When he set his drink down to continue his conversation with Sect Leader Nie, the soft seam of his mouth was lush and wet.
This sight did not distract Meng Yao in the slightest. He completed the task at hand with all due diligence, and once he had finished serving all the cultivators, he returned to his station beside Sect Leader Nie. As the cultivators talked, Meng Yao listened quietly, cataloguing all the information into his perfect memory.
At last, Sect Leader Nie dismissed the gathering, and Meng Yao was charged with showing the cultivators to their rooms. After Zewu-jun’s little display of favour, not even the most insolent of the cultivators dared to breathe an insult in his direction, and as more and more of the men retired for the night, Meng Yao felt something inside him – some snarling thing, twisted up around his heart – relax incrementally.
It disturbed him. This fox within his skin, which still cried out at the injustices he should have long learned to endure, and grasped for things that were far beyond his reach. Would Zewu-jun think less of him, if he knew of it? Would Sect Leader Nie?
He hoped not. Neither of them cared where he came from, nor did they deride him for his mother’s fate. Did it make a difference if she wasn’t quite human? If Meng Yao himself was the son of a fox?
“This is your room,” Meng Yao told the last cultivator left – Lan Xichen, who had stayed by his side until the very end. As their most honoured guest, Lan Xichen’s quarters were in fact the closest to the dining hall, but he’d showed no inclination to leave Meng Yao alone with the other cultivators and had joined them for the entire circuitous route around the Nie Sect headquarters.
“Thank you,” Lan Xichen said, for the second time that night. It was no less genuine than the first, and somehow Meng Yao found it difficult to look directly at him. It reminded Meng Yao suddenly, dizzyingly, of the moment when he had seen Lan Xichen in the small clearing that housed his mother’s grave – that instant when their eyes first met, right before Lan Xichen toppled over in a dead faint.
“Goodnight, Zewu-jun,” he said, smiling a little at the memory, and bowed. To his surprise, Lan Xichen caught his elbow before he could make a full retreat. When he glanced up, Lan Xichen couldn’t seem to look away from his smile.
“It’s been too long, Meng Yao. Are you well?” Again, the imprint of his touch left a shiver of heat, even through the fabric of Meng Yao’s sleeve. “Please, stay awhile,” Lan Xichen continued. “Tell me how you’ve been.”
“… Only if Zewu-jun also tells me how he’s been,” Meng Yao replied, after quickly calculating which outstanding tasks could be put off until tomorrow, and was rewarded with Zewu-jun’s own dazzling smile. “I’ve heard such tales of your exploits, I should hardly believe them. But if it’s Zewu-jun, I know all of the stories must be true.”
At this, Lan Xichen laughed sweetly, and protested that Meng Yao praised him overmuch; and he led Meng Yao into his room, and sat them both down, facing each other, so they could talk deep into the night.
三
THREE
The pelt did not even take pride of place in Wen Ruohan’s Sun Palace. He possessed far greater treasures than the mere skin of a mere hulijing, after all.
“Gifted by some minor sect leader who wished to curry favour,” Wen Ruohan said, when he caught Meng Yao’s eyes wandering towards the pelt one too many times. He stepped up to where it hang, stretched out across the eastern wall of the palace’s second hall, and Meng Yao could do nothing but follow. “A fox captured and killed centuries ago, an heirloom from those times when that sect still had the strength and the skill to achieve such feats. But they had become much diminished since.
“A shame. If they had gifted the live beast to me, I might have spared them. I would have liked to flay the hulijing myself.”
Wen Ruohan’s voice was very soft, almost fond, and he reached out to touch the hanging paw of the fox with such gentleness that the movement was almost a caress. The fox’s fur parted beneath his fingers, a red both richer and darker than Meng Shi’s pelt had ever been, bleeding into the perfect whiteness at the tip of each of its nine tails. Its whiskers, too, were perfectly white; and its long snowy lashes, closed over its dead eyes, seemed almost to tremble and part, as if the fox wished to catch a glimpse of those who disturbed its peaceless rest.
Meng Yao had never intended to tell anyone the truth, and Wen Ruohan was not the exception. But some terrible compulsion clawed at him, scratched itself out of his skin, threatened to shred his tongue if he didn’t simply speak –
“My mother,” he said, already regretting the words that were about to come out of his mouth – “was a hulijing.”
Wen Ruohan turned to look at him. Fire always burned in his eyes, cold and remote; but from the beginning there had been a particular flicker of interest, a single spark, just for Meng Yao. He’d only gotten this far by fanning its flames.
“My mother is long dead,” he continued, “and her pelt has rotted. But I –”
What was he offering to Wen Ruohan? What wouldn’t he offer to Wen Ruohan, if it meant finally gaining his trust, climbing high enough to stab him in the back? He’d already bet his miserable life on this one chance to fulfil his mother’s dying wish, to earn his father’s acknowledgement. Betting his own hide didn’t change those stakes.
Wen Ruohan smiled, at last. “You are alive. And you would let me take your skin.”
Meng Yao’s voice was very steady. “Sect Leader, I would.”
“Why?” That spark in Wen Ruohan’s eyes had ignited, and the roar of the blaze threatened to consume Meng Yao.
“Because you don’t care what lies beneath it. You don’t care that I’m a fox.”
It was only now that he dared to look away from Wen Ruohan, to turn his eyes downwards in a display of necessary deference. He stayed there, staring at the tiled floor, wondering if he would be struck down in the space between one breath and the next.
When Wen Ruohan finally spoke, he sounded amused. “The child of a fox,” he corrected - and the relief that swept through Meng Yao did not quite drown out the tiniest prick of anger, that even Wen Ruohan would take such pains to remind him that he was neither man nor monster, never fully what he claimed to be.
“Look up, Meng Yao.” With a flick of Wen Ruohan’s hand, the pelt peeled itself off the wall, its nine tails momentarily flaring out and spiralling in on themselves in a blur of crimson and white, before it drifted over to Meng Yao and landed all at once into his arms.
The unexpected weight almost made him stagger. Abruptly, he felt sick to his stomach: the last time he’d held a dead fox in his arms, it had been the body of his mother.
“A reward,” Wen Ruohan declared, “for your loyalty.” He bent down, closer to Meng Yao, and pressed his palm to Meng Yao’s cheek; in that instant, his touch was tender, as if Meng Yao was something to be treasured – as if Meng Yao’s skin, and the fox child within, were equally precious. Then his fingers traced down the line of Meng Yao’s jaw, coming to rest beneath his chin, tilting his head up so he was forced to look directly into Wen Ruohan’s eyes. “Betray me, and it will be your skin on display instead.”
The pressure on the soft underside of Meng Yao’s chin prevented him from nodding, and his nausea did not abate. “Yes, Sect Leader,” he said, instead, struggling not to choke when the pressure briefly increased, Wen Ruohan’s fingers digging into his throat for a single terrifying moment – and then his sect leader drew away.
“Go,” Wen Ruohan commanded, already losing interest, and Meng Yao went.
He had no further orders for today, so he returned to his quarters, carrying the pelt of the hulijing. It was an oddly heavy thing. His arms tired easily, and the balance of the pelt was difficult to negotiate; often he had to stoop down to pick up one or another of the fox’s tails, so long that they almost trailed across the palace floor, or else he had to throw a paw over his shoulder and settle the fox’s head in the crook of his neck.
When at last he reached his room, he carefully spread the pelt across his bed. To accommodate all of its tails, he hung its head off the side, and when he knelt on the floor before it, he was almost level with the hulijing’s eyes.
His hands were shaking, to his surprise. It looked wrong, this powerful creature splayed out in front of him, this nine-tailed fox laid so low. How could it end up like this, a half-breed’s prize granted on a tyrant’s whim? How dare it end up like this?
He couldn’t still his hands, couldn’t stop them from reaching out to cup the fox’s soft, splendid muzzle. Its fur, beneath his fingers – almost as if it grew out of his own skin, flayed and turned inside out, finally revealed to the world for what he truly was.
He wanted to wrap himself deep within it. He wanted to tear it from him with his teeth. He wanted to rip the whole thing apart, rend the fox limb from limb; wanted to hack off its nine perfectly-formed tails, wanted to taste its blood, his blood, and know that its fur gave way to flesh, as it was so with all men, and all beasts too –
But it was Wen Ruohan’s gift, and no harm would come to it. Not unless Meng Yao wanted to pay for the insult with his life.
This was what the great fox had come to: nothing more than fur and skin, a trophy protected only under threat. Where was all its might and wisdom now, all its infinite might and wisdom, all the might and wisdom his mother had never possessed? What difference had it made, now that they were both dead?
“My mother was a hulijing,” he whispered, the words scraping his throat raw, “just like you.”
He’d never intended to tell anyone the truth. And the truth had never been for Wen Ruohan. The truth had been for the hulijing, hung up against the wall, lifting open an eyelid to see who had disturbed its rest. More than anything, more than anything, he’d wanted this dead animal to look at him and acknowledge him as kin.
But it had been pointless, after all. From this angle, laid out before him, it was clear that its eyes had been sewn shut.
四
FOUR
“Son of a prostitute!” Nie Mingjue shouted, and as Jin Guangyao fell, a strange sort of double vision came over him: at the top of the steps, Nie Mingjue’s tall, upright form overlapped with that of all the people who had called him much the same thing, such that every time he looked back he saw someone different, and heard all their voices ringing out at the same time. Son of a prostitute, son of a whore, son of a hulijing!
Ah, he thought. So this was what he’d been to Nie Mingjue all along.
“He didn’t mean it,” Lan Xichen said, afterwards, when he found Jin Guangyao hiding in his quarters like a fox gone to ground. He bowed down beside the bowl that Jin Guangyao was using to clean his wounds, rolled his sleeves up, and gently took the bandages from Jin Guangyao’s numb hands.
“Didn’t he?” Jin Guangyao replied.
His voice was all wrong. Too flat, too dead. He should’ve been better at this by now; he should’ve been able to return to the Blooming Gardens, to all the grand plans he’d been so excited to share with Lan Xichen. Yes, Jin Guangyao could play any role, put on any mask - even this retreat to his rooms could have been spun into the narrative of the long-suffering martyr, much-abused by their tyrannical Da-ge, if only he could string the sounds together, if only he could get his traitorous tongue to comply.
Instead his throat worked and worked around the words. Er-ge, I’ve betrayed you. Er-ge, don't you see? I stoked the rage in Nie Mingjue, but I didn’t put a voice to it. The child of a fox is only ever a fox; I will never rise above my birth to men such as these.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jin Guangyao managed at last. “Da-ge said what he said.”
And he left it at that. Later, he promised himself, later he would remember how to lament and plead and let his eyes shine with unshed tears: with all his rage and humiliation and fear, everything that had drained right out of him when Nie Mingjue had driven him to the edge of Koi Tower and demanded to know: “Are you any different from the rest?”
Nie Mingjue only ever asked senseless questions. Of course Jin Guangyao was different. There had been no doubt about that, right from the start.
“A-Yao," Lan Xichen murmured, his voice so terribly sad. But he didn't push any further. He carefully dressed Jin Guangyao’s wounds, wrapping the bandages around his wrists - his temples - with a touch so tender that Jin Guangyao ached all the more for it, the fox within beating its head bloody against the wall of his chest.
Lan Xichen’s hands lingered for just a moment before he tied the last knot at Jin Guangyao’s forehead. Perhaps it reminded him a little too much of the Gusu Lan ribbon.
When at last he was finished, Lan Xichen said: “Let me play for you, A-Yao.”
And usually Jin Guangyao would have replied: Anything you like, Er-ge. But today he was thinking about foxes, and how hard, how pointlessly, he’d tried to keep Nie Mingjue alive.
“Would Er-ge be able to play 梦狐?” he requested instead. It was a low-brow folk tune, popular on the streets and in the brothels; too unsophisticated for his mother to play to her clients, at the zenith of her fame, so she only did so in private and only ever played it for him. He wasn't even sure that Lan Xichen would know the melody - yes, they had heard it while hiding together, for people still sang during the war, but Jin Guangyao recalled much that others didn't. He had long resigned himself to his own memory.
But when Lan Xichen sat down at his guqin, the first notes of 梦狐 rang out from its strings with the same reverberating shock of raindrops breaking through still water.
It was perfect. Lan Xichen played it perfectly, like a sun shower on a summer evening, wistful and full of warmth. How, Jin Guangyao wanted to ask him, how did you learn this song? When did you learn it? Was it when you realised how much it meant to Meng Yao? Did you learn it for me?
Still, he could not ask. It served only as a reminder, as bitter as the song was sweet, of what he had done with Lan Xichen’s own gift of song - of the Sound of Lucidity, and what he was going to do to Nie Mingjue with it.
Troubled by these thoughts, Jin Guangyao drifted off into an uneasy slumber. Lulled by the music, he found himself in a strange and wondrous dream: he dreamed that he woke, a little later, to find that Lan Xichen had left his qin to kneel in front of him.
“A-Yao?” Lan Xichen whispered, laying a hand on Jin Guangyao’s shoulder as if to check whether he was still asleep. How Lan Xichen looked after him - how Lan Xichen looked at him! With the golden light of the evening caught in his gentle eyes, with something so much like longing, as if Jin Guangyao was the one far out of reach…
Impossible. Jin Guangyao knew very well that he was dreaming of the impossible. Yet he was, after all, a fox’s child, with a fox’s appetites: for revenge and other things besides.
五
FIVE
In the end, he couldn’t visit the temple very much at all. It was far too great a risk; Jin Guangyao knew well what would be whispered if he travelled too often to the city of his birth, how people might start to talk.
But it didn’t matter, anyway. He still remembered everything: and sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, he would close his eyes and retrace every step from Koi Tower to the Guanyin temple, conjuring up that dearly cherished sight. The many-eaved roof reaching up to the heavens, its celadon tiles glowing beneath the moon and the sun alike. The pillars of fragrant laurel wood, polished to a golden-silk shimmer and painted bright with cinnabar; the splendid coffered ceiling with its canopy of interlocking beams, adorned in the colours of the five elements. The high altar heaped with offerings, shrouded in incense burnt by the worshippers who bowed before it and chanted endless sutras to the towering Guanyin statue - the Guanyin statue with his mother's face, and a little lacquered carving of a fox curled at her feet.
It was beautiful. He had made it beautiful. He had brought his mother down from the mountains, the bleached-white bones of her, and built her this shrine.
He had brought Rusong here, too, just once before he died. It had been no particular occasion; only a coincidence of timing, a precious opportunity seized. On a visit to Lotus Pier, Jin Guangyao engineered their route through Yunping City to pass by the temple as if it were sheer happenstance - and what loving parent would not take their son to be blessed by Guanyin's mercy, given half the chance?
A-Song had been small enough then to cradle in one arm. The child peered at the temple, looking all around with his father's sweet face and his mother's innocent eyes - or perhaps it was his mother's face and his father's eyes, similar as they were, in ways that made Jin Guangyao's heart twist and writhe like an animal ready to gnaw off its own limb before it could ever be caught in a trap.
But A-Song's face, his baby’s eyes, were filled with such wonder as they approached Guanyin. His smile held an echo of the statue's fine features, and in his laughter there was all the mischief of a fox; he babbled wildly, happily, almost wriggling out of his father's embrace in his eagerness to reach out and pet the sculpted muzzle of the huljing.
How Jin Guangyao could've loved this child. What a relief it was, when he died.
Years later, Jin Guangyao passed by the temple again on his way to Lotus Pier. He had not planned it, this time; but he'd arrived a little early to pick up Jin Ling, and knew Jiang Wanyin would begrudge parting with his nephew even a moment before he had to. Jin Ling was the only family he had left, after all. In this, Jin Guangyao could allow himself to be kind.
So when he saw the Guanyin temple, its roof reflecting the day's first light, he hesitated only for a moment before entering inside. It had been so long. He missed his mother. Couldn't he allow himself this much kindness as well?
Everything within was exactly as he recalled: the hallways, the ceilings, the people, the prayers. The Guanyin statue, smiling like his mother, like his dead child; and the little fox smiled down at him too, as he knelt before her and touched his forehead to the ground.
“Mother,” he whispered. “I've finally returned.”
For he, the hulijing's son, had moved heaven and earth to do so. He had cultivated as his mother had bidden, and risen higher than her wildest dreams; his weak body might never achieve immortality, but he was sure his name would endure. Had Jin Guangyao not ended a war, slaughtered great tyrants, sworn brotherhood to the most beautiful and most worthy man there was? Hadn’t he built twelve hundred watchtowers to protect the common people, steering the cultivation clans into an era of stability and hard-earned peace? Hadn’t he treated A-Su with honour, and done the best he could in this world?
Yes, if his mother had lived to see it, surely she would have known: in the end, Jin Guangyao was neither man nor fox, but something greater than both.