little shapes that feign some knowledge of you
by katzenfabrik

little shapes that feign some knowledge of you

katzenfabrik

Summary

Xue Yang was left for dead by the side of the road to a nowhere town—only when he was rescued did he realise he'd been dropped into the perfect revenge against his nemesis, Xiao Xingchen. Everything was going perfectly... until another exile from the Jin Sect wandered down that same road.

Canon divergence with Mo Xuanyu in Yi City, written for the Songxuexiao Exchange 2020.

Notes

None
Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 28063845.

Chapter 1

It was a warm, dry day, the first really good weather of the new spring. As Xue Yang walked back towards Yi City, the meadows on either side of the narrow track exhaled the scent of damp earth, waiting impatiently for the shoots poking up through the soil to start growing in earnest. There was a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. His step was light, though the bad leg had started to hurt by now, the sole of his boot skimming the ground when he swung it forward.

He'd made it to the nearest village and back within half a day, and that was reason enough to be cheerful—would have been even if the village hadn't fulfilled all his specifications for size, a good defensive wall and so on. The extra time he still needed to heal would let him finish the preparations, and then... it would be time for a night hunt with the good daozhang.

Xue Yang was still smiling when the coffin home appeared in the distance. Its outer walls were grey, plaster falling off in chunks. What a rathole. A rathole he was quite keen to get back to, though, and sink down onto the uncomfortable bed with its gradually rotting woven ropes. That was the first thing he was going to fix, as soon as he could spend more time on his feet.

There was a small flurry of activity ahead of him. The little blind girl stepped out of the gate just as a familiar, tall figure in white arrived from the other direction, the road that led towards Yi City. There was another man walking beside him, and Xue Yang's heart contracted. Was that Song Lan? No, it couldn't be. He was taller than Xiao Xingchen, right? It'd been a while since Xue Yang had last seen them together, but that was the image burned into his mind: a serenely condescending smile from above him, and a scowl from even farther up.

His leg dragged and throbbed when he tried to walk faster. Xue Yang was no longer smiling. Why were they going inside the coffin home? If Xiao Xingchen wanted to dole out charity, he could do it from the gate. At least A-Qing looked unhappy about this too. He could see her waving her stick around before she followed them in.

By the time he finally got back to his home—his temporary home—all three of them were sitting out in the yard, on two of the coffins they'd repurposed as furniture. The mysterious interloper had his back to the entrance. From closer up, Xue Yang could see that his robes weren't black, as he'd thought, but a dark reddish brown. It was good-quality fabric, cut well if rather plainly, the style highlighting his slight build. He was leaning forwards over his knees, wolfing down something that had probably been intended to be their dinner tonight.

"Who's this?" Xue Yang demanded.

The Little Blind's head had already been cocked towards his limping footsteps. "Great," she muttered, "now there's two of them."

"Ah, my friend, you're back," smiled Xiao Xingchen. "Our guest is a fellow cultivator, a traveller." He hesitated. Xue Yang assumed he was thinking about how he was a traveller too, until recently, but then the stranger finally swallowed the food in his mouth and turned around.

"An acquaintance of mine, actually," Xiao Xingchen said at the same moment. "We met briefly, years ago."

"Shixiong?" said Mo Xuanyu, his eyes wide.

From the sagging bed, Xue Yang could see the room's one tiny window and watch how the daylight changed through the afternoon. He'd learned the sequence over the first days of his recovery, when he couldn't get up at all. Judging by the angle and colour, the brightest part of the afternoon had already passed.

His leg felt like it would carry him again, though he'd pay for it the next morning. He ought to get up. When he'd stamped into the house, having given his erstwhile shidi his most murderous shut-up look, he'd said he was going to rest. Instead, he'd been running through all the ways he could get rid of Mo Xuanyu before he completely ruined the perfect revenge the heavens had dropped Xue Yang into.

The floorboards creaked. Pushing half of his face past the door, Mo Xuanyu whispered, "Chengmei shixiong?"

"Fuck off." Xue Yang pushed himself upright in the bed, gritting his teeth so as not to wince.

"No one will hear us," Mo Xuanyu said, walking in and closing the door carefully behind him. He didn't seem to know what to do next and just stood there, arms hanging awkwardly at his sides. "Xiao daozhang took Qing guniang to the market. I interrupted him there, before."

"'Qing guniang'? She wishes." He rolled his eyes. "Look, Xuanyu, there's room for one demonic cultivator here, and that's me. Tell me what you said about me to Xiao Xingchen and then fuck off back to Jinlin Tai before I kill you."

"I didn't tell him anything about you. He said, 'That's your shixiong?' and I said I'd seen you at Jinlin Tai before, but I didn't know you well. And I can't—I can't go back there."

"That's too much already. He might be an idiot, but he's not stupid."

Xue Yang had ignored Xuanyu's obvious hook, and he continued to ignore the boy's increasingly intense gaze, letting the silence spin out. Xuanyu had grown, in the few months since he'd last seen him. His mother's family must be tall, because he didn't get it from Jin Guangshan. He apparently hadn't grown out of making puppy eyes to get his way.

Xuanyu took a couple of steps closer to the bed. Xue Yang scowled at him and waited for him to back off—but he didn't, and suddenly he was closer than Xue Yang had thought and it was as if the expression he'd read on his face turned inside out without actually moving. Xuanyu wasn't pleading, he realised. Xuanyu was angry.

"You look like a walking corpse," he said. "Barely walking, at that. What happened to you, shixiong? Who'd you piss off this time?"

"Don't you try to threaten me, pipsqueak." Xue Yang reached for his own sleeve, summoning Jiangzai and feeling the dark prickle of its energy, just inside the qiankun pouch there. Xuanyu didn't move. The silence dragged, and Xue Yang found himself saying, against his will, "It was your beloved xiongzhang, if you must know. So you'd better get out of here, because I'm sure he wouldn't approve of his little brother hanging around a man he's already tried to kill once, would he?"

At the reference to Jin Guangyao, the colour dropped out of Mo Xuanyu's cheeks before flaring feverishly back. He twisted his face away from Xue Yang's so fast it looked like a spasm.

"What?" Xue Yang pushed. There was a weakness there, and he was too impatient to draw it out slowly.

"It sounds like we have a common enemy," said Xuanyu, trying for his earlier hard tone and missing. "Unless it was you who told him—certain things about me."

"I didn't tell him shit. I didn't get the chance to."

"Well, whoever did, Jin Guangyao has exiled me from Jinlin Tai." There were tears glistening in Xuanyu's eyes that the boy refused to acknowledge. "I can't go back there, and I won't go home to Mo Village. You don't know what it's like there, Chengmei shixiong."

"Yeah, and I don't care either."

"Let me stay here."

"What? Why the fuck would I?"

"You want revenge. I want revenge. We can work together, like we used to do before, with the Yiling laozu's notes and the Yin tiger seal—" He broke off when Xue Yang, not even bothering with Jiangzai, planted his palm in Xuanyu's chest and shoved him across the room. His feet collided with the rough wooden trunk under the window. Sliding clumsily down the wall, he bounced off the trunk with one hip and landed on the floor.

"The first thing you're going to learn here, shidi, is to keep your mouth shut." Honestly, it was ridiculous that Xue Yang had to tell that to any relative of Jin Guangyao. He levered himself off the bed. "Don't talk about how you know me. Don't call me Chengmei, or anything else, for that matter."

Mo Xuanyu blinked up at him. He looked every bit the shy scholar, the weak cultivator and the awkward adolescent that he'd been at Jinlin Tai, but there was steel in his eyes now. Interesting.

"Here's how it goes. I won't throw you out, but it's up to Xiao Xingchen if you stay or not." At the door, he paused and glanced back. "You've got no idea about what I want."

Dinner that night went more smoothly than Xiao Xingchen had anticipated. When he and A-Qing had returned to the coffin home, his friend and the young cultivator they'd met earlier in the day were both sitting out in the courtyard: silent but, at least, not arguing. He'd suggested to A-Qing that she take a rest while he cooked, but instead she joined him in the cramped lean-to kitchen, chattering as he chopped vegetables and boiled rice. Xiao Xingchen wondered if the presence of another strange young man had unsettled her. She seemed happy, though.

They ate outside, around the fire. Despite the damp chill to the evening air, there wasn't a more comfortable place for four people to sit together. The coffin home had not been designed for conviviality.

"Tell me, daozhang, how do you know Mo gongzi?" his friend asked, in a gap in the conversation. Up till now they had shared a certain mutual tact, a balance disturbed by the new arrival.

"I visited Jinlin Tai once, several years ago," he said slowly. Images floated in the constant darkness of his mind: gold and peach-coloured ornamentation everywhere, smiles and bows that promised much and meant nothing. "Well, twice, but I'm thinking of the first time. Mo gongzi was a disciple there in those days."

If Xiao Xingchen blushed at his own polite steps around the truth, the warmth from the fire would cover it. In fact, he remembered Mo Xuanyu neither from that first visit with Song Lan, when the two young heroes of the cultivation world had been reluctantly shown off as curiosities at the Jin court, nor from their second appearance there, when the gilt had rubbed off to reveal the ugliness beneath. Mo Xuanyu had known him on sight in the Yi City market, however.

"What was it like there, daozhang?" A-Qing asked eagerly. "I bet it was ever so grand, with great halls and flowers everywhere, and beautiful ladies in silk dresses, and banquets and dancing every night!"

"Don't forget, Little Blind, our daozhang can't see," his friend cut in. There was a sharpness to his voice that was not uncommon when he talked to A-Qing, but tonight Xiao Xingchen felt it cutting him too. "Jinlin Tai could have been as drab and bare as this place, how would he have known the difference?"

"I could still see, at that time," he said quickly, to prevent A-Qing launching into a defence of him. "It was indeed very beautiful. There is a staircase of a hundred steps, surrounded on both sides with snow-white peonies whose centres are gold. I didn't spend long there, though. Perhaps Mo gongzi could tell you about it another time."

There was a snort from his friend's direction. Xiao Xingchen didn't ask what was funny. He had told himself he wouldn't question his friend about his life, his identity.

They finished eating. After a while, Mo Xuanyu said cautiously, "Xiao daozhang."

"Yes, Mo gongzi?"

"This humble cultivator doesn't have much to offer, and the daozhang's hospitality has already been so great, but... it would be a huge honour to train under such a distinguished master. Would the daozhang ever consider taking on a disciple?"

He had known what this was leading up to, ever since the young voice had hailed him on the street and Mo Xuanyu had told his story of being cast out of the Jin sect. Xiao Xingchen had had most of the day to think about it. He wasn't worthy of this belated opportunity to do, in a small way, what he and Song Lan had always planned to—but to turn it down would be the height of ingratitude.

"Mo gongzi, do you really want a teacher without eyes?"

"Xiao daozhang's cultivation is great whether or not he can see," the boy answered promptly, as though he'd been expecting the question.

"A-Qing, how would you feel if Mo gongzi joined us here, for a while?"

He heard her huff dramatically, and felt her take hold of his arm and hug it to herself. Still, she sounded sincere when she said, "I guess he can stay."

"You didn't ask me, daozhang," said his friend, "but it's no skin off my nose. Let him do what he wants."

"Then let us try it, for a while at least."

They put Mo Xuanyu in the coffin-bed Xiao Xingchen had been sleeping in, in the little room that might have been a pantry if they'd ever had enough food stored to need one. He joined his friend in the only real bed in the coffin home. He was well enough now not to need it all to himself, or so he said, but neither of them got much sleep that first night. His friend had insisted on sleeping on the outer side of the bed, so that (Xiao Xingchen couldn't help but notice) it was his right hand that brushed against Xiao Xingchen's left, if either of them moved too close to the centre.

He wasn't going to ask questions. He wasn't going to behave rashly, not this time... not when he'd been so lonely, up till now.

Xiao Xingchen's new disciple was unskilled with the sword. The few techniques he had become confident with bore, unsurprisingly, all the hallmarks of the flashy Jin style. 'What harm could there possibly be in demonstrating one's mastery?' That was how it had been defended to Xiao Xingchen at Jinlin Tai, when he had been more outspoken with criticism than he was now.

Right now, though, it would do Mo Xuanyu more good to focus on gaining that mastery than on making it look pretty for competitions. The smallest thrill ran through Xiao Xingchen when he realised that he had the power to make that happen, to direct his student in the most profitable courses of training.

It took several days for them to find their feet as master and disciple. Mo Xuanyu took direction obediently, but never asked him to explain his instructions further, even when Xiao Xingchen could tell he was confused and anxious. Had he ever had one-on-one lessons? He seemed resigned to being ignored in a sea of other disciples, which was simply not possible here, even if Xiao Xingchen had wished to teach that way.

For his own part, Xiao Xingchen had to learn how to follow his student's moves more precisely. With cultivation-enhanced hearing and sensitivity to the flow of qi, not to mention Shuanghua's attunement to corpse energy, he was still capable of fighting monsters and fierce corpses. Adjusting the details of Mo Xuanyu's stance, though, required touching him. That was difficult, after so long wandering alone. There had been no touching between him and Song Lan before that either, of course. A-Qing would grab his arm for attention or so as not to be separated from him in a crowd, but for the comfort of firm, deliberate contact, he had to think back to his shizun's mountain. Baoshan Sanren had corrected his form just like this, when he was a boy. Baoshan Sanren had pushed him back down onto the bed, when he had first woken up blind and panicking with it.

It was hard to get used to touch without all this flooding back to him.

In the afternoons, Xiao Xingchen let Mo Xuanyu meditate and study on his own, while he took care of various tasks around the coffin home. His friend had been oddly quiet, since Mo Xuanyu had arrived. Perhaps, now that his past had come so uncomfortably close, he was preparing to leave. Xiao Xingchen did his best to hide the pain that thought caused him.

It took him by surprise when his friend approached them at the end of a practice session, bringing the scent of sawdust and light sweat over with him.

"Daozhang, Mo xiong," he greeted them, "I've got presents for you both."

Something was pressed into Xiao Xingchen's hands: a long shaft of wood, sanded smooth and bearing a rudimentary guard a handswidth and a half from one end.

"A practice sword?" he asked, feeling its balance.

"You can't keep sparring with Shuanghua," he said easily, "and Mo xiong's sword is a bit of rubbish anyway, hardly worth keeping around." A rush of air as something was swung through the air, his friend's quick dodging steps. "Now now, Mo xiong. You don't want to fight with me."

"I'm just testing it out." Mo Xuanyu's voice bore the faint edge of a sulk, but Xiao Xingchen heard the rustle as he bent into a bow. "Thank you, gongzi, it's a generous gift."

"Thank you, my friend," Xiao Xingchen echoed.

A hand gripped his upper arm for less than a heartbeat. "It's nothing," laughed his friend. Xiao Xingchen listened to him walk away with an inexplicable heat in his face.

"Daozhang, what are you teaching Mo gongzi?" A-Qing asked him one day. It was already summer, and Xiao Xingchen was walking to the river to bathe after an energetic morning's training. Mo Xuanyu and his friend had drifted far ahead together, discussing some project they had been working on. A-Qing would split off from the group when they reached the riverbank and pick berries, stopping to bathe on her way back.

"The sword path of cultivation," he replied, hearing the distraction in his own voice but unable to fix it.

The question had been on his own mind: what was he teaching his disciple? Mo Xuanyu's sword skills were improving rapidly under dedicated instruction, and his fragile golden core had begun to strengthen itself. Xiao Xingchen could set him to meditation and reading the few books and scrolls he'd taken down from the mountain with him, basic texts with none of Baoshan Sanren's own teachings written in them. The fact remained, however, that a blind master squatting in a coffin home could never offer an education to compare with that available at Jinlin Tai.

"Could you teach that to me, too?" A-Qing's voice was hopeful. "I never thought about cultivation being something ordinary people could learn, you know. Not until Mo gongzi came here. I mean, he is gentry, of course, but he's not... special, like the daozhang is. And he's less creepy than that other one." She gave the performative shudder that Xiao Xingchen's friend usually warranted from her, unless he'd recently given her sweets.

"Mo gongzi had the advantage of some study before he came here, A-Qing," Xiao Xingchen said carefully. "It would be very difficult for you to study cultivation without being able to see, or to read—especially since I'm blind too."

"Daozhang! Don't tell me you're going to start discriminating against blind people now!" She thwacked her stick against the roadside grass for emphasis as she spoke. "You rescued me in the market that time, and you're blind. You saved that other one's life, not that I approve, but you did that while blind! You fight monsters and you cook and you're the most honourable person I know, and! You're! Blind!" A-Qing sighed. "If the daozhang doesn't want to teach me, I understand. But don't say you won't just because neither of us can see!"

"A-Qing, I would never discriminate against you," he promised. "Just... let me think about it, all right? I need to make some plans."

He wasn't looking forward to that. Since Baixue Temple, Xiao Xingchen had felt it was better for the world if he didn't make any plans at all.

A-Qing's voice was sweet when she asked Mo Xuanyu if she could speak to him privately. She kept her gaze lowered and clasped her hands demurely in front of her, bamboo cane tucked into one elbow. Perhaps she wanted to ask him something about Xue Chengmei, or maybe she wanted help in preparing a surprise for Xiao Xingchen? He agreed, of course, and followed her into the scrub at the back of the coffin home. Someone had tried to clear the land there for crops, once. You could only tell because the weeds were more uniform where the fields would have been.

As soon as they were out of earshot of the buildings, she spun on her heel and fixed his eyes with her pale, cloudy ones. "Listen, Mo gongzi," she said. "I know you know that I can see."

"You what?"

She rolled her apparently-not-blind eyes. "I can see, all right? Don't feel bad if you really didn't notice. My eyes have looked like this my whole life, and I have a lot of practice acting like a blind person. Obviously, the daozhang can't tell, and I don't think you-know-who knows it's an act." She glanced over his shoulder quickly when she mentioned Xue Chengmei. "I did think you might have guessed, though."

"Why me?" he asked. "I'm not as good a cultivator as either of them, and they've known you longer."

"Well, just because of..." She flushed. "It doesn't matter."

Mo Xuanyu folded his arms. "If you don't explain, I'm going right back inside and telling them both." Right after he went over every embarrassing thing he'd done since arriving here, and worked out whether she might have seen it. There were so many. So much of Mo Xuanyu was just—embarrassing.

"No, don't!" A-Qing clutched at his sleeve, cane toppling into the undergrowth. She ignored it. "It's nothing. It's just. I thought, maybe you'd noticed... how-much-time-I-spend-watching-you-training-with-the-sword."

He gaped at her. He could think of absolutely nothing to say.

"In your inner robes," A-Qing added helplessly. She covered her face with both hands.

"You—really?"

"When it's really hot and they stick to you with sweat, oh no, shut up! A-Qing, shut up!" she groaned to herself.

"Should I go away?" he asked after a moment. Her furiously blushing cheeks had not got any paler, but at least she wasn't crying. Although Mo Xuanyu wasn't sure of the protocol here, if he wasn't required to comfort the maiden, he could do with some time to come to terms with both of A-Qing's revelations.

"No!" A-Qing dropped her hands and shook her head to clear it. "Mo gongzi, please forget what I just said. I'm sorry. What I wanted to talk to you about was something completely different." She drew a breath. "I want to learn to cultivate. And that means I should probably learn to read and write, too. I want you to teach me."

"Oh." He thought about it briefly, remembering his tutor when he was a little boy—Mo Ziyuan's tutor, really—guiding his hands with the brush and leading them both as they sang through the Thousand Character Classic. "Yes, I could probably do that. You're going to have to admit this to shifu if you want him to teach you the sword, though."

"I suppose so..." A-Qing sighed.

A thought struck him. "Hold on a second. What do I get out of this agreement?"

A-Qing's eyebrows quirked. A sly smile appeared on her mouth. For the space of a breath, he thought she was going to propose a payment he'd have to turn down. "Oh, Mo gongzi," she laughed, "there's a lot I know about you that you might not want me telling the others." Then she bent down, snatched up her bamboo cane, and waded through the grass and weeds back to the coffin home.

Mo Xuanyu had been training at the coffin home for weeks before Xiao Xingchen first let him come along on one of his and Xue Chengmei's night hunts. Actual night hunts weren't too common, here in Yi City; most of the people who journeyed to ask his shifu for his help were suffering from minor curses or simple bad luck. Nonetheless, he would travel through the countryside for days at a time to reverse hexes or inspect ponds that some peasant swore must have a ghost lurking in them, it was the only explanation for his missing chickens or the dark circles under his daughter's exhausted eyes. Xue Chengmei always followed him on those trips. The daozhang was far too kind, he said; without him to lean on the commoners helped out by the noble cultivator, they wouldn't offer him so much as a basket of greens in payment, and then where would the four of them be? Besides, he was better at scaring off chicken thieves and covert suitors.

Xue Chengmei counted himself personally responsible for two, possibly three, weddings in the area around Yi City since he'd been here. He'd even been invited to one of them. Mo Xuanyu would never have expected him to be a happy drunk until he rolled back into the coffin home in the grey hour just before dawn, bellowing local songs with pastries spilling from his sleeves. He'd only had to stab one man, he'd giggled to Mo Xuanyu. Fortunately, Xiao Xingchen's anxious enquiries got it out of him that the victim had been harrassing the bride, whose family had rejected him for her hand years before. Xue Chengmei's violence had actually endeared him to the rest of the village.

How could such a wicked man have such good luck, and Mo Xuanyu—who was only a little bit evil, and not of his own choice—be so unfortunate?

Anyway, Mo Xuanyu's luck had finally turned somewhat to the good. When Xiao Xingchen had heard of an infestation of monsters eating the brains of buried corpses in a village several days' journey from Yi City, he'd decided that three cultivators would handle it better than two. This wasn't his first night hunt ever, but the previous times had been well-supervised excursions from Jinlin Tai. In a crowd of Jin juniors, Mo Xuanyu had had no chance to stand out and barely any shot at the prey.

("Keep Mo gongzi safe," he remembered his older brother telling the senior who was to lead the group. "Don't let him come to any harm!" At the time he'd assumed Jin Guangyao was sincerely concerned for him: just one of many assumptions he was reconsidering since his exile.)

A-Qing had waved them off with only a slight pout. He wondered if she was feeling as left out as he had, back then. Teaching her to write was one thing, as long as he could squeeze it into his free time between lessons from his shifu and research with Xue Chengmei. Convincing the daozhang to let her pick up the sword was going to be more difficult.

His attention was wandering as he followed Xiao Xingchen through the dim forest, one light talisman serving for three of them, but they were still several li away from the afflicted tombs. It shouldn't be a problem.

He brushed aside a drooping branch whose long leaves caught in his hair. Roots and vines twisted across the pathway; every time he thought he was getting the hang of avoiding them, one would snag the toe of his boot. Ahead of him, Xiao Xingchen seemed to float effortlessly onwards. His white robes gleamed in the darkness.

Suddenly, a great boom sounded from the forest to his left. Mo Xuanyu dived to the other side, into the dense undergrowth—only to feel the impact of something hard against his ribs, high up and nearly under his arm.

Whatever it was dug into his side, angling up sharply so he was flipped onto his front, face in the mud. A weight settled onto his back.

"You need to work on your situational awareness if you're going to come out with us, shidi," Xue Chengmei whispered gleefully into his ear.

"What's going on back there?" Xiao Xingchen called. Mo Xuanyu looked up to see him returning, face pinched in either annoyance or confusion.

"Just some practical training," Xue Chengmei sang back. He jumped up and let Mo Xuanyu scramble to his feet.

"Perhaps you should save it for the daytime."

"But daozhang, it's so much more fun when it's unexpected!" Xue Chengmei replied. "I mean, so much more educational."

Xiao Xingchen's laughter drifted back towards them as they continued. What on earth did he find so funny about Xue Chengmei? Was that the only reason he put up with a housemate who was so cagey and unpredictable?

When they reached the little cemetary whose tombs were being broken into by monsters, Mo Xuanyu discovered another possible reason. The problem looked simple at first. Just two or three of the creatures, hunched and hairy beings like large monkeys with dripping fangs, sat on top of the monuments. When the three cultivators attacked, however, they jumped up into the canopy and screeched a warning until dozens of others swarmed the clearing.

They fought for half a shichen, possibly more. Mo Xuanyu was quickly split off from the others—the monsters must have seen him as easy prey. Drawing on every lesson he could remember, he did his best to prove otherwise. The blows and dodges he'd learned from his new shifu were certainly efficient, but he'd known that before. Now, with qi flowing between his blade and his body, he felt as though they were one lethal entity. When he could finally stop for a heaving breath, he was surrounded by ragged monster corpses and splatters of dark blood.

Xue Chengmei and Xiao Xingchen continued to fight. He saw with some embarrassment that they had several times as many monsters around them as he did, both dead and still attacking. For a moment, he considered running over to support them, but the way they fought was like a dance, a perfect cooperation of spins and strikes: Xue Chengmei would lash out without even looking to cut down a creature attacking Xiao Xingchen, while Xiao Xingchen feinted and parried as though rehearsed, driving the creatures towards the dark whirlwind that was Jiangzai. In an instant, their roles would switch. There was no space for Mo Xuanyu to fit himself into their deadly choreography.

He remembered seeing his brother—no, Jin Guangyao—fighting once, not on a night hunt but taken by surprise by a stray fierce corpse as the two of them were walking back to Jinlin Tai from Xue Chengmei's compound. Comparing the two sights in his mind, he found he could see what his shifu meant, now, about flashy techniques. Surely it didn't count the same, though, when someone was as accomplished, as beautiful, as Jin Guangyao?

"Mo Xuanyu? Hello, Xuanyu?"

Someone was snapping their fingers in front of his eyes. He shook away the vision of his half-brother, golden silk rippling around him as his sword drove towards its target. Back in reality, the cemetary was quiet, subdued. Xiao Xingchen was cleaning Shuanghua and Xue Chengmei was baring his teeth in Mo Xuanyu's face.

The rest of the night went as expected. They hiked back to the edge of the forest to find a sheltered spot to sleep in; Xue Chengmei announced that in the morning, he would be dealing with the headman of the village whose tombs they had protected, and Xiao Xingchen made the token protest that he should be understanding.

"So this was a proper night hunt after all," Mo Xuanyu muttered to his former shixiong, once they'd all settled down.

"Uh huh." He sounded almost asleep, but his eyes and teeth glittered in the starlight.

"I thought you had other plans. When are we going to take your project to the next stage?"

"When I say so," Xue Chengmei said. Mo Xuanyu had heard him lie many times. He didn't sound any more convincing tonight.

A-Qing wasn't sure of her exact age. Old enough to know what she wanted, she reckoned, and young enough to get it with a bit of whining, plus a few flutters of her eyelashes if she was talking to anyone but her daozhang. Tonight, it was unfairly cold—it wasn't even Mid-Autumn Festival yet!—and what she wanted, even if it was embarrassing, was to pull the blanket around her, lean on his shoulder, and be told stories.

"I'm not good at telling stories," her daozhang warned her. "Nobody ever told them to me when I was little."

Well, she knew a thing or two about that. Back in the old days, the only time A-Qing got to hear a good story was when the travelling tale-teller took pity on the little blind girl and let her squat down at the edge of the group of children. It was even money if they'd do that or order the big boys to chase her off.

"Tell me one anyway, daozhang. I know you can."

On the other side of the fire, that ruffian sneered at her. Mo Xuanyu—no, just Xuanyu! He'd told her to call him that—looked torn between copying him and joining in with her wheedling. He was a bit older than her, but he looked younger in the flickering light, with his big eyes. There was a smudge of soot around the outside of each of them: he must have missed it when rinsing his face before dinner.

One of these days, A-Qing was going to get him to paint her face the way she'd seen him doing his own.

She was going to kiss him, too. Even if it didn't go any further than that, one kiss would be nice.

"All right, then," said her daozhang. He drew his shoulders back as if steeling himself for something unpleasant. It unsettled her from her cosy position and she had to rearrange herself. "I'll tell you a story that happened on a mountain."

She'd heard this kind of story before, at least. "Once upon a time there was a mountain and on the mountain there was a temple?"

"No. Once upon a time, there was a mountain that nobody knew about. On the mountain, there was an immortal who had reached enlightenment. She accepted a lot of disciples, but once they'd come up to the mountain, she wouldn't let them leave again."

A-Qing felt a squirming ambivalence in her chest. A woman immortal—that was good. She wanted to hear much more about her. On the other hand, this didn't sound quite right. "Why not?"

Her daozhang sighed. "The immortal only hid in the mountain because she couldn’t understand the world outside it. She told her disciples, 'If you are going to leave the mountain, then there’s no need for you to come back. Don’t bring the disputes of the outside world into the mountain.'"

"Then how can you withstand the boredom?" The thought of being tied down to one place made her itch. Sure, she came back here every night to sleep, but no one would say a word if she decided not to. No one would bar her from returning!

"Some disciples left, though! Didn't they, shifu?" Xuanyu cut in. A-Qing cast an unimpressed glance at his left ear. "Sorry," he added—not because of her, but seeing something in her daozhang's face. "It's just that I know about this mountain. Everyone was talking about it, that time when you came to Jinlin Tai, when I saw you and S-Song daozhang..." He trailed off.

Beside her, A-Qing's daozhang had stiffened into solidity. He was too tense to be comforting any more. A-Qing wriggled against his side, but he didn't relax.

It was the delinquent, who thought he was in her good books right now because he'd given her some candied ginger the day before, who broke the silence. "I'll tell you a story, A-Qing," he drawled, "if the good daozhang isn't able to."

The story itself was not worth listening to: it had no beginning, middle and end, just a ramble about a stupid seven-year-old kid learning an important lesson way too late. What was interesting was the change in expression on both the others' faces as he told it. Xuanyu leaned unconsciously towards that nuisance, his head propped up on one hand and his eyes trained on the speaking lips. By the end of the tale, when it was completely obvious who the seven-year-old boy was, he had his eyes narrowed and was nodding like men did when they were impressed with their own cleverness. The nuisance smirked at him and twisted his left hand in the air, showing off the false finger.

Her daozhang, meanwhile, had crumpled in on himself somehow. His handsome face had fallen; he was wringing his hands, the knuckles white. Two dark tracks crawled from his eyes down to his chin.

The wind was picking up, and A-Qing's blanket wasn't enough to hold off the chill. She stood up and gently shook his shoulder. "Daozhang, daozhang. Are you all right? We should go to bed now."

"Yes, we should," he murmured, but made no move to get up.

"Don't worry, Little Blind, I'll take care of him," said the ruffian. "You just get into your coffin like a good girl."

She scowled at him and spat in the general direction of the fire, but then she walked off and let them deal with one another. She definitely wasn't old enough to play mother to a bunch of grown-up cultivators.

It must be dark, he thought. It was always dark for him, of course, but they'd eaten dinner and then sat around the fire for so long afterwards, talking. A-Qing had gone to bed. It must be nighttime.

It must be too dark for his friend to see what a mess his face was, surely. So why wouldn't he leave him alone to dissolve into the darkness?

"Shh, daozhang," his friend crooned, holding his chin in the gentle pinch of three fingers. "Shh, it's all right. Don't turn your face away, just let me take care of you."

The cold press of a cloth against his cheek, his lower eyelid, not scraping at the dried blood there, just letting it soften and lift by itself.

"I don't want," he started, but a sob rose up, cutting him off. "I don't want you to see me like this."

"Like what?" His friend laughed, and Xiao Xingchen shuddered. His chin jerked and was pulled back into place. "Daozhang, you couldn't look ugly to me."

He dabbed at Xiao Xingchen's cheek again, rubbing a little and making a small noise of satisfaction.

Xiao Xingchen said, before he could stop himself, "You couldn't look ugly to me, either."

His friend's hands stilled. "Daozhang. Did you just make a joke?" A peal of laughter came from where his friend's mouth must be. "You did make a joke!"

It both had and hadn't been one. Reaching out, he bumped his fingertips into his friend's wrist and then got hold of it, keeping his grip even when his friend tried to pull away. The left wrist, he could tell from where the pulse jumped in it. Good.

"We work well together, don't we?" Xiao Xingchen asked. His voice scratched on the last words and he swallowed, licked drops of metallic-tasting water from his lips. "Don't we?" he repeated, when his friend said nothing.

"Yeah. Yeah, sure we do."

"I hope you're glad you stayed. I am."

He shook the captive wrist to chase another response from his friend. Under his palm, he felt a leather bracer, laced tautly with cord. Something else brushed against the edge of his finger: a glove of some kind, or a bandage?

"Of course I'm glad. Daozhang's hospitality is peerless." The quip fell flat, let down by the uncertain tone of his voice.

"The cultivator in your story, the one who ruined the little boy's finger." With all the force of his cultivation, he willed his throat to keep clear and his tongue to stay mobile. There was no second chance, Xiao Xingchen could tell, if he got this wrong. "Was he a member of the Yueyang Chang Clan?"

His friend froze. All of a sudden, he was so deathly still that if Xiao Xingchen had not known he was there, he might have walked straight past him. Underneath Xiao Xingchen's fingertips, the heartbeat hammered but he could barely feel the flow of qi, as if it were in hiding.

"He was the clan leader," he said at last, pushing the words out reluctantly. "Chang Ci'an."

"And when he did that to you, when he ran over your hand... it wasn't just your finger he destroyed, was it?"

He was speaking the same way he'd walked after he'd first been blinded: one step at a time, hands pushing against the blackness with no real idea what lay ahead of him. It had taken him so long to have the confidence in his other senses to stride blithely forwards as he'd done before. Xiao Xingchen had been chewing on these thoughts for months, now. He knew there was something there, something solid, but the exact shape of it was a mystery that he could only approach one word at a time.

"He destroyed the world for you, that day, in a way," he continued. "He destroyed something in you—he turned you from a boy who was part of the world into something cut off, something not connected to the world at all. I... you have to tell me. Am I right?"

"Give me my hand back." It came out as a groan, a tormented, inhuman noise.

"Xue Yang," Xiao Xingchen said. "It's not the same thing, but when I lost my eyes—when I gave Song Lan my eyes, and he pushed me away from him—it felt like the world was destroyed for me as well. And I..." He swallowed. Was he really going to say the next words, the ones he felt coming inexorably towards him? "I understand why you killed those fifty people."

As softly as he could, he let go of Xue Yang's wrist. He folded his hands in his lap to wait for whatever came next.

"Fifty lives for one finger," Xue Yang said shakily. "Does that sound like a fair payment to you?"

"I understand why it was fair to you."

"You lost your sight and your best friend, your soulmate." Even trembling with emotion, he managed to imbue that word with scorn. "You haven't been wandering about wiping out whole clans, have you? I mean, the Jin Sect might be a bit much even for you to take on, o bright moon and gentle breeze, but there were plenty of smaller clans who were happy for you to clean up their messes, and never lifted a finger to protect you afterwards."

Xiao Xingchen shrugged. If Xue Yang couldn't see him, he'd at least hear the sigh of his robes shifting.

"How can you say you understand me if you never even wanted to kill for revenge?"

"Xue Yang, look at me," he said quietly. "I would go night hunting every night if there were enough ghosts and monsters to support it. The farmers cheat me in the market and I never stopped them, until you started going in my place. If it weren't for A-Qing, for Mo Xuanyu, and even for you... Do I look like a man who values his own life? Who wants to keep it?" He laughed bitterly. Fresh blood was seeping out from his empty eye sockets, spoiling his friend's work. "I wanted to save the world. I couldn't even save myself."

Something touched his hand, a tentative brush against his knuckles. A warm pressure and then something stiffer, rougher, than fingertips. Slowly, Xiao Xingchen turned his hands over, opening them up to take Xue Yang's left hand gently between them. He could feel the wooden little finger and the tight fabric that held it in place, but he didn't pull or worry at it. There would be plenty of time later to learn its shape, and the shape of the scars beneath it. He just held the whole hand in his lap, for as long as Xue Yang would let him.

The work that needed doing today was no fun in good weather, let alone under a lowering sky, with the bite of early snow on the breeze. Xue Yang's left hand was never any good in the cold and it made him tetchy. It only made it worse to know that was the reason he was so short-tempered. In short, it was not the day for Mo Xuanyu's constant complaints.

"If you don't shut up, I'm going to feed you to the next one and see if that will cure the corpse poisoning!" he yelled.

"Try it if you want!" snapped Mo Xuanyu from his position inside the complicated gate mechanism they'd rigged up at the entry to their testing village. "It'd be more interesting than wasting my life in this dump, waiting for you to make a fucking move!"

"I've made my move. If you don't like it, fuck off."

"You were supposed to kill him or—what was it you said?—'bring him down to our level,' not jump into bed with him." Mo Xuanyu huffed and stamped his feet. "You're an embarrassment, shixiong."

"Keep your eyes open, kid. There's one right on top of you," he snarled, and let out a giggle at the way Mo Xuanyu jumped and spun around, ready to defend himself from the fierce corpse that was shuffling towards him, hands twisted into claws. He was perfectly safe in his little wooden cage, but he still startled every time.

As the fierce corpse wobbled its way forwards, under the sway of the Yin tiger seal Xue Yang held in his stronger hand, Mo Xuanyu opened and closed the gates to trap it for their observation.

"Your assessment, Xuanyu?"

With a pained expression, Mo Xuanyu ran through their checklist. "The limbs are stiff, the skin is practically green, the black veins are prominent, the eyes are white. And the stench is phenomenal. There's no bringing this one back."

"Agreed." With a thought, Jiangzai flew out, severing the corpse's head from its neck. Once the body had toppled to the ground, Xue Yang dragged it off to the pile for burning.

"How many more to go?"

Xue Yang checked the tally he'd been keeping. "Twenty-six recovering, thirty-one dead. There should only be two more wandering around in there. If they're not responding to the Yin tiger seal, either they're hardly poisoned at all or they've rotted into dust."

"Well, I'm not going in to get them."

"Will you give it a rest?" He slashed the air with Jiangzai; the blade hissed with pent-up resentful energy. "What do you want, Xuanyu? You've got a famous teacher, a nice warm coffin and a roof over it, not to mention your little blind girlfriend. Why does it bother you that my priorities changed?"

"Because we had an agreement!" Mo Xuanyu wailed. He sounded younger than he had for a long while. "You wanted revenge. I wanted revenge. What happened to taking over Jinlin Tai with an army of fierce corpses?"

"You never wanted that in the first place." Holding eye contact the whole time, Xue Yang sauntered up to the gate and leaned over the crossbar. "You wanted your xiongzhang to bend you over backwards and tell you you were pretty. Killing him would be a poor substitute, don't you think?"

The boy went white. His jaw clenched furiously. "So it was you who told him," he hissed.

"Mo Xuanyu. Shidi. Do you think there was anyone in Lanling who didn't know about your crush on him?"

"What?"

"You are many things, Xuanyu, but you are not subtle." He straightened up and stretched, deliberately showing Mo Xuanyu his back. "Have you still not worked out that he did you a favour?"

"He threw me out! He humiliated me. He made it so that I'll never be able to show my face in cultivation society again." Mo Xuanyu's mouth twisted. "I'll never see him again."

"Mmm. Me, he just had killed. Or tried to, anyway." Xue Yang jumped up onto the gate, the better to peer down the village's stunted central street. Everything was silent, motionless. Not even the dust was falling. He was going to have to sweep the place before they could let the survivors back in—might as well wrap this up and get on with it. "Much like your father, the ex-Jin zongzhu. Much like the, ah, collaborators who did him in."

The ramshackle construction swayed as he climbed over it. Xue Yang paused on top of the little operator's cage, looking down to finish his train of thought. "Jin Guangyao never saw you as a brother. Why would he? You were a pawn from the start, brought in as a threat to his position. And after everything he had to do to secure that position, he did you the second-nicest turn of your life, and got you out of there breathing."

He flipped in mid-air for the hell of it, and landed on his feet. Lecturing Xuanyu had cheered him up quite a bit, it turned out.

"What was the nicest turn, then?" the kid asked.

He grinned. "Introducing you to me, of course."

It took a quarter of a shichen to find the last two villagers, dazed and feverish but still responsive to his corpse-poisoning cure. The rest of the day was just grunt work: clearing up the dismembered bodies, taking down the barriers they'd blocked the village off with, and last of all carrying those who had recovered back inside. They'd all wake up in the wrong beds, the wrong houses even, not knowing what had happened for the last few weeks, but they'd wake up. How was that for a good deed?

It wasn't that A-Qing had changed her mind about that ruffian, not one bit. She didn't appreciate him taking up her daozhang's time and attention, and she had no reason to trust him more just because her daozhang had mysteriously started staying later in bed in the mornings, and holding his four-fingered hand, and letting the ruffian put his arm around his waist. Who knew what other liberties he was taking? A-Qing did not approve.

These new developments were quite useful in some ways, though. Keeping her writing lessons with Xuanyu a secret was easier when the other two could be relied upon to disappear together in the afternoons. And if they weren't only practising reading and writing any more... so much the better, really.

"A-Qing," whispered Xuanyu, his breath tickling her damp lips, "can I kiss you again?"

"Wait till my rouge has dried," she told him imperiously. "Then you can, yes."

She leaned back against the side of a coffin. The two of them were sitting in the courtyard, where they'd been shifting bit-by-bit for the last shichen or so, trying to stay in the weak light of the winter sun. Sheets of paper covered in her uneven handwriting were scattered in their wake. Toying with her writing brush—her very own, a present!—she watched as he carefully filled in his own lips with rouge. White-faced and rosy from eyebrows to cheekbones, they looked like a matching pair of dolls. It was so satisfying to be beautiful together!

"Xuanyu ge," she said, her thoughts wandering as she waited for him to be ready to kiss her, "you know all those couples that got married because of, ugh, Xue Chengmei?"

He coughed and spluttered like the time he'd accidentally breathed in while dusting his face with rice powder.

Thumping him absent-mindedly on the back, A-Qing continued, "I don't want that."

"You—don't?" Xuanyu wheezed a couple more times, but he seemed relieved.

"No. I don't want to get married. I'm going to become an immortal, and a husband would just get in the way."

"Oh." He gave her a long, appraising look; A-Qing gazed back through her sooty eyelashes. "I wouldn't... I wouldn't mind having a husband, actually."

"Mm, that's what I thought. In the meantime, though, how about kissing me some more?"

They'd been entertaining themselves like that for long enough that A-Qing's behind was getting numb from the hard ground, and she was just thinking that they ought to start clearing up after themselves, when she heard a very unwelcome sound behind them. It was the suprised giggle of the nuisance himself.

"What on earth are you two doing?" he asked.

The two of them pulled apart to see him standing almost at their feet, a handful of her practice pages held up to his chest and an expression of the broadest glee across his face.

"Oh, daozhang, I wish you could see this," he said. "The Little Blind and your own disciple, both painted up like stage actors, with their tongues in each other's mouths."

"There's nothing against it in Baoshan Sanren's teachings, you know," A-Qing's daozhang replied as he approached. "What am I stepping on? Is this paper on the ground?"

"Someone's been copying out calligraphy."

He frowned at the pages in his hand and it was on the tip of A-Qing's tongue to snap back at him, As if your writing is any neater than mine! She managed to hold it back—only to see the flash of his eyes as he spotted the brush still loosely held in her fingers.

"Little Blind. Is this your work? You've been keeping secrets from us."

"A-Qing?" Her daozhang stepped up behind Xue Chengmei, laying one hand softly on his waist. Head full of brushstrokes and characters, she thought miserably that the furrow between his eyebrows, above the straight line of his bandage, looked just like the roof radical.

"Daozhang," she said in her smallest voice. "Um. My eyesight is actually not so bad as I let everybody think."

He'd been walking for years by the time he wound up in a fogbound valley that contained, of all unlikely things, a town. Yi City, said the carved border stone, and he wondered in passing whether the place lived up to its name in righteousness. At least it seemed lively enough here. He'd be able to rest for the night, and perhaps there would be some good work to be done.

He stopped the first person he came to, just inside the city gates. "Excuse me, madam. I'm looking for a cultivator who wears all white."

"Oh, they all do, round here!" replied the woman, a plump mother with three children trailing after her and a basket piled with vegetables. "You want the coffin home, excuse me, the sect's house. Just follow that path—there, you see it—it's outside of the city proper, but not by far! Yes, go on! You'll find it, I'm sure. I've no time to take you there myself!"

All his attempts at telling her that he meant a specific cultivator having been blocked, Song Lan bowed and turned his footsteps as directed. It didn't take him long to find the local sect house. Although it wasn't large, the outer wall had recently been whitewashed, and a freshly-carved sign hung over the entryway.

SHUDONG XIAO SECT