They slide his own decomposing fingers into his mouth, and Jiang Cheng gags, his tongue sliding over his own leathery fingers, tasting salt and blood and metal. A bruised ring of it, where Zidian once lay.

Jiang Cheng spits the fingers out.

"Give her back," he says.

"Give who back?" a soldier snorts. "Your mother? She's already dead!"

"Not my mother," Jiang Cheng says. "Zidian. Give her back."

The Wen blinks down at him. "Zidian? Oh, don't bother with that old thing. You'll have no need for it, after what the young master has in plan for you."

"What's that meant to mean?"

The Wen smiles. "Just you wait and see."

So Jiang Cheng waits. He stares at the amputated hand, crouching in the corner of his prison, the skin bruising like a Yunmeng sunset, from sunburnt gold, to yellow, and orange, and river-blue.

How strange it is to think that hand was once his, woven from the blood of all the Jiangs before him. That hand, which knew the touch of his brother, mother, father, sister. His protector, learning to wield the sword, and cast arrays. A mouth, that could speak without words as it painted characters and transcribed his thoughts on paper. The beat of his heart plucked out on strings of the guzheng and erhu.

That hand which has done nothing to hold but everything to lose that which he's loved.

That hand which is still tied to Zidian.

Jiang Cheng focuses every bit of his spiritual energy on her. And sure enough it seems to work. Zidian is moving toward him, a tide turning, slithering slowly.

Except, where he expects to see her metallic head poke through the bars of his jail, instead, there are feet.

Feet clad in red.

Jiang Cheng laughs, though it feels strangled, his breath as tangled as Zidian between the man's fingers. "Of course. What else could there be here, but you?"

"And what am I to you?" the man asks. He doesn't look at Jiang Cheng even once, too focused on watching Zidian as her powerless form crawls over the back of the man's hands, tracing the rivers of his veins, settling in the valleys between his knuckles. Not comfortable, just mapping him out, the way a virus does the body.

"Well," Jiang Cheng says, "to me, you're the asshole that has Zidian. To the cultivation world, you're huadan shou. But to my mother? Who you killed? Well, she always had a different name for you."

The man pauses. He looks at Jiang Cheng, and it feels like less than victory. "And what was that?" he asks.

"If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you. What am I, an idiot?" Jiang Cheng spits. He looks at his own decaying hand, sitting stinky and rotten in the corner of the prison, and feels a little bit like an idiot. Just a little.

Wen Zhuliu blinks at him. "Of course I know my names," he says.

Jiang Cheng blinks back. "Not this one. To my mother, you were not Wen Zhuliu. You were not Zhao Zhuliu."

Wen Zhuliu drops the hand he'd been studying to his side. Zidian remains attached to it, determined to keep to warm flesh as long as possible, like a parasite, or a lichen. It makes Jiang Cheng wonder whether she truly knows the difference between a Yu, a Jiang, or any other warm body.

Wen Zhuliu steps into the prison cell. In one corner, a pot full of human waste. In the other, Jiang Cheng's decaying hand. And Jiang Cheng himself, pressed against the brick wall.

"What did your mother call me?" Wen Zhuliu asks.

Jiang Cheng opens his mouth to speak. But instead of words, he surges forward and sinks his teeth into Wen Zhuliu's skin. His thighs, his arms, his flank, wherever he can manage, he bites down, his mouth filled with blood, his mind driven animal through fear and desperation, and Wen Zhuliu, he doesn't know what to do beside fight back.

The palm of his hand readies to melt Jiang Cheng's core.

Zidian readies to defend.

And Jiang Cheng? He readies himself to die.

Energies surge together—life and death and something that straddles the inbetween, surging up from the belly of life itself, fingers prying through every strata of the underworld to meet rock and river. Lightning strikes down from the skies, spilling from the clouds and cleaving through dusk and dawn. It splits apart the heavens, until the silver bridge is burnt in two, and the cowherd and the weaver girl cannot meet. Until the winter waits for the break of dawn, and on the branch of the barren tree, a flower blooms, small and fragile, but one which will grow sweet with time.

The first persimmon that Madam Lan has grown in this garden that has been made her prison.

She reaches up and wraps her numbed fingers around it. It is winter, and her blue fingers cannot feel the only fruit that this cruel land has given her. But if there is something there, she will seize it and make it her own.

Thumbnail sinks into flesh. Madam Lan grabs the persimmon and tears it from the tree.

Only, it seems, she tears reality in turn.

Instead of a persimmon, two very human bodies fall from the tree.

They splat in front of Madam Lan, their limbs tangled, bodies twisting. Both of them fighting, but not with words, with something more. Something beyond her.