Xue Yang Did Everything Wrong

And then she dies.

This is so remarkable

I’ll stop taking screens of Nie Huaisang when…

Xiao Xingchen: And probably Xue Yang.

He’d thought he could keep his secret forever.

Why not, after all? He’d managed it for three years. Xiao Xingchen hadn’t suspected a thing.

And then –

And then Song Lan had had to ruin everything.

Song Lan, and A-Qing, who isn’t blind. He’d tested her so many times and she’d passed every one; the little bitch was clever than he’d realized.

Xue Yang clutches at the corpse that refuses to waken and buries his face into his side, just the way he’s liked to do for these past three years. He needs to go hunt A-Qing down, just to make the point – A-Qing, yes, and everyone else, too. Everyone else that dared hurt his Daozhang.

(No one hurt him more than he had. He has that distinction, if nothing else – but it doesn’t really help, does it?)

Yes, Xue Yang will go. He’ll go avenge him. He’ll get Song Lan back, the man having already escaped his control now that his focus was so thoroughly lost; he’ll punish him, he’ll punish A-Qing, he’ll do all of that. He just – needs another minute.

A familiar hand touches the back of his head, stroking his hair gently, just the way Xiao Xingchen always did.

Xue Yang enjoys it for a few long minutes, luxuriating in the illusory feel, and it’s not until he gives himself a stern talking-to that he finally, reluctantly, starts to pull away.

He can’t.

The hand is pressing him down into Xiao Xingchen’s side.

The hand is real.

“…Daozhang?” he croaks, scarcely able to believe it. It’s impossible. None of his demonic cultivation had the slightest impact on Xiao Xingchen’s corpse; he couldn’t so much as get it to twitch. How could he have returned on his own?

Because that’s all it could be. He was dead.

He still is.

The body beneath Xue Yang’s hands is still cold, still motionless. No breath moves the chest.

“We’re going to have to talk about this,” Xiao Xingchen’s familiar voice says with a sigh. It sounds just the way it has all these years, a touch long-suffering infused with the slightest bit of humor. “You really can’t just do things like this.”

Xiao Xingchen used the same words to explain why threatening merchants in the marketplace with their own cats was a failure of judgment and etiquette.

“Daozhang…”

“Don’t look up,” Xiao Xingchen says calmly. “If you do, you won’t be able to look away ever again.”

“I don’t mind,” Xue Yang says. He feels like he’s never wanted to look away: not since the very first time they’d met, down in a marketplace where nothing else mattered. “Let me look.”

“It’ll surprise you.”

That gets a surprised snort out of Xue Yang. “More than I surprised you?”

There’s a smile in Xiao Xingchen’s voice. “Possibly.”

But the hand on the back of Xue Yang’s head loosens in implicit permission.

Xue Yang looks up.

That was probably a mistake.

The very air distorts around him, twisting in a way that doesn’t seem real: his skin glows like the true appearance of the moon of his namesake, sickly pale and strangely mottled, and his smile is far wider than a human face should be able to bear. He is many-limbed and yet not there at all, and there is the sense that even this strangeness is only a façade for something much larger, much greater, much more fearsome –