panting like a dog at the edge of your bed: 64k, Tian Guan Ci Fu, rated E. He Xuan character study with He Xuan/Shi Qingxuan endgame and a lot of He Xuan/Hua Cheng along the way.

This is a DVD commentary in two parts, because I did in-line commentary and the fic was too long to fit all in one. It's also not technically finished because the last chapter is in-beta-progress, but I've had the first half of this post ready to go for ages, so I might as well share it?

Content warnings include rape, explicit sex, torture fantasies, disordered eating, amorphous dysphoria and other Gender And Body Problems, equally amorphous suicidality, graphic violence, and what I can only describe as “Huaxuan, weed smoking frenemies.”

discord screencap of me, dated february 28 2023: i’m trying to finish a draft of the new beefleaf wip i started last week by the end of the weekend… we’ll see. it definitely doesn’t need to be a long fic

In case you've been spared my social media agonizing for the last year and a half, I've had this wretched WIP ongoing for ever, which can best be summarized as "the He Xuan biopic feat. extracanonical sexual trauma." Actual writing process stuff I'm going to include at the end of the second post.

I changed the AO3 tags many times while serializing. I used to overtag out of a “better safe than sorry” mentality, but I’ve been rethinking that for various reasons. I didn’t want to downplay the warnings here, but also didn’t want to frame the story in a disingenuous way. It ended up as CNTW and I'm comfortable with that.

There’s a bit of a genre problem wherein this fic doesn’t neatly fit into the common fanfic tropes for how sexual violence is approached… I wouldn’t categorize it as noncon, since the framing and style of the rape scene is qualitatively different from the plethora of intentionally erotic scenes later in the story (which are also, themselves, not all that erotic much of the time.) It’s not really whump either, because the events of He Xuan’s trauma conga line are mostly off-page, and what we’re actually reading is the nuts and bolts of He Xuan’s revenge arc—which is not a rape revenge arc in the tropey sense—as well as its aftermath. “Rape recovery” is probably the closest, but I don't know that people who go out looking for rape recovery fic are looking for… whatever this is. It has hurt/comfort-y aspects (and far be it from me to malign the good name of h/c, because that’s, like, a Lot of my oeuvre), but it also involves the protagonist getting turned on by forcing his arch-enemy into noncon petplay, as well as Our Hero generally being an enormous cunt. To me, it's just a character study of a character that I find it easy to believe has sexual trauma.

Now, the title. I usually avoid long song lyric titles for fic because they’re unwieldy, but on the other hand I am an unwieldy person.

This one comes from “Name” by Midwife, which is an extremely Beefleaf song:

I bring the water to the sea / What are you doing hanging out with me? […] / Your god hates me / He can’t feel my flesh / He leaves me panting like a dog at the edge of your bed

The portion of those lyrics past the ellipses are interpolated from the song “1926,” written by V/Gary Gogel and notably performed by Thalia Zedek. There’s a specific scene those lines generated in my mind, for which this whole fic is just scaffolding.

panting like a dog at the edge of your bed

In spite of the pain, his first feeling was one of relief. There was nothing to be afraid of any more. He was a terror himself now and nothing in the world but a knight (and not all of those) would dare to attack him. […] When he thought of this the poor dragon that had been Eustace lifted up its voice and wept. A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.

(From The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

The epigraph comes from the chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader called “The Adventures of Eustace.” This chapter left an indelible impression on me as a child. Rereading it as an adult, a lot of subtext jumps out which heavily qualifies my enjoyment (which is true of Narnia in general), but it retains a certain je ne sais quoi.

There’s a bunch of English schoolchildren in a portal fantasy world, within which they depart on a sea voyage to unknown lands. They land on a mysterious island, and the most unlikeable boy of the group (unlikeable largely because he has frou-frou liberal parents who didn’t raise him as a proper boy… Ideology tee em) wanders off on his own. The boy, Eustace, finds a dragon in its death throes. Eustace then stumbles upon its treasure hoard, puts on one of the bracelets, and falls asleep. When he wakes, he’s been transformed into a dragon himself. This experience is at times exhilarating, terrifying, painful, and most of all, lonely.

Despite the frustrating way that Eustace is framed as a character, as a semi-standalone story, it’s incredibly effective. Eustace’s disorientation and confusion, as well as his inability to verbally communicate with the people around him, hit hard. There’s also an element, of, uh… you know how things you read as a kid sometimes hit you in the squiggly proto-kink zone, which isn’t sexual per se but is definitely… something? Eustace’s plight is one of the most visceral and wrenching depictions I've read of a nonconsensual magical transformation, and, not unrelatedly, I recognize now that the story hit me in trans ways.

I’ve seen the Eustace story cited as a reference point for at least two other fics for canons that have nothing to do with Narnia. The physicality of the prose combined with the vivid emotions Eustace experiences leading up to the ordeal of rebirth and catharsis (which I’ll come back to later) are what I've been trying to evoke throughout this story, and are, I think, what has drawn other people to it as well.

But there’s also the dragoniness. It’s kind of epic to be a fearsome beast, and also extremely isolating. The other passage I considered using as an epigraph is this:

He took a long drink and then (I know this sounds shocking, but it isn't if you think it over) he ate nearly all the dead dragon. He was half-way through it before he realised what he was doing; for, you see, though his mind was the mind of Eustace, his tastes and his digestion were dragonish. And there is nothing a dragon likes so well as fresh dragon. That is why you so seldom find more than one dragon in the same county.

This fic is my attempt to do my own version of the Eustace story, which sets aside the Christianity (and bad opinions on parenting) in favour for the things I brought to it as a child: the complicated feelings about gender and trauma and embodiment and monstrousness. The fic that came out of it is about scarcity and indulgence, and I approached it in as self-indulgent a way possible.

From here on, my commentary will be bolded in-line alongside the story text.

chapter one

He has often been the tallest man in a room, and not one with much to fear from strangers. First item on the drinking game chart is to take a shot every time I talk about He Xuan's height, and make it a double if I use the word "looming." But there is never enough to eat here, as once again he has failed to bribe the right people, so he subsists on a mixed diet of stale rice, spite, and dismal hope, the latter of which he had expected to at some point lose the stomach for. As nourishment goes, it is somewhat lacking, and as the weeks pass, what strength he may once have had fades away, despite the forced labour.

The prison sections were the first part I wrote, and it was via a couple notebook pages of messy brain dumping that I chopped up and rearranged. Lots of it got cut, but I still like the opening graf. It frontloads scarcity, sustenance, strength vs. weakness, and the dehumanizing nature of captivity within like, three sentences.

He has never been imprisoned before; not weakened; not so very alone.

There is something about this specific misery that, while perhaps not any more significant than others he’s experienced, feels distinct: the powerlessness, the humiliation, not to mention the nature of the locale (it never happens to him out of doors)—darkness, foul smells, rodents’ skittering claws.

But there’s no point in being decorous. It only happens three times over the many months of his sentence, and in a way, it’s all very mundane.

I love the way He Xuan always has one foot in civilized respectability and one foot in the grotesque. Throughout the fic, but especially here, I wanted to strike a balance between visceral & detached, grounded & cerebral. To go from a well-mannered aspiring scholar to a ghost that eats its own kind is super interesting to me!

Only the first time is truly brutal. What he cannot forgive himself for is that the word “Please” slips out of his mouth. Needless to say, it does not help him. Despite everything, he does want to live, so he learns his lesson; both occasions following, he braces himself against the nearest surface and goes away in his mind, to other cells down the hall, enviously empty.

I didn’t want this scene to be greatly detailed, but I tried to paint enough of a tableau to linger in the back of the mind as the reader goes on, despite how He Xuan will rarely think back to these events directly. The dour yet minimizing attitude toward what’s happening is how I see He Xuan trying to regain control of his experience in some way. In other words, “it’s just my life, and it’s just my body…”

Even so, the third time is worse; that is the time his body betrays him.

He Xuan's whole Thing as a character is that he's a person who has experienced his life go wrong in basically every way possible, so I don't imagine being on the receiving end of sexual violence would come as a wild surprise, especially in this context. Having his body enter a physical arousal loop in response to unwanted stimuli is what will really haunt him in the future, because he feels he’s lost control of the only thing he has left: the ability to choose how to respond to things that happen.

When one of them notices, the man laughs, calls out to a compatriot, and then murmurs something else close to his ear. He deafens himself to the words, so all he can sense is the vibration of breath on the side of his neck. A small mercy is that no one actually puts their hand on the evidence of his feeble and senseless reaction, content with brief jeering, or merely put off by the idea of touching another man’s cock.

There’s no reason to believe He Xuan was ever bad at doing masculinity; he was really good at it, both with regards to family and career. Unlike Shi Qingxuan, he has no history of childhood gender nonconformity-due-to-contrived-plot-reasons or the like that serves as a pretext for the Gender that comes later. That said, one of the things about prison and institutions of domination is that they belie the illusory promise that Getting An A+ In Being a Man In Patriarchy will shield you against sexual violence. This impacts He Xuan’s relations with both men and women going forward, as well as his own perceptions of the relationship between gender + power on a personal level (namely, that it’s not as simple as man=powerful=safe and woman=powerless=victim.)

He is both nauseous and bored. This will end—they won’t kill him, it would keep them in here for longer—but he would like it to end sooner.

I wasn’t sure if the nameless rapist characters should be fellow prisoners or guards, but I went with the former because I wanted this to be an act of lateral violence, with the implication hovering in the background that these others have almost certainly also been abused and violated at times, whether sexually or physically or emotionally, because that’s what prisons facilitate.

Dangling strands of someone else’s hair brush his nape. It had rained that afternoon; he wonders whether it will rain again that night, and he’ll have to wade through muck in the morning when he takes his shift outside in the fields.

He’s not sure he’s ever been less of a person than this; despite all of the indignity and toil that came before, he was at least always working towards something. Like a feral dog, his purpose has become bare survival. My themes, let me state them outright. He needs to survive long enough to serve the end of his time, and then someone will pay. Maybe not the ones in here with him now, but someone. Anyone he can reach.

tumblr post by raven: negative self talk “i’m going to die here” vs positive self talk “i’m going to start killing”

Some people pay. Not enough to satisfy him; he’s not sure how many that would take, but he’ll never know, will he?

Oh, he ceases to live, to be sure. But, like film left in a bowl after the broth is gone, a residue remains.

fridge magnet poetry: I will not go gentle into that good night/I’m gonna be a huge bitch about it

I really don’t think that He Xuan thinks of himself as the same being he was when he was alive. He’s a continuity of consciousness that remains to avenge the wrongs done against that being and his family, but he’s not a whole person with a human being’s wants and needs. In his opinion, anyway.

The form of that residue is a tiny, shapeless flame, flickering to itself in the air. Its body has already been cleared away from where it collapsed in the street outside of one of the houses visited on that final tour of the neighborhood. It looks for itself and finds nothing, not even traces of blood on the earth.

I made myself cry while writing this bit where He Xuan is a ghost fire blob, because it gave me the same emotions as when I think about how my cat was a runty kitten once. You were SMALL, you were a BABY, you had ONE SINGLE HIT POINT, but you MADE IT!!!!!

It can move, at least, and there’s a beacon to follow: smoke, billowing through the evening air as dusk rapidly approaches. Something is being burned.

It stays out of sight of people—the town is strikingly empty—and scuttles to the source.

What it finds is a cremation, nearing done; little is left but charred bones, which themselves winnow away as day turns to night. When all has cooled, only a slew of ash remains, and even that is cleared into an urn by the men working the furnace (one of whom it recognizes, in a misty way, as the one who burned its parents, though it could not recall the man’s name.)

The urn is taken away, but the ghost fire follows, slipping through walls without effort. There are no relations left to attend a funeral, so its remains are stored, with little fanfare (but, it notes, not carelessly), along with the rest of its family in their shabby corner of the town columbarium.

I worried that the word columbarium was distractingly formal/archaic, but I try to avoid using Chinese words in the text of the fic if they have a direct English equivalent. I figured meaning would be clear from context—it’s a building for storing cremated remains.

It is at a loss for what to do next, but perhaps that’s alright. The darkness is comfortable, and the yin energy flowing gently all around this place of the dead is invigorating. It feels unsettled but comparatively serene, considering that, in its last living hours, it felt as though if it didn’t die of fatigue (which indeed it did), it would drown in its hatred. There was no way for a body to survive for long with a spirit so imbalanced. In comparison, this formlessness is pleasant. It can’t touch anything, but neither can it be touched. It is, and it is not.

It felt important to give He Xuan a moment of respite; not peace, but some time without being consumed by anger and sorrow, if only because He Xuan hasn’t quite yet reformed a robust enough consciousness to allow for full memory and self-knowledge.

Near midnight, there are visitors.

It feels them before it sees them. A rippling current fills the air with power, the door opens, and two figures step through the entryway: one in the lead, another a few paces behind. Moonlight spills in with their shadows.

The ghost darts behind two urns, peeking through the small gap between. It tries to dim itself, to draw within until it’s scarcely burning at all. Should it be noticed now, it suspects there would be no coming back from extinction a second time.

It was deeply compelling to me to explore He Xuan figuring out how to be a ghost from scratch, especially since he has no background in cultivation or martial arts and would have had no experience with the spirit world outside of standard cultural stuff. His strengths are being very smart, adaptable, and determined, so he makes it work, but I wanted for his POV early on to read as outsider POV on the Ghostly and Heavenly Realms.

They are not from here; their dress is finer than the wealthiest merchants in Fu Gu (several of whom are now recently dead, in any case.) He’s not ashamed, per se, but I tend to write He Xuan referring to his own acts of violence in oblique asides. I think he justifies it as being tasteful. You know, as part of a literary sensibility. Both men carry a commanding presence at odds with their young faces.

The one in the lead is regal and cold, and has an elegant folding fan tucked into his belt. His companion is broad-shouldered, armoured, and handsome, with a way of moving which recalls a prowling tiger. This scene is canon-ish; we know that He Xuan lingered after death due to accumulated resentment and glimpsed Shi Wudu when the latter came to check that He Xuan was dead, but didn’t know who Shi Wudu actually was until later. I don’t think there’s any reason to think Pei Ming was here for this, but I included him anyway because he’s at his funniest when he’s being affably involved in dastardly business. He hangs back, near the doorway, while the first man makes his methodical, silent way through the rows, browsing the names as though shopping.

There are a lot of references to commerce, especially in the early sections, as it ties together Shi Wudu’s heavenly purview and personal avarice with He Xuan’s frame of reference from his own background.

Closer and closer he comes—if the ghost had breath, it would hold it—until he pauses in front of its own row.

The man, or whatever he is, examines the urns on the shelf for long minutes before he extends an elegant hand out towards the newest of the urns.

Despite its smallness and slowness, clear thoughts surge in the ghost’s consciousness: Go away! Wasn’t death and fire enough to stop you from gnawing on me?

I didn’t see this thread through very well, because it was tricky from He Xuan’s POV alone, but my thought was that Shi Wudu does in fact experience some well-suppressed guilt and fear about the situation at this point in time. He gets more cavalier about it after centuries of his act having incurred seemingly no negative consequences, but I was imagining that he gets just enough of a nebulous bad vibe here to fuck off instead of doing the logical thing and destroying He Xuan’s ashes for good measure.

The man’s hand hovers in the air, and though cast in shadow, it sees uncertainty play out on his face.

The companion calls from the doorway, “Oi, Shui-xiong, are we done here?”

This is canon-compliance issue no.1: I misremembered the Tumours’ nickname for Shi Wudu as being Shui-xiong instead of Shui Shi-xiong (Water Master-xiong; I broke my usual rule against including Chinese words with English equivalents here for the sake of the plot.) If I’d had Pei Ming call him Water Master-xiong, the little setup I have here where He Xuan isn’t sure whether Shui is a name or a title of some kind, and therefore has an inkling there’s a connection to water but doesn’t know how or why, wouldn’t have worked because he would’ve just gone out and determined who the Water Master is. If I’d remembered this before publishing, I would’ve just cut that thread and worked around it, but ah well.

The first man gazes at the urn for a moment longer, and then turns away. Nods curtly. “We’re done.”

He’s so eager for this to be done and to never have to think about it again that the combo of his earlier hesitation and Pei Ming’s impatience signs his warrant of doom.

They head for the door. The ghost slips through the wall and hides behind a bush to watch them leave the cemetery and fade into the distance. They walk at a normal pace, but the ground under their feet seems to shrink.

Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Beefleaf’s first appearance in the novel:

Two silhouettes, one black, one white, strolled unhurriedly but rapidly, as if they were gliding through clouds.

Demons, of some kind? Or something else? Certainly not human.

Shui-xiong, the ghost fire thinks, clinging to it like it has never clung to anything. Shui-xiong, Shui-xiong. The name, and the knowledge that there are forces at work here. Something has happened, something to which it was blind all this time. Someone did this.

Something that wasn't part of my initial vision for the story is that the first two chapters play out a bit like a mystery. Later, He Xuan will become a spy, but for now he’s a detective.

Before dawn breaks, it has a shape again.

Hua Cheng’s transformation from ghost fire to Wu Ming was… very… dramatic, so I could have gone more bombastic with this, but when I wrote this I hadn’t reread Book 4 in a while, and it would’ve required more than the kind of passing tweak I’m willing to make as a post-publication dirty edit.

It lays on its back, and holds its own hand up in front of its face in the moonlight. Rotates it around, examining the sharp knuckles, the bony wrist, the unnatural pallor of the skin.

It was a bit of a tricky balance whenever I had to describe He Xuan’s body. This story is about having a body, so it was unavoidable. He’s quite emaciated, not only due to physical starvation but also, as powerful ghosts’ forms are determined in some way by their self-concept, because he continues to define himself based on hunger and lack. I didn’t want the narrative gaze to go to horny heroin chic places, but also didn’t want to lean too hard into the grotesque with this specifically, because that would just… be shitty.

This must be his body, it realizes. His body as it was before it was burned: starved, mad, and dead, but not rotten yet.

I really enjoyed using “it” for the ghost fire, and was hoping it would cue the reader in early to the idea that, especially following death, He Xuan’s gendered self-concept is highly fluid and contextual. The social position of maleness is something he’s inherited from his human life, and he exists to right wrongs from his human life, so he inhabits it; there are also obvious advantages. There's no deep metaphysical resonance with manhood in his soul, however.

Coordinated motion returns to him quickly. He collects his urn, stowing it under one arm—he knows, with inexplicable certainty, that he would regret leaving himself behind—and runs his fingertips over the graven plaque at its base, feeling the characters more than seeing them. Surname He, given name Xuan. His own name, nearly forgotten, fitting back into his hand like a good, smooth stone, to be skipped across water as far as the eye can see.

Not using He Xuan's name until this point was my attempt to signal that, despite the literal dehumanization involved in dying, ghosthood has the potential to be a do-over of personal agency for people who got a raw deal in life. An afterlife is what you make it. He Xuan sees it as a miserable means to an end, but it can be a rebirth, too.

The gender stuff creeps in at the edges as another form of death, in the sense of XIII Death, the tarot card—death as transformation, as an end of old ways of being, though one that can’t be achieved without some pain or loss.

Was it Shui for water? He could have misheard, but he doesn’t think so. It isn’t much, but he has nowhere to go, nothing else to go on, and all the time in the world.

You see why I had to stick with my misinterpretation or else rework this chapter heavily.

It could just be a name, with no greater meaning. But those men were not just men; he is sure of it.

The question that he cannot answer is why?

Everything about this situation is the opposite of Occam’s razor, so I wanted He Xuan to have to work for the truth, using deduction and often being wrong.

There are spirits in the world with no greater purpose behind their violence beyond amusement, but nothing about that midnight visit to the columbarium indicated an act of caprice. I still don’t love how that line turned out—too wordy and not right re: character voice. I don’t know how I’d rework it, though, since I like the idea. It’s the first of many instances of He Xuan setting himself apart from ~those other spirits.~ He’s a resentful ghost too, but his violence is calculated, so it’s not the same as mindless carnage (in his mind.) On the contrary: He Xuan caught traces of shame on both faces. But then, why go back?

More importantly: why him?

For all that he felt trapped here after failing to clear the national exam, he finds that he doesn’t relish the thought of leaving Fu Gu, particularly as the days go by and he witnesses the number of neighbors and distant acquaintances who pay their respects to himself and his family in a dozen small ways. The fact that Scholar He becomes known as a benevolent slayer of evil points to enduring positive regard between He Xuan and the townsfolk, which I find sweet. He’s a hometown hero! He lingers for as long as he can, spending several days locating and disguising an appropriate hiding place for his urn, and then collecting those of his parents, of his sister and bride-to-be; he will not risk Friend Shui I swear “Friend So-and-so” is a construction that exists, but I’m not sure it actually made sense as I used it... changing his mind and returning for what he left behind. He replaces all five with duplicates full of stove soot, so not to alarm the townsfolk.

He has no idea where to begin, so he travels by night and waits for a sign or insight to come to him and show him where to go next.

He understands why so many ghosts cause chaos; there’s no structure in death. It’s a desolate freedom he never experienced in life, and would not have wished to. The Ghost Realm is so anarchic, for better and for worse, as opposed to the Heavenly Realm’s autocracy & bureaucracy. He Xuan eventually figures out how to harness that, but he’s someone who really needs a purpose and to understand himself socially in relation to others, so I imagine it wasn’t an easy adjustment. Pain and other sensations feel remote; what they’ve been replaced by is a wild appetite that vacillates between desperate hunger and nauseous repulsion.

The other spirits he encounters on his journey disgust him. Starvation mentality and disdain toward fellow inmates… the afterlife is prison all over again (in He Xuan’s mind.) They are base, grotesque, and petty, intent on punishing the living whether or not they deserve it.

His plan, such as it is: he follows rumours about haunted bridges, people going missing near canals, and the like. Sometimes there’s nothing. Sometimes there’s a spirit or monster, and sometimes he’s able to persuade that spirit or monster to talk. It’s for the best that he feels such distaste for these low beings, as things can get rough.

In one instance, He Xuan holds the creature’s wrists together with one hand and presses it to the ground with a knee on its chest. Its original frail old woman’s guise slips off, revealing a slippery, clammy spirit, too mottled and skinny to have a determinable gender, and spouting a garish slice across its neck, from ear to ear. To have this spirit appear a) in the form of a woman and then b) as an ambiguously gendered water ghoul is unsubtle foreshadowing for the things ahead of Our Hero. There’s the possibility that it could shift form again and escape, but he suspects not. Lesser spirits such as this can change forms in limited ways; He Xuan himself has only managed it a handful of times, and found it exhausting.

“What did I do to you?”

“Be quiet.” He gives it a smack across the face, for good measure. “I have questions for you.”

“For me? You’re not one of my victims, I’ve never seen you before in my life—”

“How many other water ghouls are there?”

It squints, sufficiently taken off-guard by the question to forget its protestations. “What, in the world?”

“Yes.”

“How would I know that? Who am I, Hua Cheng?”

I enjoy the idea that Hua Cheng gets facetiously namedropped by ghosts the way you’d reference the president.

He Xuan slaps it again, harder this time. “Your best guess.”

“Eh—hundreds. Maybe thousands. People die in water all the time.”

He Xuan gets a lot done via guile, but especially in the pre-Tonglu days, before he had massive spiritual power reserves, there must’ve been some regular old violent interrogation, too. As he has no cultivation or martial arts training, I imagine there was a lot of brute force, which, again—in tension with his scholarly background? Sexy.

“Which are the most powerful?”

“I told you, I don’t know—” He Xuan lifts his hand again, and the thing curses him, wiggles a little more in his grasp, and sighs. “You’d probably find ‘em in some big rivers. I wasn’t willing to go full Cockney accent like the official TL does for most low level ghosts, but had to… gesture at it. The kind with a lot of traffic. Or anywhere boats run aground, like rocks or rapids.”

“Are there any who come in pairs?”

It spits at him, and he rewards it with an unrestrained blow. This results in a horrible pathetic howl that does not move him whatsoever.

Up to this point, He Xuan has been positioned as a victim. This scene exists partially to demonstrate that, despite having relatively noble aims, once becoming a ghost, He Xuan’s attitude and methods are often very callous. He’s justifying this approach on the basis of this other ghost preying on humans, but… it’s a justification.

“I’m looking for a powerful evil spirit. It may have a companion. The one I’m looking for is called Shui. I don’t know the other’s name.” It doesn’t say anything, so He Xuan continues. “The one I seek took the form of a wealthy young master with an arrogant face. He had a fan at his waist.”

The ghoul beneath him eyes him doubtfully, then laughs. “Did you get on the wrong side of the Water Master?”

He Xuan narrows his eyes. “Who?”

“Go find one of his temples and see for yourself.” The ghoul wriggles again, more forcefully this time. “There. I answered all your questions. Now if you let me go—”

He Xuan holds it down with one knee on each of its shoulders and his free hand gripping the sides of its face. I wanted this blocking to feel sexually charged, though I held back from describing He Xuan as fully straddling the other ghost out of a desire to be… somewhat coy. (Oh, so now you care about being tasteful?!?!) It’s not that He Xuan is setting out to be sexually predatory or aggressive, but sex and violence are all jumbled up in his mind, so the latter is always going to have shades of the former and vice versa. The next part, he has been keenly anticipating, in a way that would shame him if he felt pity for these beings.

No one had to teach him how to do it. When the first time came, an instinctual part of him knew him how to proceed.

This is me trying to get around the fact that canon provides no examples of what ghost-on-ghost cannibalism actually looks like.

A hairline fracture within him widens, opening up that black chasm where the things he swallows are made room for. It spreads out to the border of him, turning him inside-out, until nothing remains except that lustful emptiness. My preoccupations with circlusion begin to swallow the narrative, as it were... Perhaps nothing more than that nothingness ever existed; in those feverish moments, his humanity feels like nothing so much as a wistful dream of better days that never were.

Trying to communicate sentiments adjacent to the iconic line from The Fly without directly invoking it… to mixed success.

He Xuan leans in closer to its face, and breathes it in. There’s a moment where it takes on a look of terror, and then the thing’s eyes come flooding out as liquid, its spirit as vapour streaming out of its mouth.

When he assimilates back into himself, he feels disquieted and vaguely humiliated. Craving things, feeding your urges, engaging in creature habits when you could simply be a cerebral, unfeeling, disembodied wisp… so embarrassing. Even so, the process is very clean. Nothing is left behind. He’s doing the locals a favour. He expects business in town will be better without this kind of cowardly sneak pulling travelers into the river.

Each time he devours another ghost, he comes away sharper, more fully-formed. He occupies himself for days by combing through their fragmented memories, looking for faces he recognizes. I’m completely obsessed with the scanty lines in the novel about how ghosts can impersonate, access the memories and powers, etc. of other ghosts they eat, especially because He Xuan is stated to eat thousands of water ghosts. What must it do to someone’s sense of self to be on the receiving end of that? It is the closest to satiate he has come, not only since death, but long before that.

Incarceration, of course, being the major dehumanization event prior to physical death.

Fu Gu is far from the ocean, so the Water Master, as a young god, had not yet developed much of a following by the time of He Xuan’s death. He’s doing well for himself; He Xuan begins looking out for his temples and shrines, and notices them in any major city on his way.

The likeness there, in the statues and paintings of the imperious Water Master and his simpering wife, is striking enough. Watch your mouth, my friend. You’re gonna wish that was your own simpering wife pretty soon. He Xuan wonders whether it isn’t possible that he did come across one of their shrines during his human life, and simply failed to notice it at the time. It could be surfacing in his memory and confusing his recollection of that night in the cemetery.

It is true that he hadn’t sensed ghost qi from his midnight visitors, but he’s assumed that they were simply powerful enough to have concealed it. It’s already difficult to fathom a vengeful spirit fixing its ill will on his family, prompted by nothing he can think of; why would a god possibly bother?

He had not set out from Fu Gu with a specific destination in mind, but there is one place where, he’s heard, one can get anything one desires if fate is on one’s side. Fate has not, generally, been on his side, but in death, as in business, there’s no gain without risk.

Ghost City’s rapacious chaos once would have awed him, but He Xuan walks its streets with single-minded focus.

The Gambler’s Den is busy tonight, and it takes some waiting before the croupier ushers He Xuan to the betting table. He explains, in as few words as possible, that he wants information on a certain person.

The shadow behind the red curtain sounds bored. “Care to share the name of the one you’re looking for?”

“No,” He Xuan replies flatly.

One of the multitude of spectators in the Den cries, “Watch your tone when you speak to our lord!”

The Ghost City populace being Hua Cheng’s hype crew is such a funny part of the novel.

He Xuan makes no acknowledgement. Since he came here, he has addressed Hua Chengzhu with blank politeness, even sincerity; it would be foolish to do anything less. But he will never grovel again. He will never say “please.”

In keeping with the rest of this chapter, I wanted to set aside what canon shows us of their later dynamic and consider what it’d be like for He Xuan to meet Hua Cheng for the first time, if they met pre-Tonglu. He Xuan is too smart not to be scared, and too proud to let it show much.

Hua Cheng—it must be Hua Cheng—laughs. “I’ll need more to go on than that.”

“How do I know the one I seek isn’t in the room with us now?” It’s well-known that gods sometimes frequent Ghost City in disguise, for all manner of reasons.

“You don’t. It’s called gambling.”

Behind his back, He Xuan digs his fingernails into his palm, but says, evenly, “I will double the wager if Hua Chengzhu will allow me to confer with him in private.”

There’s a long silence, and then, behind the curtain, Hua Cheng makes some kind of gesture. The friendly croupier, who has a dog’s head on a woman’s body, turns back to He Xuan. “You may roll at your leisure.”

Second entry on the drinking game chart: take a shot for every dog reference. They’re not anyone’s canonical theme animal, which was on purpose, because He Xuan likes fish, and the dog thing is a way of framing a lot of nasty feelings about human and ghostkind alike.

Murmurs of surprise ripple through the crowd. He Xuan had thought it a long shot, himself.

He had decided to first bet a spectacular, and spectacularly cursed, giant pearl that he’d found in the lair of a sea monster, on the basis of it being rare and valuable enough to interest Hua Cheng, without being something that He Xuan would miss should he lose it.

Lose it he does, along with the enchanted dizi he had to throw in there to make up the difference. It was fun coming up with the random xianxia loot drop items He Xuan gambles with.

The croupier (her dog’s mouth smiling widely, tongue lolling) asks if he would like to bet again. He’s accumulated enough spoils from his prey to have a few more rounds left in him, but as he reaches into his sleeve, he pauses.

They say that Hua Cheng is wealthier than the heavens. That is likely exaggerated, but surely he has enough treasures that immaterial things carry greater value.

“I wager my sense of taste,” he says. I was proud of this, too, and it was one of the last pieces of the chapter I came up with.

This is less of a sacrifice than it may appear. Much as astonishing sights fail to move him, he has never eaten so much, but he can’t recall the last time he savoured anything.

Crimson Rain Sought Flower spreads his hands magnanimously. “Congratulations. And who is it I am congratulating?”

He wears red, has a great deal of tousled, uneven hair, and looks like a dashing outlaw from a story: wild and fierce, but with intelligent eyes. He appears thirty or so, though He Xuan had known the stories of Hua Chengzhu, the ancient and venerable ruler of Ghost City, even when he was mortal himself.

I also had fun coming up with other forms for Hua Cheng, since we know he doesn’t often take on his true form around others.

I was never sure if I adequately communicated that He Xuan is physically attracted to Hua Cheng is pretty much immediately, but is unable to admit this to himself and couches it in dispassionate observation, not least because he genuinely is scared of him. It’s his mischievousness and flamboyance that draw him—these are common threads between Hua Cheng and Shi Qingxuan, and they’re qualities that compliment He Xuan nicely, so it makes sense as a model for his Type.

“Xuan,” He Xuan says, because he let it slip enough times before, with the naivete of the freshly dead, that there’s hardly a point to obscuring it at a time when appearing honest is a matter of not insignificant peril.

Hey, the Black Water Demon Xuan thing had to come from somewhere, and I find it hard to believe He Xuan set out to go by this title with his closely-guarded identity right freakin’ there…

“That sounds familiar. Are you that water ghoul?”

Is he?

“I’d never even seen the ocean when I died.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

He shrugs one shoulder. “I suppose not.”

“So you’re the one who’s been out there picking the rest of them off?”

Does that make him one of them? How many of their kind must he swallow before he takes on their aspect?

This is one of those things I find so interesting about He Xuan and identity and how it interlocks with trauma and gender: the remaking of your selfhood on a fundamental level because it’s what you think you have to do to succeed at your [Paul Atreides voice] Terrible Purpose and therefore justify your existence.

“I have my reasons.”

“Oh, I couldn’t care less. Just trying to put a name to the face, so to speak.”

He Xuan certainly didn’t come here wearing his own face, but Hua Cheng’s is undoubtedly a false body, too.

Perhaps it shows in He Xuan’s expression how tiresome he finds this conversation. Hua Cheng leans back in his sumptuous chair and folds one knee over the other. “They were right out there, you know. You’re very insolent.”

Hua Cheng is having fun here. He Xuan interests him, for being neither a sycophant nor an OTT arrogant wannabe rival. It’s a type of interaction that Hua Cheng doesn’t get a lot of, especially with Yin Yu not in the picture yet.

“If your lordship says so.”

“Maybe I let you win so I could get you back here to teach you a lesson.”

Hua Cheng is being flirty-menacing with no real intention behind it, just fucking with He Xuan, trying to get a read on him.

The pit of his stomach curls in on itself. Fear is, at times, a rational sensation, so he does not waste effort attempting to dismiss it. He Xuan clears his throat. “I will accept Hua Chengzhu’s guidance, as long as the original agreement is upheld.”

He Xuan is wilfully ignoring the innuendo/sexual tension and trying to keep things all business and take refuge in formality and hierarchy. It’d be one thing if he felt like Hua Cheng actually has designs on him; He Xuan would hate that but be fundamentally unsurprised. It’s the fact that it’s playful and unserious but also not mocking that He Xuan doesn’t know how to deal with, so he ignores it.

Long moments of silence ring in his ears, and then Hua Cheng sighs. “So you want information on someone. There’s no guarantee I’ll be able to give it to you, seeing as you still haven’t told me who it is, but you knew that. Mortal or ghost?”

“Neither.”

“Neither?”

“He’s a god. I believe he’s a god. I need to confirm my suspicions.”

“Ah. Which brings you here.”

“Which brings me here.”

Hua Cheng’s brows rise, and, slowly, his expression blossoms with delight and undisguised malice. “You should have led with that. I would have let you back here much quicker.”

One must assume that their mutual hatred for the heavens formed the first plank of their partnership.

If the devouring of souls and such lol was not enough, the opening of Mount Tonglu would have confirmed that, despite He Xuan’s appearance being unremarkable (by the standards of spirits), he is long past the point where he could be considered human. He feels the mountain’s pull the way he imagines that birds feel the urge to fly south in the winter, but with a much greater sense of agitation.

He Xuan has heard enough from other ghosts, over the past however many years—fifty, perhaps? Time is disjointed after death, and not worth the effort to track closely—to understand the perils ahead. The ghosts that answer the call are to be culled in great numbers, and likely in futility; no Ghost King has emerged from the Kiln since Hua Cheng.

But it does him no good to be timid. His days as a human are remote to him, but he still has a mind; though it may be warped, he’s fought to keep himself from reverting to narrow-minded animalian ways, as so many restless spirits do, when they find themselves without any external forces of discipline. Most of the ghosts that flock to the mountain are hardly capable of rational thought, let alone strategy.

The above paragraph is what I assume He Xuan’s self-image looks like from just before the Kiln all the way through Black Water arc. He’s the best (well, second-best) at being a ruthless animal, so much so that he can transcend that status. Totally cerebral except for the need to feed and the ability to do violence.

The beginnings of his career of violence were near the end of his life, but he cannot recall whether the same heady abandon had come over him then as it does now, when he gives in to it, or whether the layers of his memory have been soaked through by the present.

He Xuan lurks at the shoreline not far from Ghost City. There’s little to be done until he gets this over with.

On the third day, He Xuan is greeted by a visitor.

“How’s this side of the Kiln treating you, Black Water Demon Xuan?”

Not for the first time, He Xuan regrets leaving any remnant of his mortal name attached to his current existence. Perhaps he could have left it behind if he hadn’t introduced himself as such to Crimson Rain the first time they met, but he hadn’t expected Hua Cheng to remember him, as one of the innumerable gamblers he had been entertaining for centuries. He’s taken the lesson; he will not underestimate Hua Cheng again.

It’s not everyone that Hua Cheng finds intriguing enough to meet face to face and flirty-intimidate! Very few, in fact! But yeah, also, don’t underestimate him. Generally a good policy.

“Crimson Rain Sought Flower.”

This form is younger, slimmer, sporting silver vambraces and a patch over one eye. Hua Cheng wearing his true form here is a gesture of sincerity and budding, begrudging respect… not that he’d admit that, or that He Xuan has the necessary context to know. Hua Cheng smiles with laughable insincerity. That’s just how his face looks if you’re anyone but Xie Lian. “You don’t look surprised to see me.”

“I expected you.”

Hua Cheng nods, and gives He Xuan an obvious once-over. “You look good,” he says, in his mocking way. “Very dramatic.”

The robes, perhaps. He just graduated from ghost murder college, okay? Let him dress up. The rest is just He Xuan’s body, after death. He is as life left him.

They’re so fun together. This fic is super goofy at times, which is difficult to communicate when talking about it because I don't want to obfuscate all of the depressing shit.

“I have no interest in intruding on your territory. I would ask no more than the same.”

“Am I intruding?”

“Not yet.”

“I wasn’t sure whether to expect you knocking down my door. But you have more sense than that, I’m sure.”

“I have no desire to meddle in your affairs.”

At Hua Cheng’s waist, the scimitar Eming opens its red eye. It regards He Xuan, blinking every so often.

Crimson Rain has been the singular ghost king since time untold; no one exists to challenge his position except White No-Face, who hasn’t been seen since long before He Xuan’s time. Hua Cheng may be the single greatest barrier to He Xuan’s plans ahead, but he has thought of other possibilities, other uses he might serve. Despite his sensible caution, He Xuan still has an enormous ego. You don’t persevere through all the stuff he has without some kind of confidence, even in limited areas. Sometimes it gets funny, though. You’re gonna make Hua Cheng serve ~uses~ for you?? He had twelve years in the Kiln to contemplate such things. I DID MY WAITING… ~~THIRTEEN~~ TWELVE YEARS OF IT… IN ~~AZKABAN~~ MOUNT TONGLU

He Xuan isn’t confident in his odds against this opponent, should it come to that, but he promised himself long ago to do everything in his power to never be overpowered again. He keeps his face blank and his qi contained.

This is the crux of it all, and part of what caused the Huaxuan relationship to continue to deepen in focus within the story when it was initially planned as solidly second fiddle to Beefleaf. He Xuan is terrified to be taken advantage of or dominated again, and needs to draw on all resources he can to prevent that, including bringing himself into proximity to someone very, very dangerous. The stakes are real!

Hua Cheng strokes his chin. “So what future do you see for the two of us? I’m eager to hear your vision.”

…meanwhile, Hua Cheng is amused by the emergence of this eccentric, self-serious little brother that he’s acquired after being peerless, in all senses, for centuries. Most confusing is the fact he doesn’t want to get rid of him.

“I won’t enter Ghost City uninvited. It’s my understanding you rarely have reason to visit the sea.”

“One for the land, one for the water? The in-universe “Crimson rules the land, Black masters the waters” idiom is top tier ship bait. If you’re me. How reasonable. And I came here worried I’d need to put you in your place.”

The idle flirting is about 10% less idle now. Again, not that either of them will admit it. Middle school pigtail pulling behaviour.

“I trust this is preferable,” He Xuan says through his teeth.

“Yes, yes, fine. Let’s leave each other to ours, and if all goes well, never see one other again.” Hua Cheng stretches his arms over his head, lazily. His eye twinkles with condescension. “If that’s all, I’ll be going—”

“Wait.”

Hua Cheng blinks (winks?), openly amused. “Yes?”

“I have something to ask of you.”

“Yes?”

“I have business to see to.”

“And?”

“You have capital.”

“And?”

He Xuan wonders whether White No-Face wouldn’t be preferable to deal with.

“There are investments I must make before seeing to my concerns.”

“Are you really short on income? I had heard that sinking ships was your thing. You’re telling me you don’t have piles of gold laying around?”

Hua Cheng being my authorial mouthpiece for a second; He Xuan really must not do much oceanic carnage to humans, otherwise he wouldn’t be so damn broke.

He Xuan levels Hua Cheng with a withering look, but Hua Cheng persists in looking unwithered.

“I am proposing a loan,” He Xuan grits through his teeth.

Hua Cheng’s face brightens. “And your collateral?”

“I can’t offer you anything material.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“I can give you information.”

“I find myself well-informed.”

“You could be more so.”

“Go on, then.”

“I’m going to Heaven.”

“Ah, still looking for your Water Master. And how do you expect to do that?”

He Xuan didn’t spend twelve years in the Kiln just scrapping with ghouls. He slept, often, and for long periods. While conscious, he took inventory of himself, of the ever-increasing stock of thing-ness he contained.

He had come to Tonglu knowing what he must do when he left it, but not why. Hua Cheng’s paltry intelligence had not extended so far as to answer for him why one of Heaven’s rising stars would have cursed the He family, if cursed is what they were. Hua Cheng’s reach in Heaven really mustn’t have been much to speak of, otherwise there’d be no need for the partnership. It’s nice to get a sense of areas other than calligraphy where Hua Cheng doesn’t have ultimate Gary Stu competence (I mean that in the fondest way possible.) It had taken Hua Cheng some time to deliver the information He Xuan had gambled for, but in the end He Xuan had received an assortment of drawings of all of the Water Master’s known forms, and documents which included confirmation from some source of Hua Cheng’s that the Martial God of the North, General Ming Guang, occasionally refers to him as Shui-xiong in conversation. Pei Ming broke bro code forever without even meaning to :( Though not as illuminating as he would liked, it was enough to make things plain for him. The one he sought was a god, one waxing in influence every day. Were He Xuan still alive, an old man and a merchant still, he would have been making offerings to Lord Water Master himself, for the sake of his supply chain.

His afterlife has been marked by a handful of fortuitous moments, unlike his living days. Perhaps the most fortuitous of them all—though, considering the circumstances, perhaps the most inevitable—was his discovery of a certain jinx monster in the depths of the unholy mountain. He will never forget its echoing laugh, bouncing off the walls of the Kiln, nor moment he devoured it, and was met by the horrific taste of sudden understanding.

Is this bit canon compliant? Cannot even remember. This part of the timeline confuses me.

I felt as though I needed to write around the Kiln, because I didn’t want to overshadow the prison-as-crucible effect within the chapter, and it’d be hard not to do that if I went in depth into He Xuan’s jaunt inside the literal volcano crucible.

He Xuan would rather not explain himself, to Hua Cheng or anyone else, but it’s true that he has nothing else worth offering, and he has come this far. And what is the most famous story about Crimson Rain Sought Flower? The first day he emerged from the Kiln, Hua Cheng challenged thirty-three gods, and won. He Xuan only needs to defeat one.

chapter two

I didn’t do it, because I couldn’t think of good titles for the other chapters, but I almost used chapter titles for the fic just so I could call this one “Shi Qingxuan.” That’s how I wanted it to feel: Shi Qingxuan’s entrance immediately changes things, just when He Xuan is starting to gain confidence about actually pulling it all off.

He Xuan could never have been called a devout follower of any specific god, but as an adolescent, he had a budget line in his limited pool of spending money reserved for incense sticks. As it was the done thing for aspiring civil servants, he visited the modest shrine in town dedicated to Ling Wen, including on the day before leaving for the imperial exam.

He would’ve been better off saving his money for other purposes. Ling Wen-zhenjun had other things to attend to at the time.

I’m very interested in these two together. Ling Wen is living He Xuan’s “good end” life, and it kind of blows? Not least because… misogyny. Which He Xuan wouldn’t have to deal with… at least in theory.

Ling Wen’s appearance in temple artwork was not particularly notable: relatively youthful, but wise and learned, and dressed in the garb of his occupation. Now, on the golden boulevards of the Heavenly Capitol, Ling Wen greets him graciously before saying, “Your palace is this way, with those of the other elemental masters,” and extending her hand.

And now the last of our major themes enters stage left in earnest: Gender, What Is It.

The newly ascended Earth Master Yi faces Ling Wen, indisputably female despite the subfusc robes of a scholar-official, and considers which is the disparity: the statues, or the form before him? Changing shape is inconsequential for such a major god, but if this is a form Ling Wen has taken on consciously, He Xuan wonders as to its purpose.

But such questions can wait.

As she goes about orienting the one she believes to be Ming Yi as Heaven’s newest Upper Court official, there is a tightness in He Xuan’s throat that won’t abate. One can plan for something endlessly, and still be set adrift when it begins to unfold. Each moment since He Xuan took Ming Yi’s place and stepped through the Ascension Gates has presented him with choices over things so minor he couldn’t have anticipated his response. He already senses how quickly these small decisions will add up to the trajectory of his false godhood.

He half-expects that, upon meeting the Heavenly Martial Emperor, Jun Wu will sense what neither his chief emissary nor any of the heavenly onlookers have detected, but He Xuan tucks the thought firmly away in the place in his mind reserved for unactionable and therefore useless fears.

The Palace of the Earth Master is stately, but appropriately staid for a man who was an engineer before ascension. He Xuan doesn’t anticipate spending much time here, but he maintains a reserved yet attentive expression while Ling Wen gives him a tour, until there comes the sound of doors opening behind them, followed by the patter of feet.

“It’s alright, Ling Wen, I know you’re too busy for all this. I can take it from here.”

Ming Yi’s false pulse jolts. Fortuitous moments.

The new arrival is a lively young man in white and green. The character painted on the folding fan in his hand is an unnecessary identifier: He Xuan knows this face. Like a reflection at the bottom of a jar, he sees a child in a little girl’s clothes—cheeks blanched with terror, but the features all the same, down to the slight gap between the two front teeth—through a monster’s warped and half-digested memory.

I have no idea if this is how the memory-absorption works, but it’s juicy to contemplate…

“Wind Master Qingxuan,” Ling Wen replies, with a smile in her eyes, if not on her mouth. For the first time since she introduced He Xuan to the Heavenly Capitol, her tone diverges from impersonal politeness: her voice is warm, but there’s a benevolent note that would make He Xuan bristle, if directed at himself.

The Tumours care for Shi Qingxuan the way one cares for a wayward niece or nephew, rather than an adult who is also their friend’s younger sibling.

Shi Qingxuan appears to neither notice nor care, though as He Xuan has yet to get the measure of him, it remains to be seen whether his appearance is a reliable marker of his mood. Re: writing He Xuan as not always immediately “right”: what if he initially thought Shi Qingxuan might be a Nie Huaisang-type faux-ditzy schemer? It would make things easier for He Xuan morally, if not practically. He approaches, almost inappropriately close, and gives He Xuan an unsubtle once-over, though his expression appears merely curious, rather than openly judgmental.

“A full house of elemental gods, finally! As soon as I heard, I came right up.”

Lord Wind Master has a handsome face and a musical voice a few notches too loud for the room. I believe it’s canon (but don't have a reference on hand) that Shi Qingxuan’s speaking voice is both pleasant to listen to and rather loud. Infinitely charming to me if so. He Xuan is aware that he should respond somehow, beyond the stiff nod he’d given Shi Qingxuan upon his first arrival, but is at a loss. He’d already decided that it would be wise to establish Ming Yi as taciturn, to reduce the likelihood of accidental slip-ups, but it would be unforgivably foolish to squander the opportunity that Shi Qingxuan has presented to him. And yet. What is to be said, when a creature that one has been hunting for longer than one was even alive lands in one’s palm of its own accord?

The seconds stretch on, and Shi Qingxuan’s bright gaze turns quizzical, though his face is no less sanguine. Ling Wen looks mildly amused. He Xuan clears his throat, but nothing comes out.

IDK if I telegraphed it adequately, but what I was trying to get across here is that He Xuan is bluescreening for a variety of reasons, Ling Wen thinks he’s tongue-tied by how cute Shi Qingxuan is (and she's not entirely wrong), and Shi Qingxuan is like “?? :)”.

“Perhaps Lord Wind Master could accompany us back to the Palace of Divine Might,” Ling Wen offers pityingly. He Xuan swallows around the sticky lump in his throat, and nods.

Shi Qingxuan appears unfazed. He chatters all the way back to Jun Wu’s court. He wants Ming Yi to come by the Palace of Wind and Water, sometime, to have a drink with him. It will be fun, Shi Qingxuan says. He insists.

Those three sentences were one of the first bits I wrote, after the prison scene. He Xuan doing the most to frame Shi Qingxuan’s sincere overtures of friendship as inappropriate boundary-pushing, in order to justify continuing to stoke his hatred…

The Wind Master, in a show of what He Xuan is learning is characteristic tenacity, or shamelessness—or perhaps just inability to read a room—returns to the Earth Master’s door personally to deliver an invitation to an evening banquet at the palace that he and his brother share.

He Xuan and Shi Wudu were introduced to one another by Shi Qingxuan shortly after He Xuan had been brought to face the Heavenly Martial Emperor. The Thunder and Lighting Masters were there as well, and the Rain Master, he was told, is rarely in the Heavenly Capitol. Shi Wudu had taken one uncomprehending look at He Xuan, made a patently insincere greeting, and ceased paying attention to him.

Shi Wudu cracks me up.

The Water Master doesn’t appear to have acquired a greater social appetite since; it’s clear that it is Shi Qingxuan’s party. Shi Wudu spends the whole evening brushing elbows with Ling Wen and Ming Guang, and doesn’t condescend to speak to anyone else unless spoken to.

He Xuan considers trying his luck once more—surely this is as natural an opportunity as it gets—but his instincts favour an indirect approach. Shi Wudu’s elitist withdrawal is something He Xuan already knows of from Hua Cheng’s meagre dossiers, but he hadn’t realized how overtly hostile Friend Shui was to even incidental socializing outside of his inner circle. Eventually, He Xuan plans to get a shell body into the Water Master’s corps of Middle Court officials, but until then will acclimate himself to enduring the presence of Lord Wind Master.

Good luck with that <3

Though the child of merchants, Shi Qingxuan carries himself like a benevolent prince. It is exceedingly clear that he has never earned a thing in his life.

tweet by @SkinnyTuna: lol nice gains. are they ill-gotten?

One hundred and fifty officials sit at tables or mill around the hall. Shi Qingxuan takes it upon himself to introduce Ming Yi to each and every one. All the while, Shi Qingxuan’s hands flit to He Xuan’s shoulder, intertwine their arms, fiddle with his robes. He Xuan has given no indication to Shi Qingxuan that he appreciates this over-familiar touch. He certainly does not repay it in kind.

“You really don’t like talking about yourself, do you? You’re going to get a reputation if you keep that up. People are horrible gossips up here, and nothing’s better than a blank slate to fill with scandals.”

He Xuan glances sidelong at Shi Qingxuan, which is a mistake; they make eye contact, and being faced with Shi Qingxuan’s blithe expression at close quarters has consistently proven the greatest challenge yet to his equanimity.

“What should I say, then?”

“Oh, whatever you want. Don’t get me wrong, you can be Mysterious Earth Master Yi if you’re up for it. Just giving you a tip, so you don’t get surprised when you hear about the affairs you’re having with three different mortal laundry maids, that’s all.”

Evening settles into night, and gradually the hall thins out. Shi Qingxuan says a personal farewell to everyone who leaves, even Middle Court officials whom He Xuan can tell are of absolutely no consequence. He Xuan gets towed along throughout.

Shi Qingxuan keeps sighing with increasing frequency. By the time the hall is mostly empty, He Xuan asks, “Do you need a drink of water, or something?”

“No,” Shi Qingxuan replies, with as much wistfulness as can be put into a single exhale.

“Then what’s—” He Xuan catches himself just in time before saying wrong with you. He doesn’t usually struggle to maintain an even temper. Something about Shi Qingxuan, beyond the obvious, grates at his nerves. :) “—On your mind?”

“It’s nothing,” he replies, in the airy tone of one expecting to be pressed for details by someone more interested in the answer than He Xuan.

Well. That’s not entirely accurate. He’s interested, in the sense that everything he doesn’t know about Shi Qingxuan is one less tool at his disposal. Shi Qingxuan’s psyche is, on its own merits, truly uninteresting.

“I should return to my palace,” He Xuan ventures cautiously, when they’re the only two left in the room, “but if there’s something you’d like to—discuss—”

“Oh, yes, will you stick around a little longer?” Shi Qingxuan sounds breathless.

Everything about his attitude towards Ming Yi seems off, in an intangible way. His immediate levels of interest, when He Xuan has been giving so little of substance to be interested in. It unnerves him.

It’s not that He Xuan is incapable of believing people are attracted to him, especially in the “me but put through a handsome FaceApp filter” Ming Yi form, but Shi Qingxuan has such an earnest crush—largely personality-based, if you can believe it—that He Xuan is slow to acknowledge that’s what’s happening.

He casts his gaze around the room, in search of something neutral to look at. “What’s going to happen to the leftover food?”

Shi Qingxuan pauses, with a thoughtful expression. “You know, I’ve never thought about it before. It tends to just… disappear when we don’t need it anymore.”

As if He Xuan needed any further proof that Shi Qingxuan has avoided all meaningful suffering.

That isn’t even true and He Xuan knows it, but hey, habitual liars love lying to themselves.

Before long, He Xuan is staring at Shi Wudu’s priceless brat of a brother over a now-mostly-empty basket of pork buns. ”Priceless” doing a lot of work here re: framing Shi Qingxuan’s personhood in terms of value and ownership, without specifying to whom he’s priceless. On the other hand, referring to him as an extension of Shi Wudu rather than by his own name sure is a strategy for maintaining compartmentalization… He nods attentively, to assure Shi Qingxuan that he’s still listening to his drivel.

“I’ve got lots of friends. That’s not the problem. It’s just, like—I’m trying to recruit a friend group.” Shi Qingxuan drums an emphatic finger on the tabletop. “I don’t know why that’s so hard! I mean, even Ge has a clique! How come I don’t? What don’t I have going for me? Am I not pleasant company?”

I find Shi Qingxuan’s situation in Heaven quite sad. On good terms with everyone, but no one cares about them as much as they care about other people, except for their brother, which, well… [grimace emoji]

He Xuan chews silently.

“Okay, well, am I not generous with merits?”

He inclines his head in concession. It’s true that Shi Qingxuan gives them away freely. It must be easy to do so, when they flow downstream from the Water Master.

Shi Qingxuan leans across the table. “And am I not at least beautiful?”

“Hideous,” He Xuan replies reflexively, because the only other person with whom he’s had anything approaching a casual conversation in seventy years is Hua Cheng.

Shi Qingxuan blinks a few times, and then sits back down to prop a smiling cheek into one of his palms. “You’re very odd.”

Such a nice turn of fate for Shi Qingxuan to have a quirky tsundere goth best friend drop into his lap like that.

Casually, He Xuan says, “Maybe saying such things is why you don’t have better friends.”

“Well, then you ought to be concerned for your own sake, don’t you think? Or is Lord Earth Master too busy with his… charts, and whatever, to care?”

Something along those lines is indeed what He Xuan had intended to say, so he takes another irritable bite.

It’s even true; he studied many things during his life, but infrastructure projects were not one of them, and he has catching-up to do if he has any hope of maintaining this ruse for long.

Here I would have included something about Original Ming Yi if I’d thought ahead that far, but… I hadn’t.

“Say. I don’t want to have to go bang on your door every time I want to hang out. Want to exchange private communication array passwords?”

Opportunities such as this are why He Xuan bothered to personally infiltrate the Upper Court at all. As such, he can’t understand why the offer fills him with unease. Regardless, he nods.

“Okay. You have to repeat after me. Lord Wind Master is boundlessly talented.”

“That’s your password?”

“That’s the start of it. Lord Wind Master is boundlessly talented. Come on, I know you can do it.” Both of Shi Qingxuan’s arms are aloft, and he gestures with each line: first at himself, and then at He Xuan. “Lord Wind Master is— ”

He blinks expectantly, so He Xuan, not seeing any alternative, echoes the line, and each interminable one to follow. Shi Qingxuan’s stupid grin gets wider with every word.

Shi Qingxuan is not gullible and credulous in all situations, and can be canny and perceptive at times. In very… uh… particular ways. But yes, I think He Xuan’s type is people who possess the whimsy and charm he lacks but also needs to bounce off of due to his own latent drama kid tendencies.

“—Lord Wind Master is forever sweet sixteen. There, that’s the end. Now you just need to say it through twice more—”

He Xuan’s understanding of the Shi brothers’ lives is a patchwork of a monster’s warped memories and what intelligence He Xuan was able to glean from the Heavens prior to usurping Ming Yi’s divinity. Many questions remain unanswered, though their number dwindles rapidly the longer he spends in contact with Shi Qingxuan, who volunteers personal information at such volume that He Xuan is not certain he ought to trust it. The details, in any case, have yet to come together in a coherent image.

A bit of cheap lampshading on my part, vis a vis how much of a nightmare the TGCF timeline is…

A few months after their exchange of passwords, Shi Qingxuan is telling an unsolicited, winding anecdote: « —and that was back when I was learning to cultivate, of course— »

I went with this kind-of-funky formatting for the personal communication arrays because I needed them to be visibly distinct from spoken dialogue, as there are several scenes with overlapping array/verbal conversations.

I thought your brother was learning to cultivate while you were staying down the mountain.

« Ge taught me some things when I got a little older. » It’s really unclear to me how much cultivation training Shi Qingxuan actually has. They’re introduced as having a sword with them, even in female form! Not that we ever see them use it… There’s a stretch of silence, and then he adds, « I can’t believe you remembered that. »

Cautiously, He Xuan responds, Why is that strange?

« I was just surprised, that’s all. It’s not that often that I think people really pay attention to anything I say. »

That’s because you’re annoying.

He Xuan has never met a creature so determined to enjoy itself, and as such, Shi Qingxuan cheerfully responds, « But you return my calls! »

He Xuan considers whether he wants the seafood stew with mushrooms or the one without. As an afterthought, he asks, “Do you want anything?”

Hua Cheng replies, “Buying me dinner with my own money? You’re so thoughtful.”

Today, Crimson Rain Sought Flower is an insouciant young maiden with dimples and a jaunty step. He Xuan looks much less memorable; this town is full of dock workers, and his impulse when taking on mortal guises is always to stand out as little as possible. For the time being, that is… Some people do not share this feeling. He spares a moment to be grateful that the town is quiet this evening, to reduce the amount of passersby who will walk past and get the wrong idea about what they are to one another.

Oh no, how terrible that would be.

To this end—not standing out—he ends up ordering both of the stews, with the vague implication to the shopkeeper that there’s one for each of them, and waits until they find a table on the deserted outer terrace to take the spare back from Hua Cheng. He Xuan had suggested they meet in this particular locale on the basis of it being roughly equidistant from their respective lairs, but truthfully, he recalled that the food was good. Hua Cheng sprawls in her chair in a distinctly unladylike manner, and watches He Xuan eat with an expression like a paying spectator at a carnival.

Hua Cheng is fucking with He Xuan again, of course. Telling himself he just wants to try different formsto suss out what He Xuan’s type is, so he can… more effectively manipulate him. It’s tactical. For sure. (Is He Xuan affected by the busty backwards-baseball-cap dyke vibe? Absolutely yes.)

Nevertheless, the meal is relatively pleasant. By the time He Xuan finishes, twilight is falling, and they leave the town behind for the craggy shore.

Hua Cheng drops his mortal form as soon as they pass out of sight of the shops and houses. The one he wears instead is the body that He Xuan assumes is Hua Cheng’s true form, if his true form is among any of the guises that he’s shown He Xuan over the last half-century. This Hua Cheng is a handsome young man: tall, with a charming smile and a wicked twinkle in his one good eye. It is most of all the eyepatch covering the other that inclines He Xuan to think that this, of his multitude of skins, is the real one: he has never seen Hua Cheng reveal any other weakness.

Besides, the current pallor of Hua Cheng’s skin is bloodless to the point that he’d receive stares on the street. He Xuan, who sees little purpose in obscuring his true face from Hua Cheng at this point, looks much the same.

He’s not foolish enough to let his guard down around Hua Cheng, however habituated He Xuan has become to their meetings, and he errs on the side of playing docile. They are both on good behaviour, relatively speaking. That being said, it is the first time they have met face to face since Ming Yi ascended to the Heavenly Capitol, and being in his true form feels like stretching his legs after a long containment. Night blossoms around them, further amplifying his urge for activity, the way that only nocturnal beings understand.

Have I mentioned that I love ghosts, just, like, conceptually?

They come to rest amid some low dunes, a respectful distance from the receding tide. The moon gleams on the water.

What a romantic spot for your spy rendezvous!

“I considered this region, before I settled on the island.”

He Xuan immediately regrets saying anything. Despite not knowing how Hua Cheng would use such information against him, it’s unwise to get into the habit of giving Hua Cheng unnecessary collateral.

He Xuan is still significantly paranoid about their arrangement, which is reasonable.

“How’s all that going, then? Having fun building your little house?”

He Xuan doesn’t dignify that comment with a response. Paradise Manor is beyond tasteless.

On to business. He Xuan recounts the goings-on of his first several months in Heaven. He and Crimson Rain have one another’s private communication array passwords, of course, but He Xuan reserves that for necessities.

“Seems like you’ve had more to do with the Wind Master than the Water Master.”

“That one is the weak link. He talks about himself endlessly. I’ve already had opportunities to search most of his personal belongings.” The first time He Xuan took Shi Qingxuan up on his offer of visiting the Palace of Wind and Water without the presence of other guests, Shi Qingxuan swanned off midway through to do someone else a favour and left He Xuan alone in his bedroom for more than enough time for He Xuan to discover, with escalating disbelief, that he didn’t seem to put locks on anything.

It’s sensible that Shi Wudu is standoffish. It’s convenient for those with things to hide to cultivate a reputation for being too arrogant to mingle with the rabble. The fake-Earth-Master maneuver, one might say. Why does Shi Qingxuan neglect to do the same?

Oh, honey.

“Maybe he doesn’t know.”

“The circumstances of his ascension are patently strange. Only an idiot wouldn’t question it.”

“If there’s one thing Heaven is rich in, it’s idiots.”

“The good-neighbor routine is very unsubtle. No one acts like that.”

For all Shi Qingxuan’s complaints about wanting closer friends, He Xuan has seen nothing to indicate that he is pursuing the company of anyone with such intensity as he has Ming Yi. They have nothing in common, beyond their vocations as elemental gods, and the Wind and Water Masters are the only two of those who seem to engage with one another socially with any frequency. He Xuan tolerates his attention up to a point, as it would be foolish not to, but has done little to encourage him.

Hua Cheng places another twig on the house he’s been building out of sticks on the sandy soil. “There are exceptions to every rule.”

“My gratitude for Hua Chengzhu’s kernels of wisdom.”

He wonders, now and again, whether Shi Qingxuan is not in fact an actor to put He Xuan to shame. Perhaps He Xuan ought to be pulling back from a well-laid trap. He dismisses this theory, most times, but it lingers in the back of his mind.

He Xuan wants to believe it, and also fears it.

When they conclude their conversation and get to their feet, Hua Cheng leaves the house of sticks intact, for the wind to take care of. It’s well-built, for an absent-minded fidgety project. Hua Cheng is irritatingly good at most things He Xuan has seen him try his hand at.

What I was trying to get at earlier re: the conviction necessary to get through the Kiln is that He Xuan, despite having doubts, insecurities, traumas, etc. still has a bit of that self-perception of being the Protagonist of Life. I imagine he experiences both irritation and envy toward someone in whose presence he becomes a side character.

Before they part ways, Hua Cheng says, “Would you like another word to the wise? You ought to go take care of that nasty river spirit causing trouble up north. He’s just sunk another barge.”

Part of He Xuan’s agreement with Hua Cheng is that they each keep the demonic creatures of their respective domains behaving within reasonable bounds. He Xuan nods curtly, but Hua Cheng adds, a malicious twinkle in his eye: “If you aren’t careful, folks upstairs are going to start thinking it’s you, and I don’t think you’d like to draw attention to yourself at this juncture.”

“Black Water,” the water ghost in question hisses. It doesn’t come across as very threatening, considering he’s pressed against a wall with quaking knees.

He Xuan shakes his head. “Don’t address me as if you’re my equal.”

It’s a bad habit, playing with his food, but for He Xuan to release his tight grip on his aura is deeply satisfying, and he permits himself to relish it. He Xuan’s qi suffuses the air with killing intent. His blurry, looming silhouette ripples on the water. His voice rings like struck brass.

This scene was super fun to write. It’s my attempt to deal with the Navy Seals copypasta problem, wherein you need to demonstrate that a character is badass without it coming across like what you’re doing is trying to make them seem badass. He Xuan is competent, menacing, dangerous, etc, even while engaging in emotionally-driven dubious decision-making, and he’s also a supervillain with a sadistic streak. Who eats other sapient creatures. And is very, very cringe.

“Did you think you could go on like this forever?” He Xuan gestures around the interior of the half-sunken ship the creature has been using as a lair. “It didn’t even take me long to find you. Your foolhardiness is impressive.”

It had been truly easy. This ghost has been pulling down boats along this waterway for a year or so; it started with fishing boats, but has scaled up to passenger ferries. The region is remote and impoverished, which He Xuan suspects is the reason the Water Master has yet to intervene; it’s no secret that the value of offerings plays a larger role for him than most, when it comes to answering prayers. He Xuan had put on a decoy form, and done some meandering punting along the shoreline. It took less than a day to get pulled under the surface and brought back to this thing’s musty little hovel.

He Xuan is not an easy character to write well, but the upside is that you get to occupy the role of a total bitch.

“Why should you get to tell the rest of us what to do? Not satisfied with the South Sea? One little river, and you want that too?”

He Xuan glides closer, and his quarry tries, unsuccessfully, to make himself smaller.

“Because I’m better than you. Fairness is irr—”

« Hey, Ming-xiong? »

It has taken Shi Qingxuan half a year of infrequent social contact to call Ming Yi exclusively “Ming-xiong.” He Xuan makes every effort not to call Shi Qingxuan by anything at all.

I don’t believe he ever uses Shi Qingxuan’s name in the novel when in either his own or Ming Yi’s form, at least not in the English TL.

His expression hardens, and the lesser ghost flattens further against the wall.

“What if I entered your service?”

“As if I need such a repulsive servant. Who do you think I am? The Green Ghost Qi Rong?”

Someday I’ll actually write about Qi Rong, but for now he gets to be the punching bag I only remember when it's convenient. Just like in canon!

« It’s rude to ignore people, you know. »

Oh, enough of this.

A few minutes later, He Xuan is alone.

I'm writing around the moment of violence and feeding, once again, because He Xuan is ashamed even as he relishes it.

I was indisposed, and you have no patience.

« There you are. I was getting worried. »

He Xuan makes a mental note to take longer to respond in future, to give Shi Qingxuan more reasonable expectations.

What do you want?

« Come down to the mortal realm with me soon, whenever you’re free. I want to show you something. »

Show me what? And why can’t you do it in Heaven?

« Something special. Don’t worry about it. You’ll just have to trust me. »

He feels unsettled by this: more unsettled than he can explain. How likely really is it that Shi Qingxuan could be drawing him into an ambush, consciously or otherwise?

Why me?

« I feel like I can be myself with you, I guess. »

What if you can’t be?

There’s minimal narration in this part of the scene because He Xuan can’t justify anything he's saying.

« Hmm? »

We haven’t known each other long. What makes you think you can trust me?

« Oh, please, you sound like my brother. »

Is that right?

« I’m not really sixteen, you know. I’ve been around. And I’m a good judge of character. »

He Xuan wades deeper into the submerged portion of the boat, searching for anything of interest. The erstwhile resident was fond of appallingly tacky human bone decor. He amends his uncharitable thoughts about Paradise Manor; as demon lairs go, Hua Cheng’s could be much worse.

What character do you judge me to have?

« You’re smart. You think for yourself. »

Hmm.

He likes this, despite himself, because these are qualities he believes are true, unlike him being trustworthy.

« Are you fishing for compliments? If you are, you can just say so. »

Don’t trouble yourself.

It’s easier to flirt when he doesn’t have to look Shi Qingxuan in the eye.

« See, you’re funny. That’s another. And I find your energy relaxing. »

He Xuan kicks open a chest of valuables with more force than is necessary.

What one must understand is that this is approximately the relationship I have to He Xuan as a fictional character.

What else?

« I knew you were playing coy. But now I feel put on the spot, so good job. »

I do have things to get back to.

« How important are they, at this hour? Not very, I’ll bet. But I can add that to your character reference. So diligent! Paragon of Heavenly Officials! Works from dusk til dawn and beyond! »

If you’re quite finished.

« So you will come? »

The Imperial City is busy this evening. He Xuan enters the sprawling, multi-story inn that Shi Qingxuan specified as their meeting place, glances at the quantity of people milling around, and decides to wait outside the front door, where at least the night air is cooler.

Where are you?

« Coming— »

Before long, a patter of feet behind him precedes a tap on his shoulder. He stiffens and whirls around.

At the sight of the person behind him, there’s a moment of idiotic mental blankness before it comes back to him. The statues of the Water Master’s simpering wife.

I really feel that fandom underplays the weirdness of this, so I mention it every chance I get.

When Shi Qingxuan’s lips part, they reveal the slight gap between her two front teeth: one of the familiar features on an otherwise different face. Don’t judge me for the horniness involved in giving Shi Qingxuan a non-canon diastoma. “Took you long enough.”

The difficulty with which his mind struggles to adjust to what he’s seeing is inexcusable. It’s as if he’s never seen someone change form, or never done it himself.

He’s been steadfastly trying to ignore it, but now it’s impossible to forget that a) Shi Qingxuan has a body and b) it’s one he finds attractive.

After a period of silence, Shi Qingxuan puts a hand on one of her hips. “What, is it your first time meeting a woman?”

He Xuan blinks twice, and manages, “Why do you look like that?”

“I can’t dress up for a special occasion?”

“Is this what you wanted to show me?”

Shi Qingxuan runs a hand through her hair, and fidgets with the ends. “Yes, actually. Now, let’s go find somewhere to sit before all the spots are gone.”

She’s clearly been here before; she leads them to a table on an upper balcony, overlooking the river. There are other patrons around them, but none too close to overhear their conversation. On their way up the stairs, one of the other customers pays unsubtle attention to Shi Qingxuan, and it sets He Xuan’s teeth on edge.

He Xuan is becoming possessive of her, but also just distrusts expressions of male desire. For her part, Shi Qingxuan is less oblivious to the ogling than He Xuan thinks she is. Receptacle for He Xuan’s displaced sense of innocence in theory, maybe less so in reality.

Rather than sitting at the table, Shi Qingxuan goes to lean over the railing, arms crossed and facing the city below. He Xuan stands by her, at a respectable distance.

Still trying really really hard to insist there’s no sexual tension, but once M/F optics come into play, it’s so much harder to pretend.

He can’t stop looking at her. His mind attempts to catalogue her features: which are holdovers from her true form, and which are new? Which come from the perceptions of the worshippers of Lady Wind Master, and which are Shi Qingxuan’s personal embellishments? Surely these details can offer some insight into his ever-growing list of information about Shi Qingxuan that fails to coalesce into anything he can make sense of.

Seeing her in this form is prompting realizations that she has to navigate these complexities of self, identity, appearance, etc just as He Xuan does, even if He Xuan’s situation is far more convoluted.

She’s kept certain imperfections. There’s a small, almost imperceptibly faded pockmark scar under her right ear. He wouldn’t have thought she’d keep something like that. She’s so vain.

Yeah, this is definitely about Shi Qingxuan’s vanity and not the fact that He Xuan has constructed a detailed 3D model of her physical form in his mind’s eye.

Without looking away from the street below, Shi Qingxuan asks, “Are you curious? You can ask me questions if you are.”

“I knew that your worshippers think you’re a woman, but I didn’t know that you took the form very often. I thought it was all a misunderstanding.”

“Oh, yes and no. It is and it isn’t.”

He isn’t sure what to make of that.

She turns around, leaning back on the railing, and looks him in the eye.

“You don’t think it’s weird?”

Her outline is shadowed against the faint light catching on the water’s surface.

Even though He Xuan’s big conscious Moment about it is later in the scene, I think of this as the infatuation event horizon… she’s extending herself to him in a vulnerable way and the setting is dreamy and he can no longer pretend he only sees her as a means to an end.

Tightly, he answers, “It’s not my business what you do with yourself.”

I mean, true, but keep telling yourself you believe that <3

Shi Qingxuan smiles, and her shoulders relax.

“You’re really cool, Ming-xiong.”

He scoffs.

She leans in closer. “No, really. You don’t get it because you’re new, but trust me, most gods are really stiff about stuff like this.”

“Doesn’t Ling Wen take on a woman’s form?”

“She’s a man in her temples because people assume that a woman couldn’t be a civil god, so she gets worshipped the other way. She really is a woman, though.”

He’s met quite a few gods, and though he may not know many of them well, it’s striking how few of them change their forms; they all seem to stick to more imposing version of their human selves. They have such power at their disposal, and what do they use it for? Constant petty status games, and little else.

Death sorts the chaff from the grain somewhat, when it comes to what matters and what does not.

It’s always been part of Hua Cheng’s legend, how freely he changes form. Crimson Rain could be anywhere, and mortals, ghosts, and gods all ought to watch their backs. Having met him, He Xuan knows that conception to be inaccurate. Hua Cheng doesn’t change form to make himself less conspicuous. His forms are always obnoxiously… vivacious. I.e. hot. He changes shape to remind you that he can. That it’s nothing to him.

Shi Qingxuan sways gently back and forth under the moonlight, as the cicadas sing and fireflies glow, as if dancing to music only she can hear—very slow music, a summertime dirge. Her hands flow through the air, playing the wind, as if they are part of the warm evening breeze. Shi Qingxuan stimming moments.

“I was raised a girl, you know.”

This is what he’s here for: to fill in the dark corners of his understanding of how Shi Wudu and Shi Qingxuan came to destroy five innocent people’s lives. He feels inexplicable trepidation.

“Why?”

“Do you want to hear the story? It’s kind of a long one.”

Shi Qingxuan correctly takes his silence for assent, and begins.

SHI QINGXUAN’S STORY

This bit was written as one big monologue with the intention that I’d then split it up into regular dialogue, but I decided to keep it as a big block of first person POV text because I liked the idea of Shi Qingxuan inserting herself into the story as a temporary narrator similarly to how she inserts herself into He Xuan’s life.

When I was really little, I thought I was a girl. I mean, my parents told me I was, so that I couldn’t slip up. Once I was old enough to keep a secret, and had started getting confused because I was better understanding the difference between girls and boys, they told me the truth.

In the novel, the Shi family lore is recounted in narration, and I’m really interested to know how Shi QIngxuan herself would tell it.

There was an evil spirit that had found me just after I was born, and we had to trick it into thinking I’d been traded away for a girl baby. It was important that I get things right when being a girl, because the spirit would keep looking for the real me, and it could take on disguises, too. The only people who could know that I was really a boy were my mother and father and Ge. Our parents both died when I was still pretty young, so then it was just me and Ge. He did a good job bringing me up, of course. I mean, he’s very responsible.

I used to think that something was eventually going to happen, to change me the rest of the way. The way that Ge’s always been… if he works hard, he’ll eventually come up with something. It doesn’t matter what it is. I figured that we’d find some special elixir, or magic necklace, and it would fix all of our problems.

It was tricky, though, having to keep switching back and forth like that. I used to have to change my clothes every time I came home from being out. I didn’t know why we bothered, if we both knew the truth anyway. But it’s always been important to him that things… look a certain way. That everything is… proper, you know. And he was right, of course. It would have been harder later on if I hadn’t known how to dress properly, or sit properly, and only knew how to do things the way that a girl would…

This is one of my attempts to try and make this situation make sense from a logical standpoint…

I did really try, but little kids aren’t that smart. I messed up. Called myself the wrong thing in public, or got my etiquette scrambled. We were lucky the first few times, and no one noticed. Then when I was ten or so, I was out by myself and found a spot in the woods to pee when I thought I was alone, but I guess I wasn’t... but that’s a story for another day, ha ha!

It was kind of a relief when the jig was up. I wouldn’t have to keep going from one to the other, and it wasn’t possible to get things wrong anymore. It used to really stress me out, everything relying on being good at being a girl. It’s a lot of pressure! But it turned out that even though I was actually a boy, it was tough to get used to being one outside of the house after not ever having done it… but I figured it out eventually.

I did miss being a girl sometimes. I found it pretty fun, so after that I felt... not all quite there. So you can imagine how excited I was when I ascended to the Upper Court, and had my own powers.

My worshippers don’t know about any of this stuff. That all happened just because people thought it would look nicer to have me and Ge be a woman and a man, rather than to have two male gods sharing a temple… mortals have such silly ideas. But if they want me to be a woman, then why wouldn’t I go along with it? I mean, worse misunderstandings happen. Just look at General Ju Yang and all that nonsense.

When I was little, I used to pray to beauty gods to make me a real girl. It just seemed sensible. Obviously that never happened, but Ling Wen is the one who taught me the spell—once it seemed like it would come in handy, with the way things were going. So in the end, it was a female god who helped me out, just not one of love and beauty. I was praying in the wrong places. Isn’t life funny?

“Do you only wear this form around mortals?”

“Now I do. At first, I was kind of doing it whenever I felt like it, and Ge had to talk me down.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t really like it. I kind of have to sneak around. I mean, I can’t blame him. It probably reminds him of the bad times. Who wouldn’t rather forget about all that?” She smiles crookedly.

Ever since she finished her story, Shi Qingxuan has been watching He Xuan very closely, observing his reactions. She looks less nervous than she did, but she hasn’t fully relaxed. She brought them all the way to the mortal realm to show him her form and make this confession. He wonders if she’s ever done the same with anyone else. From the palpable vulnerability of her manner, he suspects not.

“And I mean, I would’ve probably made some pretty weird first impressions on people if I kept it up. But I like it. I think everyone should try it.” Her eyes go sly. “Do you want to try it, too?”

“No,” he says, quickly. The reasons for his adamancy are unclear to him, but he is convinced that his control of this interaction is fragile enough as it is. He thinks wildly that this was an ambush, after all, and Shi Qingxuan doesn’t even know it.

“Are you sure?” She shrugs airily, and flounces onto one of the cushions by their table. “Your loss.”

Two jars of wine later, Shi Qingxuan nudges his calf with her foot. “I’m having a really good time tonight.”

He Xuan says nothing, and stares into the bottom of his cup. She adds, shyly, “I wasn’t sure you weren’t going to laugh at me for all this stuff. But I just have this feeling that when I tell you things, they won’t go anywhere.”

For the first time in half a century, He Xuan feels a stab of what is unmistakably guilt.

“It’s too loud in this place. Let’s go somewhere else.”

“Yes, yes, Grandfather needs his peace and quiet.”

It kills me that Shi Qingxuan must think she’s older than him.

She takes one of his clenched hands between two of her own, and unfurls his fingers to tug him along.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Shi Qingxuan is acting restrained, but before this evening, Shi Qingxuan has always had an edge of high-strung yappiness, like a spoilt puppy afraid of being left alone. He’s seen her happy, many times, but he would not have previously described her as peaceful.

She’s been drinking, he reminds himself, before he’s tempted to ascribe this observation with more meaning than is deserved.

Still, she turns heads; He Xuan can’t mistake the attention paid to them for anything else, as Ming Yi’s appearance is a dull facsimile of what He Xuan looked like prior to prison, and his aura is as nondescript as he can manage. Shi Qingxuan is more alive than the sun, though easier to look at.

The patron they passed on the way up glances their way again, and he looks Shi Qingxuan up and down like he’s browsing the wares at a butcher shop. Sex=meat, obviously. If she notices, she gives no sign.

He Xuan is seized by a matter-of-fact urge to tear the man’s head off. Whatever he sees in He Xuan’s face must communicate this feeling clearly enough, because his friend becomes very interested in the bottom of his bowl.

As they pass the man’s table—Shi Qingxuan leading the way ahead, obliviously—He Xuan realizes consciously something he’s been aware of but refused to acknowledge: the people around them will naturally make the same mistaken assumption as the worshippers at the Temple of Wind and Water do, with regards to the nature of the Wind and Water Masters’ relationship. In this case, the misunderstanding should be less disturbing, but He Xuan’s chest lurches.

Parts of his spirit are stirring which he must ruthlessly smother: first, the part offering up fevered visions of what it would be like to prove, vigorously and at length, their assumptions correct; second, the part that hoards things with the implacable greed of the ocean floor; third, and this the most unwelcome, the part that sounds like Hua Cheng saying, Maybe he doesn’t know.

Ming Yi’s heartbeat is racing. In fact, his whole form is playing out a humiliating enactment of the kinds of responses living creatures have when provoked to primal states, to nauseating effect.

Midway down the stairs, Shi Qingxuan turns around. He Xuan watches her for signs that she sees something amiss, but sees nothing. She keeps making her way down, stepping backwards with easy grace, and cocks her head.

“You’re sure you don’t want anything to eat?”

chapter three

Notes:

The Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing warns that cannabis consumption "may make one walk briskly and behold ghosts" (Shouzhong Yang TL). The character 魔 (mó, demon) is compounded via the characters 鬼 (guǐ, ghost) and 麻 (má, hemp) [see "The Origin and Use of Cannabis in Eastern Asia: Linguistic-Cultural Implications" by Hui-Lin Li]. Make of this what you will.

Without a doubt the best A/N I’ve ever written.

He Xuan leaves the Heavenly Capitol for an undetermined stretch of time. If anyone asks (which Shi Qingxuan does within a week), he will tell them that he is on a mission for the Heavenly Martial Emperor, the details of which are not his to disclose. He will keep himself occupied with the business of the Earth Master and the business of Black Water Sinking Ships. It’s in his best interest that Ming Yi be an absentee god, in any case. When he can stomach the thought of looking at Shi Qingxuan face to face again, he will return.

The months pass excruciatingly slowly, considering that he spent years as a Calamity without even a second career as a god to maintain on the side. He meanders through the seas in search of any anomalies that might come to trouble him if not addressed early on. He answers prayers to the Earth Master to the best of his ability. He dodges Shi Qingxuan’s frequent attempts at contacting him for idle chatter. The monotony is constant until an unremarkable afternoon, when He Xuan hears a sound, like the popping of eardrums, with no identifiable source.

It takes a shockingly long time to muster his will enough for He Xuan to access Hua Cheng’s private communication array. It’s not due to a lack in spiritual power; there are waves of agitation washing against his soul, pressing him to lash out at something. They recede and crash, each time with greater force.

mastodon post by me: sometimes i’m forced to sit back and remember that the character i’ve devoted the last year of my life to writing emotionally weighty fic about is a ghost who lives on a scooby doo island in the ancient chinese bermuda triangle

Is that—

« The Kiln? What else. » Hua Cheng’s voice sounds odd. Not strained, the way that He Xuan’s does, but calm and flat in a way that chills him more than Hua Cheng’s anger would. « You want another word to the wise? Find somewhere to hole up for a year or ten, and don’t come looking for me again. I’d hate to kill you, now that we’ve gotten to know each other. »

The only other beings at the manor are subservient to him, so He Xuan assumes that staying within his own lair will do, but by sunset the waves are pitching against the shore with typhoon force, he keeps considering which of his lackeys are the most disposable, and he sees the heart of the mountain behind his eyelids when he blinks. Reluctantly, he follows Hua Cheng’s advice, and takes stronger measures. There are several abysses within his domain which are filled with nothing but pale things and water even darker and colder than the rest.

Ghosts don’t sleep the way living things must, but they can do something like it. He Xuan often hibernates, either to recover expended energy, to pass the time, or to stop himself from doing something reckless. It’s something like immersing his consciousness in a pool of black milk. His awareness of the physical world is reduced to its most hazy, and he wanders the corridors of his mind.

Before he constructed a palace of his own, he had to build one inside of his head. He wasn’t a ghost for very long before he started eating his own kind, and quickly learned that if he didn’t make space for their leavings, they would become so much mental clutter to be stumbled over in search of more important things. He makes rooms for each of them, and keeps the doors shut except for when necessary. The need to keep a tidy house was only intensified as he began to conjure the cadre of shells now planted within the Heavens. Whatever it is that He Xuan is now made of, it is expansive, and his mind resembles nothing so much as an estate with sprawling wings and chambers beyond number.

I borrowed from Dune somewhat in the way I wrote He Xuan’s subjective experience once the ghost absorption begins.

From Dune Messiah:

Gaius Helen Mohiam felt herself in this instant to be not one single person, but all the others who sat like tiny congeries in her memory. They were alert, every Reverend Mother she had absorbed in becoming a Priestess of the Sisterhood.

Via the shells, he maintains awareness of happenings in the Heavens and keeps track of the passage of time. He is careful to pay only limited attention to Shi Qingxuan’s comings and goings—at least for the first month or two. After that, he spends several weeks tracking Shi Qingxuan’s movements, and observing the ways that he interacts with the shells that cross his path, all of whom are Middle Court officials, and junior ones at that. Shi Qingxuan is unfailingly cordial, at most exasperated, even when He Xuan has one of them repeatedly bungle a task with which Shi Qingxuan had asked for assistance. It appears that Shi Qingxuan just acts this way, in the face of Heaven’s corrupting influence.

One cannot prove a negative, and yet he is sure—not through logic, but the predatory intuition that has shown itself his most constant asset since he died—that Shi Qingxuan doesn’t know anything, about any of it.

The days when He Xuan was innocent to how little pity the world contains now make up the smallest fraction of his years. He would not remain if he hadn’t learned to subsist on others. In times of trouble, the strong eat the weak.

Shi Qingxuan has so thoroughly enjoyed the feast for which He Xuan was slaughtered, while remaining above reproach, and for that, He Xuan thinks that he hates Shi Qingxuan more than he ever did before.

The months wear on, as does the ambient throb of Mount Tonglu, like the pulse of a headache or the breaking of tides, and He Xuan wanders into murkier corners of his consciousness.

Not all of the chambers contain things that have really happened. He imagines inventive punishments. He entertains the prospect of building a pit where he could dangle Shi Wudu by the neck and have him eaten by He Xuan’s arowanas. He Xuan could infuse him with qi every time he gets close to dying, until nothing remains below the clavicle but chewed bones. Maybe he’d make Shi Qingxuan watch.

Go off, Jigsaw <3

Behind another door:

The following was one of the other initial inspiration points for the fic: He Xuan having, essentially, a softcore rape fantasy about Shi Qingxuan’s pushiness and affection taken up to a boundary-crossing level, so that He Xuan can avoid taking responsibility for his desire while also partaking in it.

“Get your hands off me.”

Shi Qingxuan’s palms slide up He Xuan’s arms, inside his sleeves. The anticipation of what’s to come crawls under his skin. It was the part he hated the most: waiting for things to happen.

“You don’t mean that.”

Shi Qingxuan presses himself closer. His body is all warmth, all suffocating warmth. Since this chapter in particular is ghost positivity hours, I wanted to flip the cold=creepy script. He feels He Xuan’s cool hands, and laughs. In the fantasy, the laugh is hard and mocking in a way that the Shi Qingxuan that He Xuan has had the misfortune to know has never been. The sound slithers down the back of He Xuan’s neck like droplets of someone else’s sweat.

He could easily overcome Shi Qingxuan, but He Xuan stays in place. Better to brace himself than jeopardize his progress. What’s a little more indignity, after all it’s taken to reach the point where Shi Qingxuan can make use of He Xuan’s body the way he already has his fate? He Xuan has withstood worse than an entitled brat’s pawing. This verb counts for the dog tally if you’re still taking shots. He can do it again. It isn’t difficult. He holds his tongue, finds something on which to anchor himself, and waits.

Throughout it all, inside the dream and out, his dead form remains inert. I am a dedicated warrior for the cause of fictional erectile dysfunction. Small mercies.

He Xuan wishes he found the vision plausible. It would simplify matters.

When the Kiln closes, once again fruitlessly, He Xuan reemerges into the world in time for autumn, and he goes home.

No one currently living in Fu Gu (or anywhere else) ever met him, so he wears a mortal guise that resembles what he looked like before prison. Prison, again, being the pre-death before his real death. His death rehearsal. He mills around the market square on the cusp of dusk, sampling street food and eavesdropping on conversations, when Shi Qingxuan’s voice bursts forth in his mind, shattering the fragile sense of equanimity.

« Are you up? »

He’d thought Shi Qingxuan more of a drunkard, by reputation, but Shi Qingxuan has a sense of where to stop before things get unflattering. Even so, his voice—this might be the closest that He Xuan has heard him come to sloppiness.

I’m not at my palace.

« Do you know what day it is? »

Awareness of what they are to one another resurfaces unpleasantly.

The Eve of Hanlu.

Ever since his death first made the leap in local memory from a campfire story to subject of an odd little parade, He Xuan has attended the festival most years, even if the person in the legend bears only shaky resemblance to himself. Considering he didn’t pass the exam, no one called him Scholar He while he was alive, but he supposes Shopkeeper He sounds less graceful.

« The day I ascended! I always go down to the mortal realm to celebrate. »

Enjoy yourself, then.

« No, no, wait—I wanted to talk to you. »

You didn’t just go through your list of contacts until someone humoured you?

« Who would I call before my best friend? »

He Xuan grinds his jaw, and leaves the chattering townsfolk behind before anyone can notice his expression.

Where are you?

« The Imperial City. »

This conversation was at one point even longer than it already is, but Julian shipyrds wisely told me to cut to the chase. I… made an attempt.

Are you by yourself?

« I am now. Before... It’s really easy to make friends when you buy people expensive drinks. »

Very loyal friends, I’m sure.

« Ha. »

What’s the point, when they’re mortals you’ll never see again?

« Well, all things are ephemeral. »

How very wise. Are you going to remember this conversation in the morning?

Shi Qingxuan laughs. « The good parts, at least. »

What are those?

« When I can tell you think you’ve said something clever. You sound cute when you’re smug. »

I don’t.

« It’s cute that you think that. »

And you think it’s cute to bother people with your drunken rambling?

« You know, I do. I do think it’s cute of me. »

I just think… Beefleaf… are so good together. Shi Qingxuan has such persistent good cheer and generosity of being; it plays well with He Xuan’s recalcitrance and crankiness, without forcing him to be more vulnerable than he’s capable of. For his part, HX is dependable and unconcerned with heavenly social mores.

He wanders the familiar streets without a destination, and catches glimpses along the way of the locals going about their mundane lives—on one street, vendors putting away their goods; the next, mothers ushering their children indoors before full dark.

What form have you taken?

He cannot persuade himself not to crave these pieces of inconsequential knowledge about Shi Qingxuan. Understanding is the closest he can come to possession, and is not everything of Shi Qingxuan’s really He Xuan’s, bought and paid for?

Back to the commerce/ownership stuff. This is kind of a Shi Wudu moment. Not a good look.

« Nothing unusual. All my forms are pretty, you know that. » Shi Qingxuan laughs the particular laugh that indicates he is losing his conversational footing, and it fills He Xuan with foreboding. « Why do you ask? Are you trying to imagine me? »

I’m not.

This was in the outline as “Beefleaf phone sex” despite featuring neither phones nor sex.

« Well, I bet you are now. I’m in the body I wore that time we went to see about that wind trap demon, you remember? It’s fun to be a boy with a beauty mark. And, hmm… my clothes are all blue, today. Kind of greenish blue. Aquamarine. »

Around a brazier on the other side of the street, performers from the parade are taking off their costumes, laughing and joking with each other: young men half-dressed in black, and balding uncles with papier-mache knives sticking out of their chests.

Theatre and performance is a running theme in TGCF, and I love getting a little glimpse into people playing Scholar He amidst the time we spend following He Xuan as he plays various roles.

How do you choose your forms, when you descend to do your nonsense?

« Whatever suits my mood. It’s not very deep. »

Why didn’t you go as a woman, if you like it so much.

« I can’t visit this kind of place on my own like that without an escort! It’s kind of sleazy in here. Too bad you’re not with me. »

He Xuan’s teeth click together. In an instant, Shi Qingxuan has invited him into the room. He Xuan does not see himself—Ming Yi—there; he sees, in the tavern’s warm light, Shi Qingxuan enveloped by a shadow, and Shi Qingxuan’s face tipping up, wide-eyed, trembling, to meet the gaze of the one casting it.

This is He Xuan’s conception of himself as a sexual being at this point—no sense of materiality or individuation, just a mass of predatory desire. Hey, at least it’s better to be the one doing the menacing than being menaced?

He has not found himself in this situation yet—fetching Shi Qingxuan from his revels. He Xuan endeavours to avoid ever doing so in the future. He is unconvinced he would not do something he would come to regret.

Shi Qingxuan is bad for He Xuan’s impulse control, and He Xuan wants him, and he’s scared of hurting him. It’s not made explicit until late in the fic, but I wrote this thinking that He Xuan and Miao’er never got very far physically, and he has no consensual sexual experience. From the most bodice-ripping ravishment to loving romantic sex, it’s all equally terrifying. There’s no win condition besides not to play the game.

Not necessarily.

« Not necessarily? »

Maybe I’d put on a female form, if it was what it took to stop you from dragging me to that kind of distasteful place.

Shi Qingxuan lets out an exaggerated sigh.

« This is so like you, you know. Giving me something I want, just to take something else away. » Seconds later, he adds, « But you will do it? »

I said no such thing.

« I know your tricks. You put an idea in my head so that I’ll want something, and then you can pretend you don’t, but you’ll let me talk you into it so you don’t have to admit it was your idea to start with. »

The way Shi Qingxuan is in Banyue Arc is very plucky-girl-detective, and she spends a good deal of the Ghost City arc rueing Lang Qianqiu's lack of social intelligence, so I don’t think she’s foolish and unobservant generally, just naive and more than gullible, especially when it comes to people she likes, and especially when they’re intentionally trying to deceive her.

He digs his fingernails into his palm.

A form is just a form. There’s no point in getting precious about it.

« Too true, too true. But what would you look like? »

There are female shells among his coterie of Middle Court plants, and he’s taken on women’s guises countless times when moving through the world unnoticed. He’s never worn one the way that Shi Qingxuan does, where she wants to be looked at and recognized for who she is.

You already know what I look like. I’d look like that.

He Xuan thinks of the death-white colour of a cooked fish’s flaking flesh. The mottled lips and tangled hair of one drowned. The dark and cavernous rooms of a house walked only by the dead.

He Xuan’s femininity moodboard begins to take shape.

« No, no, there’s so much nuance! I already know you’d make a very striking woman, but— »

How could you possibly know that?

« Because you’re handsome now, » Shi Qingxuan replies, like it’s obvious. « Let’s see. You dress very neatly. Nothing flashy, but sometimes less is more. A bit on the sombre side, but it suits you. And you’re pretty tall – I usually make myself a little shorter than normal, but not too much. It’s like, if you’ve got the height, why give it up, right? But you’d look— »

Absolutely not.

Writing this fic taught me that one of my firm headcanons is that being tall is important to He Xuan. Being physically imposing is important. And also his canon height via MXTX is like 6'1 or 6'2 if I remember correctly.

« Maybe not, yeah. It might be a little odd. Your manners aren’t very ladylike, though, I must say. You might need to practice. »

I don’t see the point.

« So you’d be a bossy, no-nonsense girl? Yes, yes, I can see it. That’s so cool, » Shi Qingxuan says earnestly. Firecrackers are going off not too far from He Xuan, and he feels violent about everything conceivable.

« I could do your hair for you, though, at least. »

Maybe you just want me there to make yourself look good in comparison.

« I’ll look good no matter what, don’t worry. » There’s a beat of silence, and then Shi Qingxuan adds, « I’ve always wanted to touch your hair. »

A hot prickle spreads out from the base of his neck, and in a moment of insanity, He Xuan replies, I think you just want an excuse to manhandle me.

There may be no way to win besides refusing to play, but if He Xuan acted rationally about Shi Qingxuan we wouldn’t be here, would we?

Shi Qingxuan’s laughter always gets shriller and more frequent the more nervous he gets.

Shi Qingxuan sending so many risky texts in this scene. What a champ.

« Well, I am strongest in my female form. »

Don’t get yourself into things you can’t get yourself out of, He Xuan replies. His voice has slipped into a softer, lower register he only hears himself use while speaking to things he’s about to swallow, when he wants them to be compliant about it.

There are two main registers of possessiveness He Xuan uses toward Shi Qingxuan: as a valuable treasure to be kept safe (and stolen away from its current owner), and as prey to be devoured. Neither are good ways to see another human being, but coming from He Xuan, the latter is far more intimate and personal, and speaks to a longing for togetherness that He Xuan just can’t conceptualize outside of domination.

« Oh? Is Ming-jie going to teach me a lesson, is that it? »

Blood, or its memory, courses through him. His scalp tingles. There are risks to taking on the guise of a living body, and he is experiencing them.

I should probably have been less coy about the fact that He Xuan has an erection and feels repulsed by it on a physical level, but I had such a hard time putting it into words because He Xuan so badly doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

The worst part is that he doesn’t even think Shi Qingxuan means it like that. One of the many ways in which Shi Qingxuan is an idiot is a complete inability to understand innuendo. This does not stop a horrifying part of He Xuan’s mind from wondering whether Shi Qingxuan is touching himself over this. Sprawled out on a sofa. Luxurious, indolent, pristine.

My word of God verdict on this is that Shi Qingxuan wasn’t actively jerking off but was very turned on and trying really hard to keep it together while also desperately wanting to keep up his charmingly amateur dirty talk. I did write an AU version of this scene where they go through with it, because I’m a hog: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54080128

He Xuan doesn’t think it’s true, but he can’t know, and the thought has him breathing through his mouth like an animal scenting the air.

« Well, don’t go quiet now. »

Poor Shi Qingxuan. The sexting nightmare, for real.

Desire, or something like it, has bloomed in him like one of the more subtle cancers. This is another of the earliest lines I wrote in the fic. I worried that “cancer” was too modern a word, but there are characters called “the Three Tumours” so I’m hoping people assumed it was folded into the same set of universal translator vocabulary. He wants to be the silhouette enveloping Shi Qingxuan in shadow. He wants to seep into him through every orifice. He wants to be inside her, which is the least surprising and most mundane of these compulsions, but the thought of Shi Qingxuan shifting with discomfort to accommodate the breaching of her body tastes like bile on the tongue.

I left it ambiguous whether he’s thinking of this as rape or as painful consensual sex, because he either can’t or won’t entertain the possibility that he could penetrate Shi Qingxuan without it being painful to her in some way.

« Say something, Ming-xiong. I don’t care what it is. »

The need to bring Shi Qingxuan suffering is what tethers him to this earth, for what good that’s done him. Despite every terrible thing of which he has proven himself capable, there are indulgences he will not permit, else he learn that whatever principles he’s chosen to believe separate him from the baser creatures of the underworld are merely a film obscuring urges in no way more excusable, simply more specific.

I hope this didn’t come across as that way people do villain morality in fandom sometimes, where they’ll insist that some character who’s done an array of awful things would absolutely draw the line at rape, because they feel uncomfortable enjoying a fictional character who could ever conceivably do sexual violence. There are villainous characters about whom I believe that’s true, and there are also ones where I… don’t. In He Xuan’s case, it’s not so much “despite the lies, manipulation, ghost cannibalism, kidnapping and imprisonment of various innocent people, etc., he would only ever have flawless sexual ethics,” but that I see percieved sexual self-control as part of his overall superiority complex. That, and he’s come to care for Shi Qingxuan personally.

It’s late. You should go home.

He hears a gusty exhale—every hair on his body stands on end—then Shi Qingxuan speaks again, softly.

« I really missed you a lot. »

He walks as quickly as he can through the cooling night air, tracing his steps back to his parents’ house, which is now his house, as his parents are dead and the townspeople have left it standing empty. The house is derelict and overgrown, but unmolested by vandals, so he has kept it as the site of the distance shortening array that connects the place he came from with the place he now resides.

Go back to your palace and go to bed.

Anything Shi Qingxuan says to him after that, He Xuan ignores.

Hua Cheng could have made his own way to Black Water Isle—he’s dead, so any craft he may have sailed would stay afloat—but He Xuan dislikes the thought of anyone drifting around his waters unsupervised, let alone this someone. For similar reasons, He Xuan is in no hurry to give away the locations of his distance shortening arrays, so he escorts Hua Cheng to his domain the long way.

He regrets this choice somewhat when there comes a steady knocking against the side of the boat. Hua Cheng’s eyebrows float upwards, until He Xuan pulls a bag of dried meats out of his sleeve, and starts making lazy underhand tosses into the distance, after which his arowanas splash away, like the brainless gluttons they are.

“They would have kept that up the whole way,” he explains coldly, in response to the unspoken question.

If I don’t take the piss a bit, this entire story becomes unsustainably maudlin.

“Of course,” Hua Cheng replies, and smiles as congenially as a roadside con artist.

This may seem like anachronistic language, but I had in mind The Book of Swindles and the like.

Hua Cheng is the first outsider to set foot here, and is surprisingly low on insufferable commentary. As he takes him through the halls, He Xuan sees the manor through an unfamiliar eye: stately, desolate, hostile; a mausoleum with no inscription. After giving him a tour of the premises, He Xuan turns on him and demands to know what his thoughts are, and Hua Cheng replies, “Well, it’s very you.”

He Xuan’s inroads to femininity resemble the way one genders a ship or haunted house as female (in English-speaking countries, at least.)

They settle in one of the larger studies. Hua Cheng sprawls on He Xuan’s sofa with his boots up on the upholstery.

Though Hua Cheng had acted indifferent when He Xuan first offered to spy for him in the Heavens, it’s become clear that he has more than a perfunctory interest in its comings and goings. To an extent, this is only natural—information is power. But there are patterns to his inquiries.

Hua Cheng knows too many of He Xuan’s secrets already, but is reticent with any information about his own goals or grudges. Why he lingers in the world. Where he came from. Even so, He Xuan has theories, such as his speculation that if not originating there himself, Hua Cheng is deeply concerned with the long-fallen Kingdom of Xianle. The angle of his interest is unclear, but chief among He Xuan’s data points is the fact that the gods Hua Cheng inquires about most regularly are the Martial Gods of the South.

After He Xuan dispenses his most recent report, Hua Cheng asks, “Are people still praying to Nan Yang’s huge cock?”

“His palace has been trying to stamp it out, without much success.”

“Very good,” Hua Cheng replies, with a sanguine expression.

Things then take a turn for the strange. Hua Cheng tilts his head curiously, looks He Xuan in the eye, and adds, “What about you? Why are there so many rooms here? I didn’t think you had visitors.”

He Xuan curls his lip. “Hardly.”

The manor is a darker replica of the Palace of Wind and Water. The floor plan is largely the same.

Another thing I feel fandom undersells the weirdness of: THIS???

…this Nether Water Manor was in fact a large palace. Its build and make were very similar to the exquisite Wind Master Palace and Water Master Palace.

“It wasn’t a real question. I know you’re not getting any.”

“I’m not so crass.”

“Crass? For having sex? I never took you for celibate, just a regular prude.”

“Some things belong to the living. The dead ought to know themselves, and act like it.”

This was one of my earliest headcanons re: He Xuan and sex—that he sees it as unseemly for spirits to engage in. In his mind, being a ghost should be a rather goal-oriented affair. And horniness is not a worthy goal.

“For many of us, death has more pleasures to offer than life ever did,” Hua Cheng replies, with another of his insolent, blandly pleasant smiles. “You have been to Ghost City, right?”

In the words of one of my betas, “i’m sorry hx this is so funny. you think ghost city doesn’t have goth clubs? you think the mayor of ghost city has never been to a leather bar?”

Hua Cheng lived a human life cursed by misfortune, and he sees his own death and transformation into a ghost as an opportunity to achieve power and self-actualization (albeit towards the end of being able to most effectively serve someone other than himself.) He Xuan was intended to have a grand fate as a living person, and now that he’s a vengeful ghost, he’s achieved power, but is struggling with the self-actualization piece.

Beyond gambling and adventurous food, Ghost City is known among their kind as being a welcoming place for a more carnal element. He doesn’t concern himself with what aimless, low-level spectres do to pass their time. If applied to himself, the thought has always seemed debasing and shameful. Is that why he clung to existence? To play-act human pleasure, like a pouting child that feels it was denied something?

Even though I wrote it, that bit still makes me sad. It’s okay to want things to feel good sometimes! You’re not being disloyal! :(

And then there are the practical considerations. “What can even be done, with these forms?”

“All of the usual things?” They look at one another for long seconds, and then Hua Cheng drawls, “If your problem is that you can’t get it up, it’s not because you’re dead. Take my word for it, will you?”

I wasn’t sure whether this misapprehension of the situation would seem implausible, but He Xuan is so hermitty that I’m not sure who he’s supposed to have been talking to about turgid ghost cocks.

He Xuan’s spine has never been so rigid. “My congratulations for your great prowess. Would you like us lowly ones to start praying to Hua Chengzhu’s huge cock?”

Hua Cheng shrugs, and folds his hands behind his head.

He Xuan interjects, before Hua Cheng can reply, “Is this where you tell me you’ll prove it?” He is grateful, at least, that his voice is dripping with disdain rather than the miserable, aching hunger he feels.

For the first time that day, Hua Cheng’s expression moves to something that can’t be described as ‘smug.’ He looks genuinely curious. “You’re not serious.”

For all his flirting and posturing, Hua Cheng never expected the tables to be turned on him by being propositioned directly.

Hua Cheng’s disbelief ought to be a relief. Is, mostly, a relief.

“I know how much you love to show off.”

Hua Cheng looks increasingly incredulous, and like he might start laughing at any point, in which case He Xuan might do something ill-advised. “Is this why you brought me back to your place?”

Someone mentioned in the work comments that they missed the Huaxuan tag and were blindsided by this turn of events, which is still SO funny to me.

He Xuan spits, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

It’s not true, but it’s not NOT true.

Hua Cheng’s smiling mouth is still ajar, like he’s going to reassure He Xuan not to worry, he’s not in the habit of fucking dead fish, or whatever it is that Hua Cheng is going to say, but he doesn’t. Eventually his lips press together in a thoughtful expression.

Hua Cheng never seriously considered this going anywhere, but the gears are turning in his mind about how he can square this with his Dianxia-related commitments and aspirations...

At any other time since his death, and some time even before that, He Xuan would not have considered the prospect of doing this with Hua Cheng seriously. He had never, until recently, considered it at all. But this state of starved distraction is untenable, and a small dose of prescribed poison to cure a troublesome ailment is a risk that He Xuan finds himself willing to take.

Besides, there are worse-looking ghosts than Hua Cheng. Nearly all of them. And this is the one place in the world where, whatever Hua Cheng might do to him, He Xuan can make him regret it.

Is this consensual sex? Yes. Does He Xuan have any level of confidence it couldn’t still turn violent in the unfun way? Absolutely not.

The master bedroom Another term that is probably distractingly modern… was not one of the rooms they entered on Hua Cheng’s initial tour of the premises, and Hua Cheng looks around with open curiosity before He Xuan pushes him back against the closed door with a fist in the front of Hua Cheng’s shirt.

“Some things need to be very clear.”

He Xuan is in the habit of looming over people. It’s unfortunate that Hua Cheng has enough physical height and spiritual presence that He Xuan cannot rely on it now.

Hua Cheng lets himself be tugged around, and tilts his head. His eye is full of curious, venomous patience. He Xuan distrusts this show of compliance; he anticipated having to scrap, the way the two of them never yet have.

Despite being afraid of losing control of the sexual encounter, He Xuan does want to homoerotically wrestle.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want you as my lover.”

“You wouldn’t get that even if you wanted it.”

He Xuan tightens his grip.

“Keep your hands where I can see them.”

“Sure.”

“Nothing goes inside.”

He Xuan’s vision, such as it is, involves sexy roughhousing leading to frottage and handies and maybe getting to blow Hua Cheng, which He Xuan absolutely wants to do despite being unwilling to admit it.

Hua Cheng smiles crookedly. “I wasn’t planning on taking my clothes off.”

“What are you planning?”

“I was going to suck your dick. Does that meet your approval?”

He Xuan can’t say he’s looking forward to it, but he will regret it if he backs out now and must go on wondering what it would have been like. Assuming he can get far enough, in this body. The faux-living forms he’s taken on recently are all too eager to jump into action, but the idea of wearing one for this purpose is distinctly pathetic.

This is another bit that makes my heart hurt… pretending to be alive is cringe, but also, He Xuan wants to feel attractive in his own form right now, in his own eyes and in the eyes of someone he finds attractive. At the same time, if Hua Cheng had hit on him this brazenly He Xuan would not have taken him up on it, at this point at least. There’s just a lot of complicated stuff going on about self-concept and desire and threat.

He releases Hua Cheng, sits on the edge of the bed, and digs his nails into his thighs.

Hua Cheng ties his hair back with unnecessary flourish, and He Xuan bristles.

“Are you stalling for time?”

Hua Cheng looks at him askance. “You’re sitting there fully dressed. What am I supposed to do?”

He Xuan lowkey wants to make out. Sad!

He can’t decide whether he’d be more displeased by Hua Cheng looking at his body with disgust or with desire. Plainly, He Xuan looks like something to be scared of; he is a malnourished spectre with stern brows and an aura full of malice. As per canon: That already-blanched face seemed to become even paler, with the same bloodless translucence as Hua Cheng; his forehead became sharper, his brows deeper, which naturally made him appear even more somber. Heavy eyebrow king. Hua Cheng is perhaps the singular exception, to whom He Xuan would be just another pale and cadaverous thing from the places the light doesn’t reach.

He rids himself of trousers and undergarments, but everything above the waist remains. He considers whether he should make a token effort to get hard, but decides to leave it to Hua Cheng, if he’s so confident.

Hua Cheng, to his credit, looks unruffled by the sight of He Xuan’s soft cock. He sinks to his knees by the edge of the bed, and though his body doesn’t respond in any obvious ways, He Xuan feels a stirring in his abdomen at the sight, if for no other reason than the novelty.

One of the many tangled threads here is that I think He Xuan leans heavily towards being sexually dominant, and he’s not really figured out yet how to extricate this from his baggage about sex and power. He also has little sexual confidence, which is disorienting, since he’s very competent at most things and not one to self-deprecate or downplay his achievements within his own head. Hence, splitting the difference by being a demanding pillow princess.

He Xuan survived twelve years in the Kiln, and came out stronger than most gods. It cannot be out of his power to get a fucking erection.

Hua Cheng glances at He Xuan’s posture with distaste. “Why don’t you lay back, or something.”

He plans to watch—to monitor the proceedings—but when Hua Cheng spits in his palm and curls his fingers around He Xuan’s dick, the touch snakes through him in a cold shudder. He glances aside, but cannot escape the unappetizing sound of someone taking the head of someone else’s soft cock between their lips.

Never let anyone tell you that writing unhot sex doesn’t take effort. I worked really hard on this scene, trying to get across the dissociation and sense that this is being perceived as if it’s happening to someone else, even though it's fully consensual and He Xuan wants to enjoy it.

He Xuan stares at the ridges of his ceiling and feels the ridges of Hua Cheng’s mouth. This body, to what extent it can still be called a body, is fickle and frequently uncooperative. He fights to focus on the sensation, though it’s like prodding at something under layers of loose wool. It’s not unpleasant, he doesn’t think, but he imagines the feeling of it must be a bit better when the saliva in question isn’t cold. He thinks about telling Hua Cheng to make his mouth warmer, but already knows the response he’d get: What’s that? I thought the dead were supposed to know their place and act like it.

He’s only considered what Hua Cheng would be like in bed incidentally, while wondering whether Crimson Rain Sought Flower had discreet paramours, or if he was above such things. (Certainly neither He Xuan nor the popular ghost consciousness ever caught wind of Hua Cheng having lovers, but a spirit as powerful as he would have no difficulty keeping his private life private.) If He Xuan had considered the specifics, he would have come to accurate assumptions: Hua Cheng is sanctimoniously shameless, not in the sense that he doesn’t think the things he does could be degrading, but that it would be degrading for someone else; he, Hua Cheng, only ever does exactly what it is he wants to do, and does it with panache. He’s unabashed—has no hesitation about putting his mouth to use—and keeps his eye mostly closed, which is helpful in He Xuan’s attempt to acclimate himself enough to watch.

Is Hua Cheng good at this? He acts as though he can excel at anything he turns his mind to, but He Xuan has seen his calligraphy.

He certainly sucks He Xuan’s dick. This much is indisputable.

Hua Cheng experiments with different techniques like he’s running through a shopping list. He curls his tongue in various ways. Bobs his head up and down, as best as one could in the circumstances. Does some fussy little fiddly things with He Xuan’s foreskin. He moves on to spending a solid amount of time playing with He Xuan’s balls before he leans back on his heels. “Well.”

“I did tell you,” He Xuan replies, tone icy.

Well, you implied, and with you that’s about all we can ask.

“I won’t take it personally if you’re just not in the mood.” Hua Cheng tosses his head back like he’s trying to prove how unfazed he is by all of this, though He Xuan recognizes the irritated flare of his nostrils (a sight which would cheer He Xuan up, in different circumstances.) “To be clear, you were able to manage when you were human? The equipment was at one point functional?”

For most of his life it did as it ought to, and then there was a time he kept himself as little aware of it as possible. He Xuan had other things to concern himself with.

“Of course.”

“Am I just not your type?”

He Xuan scoffs. Some questions have no good answers.

“Want me to play with your asshole a little bit?”

No conscious thought passes through his mind before He Xuan’s hand closes around Hua Cheng’s throat.

Hua Cheng yields both of his palms, and He Xuan releases his grip before his nails can pierce Hua Cheng’s skin.

Hua Cheng is kind of a dick, but he’s very smart, and without knowing the specifics can tell that He Xuan has Issues and Boundaries. Being pushy about something like that isn’t his style. He likes to taunt people into digging their own graves, not exploit their vulnerabilities in an underhanded way.

The process of arriving here took a great deal of humiliation. The idea of it being in vain is worse than that of having to put himself through a little more of it.

“Change form.”

Hua Cheng blink-winks theatrically. “Hmm?”

“That female form you like. Put it on.”

“If you think I’m letting you fuck me, you’re even more insane than I figured.”

The curiosity had not come upon He Xuan all at once, but spread up and out like groundwater through the floorboards of his consciousness. While in Fu Gu, he never got so far as to dream up a real image. Rather, he considered where the boundary lay, for Shi Qingxuan, between that which is beautiful and repellent; He Xuan considered what that space might comprise of, and wished to inhabit it.

Shi Qingxuan is way beyond living rent free in He Xuan’s head. She’s constructed a megapolis in there.

He Xuan thinks of the manor, encompassing them on all sides. Still, solemn, cavernous. A place where the living have never trod, and any who might come to enter its depths are hers to claim.

Hua Cheng looks her over, amusement gleaming in his eye, and He Xuan lifts her chin higher. She looks more or less the same as she had before. Some of Hua Cheng’s forms are ridiculous.

The lady doth protest her scorn for Hua Cheng's bazongas too much.

“So this is what you’re into?”

“Your turn. Hurry up.”

“I mean, you could’ve led with it. But whatever works.”

He Xuan is about to snap at him for wasting her fucking time, but he leans back on his heels. The process of transformation is nigh imperceptible, it proceeds so quickly. The Hua Cheng kneeling before her now is cheeky and dimpled, with an elaborate butterfly pin holding up most of her hair.

Now that He Xuan is out of her own form, she is less averse to the prospect of letting Hua Cheng look at her, and she’s feeling stifled. She unfastens her outer robe, then the middle layer, then her shirt; each item gets deposited over the edge of the bed. She reclines against the cushions with her knees listing to one side and her fists pressed into the bedsheets. After a moment’s thought, she pulls out the guan and pin that have kept her hair up—she hadn’t bothered to change anything about her appearance but the shape of her flesh—and lets it fall over her shoulders. It’s probably for the best that it obscures her breasts. Indifferent she may be on the whole, but if Hua Cheng says something in her condescending little voice about He Xuan’s tits being either smaller or larger than expected, she thinks they will come to blows, and if after this excruciating disaster of an evening, they don’t even fuck, He Xuan will find a city to flood.

The bed dips with Hua Cheng’s weight. She crawls towards He Xuan on her hands and knees, and somehow looks neither awkward nor submissive while doing so. This body is quite a bit more fleshy and compact than Hua Cheng’s true form, but she’s adjusted perfectly smoothly. She always looks at home in herself, no matter the face she wears.

Hua Cheng places a hand on one of He Xuan’s knees. They exchange a significant look, and then Hua Cheng’s palm exerts a slight amount of pressure. If she keeps it up, she’ll spread He Xuan’s thighs, unfolding her into the open air. He Xuan steels herself, and lets her.

She expects Hua Cheng to go straight for her cunt, but Hua Cheng takes the time to map out the territory; she runs her hands up and down He Xuan’s thighs, going up a little higher each time, all the while staring at the place between them like she’s studying for an exam. At this angle, He Xuan can scarcely see anything down there herself, and she wishes she’d put a mirror in here when she was furnishing.

“Why do you look like you’ve never seen a pussy before? Don’t you have one?”

He Xuan is talking mad shit right now, considering.

Hua Cheng glances up, unimpressed, and then lowers her head to the apex of He Xuan’s thighs. There’s a half-moment of anticipation where He Xuan expects to feel her tongue tracing over—somewhere. Hua Cheng instead seals her lips around He Xuan’s clit, and sucks very hard.

He Xuan flinches, instinctively. Puts a hand in Hua Cheng’s hair, tugging at the roots, but not to pull her away, just because she hopes it hurts.

Where He Xuan previously struggled to differentiate sensations, from neutral to pleasurable to unwanted, here they come upon her with unmistakable pulsing force, and she fights to catch up. What exactly is happening is still somewhat obscure to her; each touch registers with a catch of confusion before she can untangle the knot in the cord connecting flesh and feeling. She keeps glancing downwards, to confirm her impressions of which of these unfamiliar parts are being touched; now, at least, the sight doesn’t make her rear back like the surface of a boiling kettle to the hand.

When Hua Cheng lets go of He Xuan’s clit, she grazes it with the edge of a tooth, and He Xuan hisses. Hua Cheng moves a hand up to pull the skin of He Xuan’s folds taut and out of the way, exposing more of her clit to the cool air, before she laps a stripe up from the top of He Xuan’s cunt to curl against her hood.

He Xuan inhabits this body like she would one of her stolen memories, but much more vividly. These sensations are hers alone, but as this is not really her, they are no one’s, and at the end of the experiment she will separate herself from them once again.

Coping! <3 (Sincerely.)

He Xuan pushes her hand through Hua Cheng’s hair and pulls her face flush against He Xuan’s cunt. Hua Cheng’s eyebrows lift, and she laughs. The vibrations extend in tingling pulses from the base of He Xuan’s spine, spreading across her back like a spider’s velvet legs.

She wonders what this is like from the other side. Not that she’d ask Hua Cheng for that, of course, But you want to soooo bad. even if Hua Cheng hadn’t already declared she wasn’t going to take her clothes off.

Hua Cheng’s self-consciousness is still nonexistent, and she catches He Xuan’s gaze at the same time as she takes a slurping pull that makes it clear that He Xuan is getting wet. The air smells sticky and saline, and she wonders whether it’s always like that, or if it owes to He Xuan now being made up of more seawater and spite than the stuff of the living.

Most of Hua Cheng’s face is hidden, and in this form she has two eyes, so whenever she glances between her legs, He Xuan could almost pretend she’s someone else. If Hua Cheng can attend to He Xuan with little complaint, when they have a relationship of mutual tolerance and little else—and, given that He Xuan hasn’t made this form convincingly alive, she can’t imagine that Hua Cheng’s task is overly pleasant; like sticking your face in an oyster straight out of a cold northern sea—then He Xuan is filled with bleak conviction that she, herself, could spend so long between Shi Qingxuan’s thighs that by the end of it Shi Qingxuan would cry.

These (obliquely NSFW?) photos by Brigitte Niedermair made quite a… significant… impression on the trajectory of this fic. Also, that ^ is my favourite paragraph of the fic.

Her limbs are restless; as her thoughts skid from sensations to observations and back again, her right leg, with a mind of its own, extends out into the air, muscles taut, toes pointed, until Hua Cheng sucks at the rim of her cunt while nudging the side of her clit with a blunt thumb, and He Xuan melts, her heel resting limply on Hua Cheng’s back. When she masters herself, she presses down, forcing Hua Cheng closer into the join of He Xuan’s thighs.

Hua Cheng looks up. He Xuan’s gaze snags on her clever dark eyes, and she feels a spark in her gut: Crimson Rain Sought Flower, scourge of the heavens, Lord of Ghost City, et cetera, is trying to make her come. How many others, mortal or immortal, living or dead, can say they’ve ever made Hua Cheng work for something? She can feel, this time, the gush that comes sliding out of her at the thought.

Yeah… this is a dom4dom encounter. The difference is that (to me, in this story specifically) He Xuan is a sadist bottom and Hua Cheng is a service top, so they make it work.

One of Hua Cheng’s hands is still occupied between He Xuan’s legs, but the other rests on He Xuan’s stomach, keeping her at a convenient angle. That hand begins to travel: it roams up and down one of He Xuan’s inner thighs in a slow, soothing way, but Hua Cheng licks over her opening at the same moment her hand skates over a sensitive patch of skin, and the combination provokes an involuntary shiver.

The amusement is audible in Hua Cheng’s voice: « Oh, did you like that? »

Many things He Xuan can tolerate now that they’re getting somewhere, but having to hear Hua Cheng’s stupid voice even with her mouth full is not one of them.

He Xuan pushes Hua Cheng off of her with a shove of her heel to Hua Cheng’s collarbone. Before Hua Cheng can say anything else, He Xuan pushes forward, straddles Hua Cheng’s waist, and holds her down by the shoulders.

The blocking here is supposed to echo the ghost interrogation/consumption scene from Chapter One.

“Stop messing around.”

Hua Cheng looks nothing but amused, which is doubly irritating. “How so? Please, O Scholar He, tutor this student in the way.”

“Quit all the… caressing.”

Her brows rise. “Seemed to me like you were enjoying yourself.”

He Xuan tightens her grip on Hua Cheng’s shoulders, and hopes that her nails are sharp even through clothes. “I’m going to sit on your face.”

“Oh, are you now?”

“I hate looking at you.”

Hua Cheng blinks several times, and then she sighs. “Whatever the young mistress desires.” She pats He Xuan’s ass placatingly, and sticks out her tongue.

That line originally said “my princess,” but that’s way too close to “my prince” and Hua Cheng is NOT going to be caught crossing those wires.

It’s convenient that Hua Cheng doesn’t need to breathe, because as soon as He Xuan lowers herself onto Hua Cheng’s mouth, He Xuan’s overwhelming urge is to suffocate her between her thighs.

Hua Cheng’s eyes are closed, so He Xuan takes the opportunity to acquaint herself with this temporary residence. She skims her palms over her outer thighs and across her hips, her waist, her breasts. She could have been more generous with herself in that area, she thinks, now that she has the chance to investigate the modestly sloping swell of fatty tissue rising out of her otherwise bony frame. She finds herself wishing there was more of it.

Hua Cheng is being contrary now, teasing with her tongue around He Xuan’s inner labia but not committing, and He Xuan rolls her hips down further.

“Put your tongue inside.”

« I thought you didn’t want anything inside. »

He Xuan looks down and meets Hua Cheng’s eyes—now open—with the full force of her irritation, and then she jolts, and her head tips back.

It’s impossibly thick, somehow soft and hard at the same time, but slides into her with no resistance. She wanted intensity—wanted to know what it felt like—wanted Hua Cheng to do as she’s told, if only now and never again—wanted to encompass something, in this body that seems so elastic to it; to fill that yawning chasm within her, like a wound from another life, that never lets go of anything it takes in, yet ever grows in appetite.

I told you, we’re in circlusion mode all the way.

She wanted those things, and is getting them, but it’s nearly too good; she becomes abruptly suspicious, and she leans back, off of Hua Cheng’s face, to sit on her chest. He Xuan digs one knee into the bed by Hua Cheng’s side, braces her forearm on her other thigh, and looks Hua Cheng in the eyes.

Hua Cheng’s lips shine in the low light, like her mouth is drenched with wine. She blinks a few times, eyebrows aloft, and takes the moment to wipe her cheek clean of fluid. He Xuan’s attention trips over the sight, and she resolves to remember this moment every time when Hua Cheng will inevitably make a joke at He Xuan’s expense: only one of them has been covered in the other’s come. The thought is a pleasant one, but she catches herself, and returns to her original purpose.

“Whatever you’re doing to your tongue, stop it.”

“You literally told me to—”

“Stop making it bigger.”

Hua Cheng’s brows lift further. “I’m really, really not.” She sticks her tongue back out, red and shiny, and wiggles it rakishly before it retreats back behind her teeth. She laughs. “Is this where you want me to go, Ooh, Black Water, it’s because your pussy is so tight—”

He Xuan places her hand over Hua Cheng’s mouth. Hua Cheng nips at her palm, so He Xuan removes it, wraps her thighs—tighter this time—around Hua Cheng’s head, and sits down before she succumbs to the urge to permanently damage their partnership.

Hua Cheng fucks He Xuan with her tongue, alternating from quick and shallow to deep and savouring. He Xuan leans forward and braces her hands on the bed, so that Hua Cheng can’t see her face. The position—on her hands and knees—is so debasing and bestial that she wouldn’t have believed herself willing to tolerate it, but she stares through the hanging mass of her loose hair at the wall on the other side, fixing her gaze on a single point, a whorl in the dark wood of a beam, to keep herself from shaking to pieces. [Unrolling my sexcanon scrolls] This is a dommy He Xuan in the sense that she wants to feel in control of a situation and likes telling people what to do, but she enjoys bottoming in the sense of getting out of her head via receiving intense (safe) sensory experiences. She can feel herself approaching a compression point of something near agony; there are several moments when she fears she’s lost hold of it and it won’t return, but it comes curling back for her, and she sets her teeth into the feeling and refuses to let go.

She’s not naive to what this feels like—she carries with her the residuum of countless female ghosts, and the flotsam of strangers’ recollected pleasure float up through her consciousness every so often. She pushes these morsels aside, but doing so only makes more room for more persistent visions.

He Xuan has imagined having Shi Qingxuan against a wall, with the fingers of He Xuan’s left hand in Shi Qingxuan’s mouth, her right hand playing with Shi Qingxuan’s breast, and her teeth resting over her jugular vein. The thought ripples through her now, but it is followed by others, newer but just as urgent. She wants to fuck him, on his back, with the ridges of his throat shaking under her palm. Would Shi Qingxuan still be charmed by her then, if she did her best to envelop him whole? If Shi Qingxuan could see He Xuan right now, would she want her like this—gaunt, cruel, and avaricious?

The idea echoes through her, from her toes to the crown of her head. She imagines Shi Qingxuan peering down at them through an invisible screen, or peeping through a hole in the wall. (Hua Cheng hooks her arms around He Xuan’s thighs again, pressing her more tightly against Hua Cheng’s pointed tongue.) Looking and longing, pouting about being left out of something, and slightly scared—she should be scared—scared to be noticed, scared to go unnoticed, scared to be left behind. Wanting and paralyzed by it, and too intimidated to touch, even if she could. (He Xuan pushes towards it, chasing something beyond her fingertips that she can sense the contours of and needs beyond reason.) Squeezing her thighs together, squirming. Hurting from the lack of something she never could have had.

Something gives inside of her—the last bit of tension in the levee—and climax floods through her with enough force to, for a time, wash away anything.

When she stops shaking (somewhat), He Xuan rolls off of Hua Cheng, sits haphazardly cross-legged at arm’s reach from her, and waits for the tremors in her thighs to subside.

Hua Cheng folds her ankles one over the other, daintily, and makes a production out of wiping her face off with a handkerchief out of her sleeve. She’s not even that messy. She’s so dramatic. Though the strands of hair at Hua Cheng’s temples are very damp, He Xuan realizes. He Xuan sits up a little straighter, and feels a sense of grim triumph.

She considers finger-combing her own loose hair until she no longer looks wild, but decides against it. Likewise, she finds that she has no desire to restore herself to being dressed. This is her house. If she wants to be naked, then Hua Cheng must either tolerate it or leave.

I find this very sweet. Coming out of good sex with some nascent comfort in just being in her body… Granted, it’s because it’s still not quite what she thinks of as “her body,” but baby steps.

She sits upright, with one arm folded over a propped-up knee, and gazes intently in Hua Cheng’s direction. “I’ll do it, if you want something.”

You are trying to play it cool but you want to go down on Crimson Rain Sought Flower so bad.

Hua Cheng glances over without turning her head. Her gaze lingers for long seconds, and He Xuan feels a kindling curiosity spreading through her abdomen, but Hua Cheng eventually looks away. “Very kind of you, but I’m good.”

“Why did you agree to do it for me, then?”

“I’m just a generous sort. Kind of a bleeding heart.” This is total BS, but also not. The ask took Hua Cheng by surprise, and he wants to “get” He Xuan. Also, Hua Cheng is repressed and horny. But, also, He Xuan did seem kind of desperate and I dare say Hua Cheng experienced a twinge of empathy. Hua Cheng stretches her arms above her head and shifts toward He Xuan. “Say. You must have an incense burner around here, right?”

There’s a mischievous inflection to her voice, so He Xuan studies her, but sees nothing but a considering expression. It’s not exactly an odd request, is it, after an assignation? It’s as if they’re real people. And He Xuan finds that she doesn’t want to be alone with her thoughts yet. She wants to remain in this body for long enough to savour the remnants of lassitude before it fades entirely. It seems pathetic to do so without company.

She swings her legs over the side of the bed and observes what it feels like to walk around in this body: the altered gait, the shifted centre of gravity, the way her nipples draw tight with the slight draught drifting through the room.

He Xuan picks up one of her robes from the floor and pulls her arms through the sleeves. She doesn’t bother to fasten it, so the fabric flares out as she walks, and she grants herself permission to take relish in the way the black silk ripples through the air, sweeping behind her like a long sundown shadow.

It’s important that this form is indulgent. She feels hot and goth and intimidating and that pleasure is a source of strength, even if she’s not thinking about any of it in those terms.

Hua Cheng sits cross-legged on the floor, and peers at the incense burner. “How does this thing work?”

He Xuan smacks her hands out of the way before she breaks something. “Let me do it.”

The object is largely decorative. He Xuan took it from the lair of some ghoul or another, because it caught her eye and, its previous owner having no further need of it, it was just going to rust otherwise. There’s a seashell pattern around the edges, the metal has an attractive dark sheen, and the lid is about as easy to remove as a barnacle from a rock.

He Xuan’s interior design preferences are very charming for me to consider.

He Xuan has practice, so she’s spared having to struggle with anything in front of Hua Cheng, which she’s had enough of this evening to last the rest of their acquaintance. While He Xuan gets the thing open, Hua Cheng pulls a sachet out of her sleeve.

Postcoital alcohol would be the obvious choice, but drinking is Shi Qingxuan's thing. I wanted to capture something with the vibe of, well, smoking weed after sex, and after tossing around some possibilities went “Why don’t I do some research on the history of cannabis in China just in case,” and lo and behold…

She frowns. “What is that?” She has a general idea, but it’s the principle of the thing.

“You really don’t do anything fun when you come to Ghost City, do you?”

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Give it time.”

“I don’t think this was one of your better ideas.”

“I’m impressed with how much you can still complain, after I spent an hour with my—”

She’s going to have to air the room out after this, but He Xuan is less irritated than she ought to be.

In any case, nothing else feels quite so urgent as for her to spend some time in repose and contemplation. He Xuan was too distracted earlier to fully appreciate it, but the foreignness of this body makes it refreshing to inhabit, like an opulent rented room to a traveler. Her fingers idly travel up and down the bare skin of her torso, admiring its softness.

This scene has a narrative function, which is to communicate this sentiment:

tumblr post by lakevida: drinking a beer in a hammock in the sun realizing maybe i don’t have to hit myself with hammers every day forever just some or most days

…but is also extreme self-indulgence, because the thought of He Xuan getting postcoitally zoinked was so endearing to me.

Her right hand moves to the edge of her robe, and the texture of the fabric draws her attention. The cool liquidity of the silk contrasts the delicate ridges of the embroidered waves. It’s fascinating. She rubs the cloth between thumb and forefinger, and thinks that she ought to consider this more often.

What had Shi Qingxuan said? Ming Yi would make a no-nonsense girl? In this form, He Xuan feels more like a mantis than a girl: like something spiny that could devour its mate. But it’s true that she dislikes nonsense.

Anglerfish might have been a more on-brand example of female animals that absorb/assimilate their mates, but direct coprophagy just felt more… thematically appropriate.

It’s then that she remembers her guest, whom, she realizes, has been saying something, perhaps for some time.

“What?”

“Oh, forget it. I don’t know why I thought this would be fun to do with you anyway—”

He Xuan rolls from where she lay on the bed to peer at Hua Cheng. She’s drawing on sheets of loose paper. The rasp of charcoal on the page is pleasing, like the crackle of coals. It makes her think that it could be enjoyable to write something; she would appreciate feeling the slide of a brush under her fingers. But He Xuan would have to sit at her desk for that, and grind some ink, and that seems like an unjustifiable amount of effort when she is very comfortable. She doesn’t remember the last time she was so comfortable.

She looks over at Hua Cheng curiously. “Why did you do this? Were you planning something?”

“Like how you brought me back to your lair to seduce me, you mean?”

“I told you I didn’t,” He Xuan replies forcefully. It had been an idle thought in the back of her mind, and nothing more. She surprised herself with her own desperation, and surprised herself more by enjoying its result.

Fandom, in its love for UST and repression, sometimes underplays the reality of impulsive sexual decision-making.

Hua Cheng tuts her tongue and shakes her head. “It’s alright, Black Water, I know you’re lovesick and pining away for me. Don’t feel bad. You’re not the first and won’t be the last. Anyway, I wanted to get you intoxicated and trick you into giving away your secret weaknesses and such.”

“I don’t have any secret weaknesses.”

“Well, that’s too bad. I’ll have to settle for my second idea, which was to wait for you to fall asleep so I can walk off with your ugly incense burner.”

“It’s not ugly. Get your own.”

“I suppose,” Hua Cheng says, with a sigh of disappointment.

Hua Cheng is sketching some kind of portrait, though it looks more like the kind of thing that might hang in a temple. She’s a good artist, for someone who can’t write legibly.

“Who is that?”

Hua Cheng glances at her with an unreadable expression, and then returns to her sketch.

He Xuan pushes herself up on her elbows to get a better line of sight. “Is it someone you knew when you were alive?”

“I actually liked you better when you were lying there staring into space.”

“I don’t like you at all,” He Xuan says, unnecessarily.

“That’s nice,” Hua Cheng replies, without a second look in her direction.

He Xuan focuses on the details of the image, and attempts to commit the motifs to memory. The fine robes, the sword and flower. Something about it provokes distant recollection, and she thinks that she will want to return to this when her state of mind is more. Analytic.

Hua Cheng rolls up the picture, tucks her tools away, and clasps her hands. “Well. This has been… something, but I have another engagement.” She gives He Xuan a patronizing once-over. “I’ll see myself out. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“No.”

“You’re going to chain me to your bed? I know I made it good for you, but—”

“I’ll take you back to shore.” He Xuan sits all the way up, and notes that she feels as though she’s moving through syrup. She adds, “In… a moment.”

After a few seconds, Hua Cheng replies, “How courteous.”

“Or else… The fish.”

Hua Cheng stares at her for a long time, and then sighs, shakes her head, and retrieves her paper from her sleeve. He Xuan can just make out that the edge of Hua Cheng’s mouth turns up in an expression distinct from her usual simpering disdain.

He Xuan watches her for a long time, listening to the rustling sounds and observing her clever, impish face focused on something, for once, hardly nefarious. She wonders who else has seen Hua Cheng like this, in all of his many long years. She wonders whether Hua Cheng ever regrets letting He Xuan establish herself as the closest thing to a rival that Hua Cheng has ever had, even if, in practice, they have little to compete over. He Xuan had anticipated there being more catches than there have been, more moments where she must decide how far she’s willing to go to maintain their alliance.

There’s something gratifying about not having to treat someone cautiously. For He Xuan, Hua Cheng is the only candidate in any of the three realms.

She returns to her comfortable position on her back, folds her hands over her sternum, and counts the rafters, which enclose them from above like a great black ribcage. Hua Cheng was right, she admits, even if he was being glib. The place is very her. It’s not an insult if she doesn’t find it insulting.

chapter four

Chapters 4, 5, & 6 were by far the hardest to write. I initially conceived of this fic as being five chapters: 1, 2, 3, a chapter that spanned 4-7, and one that spanned 8-10. Nutso. Even after I broke it down a bit more, 4 + 5 were still rolled together, and they gave me a lot of grief both before and after I split them up for good.

The first time that He Xuan takes on a woman’s form in front of Shi Qingxuan, they are on a mission, and it is to utilitarian ends.

The thirteenth time, less so. They are still on a mission, at least.

This upcoming sequence in particular was one of the most difficult.

“Beautiful evening for it,” says Shi Qingxuan. Night in the village is thick with stars, and a heavy-hanging moon illuminates their way nearly as well as the sun. The villagers have shut up their doors, and aren’t likely to emerge until sunrise. The two of them pass through the dark unnoticed.

He Xuan ignores the inane commentary, and scans their surroundings. An aura of evil emanates from the mine’s boarded-off entrance. The strength of its resentment is formidable enough that Shi Qingxuan, too, can sense it from a distance; she shivers. “What poor people, living near a place like this.”

Most duties of the Earth Master are mundane, such as bestowing blessings on new building foundations. He Xuan delegates that tier of concern to her Middle Court officials (most of whom are her own shells.) But occasionally a matter will come along which requires personal intervention, and when demonic threats are involved, He Xuan sometimes brings Shi Qingxuan along, to provide plausible deniability for the ability of a non-martial god to handle such things.

There was a lot I wanted to communicate here: what He Xuan sees in Shi Qingxuan beyond physical attraction, the rationalizations He Xuan has about wearing a female Ming Yi form, He Xuan in her role as Earth Master, He Xuan’s self-concept vs. other ghosts, desire and fear of where desire might lead…

He Xuan hardens her mouth. “Let’s get this over with.”

tumblr post by auckie: picking strawberries with a beautiful girl and I’m not even smiling I’m just picking the most strategic berries so we can leave and I can go answer emails

Moonlight sits favourably on Shi Qingxuan’s features; she glows with diffuse light. Her lashes cast dense, voluptuous shadows on her cheeks. She swishes the plume of the whisk in her hand. “You lead the way, Ming-xiong. I’ll be right here to cover your back.”

Whatever else can be said about Shi Qingxuan, she is not a coward. There are only a handful of things that He Xuan has known her to be truly frightened of, and only one monster has ever made the list.

In retrospect I’m not even certain the scene was fully necessary, as most of the stuff I wanted to surface is covered to some degree elsewhere, but it felt important to get a scene of f/f Beefleaf together in the flesh before their canon visit to Puqi Shrine in chapter 6.

He Xuan has been inside mines before, in her role as the false Earth Master, and she always dislikes them, despite the comforting quality of their thick darkness. The bottom of the sea is just as black, but while underwater, He Xuan may move in endless directions. Here, she is pressed in on on all sides, and can’t help but think of the true Ming Yi, imprisoned in Ghost City. If that man had the power to turn against the earth against He Xuan from afar, no doubt he would have tried it already.

We start seeing references to Original Ming Yi as an actual person. Again, it would’ve been smart to sprinkle this through 2-3, but I never claimed to be smart.

“Which way, do you think,” asks Shi Qingxuan. She makes a token effort to speak more quietly, but her voice is nonetheless sonorous as a bell.

I swear it’s canon somewhere that Shi Qingxuan’s speaking voice is a bit loud, but I don’t have a quote to back me up.

He Xuan closes her eyes and extends her awareness to the flow of energy around them. They may have opened up the main entrance to the night outside, but inside of the mine, even this close to the surface, the air is stagnant and sluggish. Resentment suffuses everything so densely that He Xuan must concentrate to determine its locus.

“It’s in the oldest of the shafts,” she says. “The deepest one.”

“Of course it is,” Shi Qingxuan replies evenly. “Nasty things love to hole up in the dark. Do you think it knows we’re here?”

“Not yet.” This is He Xuan’s sincere belief, at the time she says it. She hasn’t felt any sudden shifts in the patterns of ghostly energy since they arrived.

Shi Qingxuan casts a look down the dark length of the tunnel. Her eyes are bright and alert, even in the poor light, and she has a determined set to her shoulders. “Well? Shall we?”

The two of them make their way down the narrowing channel delicately enough, but the hair on the back of He Xuan’s neck stands up mere moments before a crash of rubble falls behind them, and they are smothered in darkness.

Originally this whole section was way longer and I went to pains to make it obvious this was a trap… I’m still not sure it’s perfectly clear, because I might have cut too much… ah well.

Immediately, Shi Qingxuan cries, “Ming-xiong!”

Shut up. We don’t need to make ourselves even easier to find.

He Xuan can hear Shi Qingxuan’s feet on the earth—she’s typically graceful, but made clumsy in the dark. He Xuan can see her in the manner of nocturnal creatures: no colour, but shape and shade and depth. Her billowing white sleeves are a beacon to any and all dread things nearby. He Xuan, the dreadest of those things, braces herself as Shi Qingxuan nears. The displacement of earth by her hands on the wall makes He Xuan’s stomach curl in on itself.

Really trying to hammer in the idea that He Xuan is, post-Kiln, so OP that around anyone but Hua Cheng or Jun Wu, any fears of immediate physical danger are emotional in nature—but real nonetheless.

Wearing the guise of Ming Yi’s supposed true form for too long is tiresome; it resembles He Xuan enough that he can neither hold himself unconsciously nor immerse himself in the lie. It puts no greater strain on He Xuan’s energy, then, to be Ming Yi as a woman. The body itself is an assemblage of women she has seen and been. The form that He Xuan took on with Hua Cheng is too ghastly for polite company, so as Ming Yi she concedes to look more like a goddess.

The primary consideration to be weighed with the assumption of this form, she has found, is the increased weight of Shi Qingxuan’s attention. Whenever He Xuan tires of her unsubtle hinting and appeases her by changing shape, He Xuan catches Shi Qingxuan staring when she thinks He Xuan can’t see, and often—unapologetic and unabashed—when she must know that He Xuan can.

Phrased as if it’s a bad thing, but not convincingly so.

As the Earth Master, He Xuan is as inconspicuous and forgettable as is plausible for a major god. It’s a way of being that she has made a habit of out of necessity.

She never wanted to be ordinary once in her life.

This is another point I don’t know if I made as clearly as I wanted to within the actual fic… I don’t think “unobtrusive NPC” was ever He Xuan’s desired state of being. During his human life, he was an overachiever at everything he tried his hands at. Blending in via a bland heavenly persona is a tactical choice; his lair and his true form are both ostentatious, and his female form as Ming Yi is described as strikingly beautiful in all its canon appearances. I see her female form as one of her outlets to get some of that energy out, to be noticed and noticeable, while getting to pretend it’s all Shi Qingxuan’s fault.

Two more shuffling, sideways steps, and Shi Qingxuan will have found her. He Xuan considers abandoning her here, to feel her way around in the dark—trapped and terrified once she realizes that she’s been left—while He Xuan escapes in the other direction, where no demon will perturb her as greatly as the threat and promise of Shi Qingxuan’s grasping touch.

One more step.

Shi Qingxuan’s twitchy fingers curl in He Xuan’s sleeve.

This is another subconscious lyric reference: your touchy little fingers through my hair / you write your name across my forearm / and I belong to you… I always mishear it as “twitchy little fingers.”

« Found you, » Shi Qingxuan says. « Not that you were any help. »

He Xuan could’ve run, but did not. Isn’t that help enough?

She Qingxuan’s hand travels upwards, a little at a time, until she reaches He Xuan’s shoulder. Her palm is so hot He Xuan feels it through cloth.

He Xuan wants to punish Shi Qingxuan severely for the audacity with which Shi Qingxuan helps herself to He Xuan’s body. The thought of enacting such punishment makes He Xuan feel winded. By “punishment” she means, like, spanking. It’s not even anything particularly kinky. She craves sublime bursts of Shi Qingxuan’s terror. Or perhaps just to make Shi Qingxuan come until she forgets their mutual name.

« Is that you? Say something, so that I know it’s you. »

He Xuan stands motionless and silent, through cultivation or otherwise. The stale air is scented with rot and inert mineral. Shi Qingxuan is all wrong in a place like this. She is an interloper in the realm of dead things.

The tapping of Shi Qingxuan’s hands up He Xuan’s shoulders slows as she reaches He Xuan’s neck. He Xuan can hear Shi Qingxuan’s shaky breath, feel her trembling. Has Shi Qingxuan touched anyone like this before? Has she had mortal or immortal lovers? When He Xuan first met Shi Qingxuan, he’d thought, This one is a libertine. Her opinion has been revised: No, just an idiot who doesn’t understand the things she’s constantly offering, and has been shielded from finding out. But the current transgressions are so blatant that she must know.

There’s a Dune quote about the Reverend Mothers combining “the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess and holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of their youth endure.” I often think of it when writing Shi Qingxuan’s female form from another character’s POV. (She’s of course very silly, too.) He Xuan never learns, one way or another, where Shi Qingxuan actually falls on the spectrum of naivete to covert sluttiness. It’s not her business.

For her own part, He Xuan dreams of Shi Qingxuan, devoured. If Shi Qingxuan were another dead thing, like herself, the temptation would be too great to resist, and then at least He Xuan could contain her: suspended in eternal digestion and assimilated into the slipstream of selves that He Xuan may drag her fingers through as she pleases, and which never disturb her otherwise.

But if Shi Qingxuan were dead, they wouldn’t be here, because He Xuan would be free.

Whatever dark thing these tunnels have birthed moves onward, closer to them; she feels the emanation of its ghostly qi at the horizon of her awareness. Either the consciousnesses of the miners who died in here have merged into a swarm, or one of their spirits has proven stronger and hungrier than the rest, and incorporated the rest into its assemblage. As a child, I went to a coal mining museum where they had fake 1940s-era mine shafts you could crawl through, and it was so horrifying. That + pictures of flooded mines are absolute nightmare fuel to me. In any case, the thing crawling up from the deep is nothing like herself, no matter if it’s able to put together crafty tricks; its energy is writhing and unstable. There is no quality He Xuan has relied on more, in life and death, than self-discipline.

Hence why Shi Qingxuan scares her so badly.

Fingertips dance across her cheek, approaching her mouth. A place Shi Qingxuan has never touched, despite her frequent liberties. He Xuan is a master at suppressing her own aura, but the intensity of her hunger feels as though it should be impossible to miss, even for a fool unaware that she should be alert for it.

She will be unable to account, when she will look back on the moment, for why she does not move away—unable to account for it other than accepting the obvious truth that she does not run because some base part of herself wants to be caught. It’s not as though the desire itself is a surprise, but the power it demonstrates over He Xuan’s force of will leaves her shaken.

The pad of Shi Qingxuan’s thumb skims He Xuan’s bottom lip, and her mouth opens—how could it do otherwise—He Xuan wants so badly to deflect responsibility, to frame this as Shi Qingxuan having her way with He Xuan instead of He Xuan savouring and accepting the flirtation and exploratory touch she’s being offered. Her mouth just by opened itself, honest!! and Shi Qingxuan hesitates at the brink of it; she has reached the limits of her daring, or her presumption.

Shi Qingxuan is quite admirable for putting up with He Xuan’s constant mixed signals. She has a thick skin. It’s one of her best qualities (as well as one of her flaws).

A skittering sound rustles up from the darkness, and Shi Qingxuan leaps back.

He Xuan conjures a ball of light in her palm. Shi Qingxuan’s features are cast into menace and mystery by the estuarine play of glow and shadow, until He Xuan’s vision adjusts, and Shi Qingxuan becomes as sweetly familiar as ever. I thought this line was way too much, but a few people commented on it favourably. Ain’t that always the way. She shakes her hands out with a sheepish smile, flicking the traces of He Xuan off her skin like droplets of water.

“How go your endeavours?” Ming Yi asks, without turning away from the painting he stands examining on the wall of his study.

Noted sage and excellent beta Julian shipyrds told me to get rid of this scene because it killed the pacing; I succumbed to hubris and kept it, because I wanted to reinforce the prison throughline, as well as He Xuan’s hypocrisy. I did significantly edit the structural flow of this part of the story, so hopefully it doesn’t drag too much anymore.

Ming Yi lacks the eloquence of a civil god, but there are things to be appreciated about straightforwardness. That said, they do not typically discuss in such blunt terms the things He Xuan does when he is not here.

He Xuan looks at Ming Yi doubtfully. “Why do you ask?”

“Don’t you think you’d be interested, if you were in my place?”

He Xuan leaves the barbed wordplay alone. “Perhaps.”

Ming Yi has become more literary over the years. He has endless time on his hands for edification, and He Xuan has given blanket permission for any reading and writing materials Ming Yi may request to be added to his own tab. He Xuan has less time for reading than once he did, so whenever he descends to the bowels of Paradise Manor to see Ming Yi regarding some pragmatic matter of the ruse, He Xuan will also ask about books. He imagines that the possibility of diversion from the monotony of containment must triumph over the resentment Ming Yi bears him.

Perhaps it is has been adequate diversion in the past, but not today. “And don’t you think you might owe me some morsels of truth about the situation in which I find myself?” Ming Yi has never been prone to self-pity, and isn’t one to beg and plead, which is part of why He Xuan has kept him alive. His tone remains as dry and retiring as ever.

“Would it benefit you in any way?”

“I suppose not. But sated curiosity is no small prize.” The way my Ming Yi talks is possibly too arch to be borne, but I wanted He Xuan to play off someone in that way, and there are no better candidates besides maybe Ling Wen or Shi Wudu, neither of whom I could easily work into an already overstuffed story. Ming Yi tilts his head. The man is in a restless and nonchalant humour. In a prisoner, these are dangerous qualities. “Is it that you haven’t made much progress, and you’re ashamed to say so?”

Incredulously, He Xuan replies, “I have no need to prove myself to you.”

“No, no, of course not. I only wonder why you have yet to make your move, if you’ve accomplished so many things.”

“I can only control so much.” He Xuan grits his teeth. “You’ll get your due. I made no promises as to when it would happen, only that it will.”

“So you did not.” Ming Yi takes a seat on one of the comfortable chairs in his study, and folds his hands idly in his lap. “What would you do, Lord Black Water, if you had the opportunity to have it back? To regain your fate, I mean. Ascend.”

He Xuan remains rigidly standing. “What are you implying?”

“It’s only natural to wonder. Are you enjoying it up there?”

“Hardly.”

He thinks of the heaven’s endless, revolting plenty: their decadent feasts full of food that vanishes into the ether if it goes unconsumed, and the radiant beauty of the well-fed. He Xuan has eyes in every corner. He knows how deep the rot runs.

“I’ve been very patient, I think, about all of the...” Ming Yi gestures around them: the tidy bookshelves, fine carpets, windowless walls lined with choice landscapes.

Ming Yi’s type of imprisonment differs from a sage’s hermitage only in that the inmate did not choose seclusion of their own free will. (If anything, the furnishings of Ming Yi’s cell are more comfortable.) A non-trivial matter, to be sure, but there are other sorts of imprisonment. He Xuan has suffered them.

He spits, “You think to lecture me about patience?”

“Don’t misunderstand. I spent the first century very angry. But over time, that became... exhausting.” Ming Yi inclines his head in concession. “It’s different for someone of your kind, I realize.”

DEI king.

He Xuan makes a sound that resides in the neighborhood of a laugh. “I did not realize that Lord Earth Master was a Bodhisattva, too. How accomplished you have become.”

Ming Yi chuckles. It sounds rather genuine, which sparks fresh fury in He Xuan’s heart.

He Xuan pushes the words through his teeth: “I don’t expect goodwill from you. I hope you can understand that, in return, you can’t expect sympathy from me.”

That ^ is the first line of this scene I wrote, and was the seed from which the rest of the Ming Yi stuff grew.

“Very reasonable.”

While in Ming Yi’s company, He Xuan has enjoyed embodying an affect largely inaccessible to him, these days: that of an educated man idly spending time in conversation with a peer. It’s not the only affect available to him, when he has the luxury of occupying his own form.

He Xuan sets back his shoulders, and levels Ming Yi with a cold stare. Allows just a ripple of the killing intent always suppressed within him to surface, causing the very particles in the air around them to tremble. “Lord Earth Master need not worry. Heaven does not interest me enough to stay for its own merits, and when my task is done, there will be nothing left for me in any of the three realms. You have warmer prospects ahead than I ever will.”

I think this scene is one of He Xuan’s worse looks in the whole story (figuratively speaking.) What he did to Ming Yi is horrific. For someone with formative prison trauma, He Xuan loves imprisoning people…

“That’s comforting.”

“If I were not too lenient for my own good I would have simply killed you, and saved myself the future expense.”

Ming Yi pinches the bridge of his nose. “Please don’t insult my intelligence, my lord.”

He Xuan curls his fists inside his sleeves. “What now?”

“Let’s be honest with one another. As long as I remain alive to receive the spiritual power bestowed by my worshippers, another Earth Master isn’t going to take my place, and your position in my palace is safe. Isn’t it so?”

He Xuan narrows his eyes, and turns for the door.

“Don’t underestimate yourself,” Ming Yi adds, before he has closed it behind him. “I don’t think an excess of lenience is among the challenges you face. I have faith you are a crueler man than you think.”

I quite enjoy Ming Yi as he’s drawn up here. I wish he was in more scenes, but I could barely justify this one as it is.

“We don’t have to see the match through, if you’re not in the mood,” drawls Hua Cheng.

After leaving Ming Yi, He Xuan paid a call to Hua Cheng, as is their custom. The room around them, like everywhere else in Paradise Manor’s main building, is lush and perfumed, furnished with ornate vases and beaded curtains. He Xuan is well accustomed to it, and likewise to Hua Cheng’s obnoxious personality. “That’s not the done thing.”

“Good thing no one’s here to tell us off, isn’t it?”

“You’re just unaccustomed to losing.” The only games that He Xuan will play with Hua Cheng are those where chance plays no part.

I’m sure Hua Cheng could figure out some way to rig a weiqi game if he set his mind to it, but he enjoys the challenge.

“I’m not the one who has to be reminded to take my turn,” Hua Cheng replies placidly. “Am I that dull an opponent?”

There’s so much adverb abuse when it comes to Hua Cheng’s dialogue in this fic. He never just says something normal-style.

He Xuan doubts that Hua Cheng spent much time at the qi board while alive, but Hua Cheng has been around a very long time, and he has to fill his days somehow. His refusals to observe etiquette are conscious ones.

“You are tolerable.”

“Feel free to see yourself out, if I don’t meet your standards.” Hua Cheng places a white stone with an indulgent flourish, and blinks his solitary eye. His eyelashes are long, and resemble a crow’s gleaming feathers. He Xuan flopping big time, as always, at not finding Hua Cheng hot. “Some of us don’t live on islands.”

He Xuan stares at the board, attempting to sift through the patterns. He’d hoped the match would be sufficiently engrossing to clear his thoughts, but the conversation with Ming Yi has been fermenting inside his mind, rather than evaporating.

Trying to say “coping and seething” in an IC and not distractingly memey way…

Hua Cheng continues talking, because he loves the sound of his own voice. “We could have it out some other way, if you’re spoiling for a fight.”

He Xuan looks up, and narrows his eyes.

Hua Cheng is giving him one of his most genial, and therefore most insincere, of expressions. “You know, have a tussle the old-fashioned way. We might as well change forms, too. I know you’ve got exotic tastes.”

Hua Cheng being quite blatant at propositioning someone while pretending it’s their idea…

Ah, so he is being mocked. …and He Xuan taking the bait. That it would happen eventually was inevitable. He Xuan’s left hand, resting on his thigh, curls into a fist.

Hua Cheng is waiting for him to refuse on principle, because that is what He Xuan does. Gonna be honest with you chief, he knows you’re gonna go for it. But whatever helps you sleep at night. He should refuse. It was not so long ago that he returned to his true form after a mission with Shi Qingxuan and felt the clarity of shame wash over him, like a sudden submersion into ice. He hated Shi Qingxuan for her insistence upon her whims, and despised his own recklessness for indulging them. But Shi Qingxuan is not here, and there is little He Xuan wants less than to indicate to Hua Cheng that He Xuan possesses any vectors of uncertainty which Hua Cheng may exploit.

Great job rationalizing why it’s tactically advisable to have casual sex with your frenemy, 10/10.

He meets Hua Cheng’s cool, laughing, viper’s eye, and considers the feeling of air on skin, of skin on skin, of the particular pleasure of being cruel to someone to whom it will come as no surprise.

If you wanna rage, baby girl, just let it out…

“Fine,” he says, and closes his eyes before he can see the look on Hua Cheng’s face. He Xuan doesn’t dwell on the form he will take on when he opens them, instead letting it settle over him as she may.

Bit of an awkward sentence construction, but I wanted to get across that He Xuan is (on a conscious level, anyway) conceiving of the hot lady ghost form as a persona rather than an aspect of self. It’s, like, sex drag.

Soon enough, they abandon the board, shuffling closer to one another on their knees. Hua Cheng’s sharp face has become more comely, No one asked about my sexuality headcanons, but I think Beefleaf are both bi with an overall preference for women. though she retains her eyepatch this time, which is a sight that perturbs He Xuan for reasons she does not fully understand.

…i.e. because Hua Cheng is compartmentalizing this in a very different way.

When they approach each other at arm’s length, He Xuan’s gut swoops with anticipation and an odd, furtive instinct.

She’s embarrassed to be seen like this, not because the form is shameful, but because she believes the evident pleasure she takes in it is.

“Put your hands on my shoulders. There.”

Hua Cheng’s tunic is soft to the touch. Only the finest.

“No dirty tricks,” He Xuan warns.

“I wouldn’t know any,” Hua Cheng replies smoothly.

He Xuan hisses through her teeth, and tightens the grip she has on Hua Cheng’s shoulders. Hua Cheng flashes a glimpse of bright teeth, and digs in her fingers. Neither of them moves further, just testing, exerting barely-there pressure. At this proximity, she can smell the dark, sweet, slightly spicy scent of Hua Cheng’s hair.

The promise to fight cleanly is immediately and mutually broken. In the blink of an eye, He Xuan gets a knee to the gut, and wastes little time before pulling Hua Cheng’s hair by the roots.

Full disclosure, this scene was inspired by the following post:

tumblr post by skarchomp: lesbian sleepover porn movie pillow fight scene but it has the same fight choreography as a john wick movie

There’s no finesse to it; Hua Cheng is toying with her, she realizes swiftly. She’s putting much less force into her grappling than He Xuan senses that she could. She doesn’t have the consistency of someone who practices a specific discipline of martial arts, but she’s quiet and strong and deadly. For her part, He Xuan was only trained to fight insofar as boys wrestle each other for sport, shirtless in the summer in a slow-moving creek. I try to be sparing with the reminiscences from He Xuan’s human life, because of how distant that self is to her, but I love this line. Not the kind of thing that really helps you defend yourself when it matters. The scrapping she’s done with other spirits is something else entirely, more animal and evanescent by turns.

Having to really struggle, for the first time in uncountable years, heats her cold blood. You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me… She has no attention to spare for her shells; she puts her confidence in the verisimilitude of her own creations, and focuses on the present moment. Despite the relatively shallow pool of spiritual power from which to draw, this body feels more substantial—fleshier, and less whittled down.

She doesn’t trust Hua Cheng. She does, on some level, or she wouldn’t be doing this. She would be a fool to do so. Hmm. However, He Xuan is certain that, if Hua Cheng ever were to move against her in earnest, it wouldn’t happen like this, through opportunistic trickery—Hua Cheng is too fond of showboating. If Hua Cheng were to come for He Xuan, he would appear on the shores of Black Water Isle and start breaking down her door.

ROMANCE.

There’s no way that He Xuan can win, not in a situation where she doesn’t hold some advantage. Hua Cheng is too old, and has been gathering strength for too long. He Xuan has always loathed to lose at anything. Even so: when Hua Cheng puts her weight into pinning He Xuan at the shoulders and hips, their breasts press together, and a current runs down He Xuan’s spine to her cunt. I don’t see this as a submissive impulse so much as He Xuan enjoying a Struggle For Dominance as pretext so that when she gets fucked, she can eschew its relationship to her own desires. Plus she likes the sport of it, and intense sensation in a controlled environment helps break through the walls she’s built against emboded experience. Their faces are close enough for He Xuan to bite at Hua Cheng’s lips—she’s tempted to do it—but then Hua Cheng reaches up to rip at the roots of He Xuan’s hair, and it gives He Xuan just enough of an opening.

She rolls them over with enough force to clip Hua Cheng’s head on the edge of the qi board. It sounds like it hurts. Stones scatter across the floor, and He Xuan’s face is possessed by something akin to a smile.

You can’t expect me to read the not one but two canon scenes where He Xuan steps on people (Qi Rong at Puqi Shrine and Shi Wudu at Nether Water Manor) and not believe they’re a sadist, I’m sorry.

Hua Cheng laughs, the sound threaded through with a glint of surprise, and says, “What a bitch you are.”

Gender affirmation but at what cost…

He Xuan’s control slackens a moment too long, and Hua Cheng seizes the chance. She uses a reserve of core strength to flip them back over, straddling He Xuan’s hips. He Xuan lands with a thud that would have knocked the wind out of her, had she had it within her to lose. One hand holds He Xuan down by the throat while the other snakes swiftly between the folds of He Xuan’s robes, past her trouser waistband, into her underclothes, where Hua Cheng’s long fingers meet He Xuan’s cunt with a squelch.

This is the hottest sex scene in the fic on reread to me, personally. That line is intentionally off-putting because He Xuan’s sexual (also general…) self-image is so grotesque, but it works for me because they’re both clearly enjoying themselves so much.

“You’re so easy,” Hua Cheng says conversationally. “Shame you’re a loner type. Think of all the nice girls missing out on Black Water’s big wet sinkhole—”

He Xuan slaps her across the face.

The sense of satisfaction that the blow produces lasts only as long as it takes for Hua Cheng to thumb He Xuan’s clit. Her first two fingers, meanwhile, stroke either side of He Xuan’s hole, pressing in such a way as to simulate filling it without ever slipping a digit inside her, and He Xuan resigns herself to the loss of her pride.

He Xuan pushes her hips up closer to Hua Cheng’s hand, asking for it as plainly as she can allow herself, ignoring the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach as she braces herself for the discomfort of penetration—gritting her teeth—and then Hua Cheng slides her middle finger inside He Xuan’s cunt with a single smooth, slick motion. It’s so easy. Like He Xuan is just sucking her in.

They fuck like that, on the floor.

As with most things, sex has a winner and a loser, but at least this has been a spar from the start, and no one is under illusions to the contrary. Despite Hua Cheng’s airs of dissolute boredom, He Xuan makes her work for the upper hand. For the rutting of two dead things in false forms, it’s very carnal. Every subvocal sound or straining grunt of effort that escapes Hua Cheng’s throat lands on He Xuan’s body like a burning palmstroke. A turn of phrase riffing on “Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake” by Zola Jesus, which I always found an evocative title. That track has the outro lyric, “I’m the one you need / I’m not the one you need,” which is extremely Them. This is turning Hua Cheng on, whatever she might say about He Xuan’s exotic tastes. It’s not just He Xuan, hungry and wet and perverse, who needs something from the other.

AND SHE’S RIGHT!

Hua Cheng’s mouth is slightly parted, and He Xuan leans up, pushing past the force of Hua Cheng’s weight holding her down, to capture Hua Cheng’s bottom lip between her teeth. Their only kiss in this fic :’) Hua Cheng laughs, a low, surprised chuckle that reverberates through He Xuan’s mouth. He Xuan wants to inhale it. She laves her tongue over the imprint of her own teeth on the inside of Hua Cheng’s mouth, instead.

A second finger sinks inside her along with the first. Hua Cheng’s wrist flexes, and He Xuan can feel—can hear—her palm smacking against the soaking mess between He Xuan’s thighs.

I’m telling you, service top x pushy mean bottom is a great combo.

Hua Cheng leans back, and He Xuan’s legs lock tightly around her waist—she will not tolerate being left unsatisfied now—but Hua Cheng just goes up on her knees to give herself more leverage. He Xuan’s shoulder-blades dig into the hardwood.

Hua Cheng’s left hand pushes up underneath He Xuan’s right knee, spreading her more widely, and she can feel herself clutching around Hua Cheng’s fingers. Hua Cheng murmurs into He Xuan’s ear, “You really are a glutton everywhere, huh?”

Orgasm seizes her with violent, humiliating force. Humiliating, yet He Xuan feels a strange, foreign pride in its vigorousness and greed.

I feel so so fond of her here. Figuring out how to have enjoyable sex is/was not easy!

She hasn’t finished twitching before she reaches for the belt at Hua Cheng’s waist, but Hua Cheng extracts herself quickly, and she leaves He Xuan with the remnants of langour, on the floor, hair tousled and damp everywhere, to seethe Couldn’t avoid it forever… and swallow her disappointment.

I don’t think Hua Cheng is actually stone as a matter of course, there are just complex mental gymnastics at work here.

While He Xuan rights herself, Hua Cheng goes searching for another set of stones, apparently happy to leave the other ones scattered across the floor. Someone else will clean it up, He Xuan supposes. Maybe Hua Cheng makes Yin Yu do it.

First Yin Yu mention in this fic; it amuses me to write He Xuan being a bitch towards him, but also I wanted to remind everyone that temporal progression is happening in the background. This fic is a true clip show. If that’s a term that people even use these days… sorry about my filthy TV Tropes intellectual background.

He Xuan takes black once again. She pays the board impeccable attention, and ignores the garish red shape of Hua Cheng in the periphery of her vision.

Unfortunately, the peripheral view is enough to know that her opponent looks disgustingly self-satisfied. “If I knew this was all it took to improve your mood, I would have leant you a hand ages ago.”

He Xuan casts a brief, disdainful glance in her direction. “Be serious. You’re not the first.”

Hua Cheng sinks two fingers into the stones in her bowl in a boorish manner. Her dark eye flashes lasciviously, in case there was any doubt to the innuendo. “Oh? But I thought I was. Wasn’t that what you said last time? Poor, dried-up Black Water?”

He Xuan straightens her posture. “Ming Guang isn’t above seducing Middle Court officials.”

Hua Cheng leans across the board, and lets out a cruel, astonished bark of laughter. “You let him fuck one of your shells?”

He Xuan sets her next stone tidily in place, keeping a careful eye on the field of play. “I wasn’t steering the vessel at the time.”

Most of the time.

Morbid curiosity, mostly, but also He Xuan would rather fake an orgasm than risk exposure… one of my betas compared this to when you’re in college and bragging about your fail hookups to the queer people you really want to think you’re cool. Humanizing…

Hua Cheng shakes her head, and smiles. “You’re such a freak.” Her voice contains a mocking note of something near admiration.

He Xuan rolls her eyes, then makes the mistake of glancing across across the board.

Hua Cheng rests her face in a propped-up palm, and she pays He Xuan a knowing look. On anyone else, He Xuan wouldn’t pay it any mind, but she dislikes it on Hua Cheng; she already knows too much. “Really. You would have been wasted as a real heavenly official. You would’ve either usurped the Palace of Ling Wen or been bored out of your mind.”

illustration of He Xuan and Hua Cheng playing weiqi together

GIVE IT UP FOR TASHA’S ART, EVERYBODY CLAP!!!!!!!

After the game (which He Xuan wins, but not without effort), Hua Cheng resumes his most familiar form and leisurely sets about warming some wine. As if as an afterthought, he sets some salted fruits on the table, and shoots her a glance that she knows is all the invitation she’s going to get.

She sits cross-legged, eats dried jujubes by the fistful, and ignores everything but the rhythm of mastication until Hua Cheng sets out a pair of cups. Ugh, He Xuan is so cute to me. He Xuan takes hers with a vague sense of suspicion over his hospitality.

The room around them bears the hallmarks of Hua Cheng’s gaudy, lecherous aesthetic sensibility, and the wine is exquisitely sumptuous. Shi Qingxuan would approve of the wine, if not the decor, He Xuan thinks, and then forces herself to think of other matters.

She darts him a quick, neutral glance over the rim of her cup. “I know who you were drawing.”

“Excuse me?”

“The man in the picture. The Crown Prince of Xianle. The God-Pleasing Crown Prince.”

Hua Cheng’s voice comes back light and mocking. “Have you been doing research? Is that fun for you? Remind you of the good old days?”

I took the angle in this fic that Hua Cheng doesn’t disclose the Xie Lian stuff until late, because I wanted an arc of He Xuan meaningfully getting to know him over time, and also because in fic I read about the HC-HX relationship it’s usually taken as a given that He Xuan knows basically everything, which I don’t entirely agree with. I think by canon era he knows the gist, but I don’t think Hua Cheng would just, like, talk about Xie Lian outside of the scope of the information it’s pertinent for He Xuan to know. That seems like a lot of emotional vulnerability and Hua Cheng is not really an emotional vulnerability kinda guy. Even to Xie Lian!

“The Martial Gods of the South came from that kingdom, didn’t they? Is this why you’re always asking about them?”

Hua Cheng is silent for so long that He Xuan thinks he’s gotten tired of the conversation and will not answer, until he replies in a manner that could be misunderstood as relaxed. “If your paths ever cross, you’ll stay away from him. You understand?”

He Xuan’s brows furrow deeper. There are piles of notes in her study at the manor, assembled from materials accessed by a shell who had worked his way up to a position of relative trust in the Palace of Ling Wen. The Crown Prince of Xianle has not been seen in heaven nor on earth for hundreds of years. Hua Cheng might as well be telling her not to linger chatting with White No-Face.

“I can’t imagine that will be a problem.”

She expects some kind of menacing reiteration, like Better not be, or No, I can’t imagine it will, but Hua Cheng says, “If you ever come across him, you’ll tell me. Immediately. And then you will leave him be.”

“Why?”

“None of this has anything to do with you,” Hua Cheng replies, and offers nothing else in way of explanation.

Despite my earlier comment, I had Hua Cheng start letting He Xuan in on the dianxia thing here because he can tell He Xuan is being a bit vulnerable, and this is a way that Hua Cheng can reciprocate for relational reasons and still justify it to himself (i.e. He Xuan can help his search.) He didn’t mention it to He Xuan before now because he didn’t want to risk drawing attention to Xie Lian until He Xuan had a while to prove herself as a spy.

It’s no concern of hers what Hua Cheng occupies himself with, as long as it’s not at cross-purposes with He Xuan’s own aims, but is she supposed to believe that Hua Cheng wouldn’t root around in He Xuan’s closet, if He Xuan hadn’t already been forced by necessity to disclose nearly everything about her past?

He Xuan simply dislikes having only partial understanding of a situation. Hua Cheng hates the Heavens, yet the portraits he drew were deft and lovely—all for a god fallen so far into obscurity that He Xuan had to read a description to be able to place him.

She gazes into the still surface of the wine in her cup, staring at the patterns in the glaze below. Why did he offer her these... refreshments? C’mon, he’s a dick but he’s good for it, he can spot you some postcoital nibbles. They are not friends. As far as their working relationship goes, they barely qualify as partners, in light of the amount of money that He Xuan owes Hua Cheng and has neither the desire nor ability to begin repaying. Certainly not lovers, either—not that He Xuan would even want them to be—considering how Hua Cheng seems repelled by the prospect of her touch.

Here’s where it started getting really tough to handle from a writing POV; there’s a lot going on between them it’s hard to broach directly. Hua Cheng is only able to justify going along with this if he sees this as something he’s doing for/to He Xuan, without his own personal participation or enjoyment being a factor. He Xuan doesn’t know why Hua Cheng won’t reciprocate sexually, and takes it as rejection and confirmation that a) this is pity sex and b) she carries a sexual taintedness. Hua Cheng doesn’t know the precise contours of why it’s important for He Xuan to feel like she has agency and full participation in the sexual encounter, and He Xuan isn’t exactly emotionally forthright. Will they just communicate re: all this? Of course not.

He Xuan lifts her gaze to his face. “How did you die?”

She is incredibly lonely. She can’t leave Ming Yi or Shi Qingxuan alone because she wants human connection so badly. Augh, my heart hurts…

Hua Cheng raises the brow over his good eye, and takes a long draught.

“Getting mighty personal.”

She sips, in turn, for something to do with her hands. “You know my past.”

“You freely volunteered information.”

“I couldn’t afford not to.”

Hua Cheng pours himself some more wine with an indulgent look on his face. “Some things never change, ah?”

She leaves the remark untouched. “Did you have some kind of shameful death? Executed like a common criminal?”

Hua Cheng gives her a sardonic smile that he probably thinks gives him a mysterious air. You know she thinks it’s handsome. “Not at all. I died fighting for the one I love.”

“You did not.”

“Your opinion of me is so low you won’t believe a heartfelt confession? See if I tell you anything, next time.”

She was certain that he was bluffing, but now...

“Pardon me for thinking someone who looks like you was ever anything but a scoundrel.”

“I looked a bit different at the time.”

Her eyes narrow. “I thought this was your true form.”

“Your point being?”

“It ought to be how you really looked.”

“Not necessarily,” Hua Cheng says patiently, like he’s talking to an infant. “You really thought every Supreme was like you? Walking around like we just keeled over?”

A while ago, I tried to describe He Xuan to someone with the following: "there are characters who are ghosts without making it their entire personality. He Xuan is not one of them." Then I started to tack on "like Hua Cheng, for example," as the counterpoint ghost character who is very much A Guy separate from being dead. Like, you could pitch Hua Cheng as "David Bowie in Labyrinth if he lived in fantasy ancient China and was gay and had an eyepatch" and wait until sentence #2 to mention that he's a ghost, but this would be completely impossible to do for He Xuan.

“If not that, then what?”

“These aren’t human bodies. If you’ve got enough spiritual power, however you see yourself, eventually it’ll stick.”

Though Hua Cheng is nervous to show Xie Lian his true form, it’s still an idealized version of the person he was when he died—taller, broader, with a deeper voice and adult handsomeness.

One must assume “true form” does not literally mean “one’s form at death,” despite the fact He Xuan’s true form looks like he presumably did at death, replete with the malnourishment. These facts would already speak volumes about their relationships to their afterlives even before one factors in He Xuan’s forays as a beautiful lady alongside Shi Qingxuan…

“I see.” He Xuan bristles at his tone—has been bristling—and her voice is frigid.

Hua Cheng, wholly indifferent, gives her a patronizing once-over. “This could be your main look, if you wanted. Since you like it so much.”

I stayed up all night with a rock ‘n’ roll star / he said you gotta dress for the part you want, not who you are…

He Xuan has not been keeping a tight hold on her aura. The liberty to be nakedly ghoulish is something she appreciates about being in present company. It flares with aggression now, flowing out of her in sinister shudders. “What are you talking about.”

“Settle down, you lunatic.” His brows lift in amusement. “Remember when you couldn’t even get hard, and now you’re slutting it up all over the place?”

Hua Cheng is giving her earnest advice, but he’s being an asshole about it. It’s not all He Xuan’s fault the conversation goes poorly.

He Xuan is speechless and suddenly repulsed by this body. Its sinuousness makes her sick to her stomach.

The essay “Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia” has great stuff on body horror and forcefem that I feel is very relevant to a gender-expansive reading of He Xuan’s character…

After the visit to Nether Water Manor, He Xuan realized that Hua Cheng had left something behind: a slip of paper tucked under the cover of one of He Xuan’s books. She doesn’t recall ever actually falling asleep while Hua Cheng was in her bedroom, but Hua Cheng still managed to leave it behind without attracting He Xuan’s notice, which must have amused him and was, undoubtedly, the reason Hua Cheng left it in the first place.

The figure in the portrait, drawn in brisk charcoal rubbings, gazed pensively at a point past the paper’s edge. Hua Cheng at least had the grace to make her likeness tasteful (and fully dressed.) If He Xuan saw the same figure on the street, she would consider her an attractive woman, despite a sullen air and sunken eyes above dark tear troughs.

It unsettled him when he first saw it, at a time when he was in his own form, gazing at an image of himself-not-himself. He had not studied it for long before he tucked the paper back between the book covers, out of sight. It enrages her to think of now; does Hua Cheng think he’s uncovered something about her, like he knows her, as if there aren’t all kinds of things in her past that Hua Cheng will never know about—

Hua Cheng’s head tilts to the side. “Am I wrong?”

He Xuan was alive once, and now is not. A form is just a form, but one must remain rooted in something. In her case, it is the crimes done to an innocent man and everyone he loved in the world. Whatever the methods needed to balance the scales, He Xuan will not lose sight of her beginnings. She will not allow Ming Yi to be proven correct, and with equal vehemence, she refuses to be talked down to on this subject by Hua Cheng.

Even his name rankles her, transparently fake as it is. He Xuan didn’t linger on this earth for the sake of building palaces and collecting rare swords and whatever else it is that Hua Cheng fills his days.

She pushes the words through clenched teeth. “It wasn’t enough for my parents to die on my behalf? I should do away with their son, too?”

I find it plausible that He Xuan’s resistance to/angst about gender (as posited in this fic; you can go either way re: whether he gives a fuck in canon) comes in part from a filial place, despite the fact that he's already a ghost, which makes all of that a bit of a mess already. Anyway, I don't see the gender stuff as easily distinct from the rest of his emotional quagmire.

“I couldn’t care less what you do with yourself,” Hua Cheng replies pleasantly. His eye takes her in unblinkingly, unflinchingly. It is infinite in depth, and holds infinite confidence in its own power, and the wisdom of its judgement. “More wine?”

There is a lake situated between Paradise Manor and the rest of Ghost City, and He Xuan loiters by its rim. Will-o-the-wisps burn around the marshy edges, illuminating the night. The water calls to her, its darkness, its coolness; she would like to sink to its bottom and sleep for a long time, perhaps never to wake.

She wore a mask on her way here, as Yin Yu does. I love the detail that masks are very common in Ghost City. He Xuan is not like Yin Yu in many other respects; she may be in Hua Cheng’s debt, but she does not take orders from him. He Xuan needs to feel superior to someone, whether Yin Yu is one of his narrative foils or not! But she follows Yin Yu’s example in the sense that, while in Ghost City, He Xuan’s true face is always obscured. No one would recognize her, because no one but Hua Cheng and his lackey know who He Xuan is, let alone what he looks like, and it is all the more true in a body like this.

Over the years, Hua Cheng has vexed her, inspired caution in her, been the object of resentment and envy and grudging respect. Loathing him is new.

But enough of this: enough of it for now, and for always. He Xuan is coming to realize that, in some matters, one’s own strength of will against temptation is not to be trusted, not even someone as resolute as he.

As a ghost of He Xuan’s calibre, to change shape is not painful. The process is so quick that one might forget that it is a process, but there are always moments, be them half the span of the blink of an eye, wherein one’s skin stretches, bones recast, internal organs make new room for each other.

The transformation He Xuan underwent as a human, on the contrary, was purely through deprivation, and made for a slower, more wracking process, the results of which are still visible, when the masks and false skins fall away. Starving felt more like dying than dying did.

That paragraph was inspired by The Hunger Artists by Maud Ellmann, a book on which I have mixed feelings, but it focuses extensively on prison hunger strikers, and as such contributed to the evolution of this fic in various ways.

He Xuan restores himself to his true state, that lean and wretched thing. His shape reflected in the flickering lights on the gently lapping water is a spindly, featureless silhouette. No colours can be made out, nor precise shapes. He is a void where a person could be.

Judith T. Zeitlin’s The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature had some choice selections that flavoured the Vibes Soup I tried to stew up here.

Tl;dr Our Hero is vascillating between different types of gendered ghostly subject positions and feels Weird about it!

chapter five

His choice to bring the first dragon to a semblance of life came from curiosity and pragmatism, and He Xuan considers it a generally successful experiment. It performs its task—patrolling the waters of his realm—with the vigour of the deathless, but his attempts to train it out of other, less desirable habits have produced mixed results.

I wanted to include more bone dragon content, but this was the only scene in which I could work it in neatly. It was very much inspired by this art.

Whenever He Xuan is in residence, the thing will swim up to the shoreline of the island regardless of whether he’s given any indication of having the time or desire to pay it the attention it craves. Any minions sent to placate it have been met with complete disinterest.

I love getting to use the word “minion” unironically.

His hope is that, should he provide it with a companion, the things will have enough wit in their empty skulls to amuse each other. The process of bringing the things to being is rather involved, but begins with the fashioning of the bones themselves. The sun sinks pink and orange into the eastern sea, and He Xuan kneels a few paces down from the tidemark to shape the last few pieces, the delicate vertebrae of its tail, out of sand and will. The elder creature splashes in a tidepool idiotically.

Big stupid dogs <3

The perimeter of his mind is awash with noise, as the sights and sounds perceived by fifty shells compete for his attention. He can quiet the sounds somewhat, but to silence it altogether would defeat the purpose, so he endures it. He Xuan’s mindscape is a legit nightmare. He hasn’t been alone with himself in centuries. The only time he’s truly without distraction is when he’s fighting something.

Yet more Dune vibes. From Children of Dune:

He felt, at times, like an extension of those countless other lives, all as real and immediate as his own. In the flow of those lives there was no ending, no accomplishment—only eternal beginning. They could be a mob, too, clamoring at him as though he were a single window through which each desired to peer.

Or, as he’s learned, fucking, but that hardly helps him now.

There’s a minor furour in the Upper Court’s public communication array. Hua Cheng will be amused to hear of the events under discussion—whenever he hears of them. He Xuan is in no hurry to reach out, but this matter involves Hua Cheng, at least tangentially, so he’ll need to be informed eventually, if he doesn’t already know.

A certain junior official of Ling Wen has been visiting the Gambler’s Den regularly for years in order to gamble for setbacks to strike his peers in her palace. Presumably, his goal was to work his way into the position of her most trusted delegate. (A foolish effort, since Ling Wen is too cold-blooded to have real favourites.) The Ling Wen route is the secret third ending to the dating sim version of this fic. In any case, when the junior official in question made a move against He Xuan’s own plant within the palace, it was a simple matter to stage an unmasking.

Now the rabble in the array are having a grand time tutting their tongues and speculating about how Ling Wen Zhenjun will punish him: will banishment suffice, or will she insist on something crueler? Certain officials of the Upper Court are engaged in an effort to outdo one another in their contempt. If one of their own junior officials were to sink so low, or even be caught dead in the Gambler’s Den, why, they’d—

A merry peal of laughter heralds a familiar voice: « The way some of you are talking, you’d think you’d never been there yourselves! »

The corner of He Xuan’s mouth contorts slightly.

Shi Qingxuan speaks without a shred of doubt as to his right to air out his opinions on any given topic. He may be the only official in Heaven who both says what he really thinks and pays enough attention to public matters to have anything to say in the first place. Oh stop it, He Xuan, you’re getting sappy. « Everyone knows that gods of the Upper Court visit Ghost City in disguise all the time. Not that I have, personally, but is it a crime to go sight-seeing? »

There are a few moments of silence before a few of the more loudmouthed officials rush to qualify their earlier sweeping statements, to ensure Lord Wind Master didn’t misunderstand what they really meant.

He Xuan experiences a grotesque upwelling of something resembling fondness. As soon as he becomes conscious of the slip, he recoils from himself, and there is a corresponding crunch in the material realm. He looks down to see the painstakingly formed vertebra has shattered in his grip, scattering white dust over his robes. He stares at it numbly.

The bone dragon whiling away its time in the shallows has turned to look at him. The playful splashing after crabs has stilled, and its vacant sockets are trained on He Xuan warily. There’s no reason that dread should drop in his stomach as a result.

Uh oh, did someone get scared about breaking the ones he loves?

So much of this story is about He Xuan’s perceived vs. actual capacity for violence. He’s terrified of losing control and ruining everything with impulsive acts of physical/sexual violence, yet constantly rationalizes acts of psychological or emotional violence, in part because he doesn’t see himself as a feeling being capable of impacting others on that level.

“Earth Master Yi responded to the summons quickly, despite being far from the Heavenly Court.”

As much as possible, He Xuan keeps his distance from the Heavenly Capitol. He suppresses any evidence of nervousness. “This one apologizes for neglecting his office,” he replies, and waits to determine whether he should conduct himself with an air of perfunctory politeness or genuine remorse.

I wanted a brief Jun Wu cameo for a look at He Xuan’s interactions with the non-Hua Cheng individual whom he really cannot afford to underestimate. Jun Wu is tough to write, especially for a relationship like this, where speculation is all we have to go off of.

“There is no need.” He has only come face-to-face with the Heavenly Martial Emperor a handful of times, but he has always felt uneasy about the pairing of Jun Wu’s aura of fatherly gravitas with his fresh, unwrinkled face. “Your palace is in good order. I trust you keep yourself busy in the Mortal Realm ensuring it stays that way.”

He Xuan feels no little degree of contempt for Jun Wu, though of course the disdain is tempered by justified caution. It’s strange to recall that, if He Xuan had succeeded in his mortal ambitions, he would have become a dutiful and deferent minister to some other ruler. In a just world, where his godhood was not stolen from him, it would be He Xuan, instead of Ling Wen, at Jun Wu’s right hand. He stokes the fire of that grudge on principle, but he no longer has the necessary temperament. He lost the taste for submission to those above him long ago.

They stroll the pristine, empty corridors of the Palace of Divine Might, and Jun Wu finds his way to his point in a leisurely fashion.

“Is Earth Master Yi aware of the recent affair regarding heavenly officials and Hua Cheng’s Gambler’s Den?”

He Xuan stays respectful, impassive. Consistency in all things. The false Ming Yi has never been effusive, nor eager to curry favour. The pit of He Xuan’s stomach gnarls with apprehension nonetheless.

We know from canon that Jun Wu knew the whole time.

“I think I’ve gathered the main points.”

“Have you been to Ghost City yourself?”

He doesn’t let himself stumble, but his heart clutches with cold dread. Jun Wu adds, “Whatever the answer, you’ll not be punished.”

He Xuan waits for a few moments before gravely replying, “I have.”

Jun Wu walks on in silence. The walls of his palace are so bright they blind the eyes. They wind their way through a garden, and He Xuan’s eyes catch on the silvery ripple of a carp’s scales below the surface of a pond. When Jun Wu next speaks, it flits away.

“I have need of someone I can trust in the Ghost Realm,” the Heavenly Martial Emperor tells Black Water Sinking Ships. “If I asked Earth Master Yi to risk his life gaining Hua Cheng’s confidence, would he be willing?”

He Xuan glances up from the water to Jun Wu’s face, but it is impassive as ever. If this is a test, or a signal that his ruse has been discovered, it is in no way obvious.

He agrees, of course. A request from the emperor cannot be denied.

Discontent bubbles up from the hollow core of him as he walks the Great Martial Avenue, and He Xuan attempts to ignore it until that proves untenable. He has the thought that he hopes Ming Yi will never hear of this, and then marvels at the idiocy of being concerned with what a man he has imprisoned thinks of him.

Womp womp.

But Ming Yi asked He Xuan what he was waiting for, and He Xuan had no good answer. Hasn’t he spent enough time on matters that bring him no closer to his goal, beyond keeping the ruse intact? He has the rough shape of a plan in mind, for where things will go when he sees them to their logical end, but he should admit this much, at least to himself: he has been stalling.

The sound of a bright, clear voice behind him sends chills down his spine.

“Ming-xiong!”

He Xuan keeps walking. There’s a patter of skipping feet. The scent of her skin makes his eyelids twitch, his heartbeat skitter.

“I heard you were around. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were ascending!” She raps his arm with her fan. “What kind of best friend are you?”

“I had important business.”

“I bet.” Shi Qingxuan strolls next to him, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She’s nearly floating and not sparing a glance for the way ahead. Trusting Ming Yi to steer her clear of danger, and the other officials on the boulevard to make room. “What did the Heavenly Martial Emperor want with you? Have you been naughty?”

“Who told you I was seeing the emperor?”

“People tell me things,” she replies, preening.

Her fan flutters expressively in time with her speech, and he makes the mistake of paying her a glance; she smiles just enough to reveal a hint of teeth. She is so beautiful it makes him sick.

When they first met, Shi Qingxuan would never have taken on this form in the Heavenly Capitol at all, let alone on broad daylight in the main avenue. He Xuan suspects he has emboldened Shi Qingxuan to present herself this way—not his presence in this specific moment, but the accrual of days he’s spent in Lady Wind Master’s company. It irks him, even as he draws a meaty satisfaction from the thought of her brother’s displeasure.

They make a languid way off of the main streets and into the garden paths beyond, which traverse forests and streams dividing different areas of the heavenly city. He Xuan is charting their course with an aim, desperate though it may be.

In my notes, this was the “Arya throwing rocks at Nymeria scene.”

He has been aware for some time that whatever strategic utility Shi Qingxuan’s friendship may offer is not worth the trouble she causes by inserting herself into his sham of a life. Shi Qingxuan wants to believe that the world is full of good things, that people are fundamentally kind and the monster of which she once lived in terror is only a memory, and He Xuan has plumbed the depths of that naivete. Someday—before much longer, he swears to himself—she will learn just how wrong she is, but for now…

They reach a brightly painted bridge arching across a tinkling brook. Shi Qingxuan has been walking a half-step ahead of him, and when He Xuan stops at the bridge’s edge, she continues on to the apex of the arch before turning around.

Her mouth opens, no doubt to ask him what he’s waiting for, but he speaks before she gets an opportunity.

“You don’t have anything better to do than bother me? Don’t you have half a palace to look after?”

Shi Qingxuan is unfazed. “I’ll always make time for you.”

“That must be easy to do, when your main occupation is drinking and socializing.”

She crosses the distance to smack his arm. “Rude. When’s the last time I was in the heavens for more than a week straight, and not out doing stuff for my worshippers, or helping my brother?”

He keeps his expression flat. “With a brother like yours, it really doesn’t matter what you do, does it? No matter how much of a mess you make, he’ll clean it all up for you.”

Her airy expression flickers before she laughs. “Ming-xiong. Is that any way to speak to your best friend? After I came to surprise you, and everything?”

I was really looking forward to writing this scene, and it was indeed very enjoyable. Very juicy.

He realizes that there is little he can say that Shi Qingxuan will not brush off as caustic teasing. He’s acclimated her to it by not better controlling his disdain in the past.

There are other officials in the distance who can see them, if not hear them, so things must stay civil at a glance, but his tone is cold. “I didn’t ask for you to come find me. I don’t know why you expect me to be glad to see you.”

She’s taken aback. “What’s gotten into you, today? Did you really get in trouble with the emperor? I was just joking before.”

Even while her face is awash in confusion and irritation, in the ambient golden glow of heaven, Shi Qingxuan looks... celestial. She looks as though she belongs here.

If he didn’t know better, he would have thought Shi Qingxuan the rare example of a heavenly official who lives up to the title. She cares for her followers. She goes against popular opinion even when it’s not advantageous. She even ventures her brother’s disapproval, on occasion, as she does now, because He Xuan has encouraged her to take on whatever body she likes, with the spiritual power won at the cost of everything good that He Xuan ever had.

It’s crucial to me that He Xuan actually likes Shi Qingxuan as a person.

After the last time He Xuan visited Paradise Manor, he resolved to stop taking on female forms without a compelling reason. He has nothing from his family but their ashes, an empty house, and the body they gave him, withered and ravaged as it may be. He may struggle to remember the precise image of their faces, but he knows that he has his mother’s nose and father’s chin; that people always knew that Xuan’er and his sister were related, because they shared heavy eyebrows that flared out at the ends like a cat’s puffed-up tail.

He is not Shi Qingxuan; he has things to answer to, beyond his own whims. If He Xuan ever finds himself taking the path of ease while his grievances remain to be settled, Hua Cheng ought to dissipate him and be done with it.

He swallows through a dry throat, and says, “You only ever do whatever you want, without a thought in your head. Just look at you.”

I was already listening to the Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds album Let Love In while working on this part of the story before I came across this post, which goes into its themes of abuse and sexual violence and resulting emotional dysfunction. It really resonated. Like, the core of this fic is when some very scary things happen to you, and as a result you become something very scary. And then you form a connection with someone who insists on treating you as if you were still a human being, but they're unknowingly complicit in everything bad that happened to you. Not only that, but you form another connection, with someone else who is the same kind of frightening creature as you, but insists on acting as if the both of you are still basically human, which is very gauche of him. Not only do they both insist on treating you like a human being, but they cause you to experience Feelings. And Feelings make you vulnerable, they make you feel powerless and out of control.

He Xuan has taken great pains to become powerful enough he can overcome all enemies, but in some ways, knowing Shi Qingxuan brings him back to his previous state of being at the mercy of others, or at least it feels that way. And Shi Qingxuan is unaware of all of this, and just thinks they are dear friends who also harbour some non-platonic feelings, but are playing out a shy, protracted courtship because there’s no need to rush.

For the first time in the conversation, Shi Qingxuan’s voice becomes smaller, folding in on itself. “What does that mean?”

His tongue is thick in his mouth. He urges himself: say it. Gesture at her body, if you can’t manage the words. Even a pointed glance will do. It will be a relief.

A prodigious wave of self-loathing breaks over him. He Xuan addresses the ground. “Nevermind. I have places to be. Things to do for the emperor.”

“Okay! Go do them, then!” She stamps her foot. Angry, and beyond that, indignant. It isn’t as though she’s afraid of him. “You’ll be hearing from me later!”

To return to my unfortunate HBO Game of Thrones reference point, Arya is more successful at chasing her direwolf away than He Xuan is at this ineffectual attempt to prompt a friend-dumping. F.

Where are you?

« Need something? I thought you were mad at me. »

I’m coming by.

« Oh, one of those calls. I see. »

This upcoming scene was the hardest one to write out of the whole fic. There’s a lot going on emotionally, but I also wanted the porn to be hot. He Xuan has a deeply meaningful sexual experience where she feels desirable and powerful and lets herself do something for the sake of pleasure alone, and for that to hit the way I wanted I needed it to be erotic… but the emotional landscape is quite gnarly.

A few hours later, He Xuan stands at the door to one of Paradise Manor’s countless empty lounges. Hua Cheng takes her in with a long, head-to-toe look. If the meat inspection takes much longer, He Xuan will call the whole thing off, but, blessedly, Hua Cheng only asks, “I take it you’d like me to change, too?”

“I’m here for your hand and your mouth. The rest of you is of no concern to me.”

…I said all that about the emotional complexity, but TBF this is the attitude with which I approached all the Huaxuan sex scenes:

tumblr post by ewaneneollav: the clatter of two skeletons tryin it

“It’s a real mystery why you don’t have other people to go to when you’re in this mood,” he replies, but he steps aside.

As He Xuan sheds her clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor, Hua Cheng continues. “I thought you were going to go a couple years without talking to me, but I didn’t account for your serene and forgiving nature.”

She didn’t come here to talk, but he knows that. “You still have your nasty incense, don’t you?”

Soon, He Xuan lays on her back on a settee with a pillow below her head, and watches dust motes circle in the air as she tries with all her might to become intoxicated.

Getting smoked out on her situationship’s couch is the single most well-adjusted thing He Xuan could do at this point. Congrats, you ran toward human connection instead of away, for once.

Hua Cheng drapes himself across a large cushion on the sumptuous carpet and eyes her skeptically. “Do you just want to nap? I have blankets.”

In sleep, He Xuan only ever dreams of the same things she broods on while conscious; it would do nothing for her now. What she does want is a display of weakness in any estimation, but it’s a manageable risk taken to avoid a greater one. If He Xuan doesn’t become preoccupied quickly, she is going to do something very foolish, like go to Shi Qingxuan to tell her that He Xuan had made a mistake, or beg for her forgiveness somewhat sincerely, or crush her windpipe, or tell her the truth and break her heart forever.

On the way here, He Xuan considered whether it was possible to go through with being fucked in his own form, but the thought has not become any more appealing since the evening Hua Cheng spent at Nether Water Manor. He Xuan’s true body is a weathered vessel for the memory of people he is still trying to do right by, in his way. As much as it might presently seem otherwise. He must fashion new flesh for the shameful pleasures of the dark.

He Xuan perches on the edge of the settee, leaning back on her arms and with one knee crossed over the other. Being completely bare is less shameful in this context than being half-clothed, perhaps only because she cannot imagine Hua Cheng self-conscious of his own appearance, in any form.

How must she look to him? Severe, surely; she has one of those faces. Unafraid, she hopes. Lustful, likely. She is, at the moment. She doesn’t need to dwell on how she’s come to crave these debasing things. He Xuan was accustomed to numbness, and the stubborn resurgence of desire has yet to ebb. Some days she wishes she was more meaningfully dead.

She parts her knees, and says, “I’m waiting. Your part isn’t complicated.”

“Alright, alright.”

The unfortunate truth is that Hua Cheng is handsome. His thick eyelashes fall shut; he bows his head, and he spreads her folds with two fingers while his cool tongue laps just below her clit. His elegant widow’s peak is on full display from this angle. At present, he is probably at his least irritating; he looks good on his knees, though he still radiates smugness even with his eyes closed and his mouth on her cunt. It’s inherent to his being. A Hua Cheng without smugness strains the imagination.

Looking down at him, the sight of her own form is unignorable: ashen skin, dark hair between her legs, a pair of breasts. She never spends time looking at her own body, how it really is. Watching it now, it’s animate and nearly alive, yet as foreign as it is familiar, remains strange as ever.

One of her hands rests on the top of his head, ready to direct him this way and that, but the other shifts to grasp one of her tits. She feels the fullness and weight of it in her palm. Twists a nipple between two fingers and releases it. He isn’t looking anyway, so she may as well do as she likes. He seems wholly indifferent to them, which is agitating.

Whenever they are alone together, there’s a tension in the air stemming from the push-pull of familiarity and uncertainty. The sense that things could shift towards violence in the blink of an eye, yet chances are good that they won’t. She’s not relaxed around him, because she’s not relaxed around anyone, and he is one of the few whom she couldn’t overpower in a pinch, but she knows him, can predict him—which makes it frustrating when she cannot.

He Xuan pulls him away from her by his hair, feeling her claws brush his scalp.

You will never take long black nails fanon from me.

“I want to get you back this time.”

“You haven’t even come yet,” he says, with a beleaguered air.

“What is it with you? Do you like things so shameful you can’t say them out loud?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hua Cheng replies, and bends his neck once more, but He Xuan tightens her grip on his hair.

“Why do you keep doing this if I repulse you?”

On some level, it’d be preferable for him to turn her down than to keep having sex with her in a way that makes her feel kinda bad. It’s just that it also makes her feel really good. A classic dilemma.

Hua Cheng has an undecipherable expression. “Did I really say you repulse me? I can’t recall.”

For some time now, her mind has been presenting her with the image of a bone that a dog keeps chewing on and then spitting back out. Is it this body? Does he prefer men? She hadn’t thought him tied to specifics, in that way, considering the abandon with which he changes his own form.

He Xuan committing the classic bi person blunder of failing to have theory of mind for people with fixed sexual orientations.

She tilts her head. “Is it that you want me on my hands and knees so you can pretend I’m someone else?”

She’d do it, too, but thank god Hua Cheng has some ability to read the room (besides not being willing to stick his dick anywhere at this juncture.)

“Is that what you want?”

Why are they even talking about this? Shouldn’t this be among the simplest rules of this world—that when some sorry thing is available, men will fuck it?

Between everything that happened to his sister and Miao’er + He Xuan’s… gender… stuff (however one slices that particular pie), it’s easy for me to imagine He Xuan has some low-level misandry going on, even before getting to the events of this fic specifically.

“I offered, didn’t I?”

Hua Cheng gives He Xuan one of his infuriatingly placid expressions. “If I said that that I’m just more interested in giving than receiving?”

Great work! This is only like 60% obfuscation!

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Black Water, there isn’t enough paper in the world to hold the things you don’t know about me.”

Xiao Black Water didn't feel right, but as I wrote that sentence I was aware that if this were fic for a Japanese-language canon, it would’ve been “Black Water-chan.”

Enough.

He Xuan has him give her two of his fingers to start. It’s not as effortless an entry as the last time they did this, but smooth enough to remind her why she bothered to come here in the first place. She almost wishes she never learned how enjoyable she finds this. Like a good meal, there’s a comforting relish to the effort of taking something within her for her own ends. A certain mastery. Like she is so much void, so much walking oblivion.

The pressure, the fullness, is still tight in her throat when she grits out, as evenly as she can, “Come on. You can add another.”

“Can I?”

It will be difficult. But how else does it go? Is anything worth anything ever easy? She can aimlessly masturbate on her own time.

“I don’t care about your comfort, so don’t concern yourself with mine.”

Hua Cheng shakes his head, his eye laughing, and He Xuan leans forward emphatically.

“This body isn’t even real, and it wouldn’t matter if it was, we’re dead—”

Hua Cheng sighs, and shifts into that other form, the one they’ve used together like this in the past: an untrammeled, boyish beauty. In response to He Xuan’s expression, Hua Cheng says sweetly, “I thought I’d make my hand smaller. I’d hate to keep a lady waiting.”

Again with the patronizing gender affirmation, lol.

“Give me the rest of it, then.”

He Xuan’s mind is still filled with too much noise to be borne: the distant awareness of dozens of shells going about their business, the low whispers of the remnants of devoured spirits, and the heaviness of doubt, which is a luxury she cannot afford. She needs something to chew on; needs this fool’s errand to be worth her while. She wants everything. She is starving. She never knew it was possible for a hole to hurt for want of being fucked.

There’s an inverse correlation between how “receptive”/“passive” He Xuan is being sexually and the intensity and meanness of her mindscape and affect. (Okay, I could imagine otherwise in select sappy Beefleaf contexts, #letshiqingxuantop, but: not relevant right now. Let’s touch base in four chapters’ time.)

Hua Cheng drips more oil on the tense, taut rim of He Xuan’s cunt, and eyes her face with mock-concern. “Think you can manage?”

Sometimes He Xuan flatters herself by entertaining the idea that the relationship they share is unique. It is, factually; they are the only two sons of Mount Tonglu who walk the earth. She is reminded, at times like this, not to believe this means Hua Cheng respects He Xuan more than he does anyone else.

“Not another word from you.”

“Considering you’re an uninvited guest here, you could stand to have better manners,” Hua Cheng replies, but rocks three fingers in He Xuan’s hole with gentle motions.

“I realize now it may not have been worth the trouble.”

Hua Cheng tuts her tongue, but folds her pinky finger beneath the wedge she’s made with the rest of her fingers. “Go ask Ming Guang to put his hand inside you, next time. I’m sure he’ll be weak to your sweetness and feminine charm.”

The fourth finger is a stretch, it’s true. He Xuan digs her fingernails into the cushion and bites back a groan. It’s not truly one of pain, just effort. Whether he respects her or not, He Xuan is a Supreme, same as Hua Cheng, and beyond that, she doubts there’s another man or beast on earth more practiced at swallowing things even when it seems as though there isn’t any room. She holds the taste of discomfort on her palate as it dissolves, gradually, into triumph.

YEAHHHH BABYGIRL… THAT’S FUCKING RIGHT…

Her thoughts drift hazily, and roll toward Shi Qingxuan like a rivulet. She wipes them away, and speeds proceedings along as best she knows how, touching herself inexpertly. It’s hard to concentrate while He Xuan is slowly turned inside-out. There’s nearly half a fist inside of her, and still she unfurls.

As with everywhere in Paradise Manor—at least above ground—the room around them has an atmosphere of louche degeneracy, even if the master of the house apparently doesn’t fuck. The heel of Hua Cheng’s hand glistens in the low light. However she might act, she is part of these things they do, and cannot go unstained. They are the same kind of tainted creature.

He Xuan’s opening has met the knobbly row of Hua Cheng’s second set of knuckles. She shifts her hips impatiently and glowers at Hua Cheng’s cheerful expression, which says, Now, what did I tell you?

She closes her eyes and thinks of that hairline fissure between her flesh and the capaciousness within; her awareness presses at it, testing, with the brutality of patient certainty. There is a deep feeling—almost a sound, though it emanates from within her own consciousness—like the cracking of an ice floe, and then something gives in the face of that steady pressure.

There are a few scenes in this fic that made the following passage from The Sisters Brothers pop into my head:

My very center was beginning to expand, as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountably limitless. My flesh and scalp started to ring and tingle and I became someone other than myself, or I became my second self, and this person was highly pleased to be stepping from the murk and into the living world where he might do just as he wished. I felt at once both lust and disgrace and wondered, Why do I relish this reversal to animal? [...] Shame, I thought. Shame and blood and degradation.

She is overtaken by the fullness of sudden depth. He Xuan is sweating everywhere, dripping everywhere; she feels slick and salty. She hears her own stifled gasps with every twitch of Hua Cheng’s hand inside her.

“Don’t move,” she grits out, and Hua Cheng keeps her forearm propped on the edge of the settee, obligingly still.

The sensation doesn’t remind He Xuan of the pleasures of feasting any longer; it reminds her of how it feels to swallow spirits. The grisly euphoria of taking something inside that is still pulsing and writhing. No amount of struggle may change the fact that once He Xuan has something, it’s hers forever.

I wanted ambiguity about whether or not she’s had an orgasm yet, but I feel like it ended up just being confusing…

He Xuan is very capable of stillness—she’s dead—yet she trembles for some time, adjusting to the extremity of the feeling. Even the most minute of shifts in her muscles are felt inside her cunt.

She returns to possession of herself, in time. She glances at the scene between her thighs, and meets Hua Cheng’s gaze. Hua Cheng watches her with interest, and not as He Xuan might have expected, the curiosity of morbid distaste; she looks at He Xuan like she’s trying to take in everything she sees, and remember it hereafter. A small hook tugs in He Xuan’s chest.

Hua Cheng winks her single eye, and the expression is gone, replaced with faint boredom. “You good?”

Neither of them has figured out how to fully communicate or negotiate their respective boundaries and longings, but they still landed on something that was intimate and felt good for both of them. I think it’s sweet!

Hua Cheng is relatively considerate, in the slippery stillness that follows; she waits for He Xuan’s word before she pulls her hand free.

That is, she attempts to pull her hand free. She gets just slightly out of He Xuan’s hole before meeting taut resistance. He Xuan grunts in shock.

Genital terminology is a fun characterization point. Most vulva words work for He Xuan, but I appreciate the bluntness of “cunt” and “hole.”

Hua Cheng’s brows draw. She compresses her hand within, pulling all her fingers into a tight cone, bending the knuckles to take up as little breadth as possible, yet it’s as if all the spaciousness within He Xuan’s body has become tightness. “Quit it,” she mutters, before her throat has the chance to betray her with any more undignified noises.

This bit with the contractions was inspired by an anecdote from the How To Fist episode of the Pleasure Mechanics podcast.

“Never thought of you as the clingy type.”

Through gritted teeth, He Xuan replies, “Just wait. It’ll…”

She had felt a series of contractions—her body squeezing around Hua Cheng’s hand in ways that temporarily caused her to lose sight—but that’s happened every time she’s climaxed in this body. She wasn’t aware it could lead to… this. It will loosen eventually. Surely.

“I hope it will.” Hua Cheng grins. “Gives us time to catch up, ah? Anything interesting happen since you started sulking? Haven’t heard any reports in a while. I’ll be adding some fines to your ledger for that, by the way. I never let Yin Yu get away with turning anything in late.”

He Xuan tilts her head back so she can look at the ceiling, instead of Hua Cheng’s infuriating face. “Jun Wu is sending a spy to infiltrate Ghost City on behalf of the heavens.”

Hua Cheng blinks. “Who?”

“Ming Yi.”

“Ah.”

“Good work, if you can find it,” He Xuan says.

Hua Cheng lets out a quick, shocked bark of a sound.

The vibrations of Hua Cheng’s laughter run through her chest down into her fist and reverberate inside He Xuan’s cunt. He Xuan sags back on her elbows from the sensation, and gasps.

“Was that a joke? You make jokes, now?”

Before she can suppress the reflex, He Xuan is laughing too. It’s so foreign to her body that at first she doesn’t understand what’s happening.

Ugh. Reader, I love them…

In the moments after the absurdity has passed, He Xuan becomes conscious of a slackening of her whole body, as her muscles succumb to a dense yet pleasant lassitude. Hua Cheng senses the same; she gives a gentle, steady tug, and her hand comes sliding free in a slow, measured retraction that still causes He Xuan’s fingers and toes to curl involuntarily.

A sense of relative calm settles between them. Tentative camaraderie. Hua Cheng gives her newly-liberated hand a glance, and flicks it carelessly. It’s restored to a smooth, dry, and un-pruny state, and with the same motion Hua Cheng returns to his true form. He extricates himself from between her legs, and sprawls in his rakish way against the edge of the settee, with his face tilted up indolently.

He Xuan crosses her arms across her chest. She ought to also return to her own form, but her clothes are a few paces away, and she hates being naked in that body. It is forbidding while dressed, but unclothed looks like a specimen in a doctor’s cellar.

“So,” Hua Cheng says.

“So?”

“Did that take the edge off?”

There’s a lethargy to her now, a desire to be horizontal, which is disorienting yet not unwelcome. The edges of her perception are lapping like gentle waves. There remains, also, acerbic impatience: the compulsion to win some sort of victory, however small.

He Xuan drapes one of her knees over the other, and shifts her upper body to face Hua Cheng.

“I understand, now. You, and your grudge.”

It has been coming back to her, where she’s seen the likeness Hua Cheng was drawing in her manor. The two-dimensionality of the portrait had disrupted her ability to make the connection. Not to mention the difference in scale.

“You do, do you? Let’s hear it, then.”

There’s a certain intellectual excitement about having the opportunity to explain her reasoning. “There were so many things that didn’t add up. Your origins. The way you look. Your priorities. But I’m certain that you come from the Kingdom of Xianle. Like Nan Yang, and Xuan Zhen, and Xie Lian.”

Hua Cheng gives no sign of confirmation or denial.

“That Crown Prince is reviled as the downfall of your homeland. But he means something to you. There are two possibilities, broadly speaking.”

She leans closer.

“One is that, for some reason, you despised Xianle, and you celebrate him as its undoing.” Hua Cheng’s expression is unreadable, and He Xuan carries on. “Unlikely. Xianle fell long ago; if that were your grudge, you would have passed on.

“And then I remembered the statue in the Kiln.”

tumblr post by radiantmists: he xuan spending years trying to break out of the kiln: (expressionless face); the massive xie lian statue in the corner: (serene smiling emoji)

The whole place had the feeling of a profane temple from an ancient time. He Xuan had other things to occupy him then; he didn’t have much attention to spare for the surroundings. He had eaten, slept, licked his wounds, digested, and indexed the things taken inside; analysis of his environment was limited to threat evaluation and risk-reward assessment.

I think it’s really funny to imagine He Xuan assuming some Ancient Aliens stuff about Tonglu rather than instantly figuring out the specifics of Hua Cheng’s Deal. He was kind of busy at the time.

But there was something impossible to miss, even in such a distracted state. Immense as a small mountain of its own, and unchipped, despite the carnage: the Crown Prince of Xianle (not that He Xuan knew who that was, but for the vaguest of historical terms), down to his even brow and delicately sculpted robes. The God-Pleasing Crown Prince bore the faint smile common to bodhisattvas and gods of a certain disposition, difficult to imagine on the martial gods of He Xuan’s own time. He Xuan remembered those details more clearly than he had either the flower or the sword. The vision of serenity was more perverse, in the circumstances, and therefore more memorable. He had hated the sight of it, whenever his travails brought him to its feet. But what hadn’t he hated?

That line was a subconscious Dawn Treader reference I didn’t catch until I reread the Eustace chapter in preparation to write this commentary.

screenshot of a line from Dawn Treader: “I hated it. But I was hating everything then.”

She can see the recognition in his eye now, and it emboldens her.

He Xuan’s eyes narrow. “The second possibility is that you revered him despite the tragedy he brought his country, and despite his banishment, and you remain to revenge him. You need information on the Heavens in order to determine who best to make suffer for Xie Lian’s fate. You pay particular attention to Xuan Zhen and Nan Yang because they were his disloyal retainers.”

The question that begs itself is, then, why has Hua Cheng waited so long to plan his strike; but such things cannot be rushed.

I really like how this conversation turned out, but it was very tricky and took many drafts to get right.

“It’s not revenge,” Hua Cheng says evenly, calmly. “Nothing that small.” He gives her two slow, sardonic claps, and bows his head. “Congratulations, though. You’re very clever, and all that.”

Nothing that small. She hates him, she really does.

“Then what is it?”

“Many years ago, he told me to live for him, so I have, and will.”

Her lip curls. “That’s it?”

The energy they’re both bringing to their interactions, never moreso than right now. (SFW fanart at the link.)

“Everything I do, I do for him,” Hua Cheng says with such sincerity it’s repulsive.

She remembers something. “When you said you died for the one you love…”

“Yes.”

“You were his lover?”

A reasonable enough assumption… more plausible than the truth, at any rate. Hua Cheng is crazy <3

Hua Cheng’s whole face gives an odd twitch, and after an incriminating period of silence, He Xuan realizes that things are even worse than she’d feared. She has been wrong to take him for anything less than a madman.

She lets disdain seep through her tone. “Why did you bother to hide your purpose, then? He means nothing to me.”

Hua Cheng looks amused. She wants to slap the smirk off his face. “Why would I tell you a thing you don’t need to know? I don’t trust you. I certainly hope you don’t trust me.”

We couldn’t have all that “intimacy” and “connection” stuff get too cozy, could we? Hua Cheng is getting anxious. He already feels like he’s walking a razor’s edge of blasphemy-infidelity with someone whom he knows on a much more fallible and human level than he does his idealized love object. He Xuan isn’t the only one pushing people away out of feeling existentially threatened by emotional attachment.

Hua Cheng eventually gets bored, tosses a coverlet at her head despite He Xuan telling him what he should do with his stupid blanket, and leaves. Perhaps she should be further insulted by the fact he sees her as little enough of a threat to leave her unattended in his palace overnight.

He Xuan had considered them alike in their states of unrest, but she is more alone than she ever realized.

Since he left, the turmoil in her chest has begun churning anew, though it’s heavier than it was, slower but more vicious. She watches with glazed eyes the pattern on a paper screen across the room ripple and sway under overly-rapt attention.

She’s still pretty high right now. I want to pet her hair.

She thinks back to watching Pei Ming lift the skirts of a demure Middle Court official who doesn’t exist. That was only a shell body, of course, engaging in the kind of thing that those do in hopes of rifling through Ming Guang’s closet if he gets up to take a piss. But Hua Cheng brought it to mind, and the memory has lingered with He Xuan more than she realized—the skin-crawling self-confidence with which General Pei called that woman meimei and guided her to hold her own knees up for him. He Xuan felt hot breath on his neck from afar as he watched that handsome profile, and all the while was thinking, I saw your face the night I died, when I was nothing but fire and ash, and I don’t know that you remember me at all.

Mismatched emotional investment (perceived, anyway) is most of what makes things with Hua Cheng sting. Power is other people having to orient themselves around your wants and needs. Anything that brings He Xuan back to the place of knowing there’s someone to whom her personhood and agency don’t matter, who can afford to just not care how she feels about something—she’s very sensitive to any situations in which she feels that dynamic crop up. And Shi Qingxuan is the only person who never makes her feel that way…

The back of He Xuan’s consciousness is a labyrinthian courtyard, onto which thousands of doors are open. The world through the eyes of her shells. Memories belonging to digested others. Memories of her own, from life and death. Closing her eyes in the physical world only intensifies the terrible awareness, as her perception fractures into multidimensional vision like the eye of a fly. She aches to reach the quiet emptiness of the darkness beyond, but the way there—the route to that realm only available to her once things are made right—remains obscure to her.

She hears her own reprimand in Ming Yi’s dry tone: Is it obscure, or do you fail to see what you are reluctant to actualize?

He spoke, once, of having faith in He Xuan’s cruelty. It has never failed her before, once she learned to use it.

tumblr post by zoethebitch: sometimes the nut doesn’t bring any clarity at all no matter how hard you bust it. the delirium only deepens.

Like an ill wind, Shi Qingxuan’s bright voice—in reality, not imagination—blows through He Xuan’s mind.

« Hello, hello, I’m wondering if my best friend Ming-xiong is over his tummy-ache, or whatever had him so grumpy earlier. »

He Xuan pulls the edge of the offensively bright blanket higher up her face to obscure the bleakly maniacal glint in her eyes, though Shi Qingxuan can’t see it.

Would you like to find out?

« Whatever Jun Wu asked you to do was that bad, huh? »

I’ve adjusted to the idea.

He Xuan is resigned, she finds, to this and to everything that will come; resigned and fatalistic. It is a welcome observation. She has to stop thinking of a way out. There will be no way out but through, and she knows where that will lead, where it has always led. Nothing has changed, despite temporary distraction.

Warmly, Shi Qingxuan replies, « You’ll be able to handle it. You’re super capable. »

Just as He Xuan had vowed to stay true to his own form, so had she promised herself, upon arriving at Paradise Manor with the bile of her own weakness on her tongue, that despite the goal of the visit, she would not allow herself to indulge in thoughts of Shi Qingxuan any longer.

He Xuan had again proven herself weak-willed.

As she approached orgasm, He Xuan’s cunt had twitched around Hua Cheng’s wrist at an image that came to her unbidden: Shi Qingxuan behind a heavy door with impenetrable locks. At He Xuan’s mercy, such as it is. He Xuan thought of how it would feel to watch the realization chart across Shi Qingxuan’s face that there is no escape, no exit; that He Xuan has enclosed her; that there is no meaningful way for Shi Qingxuan to resist.

She can recall the taste of Shi Qingxuan’s fear, and she wants it again, desperately, but not in fits and starts. She wants Shi Qingxuan in her grasp, between her jaws, held within a dark place. Helpless and untouched by the world. For her own part, He Xuan would do unspeakable things to her: unspeakable because He Xuan—whose skill with composition was such that, as a student, he never had a peer who didn’t resent him—simply does not have the words.

Unflattering former gifted kid moment.

But the satisfaction of the fantasy was limited. It reminded He Xuan of Ming Yi, fathoms below—a sour thought for the bedroom. There was a wrongness, too, to the vision of Shi Qingxuan contained. It’s Shi Qingxuan’s nature to go where she will. Take her freedom, and she becomes unrecognizable; a pale imitation of herself, nothing more.

Since sexuality originates in eating, it is always haunted by the imagery of ingestion, having neither an object nor a territory proper to itself. Yet eating, in its turn, exceeds the biological demand for nourishment, for it expresses the desire to possess the object unconditionally. […] The genesis of secrecy may also be attributed to eating, for it is well known that the best way to keep a secret is to eat the evidence. The stomach is a place almost as private as the grave. (Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists)

He Xuan then thought of Shi Qingxuan on a wide shore, extending unbroken on either side. Of holding Shi Qingxuan’s chin between her own finger and thumb, noting how little force it would take to prick her perfect skin. Of standing, wan and ragged, before Shi Qingxuan, and Shi Qingxuan seeing her bloodless pallor and knowing her for exactly what she is, knowing everything, and then sinking to her knees in fear, in deference, in reverence.

Shi Qingxuan’s tears falling from her cheeks to the sand as she vows that she will offer up her life, in penance, as He Xuan sees fit to use it, and then bending forward, and, steadying herself with trembling hands on the earth, kissing the hem of He Xuan’s robe.

He Xuan was aware, even at the time, of how pathetic a fantasy it was.

She now puts those thoughts in a box in her mind, and pictures herself twisting shut a lock, and then placing the box into a larger crate, and fastening that one shut, and then stowing the crate into a trunk, and casting the trunk into a pit in the bottom of the sea.

I will break her heart, He Xuan thinks to herself, as one makes an oath; not like a promise, but a curse, to reverberate through time and be reneged only at great peril: I will do it if it takes all the cruelty I can spare.

That bit obliquely influenced by a bit from Antigone’s Claim.

To Shi Qingxuan, she says, Capable enough.

TO BE CONTINUED!!!!

So that's that for Part 1 of this fic. This is the turning point in the story, the place where it moves from precanon speculation to a canon-era retelling of events we saw from different POV, and then onward to postcanon sorta-fix-it stuff. The sense of terrible inevitability was fun to wallow in, and I had lots of quotes and images pasted into various documents scrapbook-style to help me remember what I was going for. Here are a few:

Electra: By dread things I am compelled. I know that. I see the trap closing. I know what I am. But while life is in me I will not stop this violence. No. Oh my friends, who is there to comfort me? Who understands? Leave me be, let me go, do not soothe me. This is a knot no one can untie. There will be no rest, there is no retrieval. No number exists for griefs like these.

The survival of massive trauma seems to be characterized by a region of unknowable and unshakable experience. Simply put, there can never be another who can know the survivor in the moment of the “execution itself.” In her core, the trauma survivor remains solitary in the moment of her own extinction. No one knew her in the moment when she died without dying; no one knows her now, in her lived memory of annihilation. This place where she cannot be known is one of catastrophic loneliness; it is a solitude imbued with hate and fear and shame and despair. And it is an area of deadness strangely infused with a yearning for life. For unlike the dead, she is at once dead and yet left alive in the wake of her own destruction. Death has possessed her in its impenetrable solitude. But life makes her desire to be known in that solitude.

(David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature: Shakespeare to Milton; Sophocles’ Electra, tr. Anne Carson; Sue Grand, The Reproduction of Evil)

A Part 2 will be coming after I've had a few weeks to digest and reflect on the back half of the fic. ~~I'll be editing this part of the post to include a link once I do. If you made it this far, you're a champ.~~ PART 2 HERE! :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This was such a fun DVD commentary to read! I followed many of the links and read the essays (the one on Phyrexia and gender/horror/transformation was deeply fascinating), and the memes peppered throughout absolutely added to the 'canon' of the fic. Upon re-reads I will definitely think about those :D The mix of seeing what you would have/should have done with "I liked this part" were relatable as a fellow writer for sure. The "POV" you gave of HC's parts (since, in the fic, we only get HX's POV) were great at adding another layer to the story, again something I will consider on re-read. Thank you for posting this style of DVD extra, it was a very enjoyable read that made me appreciate the fic even more.

dvd commentary: pantingbed, pt. 1 of 2

panting like a dog at the edge of your bed

chapter one

chapter two

SHI QINGXUAN’S STORY

chapter three

Notes:

chapter four

chapter five

no subject