Chapter Text
There are footsteps behind him, pattering toward him at an alarming speed.
Blade turns, one hand on his sword already. Beheading isn’t his immediate reaction, but it’ll happen if whatever is approaching him is sufficiently annoying. Before he can even finish turning, though, something thuds into his side with a force that has him stumbling.
“What—” Blade starts, but is interrupted by a tearful cry.
“Yingxing-gege!”
The voice reaches his ears at the same time that he gets a look at whoever has barreled into him, their tiny arms wrapped around his waist. For a second, he’s thrown back not by hours or years but by centuries. It’s a dissociative experience, almost, as though he’s been displaced from time, as though he’s found himself in some sort of surreal memory.
Jing Yuan is the one clinging to his middle, with a fluffy head full of silver hair and both eyes visible, wide and wet and golden. He’s at a height that barely reaches Blade’s waist, the height he’d been when Jingliu had just taken him in.
When Blade had just met him. When Blade hadn’t yet been Blade, hadn’t yet become a weapon.
Blade’s fingers fall from the hilt of his sword, almost nervelessly. “That’s not my name,” his mouth says, reflexive.
And at the same time again, Jing Yuan sees his face. Blade’s appearance has changed, he knows, since the years that Jing Yuan knew him. His eyes have gone crimson-ochre with mara, the angles of his features sharper, colder, more monstrous. The way his hair has bled in with dark shades is hard to miss, but Jing Yuan must not have seen it clearly from a distance.
He does now, and he flinches, letting go of him. That he would be afraid is only to be expected, but Blade still feels something in his chest give a sudden twinge.
“I-I’m sorry, xiansheng,” Jing Yuan says anxiously. His voice is unmistakably young, too, softer and higher, as though the flutter of a bird’s wing.
The little bird takes a step back, hunching his shoulders slightly.
“I thought you were someone else—the clothes that you’re wearing…”
Is this a trick? Or some sort of illusion? But it feels too real, the way Jing Yuan had touched him. Has Blade finally gone mad, then, and succumbed to the mara? Is that why he’s seeing things?
He doesn’t get the chance to question this, nor the chance to speak. Shouts ring out from somewhere deeper in the Alchemy Commission, some kind of clamor or commotion. Jing Yuan shoots a frightened look behind him and swings his head around, searching for somewhere to hide himself, presumably. But Blade had been standing out on open ground, a lonely stretch of beach that fades down into the Vidyadhara sea. There’s nowhere else to run to, now that Jing Yuan has come running to him.
Around a distant corner, a group of Cloud Knights comes charging frantically into view. Searching for their missing general, most likely. That’s a good thing. They will take Jing Yuan out of Blade’s sight, and turn a blind eye to him like Jing Yuan has always asked for them to, and then Blade will be able to forget that this had ever happened.
But Jing Yuan darts behind him, and his little hands fist in the back of his coat. “Xiansheng!” he pleads, and it’s high with fear, urgent. “Please be careful! They’re dangerous.”
Blade had frozen for a moment at the familiarity of that tugging motion, but he unfreezes when he hears the warning. He has never known a Jing Yuan of any age to judge someone incorrectly, and the fingers that have latched onto Blade’s back are a little wobbly.
Blade doesn’t need to think, really. He draws his sword and throws an arm out to keep Jing Yuan behind him.
It turns out that the Cloud Knights had been disguised disciples of that cursed being, the Abundance. They must have… poisoned Jing Yuan, or something. He’d run from them, freshly a child and without any of his memories, and simply happened to flee in Blade’s direction.
Bad luck, on Blade’s part, or maybe this is what Kafka likes to call destiny. Even back then, Jing Yuan had been inexplicably drawn to him.
The impostors had made an attempt to convince him that they were real Cloud Knights here to bring the general back to the Alchemy Commission, but how would they have known that it was Jing Yuan when he looked like this? And even if they did, didn’t they have anything to say about the fact that it was Blade in front of them?
Blade was untalkative, not stupid. And he wasn’t going to lower his weapon when Jing Yuan was still stuck to his back like a particularly scared limpet.
The disciples had been rather quick to resort to violence. Not that Blade was opposed to this.
He had promptly taken the liberty of separating their heads from their bodies, as he’d originally intended for whichever person was coming to bother him.
Jing Yuan had flinched at the first splatter of blood over the beach, but he hadn’t tried to stop Blade, and he hadn’t let go of him. It was a little annoying swinging his sword when Jing Yuan was attached to him, even if he didn’t weigh enough to really slow his movements. But there was nothing special about these opponents. Blade could have killed them in his sleep, even if it did take a couple of tries before their mara exhausted itself and their limbs stopped regrowing.
…killing other abominations of abundance always made his own body sort of itch.
It was only when the last of the bodies ceased twitching that Jing Yuan’s fingers unclenched from the fabric of Blade’s clothing.
Blade looks down at him, not putting his sword away but keeping the weight of it tight in his grip. He’d slashed his other hand open during the fight, a habitual motion, and Jing Yuan’s eyes dart to the already healing injury, undoubtedly tucking away the information in that inquisitive mind of his.
“Well?” Blade says. It comes out rough, and he resists the urge to clear his throat, to soften his tone for him. “If you have something to say, say it while I’m still listening.”
Jing Yuan’s expression is cautious, but not particularly surprised by his methods. He must have expected when he’d requested help that Blade, with the shattered corpus of his weapon and the coldness of his countenance, would tread on such a path to rid the world of his opponents.
Jing Yuan puts his hands together quickly and bows to him at a perfect thirty-degree angle. “Xiexie, xiansheng.”
A confusing feeling swirls up in Blade. Discomfort at being seen like this. Annoyed that this has to be happening. Even more annoyed that Jing Yuan, even in this child’s body, won’t reveal what he truly thinks of him.
Jing Yuan peeks back up through the circle of his arms, the very picture of respectful. “You’re very skilled with the blade,” he says innocently.
Blade scowls at him.
“This one is… named A-Ming,” Jing Yuan says even more innocently.
Blade scowls harder, not giving him the satisfaction of figuring out whether Blade knows what his actual name is.
Jing Yuan wilts a little, but then lowers his hands and straightens up. He probably figures that if it actually was his Yingxing-gege, he wouldn’t have left him in the lurch for this long without teasing.
No. Blade doesn’t care about his logic. He doesn’t want to think about this.
“Since they’re dead,” he says, inclining his head at the scattered bodies surrounding them, “you should leave.”
The brusqueness isn’t enough to tamp down the feelings, but it does give him the excuse to start walking away from the scene. Unfortunately, Jing Yuan’s pitter-pattering footsteps follow him over the beach.
“Wait,” he calls after Blade, and then his voice grows a little nervous. “Please, if I may trouble you for another moment? Do you… do you know where I can find Yingxing-gege? The Furnace Master? You… you really look like him…”
The combination of the name and the title are too much, abruptly. Blade walks faster, something frothing in his stomach, sheathing his sword without bothering to clean the blood off its surface.
But Jing Yuan dogs him determinedly, so Blade forces himself to say, “He is no longer living.”
“W-what?!” Jing Yuan’s voice ratchets up in alarm. “What do you mean?! Did something happen to him? Where is Yinyue-jun?”
Did something happen? Of course, something happened. Everything happened, and Jing Yuan did nothing to prevent it, and now… Blade takes a deep breath. Now he doesn’t even know about it.
“If you say those names again,” he threatens on autopilot, “don’t blame me for what I will do to you.”
Jing Yuan quails, quiets. Blade doesn’t look back, but he can hear that Jing Yuan’s pace falters for an instant. Even so, he recovers rapidly, and when he speaks again, his voice is probing.
“Then… what is xiansheng doing outside of the Alchemy Commission? Does he also have enemies on the Luofu?”
Blade has nowhere near the patience to endure these questions, nor to endure the look in Jing Yuan’s eyes as he tries to study Blade for his intentions, his plans, his weaknesses. Never mind that he is too young to have mastered any of it. The attempt is enough to grate at Blade’s teeth.
“Go to the Divination Commission,” he says, an order. “They’ll answer your questions.”
Having effectively ended the conversation, he goes to stalk across the wooden platform that leads out of the beach. But Jing Yuan’s footsteps simply continue trailing after him like an irritating shadow that won’t leave.
Fine. Whatever. Blade won’t bother chasing him off, as long as he stays quiet.
Jing Yuan doesn’t stay quiet, but he does eventually scamper out of sight after Blade comes to a stop in the Exalting Sanctum.
He’ll be here for the next few weeks, killing time until Kafka is free to pick him up for his next assignment. It’s not the ideal place to leave him, but she had just eased his mara recently, and it wasn’t as though either of them had known that this would happen. The repeated reminders of the past are starting to wear at him, sanding down the delicate constraints of his consciousness.
Jing Yuan may be little, but he knows what he’s doing. It had only been a few years at this point until his first expedition and his first singlehanded victory. So he circles back to Blade, over and over again. Doesn’t approach him anymore, but does stick close, if just out of view. All Blade catches are flashes of his hair ribbon, a vibrant red around the corners of alleyways and at the ends of every few streets.
He must be able to tell that his surroundings are unfamiliar, that this Luofu is no longer the same as the place he had lived in. That things have become different, and therefore dangerous. He spends his time gathering information, always in Blade’s periphery—remaining close to someone who has already demonstrated an ability and, more importantly, a willingness to protect him.
Blade’s headache is worsening just thinking about it. Why won’t Jing Yuan go to the Cloud Knights? Someone who can put him back to how he was? Why does it have to be him?
He snaps at Jing Yuan to stay away to no avail, using his ridiculous fake name and everything, but Jing Yuan had never been one to listen to him, and so he keeps following.
The hours turn into a day, then two. Blade doesn’t know where Jing Yuan is sleeping, or if he’s sleeping at all, for fear of Blade vanishing somewhere without him knowing.
Blade waits for the Luofu to descend into chaos, but it never happens. No search parties are sent out, not visibly, at least. The Seat of Divine Foresight is silent.
Of course they wouldn’t want to announce that their general was missing, to thrust the Luofu into panic. Not until they’ve determined what has happened, or whatever it is they’re thinking. Blade has always hated the political machinations of these ships.
But not more than he hates that no matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop thinking about where Jing Yuan is.
When a while has passed since Blade has last caught a glimpse of him, he reverses course and starts quietly tracking him—he passes by his own wanted posters, so Jing Yuan must have seen them, and newsstands with Jing Yuan’s title on the headlines, so he must know who he is.
Jing Yuan hasn’t strayed far from Blade’s location. Only far enough to get into an argument, apparently.
If he’s been talking to other people these past few days, Blade hasn’t seen it—Jing Yuan doesn’t seem to want to be found by anybody until he knows everything. But today he’s run into a group of gossipmongers wasting daylight whispering about the Sedition, because of course he had to, and now he’s shouting angrily at them about the Yinyue-jun he knew.
Where has all that intelligence gone? Doesn’t he know about the Ten Unpardonable Sins? If he keeps making a racket about this in public, he’s going to get himself and the lot of them arrested.
Blade starts to step in, but Jing Yuan sees him getting close and runs off furiously.
As if raising his voice had knocked something loose inside of him, Jing Yuan runs all the way to the Artisanship Commission, and gets into an argument all over again when the poor artisan he interrogates doesn’t have any information for him on the person he’s looking for within.
The pounding in Blade’s head only keeps building.
Jing Yuan must know by now the date on the star calendar, how many years it’s been. He must have discerned the reason for his current state, the broad strokes of the attempt on his life if not the specifics, and he must understand what the passage of centuries has to mean.
And he could have accepted that the people for whom he is searching were no longer here, maybe—what he can’t seem to accept is not knowing. The only thing worse than one of them being hated is the rest of them being forgotten.
Why is Jing Yuan always so stubborn? Why does he never understand these things?
Blade doesn’t know, and the thread of his sanity is already tenuous enough without ruminating on this. He turns and goes back to Aurum Alley, the empty little corner of it where he’s been staying.
After a few hours of restless meditation, it occurs to him that in all this time, he hasn’t seen Jing Yuan eating. Of course, he hasn’t seen much of him at all—but Jing Yuan wouldn’t have had any strales on him, and he certainly isn’t the type to steal from anybody.
Is this headache ever going to leave?
Blade fetches a meal for him and sets it out on the corner, as though he’s courting a stray cat who refuses to greet him. There’s no movement for several hours, but the plate is gone in the morning.
After a few more days of keeping Jing Yuan fed in the most roundabout possible way, Blade’s irritation reaches its limit.
“Come out,” he says, finally, in the direction that he’s fairly sure Jing Yuan is lurking in. He can’t actually tell, which is even more irritating. The kid’s gotten better at hiding his traces.
Blade continues, “You’re tiring me. You can stay in sight as long as you don’t make any trouble.”
Nothing. Not even a breeze.
“I’ll stop leaving food out,” he menaces. “Aren’t you scared of starving?”
Jing Yuan doesn’t know him well enough to know that he’s lying, which does make the threat effective but also feels vaguely underhanded. He emerges from the shadow just to the left of where Blade had thought he’d been, appearance a lot more disheveled than the last time Blade had seen him.
His hair has come loose, his ribbon tied in a knot around his wrist. He’s found time to wash, at some point, but dust and dirt cling to his clothes. More than that, his young face has settled into a firm distrust, which is an expression that Blade recognizes, but one that had taken seven hundred years for the Jing Yuan of the present to develop.
“What,” Blade says flatly. “Is that how you look at someone who saved your life and fed you?”
“You’re wanted by the Luofu,” Jing Yuan says directly. “You’re marastruck, aren’t you?”
The pang of concern that had risen in Blade’s chest melts and twists into that now familiar frothing feeling. If you know I’m marastruck, then why are you provoking me?
“Asking unnecessary questions counts as making trouble,” he grits out, dangerously.
“You know what happened,” Jing Yuan further accuses. He rocks a step forward, and his golden eyes have narrowed into an actual glare, something that doesn’t suit a face as small as his.
“Did you have something to do with it? Tell me.”
The air turns hot in Blade’s throat, drying it out, a crackling feeling. Jing Yuan’s hostility is uncharacteristic—being alone for all this time must have rattled him, and, well, Blade hasn’t been particularly gentle or forthcoming.
Nor does he intend to be.
“Leave it alone,” he sneers. “A brat like you wouldn’t understand anything.”
“Don’t call me that!”
The raise in volume actually startles Blade. Jing Yuan has clenched his fingers into fists.
“Only Yingxing-gege is allowed to call me that,” he insists.
And a sort of vertigo comes over Blade, very abruptly—an anger that punches into him, surpassing every other sensation, so intense it leaves him dizzy.
“I’ll call you whatever I want, A-Ming,” he retorts, hissing out of him. “Your ‘gege’ is long gone, haven’t you heard it enough times already? He isn’t here to stop me.”
For all his goading intentions, Blade isn’t expecting Jing Yuan to actually launch himself at him.
He manages to smack Blade under the chin before Blade catches him—a blow that’s more startling than painful, more like a kitten’s declawed paw batting at him than anything. Jing Yuan is full of mettle, but he’d never been a very talented combatant. It had been nothing short of hard work that had brought him to his current position, and as a child, he hasn’t had anywhere near enough of that training.
All that to say, Blade throws him off quite easily.
Too easily. Jing Yuan hits the ground shoulder first with a loud crack, and Blade stops in his tracks, the sound of it reverberating over him.
He hadn’t meant to do that. Hadn’t been watching the strength in his movements. He may be marastruck, but that doesn’t mean he makes a habit of beating children.
But the injury doesn’t seem to give Jing Yuan a shred of pause. He climbs up immediately, clutching at his shoulder, and his eyes are burning with even more fury.
He throws himself at Blade again, and when Blade tries to sidestep him, he kicks up a cloud of dirt that sends a searing shot of pain through Blade’s vision.
Blade staggers and swings his hand out on instinct, a loud thud of impact that sends Jing Yuan crashing to the floor for the second time in as many minutes.
Jing Yuan tumbles several feet over the stone before coming to a stop. Blade is tasting blood now, caught like spiderwebs between his lips. He isn’t sure where it’s coming from, or if it’s real; the world is starting to change color, splotching with red and yellow around the edges.
His body pulses all over. His breathing comes out heavily.
“Enough,” he growls, trying to stumble a step back, to grasp white-knuckled onto what little remains of his awareness. When the mara comes over him, he becomes a different person—loses the ability to discriminate between targets.
“Stay—stay down,” Blade warns. “Don’t get up again.”
Jing Yuan gets up, as though he hasn’t heard him. He’s bleeding from the mouth, a red mark blooming on his face where Blade had hit him. Hard enough to give him a concussion, probably, and Blade is getting even more dizzy, or Jing Yuan is wobbling on his feet, or both of those things.
Even so, Jing Yuan stays standing. Always been—he’s always been like this—
“Then take it back!” he screams at Blade. “Tell me where Yingxing-gege is!”
—and the rest of the world smears into that same red, his throbbing vision swallowing the rest of him. Blade loses his grip on who he is, a distorted second body.
Hands, jaws, the strangling vines of his cardiovascular system—all he can think about is ripping the shape in front of him open.
“He’s dead,” his vocal cords snarl, or maybe it’s a rotten fruit spilling its insides into the sickly summer heat, or maybe it’s someone else’s sword twisting in him. “He’s been dead for centuries. He turned himself into the very thing he sought to destroy. He’s no longer human.”
The image in front of him wavers in that same pyrexial heat, and Blade’s mouth won’t stop moving.
“Your Yinyue-jun? He committed the most unpardonable of sins. He failed, and he has paid nowhere close to the price for it. He will pay. When I see him again, I will kill him.”
“Stop it!” Jing Yuan yells at him. “You’re lying!”
He barely even manages to get close this time. Blade kicks him down harshly enough that he feels several ribs splinter, and his foot presses down harder, keeping Jing Yuan pinned to the ground beneath him.
Jing Yuan makes a horrible, choked sound of pain, hollow air, folding wings, but he doesn’t cease clawing at Blade’s leg with the one usable hand he has—he just won’t stop struggling.
Stupid. From in the thick of the mire, that thought manages to surface. Wasn’t this the first thing Jingliu should have taught him? Never to fight an enemy he knew he couldn’t beat.
That unwanted name hammers all over him, the phantom gore of his every limb, and Blade is hauled back under, pouring it out like his entrails are acid.
“Baiheng… she became a monster. Nothing like the one you knew. And Jingliu… she slew her mercilessly, and then thousands of the Cloud Knights who came to subdue her after the mara consumed her entirely.”
“You’re lying,” Jing Yuan sobs, and writhes against him more weakly.
Blade raises his foot and kicks him again, without any sense of what he’s doing; more ribs break under his shoe, as if a pane of glass or corroded iron, and Jing Yuan coughs up blood, curving over the floor like a bowstring.
The terror must set in, then, a haze that mixes with all the rest of it, and Jing Yuan tries to pull his hands together beneath him. Tries to crawl away, but collapses back down as his palms slip on the wet surface.
Blade is in a haze of his own. He advances blindly on him.
“And you…”
He grabs Jing Yuan by the wrist, opposite of the shoulder he had injured previously. Jing Yuan flinches hard, his eyes dilating, but Blade drags him up venomously. Dangles him a few feet above the ground, heedless of his broken body; Jing Yuan kicks weakly at him, gasping for air, but his efforts are useless.
“S-stop,” Jing Yuan cries, “stop, stop, let go of me—”
“You knew better than all of us, the price we would have to pay,” Blade snarls, like a mouthful of split teeth. His fingers tighten around Jing Yuan’s wrist until something snaps, sickeningly.
Jing Yuan cuts into a jagged sob, going limp in his grip. Blade does not hear him. Blade does not hear anything.
“Yet you said nothing. You did nothing. You let this happen, and you were the only one who got to walk away from it. And now…”
An overturning in his chest, and he is half-in and half-out of his existence. The rage blurs over the rupturing boundaries of his body, barely recognizable as his.
“Now you refuse to even accept it!”
Jing Yuan isn’t fighting anymore, but Blade’s hand still surges toward him—not knowing what it’s doing until it closes around Jing Yuan’s throat and squeezes. Jing Yuan makes a scared whine of a noise and comes back alive a bit, scrabbling futilely at Blade’s bandaged wrist.
Blade’s pulse is a flood in his ears, his lungs, the scorching kaleidoscope of colors under his skin. Wildly out of alignment, and he has killed people for far less feeling than this.
Only—
“I’m sorry!” Jing Yuan chokes out, a barely audible wheeze in the circle of Blade’s fingertips. His eyes roll back in his head, and everything roars a little out of focus—for him, for Blade, for the rapid, airless constriction of the world around the both of them.
“Pl, please,” Jing Yuan begs, and then, “ge, gege, please—”
Blade drops him very suddenly.
Jing Yuan crumples to the floor, crumples into a shivering, boneless heap. Blade jerks a step back, and then another, his breathing shoving itself out of him, a disorientation that crawls all over him as the mara recedes.
Enough for him to feel the wetness on the back of his hand, the streaks of red and clear fluid over his skin—neither belonging to him, and he is getting double vision.
Where is he? Why is Jing Yuan here? What is he doing?
Blade’s fingers cramp up. He swallows blood and spit and nausea compulsively. He looks at Jing Yuan, and now he can’t stop looking.
As if the sight will undo itself if he blinks enough times, if his heart beats its way out of his thoracic cavity. As if his awareness will disappear and return to a different reality, and this will turn out to have been some feverish spawn of his imagination.
“…you…” Blade says. His voice is hoarse, raw in his throat as though he’s been shouting. He’s been shouting. Has he been shouting?
What is he doing? What is he doing?
At the sound of his voice, Jing Yuan shudders violently, and then curls in on himself in an abrupt, terrified motion. “I’m sorry,” he pleads again, and then, as though he can’t stop once he’s started, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I didn’t mean it I won’t do it again I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—”
He had been wary as a little kid, Blade remembers as if through a dream. When Jingliu had taken him as her disciple, she had more or less adopted him, even though she never said it, even though Jing Yuan never seemed to notice. Perceptive as he was, he was completely oblivious about the most important of things—the silent ways in which she and in which all of them cared about him.
But of course, that hadn’t been without reason. Jing Yuan’s parents hadn’t wanted him to become a Cloud Knight. Mostly, they hadn’t wanted any of him. Jing Yuan was diligent, and eager to please, but he had a will of his own, and until he’d run they’d tried their best to stamp it out of him. Loud noises frightened him for several years. He would freeze up when Jingliu scolded him.
Baiheng would always stop her, and Jingliu seemed to acknowledge it, looking away until she had calmed down enough to say her piece without raising her voice at him. Slowly, all of them learned where the lines were, learned how not to cross them—and Jing Yuan grew up, and grew more into himself, and one day the person Blade had been had lost his temper at him and Jing Yuan had hardly reacted, only continuing to squabble playfully with him.
The Jing Yuan curled up on the floor in front of him hasn’t yet had the chance to shed those fears from his skin. And even if he did, Blade has ruined it. Blade has ruined everything.
A vertigo runs like still water all over him. He reaches out, and Jing Yuan doesn’t even recoil. He goes completely still, like a prey animal that knows it’s about to die and is too afraid to even be afraid of it.
“Jing Yuan,” Blade says, ragged and unthinking—but Jing Yuan makes an awful gasp of a sound and looks up at him with a horrified, haunted expression.
“Y…” His voice is shaking so hard that Blade can barely hear it. “Yingxing-gege?”
And Blade’s stomach drops entirely out of his body.
Shit.