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Jiang Yanli didn’t know what to do when she heard her a-niang screaming.
She had never heard her a-niang scream. Her voice had always been sharp and cold, like an icicle about to fall to fall onto someones’ head. The only emotions Jiang Yanli could say ever made their way out her a-niangs’ mouth were disgust, disdain, and pride. The only exceptions were when she got into fights with a-die, any emotions that could be heard were hidden under a thick overcoat of rage. When she yelled she was loud enough that you could hear her from outside the house. It didn’t matter where inside the argument was taking place or if all the windows and doors were closed, Yu Ziyuan always made sure her voice was heard even if she had nothing nice to say. Though Yu Ziyuan yelled, she did not scream.
When she heard her a-niang shriek Jiang Yanli didn’t move. She didn’t even recognize it as her a-niang. The sound felt foreign, as if it didn’t belong to Jiang Yanlis’ mother. The sound didn’t seem like something that should’ve been able to leave her mouth, the woman had never reacted to much unless it was an opening for a one-sided argument or debate, yet there was no one else that scream could have belonged to. Jiang Yanli had heard her father, Jiang Fengmian, scream when he woke up in the dead of night from night terrors. She had also heard her younger brother, Jiang Cheng, scream whenever they watched a horror movie together. For half a second her brain entertained the idea of her brother bringing a girl home and the scream being hers but quickly dismissed it.
The scream lasted longer than one caused by a horror movie jump-scare and, as far as Jiang Yanli was aware, her a-niang did not take naps that ended in getting woken up by night terrors, she didn't even get night terrors. Jiang Yanli stood up at the dying end of the scream and unlocked the door to her bedroom, poking her head into the hallway so she could guess where the scream was coming from, it didn’t help that they lived in a three story house with a severe echo problem.
She looked back at her room and at the array she had been drawing in the middle of the floor where her rug should have been. The ink wasn't dry yet, at best it was tacky. She couldn't afford to get caught, not when she was so close to finishing the array after her previous six failed attempts. She couldn't risk smudging and destroying her progress by hiding it under the rug either.
Patting her pant pockets to make sure she had her phone and a pen on her, Jiang Yanli pushed and twisted her doorknob from the inside, stepped into the hallway, and closed the door behind her, listening to the lock click in place. She planned to start in the kitchen since it had the biggest echo problem compared to the other rooms. If her a-niang wasn’t there then Jiang Yanli would move her way up until she found her. She ran down the hall lined with empty guestrooms that never saw use and down the staircase, grateful that her room was on the second floor and not the third. The staircase split into two and lined the curved walls of the foyer, as if inviting people to come upstairs before going to the living room and kitchen beyond the archway. The kitchen and living room were separated only by flooring, the kitchens being white marble tiles while the living room floor was vinyl printed to look like dark brown wood. Her a-niang called it open-plan and modern, Jiang Cheng called it a mini panopticon.
Freezing at the foot of the stairs, scared of what lied beyond the archway, Jiang Yanli called out from where she stood. "A-niang, are you okay? Did you scream?" There was a clatter of something metal falling to the floor. The sudden sound made her flinch. Then a small voice, as tearful as a voice could get, responded. "Jiejie?" Jiang Yanli lost all her hesitation and ran into the kitchen at the sound of her little brothers’ voice.
Jiang Yanli was greeted by a sight she had only seen in horror films. Jiang Cheng stood in the kitchen with his back to the sink and their a-niangs’ body at his feet. Yu Ziyuan was laying in what could only be a fast growing pool of her own blood. She laid face down on the tiled floor, her hair up in a bun, exposing her half-chopped off neck. It bled fast, as though her neck had been a dam holding back nothing but gore. By Yu Ziyuans’ side was a meat cleaver that she had bought on a business trip a few years back, Jiang Yanli had forgotten the cleaver even existed but its bloody presence was undeniable. If not for the body, its presence would’ve commanded the room. Jiang Yanlis’ eyes darted rapidly from her brother, the knife, and their mother, trying to take the scene in without throwing up or screaming herself.
Eventually she made eye contact with Jiang Cheng. Her younger brother had tears in his eyes and blood splatter on his cheek. She waved him over and he ran, wrapping his arms around her torso and hiding his face in her shoulder. In the back of her mind Jiang Yanli remembered that Jiang Cheng was thirteen now, a growth spurt was expected, but he had grown so fast. She was expecting him to hide his face in her side and hug her leg like he did when they were younger. Though she was surprised, Jiang Yanli wrapped her younger brother in her arms as he cried into her shoulder. She ran her hands through his hair and drew circles in his back, each kind action only made him cry harder.
After a few moments he pulled himself away but Jiang Yanli kept her hands on his elbows. Jiang Cheng began to frantically speak through his tears, trying to get his words out as fast as possible before the sobs caught up to them. "It was an accident I promise jiejie, I really- I don't know I just got scared and the knife was in the sink and she was getting so close and close-closer and-and she raised her hand and she had so-so many-so many rings," Jiang Cheng took a series of quick and shaky breaths, sounding as if he were about to faint. "Jiejie I'm sorry I'm so sorry I promise jiejie I didn’t mean- believe me, please believe me." He fell into his sisters shoulder and began to violently shake and cry, choking on tears and snot, gasping for breath like he was drowning.
Jiang Cheng was quick to anger, Jiang Yanli knew this like a child knew to not stare at the sun. He assumed the worst from everyone and believed everyone assumed the worst of him. Despite this, Jiang Cheng had never gotten into a real fight. He spoke in insults and threatened people, but Jiang Yanli had never seen or heard of him getting physical. He would hit his friends in the shoulder if they made bad jokes and kick them under the table to to shut them up, but that was the most violent she had seen him get. The trembling boy in her arms was her didi, begging for forgiveness for a crime she would have never thought him capable of, if not for the scene in front of her.
Jiang Yanli pulled down her rolled up sleeves and tried to wipe the ever-flowing tears off her brothers face. "A-cheng, do you know how to unlock the door to my room?" she asked softly. When he shook his head no, she pulled the pen out from her pocket and put it in his hands. "I know you know how to get the cartridge out the pen, the hole in the middle of my doorknob, push the cartridge into that hole until it feels like your pressing down on something, then, twist the knob until there’s a click noise, okay?" She cupped her brothers face in her hands. "Don’t touch anything." Jiang Cheng nodded then ran out the archway and up the stairs, clutching the pen to his chest like a lifeline. Jiang Yanli stood frozen, one foot on the living room vinyl and the other on marble tiles. Now that Jiang Cheng was gone she could not take her eyes of the body of her mother.
Yu Ziyuan was not a woman that was supposed to die. She was supposed to become one of those women you see at the park who could be anything from sixty to a hundred years old. She was supposed to outlive whatever descendants she'd end up with, only dying after she could find a one to be proud of. An impossible task considering the womans’ standards, but Yu Ziyuan always got what she wanted. She was not supposed to bleed out on the floor of her kitchen from a gash in her neck. The wound was jagged, like Jiang Cheng had struggled to pull the cleaver out their mothers neck. Though he had a growth spurt he was still shorter than their mother, still weaker than her. Her half-slashed neck was pouring out onto the tile, it pooled underneath her body and stained her white suit, the one she wore whenever she had an important meeting with investors or something of the like. Jiang Yanli didn’t know if her a-niang was going to or coming back from a meeting but hoped that it wasn’t the former, her absence would absolutely be noted and someone would call her phone if not the house number. If those failed someone would message a-die and ask if he knew why his wife was a no-show and he'd probably call Jiang Yanli — or heavens forbid, Jiang Cheng — to ask if their mother had come home.
For a moment, all she did was stare at the body. Then, Jiang Yanli knelt by her a-niangs’ side and propped her body up against the kitchen cabinets, keeping a hand on the neck so her mothers head wouldn't fall or twist off. A few years ago Yu Ziyuan broke her leg and needed help moving around, she refused to admit this and adamantly refused others help, however, she still accepted Jiang Yanli’s help. Handing Yu Ziyuan her crutches or helping her stand would earn Jiang Yanli her the little praise that her mother was willing to give out. Propping her mothers body up was a morbid reminder of one of the few good memories Jiang Yanli had of her a-niang. Jiang Yanlis’ feet, legs, and hands quickly became drenched in her a-niangs’ blood as the wound continued to leak. She didn’t blink, trying to prevent her tears from falling onto her a-niangs’ body. A voice in the back of Jiang Yanlis’ head told her that Yu Ziyuan did not deserve her tears; Yu Ziyuan was the first person to make Jiang Yanli hate herself. Her weak cultivation, her body, her grades, her face. She had once banned Jiang Yanli from joining school clubs — "Why? You aren’t good at anything, joining a club would be asking for public humiliation." — keeping her trapped at home. The tears sat on her waterline, begging to fall but Jiang Yanli shut her eyes and wiped them away with her arm.
Jiang Yanli reached for the cleaver and made her way back to her bedroom. She kept her hands and murder weapon close to her body, trying to stop the blood trail she left behind from being any bigger than it was but failing. Jiang Cheng had left the bedroom door slightly open. She nudged the door open with her shoulder and saw her brother sitting on her bed, wrapped up in a blanket and staring at the array on the floor. He looked up at his sister, eyes widening as she entered the room and knelt in front of the array. "What are you doing?" he asked, voice still trembling. Jiang Yanli kept her eyes focused on the array, unable to look at her brother and have to see the fear in his face. "This is a summoning array," she explained. "I don't know if it works but, if it does, it means we get help." Jiang Yanli had left the array unfinished, most of the patterns meant to be in the innermost circle hadn’t been drawn yet nor had she even gotten started on the seal script meant to encircle the array in its entirety. Jiang Yanli took her red hand to the floor and began to finish the array in blood.
The summoning array was created sometime during the Northern Wei and Liu Song dynasties, an unknown amount of years after a war between cultivation clans. Jiang Yanlis’ research differed on who had originally come up with the array; a bastard son to one of the clans that had participated in that cultivation war or a spy from that war who switched sides on a whim and ended up being a serial killer. Honestly, Jiang Yanli didn't care about who had come up with the array, it didn’t matter if all that remained were weathered and completely unreadable notes. It had taken Jiang Yanli a year to come up with what she thought it looked like based off artifacts. That first design had failed miserably. Her following attempts were closer but were all smoke and no fire.
That was when she was fourteen, now she sixteen going on seventeen. Almost three years of trial and error and six failed attempts got Jiang Yanli to the pattern she was finishing up with her mothers blood. If the array didn't work, Jiang Yanli was prepared to roll her mothers body up in a rug and bury it in the backyard. The 'help' she told Jiang Cheng she was trying to summon was the spirit of a supposed demonic cultivator, the Yiling laozu; The Yiling Patriarch, War hero turned number one wanted man in the entire Jianghu. From what Jiang Yanli read, the Yiling laozu had been the classic tale of a promising and charismatic young man who fell into darkness after his curiosity had gone unchecked. Only two weeks before war declared, he had gone missing. No one had known where he was for three months until they found him infiltrating and destroying an enemy base by himself. The Yiling laozu spoke little of the time he spent missing, though many agreed something horrible must’ve happened in those three months as, upon his return, The Patriarch had begun to cultivate using resentful energy instead of continuing the orthodox path. Reports from a major clan claimed that, after the war, the resentful energy began to corrupt his mind and he grew twisted and mad with power. Though, those who were close to him said that he was mostly fine if not a bit agitated at such claims. He was killed in his early twenties and ever since, the desperate have been trying to summon his spirit as a last ditch call for help.
Jiang Yanli wasn't sure why she had wanted to summon him in the first place, she thinks she wanted him to kill her. Fourteen had been the worst year of her life. That had been when her mother broke her leg. The injury became reason for her to work from home, which meant that Yu Ziyuan could grossly insert herself into her childrens’ lives, despite already being such a prominent and terrifying presence. Though Jiang Yanli was praised whenever she helped her mother, it was scattered between thousands of snipes and jeers. Yu Ziyuans’ comments on Jiang Yanlis’ appearance had been constant since her birth, but, they became harder to ignore as she hit puberty and grew more self-conscious with each passing look in the mirror. In her mothers eyes, she fluctuated from eating too much or too little on a daily basis. Her skin became a common argument, she had too much acne and wrinkles, or her eyebrows were too thick and dark. Jiang Yanli hadn’t worn half the clothes in her closet in years, her mother claiming that they showed off to much skin — "You’re wearing those to get attention I just know it, don’t even try and deny it, just because you wear revealing clothes doesn't mean boys will like you, you aren’t even pretty enough in the face." — even though she rarely left the house in anything but her school uniform with sweatpants under her skirt. Every thought Jiang Yanli had about herself was repeated and amplified tenfold by her a-niang. It became too much. She covered the mirror in her room with a blanket and started showering in the dark, anytime she looked at her reflection Jiang Yanli would spent up to an hour picking at her skin, giving herself lesions and cuts with chewed off nails.
The first summoning attempt had been desperate and messy, the second was more researched but still done in a frenzy with an unclear mind. After her third try at summoning failed it became a test of skill, a way for Jiang Yanli to prove herself to herself. She had spent so much time and effort into contacting the archaeologists who had found the weathered notebooks; researching the logic behind array patterns and each of their components; how much spiritual energy an array needed based on its parts and the materials used to draw it out. The summoning array became a passion project, it got her mind off her appearance and her mothers words until they became whispers lost in the wind. If she could successfully recreate a complex array from nothing but fragments of the past and her own mind, then why would it matter that she wasn't pretty?
By the time Jiang Yanli had finished drawing the array, the blood on her right hand had been used up as well as most the blood on the cleaver. Jiang Cheng had been silent the entire time. When Jiang Yanli looked up he was no longer sitting on the bed. He was still wrapped up in her blanket, but now he sat across from her on the other end of the array. He looked up at the her and cleared his throat. "Do you want me to help you activate it?" he asked. Jiang Yanli knew her brother was clever, she didn't know how long he had been staring at the array but he had clearly noticed that it needed inane amounts of spiritual energy.
Pushing spiritual energy from your meridians into anything — an array, another person, a talisman, even a wound — was supposed to feel like going on a run, that being tiring. The better you were and the more practice you got, the less tired you were supposed to be. Good cultivators had enough spiritual energy flowing through their meridians to fight an army all by themselves. Jiang Yanli had never been a good cultivator. For one reason or another she always got tired far too fast. Jiang Yanli recalled the first time she had drawn the array, how she had nearly passed out from how much it had taken from her meridians and how empty she felt in the days after. Her following attempts all had some kind of talisman meant to supplement the energy she lacked. She hadn’t considered another persons help before.
She nodded at her brother. "I'm gonna count down from five, when I say one, we activate it," she said while placing both hands on the array. Jiang Yanli took in a deep breath and made eye contact with Jiang Cheng who already had his palms on the ink drawn part of the array. She began to count down. "Five, four, three, one!"
Jiang Cheng panicked when Jiang Yanli skipped to one but kept his hands steady on the array, pushing his spiritual energy into the ink and blood. Jiang Yanli kept her hands on the part drawn in blood, her energy moved through the blood more effortlessly than it had through ink. It was the difference between cutting butter that had been left out in the sun and cutting ice. The array sparked before it began to glow underneath their hands. It started out an orange gold, white sparks that remained present in all her Jiang Yanlis’ attempts erupting at her and her brothers’ hands. Jiang Yanli looked away for a moment so that the sparks wouldn’t get her eyes. When she looked back the array had begun to glow a blue so pale it bordered on white. She stared in surprise, 'That didn’t happen before' she thought curiously. Jiang Yanli glanced up at her brother who was gawking at the array.
Sparks began to fly through the air in greater and greater numbers until neither of the siblings could safely keep their eyes open. For a half-second, the sound of sparks sizzling stopped. Immediately after came the sound of a deafeningly close explosion, like a firework going off next to your ear. The two of them were thrown back by a kickback of energy from the array. Jiang Cheng held his arms up in front of his face as if blocking a punch, he was whipped across the room midair and hit his sisters bed, just avoiding the thin metal bed-frame. Jiang Yanli skidded across the floor with her hands around her neck and chin tucked into her chest. Her back hit the door and she curled into herself on impact. The cleaver landed a few feet away from her head and embedded itself into the floor with a thud. Their ears rang and, for a moment, all either of them could see was dark grey smoke rising from where the array had been.
Jiang Yanli got up first. The pain from hitting the door felt like a thousand needles were stuck in her back. It made her tear up and only intensified as she moved but she needed to see if they had failed or not. She kept one hand on the door to steady herself and stretched the other out in front of her to wave the smoke away. Coughing, she made her way towards the array. Jiang Yanli was hunched over herself in pain, and, unable to clearly see where she was going, she bumped into someone. They were too tall to be Jiang Cheng but there was no way they were her a-die. Whoever they were they were bony and thin, unhealthily so. She looked down and rubbed her forehead only for her eyes widened in shock. She was standing in the array, or what remained of it. The blood and ink had turned to ash underneath her feet. Jiang Yanli would’ve thought about how the pattern she had painstakingly drawn was now mere dust if not for the pair of bare, dirt covered feet in front of her. Her head shot up and Jiang Yanli found herself staring at a man she had only seen in artifacts, who she had been trying to summon for years, the Yiling laozu.
Art of the Yiling laozu in the decade after his death had been obvious propaganda. He was depicted like he was one of the corpses he took resentful energy from, nauseatingly inhuman and uncanny. Most paintings showed him murdering innocents and raising the dead, or being defeated with an anonymous sword halfway through his stomach. Inaccurate as they were, the propaganda pieces were what remained of The Patriarchs’ appearance. Jiang Yanli however, had been sent a scan of an unfinished portrait by one of the archaeologists she had contacted while researching the array. The archaeologist believed it to be of the Yiling laozu, before the Jianghu turned against him. The e-mail the scan was attached to claimed it was drawn by his martial sister, her name lost to time and now known only as Jiang furen, the first born and only daughter of the Jiang Clan as well as wife to the late heir of the Jin clan, Jin Zixuan. Though odd for her era, Jiang furen allegedly insisted on being referred to by her natal clans’ name instead of her husbands’. The portrait was painted in only black, like Jiang furen didn't have any other colours available rather than it being an artistic choice. The Patriarch was smiling with a closed mouth and crescent eyes, not a deviously evil grin like the propaganda portraits but rather something much more genuine and playful that was clearly directed to the woman drawing him. He had high cheekbones and tired eyes, Jiang furen had apparently deemed his eye bags as a necessary detail she couldn’t omit, even in the beginning stages of the painting. His hair was untied, dark, and silky. It blended into his fine black robes which sat lose on his figure, it was as if they had once been tailored to him but he had shrunk.
The man — or spirit, perhaps — standing before Jiang Yanli was surprisingly similar to the unfinished portrait if not for the fact he was semi-transparent. She could see Jiang Cheng, siting on her bed and staring at the two of them in a daze, through The Patriarchs’ body. The Patriarchs’ hair and robes were dark, though unlike the portrait, neither seemed to be well kept. His inky hair was half tied up and matted with mud. Some of his hair fell in front of his face, too short to be tied back they instead stuck to his face like sweat. His dark robes only had their colour from being unwashed, they were covered in layers of grime and Jiang Yanli could’ve sworn she saw blood in them. They were made from threadbare fabric and were patched up with cloth that was both an entirely different material and colour. Jiang furen had made his eye bags look reasonable, maybe three late nights or early mornings, but the man before Jiang Yanli had eye bags so deep they were beginning to scab. His cheeks were sunken and his skin was tan yet desaturated, he had evidently been outside for hours but the grey tint made him seem malnourished. Though he was depicted as an evil and vindictive man in the years after his death, the Yiling laozu in front of Jiang Yanli looked exhausted.
He looked at her with his head cocked to the side, examining Jiang Yanli with an air of confusion. Jiang Yanli mentally scolded herself, 'If I was him I’d be confused too.' she thought. She took a few steps back before bowing ninety degrees with her hands in front of her head, like she had seen in historical dramas. "Yiling laozu," she half shouted, still in shock that her array worked. "My brother and I have summoned you because we need your help!" She looked up at the summoned spirit with her head still bowed. He looked surprised from what she could see. He opened his mouth to speak but paused. He hid his mouth behind a fist and cleared his throat. "You and your brother?" he asked, his voice sounding like he hadn't used it in years. Jiang Yanli could almost see the cobwebs between each syllable. She nodded as best she could while still bowing. "He should be behind you," she responded. The Yiling Patriarch looked behind him, the smoke had died down enough that he could see Jiang Cheng with a blanket wrapped around him. Jiang Cheng startled when The Patriarch looked at him and he got off the bed to try and copy his sisters bow. "No you don’t..." The Patriarch said, trailing off at the end. Jiang Cheng froze, his hands in front of his head but standing completely straight. Jiang Yanli felt a hand on her elbow as she was gently lifted out her bow. Despite his transparency, his hand felt solid, as if he was still a flesh and blood man. "Neither of you need to bow," The Patriarch said after a moment of silence.
The Patriarch waved Jiang Cheng over to where he and Jiang Yanli had been standing. Jiang Cheng raced over to his sisters side and grabbed her arm. The spirit in front of them kept his hands close to his body, one hand on his other wrist as he looked the two of them up and down. "Are..." he began, warily. "Are either of you hurt?" Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli looked at each other confused, the confusion disappearing when they did. Jiang Chengs’ entire face was red and puffy from crying. He still had blood splatter on his face and tear stains running down his cheeks, some tears had ran through the blood on his face giving the impression that the boy had cried tears of blood. Jiang Yanli also had tear streaks on her face and red eyes, though less inflamed than her brother. Her hands and legs were still covered in blood. She had used the blood on her right hand to complete the array but only her right hand, the rest of her limbs were still drenched and dripping in red.
The siblings shook their heads and the spirit in front of them seemed to look relieved. "That’s good, that’s good," he muttered to himself. He looked at the ground and the array that had been transformed into ash. Jiang Cheng noticed what the spirit was staring at before his sister did and spoke up. "Jiejie drew it," he said. "The array that got you here, I just helped activate it." The Patriarch looked up from the array at Jiang Yanli with a small smile. "You drew it well," he complimented. "It dragged me straight from death to here, I could barely fight against it." Jiang Yanli lowered her head and muttered a thanks, still in awe that it had actually worked.
The Yiling laozu looked around her room. The smoke had fully died out and now all three of them could clearly see their surroundings; Jiang Yanlis’ desk with loose papers filled with notes on the array that had scattered across the room in the explosion; the overflowing laundry basket that had become a laundry corner; and her dresser that had a pile of dirty dishes on top of it. "Do you need my help cleaning your room?" The Patriarch joked. Jiang Cheng chuckled and Jiang Yanli hit him on the shoulder. She didn’t think her room was that messy even after the explosion, it had seen worse days. Again, before Jiang Yanli got the chance to say anything, Jiang Cheng spoke up first. "It’s my mess we need to clean up," he admitted. The guilt evident in his his voice and the pinch of humour from his earlier laugh was gone. The spirit looked at him with a raised brow. "A-niang, I- she got back early, I w-was in the kitchen scar-scared and she-shes..." Jiang Cheng stuttered and trailed off, slowly hiding his face in the blanket as he started to break down. The Patriarch was taken off-guard, less at the indecipherable confession and moreso at the tears. He pulled his sleeve up to his palm but paused. He glanced at Jiang Yanli who had her hand interlocked with her brothers’, gently squeezing it. The Patriarch took a silent breath, lifted Jiang Chengs’ face up by the chin, and began to wipe the boys tears away with his sleeve. "It'll be alright, you summoned me for help and I’m going to help," he promised.
Jiang Cheng looked up at the spirit. "I killed a-niang," he blurted out, as if the sentence was one word. Like he had to get it out or else he would never be able to admit it. Jiang Cheng broke, fully hiding his face in the blanket as he could no longer hold back his tears. The spirit was stunned at the sudden confession and looked up at Jiang Yanli. He pointed at the blood on her hands and she looked down. "A-niangs’ blood," she mouthed. The Patriarch nodded and turned his gaze back to Jiang Cheng, he combed the boys short hair with his fingers while reminding the boy to breath. After a moment, Jiang Yanli cleared her throat. "Do you want me to take you to her body?" she asked the spirit. The Patriarch nodded. Jiang Yanli turned to her brother and hugged him, he fell into her arms like a rag doll. "A-cheng, I’m gonna take him to a-niang, do you wanna stay here or come with?" she asked. Jiang Cheng shook his head violently. "Okay, can you sit on my bed and wait for us?" At this, Jiang Cheng nodded. Jiang Yanli walked her brother to the bed and promised to return soon.
She led the ghost down the stairs and to the kitchen in silence. The Yiling laozu examined his surroundings as he followed, intrigued by a form of architecture he had never seen before. Jiang Yanli paused in front of the archway to the kitchen, The Patriarch bumping into her as she stopped. He looked down at her. "Are you okay?" he asked. Jiang Yanli nodded but The Patriarch didn’t seem convinced. "You don’t have to watch me clean up if you don’t want to," he added. "No, I'm fine, I'm almost seventeen, I can handle it," she responded, as if her age made her qualified to watch someone dispose of a body. "Almost seventeen isn’t seventeen," The Patriarch argued, but Jiang Yanli stood her ground. "Sixteen is still old enough," she retorted. The Yiling laozu shook his head. "Sixteen is also young," he said wisely for a man who died in his twenties. "A dead body is a horrible sight, you saw it once already, I'd rather you not have to see it again." Jiang Yanli recalled that the Yiling laozu was a war veteran and had been one of the few soldiers who willingly volunteered to bury, burn, or otherwise lay his dead allies to rest. He was offering her an out so she wouldn't have to see a sight he had grown accustomed too, but Jiang Yanli stayed stubborn.
"This is my mothers body," she said simply. Not referring to Yu Ziyuan as ‘a-niang’ felt odd yet necessary. Forgoing the childish term made her sound more assertive, it made her feel more assertive. The Patriarch sighed despondently. "Fine," he conceded. "But, you cant stand too close or interfere unless I ask for help."
"Are you gonna ask for help?"
"Probably just to move her."
Jiang Yanli nodded and led the spirit through the archway. The sight before them made her stomach turn. It was almost exactly as she had left it, but Yu Ziyuans’ body was no longer pouring out blood. All of it had leaked out onto the floor in the time it took to summon the Yiling laozu. The smell of iron filled the room like a toxic gas, filling up Jiang Yanlis’ nostrils until she could no longer breath. She pinched her nose and started breathing through her mouth, trying to avoid the smell of blood and the beginning whiffs of rot. Her mothers eyes were glassy and had lost their brown colour, they looked more like grey balls embedded in her head rather than eyes. Her skin had also lost its pigment, her foundation stood put against her desaturated skin as a grim reminder of what she had once looked like. Jiang Yanli almost wanted to thank The Patriarch for giving her a chance to not see this, she almost wanted to turn around and sit in the foyer, almost. Jiang Yanlis’ entire face twisted at the sight, but The Yiling laozu only scrunched his nose, less at the smell and more because of the jagged gash in the dead womans’ neck.
"Do you want to cremate her?” he asked. "Cremation’s easier but people from my era had reservations about it after the Sunshot Campaign." The Patriarch looked at Jiang Yanli through the corner of his eyes. She recognized the Sunshot Campaign as the name of the cultivation war he had fought in, though in her opinion such a name didn't prepare people for how gruesome it was. It sounded too noble for how gory it ended up being. "Easier than what?" she wondered. The Patriarch sighed, like he was desperate to forget about the alternative. "War means advancement,” he said gravely. “We were digging up graves for the fallen but there were archers hiding in the thicket, waiting for us to switch our swords for shovels so they could ambush us, one of the three survivors made an array that instantly cremated someone, he also made a talisman version that worked slower." Jiang Yanli felt her knees grow weak. "Lets go with the array," she decided.
The Patriarch nodded and walked towards the body. Though the blood on Yu Ziyuans’ face had dried up, the pool of blood she sat in was still pungent and fresh. The spirit, despite his transparency, was able to pick some of the blood up on his finger. A few feet away from the body he began to draw the array he had been speaking of, intermediately dipping his finger back in the blood like it was a brush.
Standing in front of the archway, Jiang Yanli watched the scene like it was a snuff film. Her guts twisted up and she grew nauseous, bile slowly rising from her stomach to her throat. She wondered for a moment if this was all a dream, if she had passed out at the sight of her mothers corpse leaving her brother with two bodies to deal with. She caught another trace of her mothers rotting body and quickly dismissed the idea, she hoped there was no way her brain could come up with a smell so foul. Jiang Yanli figured that she and Jiang Cheng would have to explain a-niangs’ disappearance to a-die. It felt impossible. Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli were left home alone most of the time. Yu Ziyuans’ working-from-home stint was just a stint, when her leg healed she returned to the office. Their a-die, Jiang Fengmian, worked in a different city with a forty minute commute. He often slept in his office and only came home every other weekend. He trusted Yu Ziyuan to watch the two of them but she worked from six in the morning to six in the afternoon and was ready to drive back to the office at any minor inconvenience. Jiang Fengmian did not know his wife or children very well, Jiang Yanli hoped that meant he didn’t know when they were lying.
Jiang Yanli walked to the living room half of the room, sat on the backrest of one of the couches, and continued to watch The Patriarch draw, pointedly ignoring her mothers body. He was focused on the array in front of him, paying no mind to anything else. Each line he drew was made with confidence, the kind you could only find in someone who knew they were good and that they could back it up. Earlier, The Patriarch had promised Jiang Cheng he would help them with such assurance that Jiang Yanli had thought his words were simply meant to comfort a crying child, but, looking at him now, Jiang Yanli could see the weight they held. The array he drew was not as intricate as the one she had drawn to summon him, she guessed that something more complex would be hard to properly use during wartime. Though it was simple, she could see the thought that had been put into it. More importantly, she had never seen it before. Most arrays had evolved since the Northern and Southern dynasties; their patterns, shape, size, and material deemed best used to draw them had nearly all changed. Whatever the Yiling laozu was drawing was an artifact. If it wasn’t being used on her a-niang, Jiang Yanli would have been interrogating the spirit on how it worked. If it wasn’t being drawn in blood, Jiang Yanli would have taken a picture and sent it to the archaeologist who sent her the unfinished portrait.
Eventually, The Patriarch drew the last line of the array and stood up. He looked at the archway, concerned when he didn’t see Jiang Yanli standing there. He worriedly whipped his head around before finally landing on on her. She waved at him. "You need help moving the body now?" she guessed. The spirit nodded and she jumped off the back of the couch. "You hold her feet," he instructed as Jiang Yanli walked around the array and, hesitantly, into the pool of blood her mother was sitting in. She wanted to faint as she felt a new layer of blood coat her already bloodied feet. "I'll make sure her head doesn't fall off or anything, yeah?" Jiang Yanli nodded and grabbed her mothers ankles. Moving her mothers body felt different than when she was just helping her sit up, she was so much colder now. A rock formed in Jiang Yanlis’ throat and a pit grew in her stomach as The Patriarch counted down from three and they lifted her body up, then onto the array.
The Patriarch looked up at her as they set the body onto the array. "I’m afraid I need you to do something else," he confessed. Jiang Yanli swallowed trying to get rid of the rock in her throat, it was gradually starting to feel like a boulder. "With what?" she anxiously asked. "As, this—" he waved his hands around, gesturing to his semitransparent self "—I don’t have enough spiritual power to activate this array, I only realized as I was drawing it," he admitted, clearly embarrassed. "It doesn't take that much energy to activate it, if you have enough left in your reserves-"
"My reserves?" Jiang Yanli interpreted, intrigued. The Patriarch seemed puzzled by her question. "The spiritual energy you keep stored away in your core for emergencies, so you don’t have to keep it all in your meridians?" he clarified, incredibly confused. "Do you call them something else in this era?" Jiang Yanli had never heard of reserves nor the concept of them. Everyone she knew only had the energy in their meridians and nothing more. Having so much spiritual energy that you could keep some tucked away for later was mind blowing. "No, yeah, different name," she said unconvincingly, refusing to look at anything but the small section of the floor that wasn’t bloodstained. "I think I have enough in my meridians to activate it." Her brothers’ help meant that she wasn't drained after activating the summoning array like she normally was. If this cremation array was as simple as he claimed it to be, Jiang Yanli figured she would be able to power it just fine, as long as she didn’t look at her mothers body. "It’s instant?" she questioned. "I activate it and a-niang is cremated, just like that?"
"We would make the dead hold a jar before we activated the array so that their ashes would also be instantly stored," he added. Jiang Yanli quickly got up and rummaged through the kitchen cupboards until she found a yellowed plastic container she used to pack her school lunch in. She handed it to The Patriarch who examined it curiously before taking the lid off and placing it in her a-niangs’ arms. "Do people still use warming talismans? To stick on plates and use in winter?" he asked. Jiang Yanli nodded. Unlike arrays, talismans remained mostly unchanged through time, their uses for practical for everyday life. "Powering this array takes about as much energy as one of those," he continued. "So, almost none." Jiang Yanli placed her hands on the array and closed her eyes, even if it was instantaneous, she didn’t want to watch her mothers body become ash. She sent a pulse of spiritual energy into the array. If it was just as dramatic as the summoning array Jiang Yanli couldn't tell but she did suddenly feel the temperature of the room rise for a moment. It felt like a fire had started at her feet and used its fuel up immediately. Just as quickly as the heat came, it left.
She kept her eyes closed, afraid to open them and have to see the dust that had once been her mother. She wondered if the unease she felt now would return when her a-die died. She wondered if she would feel anything when he died or if this day had ruined her forever and she just didn’t know. Jiang Yanli felt a tap on her shoulder and looked to her side where the Yiling laozu was crouching next to her. He lifted his hands and a plastic container that was half-filled with ashes was presented to her with the same melancholy of a dead pet. The Patriarch pushed the lid on and handed it to Jiang Yanli. She immediately put it down and stood up. "The blood," she said before The Patriarch had a chance to speak. "The blood-"
"Has already been cleaned up."
Jiang Yanli whipped her head to the kitchen. It had returned to its pristine white marble state, the red splatter nowhere to be seen. Even the array that The Patriarch had drawn was gone, not reduced to ash like the one in her room but truly and fully gone. Even the thick smell of iron had vanished. She turned her head to the Yiling laozu who was still crouching. The spirit looked up at her and smiled comfortingly. "I wasn't going to let you do all the work, didn’t I say I would help?" he asked rhetorically, a smug look on his face. "This new era probably has new ways to find cleaned-up blood but, back in my day, this was more than enough to throw people off your trail." Jiang Yanli stared at the man in shock. "A wartime invention?" she asked. The Patriarchs smile faltered but he quickly recovered, as if nothing had happened. "You're clever. I learned it from doctor friend of mine who made it to clean up between battle-wounded patients." Jiang Yanli nodded and wondered if the blood would still show up if sprayed with luminol.
A few months ago a bunch of different multi-surface cleaners were recalled because of a common chemical they contained, active oxygen. Apparently, it cleaned too well. Active oxygen erased nearly all traces of blood from a given surface. It interfered with police investigation, blood wiped down with any of the recalled products wouldn’t show when sprayed with luminol. One of them was Yu Ziyuans’ favourite brand. She had heard rumours of a recall order so, before it went public, she had stocked up on boxes of the cleaner. There was a half empty spray bottle of the cleaner in one of the kitchen cupboards, and a thousand more boxes in the garage. Jiang Yanli figured it wise to grab some and mop the floor with it as soon as she could.
"What about the blood on the stairs and stuff?" she asked, thinking about the trail she had left behind. "It’s a talisman you’re supposed to place in a pool of blood, it gets rid of any little red drop within thirty li, as long as it’s the same blood you placed the talisman in," The Patriarch explained simply. Jiang Yanli had no idea what thirty li was. It sounded big. The Patriarch seemed confident that whatever blood she had dragged along was gone.
She assumed that the talisman also got rid of the blood that she had been drenched in, but the feeling of suffocatingly hot blood running down her skin hadn't gone away. The sickening warmth should have left her body and she should’ve been freezing in her skin. The pit in her stomach and the rock in her throat should have left with the blood instead of making it harder and harder to breath. Why was her stomach still twisting and turning, even more turbulent than before. Jiang Yanli grew lightheaded and hid her eyes in the back of her hands, hands that were not dripping in red but still felt as wet as they had when she was helping her mother sit up. Yu Ziyuan was not a warm woman or a warm mother but, in that moment, the only thing she had been was warm. The fleeting warmth on her skin and the blood leaking out her neck had been what Jiang Yanli was desperate for when she was younger but never got. All encompassing and sticky warmth other moms at least pretended to show their kids. Warmth that people wrote about in award winning poems. Warmth she had wished for when making mothers day cards in art class that she only did for a grade. Jiang Yanlis’ mother was not a kind woman and she would never get the chance to be one.
Salty tears began to well up in the corners of her eyes and she could feel them trickle down her skin, pooling at her chin, and then falling onto her shirt. Refusing to cry out loud, she bit her tongue and started to shake like a leaf. Jiang Yanli crouched and curled in on herself, pressing her eyes into her knees and covering the back of her neck with her hands. She took a shaky breath that quickly descended into a cough that had her grasping for air. Unexpectedly, she felt an arm wrap around her shoulders as a hand rubbed circles into her shoulder. Though surprised by the touch at first, Jiang Yanli found herself gradually leaning into the comfort. The Yiling laozu spoke quietly and gently. "You’re doing this to protect your brother and no one can fault you for that, this is a heavy day but that doesn’t mean it wont get lighter,” he comforted in a soft voice, like if he spoke any louder she would crack. “Your brother knows what happened, he’ll help carry the weight, neither of you are alone." Each kind word made Jiang Yanli cry even harder. The tears violently fell, some down her face and the others fell through The Patriarch onto the floor. She lifted her head from her knees and looked up at The Patriarch through tear filled eyes that made everything look like a giant blur. She sniffed and wiped her nose with her sleeve. "Y-you're say-aying this and you-you don’t know my name," she said through hics and choked breaths.
"Do you know mine?" he asked. "You've only called me the Yiling laozu so far." Jiang Yanli shook her head. Too many historical figures were referenced by their titles and not their actual names, leaving them as mysteries. If they were referred to by a name it was their courtesy name, birth names stayed unknown. "You don’t know my name but you still summoned me to help, if you’re allowed to put that much faith in me I can have faith in you," he said absolutely, as if it was a fact she wasn’t allowed to deny, like grass being green and the sky being blue. She didn't understand The Patriarchs kindness but didn't question it. They sat in silence for a moment, Jiang Yanli huddled up into The Patriarchs side as she eased herself out of her despair.
"My milk name is Wei Ying, courtesy Wuxian," The Yiling laozu admitted suddenly, breaking the silence. Jiang Yanli looked up at him and rubbed her eyes with her palms. She couldn't tell what characters it was made up of just by hearing him say it but she thought it sounded nice. Wei Wuxian continued to rub circles in her back as he stared into the middle distance, eyes unfocused.
"I'm Jiang Yanli," she said after a moment. Wei Wuxian looked down at her and smiled just like the unfinished portrait. The portrait didn’t include his crows feet and smile lines, or the shine in his eyes, or the way you could see his front teeth through the crack in his lips even though his mouth was closed. Jiang Yanli wanted to go back in time and plead to Jiang furen to finish the portrait. "That’s a good name," he replied, his voice cracking as he spoke. "A very good name."