Chapter Text
The weather turned hot and muggy, which meant one thing: watermelons for all the residents.
That week, the menu heavily featured leafy greens, tubers and eggs. The watermelons were rolled out for dessert, when the wyrms had already eaten their fill and they could spend some time playing around with their food. Each wyrm had their own special approach to cracking open a watermelon, some more successful than others.
Shi Qingxuan usually spent a lot of time in the pond sending the watermelon bobbing up and down on the water before he ate it, or before another resident snatched it from under his nose, to the point that He Xuan took over the task of cutting it open for him.
Hua Cheng delivered food to the quarantine grounds personally once again, first hauling in a bucket of fresh cabbages and a dozen raw chicken eggs, which he placed in Xie Lian's preferred spot.
When Hua Cheng walked back to the food crates and returned with the watermelon, Xie Lian was already in the process of crunching through a cabbage, head tilting back to swallow shredded pieces of it. He swallowed up the last of the cabbage a bit more hurriedly before turning the entirety of his attention to Hua Cheng and the watermelon.
"Here you go," Hua Cheng offered with a grin, setting the watermelon down and pushing it into a roll towards Xie Lian.
Xie Lian hopped fully into the air and jumped onto the watermelon like a cat pouncing on a little mouse toy. He caught the watermelon and then proceeded to hop around it some more, batting it with enthusiasm. Hua Cheng couldn't help a laugh, but he regretted it when Xie Lian noticed. The wyrm's long ears flattened against his skull, and he stopped his hopping, looking abashed.
"Sorry, didn't mean to--" Hua Cheng hunched forward, body language apologetic. "Please don't mind me, I was just happy to see you enjoy yourself."
Xie Lian's large eyes fixed on Hua Cheng for a moment longer, but then he lowered his head back to the watermelon and sniffed it in consideration. He didn't return to playing with it, but instead he shoved it into the pond, and washed the dirt off it. After that, Xie Lian carried it out of the water in his front talons, and he shuffled towards the shade of the trees using only his back legs. Wyrms weren't made for that sort of gait, so it looked awkward to say the least.
Finally, however, he settled into the grass and started eying the fruit critically. Using his teeth, he pierced a series of holes into the watermelon in a straight line, and then gripping these openings with his talons, he ripped the watermelon open into two almost-perfect halves.
Hua Cheng watched all this with interest, and Xie Lian seemed pleased. The wyrm even looked to Hua Cheng and made a garbled chirping sound as it tilted the watermelon towards Hua Cheng.
Hua Cheng laughed quietly to himself, but seeing this goodwill aimed at him, he couldn't resist walking over and crouching down, giving the watermelon a careful look. He reached out slowly and ripped off a hanging wedge of the watermelon's red flesh, popping it into his mouth. It was sweet enough, though a bit under-ripe.
Xie Lian looked pleased enough, however, and he settled down, delicately taking small bites like a well-heeled young lady. It was a drastic difference from other wyrms, who tended to gorge quite messily on whatever treats they received.
Taking advantage of the friendly atmosphere, Hua Cheng sat down right next to Xie Lian. He didn't eat any more of the watermelon, even though Xie Lian ostensibly left him a whole half, but instead leaned against the nearest tree lackadaisically. He was sitting closer than usual, having worked up to a level of proximity where he could simply reach out and touch Xie Lian without Xie Lian startling.
Hua Cheng did so right now, slowly but obviously moving his hand over to Xie Lian's mane of fine white hair, pushing it back so it wouldn't fall into the watermelon juices as Xie Lian ate.
After stroking the hair back with careful motions, he followed the curve of Xie Lian's long neck all the way down to the tangle of skins around his lower neck and shoulders.
Somewhere in that mess, there had to be a knot. He slid fingers around the edges of the skins, watching carefully to see if this elicited any reaction.
Xie Lian paused in his eating for a half-beat, clearly acknowledged Hua Cheng's touch, but continued on eating. This was something like permission; he was aware of it and did nothing to stop it.
Hua Cheng carefully ran his hand up between the layers of the tangled old skins. They felt like discarded wyrm skins usually did: soft to the touch, somewhat velvety, unlike any other material Hua Cheng was familiar with. But these ones were also warm from Xie Lian's body heat, and so that gave them some additional pleasant quality that Hua Cheng found intensely fascinating.
He lifted slowly the edge of several layers, trying to find the middle of the whole mess. He was sure that the tangle had to be in the bottom-most layer. Xie Lian wasn't acting as if he was guarding an old injury either, and with wyrms, that tended to be obvious.
Indeed, when Hua Cheng slowly reached his hand up and up under the layers of skins, his fingers brushed over old strips of threadbare skin and loose tangles, but as he steadily approached Xie Lian's neck, the wyrm froze in place. Unsure if this was good or bad, Hua Cheng stopped for a second as well, but Xie Lian still did not move away, so he continued.
Hua Cheng was sure he was close to the source of the problem, to whatever bottom-most tangle was keeping the shreds of old pelts in place, but when his fingers brushed something foreign and unexpected, he flinched, and then so did Xie Lian.
Hua Cheng retreated, raising his hands and showing he meant no harm.
"It's alright, it's alright," Hua Cheng assured. "Did I hurt you? I'm sorry. I'm sure it must be painful."
Xie Lian's head lowered close to the ground, another one of those shows of submission he'd displayed on the first day, so Hua Cheng retreated slowly, not wanting to aggravate the situation.
"I'm sorry," Hua Cheng said gently. "I didn't mean to. I won't touch you if you don't want, but if you're uncomfortable, I can help you. I don't want you to be in pain."
Even as he offered help, however, Hua Cheng crawled on his knees backwards, putting some distance between them before he dared to rise to his full height.
Xie Lian coiled up, head close to the ground, following Hua Cheng with his big, luminescent eyes. They stood at an impasse like that for a while, watching one another.
In spite of the body language ostensibly telegraphing submission, it wasn't really accompanied by any other fear signals. Xie Lian's ears didn't flatten against his skull, and his tail didn't thrash from side to side. It was a curious display, as if Xie Lian was trying to signal that he himself wasn't a threat, instead of treating Hua Cheng as a threat in turn.
For a wyrm who had all the trappings of sapience but none of the means to communicate clearly, maybe this was meant to send a message.
"Can I see?" Hua Cheng asked, gesturing to Xie Lian's skins.
Xie Lian inched a bit closer, kept his head lowered, and then flicked a nod in Hua Cheng's direction.
Hua Cheng moved carefully, and reached out once again towards the tangled skins. He worked more confidently this time, though still gentle, and peeled back layer after layer of the tattered skins to find the middle. This time, when he flipped over the skins, he found what he was looking for right away.
The first glimpse of metal sent Hua Cheng's heart pounding with indignation. It was a collar. It must have been put on Xie Lian at least six sheds back. Xie Lian's old skins were stuck beneath--no wonder he wore them like rags! They wouldn't come off!--and it seemed Xie Lian had also grown a bit since then, the flesh of his neck bulging on either side of the collar like a swollen finger around a too-tight ring.
Xie Lian gave Hua Cheng an expectant look, not afraid and not even that wary, but waiting to see what Hua Cheng would do about it.
When Hua Cheng strode into the office building, He Xuan was already there, slouched over his keyboard, looking aggrieved. Not at Hua Cheng, but at Shi Qingxuan, who stood next to his shoulder poking at him playfully.
As became his habit lately, Shi Qingxuan was once again shapeshifted into the form of a human woman in spite of being a male wyrm. Since her shapeshifting times were much longer in this form, He Xuan couldn't really say anything about it, and Hua Cheng did not care one way or another as long as Shi Qingxuan could hold some kind of human shape.
He Xuan did not look especially enthused, but Hua Cheng could recognize performative grumpiness when he saw it. The fact that he let Shi Qingxuan into the office building displayed astoundingly lax standards of permissiveness on He Xuan's part.
Unfortunately, Hua Cheng didn't really have the time or inclination to make fun of He Xuan at the moment. He strode directly to the storage room, passing by He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan without a word. They both gave him curious looks, leaving the desk to follow him.
"Hua-Chengzhu!" Shi Qingxuan called out chirpily, using that nickname that the wyrms had given him. "There's someone new in quarantine, isn't there? Can we meet them? He-xiong won't tell me anything!"
"Where's the lock cutter?" Hua Cheng asked as he looked through the storage room.
He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan shared an uneasy glance, even as Hua Cheng re-emerged from the storage room brandishing both the lock cutter and a razor-thin smile.
"Is there a lock that needs cutting?" Shi Qingxuan asked, her voice subdued and her eyes wide.
"Are you going to kill someone with that thing?" He Xuan asked instead.
"I may very well kill someone," Hua Cheng replied serenely, before leaving.
He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan shared an equally bewildered look at one another.
"So, is that also about the new resident?" Shi Qingxuan asked. She leaned over He Xuan's desk excitedly, a bit too unaware of the amount of cleavage her chosen sun dress was putting on display.
He Xuan grunted and pushed over a chair for her to sit down.
"He's obsessed with that one," He Xuan said. "I say it's wild, but he says it's definitely self-aware."
"What side does Yin Yu fall on, then?" Shi Qingxuan asked, primly sitting down but then dragging her chair closer to He Xuan.
"He doesn't care as long as it isn't his responsibility." He Xuan gave a rolling shrug. "Neither do I."
"But aren't you curious?" Shi Qingxuan insisted. "Oh! Can I see the new resident? I could be able to tell."
"You just want to meet him. He's in quarantine, he's not taking social calls."
"Come on, He-xiong, if he's not even sick, the quarantine is just for adjustment. Won't he adjust easier by meeting a friendly face before joining the rest of us?"
"Who says he's not sick? You don't know what he even looked like when he came in."
Shi Qingxuan tried pressing for some more details after that, but He Xuan waved off every question with little concern.
They both fell silent again when Hua Cheng walked back into the office building not very long after. He still had the lock cutter in on hand, but then in the other he had two pieces of metal that he threw onto his desk with a rattle. His face still had that flat, neutral look to it that parsed as unmitigated rage.
When it came down to it, removing the collar wasn't difficult at all. Xie Lian held very still, and two quick snips with the lock cutter was all it took. Hua Cheng didn't even need to pull off the collar manually, because Xie Lian gave a full-body shudder and the collar fell off in two pieces. The whole thing might have taken ten seconds at most.
Xie Lian's old skins were still wrapped around his neck, but the wyrm sprang off and ran in circles for a bit, as if released from shackles, and Hua Cheng let him enjoy his freedom. He scooped up the collar and left Xie Lian for now.
Inside the office, Hua Cheng scrutinized the metal collar closer. It was smooth, not at all rusted, and silvery in color, though perhaps not actual silver. There was no inscribed spell, no indication it was a magical device. There were two characters etched along one edge, saying only this: Xianle.
But the Xianle subspecies of wild wyrm was extinct. That was a notorious story, and anyone who had any knowledge of wyrms at all had read about their tragic disappearance, as a case study if nothing else. Hua Cheng recalled a documentary he watched years ago, detailing the plague that sent the Xianle population into steep decline, the quarantine efforts that were meant to save the small number of unaffected individuals and stop the disease from spreading to other wyrm populations. And also, the failure of the effort, leading to even the healthy wyrms disappearing into the mists of history.
The only Xianle wyrms still around were presumably those who'd managed to cultivate a human form before the tragedy struck. Perhaps only handful, scattered and anonymous now--impossible to say how many, save that they must have been very few. The rest of the Xianle wyrms survived only in murals and painted scrolls, their scales white or red alternating with gold, beautiful in rendition but unlikely to grace the skies ever again.
If Xie Lian was one of the remaining Xianle wyrms, he was truly a rare specimen. He had to be eight hundred years old at least to have been collared back when they were trying to contain the diseased population. One would think that after eight centuries, he would have advanced his cultivation out of sheer inertia.
Seven skins, Hua Cheng thought suddenly. Wyrms shed roughly once a century. That meant there had to be seven or at most eight skins. Xie Lian's collar must have held onto most of them through centuries, each shed making the collar tighter by degrees.
Hua Cheng was suddenly apprehensive about having taken the collar off. A few skins maybe weren't that huge of an issue if the collar had enough give to begin with, but--
He placed a quick call to the veterinary service the Ghost City Wyrm Sanctuary regularly used, and then went back outside to have another look at Xie Lian.
Xie Lian was done with prancing, and had moved to rubbing his neck against the bark of the trees. One long strip of skin hung from a branch already.
Hua Cheng dithered just inside the gate of the quarantine enclosure. He hesitated to intrude, so he took out his phone and filmed Xie Lian's antics instead. This was for the vet, and not just because he wanted cute wyrm videos, but it was definitely cute to witness.
Xie Lian managed to remove another layer of the old pelts. In many ways, what he was doing was not so dissimilar from how wild wyrms regularly shed their skins, except in that it was long overdue in Xie Lian's case.
Hua Cheng watched Xie Lian for the better part of an hour as Xie Lian stripped off almost half of his skins. They clung to bark and hung on branches at first, but partway through the process, Xie Lian returned to the skins he'd managed to strip off and gripped them in his talons and in his mouth, gathering them all in one place and arranging them in a pile.
The wyrm already looked lighter, the bulk around his shoulders decreasing, his silhouette more sinous. He must have tired himself out, however, because he stopped at one point and flopped onto the pile of skins, stretching onto his side. His ribcage rose and fell with deep, full-chested breaths, and Hua Cheng realized he hadn't seen Xie Lian breathe so deeply until now. His breath had been very quiet before, but there was a slight whistling wheeze to it now.
Hua Cheng carefully walked up to Xie Lian, making sure his steps were loud enough for the wyrm to know he was approaching.
Xie Lian rolled his head over to look at Hua Cheng, but his eyes were clear and calm. When Hua Cheng crouched down next to Xie Lian, the wyrm wiggled his front claw against the remaining skins wrapped around his neck and tugged.
This looked like a clear request for help to Hua Cheng, so he began tugging the skins away, trying to unknot and unravel them. Unfortunately, it seemed like Xie Lian had tangled them a bit worse while trying to rub them off against the trees, but Hua Cheng felt the trust was still too fragile for him to just go in and get something to cut the skins. Wyrms could be peculiar about that kind of thing, and when people tried to help by cutting their shed skins, they tended to have very hostile reactions.
The skins were still as soft and velvety as Hua Cheng expected, and the ones beneath were a pearly gray rather than the dusty brown of the one one top. Kept clean from the elements and smoother than the oldest layers, Hua Cheng still checked in case there were any nasty surprised like mold or parasites. Usually a wyrm wasn't as prone to such things the more spiritual power they had, but Xie Lian didn't really seem to have that benefit.
Though, actually... Hua Cheng managed to pull apart enough layers that his hands touched Xie Lian's living hide, brushing against opalescent white scales. The stream of qi was sluggish, but with each breath that expanded Xie Lian's chest, it seemed to pulse through the wyrm's skin, like brackish water spurting through a clog.
Since Hua Cheng was sure Xie Lian hadn't had access to spiritual power before, was this a side-effect of being released from the collar?
He almost distractedly managed to find the bottom-most layer of Xie Lian's skins, and when he pulled it off, the blinding white expanse of the wyrm's neck was exposed. Where his mane was meant to grow down his back, the hair was actually missing, worn down by the rub of the skins. The bottom of the wyrm's neck was visibly malformed where the collar and the skins had been, narrowing near the base where it should have been thickening as it met the shoulders. The scales were also worn down much too smooth for this area of the body, looking more like they'd been rubbed down to the flesh. This area of the body was a blotchy pink rather than the expected white, and if Hua Cheng looked closely, he could see the veins under Xie Lian's skin.
This kind of blatant vulnerability wasn't a good thing for a wyrm in the wild. It was likely Xie Lian might not have had the good luck to survive another skin-shedding. If a skin didn't come apart mostly in one continuous part, it tended to not come off properly at all, leading to suffocation or infection depending on which part of the body failed to shed more catastrophically.
Xie Lian gave a final full-body shudder, rearing back upright and shaking his head to release himself from the final pelts hanging onto him.
Once he was free, his entire sinuous length now unobscured, it was almost as if he had shed a weight many times heavier than mere skins. He stretched, then jumped into the air, looping into a hover powered by meagre spiritual energy, before dropping back onto the ground gracefully.
Hua Cheng watched the prancing, delighted contortions of Xie Lian's body, before his attention returned to the shed skins. He leaned down to pick one of the skins, but before his fingers even had the chance to brush any of the discarded skins, they were snatched up and pulled out of his reach.
Hua Cheng looked up and met Xie Lian's gaze, unreadable as the wyrm sat with the skins bundled in his front paws and gathered to his chest.
Very slowly, Hua Cheng threw his hands up in willing surrender. He turned around and walked away from the quarantine grounds, leaving Xie Lian to savor his newfound freedom a bit longer.