Chapter Text
Spooky castles aren’t really Shen Yuan’s thing. He has read enough gothic horror novels to know entering one under dubious circumstances does not end well– either with someone’s head being decapitated or unspeakable horrors haunting your entire bloodline.
But here he is, about to step foot into one. All because his stupid wet rat bastard of a friend roped him into this entire hot mess.
Shen Yuan blows out a gust of air, watching as it mists and condenses into fragile puffs of white. The cold is unbearable. It reaches him even under layers upon layers of clothing, leg warmers wrapped around socks wrapped around heat padding such that he represents a rolly-polly snowman, with the way the frost clings to his eyelashes like stubborn dust.
Shang Qinghua, the idiot, has managed to get himself stuck in one of his ghost-hunting locations for the second time that week. One would think that being a “professional” ghost hunter would warrant greater caution and, get this, common sense, but those are two departments his unfortunate friend was desperately lacking in.
Shen Yuan can still remember their conversation in the morning, before Shang Qinghua had departed for his filming expedition. Bundled up charitably and smothered under layers of winter wear, Shang Qinghua had hefted his armload of filming equipment and set off with a well-worn quip: “Don’t call the police if I’m not back in eighteen hours.”
Which is precisely why Shen Yuan is presently stuck in a creepy forest at five fucking am, freezing his ass off.
Shang Qinghua! You idiot! You owe me one! No, you owe me ten thousand kowtows! Shen Yuan was shaking (his metaphorical fist– he’s too cold to lift it up from beneath his stone-cold armpits) as he neared the battlements. The snow was fresh and powdery beneath his boots, snowflakes pummeling the ground in avid torrents. The castle was straight out of a horror movie. Ash-black walls, with glacial patterns crawling up its edges loomed over him. The towering pillars ended in spiky turrets that were shrouded in fog. It was built like a fortress– Shen Yuan can imagine armies crowding at its iron-wrought gates, gory battles waged on blood-soaked ground, and an avaricious ruler crowing with laughter above it all, gathering the spoils of war like a baby being given too much free will.
If I ever get out of this alive, Shen Yuan thought grimly, I am never letting Shang Qinghua pile the laundry on me ever again. He’s doing it for the rest of his short and sorry life.
An unsettling thought worms its way into Shen Yuan’s brain. The castle was indeed built like a fortress, but what if it’s not for keeping people out?
What if it’s to keep something in?
Ah, there goes my imagination again, Shen Yuan sighs and cranked up his mental state to that of onset hypothermia. His parents had always said his imagination was his greatest blessing and his greatest downfall. While the other village kids had grown up playing street-soccer and digging through clumps of weed to find ants to fry with a huge magnifying glass, Shen Yuan had spent most of his childhood holed away somewhere in his room, poring over encyclopaedias, novels and storybooks. Knowledge fascinated him. Sue him for not wanting to get his knees bruised or stunk up with sweat! He’d much prefer learning the fifteen different pollen grain structures of amaranths, thank you very much.
Shen Yuan squints into the blizzard. In the distance, a blur of black metal. The door? The gate had been partially demolished, dilapidated and swinging on its hinges, either from the strong gales or whatever it was that made old castles fall into disrepair.
He ventures over to it, feeling like a deer walking into an open trap. He can almost envision a monster lying in wait for him on the other side of that door, licking their chops in anticipation. Shen Yuan inwardly groans. Please spare this one. This one doesn’t even have enough muscle on his bones to be a tasty, hearty and filling meal.
He is in front of the door now. Teeth chattering uncontrollably, Shen Yuan gathers all that is left of his rapidly dwindling energy to raise a hand, and he knocks. The knocker slams into the metal door, giving his fingers a wedgie before Shen Yuan could even say “fuck”. He doesn’t hear the slam in the howling blizzard, but he does feel it reverberate across the entire surface, emanating into the space beyond.
With an ominous pause, as haunted doors usually do, the door groaned open. Wintry confetti swirled into the darkness beyond from the opening, and Shen Yuan looked down to see a marbled floor coated with chalk-white dust. The total white-out outside cut a rectangle of light into the gloom, and Shen Yuan is so cold at this point that he would rather die later from a monster biting his head off than die now from hypothermia. He shuffles in as fast as he can and collapses to the floor just as the door swings shut behind him with a resounding slam.
Quiet. It is too quiet. If he stills the ferreting of his breath and listens hard, Shen Yuan could almost hear the storm still blowing blankets of snow outside. The sounds are not just muffled, but completely extinguished– just how thick are those doors? He wants them for his apartment! That way, he won’t hear Shang Qinghua’s shrieking whenever he gets a new ghost-hunting idea or when he’s filming his shitty reaction videos!
Shen Yuan realises that it’s also really dark. He remembers the feud between Anish Kapoor and Stuart Stemple over creating the world’s “blackest black”-- move over, he’s found it and it's in this creepy thousand-year-old castle! He shivers. Is he scared? Kind of. Should he be more scared? Probably. He is a sickly twenty-three year old man clad in dumpy clothing, alone with no food, water, emergency hotline or companion in the middle of a freaking forest. Not to mention, he probably broke a dozen international laws just by trespassing into unbordered territory on a whim without a permit! And it is with a jolt that Shen Yuan remembers that shit, he has his phone.
He rummages through his clothes for several minutes before pinching it out of an inner pocket. The screen was freezing to the touch. He feels like he is holding a block of ice. He taps its screen and almost cries in relief when it lights up with a happy glow, acutely shooting pain into his eyes. Blinking his tears away, Shen Yuan checks the screen.
Surprise to nobody, there is no signal. Not that he was expecting one, what with the fact that he is seated in an abandoned castle. He turns on the flashlight button and whoops with joy before clamping a gloved hand to his mouth and checking himself. If he were a horror movie protagonist, he’d be dead by now! That’s a surefire way to alert some eldritch horror of your location, if they didn’t already know!
Swinging around his solitary beam of light like a drunkard, he takes stock of his surroundings. And almost drops his phone from a mini heart attack.
Sheets of white hung suspended in the gloom, looking like giant cobwebs long abandoned by its weavers. In his reptilian brain, Shen Yuan thought those were ghostly spectres of doom of some sort. Now, upon closer inspection, he realises they were simply old bedsheets and cloths draped over heavy oaken furniture. They glowed like bioluminescent lamps in the wintry haze of his phone torchlight.
Shen Yuan swivels his beam of light toward the centre of the room and boy, is the room big. He supposes he is in the castle’s Great Hall of sorts, with how pilasters with intricate inscriptions stretched across the circumference of the room and a massive chandelier strung up in the centre of the room.
And damn, is the room still cold! It isn’t freezing at sub-zero, nautical temperatures like the outside is, but it is still inhospitable! Trust a medieval castle to not have any central heating system. Wriggling his toes and fingers (which feel numb by now), Shen Yuan walks over to the spiralling staircase at the edge of the room. Its banisters were layered with a thick coat of dust, such that it almost looks like a marble white rather than being solid wood.
There was nothing to do except to descend the staircase. He’s a curious soul, sue him for exploring a possibly haunted castle! Well, he supposes that some streak of stupidity must be binding him and Shang Qinghua in their friendship. The wood was solid under his frost-laden boots, which were quickly depositing a slurry of slush and tepid water onto the carpeted stairs. Several dusty portraits hung at intervals caught his attention, and he swung his phone flashlight toward them. And almost dropped his phone again in shock. (He is going to get a titanium-level-of-durability phone screen protector once he goes back.)
It’s not just because the man depicted on it is the most beautiful person he’s ever seen. High cheekbones that could cut glass, dark brooding eyes that seemed to hold the weight of the universe behind them. It’s also because of the three long gashes running through the centre of the portrait, almost cleaving it in two. Now, what had created that?
Shen Yuan has the good conscience to now feel a little flare of panic. Okay, so maybe this castle is haunted after all.
He contemplates between running for his life, awaiting news about Shang Qinghua’s dead body– unless he freezes to death himself in the raging snowstorm– and staying in the creepy castle, scouring for clues to find his witless friend. And because he is an idiot with a bleeding heart, he settles on the latter.
The staircase leads off to a landing that branches off into two directions, hallways that stretch beyond what he can see. The walls were lined with flickering sconces, soaking the floor with a pale glow. Shen Yuan could see his healthline rapidly shrinking as he walks across one of the hallways chosen at random, but some strange instinct tells him to keep moving.
The walls open up to a cavern, and Shen Yuan realises he must be in the castle’s dungeons. It is dingy and ancient, and when he blinks he swears he sees something shift in the corner of his vision.
In one of the corners, the furthest cell, he spies a familiar silhouette.
“Bro! You came to find me!”
Shang Qinghua’s hysterical crying is enough to make Shen Yuan feel like a mother hen who just located one of her missing chicks. Shang Qinghua, we are probably going to die soon! Have some dignity, will you?
“Quiet!” Shen Yuan hissed, crouching down so he could talk without raising his voice. His friend’s bushy eyebrows shot up in alarm before settling on a mien of pain.
“Forgive me if I am excited, Cucumber-bro! I’ve been stuck here for hours rotting my ass off!”
Shen Yuan rolls his eyes.
“And how did you get yourself stuck in a musty dungeon, of all places? I always knew you would end up behind bars, but not in a castle in Narnia.”
“I put him there.”
Shen Yuan’s heart crawls up his throat and dies in his mouth. He whirls around, hands shaking, and sees the entity.
And wow, does the portrait not do him justice.
He has the kind of face that makes people stop in their tracks, look over and think, “Now that is someone whom God spent a lot of time on”. Wavy, silky hair the colour of sesame paste, looking artfully tousled, windswept even, although the only wind was a chilly draft down in the dungeons. A sharp, strong jaw that tapered off into high, regal cheekbones. The man is broad shouldered, slightly built, lithe and graceful with a dancer’s airiness underneath his crimson robes. And above all, soft, full lips with a cupid’s bow. The only other difference between the portrait and its flesh and blood form before Shen Yuan was a red zuiyin that kissed the crest of his delicate eyebrows.
“I, uhh. Uhmm.” Shen Yuan feels like an idiot. His brain is short-circuiting. He can almost see wires protruding from his skull, firing off synapses ending in tiny fireworks. He most probably looks like an idiot, with how he is staring with his mouth dumbly open.
In the rheumy light of the dungeon, he sees a complicated expression cloud the man’s fine features. Annoyance, recognition, confusion– before it settled on anger. Shen Yuan shivers. Ah, that’s not a good emotion to be looking at him with! With that soul-piercing gaze, one would think that the man would have loved to tear him apart limb by limb and stick him in a jar like some human pickle!
“This one did not think Shizun would deign to visit him again, after so many years,” the vampire? Supernatural entity? Really hot ghost? bends adroitly at the waist and smiles a razor-thin smile. Shen Yuan winces; it looks like it could draw blood.
“I, uhh.” Shen Yuan wants to smack himself upside the head. Way to communicate with a presence that was literally oozing killing intent like a black miasma!
“Hmm, is Shizun surprised to see this one after so long? Never thought I’d last, did you?” Something hard flashed in the man’s eyes, and his tone took on a clipped, bitter edge.
Shen Yuan hears a whimper from behind him like a dying animal and remembers his friend. He dares not look back or turn his back to this apex predator that is presently smirking at him like he is some interesting toy they would enjoy ripping apart, so he utters the next best thing: “Why?”
The man’s smile widened. Ah, he really looks handsome when his lips do that, but don’t you think you are smiling a little too widely for comfort’s sake?
“Some vermin stick their hands where they don’t belong. I remember. You always liked taking out the vermin, didn’t you, Shizun?”
Shen Yuan feels like he’s missing some important information here. He feels like some poor NPC character who got thrust in the middle of a high-stakes, lore-heavy minisode! Spare him, this lowly one knows nothing! And why is this entity calling him by such a reverential title, in such a condescending way?