MO RAN SAID NOTHING—or perhaps there was nothing he could say.
He stepped forward and pulled Chu Wanning into his arms. "What's gotten into you?"
Holding him like this, Mo Ran could feel the warmth of Chu Wanning's body even through the cool cloth of his robes. "Are you crying?"
He didn't know if this was dream or reality. He no longer knew anything with certainty, except that Chu Wanning's cold corpse was no longer lying in the Red Lotus Pavilion. His shizun was still alive, still worrying about the flexibility of his Holy Night Guardians' joints and whether they should be sealed with tung oil or clear lacquer.
This was enough. Mo Ran drowned himself in it, refusing to wake.
He and Chu Wanning finished the automaton together. When it was dark, he led Chu Wanning back to his room and tangled his limbs with his shizun's, just as he had in the past life. The Chu Wanning in this dream wasn't so easily tamed. He remained vicious in some respects, recalcitrant in others. Even as his climax crashed over him, he gritted his teeth in silence, sharp eyes misted with tears. Only the roughness of his breathing escaped his control.
The candles were lit. Their light shone upon the face of the well- ravished man beneath him. Mo Ran drank in Chu Wanning's features with hungry, adoring eyes; he watched as Chu Wanning's black pupils filled with the reflection of the candlelight.
The light flickered like petals fallen into a deep pond. When Mo Ran moved, those petals swirled and drifted in the waters, rippling outward.
Eventually, tears ran from the ends of Chu Wanning's eyes; Mo Ran kissed them all away.
He knew too well what Chu Wanning was like. Without the use of aphrodisiacs, he rarely made any noise in bed. His self-control was regretfully unshakeable. But what did that matter? Chu Wanning couldn't control the wetness of his eyes, nor his helpless panting. So what if he didn't moan? It was enough for Mo Ran to fuck him to the point of tears, to see his eyes glaze over, to see his chest heave with desperation.
Their night of pleasure stretched into the small hours of morning, when they finally fell asleep wrapped in each other's embrace. Mo Ran held Chu Wanning tightly in his arms. Their bodies lay pressed together, bare skin warm against bare skin, sweat-damp hair tacky on their cheeks. He planted ardent and tender kisses on Chu Wanning's ear and the pale column of his throat, then pulled him even tighter into his arms. "This is all I need, Shizun. Just you by my side."
He slept.
When he woke, he found the bed empty. "Shizun?!"
Jolting upright, he saw Chu Wanning standing at the half-opened window. Day had broken, and a misty rain shimmered down outside. Mo Ran let out a sigh of relief and reached out a hand. "Shizun, come here…"
But Chu Wanning didn't move. His robes were neat and as white as driven snow; he looked quietly at the man on the bed. Gazing at him, Mo Ran felt a pulse of violent unease.
"Mo Ran," Chu Wanning said. "It's time for me to go."
"Go?" Mo Ran stared. The blankets were still warm. There were strands of hair on the pillow and a faint musky scent in the sheets, but Chu Wanning looked so distant he seemed to be standing on a far-off shore.
"Where are you going?" Mo Ran asked anxiously. "This is the Red Lotus Pavilion, your home. We're already home, so where are you going?"
Chu Wanning shook his head. He turned back to the pale dawn gathering outside the window. "There's no time. It's almost morning."
"Wanning!"
He blinked, nothing more. Then the room was empty, as if Chu Wanning had never been.
Mo Ran threw on his clothes and scrambled out of bed, forgetting his shoes as he staggered outside. A nighttime breeze had strewn the courtyard with a thousand snowy petals. The flourishing boughs of haitang blossoms were nearly bare, fallen flowers littering the steps, table, and chairs. A finished Holy Night Guardian lay on the stone table, with the metal glove and file tossed carelessly down beside it. As if Chu Wanning had just left.
As if he would be back any minute. "Wanning? Wanning!"
Mo Ran sprinted through the Red Lotus Pavilion as if mad, searching for him, yet avoiding the lotus pond with unerring accuracy. He subconsciously feared the place, he dared not go…
But he wandered deliriously toward it in the end, his feet bare against the freezing slabs of stone. He was still a fair distance away when he stopped. Numbness crept up his body, rising from his pale feet all the way to his face, drained of color as he gazed at the man within the lotus pond, eyes wide in mute shock.
The body in the pond looked precisely the same as it did every day of the last two years of his past life. It lay in the depths of the lotus flowers, held in stasis, robes pristine.
Lying in the depths of those flowers, body in stasis and robes pristine—what difference was there between dead and alive? What difference was there?!
Mo Ran took one step closer, then another.
If he kept going until he reached the pool's edge, he would see each of Chu Wanning's lashes, those sharp brows faintly furrowed even in death, the sweeping line of those phoenix eyes that would never open again. He sank down in terror instead, his knees hitting the stone as he shook and cowered.
Shivering on the ground, he remembered that pill Old Liu had given him, that pill with the powers of resurrection. Mad with joy, he dug through his qiankun pouch with shaking, contorted fingers, tossing everything out.
"The pill…the pill… I need the resurrection pill… Where is it?
Where is it?!"
He went through every item in the pouch, digging into every last wrinkle and probing every inch of every seam, but there was nothing. The resurrection pill was missing; it wasn't there. Or maybe running into Old Liu and taking the pill had been a dream? No, these were all dreams, one after another…
He finally shattered, mind reduced to fragmented scraps as he scrubbed at his face and eyes in despair. "No, it's here…" he murmured. "I put it right here… The resurrection pill… It exists…it exists…it exists…" He began to search madly once more, hysterically looking all around where he knelt before Chu Wanning's corpse. A frightful glint shone in his eyes, but his voice grew only more hoarse and more hollow. In the end, he curled up and sobbed. "I put it there, I did!"
He flung away the items scattered around him, countless ceramic bottles clinking as they smashed. Within these fragile ruins, he hobbled forward, ignoring how they pierced the skin on his knees. He crawled toward the man lying in the lotus pond.
Mo Ran walked out of the pond with Chu Wanning in his arms, that icy corpse tightly clasped to his chest. Something he'd always wanted to do in his last life, yet somehow never did. He clutched at Chu Wanning's body. That misty rain fell unceasingly; the sky in the east continued to brighten, but it had nothing to do with them. He clutched Chu Wanning and cried, pressing his face to Chu Wanning's and kissing his nose, lashes, and lips.
"Shizun… I'm begging you… Please pay attention to me… Please…"
In that moment, his silhouette seemed to recall that of the orphan sobbing over the rotting body of his mother in the burial grounds, the boy who'd begged passersby to bury him with his mom. He'd been only five years old. A five-year-old child who swore he'd never again watch his loved one become a pile of rot while he looked on, helpless.
Years had passed in the blink of an eye. The thirty-two-year-old Taxian-jun clung to his shizun's body and fell into fits of crazed laughter broken by bouts of sobbing as he caressed this corpse. A corpse that looked just as the man had in life. He'd done it. He could make a dead man look alive. There was almost a faint flush to the dead man's cheeks, his face so peaceful he might have merely fallen asleep.
This time, he didn't beg anyone to bury him alongside Chu Wanning.
Taxian-jun had already buried himself alive. The day after Chu Wanning died, he'd drunk a jar of pear-blossom white wine. And with every day that came after, he'd sat in this mausoleum to the living dead called the Red Lotus Pavilion and drunk himself into a stupor. He had been buried six feet under since that day.
"Shizun, please pay attention to me…" "Mo Ran!"
"Please…pay attention to me…"
He seemed to hear a familiar voice calling his name. As darkness fell around him once more, he clutched at the sound like a drowning man clutching a piece of driftwood.
A hand reached out to him. He sobbed, grabbing it tightly. "Don't go; I won't do anything bad or evil ever again, I'll never make you angry…"
Mo Ran clung to that person's hand, their fingers entwining. He smelled the faint scent of haitang flowers. "I have a resurrection pill, but I…I don't know what happened, I can't find it anymore… I can't find it, but could you still stay with me? Please…" He blindly sought the warmth of that unknown person and held them tight. "Please, I'd rather…I'd rather I was the one who died…" "Mo Ran! Wake up!"
But he couldn't wake up. He was drowning in an agony deeper than the ocean; he couldn't wake up. Sobs caught in his throat as he latched tight to the person calling his name, his eyes overflowing with tears. "I'd rather I died instead, Shizun…"
"Damn dog! What are you trying to do? Hey, you!"
He felt someone rush over and grab him. There was a brief scuffle, and a hand poured a freezing liquid down his throat. It was cold, like dark ice left frozen for a thousand years, filling him until his insides crackled with frost.
His eyes snapped open.
Jiang Xi's displeased face came into focus, a jade bottle in his hand.
It had obviously held whatever he'd just been forced to drink.
"I…" Mo Ran heard the hoarseness of his voice the moment he spoke, and fell silent.
He looked around and saw that he'd returned to the ancestral temple.
He'd sweated through all his many layers of robes, and those around him watched him strangely. Xue Meng in particular—his face was awful to look at, turning greenish and pale in turns.
Mo Ran was lying in Chu Wanning's lap, his arms wrapped tightly around Chu Wanning's waist. As he dreamt, he'd pulled Chu Wanning's neat robes into complete disarray; one sleeve of his outer robe had nearly come completely off his shoulder.
He paused. Had he…had he said anything he shouldn't?
Chu Wanning's expression was unsightly as well, but he still had his composure. "Why did you rush ahead so quickly?"
"Shizun, I… I just…"
"You were caught in a nightmare." Jiang Xi put the bottle away and stood, casting his eyes downward. "Rest for a while. I gave you dreamwake frost. You'll feel cold, but it'll fade in a few minutes."
Mo Ran had not fully shaken off those layers of nightmares. His eyes were still glassy. A long beat of silence followed before he mumbled, "A nightmare? But…I was careful, I didn't… I didn't notice any trace of spells…"
"Spells?" Jiang Xi asked, hackles raised. "What use are those stupid things?"
Silence greeted that proclamation.
"You think spells are the world's most vicious, lethal, and invisible weapon?" This medicine sect leader narrowed his eyes, sweeping his sleeves back as he spoke in tones of purest disdain. "Wrong on all counts. The world's most formidable weapon is medicine."
He continued coolly, "The temple was filled with a type of incense known as nineteen hells. This substance is colorless and odorless, but those who breathe it sink into an illusion of their greatest fear." At this, Jiang Xi paused and looked Mo Ran up and down. "The greater the fear, the deeper the illusion. I've rescued a few people caught in a nineteen hells nightmare before, but they woke up after four or five drops of dreamwake frost. Do you know how much you drank?"
"…How much?"
Jiang Xi seemed rather vexed. "Most of the bottle. The amount required to wake you is enough to save a hundred ordinary people. Now, riddle me this, Mo-zongshi. How do you have such a deep-rooted fear at your young age? What is it that you're so afraid of?"