Gu Tian was still standing by the table, his good hand clenched so tight his knuckles had gone white. When he spoke, his voice was carefully controlled.
"What happened down there, Kaelen? And don't tell me nothing. Don't lie to me."
Shen Yue stayed kneeling by Chan'er while she gave her back to him. She could feel his stare boring into her spine. She could feel the weight of questions she had no good answers for yet.
"I don't know what really happened down there. I don't really know how we didn't die..." she said breaking her voice.
"Really? You can tell me at least something. Just anything to enlighten me. What did you really see there and how did you escape?"
"I don't know. It felt as if somebody was watching us, as if I had been directed to that cave, as if..." she couldn't finish her statement without breaking off.
Gu Tian stared at her, his initially piercing stare softening to something like curiosity or empathy. The silence that stretched was tense. Outside, she could hear Mei Lin's voice at the shrine, soft and rhythmic. Whether she was praying or doing some poetry, he couldn't tell. The water wheel creaked. Chickens clucked. Normal sounds of a normal village where normal people lived normal lives.
"Your ankle..." Gu Tian said suddenly. "Let me see your ankle."
Shen Yue's hand moved instinctively to cover it even through her robes. "It's nothing."
"Show me. I want to see it."
"Gu Tian..."
"Show me."
Maybe it was the command in his voice that had unexpected authority. Maybe she was just too tired to argue. Either way, she found herself rolling up her robe's leg, exposing the skin where the shadow-thing had touched her.
The frost-patterns had spread. What had been delicate tracery around her ankle now crawled halfway up her calf, black veins under pale skin that pulsed faintly with her heartbeat. As Gu Tian stared, one of the patterns shifted and for just a moment looked almost like a character, like an ancient script she couldn't read but somehow understood meant hunger.
"Holy sh*t ," Gu Tian exclaimed while stepping back, his face gone white. " Those aren't any regular wounds. That looks like demon qi poisoning. Did you get this from the dungeon?"
"No," Shen Yue said, pulling her robe down. "It doesn't seem like qi poisoning to me. It's...it's just a graze I got while fighting the Plague Hounds. It's under control" She lied.
"Like hell it is." But he was scared now, truly scared and fear made people unpredictable. "We need to find a healer. There must be someone in the village who can help, someone who can..."
"Do what? Cut it out of me?" Shen Yue stood. "Gu Tian, look. We survived something we shouldn't have at merely SaoYu level. Don't you think this is abnormal? If anybody gets any wind that we are survivors from that cave exploration, we might get into trouble. And that's why no one would know who we are. My wound's fine, okay?"
He had no answer. Just stood there as if contemplating on something new that he had just discovered.
"I'm still me," she said quietly. "I'm still the person who got you both out of there. Who kept Chan'er safe."
Liar. A voice whispered in her mind, Kaelen's voice or something else, she couldn't tell anymore. You were never that person. You just took his place.
"Get some rest," she told Gu Tian. "We'll figure this out in the morning."
She walked to the door. She needed air, needed distance from his stare. Outside, the sun had long gone over the mountains, the moonlight replacing it with paints in shades of violet and gold. Mei Lin was still at the shrine, but she'd stopped praying. Now she was just sitting, staring at the paper talismans fluttering in the evening breeze.
The frost-patterns on her leg pulsed once, twice, then settled into a steady rhythm. Inside her chest, nested in the stolen architecture of someone else's body, the demon orb dreamed dark dreams and counted down to something she couldn't see yet but knew was coming.
Five days in the dungeon that had felt like four hours. Time, she was learning, was just another thing that could be bent and broken in places where the earth was old. She wondered what else could break before they found safety; that's if safety even existed for people like them anymore.
Time had barely passed and she had even barely had control over this body yet she was been haunted. Reaching out to the owner's memories, she could access quite a large amount of data from this world. Lucky for her even if the boy was weak in terms of qi and magic, his knowledge bank was diverse and she wondered where he got all this knowledge from because the boy, Kaelen, had come from under-privileged and poor family.
Behind her, through the open door, she heard Chan'er begin to cry softly in her sleep. The little girl must have got some trauma from those events she'd experienced in the dungeon. She couldn't still process what had really happened there. She could swear it happened like a fast forwarded occurrence. She had forgotten most of the details there. All she was sure right now is she had to do something, something that had led her into this world. A world where power determined the course of nature, the survival of people.
She understood that her situation had greatly disadvantaged her since her arrival here. But Shen Yue even from her old world never gave up on easily, that's what had enabled her rise through the ranks to the Party's Commander in her old tech world. Here she was now, thrown into the quite opposite of everything she'd ever experienced or had knowledge of and somehow, she had to overcome all these challenges and adapt. She felt like she had nothing to lose.
What loss am I to make? Even the body am wearing as a clown isn't me...