Chapter Text
It is a dream.
Jiang Cheng knows that it is a dream not because he stands on the surface of the water, but because the places where his clothing and shoes are damp do not feel weighed down. The reality check does not come from the most fantastic element, but the most mundane. He’s spent his life dashing over the piers, slipping or getting pushed into the water, and then having to slog the rest of the way to his destination uncomfortably.
It is a dream.
Water flows in very definite ways, and what is under his feet is neither an ocean or lake by the way the current acts. Though it runs like a river, it cannot possibly be since he can see no shore, and the surface is calm. There is no landscape in the distance, only the water that rushes under him for as far out as he can see.
It is a dream.
He knows it by the way the bodies flow in the current. The dead have no grace in the water. That is only in fiction. They float, they bulge, they bleed, they rot. They get eaten away at, soft tissue first. Even if they’re preserved in the cold of the depths, especially in winter, they’re still wholeheartedly dead. The bodies that pass in these currents under the surface could be sleeping. Even with the warp of the water, he can tell they are all perfectly together. No lacerations, no bite marks, no bruises. For once, just people, not victims.
It is a dream.
But it also feels very, very real. Not in the sense that he has been here, but in a sense that there is a place, somewhere out there, that probably looks and feels and acts very much like this.
It is a dream.
He knows it because from somewhere behind him, his brother’s voice echoes, “You should not be here,” and he’s been dead for many years now.
When Jiang Cheng turns around to look. Wei Ying is nowhere to be found.
He turns back and sees something. A person hanging upright and limp over the surface of the water, fast approaching. Despite this, his eyes are drawn down to the water under his own feet where one of the bodies has halted in the current. The other corpses flow around it. He looks back up. The hanging person is just a short distance, and then. Here.
Not so grotesque as to be covered with blood, or be visibly broken, but his brother looks so indescribably not himself that he can’t even be a memory. Hanging a bit above the water and tilting his head down to look at Jiang Cheng. He’s just so expressionless. Not dead, perhaps, but without life.
There’s only so much he can absorb in a short amount of time, but the threads wrapped around his brother’s wrists and ankles stick out with their shining silver. They lead to a boat behind him, appearing out of nothing.
“Leave.”
It is a dream.
He wakes.
In the years since taking over for his father as the head of the family business, he’s found that power without equal was worth something. Money, enough to live comfortably or lavishly as one chose. Money for emergencies. Money to take care of others. Money to solve any problem that could arise.
Sadly, power without equal has always involved a lot of paperwork as far as Jiang Cheng can tell.
And at night he dreams.
There is money there too. Not as often. Not as much. Not the sort of money that makes him feel vaguely uncomfortable when he thinks about it for too long. How much of it came from generations of well-off Jiangs. How much he has done for himself. How much might have come from things he doesn’t want to think about too hard. How much went towards things he doesn’t want to think about either.
When he’s awake, he signs documents. He tries not to think of it as signing over his soul. He doesn’t know if he has one anymore.
Some days, he’s not sure if he ever did.