Chapter Text
Xie Lian was just easing the lid off a bamboo steamer to check its contents, careful to avoid the billow of hot air directly to the face, when he felt the unsubtle twang of something passing through the barriers he'd set up.
The barriers were only there to give him some forewarning, but anyone even remotely spiritually aware would have known they were tripping up someone else's array, and anyone lacking spiritual awareness would have simply felt a compulsion to avoid going that way.
Xie Lian set the lid back down, and stepped away from the fire and into the shadows.
He'd set up for the night in the half-collapsed remains of an old shrine, because the stove was intact and it seemed like a shame not to make use of it. If the villagers saw the smoke or the firelight and thought to summon some exorcists, Xie Lian was ready to simply leave before trouble found him. But he would have still preferred to stay, so he merely stepped out of the shrine through one of the gigantic gaps in the back wall, and circled around in the dark after the interlopers made their way inside.
His uninvited visitors made no effort to hide themselves, but as Xie Lian heard on of them bumble their way in through the door and exclaim loudly upon discovering the steamer, it became obvious that the interlopers were just as dead as Xie Lian was.
Xie Lian rolled his eyes and stepped back inside the shrine.
The larger of the two ghosts who'd arrived was easily the size of an ox, and standing upright, he nearly brushed the ceiling beams. Currently, he was crouched down next to the steamer, happily inspecting its contents. Xie Lian recalled this particular ghost only went by Lao Deng.
The second ghost, more normally proportioned, was a gloomy-faced woman in mourning robes, her skin showing the tell-tale signs of originally having belonged to someone else other than the person currently wearing it. This was Zhaodi, and Xie Lian was more acquainted with her because she had a knack for tracking him down.
"Hey, boss, you've gotten better at cooking!" Lao Deng declared as he chewed. "What is it that you're making?"
"That's animal offal. I'm making glue," Xie Lian informed him.
Lao Deng froze, blinking slowly as this information sank in, but then, after thinking about it for a moment, started chewing again.
"S'good, though," he persisted.
Zhaodi made a small disgusted noise before turning to him.
"Boss, why're you even in this shit hole?" she demanded. "Ain't even spooky. You even seen the kinda place Black Water has?"
"Have you?" Xie Lian asked, curious. He always did his best to avoid the other Ghost King, and the feeling had always been mutual.
"No, but I bet it's way more impressive than this place. What is this? A shack?" She kicked some loose, rotten piece of wood along the floor and snorted. "Have some pride, boss."
"I think this was a shrine once," Xie Lian said. "I quite like it, I was thinking of fixing it up and staying here a while."
"I don't think you've got enough glue for that, boss," Lao Deng opined, even as he dipped in for another mouthful of steamed animal bits.
"It's a work in progress," Xie Lian said simply. "Have you come to me for a reason in particular?"
"Sure did!" Zhaodi said, and reached into her sleeve to take out a scroll. "Boss, you know how the Heavenly Emperor his self keeps descending to meddle with things?"
Xie Lian would have felt his heart skip in his chest, if he'd still had a beating one.
"The new Heavenly Emperor, you mean?" Xie Lian said, softly.
Zhaodi scrunched her nose. "How's he new, when he's been around for almost two centuries?"
"Ahah... yes, you're right," Xie Lian quickly agreed. He supposed even a lot of ghosts had only come around after Jun Wu was killed and then replaced, so saying this was a new state of affairs was simply revealing Xie Lian's advanced age.
"Right, so, the Heavenly Emperor," Zhaodi continued, "keeps poking his nose in everyone's business, right? Recently did a number on that fucker, Qi Rong."
"Night-Touring Green Lantern. Right." Xie Lian had never met this ghost whose name was so coincidentally like his cousin's, but from what he heard from the grapevine, it was just as well Heaven did something about him.
He was a bit vague on the details, and the rumors and stories contradicted each other on whether the Heavenly Emperor dispersed or imprisoned Night-Touring Green Lantern, but nonetheless, any story they told only served to increase the new emperor's prestige.
"Word now is that his butterflies were spotted at Mount Yujun," Zhaodi informed him.
"Ah." Xie Lian pressed a hand against the bridge of his nose. "Please tell me Xuan Ji has been calmer lately."
"No good even if she was, boss," Zhaodi said, unfurling a scroll. It was a call for exorcists. "When you saved that little bride from Xuan Ji last month, she ran home and cried to her daddy about the mean ghosts upending her wedding sedan."
Xie Lian tried not to look too sheepish. "There were wolves," he said helplessly. He hadn't meant to knock over the sedan, but even when he did, he'd used Ruoye to gently pluck the young woman from inside and set her on her feet. It didn't occur to him until now that she might have seen the situation as frightening even when she was being rescued.
"Anyway, her bigshot daddy was a local official, and he put a call out for any cultivator in five hundred li to come help, and then made a huuuge offering to the Heavenly Emperor himself, asking to be saved from the terrifying White Silk Wanders, who's been definitely spotted on Mount Yujun and who's now gotten all the blame for the missing brides."
"Do they really think I've been kidnapping brides on Mount Yujun this entire time?" Xie Lian asked doubtfully.
"Oh yeah, they definitely think you're some kind of sex-crazed kidnapper," Lao Deng interjected happily.
Xie Lian hid his face in his hands.
"It's not all bad," Zhaodi said, rolling up the scroll again. "If it helps, everyone knows you look real pretty, so some girls are into that kind of thing."
Xie Lian's voice was muffled as he said through his hands, "That doesn't help one bit."
"Anyway, boss, thought we should tell you about that," Zhaodi said. "'Cause they say the Heavenly Emperor took personal interest in this thing, and his butterflies are all over the place, so obviously--"
"I need to go find Xuan Ji," Xie Lian said, as he straightened up and nodded.
"No!" Zhaodi and Lao Deng yelled at the same time. Then Zhaodi chucked the scroll at Xie Lian's head, missing by an impressively wide margin, and continued, "It means you gotta lay low until this thing blows over!"
"But Xuan Ji--"
"--Is a huge bitch, who cares what happens to her?" Zhaodi snorted.
"I care," Xie Lian said simply. "It's my fault, and I promised I'd visit her again anyway, so I can't, in good conscience, let her suffer the consequences for my own actions."
Zhaodi groaned and tugged her own hair in despair. She would have perhaps buried her face in her hands, but she was mindful not to disturb her skin. "You could let her suffer a little bit," she insisted.
"Thank you both for telling me about this," Xie Lian said. He snuffed out the fire in the stove with a flick of qi, the only sign he would leave of his passing through this shrine. "Don't concern yourselves overly much, I will handle whatever happens at Mount Yujun."
"If you say so," Zhaodi muttered, doubtful.
"Okay, boss," added Lao Deng. "Good luck. Can I--"
"Yes, you can finish the rest," Xie Lian said.
"You're the best, boss," Lao Deng was saying, as Xie Lian already departed in a cold rush of ghost qi.
Xie Lian did not usually rush anywhere. Since dying, his luck took a paradoxical turn for the better, so he found himself being run out of towns much less nowadays. Even the times when he attracted the attention of cultivators who recognized him as a ghost, he managed to extricate himself gracefully from those situations.
Even in other aspects, traveling as a ghost was more enjoyable than it had been while he was still alive: he no longer suffered from starvation, or minded the elements. He feared no attack or robbery, and even other ghosts were no real match for him.
He was no longer powerless, and no longer plagued by misfortune. In a stroke of sad irony that fell in line with the rest of his life perfectly, his two cursed shackles had shattered while he'd still been pinned inside the coffin, and at long last, his forced cycle of death and revival broke off. That Mount Tonglu had opened at the same time had been disorienting to the extreme, but it had given Xie Lian's confused mind something to focus on at the time.
So he had thus leapt from banished god, to nascent Wrath, to new Supreme so quickly, that when Xie Lian emerged from Mount Tonglu replete with new power, he had scarcely known what to do with himself.
So he had plodded on, continuing as he had during his banishment: after all, he could not return to Heaven any more now than he could have before. It was just that--well, he just ran into ghosts a lot more now, and since he himself was dead, he just thought he'd make the best of it. He tried to help. He failed miserably at it more times than not, so he had no real idea why he was so popular and sought-out by so many of his fellow ghosts, but he found himself not quite wanting to let them down.
(None of them were Wu Ming, and Xie Lian knew that nothing he did now would make up for how he'd treated Wu Ming, but it was at least some way he could honor the nameless soldier he had failed so horribly. What other reason did Xie Lian have to stick around as a ghost?)
At any rate, one additional thing that Xie Lian found convenient about being a Supreme nowadays was that he could alter his appearance. He did not frequently bother, but when he did, it was because he wanted to avoid stirring any trouble up with mortals.
His usual appearance would be too eye-catching on Mount Yujun, where people would be looking for him specifically, so he changed his clothes to rougher fabrics, a simpler cut, and to a dark blue color, near to black. With his bamboo hat, he now looked more like a peasant than a cultivator. Recalling that the rumors also spoke about how good looking he was, he also subtly tweaked his features to look plainer, even a little bit older, with subtle crow's feet and laugh lines. The fine lines only made him look like he was in his thirties, but these were details that most ghosts could not produce, so it added to the disguise.
He had his basket of scraps on his back when he walked into the village on Mount Yujun, and since he passed through just a month prior, he was taken aback by the new temple to the Heavenly Emperor which had sprung up in the meantime.
The temple itself was not very large, and in fact scarcely seemed the same size as the temple to Nan Yang just down the way, but the building was so new that it still smelled like freshly cut lumber and drying paint. It was a sharp contrast to the grandiose temples once dedicated to Jun Wu, but there was a charm to the simple, red-painted roof tiles and paper butterfly lanterns embellishing the building.
Xie Lian couldn't entirely resist a little prod of curiosity. He walked up to the temple doors, almost expecting to be struck down as some evil thing rather than be allowed to approach, but when he passed the threshold, there was no resistance.
The interior of the temple was just as clean and new as the exterior. There was no statue of the new Heavenly Emperor, but Xie Lian knew that was out of the Heavenly Emperor's own desire.
There was also no prayer cushion, and that part always struck a chord with Xie Lian, albeit of embarrassment. He recalled demanding that his own followers not kneel, but it was never something he had managed to impress upon the masses, and now, looking back, he felt foolish for having tried. In the case of the Heavenly Emperor, the fact that people obliged his request must have had more to do with the fact that the Heavenly Emperor himself appeared to his followers in their dreams to inform them that anyone who knelt in his temples would be struck by misfortune.
Even without a statue, there were paintings lining the temple walls, depicting scenes of the Heavenly Emperor in legend. In the two hundred odd years since he'd ascended from Martial God to Heavenly Emperor, numerous folk tales had already sprung up of him: of traveling in disguise and punishing corrupt officials--sometimes mortals, sometimes even other heavenly officials--and often of mocking the foolish. More fanciful tales liked to speak of him searching for some lost lover, or seeking out an old enemy, but no doubt, there were many more tales of the new Heavenly Emperor descending to the mortal realm personally than there even had been of Jun Wu doing so.
Xie Lian gave a cursory look to most of the painted scenes, finding the style somewhat mediocre and the workmanship about on par for such an obscure village, but he paused at the one mural to the far end, just bordering the image of the Heavenly Emperor on his throne.
It depicted the scene of him striking down Bai Wuxiang, his sword thrust through the ghost's chest as a the outline of a mountain framed him: Mount Taicang, where the last battle took place. Or maybe Mount Tonglu, where the fight started. Xie Lian had seen the remnants of the conflict back then, when he'd suffered in the furnace: crumbled stone, odd pieces of statuary too broken to make out their subject.
Xie Lian could not make himself look upon the pathetic figure of Bai Wuxiang, reduced here to a smear of white with its face sketched poorly in black. He hoped this story was one which had been made up entirely, because Xie Lian could not fathom how Bai Wuxiang could have come back again and killed Jun Wu, and after knowing it was possible for it to happen once, how could Xie Lian ever sleep knowing that even a Heavenly Emperor could not slay him? What could guarantee that Bai Wuxiang could not return again, and that this new Heavenly Emperor's victory over him was any more real than Jun Wu's had been?
No, no. Xie Lian no longer slept anyway. He couldn't think of this, so he turned abruptly on his heel.
His sudden movement sent one of the nearby hanging drapes fluttering, and a little glint of silver attracted Xie Lian's gaze.
He froze in place when he saw it was a silver butterfly, perched inconspicuously in the shadow of the red fabric. For the common people, seeing a silver butterfly was deemed great luck, but Xie Lian was a ghost, and he did his best to keep his eyes lowered from the glare of Heaven.
But an innocent scrap collector would not flinch away from such a sight, so Xie Lian carefully breathed out as if in surprise, and reached out a tremulous finger towards the creature.
It really was so pretty, that he almost wanted to touch it. Still, when he got too close, the butterfly fluttered off the wall and disappeared into the air, and Xie Lian felt a twist in his chest; disappointment, or relief?
Xie Lian decided it was better to leave and be on his way, but just as he turned to walk out, the double doors of the temple were banged open, the impact and the rush of air sending all the decorations inside shaking and fluttering.
The doors missed Xie Lian, luckily, but he stopped in his tracks face to face with the man who'd just barged in, and they both jerked to a halt just one arm's length from each other, mutually startled.
The man facing Xie Lian was tall and strikingly handsome, an eyepatch covering one eye and his hair falling wild around his shoulders. He was dressed in red, his clothing fairly simple but made of fine fabrics. He also had a silver sword on his hip, but he did not have the air of a cultivator. A young master of some well-off family, perhaps, but maybe too well off for Mount Yujun.
They were stuck in place staring at one another for what must have been no longer than a heart beat, for all that it felt like a lifetime, and then there was a rattling sound--
The young man smacked a hand over his sword, a flash of embarrassment passing over his face.
"Excuse this lowly one," Xie Lian muttered, and darted past the man, out into the village.
He brushed past two other young people, dressed just as incongruously for this backwater village (practical clothing, but very fine make and fabric), and they must have been accompanying the man in red.
"General, who was that?" the young woman of the pair asked. Her voice was only just high enough for Xie Lian to hear it as he made himself scarce. He did not hear the man in red's answer.
Xie Lian walked until he found a tea house to sit in.
Last time he'd been through here, he avoided mortal dwellings entirely. He'd gone directly to the mountains to find Xuan Ji.
Now, there was no reason for anyone to think he was anything but a wandering scrap collector, and the man at the tea house even gave Xie Lian a mistrustful look until Xie Lian put a few coins on the table to prove he could pay the bill.
Xie Lian took a single sip of the tea and set it back down. He'd chosen a seat next to the window, and so he looked out at the passing villagers, trying to overhear anything useful. He enhanced his hearing just a little bit with spiritual power to catch their words.
Most of it was the regular talk one expected: complaints about sore backs and bad weather, listing out tedious chores they yet had to do, scolding misbehaving children, gossiping about indecent affairs (Xie Lian blocked out his ears from hearing the details), but no word about any other brides going missing since the last one.
Actually, no, there was something:
"...the brides without living relatives would have just ended up unburied otherwise."
"What shamelessness." A disgusted click of the tongue. "So if a body wasn't valuable enough to ransom back to the family, they were just going to throw it away like trash?"
"You don't know shamelessness, if you haven't heard how they treated some of the more well-preserved brides."
A gasp, and then the murmur of conversation moved away.
Xie Lian put the pieces together numbly. After talking Xuan Ji down, he'd destroyed the array around the Ming Guang Temple and left a message with the first mortal he ran across at the outskirts of the village, to tell them about the temple and inform them that the bodies of the brides could be taken away to be buried.
He could not imagine that whoever went to recover the bodies would act so disrespectfully towards the dead.
Xie Lian looked back down to his tea cup, and was ready to pick it up again, except that a silver butterfly had perched on its rim at some point when his attention was diverted.
He did not feel so alarmed seeing a butterfly the second time, but he also did not have the heart to shoo the creature away. He suspected he would not often have the opportunity to regard such a delicate, beautiful thing as the butterfly up close, anyway, so he merely sat there and watched the gentle flap of its wings, like the flutter of gossamer in the soft breeze.
The tea had long since gone cold when someone sat across from Xie Lian.
Jarred from his reverie, Xie Lian looked up only to come face to face with the red-robed man he'd crossed paths with at the temple.
"Ah--" Xie Lian gave a startled look around, but every single other table in the tea house was unoccupied, so it wasn't as if he had missed some kind of rush. The man had to have sat down at his table deliberately. "...how can this one help young master?"
The man had an intense gaze, all the more for having one visible eye, but Xie Lian did not squirm. Even a heavenly official would not immediately know he was a ghost when he was disguising himself, and Xie Lian knew because he'd run across a few as a ghost. Never mind the intricacy of his skin, but even his ghost qi was tightly hidden.
Still, Xie Lian didn't know what to make of the sudden interest he'd attracted.
"I am the one imposing, so forgive the question," the young man said, not sounding remotely apologetic, "but you are not from this village, are you?"
"I'm only a poor old scrap collector, just passing through," Xie Lian said.
At this, the young man raised an eyebrow.
"Gege hardly seems that old," he said.
Xie Lian coughed to himself. Of course, he was many times older than he looked, but the disguise he was wearing hardly showed it. Indeed, he might have looked like only a scant few years older than this young man, so it must have sounded strange to hear him speak like that.
"Ah, I'm older than I look, young master. I just happened to keep well," Xie Lian fluttered his hands self-effacingly.
"And gege has never been through Mount Yujun before?"
"I... may have passed through before once or twice," Xie Lian dithered. "I walk so far and wide, some places blend together after a while."
The man clasped his hands together on the tabletop and then leaned forward, looking serious. "Gege should be more careful where he wanders. Mount Yujun is haunted."
Xie Lian coughed awkwardly.
"Th-the ghost bridegroom, yes, I've heard. Though," Xie Lian gave a small smile and a shrug, "not being a bride myself, I've not been too concerned."
"Not only that."
"Oh?"
"White Silk Wanders was seen around here, too," the young man imparted, his voice dropping conspiratorially.
"Mm. Yes, I think I've heard of that."
"Gege is not afraid of White Silk Wanders, then."
"Hah..." Xie Lian stopped his leg from bouncing in place, and picked up his cold tea to take a sip. Ruoye was stuffed under his clothing, where it couldn't be seen, but it squeezed his torso in support. "Well, of course anyone should be afraid of such creatures lurking about. What defense does a poor scrap collector like myself have against ghosts?"
"But?"
"But at the same time, what notice would a Ghost King even take of an insignificant mortal?"
"I see," was the young man's response, and then they lapsed into silence as Xie Lian pretended to be extremely absorbed by his cold, watery tea.
The man in red opened his mouth to speak once again, but before he could say anything, a call of 'General!' interrupted him, and then two worried youths invited themselves to the table as well, sitting on either side of the table.
"General, please don't run off," the young woman of the pair said.
"Who is this?" the other new arrival, a young man, asked immediately after.
"To my shame," the man in red said, "I did not catch my table companion's name."
Three pairs of eyes turned towards him, and Xie Lian gave a vague smile. He could have even given his real name at this point, as he had never had it associated with his Ghost King persona, and it was equally unlikely anyone remembered the Crown Prince of Xianle, much less his name.
Xie Lian thought that maybe he would have felt reckless enough to do it if it was only the man in red asking, but as it were, the instinct to conceal and protect the identity he'd had in life was strong.
"This one is surnamed Yan, given name Lian."
The man in red held his gaze for a long moment, a frisson of tension going through Xie Lian as he was pinned under that gaze.
Then, with the slow deliberation of an executioner sheathing a blade, he smiled.
"Then, gege can call this one San Lang."
"Ah, you're the third son but managed to become a general! How impressive the rest of your family must be."
San Lang's smile turned into a full grin in response.
"Oh, I'm not really a general," he said quite brazenly.
"But..." Xie Lian gestured vaguely to the other two at the table.
"That's just something they call me, ignore them," San Lang dismissed.
"I didn't catch your companions' names either," Xie Lian said.
The other two glanced to San Lang, but even though San Lang just continued looking at Xie Lian with an unreadable expression, they must have understood something, because they introduced themselves as Ban Yue and Pei Xiu.
"And you are all here regarding the ghost sighting?" Xie Lian continued with a friendly smile.
"We can't talk about that," Pei Xiu said almost immediately.
"If you have any information, we would be grateful to receive it, however," Ban Yue added.
"No," Xie Lian shook his head. "I'm afraid I don't have anything I can tell you."
With that, he glanced out the window to check the position of the sun, and declared that it was getting late. When he picked up his basket and left, none of them tried to stop him, but Xie Lian nonetheless felt the weight of San Lang's attention as he shuffled out the door.
Xie Lian didn't entirely know if it was wise to visit the Ming Guang Temple, when it seemed the matter was in the middle of being investigated, but he reasoned he could plead ignorance convincingly enough, and he was not confident that Xuan Ji was capable of lying low for any length of time.
He walked through the woods and up the mountain, finding the Ming Guang Temple just before dusk. The remains of the array he'd broken were gone: the magic dissipated, the physical traces washed over a month's worth of mountain rains. Xuan Ji would not have had the skill or the power to rebuild it on her own, and Qi Rong was likely in one of Heaven's dungeons, and with bigger problems than helping one of his minions terrorize the countryside.
The temple was exactly the same as the last time he'd seen it.
When Xie Lian checked inside, however, other than the dead brides being gone, Xuan Ji was also notably absent.
Xie Lian roamed the grounds of the temple for a bit, before circling back and sitting down on the front step. He took out a talisman, burned it to check his hunch, and as the ashes blew away from his fingertips, he let out a little sigh.
Xuan Ji had dissipated, then. Not dispersed by anyone else, but simply disappeared on her own, given the pattern of spiritual energy left behind.
Xie Lian had hoped for Xuan Ji to let go of her obsession, but now that he knew it really happened, he couldn't help but feel a bit melancholy about it, a bit regretful about how harshly he had spoken to her. This was the best outcome, and yet, nonetheless... The last traces of a person were gone from this world.
As the sun hung red just over the crest of the mountains, Xie Lian looked to the temple gates and saw San Lang bathed in sunset hues, leaning against the gatepost with his arms crossed and regarding Xie Lian quietly. Xie Lian was alarmed to realize he did not know how long San Lang stood there before being noticed.
"Gege found his way here quite easily," San Lang remarked with a razor smile.
He pushed away from the gate and strode towards Xie Lian with an easy, catlike grace.
"It's just that I've been through this area before," Xie Lian explained.
"Mm, and yet, when I asked the villagers, none of them had seen gege before today."
"Ah..." Xie Lian lowered his eyes. "A scrap collector isn't very memorable anyway."
"On the contrary, I could scarcely forget someone like gege."
Xie Lian gave San Lang a flustered sideways glance. He didn't understand the game, but he didn't feel in danger either.
"San Lang got here so quickly," Xie Lian remarked.
"Same as gege."
The silence that followed was not quite like a stand-off. They merely looked at one another. But something of Xie Lian's melancholy must have been making him look particularly pitiable in that moment, because San Lang was the first to relent.
He sat down next to Xie Lian on the front steps, and they both stared off in the distance. The sun had slipped just below the mountain crest, leaving behind strikingly red clouds.
"Was the inhabitant of the temple one of gege's friends?"
Xie Lian laced his fingers together over his knees and looked at his own perfectly-rendered dirty nails, entirely human in appearance, with loving detail down to the hangnail.
"No," Xie Lian said. "I didn't even like her. By all accounts, nobody should be sad at her deciding to pass along."
"...But?"
"But... I don't know."
How could Xie Lian explain, that being a ghost was like living in epilogue, and sometimes it was better to just close the book?
Some ghosts lingered without even knowing why. They would dissipate without even knowing what desire held them tethered to this realm until the moment it was fulfilled. Xie Lian had seen it on their faces often: the surprise and the relief, the resignation and the serenity both. And then the slow fade out. It was always a little scary to Xie Lian, to see the exact moment someone just... let themselves slip away.
As a Supreme, Xie Lian knew he was at no risk of going the same way. If he dissipated, it would be because he made a choice, and if he persisted, it was similarly because he chose to. Even if he could not put in words what held him in this world, he was powerful enough that whether to dissipate or not was his own choice that he had complete control over.
He resisted the urge to touch his throat, to recall the moment when the shackles shattered. For all the misery they'd brought him, his knee-jerk reaction at the time was to panic. The shackles had been his companions for six hundred years. He still loved the world, even when it brought him only suffering, and the world had undoubtedly inflicted misery on him aplenty. And yet, in that coffin, in his lowest moment, when death finally came, his soul did not move on. It flared, it clung, it scratched and grasped, and he burst out of the coffin hungering for Mount Tonglu, and then fought every other ghost standing between him and the Kiln.
"I suppose," Xie Lian said eventually, "that I was reminded that the world still feels worth clinging to. Is it hypocritical of me to want others to pass on, then?"
"It isn't," San Lang said decisively. "Some trash needs to take itself out."
"San Lang!" A nervous laugh was startled out of Xie Lian at this terrific rudeness.
"But if gege finds the world worth holding on to, that's good," San Lang continued. "The reason to carry on doesn't matter."
"Does it not? That's a relief then, because I wouldn't know why or how I'm still around." Xie Lian laughed at that, but when he turned to look at San Lang, even though his expression was perfectly neutral, there was a vague sadness underneath. An illusion of the encroaching night, perhaps, because then San Lang smiled mischievously.
"If gege doesn't know," San Lang said, "then how about you stick around so that I can show you something interesting next time we meet?"
"Oh?" There was going to be a next time, then? How confident of San Lang. And yet, Xie Lian believed him completely.
San Lang stretched his long legs before him, leaning back with a smirk. "A scrap collector would be very interested in all the little trinkets I've collected over the years."
"Now you've made me curious," Xie Lian said. "Alright, alright, I'd love to see anything you have."
"I'll find you," San Lang said. "Unfortunately," he raised two fingers to his temple, the gesture distinctive and immediately familiar to Xie Lian, "Right now I am being harangued by incompetent subordinates. But gege shouldn't worry, we'll see each other again. Will you stick around Mount Yujun?"
"I... would like to find out what happened to the remains of the brides," Xie Lian said.
"Ah. Gege needn't worry, they all got proper burials," San Lang gave a dismissive wave of his hand, then added darkly, "The trash who tried to profit off of them has been dealt with."
"I see... Then I should thank you."
A smirk spread across San Lang's face.
"Gege can show his gratitude properly next time," he said, his voice low and smooth such that Xie Lian felt a strange heat rise to his face.
And then San Lang turned to the temple gates and strode off.