Chapter Text
Zhuo Yichen wondered sometimes how 30,000 years could be endured. The eight after he’d lost his father and brother had seemed endless. Then, Bing Yi’s demonic blood rewrote his experience of time itself.
A moment lost in thought could see the sun set before he’d realized it. He felt time passing the way the river feels it: Ever-moving, ever-flowing, sunrise and moonrise, and the frail mortal lives briefly floating his same way. Far from fewer diversions, there were more. The fragmentary catch of sunlight on a rain puddle became a cause for pause and appreciation. A young zither player’s delicate hands became a butterfly’s wings, fragile and fleeting and unspeakably radiant for their impermanence.
Zhuo Yichen smiled despite the heavy weight of his heart. Maybe someday he’d get to tell Zhao Yuanzhou that he understood now.
He searched four years, then eight, then twelve, following little more than the thrum of his yunguang sword and the variations of light across its hilt. Some pulsing sensation in his blood, or maybe something he made up in a dream, told him to travel this way, then look here, to check this forest, then the small village with its cooking fires smoking into the sunsetting sky.
An August dawn of his fourteenth year found him on foot, leading his horse beside him. A farmer’s field of wheat stretched beyond the hiding hills, golden waves meeting a sun-yellow sky.
On the roadside he noticed a little boy ducked down in the rows, who didn’t share his peacefulness at the sunrise. The child dug idly in the dirt with the tip of his hand sickle. Yichen took in a breath; maybe one day he would see a young boy and not think of Bai Jiu.
Yichen glanced around. A half dozen adults worked elsewhere in the wheat, sickles moving in steady sweeps to slice through the stalks in thick bunches. He left his horse to graze on the wild grasses growing at the road’s edge and walked over. The boy jolted at his approach and looked up at Yichen. Clear tears tracks trailed down his dirty cheeks.
Decades ago, Yichen might have scolded the boy for not helping his family, as he’d clearly been tasked to do. Now, a timeless being looked upon a child who couldn’t have lived more than six years of life, looked at his desperately sad scowl, his dirt-grubby hands, and felt fondness.
“What’s wrong, little friend?” Yichen asked. He knelt down. Wheat seeds clung to his robes, speckles of amber almost disappearing against the pale fabric. Perhaps they’d fall somewhere further on his journey and in a decades’ time there’d be a new field.
The boy huffed, voice thick with tears. “I’ll never get it done. There’s too much and it’s too hard.”
“Are you meant to do all of this?” Yichen looked at the wide patch before them. The adults had disappeared over the hillside, the wheat chopped and laying in bunches ready for gathering.
“My mama—she said to do as much as I could.” He pinched the sickle blade between his fingers, rocking its loose handle in what seemed to be a familiar motion. It would be difficult to cut anything with an unsteady sickle. A few rough, hacked-at stalks laid on the ground beside the boy. He’d obviously tried.
Yichen hadn’t been much younger than this boy when he’d first started practicing sword forms. His blade had come with more reverence from the world.
“What if I helped you?” Yichen asked.
“Why would this grandpa help me?” The boy’s eyes stayed fixed on the dirt, too despondent for one his age.
Yichen hissed lightly. “This big brother will help you if you don’t call me grandpa. I’m not so old.”
The boy blinked up at him. “You have white hair.”
Yichen nodded, conceding the point. He was also probably older than this boy’s parents, and yet he bristled. “You can call me uncle, how about that?”
The boy’s small giggle was, at last, the first thing aside from his cheeks to properly fit with his youth. He let Yichen take the sickle from him. It was a simple task to tighten the joint. The boy climbed to his feet to stand beside Yichen’s crouch, hand on Yichen’s shoulder to peer over him and watch. Yichen let the magic curl from his palm long enough for the boy to see—and utter a small, delighted gasp–then fused sickle blade to hilt and handed it back to the boy.
Plump fingers gripped the blade that, this time, didn’t rock in the handle at all. The boy grinned. “Thank you, Uncle!
“Now, let’s see about this wheat.” Yichen stood and placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Step back.”
Side by side, they retreated to stand in the road where Yichen’s horse still snuffled amongst the wildflowers. “Wow!” the boy cried as Yichen unsheathed his yunguang sword. Its blade gleamed in the morning sun, though the gem at its hilt remained dull.
Yichen concentrated—perhaps a bit theatrically; he could feel the boy watching him with wonder—and then slashed at the air. He’d once failed so spectacularly to bring down cypress branches with Zhao Yuanzhou. He’d perfected the move since then.
Before them, the wheat stalks snapped at the root, then halted as though a great hand held them aloft and kept them from scattering. Gentle as a snowfall, the wheat shafts dropped to lay atop each other in a tidy heap.
“Wow!” the boy said again, then again once more as though he’d forgotten all other words. He charged into the field, hopping about the pile of wheat with shock and delight. Sheathing his sword, Yichen couldn’t help the small smile and blossom of warmth in his chest. Even tears could be beautiful, but the boy’s joy was radiant.
Voices nearby and Yichen looked up to see the adults returning. He recognized the tenor of the activity, the sudden surprise to see a stranger, and one dressed as Yichen was, on their land and with their son. The woman anxiously fixed her hair, wrapped though it was in a cloth to soak up sweat, and brushed her hands down her dusty clothes. As they rushed over to them, the man wiped his sweaty face and beard with a cloth. Yichen could already hear their apologies, their dignified embarrassment.
“My lord,” the man said, head ducking, “I’m sorry. Our son is so naughty.” He and his wife were both so gaunt, their son so plump and healthy. Only rarely did the sacrifices of the human heart show so boldly in the body.
Yichen waved away their worries. “He’s been a good host.” His father and brother had long ago taught him how to handle the praise and adulation of others. He saluted the couple with a small bow. “I apologize for appearing so suddenly and uninvited.”
The boy sprinted to his mother, grabbed her hand, and pulled her to the pile of wheat. “Look what Uncle did, Mama! One swing!” He swung his sickle like a sword.
The boy’s mama scooped him up into her arms, shushing him. Yet, her eyes widened at the gathered wheat. She jerked her chin at her husband.
“Oh, yes,” the lanky father said, tugging on his beard. “You should—That is, my wife and I, will you join us…”
Like the butterfly-wings of a zither player’s hands, a sunlight glimmer on a rain puddle, Yichen saw the awkward hospitality in the father’s eyes die along with his words as his eyes fell to the marks on Yichen’s neck. Suspicion and fear rose to the brown-black surface. “That is...that is...” the man stuttered, hesitating. “Dear...” He whistled lowly in her direction to seize her attention.
How beautiful and happy his wife looked, holding her chubby son and admiring the harvest. Yichen closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see the moment that happiness was cut down.
Eyes still lowered, he lifted his hands and gave another bow. “No need for such courtesy. I have hours left to travel before I stop, so I should be leaving.” Hours left to travel, days, months, years. The weight of them pressed on his heart. He might be searching forever. “Please forgive my intrusion.”
Yichen turned, eyes on the ground, on his own boots stepping over the dirt toward the hooves of his horse, and took the reins. He continued the way he’d been going.
“Bye, Uncle! Thank you, Uncle!” the boy cried after him before his parents shushed him sharp and quick. Yichen halted and missed Bai Jiu so much it sliced through his chest. He turned, tears lodging in his throat, and managed to meet the boy’s eyes over his mother’s shoulder, even as his parents hurried away with him.
“It was nice to meet you, little friend,” Yichen called to him and smiled. The story of Zhao Yuanzhou’s sacrifice had not made it to these far villages and farms, and some would never accept demons even if they were to know how one had died to save them. But perhaps, like the wheat dropping from his robes, Yichen could plant a seed with that little boy. Maybe in a decade, five decades, ten, a lonely demon would stop by this place and be welcome.
For now, the lonely demon who had once been the treasured and praised son of Tiandu lifted his sword, observed the pale gem at its hilt, and kept walking the way his soul pulled him.
The look of distaste in the father’s eyes stayed with him for too long. Wen Xiao assured him that his features were unchanged, but the way he’d started avoiding his reflection revealed to Yichen how often he used to seek it out. He would admire his shape in bronze, pools of water, in the eyes of the women crossing his path in the streets. He’d grown so accustomed to seeing the brightness of appreciation, attraction, even desire in strangers’ gazes. Swallowing the razor of their disgust and discomfort did not come easy. And swallowing that revulsion let it slice into his bloodstream, poison him. Sometimes, he revolted himself, too.
Alone, he could walk with confidence, a crystalline remnant of the bond between Bing Yi and the great Ying Long, a fierce demon hunter who had bravely risen to greater understanding, the childhood friend of the Baize Goddess, and zhiji of the Great Demon Zhu Yan.
With humans, he could only feel achingly inhuman.
Wen Xiao assured him he was still handsome, that few women would have any objections at all to his new appearance or demeanor. The words had wounded more than soothed. She hadn’t wanted him, after all, as a man or a demon. She’d made her choice and it was not him. It wasn’t much solace to be wanted in an unknown and perhaps unreachable elsewhere.
And though she was his dearest friend, Yichen hadn’t been able to share his deeper fears.
What if, after all this time and all these changes, he was more Bing Yi than Zhou Yichen? What if, after all this time, he no longer looked like Zhuo Yixuan’s little brother?
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His yunguang sword and its tether in his soul pulled him toward a small town, then to a narrow street smelling of boiling noodles and steamed beef, then to a restaurant where a deceptive beast was causing trouble. The demon, a willowy flower of a woman dressed in violet, paled when she saw Yichen standing in the doorway. The married couple she’d thrown into disarray didn’t even halt their arguing as she, head lowered, sulked over to him and allowed herself to be escorted out of the town.
How much easier demon hunting had become now that he was one of them. They sensed his power before he’d ever drawn his sword, some knew his name before he ever spoke it, and only the most foolish tried to fight him. The challenge had instead become not killing them, even if they were intent on killing him. His conscience demanded that he hear them out.
The deceptive beast he might once have viewed as an unforgivable, intolerable blight shivered by his side. Her elbow felt skinny through the fabric of her cloak as he helped her onto the back of his horse for the journey.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asked.
“No,” she said, trembling.
She lied because she had no other choice, just as Zhu Yan had no choice but to collect the world’s malice and Zhou Yichen felt time like a river. Demons and humans alike, they were all what they were and just trying to make lives for themselves.
Rather than shaming her, Zhou Yichen found himself making suggestions, looking for ways she could satisfy her nature without hurting anyone. “A salesclerk at a clothing shop?” he said, walking with the horse’s reins in hand. “Everyone likes to be told they look good in a new outfit. At worst, you would make someone unfashionable. It may be difficult to make friends, but with other demons, you might—”
“I don’t want friends,” she said. “I don’t need friends.”
Yichen couldn’t stop the stutter-step of his feet as he heard, then translated her words. “You’ll find them,” he said softly. “There are others like us who will understand.”
They traveled to an inn on the outskirts of a village another li down the road. He set her up with a room, paid for a full week, and left her to the life she could make for herself. She didn’t tell him to leave, so he didn’t stay.
Yichen might have said those phrases once. I don’t want friends. I don’t need friends. They would have been lies from his lips as much as they’d been from hers. Wen Xiao saw through him, and opened the door to Bai Jiu, Ying Lei, Pei Sijing. Zhao Yuanzhou. She’d opened his heart and they’d all come barreling in after her no matter how he tried to keep them out.
Between tall grasses, by a trickling river, he sparked a small fire among the rocks, to heat his chilled hands. With ice and water at his command, he sometimes forgot how good it felt to be warm. The river, which was wide and deep in places, fell shallow and still here. Yet, he knew it continued flowing. Flowing, flowing, flowing so slowly yet never stopping, thin and glimmering through the grasslands, until it could meet the places where rain and melting snow would let it surge strong once again.
Here, beneath the stillness, Yichen could discern how every rivulet danced and weaved around each stone, drawing away pieces even Yichen’s eyes couldn’t see. The rocks beneath him pressed against the soles of his boots, a thousand individual points of pressure. Each rock had traveled here on that same stream, worn down by time, by the weaving waters, spun in the current for centuries, their edges smoothed; then cracked by another force, by a rock falling from a mountain, a human dropping a pan for river-side frying.
He lost track of how long he sat at the water’s edge, sword in hand. In another life, his knees might have started to hurt, or his backside to go numb. He sat so long and unmoving that dew collected on his robes, beads of water on the still-black of his hair.
The rising sun turned the water to glass, reflecting the bare reaching branches of the trees and the white sky above. Something fluttered as if on a wind, joining the pop and crack of the damp wood in the high flames of his magic-charm fire. Yichen turned to see a parchment drifting toward him.
He reached out a hand and the stiff, aged parchment sailed into it. The Great Demon will accompany Wen Xiao for as long as he lives. He smiled first at the words. The sudden longing for his friends distracted him from the shock that this paper was here at all.
Then, he saw the wisping red of the blood mark. His yunguang sword’s stone lit bright, the radiant blue confirming what his heart already knew.
Zhao Yuanzhou.
He’d looked so long and Zhao Yuanzhou had found him.
The Great Demon will accompany Wen Xiao for as long as he lives.
Tears rose in Yichen’s eyes, his heart like brittle land collapsing into a cavern. Zhao Yuanzhou had found him, and Yichen could bring him back to continue his promise. Finally.
He could bring Zhao Yuanzhou back to Wen Xiao.