Work Text:
He reached his hands up with a final shout of the Yiling Patriarch’s real name, feeling the power rush along his cuts, down through his veins into the array of his own blood. He could feel his inhuman traits try to rise to the surface with them, but the seal the jin sect had painted on him kept them wrapped away. He couldn’t wait for it all to just stop.
No more arrogant cousins and abusive family.
No more failure. No more derision.
No more cultivation sects forcing him to stay human.
He will finally be worth something more than a useless half-breed lunatic cut-sleeve.
...The array flickered red before going dark, the candles surrounding him going out with a hush. He dropped his arms, a twisting sort of dread laying heavy in his stomach. He looked down at the array he had spent so long painting, the night gone to painstakingly draw and write this from his memories. “Nononono...Come on. This has to work.” He whispered desperately under his breath, pushing what little energy he had at the array. This couldn’t...
He needed it.. He shoved as much as he could into it, his eyes burning with unshed tears.
He couldn’t have failed here, not when there was so much on the line...! “Please, I call the Yiling Patriarch! Wei Wuxian! There is nothing left for me here, please work.” He begged, clenching his fists as he fought the tears. His arms stung painfully, blood running down the inside of his wrists. “Please.”
He curled over his fists, pressing his forehead to the cold floor. He didn’t know what he expected, he never did anything right. He couldn’t even sacri- Red light crackled over his knuckles, the air going from practically null to crackling with energy.
Mo Xuanyu fell back, eyes wide as the array suddenly glowed red with the crash of lightning. The cuts on his arms stung sharply as the air in front of him warped and twisted. Pain shot through his chest, and suddenly his little shack was gone.
Instead he found himself looking at a cave floor carved with a sealing array and layered with old and new talismans around a dark red pool, strangely numb to his wounds. In fact he was numb to everything, including the sharp hunger pains he had ignored to bring the array on his floor to life. A dreadful sort of curiosity made him look up, half convinced that this was a last fever dream until he bled out on his floor. Maybe he would see the blank eyes of the ghost general again, or maybe he would see his own face.
Instead a white tiger laid there, half submerged in the blood red pool with a spiritual sword thrust in through it’s back between prominats ribs to the hilt. It’s white fur was tinged pink with pitch black stripes curving along starvation bold ribs, scars carving lines across the fur. Despite this the tiger’s sides rose and fell with the long breaths becoming shorter as it seemed to stir from sleep. Was this some last nightmare before he found his soul torn apart by a ritual gone wrong?
As the beast wakes, the shadows clinging to the edges of his vision and the cave walls start to swell and recede as if they were living things breathing in time with the stirring beast. The atmosphere thickens as the beast gets its front paws under it’s skinny bulk, and Mo Xuanyu grips his head as the blade scrapes against the stone bottom of the pool. Fresh blood drips from the wound as the sword shifts, and the talismans surrounding the pool spark warningly. The shadows seem to drip from the walls, slinking their way to the pool like snakes.
Mo Xuanyu flinched away from the reaching tendrils, even as his eyes tracked their trail as they curled around the edge of the seal. Why couldn’t he have done this one thing right? Sect Leader Nie had been so nice but sad when he talked to him. The person who had listened to him and believed him when he talked....and now Mo Xuanyu is gonna have his soul torn to pieces and he will have done nothing. Suddenly the talismans closest to him began to smoulder, the shadows grew more agitated as the pressure in the cave grew stronger. He curls his arm to his chest as a low burning ache sparks in him.
The tiger shook its head, blinking it’s way to full awareness with a yawn. Mo Xuanyu felt his eyes drawn to the Tiger’s as it blinked them open.
Sleep hazy crimson eyes met his own and the pain he hadn’t felt flared bright hot across his chest and the cuts decorating his arms. He curled forwards as his breath caught, the talismans burning to ash in a flash of all to familiar red energy.
The tigers eyes seem to snap to awareness, round pupil folding needle thin as it rumbles with an echoing growl. The shadows surge forwards the instant the last of the older talismans burn up, filling the seal carved into the floor and crossing over the tigers rising form.
The cuts burn like he poured chilli oil over them, but he can’t help but watch as the shadows and the array glow with the same resentful energy, the shadows twining around the Tiger’s neck and jerking it down into the pool with the sickening slick sound of a sword cutting through flesh.
The dreaded sound of the door to his shack rattling threaded into his hearing, superimposing the splash of blood and the tiger’s angry snarl. He twitched away from the strange scene in front of him to glance over his shoulder, and the sight of his shack flickered into view like a weak spirit.
The pressure on his chest increased, and his lungs burned like he had swallowed fire. It feels like he can’t breath, but it also feels like if he let it, his breath would devour him. Dark spots that are distinctly unlike the shadows pressing the tiger down into the pool flicker through his vision.
Movement catches his gaze, and he watches hazily as a man seems to pull out of the tiger as the shadows shove the sword deeper. All he can see is tangled hair pulled back into a hair up style with a bright red ribbon, long black robes, and soft grey eyes with the same slit pupils as the tiger.
That is all he can see before something that feels suspiciously like his cousin’s foot crashes into his back and he wakes up in the shack just in time to crash head first into the floor. “Stop playing dead!” His cousin yelled as Mo Xuanyu gasped in air as quiet as he could, his limbs twitching as what felt like his soul reintegrated with his sorry form. He could hear them smashing his things, he should never have tried to tell Madam Mo. Sure cousin, Xuanyu will get right on that as soon as he stops bleeding out and his soul gets it’s act back together.
”Huh, I’m not sure how to feel about this.” An unfamiliar male voice said lightly, dark boots stepping into his vision. Mo Xuanyu’s arms burned, and he bit back a frown even as his cousin leaned over him to make dull threats.
”--Are you proud of yourself just because you’ve studied cultivation for a few years? Well, how does it feel when you’ve been kicked back home like the beast you are?” Ziyuan taunted, flicking him in the nose.
Mo Xuanyu waited until his cousin and his lackey’s left before he pushed himself up to a sitting position. The dark boots led up to worn black robes edged in red that floated like the man was underwater, and a black flute tucked into the belt cinched too tight. Mo Xuanyu felt something prickling at the edge of his disbelief, the striped white tail flicking behind the spirit with agitation.
”For one thing, this is from my journal and I don’t think I qualify as an evil spirit!” The man complained, kneeling down to meet Xuanyu’s gaze. It was the man from the cave, or at least someone who looked like him, with the warry curiosity burning in red tinted grey eyes. “Mainly because the main requirement is being dead, and despite everyone's best efforts I am very much alive thank you. The fact you got this far is rather impressive for what you tried.”
Mo Xuanyu stared as the man leaned straightened up, gliding around Mo Xuanyu to look at the array now burnt into the shacks floor. Xuanyu swallowed, turning carefully to watch the man move around, white tail swinging. “Y-yiling Patriarch?” He asked carefully, before blinking rapidly. “Wait, Impressive?”
The man, who might very well be the living spirit of the boogeyman of the cultivation world, turns to him with a sarcastic smile full of sharp teeth to match the black stripes curving over his sharp cheeks. “Wei Ying courtesy name Wuxian at your service. Quite literally given the fact you managed to force the seal I designed to bind me for eternity to let me out, and have bound me to your service until we, and I’m just guessing here, deal with that revenge you tried to give your soul up for is complete.” The YILING PATRIARCH said lightly, squatting to bop him on the nose.
The second Wei Wuxian’s ghostly form made contact with Mo Xuanyu, the man vanished from sight and Xuanyu’s skin felt impossibly crowded. For a moment that seemed to stretch too long, he could taste iron on his tongue and something cold and hard brushing against his core. It was over all too soon, and he found himself numb again as he fell out of his own body in a ball of feathers, scales, and furs. He laid on the floor for a moment, taking in the strange sensation of being both immaterial and in his pixui form for the first time in years. He hadn’t known he could miss having a tail do much until he had one again.
Something fell behind him with a solid thud, startling him from his admiration of his spirit/soul form. ”OWowowowow.” His own voice complained behind him. It took a moment for him to remember how to get his paws under him and how to fold his wings in a way so they laid somewhat flat. He turned to see his own body laying face first on the ground pitifully, arms wrapped around his stomach.
“W-what are you doing?” He asked before he could stop himself, spirit forms were good for several things but talking wasn’t usually one of them. Though apparently it seemed being a soul literally expelled from his own pitiful body blurred some of the rules, not that he was complaining.
”I was going to stand up and maybe look around a bit but you are really hungry. And dangerously low on blood.” Wei Wuxian complained to the floor, before pushing himself up with Mo Xuanyu’s skinny arms. There was something almost funny about seeing someone else pilot his body, he couldn’t ever remember making that wide eyes look of comical surprise before. “Oh! You’re one of those...those things! The one that’s like a Kirin but not as cool as the Kirins. What the Peacock was! The lion bird thing! Like the little statutes humans put outside their houses sometimes.”
Mo Xuanyu eyed him with disbelief, was..was he serious? There weren't that many spirit animals that like to masquerade as human cultivators. “A Pixiu?”
Wei wuxian gestured at him excitedly before wincing, drawing Mo Xuanyu’s cut arm to his chest. “Yes, Pixiu! Though you would think...” The patriarch started before shaking his head, looking around the shack again. “Not important, I don’t suppose they feed you, uh... What is your name?”
Did..did he forget to introduce himself to the Yiling Patriarch? Could his pitiful existence get any worse? Ah, introductions now, dying of embarrassment later. “Mo Xuanyu. My name is Mo Xuanyu.”
The Yiling Patriarch smiled at him, and not for the first time he wondered what exactly Sect leader Nie thought was so special about this man, tiger??, to want to bring him back. He supposed he would figure it out, if he survived this.