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He wasn't strong enough yet. One day Tonglu would open, he would have his chance. But he would only go in if he was sure he'd win. He had to win. He had to live.
Dying was much easier than living. He'd died quite a few times now, literally and figuratively. Staying alive was hard, getting stronger on top of that was even worse.
He fought other ghosts. And fought spirits. He found minor gods. He fought young heroes trying to bravely defeat him and cultivators trying to exorcise him.
Lately, he fought demons.
Demons were different. They were clever. And unlike ghosts, they could be organized, could plan, could collude.
He hadn't understood this. He was still young and so fucking stupid. To be fair, simply being too stubborn to die had served him well in the past hundred years. It was just that this time it didn't work so well.
He was used to singular demons, not demons who belonged to a whole clan of demons, to a whole city, a whole kingdom of demons, that swore fealty to a demon lord with a complex system of law and government.
The demon he'd come upon was just a city guardsman, really. But he'd been traveling with his other fellow guardsmen who had heard blades clanging and came to see who then called their demon captain to help, too.
It had been a long time since he'd gotten his ass so thoroughly kicked. It was almost refreshing.
He wasn't scared at first. Dying again, sure. Do it. He'd come back. He always came back, sure as sunrise.
“This one is strong, isn't it?” said the captain, nudging his body with a boot. “My wife hasn't been well lately, I'll bring him back for her to eat.”
No.
“Sir, you're such a good husband.”
“Well, she's pretty scary, he has to dote on her...”
No. He couldn't get eaten. That might actually kill him.
He grit his teeth. Up. Get up.
He went up, but only because a guardsman hauled him up and bound him; he ended up tossed into the back of a wagon with other provisions.
Get free.
His body wouldn't respond. His leg and arm were broken. Really broken. It was hard to accept his limits. It felt like he got by in a lot of his life (“life”) through the force of sheer will. But...it simply wasn't the case. He was lucky. Unlucky when horrific things happened to him but then also lucky when he survived those things. In reality, it wasn't always will. It was sometimes someone else deciding to take pity on him.
Like a prince deciding to save him as he fell.
Like someone deciding to give him food.
Like someone sheltering him for the night.
This time, it was a bit of both luck and someone's kindness. It had nothing to do with his indomitable will.
They descended on the demons in flashes of black. He really couldn't see more than that, it was more sound. Yells, blades screaming, arrows, crackles of power.
“Someone's in this wagon.”
“What?”
A face appeared over the edge of the wagon, peering at his bound and gagged form. And he recognized that face, though it held no recognition in return.
This person hauled themselves up into the wagon.
“Wait,” called one of the others, someone with a higher level of cultivation. “That's not a person. It's a ghost.”
“Oh?” Lifting a brow, the person knelt down beside him, studying his face.
Still no recognition.
You really don't remember me, do you?
“Hey,” this shitty person said, voice soft as he removed his gag. “Don't you think it's time to move on?”
“No!” he snapped. “No, I can't! I have to live! There's someone...there's someone I have to live for.”
Obsidian eyes flicked over his face, and then he was quiet. It was like he stopped seeing him, expression cool.
“Mu Qing,” called the cultivator still outside the wagon. “Just disperse him. What are you waiting for?”
“Didn't we get a report of someone with different colored eyes?” that awful person murmured. “We thought it was a cultivator or some wandering martial artist. Bit off too much this time, huh?”
He pulled a short blade from his hip, and instead of stabbing him with it, he used it to cut into his own palm.
“Mu Qing! What are you doing?”
“Open up,” he told him, ignoring the other deputy official.
Instead of obeying, he pressed his lips together more tightly.
“Come on, you're too weak to even move, right? And if you don't eat now, you might lose it and go feral,” he said, flexing out his fingers and making a fist over and over to make the blood flow. “Don't be weird. Open up.”
There was no reason not to except he didn't want to.
The deputy rolled his eyes and grabbed his face, squeezing his jaw until his lips had to part.
“Mu Qing, he doesn't even want to!”
He kept ignoring his fellow deputy official, busy making him drink the stream of blood from his palm.
“The general won't like this.”
“What complaint can he have?” he hummed idly as if he wasn't splattering blood over another man's mouth, making a mess. “There's no rule.”
“He's a ghost!
“So? A ghost is fine,” that shitty, horrible person said, with his voice so, so aloof.
The blood was...it was delicious. It was what he needed. Better than a regular person’s blood, intoxicating really, but more importantly, it didn't just heal him. It made him a bit stronger than before. Not a lot. Just enough that he could feel the distinct difference, a difference he couldn't chalk up to imagination or misremembering.
Which was the worst thing that could happen to him.
When he was done making him drink, he cut him free of his bonds and hopped down from the wagon.
“You'll get in trouble,” the other deputy was saying.
“Like he needs an excuse,” that awful person muttered.
—
He encountered this shitty person again, maybe fifty years later, when he was stronger. After dithering around, he turned and didn’t engage him. This happened a few more times. But then he found he couldn’t really remember the taste of that blood. And had it really helped him all that much? Wouldn’t he have escaped without that? Wasn’t this still the fucking worst person? So what if he was sort of nice once? Who cared? Did that makeup for anything? No. It didn’t.
Anyway, he plainly didn’t remember him, so why was he even holding on to that?
So he let go of it, shook it off, and began using him for practice, him and that other asshole. He’d find them, alone or together or in groups, kick their asses, and then leave. He thought maybe he’d have some feeling of guilt, but after the first time, he found he didn’t feel anything besides very pleased with himself. He even managed to switch out their hairpins with ones of his own design so he could go and find them at his leisure whenever he felt like practicing or just wanted to make himself feel better.
That was how he ended up finding him that day, fully intending to beat him senseless, eager for it, already smirking about it. What had saved that shitty, shitty person was that he was in a hot spring. He remembered groaning when he’d realized what he was approaching. This meant he’d have to wait until he was done and dressed.
He’d only come close enough to glimpse his vague figure and confirm he was, indeed, actually in the water. He didn’t want to see that fucking asshole naked, he’d have to tear his eyes out. But he had very good hearing, and what he was hearing sounded weird for a bath. There would be a moment of silence, then gasping, then silence. Over and over. It wasn’t even concern that made him come closer. He just couldn’t figure out what he could be hearing.
So he approached, eyes narrowed, steeling himself in case he saw too much of that person’s body. And what he saw was that person, that ugly, awful person, dunking himself under the water, coming up, trembling, then going back under. He had to watch closely to figure it out: he was going under, screaming, and then coming back up for air. Then he would start again.
When he finally stopped—it felt like forever—this person, this awful person, sat with his shoulders heaving up and down, looking like someone about to throw up. With a vague, fogged look his eyes, he rested his forehead on a rock, staring at nothing.
That terrible person, that worst person, had pale skin that was reddish and splotchy from strain and hot water. Clinging to the rock had drawn his body up out of the water, and the map of blooming bruises stood out in violent relief. Interspersed with the bruising were so many slash marks. New ones overlapped scabbed ones, overlapped scarred ones, overlapped faded ones.
These were concentrated on his back, but the garden of bruises was on his neck, wrists, ribs, his waist. Not his face.
When his breathing had calmed, this awful person rolled over to blink slowly up at the cloudless abyss above him without seeing it.
Weakly, he lifted one of his wrists, holding it against the sky and steam, regarding the bracelets of brown and purple finger marks.
He watched him dig into the pile of his clothes and retrieve soap and a brush with the gaze of a dead man. He watched him scrub mercilessly at his arms, his legs, until the skin was an even angrier red.
He didn't look away when that person climbed out of the water, and the locations of even more bruises affixed themselves in his too-good memory. That person found a jar of salve and, face devoid of interest, started touching it over his throat, his wrists, his chest, and sides.
When he got to his waist, got to his thighs, he stopped. With a clinical economy of movement, he bit down on his own forearm. All of him shook. After a few moments of this, he stopped shaking. Then he relaxed his jaw, removed his arm from his mouth, and continued applying the salve.
It made the bruises fade to nothingness, but from how he moved, he didn't think they were actually healed, just masked. The magic equivalent of applying makeup.
None of this confused him. He knew why it had happened, why it had happened to him, why he was alone, why it was going to keep happening. He hated every single thing about himself that let him understand this person so easily. They were the worst things, the things he hated the most about himself, the most painful parts.
And he didn’t want to know this, he hated knowing this. But now he did. And the knowledge was going to drive him fucking insane.
Usually, when he happened upon things like this, things that weren’t about his prince, things that bothered him, he handled them. He handled them as quickly and decisively as possible and then stopped thinking about them.
He could kill him. After all, he’d planned on killing him. He’d imagined it a thousand times, he’d definitely do it when he was strong enough. Maybe. Probably. Probably not. Maybe. He might. He wanted to kill him.
Maybe he’d even let him. No. He wouldn’t. He would fight, even though he was weaker than a kitten right now. He’d fight with all he had, maybe even self-destruct and take him with him as a last “fuck you.” They were the same that way. Revoltingly. Terminally. They just wouldn’t let themselves die.
He won’t die, he reminded himself. This won’t kill him. He’s tough. He can take-
Yes. He could take it. And he would.
Maybe he even saw him mouthing the words you can do this.
(Maybe not. Bit dramatic.)
He knew this horrible fucking person would grit his teeth and bear it. Until he figured out how to get his general to stop. Probably already had a plan.
He wrinkled his nose, scowling.
The plan was probably “suffer until you’re strong enough to get away.”
How long would that take?
He left without realizing he had, suddenly finding himself somewhere else, on another road, thinking.
He didn’t come up with anything that day, or the next. And a few days later, Tong’lu opened, and he had more important things to think about.
But he didn’t forget it. The way he hadn’t really forgotten what his blood had tasted like. He’d never forget. He had always been shitty that way.
—
“I’m not going to,” Mu Qing said. “You shouldn’t either. It’s stupid.”
Talking around a mouthful of food, Feng Xin shrugged. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Oh.”
“Like I give a shit.”
Mu Qing’s lashes fluttered as he looked at the table.
“What?”
“...you’re not worried about how it’ll look?”
Feng Xin scowled. “No. I’m fucking busy, aren’t you?”
If Mu Qing declined on his own, it would look bad. So he and Feng Xin had to both decline. Because everyone knew they hated each other, when they agreed, it made people think twice about the subject. No one would ever call Feng Xin a coward, even though he fucking was! He was! That fucking- And he had an enraging, unyielding way of refusing things that automatically made the thing he’d refused seem frivolous. Whereas if Mu Qing refused something, it always made people think it said something about him like he had some ulterior motive. So he’d spent an afternoon assembling arguments and the perfect phrases to steer Feng Xin to not take up the challenge, and here he had already tossed the letter into the trash.
He thought getting Feng Xin on side would be a relief, but all he felt was tired.
He’d treated him to dinner. Feng Xin didn’t like to get violent if they were in public in a nice establishment and if he was eating good food. It wasn’t an impossible barrier for him to overcome, but Mu Qing had done everything possible to try and make this conversation not dissolve into a fistfight. He didn’t want to avoid a fight because he wanted to convince him to decline. Between them, the outcome of an argument really had little to do with whether or not they were beating each other up at the moment. No, he was avoiding a fight with Feng Xin for the same reason he couldn’t accept that ghost’s weird challenge to a duel: He wouldn’t win.
Sitting with him was only possible because Mu Qing was propped up on rare medicinal herbs and a couple powerful relics. Otherwise, he’d be curled up in pain, unable to think or move.
“Is your Nao Xing going to accept?” Feng Xin asked.
“Mm.”
“Figures. Your general’s a fucking idiot.”
Mu Qing had been a god in his own right for a while now, they both were, but because they were both from the south, younger and less established, they were still a lower tier than the general of the south, Nao Xing. Mu Qing was a part of Nao Xing palace, scooped up when he’d left Xie Lian, but Feng Xin wasn’t actually affiliated with him.
Feng Xin sort of knew something was wrong. With his irritating, dog-like intuition, he could smell something about Nao Xing that he hated. And he knew Mu Qing acted a bit strange sometimes. But luckily, he was just as dumb as a dog and would never figure it out. On top of that, he was an asshole, so he was only capable of grumbling about Mu Qing being weird and that he served a “bad” general. He didn’t know what was bad about Nao Xing or that these things were connected, and he never would.
It was mind-numbing. Feng Xin liked hanging out with him, but he also thought Mu Qing was disloyal, conniving, and generally a bad person. He never pointed this incongruity out. It would be useless. Feng Xin obviously did not find anything strange about this, it was invisible to him. And Mu Qing was worried that if he asked about it, Feng Xin would realize it was bizarre and stop wanting to be around him.
Sometimes he fantasized about Feng Xin finding out about Nao Xing and the knowledge changing their relationship, making Feng Xin treat him differently. But it wouldn’t.
If Feng Xin found out, he’d throw a fit. He’d try to kill the general of the south, he’d be so loud about it. He’d foam at the mouth. He’d get killed or kicked out of heaven. He’d never shut up about it. He’d be outraged.
But there was no reality where Feng Xin would say what Mu Qing wanted him to say or act the way he hoped he would. It simply wasn’t possible. He’d yell at him for not telling him. He wouldn’t understand why he hadn’t said anything, he’d demand that he explain why.
He’d say, “You didn’t say anything because you wanted to save it for blackmail material.”
He’d say, “You liked it at first, didn’t you?”
He’d say, “You probably seduced him.”
He’d say, “You started it, didn’t you? This was some plan of yours. And then things went too far.”
He’d say any or all of those things and then forget what he’d said, while Mu Qing wouldn’t be able to ever forget, and then that would really be the end. He’d have to cut things off with him completely.
More than anything, he didn’t want to be alone again, he didn’t want to lose the only person he had left. So Feng Xin could never know.
“Mu Qing?”
“What?” Mu Qing murmured.
“What’s wrong with you?” Feng Xin demanded. He’d set his chopsticks down and was glaring hard at him. “You look like shit. Are you sick?” He grabbed for his wrist, and Mu Qing yanked it away, knocking over dishes. At least they were in a private room.
“What are you knocking things over for?” Feng Xin asked. “Come here!”
Mu Qing lifted the hem of his robes and turned. “I already paid. I’m going.”
—
And then, Nao Xing was gone. The ghost king that had appeared from nowhere had defeated him utterly. And when the general of the south hadn’t kept his end of the deal, the ghost had burned his temples. Nao Xing’s power deteriorated and Mu Qing and Feng Xin’s cults surged into a vacuum he left behind. Just like that, it was over. Mu Qing wasn’t just free of Nao Xing, he was buoyed up into levels of power with an unheard-of speed. Nao Xing was still dying when Mu Qing and Feng Xin were handed the southern territory.
Mu Qing traced his long fingers over the throne in his new palace. He could have survived, he could have gotten here on his own. But how strange to have been saved all that time and torment by a ghost. The same ghost that he now knew loved to harass them at every chance. He wondered what that ghost that dogged his steps would think if he knew how he’d helped Mu Qing.
He thought it’d probably piss that ghost off.
It did.