Chapter Text
The walls did not learn as a human would learn. The knowledge seeped into them, as the water had seeped over them, taking bit by bit until there was only the void.
That void was filled with a boy, and the boy filled it with desperation as plentiful as an ocean. The terror, the hatred, the fury, the sorrow, the need did not cut through stone as water once had, but it stained the caves along with the boy's spilled blood. Gathered in the gashes left by his flailing sword and festered there.
The walls did not feel as a human would feel, but they remembered. They remembered. Desperation, in the shape of a slender youth. Need, in the light of his cutting eyes. Want, in the slightness of his waist and the curve of his sneer.
When at last the boy left the void, it was no longer empty. All that he had left there it kept, growing and breeding in the dark.
'Gratitude' is a vile word. Shen Jiu has hated it all his life, and hates it more now than never. He is meant to be grateful for so much and to so many. He should be grateful for his life, for his position, for the fragile strands of his crumbling cultivation. He should be grateful to his shizun and her disappointed gazes, to the sect leader and his cold judgment, to the future sect-leader "Yue Qingyuan" and his guilty, anxious glances.
He is alone in the cave. There is no one to see him spit in disgust at the very thought, a splatter of moisture against the dry cave floor.
He does not watch to see the cave drink it down.
There's no point in feeling like an intruder in the caves. So long as the mountain's systems of communication remain as broken as they always have been, no one will second guess his right to be here. The forged papers from Qian Cao should hold up under casual scrutiny, rendering his shizun's concerns null. The request and approval from Qiong Ding, both of which he'd made himself, would only end up on Yue "Qingyuan"'s desk, and hells knew the man wouldn't dare angering Shen Qingqiu by denying him when it could risk his precious reputation.
And if his shidi failed to hold up their ends of the deal in covering for his absence, he would have a lovely excuse to kick a few more of them off the mountain even before his rise to peak lord and the thorough cleaning he would be giving Qing Jing.
There is a boy in the darkness, and his presence fills a void. The cave knows him through his absence. Every inch of stone—every clinging fragment cavern's cultivation—is trained on his every motion.
He approaches the raised rock where once one screamed his name with the only breath in his lungs, and strips down to his inner robes before it.
The cave breathes around him.
The Lingxi caves are mostly beautiful.
Mostly.
The cavern he's chosen for himself is ruined. There are gashes in the walls, filled with the rusted crust of old blood. Shen Jiu suspects that the servants of the sect are too likely to be overwhelmed by the cave's natural energies to be sent in for cleaning, and of course no precious disciples could be asked to enter the esteemed Lingxi caves for a cleanup operation following some sub-par cultivator's ugly death.
The cavern is disgusting in comparison to the glory of its surroundings.
It feels as if it was just waiting for Shen Jiu to walk inside.
He sets aside his outer robes and takes off his boots. He'll be here for some time, and he may as well spend it comfortably. The entry to the caves is limited and restricted enough that he shouldn't be bothered for some time. After all, the only other person in the sect who could forge a reason to access the caves would be that An Ding rat, and he appears to have no real interest in furthering his cultivation.
What good would such cultivation do him once he sold out the sect to whatever demon he's made a pact with, after all.
The boy sits on the stone. On the stone where once another grooved limestone with his clawing hands, spread spit and tears and blood against rock as he wept and howled into the cave floor. The cavern did not understand bodies, but it understood 'broken.' The boy was broken, and he broke the cave in turn. And all that damage, all that pain, all that screaming and liquid, was on behalf of the creature now delicately seating himself upon the cave's stones.
The cave does not feel . Not as a human would feel. Does not want as a human would.
What the cave feels and wants is reclaim a void, but no matter how its stalactites and stalagmites grow—no matter how beautiful the ribbon formations and crystal-clear pools—it cannot take back the stone that was stolen by the ocean so long ago.
In the middle of the cave sits a boy who is a void personified. He was made known to the cave by his lack. The cave will not let him go.
Spine straight, legs crossed, palms up, eyes open, Shen Jiu breathes. He is not calm. He is not settled. There is a reason he had to forge the papers to be allowed in this place—a reason he did not dare allow the true masters of Qian Cao to judge him unfit. He must improve his cultivation at any cost—there is no other option—but meditation lingers at the edges of his bitter frustration.
His scarred and ruined meridians itch under his skin. The spiritual energy rich in the cave stings in his nose as he breathes, as if it were one of Wu Yanzi's noxious brews, brimming with alcohol to hide all else that it contained.
His so-called master will not leave his thoughts. Neither of them will. As the precise calligraphy Qiu Jianluo whipped into him is praised and lauded by his two-faced shixiongs and his new shizun pretends at kindness, he thinks endlessly of the people who have owned him before. The gratitude he has owed all his life, to those generous enough to spend their coin and effort on his behalf. A pet for a beloved sister, a toy for oneself, a new and subtler knife.
His breathing is ragged, and his body trembling. He sees the walls melting, and assumes it is his mind. Feels the stone moving, and believes it is his crawling skin. The cave does not pity him. It wants him. It wants to claim this void, and have him, and keep him all for itself, as the water has kept the stone it stole.
"Idiot," Shen Jiu hisses to himself, struggling to control his breathing. "Idiot. Idiot. You're deviating. Calm down ."
He drags in a breath through his teeth, and lets it out slowly. The night pearl before him flickers in the darkness, responding to the fluctuations in his qi. He is not stable enough to be here. He never will be. If he waits to be stable to advance he will never move from where he stands now, on a knife's edge between security and utter ruination.
There is no one and nothing left. At least when Qi-ge was just dead Shen Jiu could pretend. Now he knows, and there's no way to stop knowing. He wasn't worth it. Wasn't worth remembering. Wasn't worth saving. He was a worth enough friend for a stinking stray dog, but what good is a rat to a prized hunting hound?
He's making it worse. (He makes everything worse.) The spiral will just drag him down into a qi deviation before he can even begin. He needs to shake off the thoughts of Wu Yanzi—of Qiu Jianluo—of Qi-ge. They all died, they all left him more and more worthless after every one of them.
Sword forms, he decides, and shifts to rise.
His left foot won't move.
Shen Jiu freezes. The rising agitation of his qi goes suddenly quiet as he expands his senses. Something is wrong, and his first instinct is to stop and seek the threat, one hand braced on the stone floor, and the other lifted with a talisman immediately between his fingers. The cave is silent, and still. The cave is teeming with energy, wild and untamed. The cave is—is—
Watching him.
His breath stutters. He looks down.
His ankle is embedded within the rock, as if he had been abandoned in this cave for a thousand years. He tugs against the hold.
The stone squeezes around him—responding to him— restraining him .
Shen Jiu angles the talisman down and unleashes the explosion at the stone around his leg. The shrapnel shears into his calf and ankle, but he hardly feels it past the thrumming panic. He launches himself forward and away .
His hand doesn't move, sunken wrist-deep where he'd braced himself.
The force of his attempt to escape snaps his own elbow, and he screams as he crumbles back down, tethered by his now-broken arm.
He fumbles for another talisman, blood spilling from his ankle and leg, arm a burning rod of agony, mind whirling. The dense spiritual power of the cave is so thick in the air he can barely draw breath. He readies another talisman in trembling fingers, but even as he takes aim he can feel his good leg sinking. If he blows off his arm he'll only have one less hand to work with. Whatever this is, he needs to think. To be calm. He's supposed to be a stratigest now, for fuck's sake!
He scans the cave once more, channeling qi through his eyes, straining to see whatever hidden force is responsible for his restraint. There must be someone here. Must be something—
He sees the cave walls melting, and registers them as real for the first time. Stares in open-mouthed horror at the cavern's entrance, growing smaller and smaller with every passing breath. Below him, the stone shifts and writhes, as if he'd sunken his hand into a living pool of cold, hard mud.
There is no one in the cave but him.
The cave doesn't understand hands, but it understands holding . It doesn't understand loving, but it understands having. It wants to have.
When part of the cave was a boy, they dreamed of bodies pressed together, inside and around. The cave does not understand "body", but it understands "inside".
The stone drags at him, and Shen Jiu snarls. He struggles—an animal in a trap. Perhaps someone caught wind of his plans and laid a talisman here before he arrived. (How? WHO?) Perhaps his mind is simply deteriorating, his malfunctioning qi twisting the spirit-rich landscape. (No, it isn't, he knows, it's not him, it's not—) Perhaps it's not even really happening at all.
"I didn't break your arm," Qiu Jianluo once sneered. "You did it yourself just for the sympathy." and Shen Jiu wasn't sure whether he was right or not. He couldn't tell anymore. He couldn't tell.
The stone drags at him, and he struggles. His broken arm jolts and jostles—his shredded ankle is swallowed up in stone again. The inexorable pull shifts him, until he is suspended, only one hand free, within a cave that is growing ever-smaller.
He is trapped, alone, and has woven a perfect paper trail. No one will be looking for him. No one will feel his absence for months. Something has gone wrong, just as his shizun worried it would, and he has covered his own tracks so thoroughly that he will be encased in stone long before anyone thinks to look for him.
Except the stone doesn't encase him. Doesn't swallow him whole. Doesn't even seem interested in covering more of him than wrist and ankles.
Just before his night pearl is swallowed by the stone floor, something hard nudges up against Shen Jiu's thigh, and his heart crawls up into his throat in sheer, abject terror. He stares at the closing entrance fixedly, jerking against the bonds holding him, what feels like a stalagmite suddenly sprouting between his forced-wide thighs.
The cave does not care about clothing. The cave knows the boy's dreams, and its own emptiness. It knows want, and inside.
The stone gulps down the night pearl, and rolls upwards like an earthquake, pressing an enormous, cold, blunt ridge of stone against Shen Jiu's clenched-shut hole.
The darkness is answered by a scream clawing its way up past the heart in Shen Jiu's throat.
There is no one to hear it.
The boy-shaped void is stubborn. It is difficult for the cave to fill him. He is always moving, writhing and struggling. His left hand is free, and with it he keeps sending wild qi-blasts at the entrance, refusing to let the cavern fully heal itself with him inside.
He is stubborn, and he is making it difficult on purpose. However, the cave does not know frustration or impatience. It drank the desperate, obsessed dreams of a broken boy for a long year, and has no trouble considering it will spend a year just like this—slowly spending its long-hoarded power to have its own little void.
The cave does not understand speech, but it hears.
"No, no, no, no, no."
It is busy with other things. There should be an entrance. The cave knows it from the other boy's dreams. Like the caves themselves, a boy has caverns. It is patient, and it is strong. It changes the angle, and keeps trying. The tearing of fabric is nothing the cavern, nor is the boy's groaning howl of pain.
It has not found the right place. It feels one of the legs it holds lurch and slide, a bone jolting out of socket. The boy writhes, and sends another blast of qi from his hand to stop the entrance from closing.
The cave does not like when he does that. The other boy hurt it too—left gouges on gouges—blood on blood.
It remembers the boy's body growing hard and long sometimes, rocking into the stone as his crippled body bled and healed in spurts and turns. It remembers his vivid dreams of where that hard, hot thing should have been going. Blindly, the cave searches—rolls itself and the boy, wriggling until—
"Hgck! N-No, no—Haah—N—Ghghk—"
Inside the cave sighs to itself in relief.
The void boy is still writhing, but the writhing no longer moves the cave's hard length from the heat of him. He is hot and warm, iron-rich blood seeping from within him down to the cave's stone floor.
The other boy desired this. To have him, to be inside him, to be around him. The cave understands and does not. It is a senseless mockery of humanity with which it moves. The stone takes no pleasure from the squeezing of tight walls around the cold, hard phallus. It means nothing to the rock walls that Shen Jiu gags and retches, bucking and twitching like a creature dying at the immense intrusion. One leg dislocated, one arm broken, bleeding onto the ground. Cycling qi is all that keeps him conscious through the first crushing intrusion of fist-sized rock into his unprepared body.
The cave has no sense of limit, or of frailty. Of human limitations. It knows what the other boy wanted, and that was more .
The world within the cave is malleable. The stone rolls as if it were in an earthquake, moving itself in and out of the struggling animal body in its grasp. With each repetition it manages to access a deeper portion of the void boy's channel, stretching the walls of him wide, wide, wide.
It remembers the other boy had envisioned two entrances to the cave of a human, and reaches also towards the face, but there are stones grit before the second entrance. Though it can feel the air puffing out—"Hngh! Krghk…Nnnn!"—it is more polite than the boys. It will not shatter the stone of the cave. Not yet. There is time.
Already, the disjointed blasts erupting from the cave's new boy are dwindling. The cave is aware of the qi flaring and spasming in the boy, matching and mirroring the desperate and pathetic jerking motions of the boy's body in the cave's grip.
Still, it is a rude double standard, to guard his own entrance while refusing to let the cave close its own. It is likely the two caverns are connected either way. The cave presses deeper to prove it, and a gout of blood spurts from between the boy's stone-guarded cavern—pours down his face and onto the stone.
Something rips—fabric and more. The qi flow in the boy stutters, then desperately circulates further. The cave feels a pour of hot blood splash against its surface, and wonders at the fact that its other boy had never dreamed of any blood at all in such moments save his own.
The cave accepts that its former resident was wrong, and rolls upwards over and over into its new boy, feeling its stone grow hot and wet.
The burning tears and blood that pour down the second boy's face only make sense to the cave. Its boys are always pouring salt and iron.
Yue Qingyuan should not be here. He has not exactly been banned from the Lingxi caves—to do so would bring too much attention to his forced seclusion for the sect leader's taste—but he has been strongly advised to avoid them.
Mu-shidi had said 'please', even.
But the paperwork had crossed his desk, convincing in every way but entirely impossible, and he hadn't been able to stay away.
Thinking of Xiao Jiu in that dark, empty cavern—
He isn't there, of course. He isn't there. He isn't trapped. He walked into these caves on his own two legs, and he'll leave them the same way. Yue Qingyuan isn't needed here. More than that, he isn't wanted here. There is no one who wishes to see him less than Xiao Jiu—not even the shixiongs whose progress and position he had usurped by being appointed head disciple.
Xiao Jiu hates him so fiercely that even the cold, indifferent mask he has cultivated—eerily reminiscent of Qiu Jianluo at his most polite—cannot withstand the hatred. It cracks into sharp words and fury like a paper-thin porcelain cup shattering.
Three times on the way there he almost manages to talk himself out of it. Three times he turns his back on the cave and looks back towards Qiong Ding. Four times the image of Xiao Jiu as he had been then makes him turn back. The thought of his perfect, beautiful, strong Xiao Jiu, his meridians, tendons, and bones shattered, bleeding on the cavern floor—
He has to make sure. He has to see for himself.
And who knows. Perhaps his shidi on the beast peak is correct. Perhaps he must climb atop the monster once again, before he shies from it in terror for the rest of his life.
He walks into the caves, tells himself it is therapy, and pretends he can't perfectly visualize the expression Mu-shidi would make if he heard him thinking so.
Deep within the caves, there's the sound of an explosion.
The choice to freeze in moments of fear or terror is one Yue Qingyuan gave away a long time ago. When he sold his soul to this sect in exchange for a blade and training he could not wield in time. He is running before he registers it, past empty caves and branching offshoots, towards where the echos lead him—not just of an explosion now, but of someone breathing harshly, making strangled sounds of agony.
Xiao Jiu is the only one in seclusion.
The sounds lead him unerringly towards—unmistakably closer to—
He knows where the cavern should be like he knows where his own legs should attach to his body. Seeing the wall of stone where there should be an entrance breaks his final reserves of courage into terror.
"Xiao Jiu!" he cries, slamming into the stone wall. It does nothing but bruising his body, but this close he can see the small gap, still smoldering, only wide enough for an arm to reach through.
Yue Qingyuan summons a palmlight in the darkness, eyes searching through the crevice, and—
Xiao Jiu's face—waxen and grey-white as a death mask. If not for the gleam of his eyes—rolling in agony and terror—he might have thought him dead. The lurching jolts of his body are inhuman, each one jolting an awful sound from between his clenched teeth. Before his mouth, a protrusion of stone presses against his pale, blood-soaked lips.
The stone grips him, and worse—worse, in the dim light Yue Qingyuan can see another protrusion that's— Oh gods, no —that's thrust so deeply into him that it has split open his stomach, blood and viscera blossoming forth like cave-dwelling fungus, his insides spilling onto the stone floor even as the stone continually thrusts in and out, in and out, dragging at the wet mess and ruin of him.
"Xiao Jiu!" Yue Qingyuan calls, slamming his free hand into the stone again, unable to bring himself to extinguish the palm light.
Those rolling eyes fix on him at once. He's still awake. Still aware. The one hand he has free is smoking with expended qi—the source of the explosion. He's still fighting—still holding on. A cultivator can survive terrible things, Yue Qingyuan reminds himself desperately. They are cultivators now, Xiao Jiu can—
"Hnngh!" Xiao Jiu grits out past his bared teeth, his brows tight with agony, sweat soaking the pieces of him that aren't drenched in blood, desperation clear in every line of him.
"Hold on," Yue Qingyuan scrambles, shoving qi through the cave walls, but it will not open to him.
The cave has succeeded where the boy failed, and it is not pleased with being asked to share. Less pleased still that the boy tries again to harm it. It latches onto that familiar qi and soaks it into itself, empowering itself. Enriching itself.
Nothing. He shoves, he strikes, he pushes. He sets the light to hover before him instead and drags his cursed sword from its sheath, feeling it close around his lungs like a vice, but all he gets from a strike of his cursed blade is a ringing sound and a screaming lurch of pain that jolts straight through his bones.
His bond with the blade was born here—born in the dark of this cave, impulsive and stupid and ruinous. A cursed birth with a twisted offspring.
He cannot—Xiao Jiu is— Don't be impulsive, a boy warned him long long long ago— he needs—
Yue Qingyuan slams himself against the wall once more. Twice more. Feels the cave give, but not in destruction. No, the stone begins to sink around his fingers, as if it's going to draw him in. String him up like its bound Xiao Jiu.
He deserves it, to be split open like that. He deserves to suffer every pain. But then who will there be to help Xiao Jiu?
Don't be impulsive, Qi-ge!
Yue Qingyuan yanks his hand away with all the might he has, leaving a layer of skin embedded in the stone, bleeding hot onto the floor of the LIngxi caves.
"Xiao Jiu, I'm bringing help!" he screams to the barely-illuminated form of his precious friend. "Just hold on, I'm getting help!"
"MNNN!" Xiao Jiu screams behind his clenched teeth, thrashing his head in a denial that splits and tears his lips against the stone pressing at his mouth. His wild eyes go wilder, his free hand scrambling for purchase against the stone binding him—against his own body—reaching desperately out towards Yue Qingyuan.
Yue Qingyuan reaches back, but they are too far apart to touch, and the stone starts to close, and—
"Hold on!" he cries once more, then turns and for the first time leaps aboard his sword, screaming like a falling star from the open maw of the caves.
Behind him, he hears a long, terrible, agonized scream that is abruptly strangled into silence.
"He's alive,'' a voice declares, harsh and rushed. "Get over here, all of you!"
"Liu-shizhi, cut here," another says.
Shen Jiu wheezes in a half-breath through his nose, drowning in blood, strangled by the stone pressing itself down his throat, his faltering qi no longer able to keep up with the damage done to him. He cannot force his diaphragm to function with his guts spilling out on the floor. He cannot reinforce his windpipe. He can't keep up with the bloodloss.
What does it matter? Qi-ge left him again. Left him to this…
A hand on his throat—burning hot. He groans, unable to restrain the sound—uncaring who hears it. At least Qiu JIanluo was never so cold—never so careless with his life. At least—
The stone is ripped from between his teeth, and a flow of qi rushes into him in its wake.
if he could breathe, he would scream. He cannot breathe.
"Cut him free!" a voice is shouting. "I don't care what you have to do, get him free, get it out of him!"
There is nothing left of him but agony. There is nothing in him but the gaping black hole of his heart. Perhaps that's what it is, that drags not only cocks but even stones into his brutalized body. He was always meant to die this way, split open for another's pleasure, abandoned by the only person who had ever—
"Wake up," a voice commands, harsh and fierce. "Wake up! Shen Jiu, if you can hear me, wake up ."
"Don't yell at him!" a wet voice commands, strangled and screaming.
"He is dying , Yue-shixiong! He is giving up! Wake him! Make him fight, or there is nothing I can do!"
"No, no, no , Xiao Jiu, please!"
He knows that voice. Knows those arms, wrapping around his torso as his broken arm is abruptly freed from the clinging stone, dangling limp at his side. Knows the scent of the chest he's abruptly pressed against.
But it can't be. It can't—
"Breathe, breathe, breathe," chants that voice.
There are hands on his legs, gripping, pushing. The massive, immovable, implaccable weight inside him vanishes, and he wheezes out a strained sound.
"He's free, go!" the other voice barks.
The hands on his torso gather him closer. Someone else touches the trailing, dangling pieces of him. He jolts his head left and right, the only piece of him left to struggle against the touch, but there is nothing he can do. The world blurs around him—darkness, pain, and nothing else. No relief, no reprieve, nothing. That brief flash of a fool's hope before—that moment of thinking he came —what has it done but driven a final iron nail into his heart?
Stop fighting, he urges himself as his awareness blurs.
(Distantly, the feeling of ground beneath him. Distantly, the feel of hands on his face—his throat. Qi washing through him. "Xiao Jiu, please—")
Why is he still bothering at all? Why try? They'll find his defiled corpse months from now, and it will be a relief. Liu-shidi will find poetic justice in the death of a lecher, though he will not recognize the literary merit of such a thing. Qi-ge will perhaps light a stick of incense for him. Perhaps he is already doing so, wherever he's vanished to. Perhaps he'll be sorry, even just a little. Perhaps—
Lips against his. A thumb on his chin, prying his frozen jaw open further. Breath, pushed inside his lungs.
The pain sharpens. Clarifies.
"Again," orders the other voice, even as hands press over his aching ribcage, forcing the air to wheeze out of him.
Lips once more, and air. Warm and real, cutting through the fog. His hand flexes, straining to reach, but he is sapped of all strength. He has given everything, he has—
Hands on his chest again. Different ones this time, broad and strong, forcing the air out once more.
"Shen-shixiong, you must try to meet me," the sharp voice is commanding. "You must help me, Shixiong, I cannot stabilize you without—Liu-shidi, feed him qi! Yue-shixiong keep him breathing!"
Yue-shixiong?
Lips against his own. The warm reality of air forced down his bruised, burning, bloody throat. A stream of qi like lightning singing through his meridians. Hands on the spilled parts of him—the torn pieces, trying to—to—
It hurts. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, but the pain is different. The pain is new.
Shen Jiu pries open his eyes, and watches the blurry figure of a man with terror in his eyes sit up from where their lips had been sealed together. Their eyes meet, Shen Jiu's dry, blurry gaze to Qi-ge's tear-filled, terror-filled one.
"Xiao—Stay awake!" Qi-ge cries at once. "Xiao Jiu, stay awake! Stay with me! You're going to be okay, hold on! Hold on! Stay with me!"
He repeats himself over and over, until that sharp voice cries—"Shixiong, help him breathe!"
Shen Jiu can't tear his eyes away to see who's speaking. He stares up as Qi-ge bows forward like a tree in a tempest, sealing their lips together and breathing into him. The lightning qi flooding his veins is sparking against the torn open parts of him, mingling with a more subtle presence there, reaching into him, seeking, seeking, seeking—
"Shen-shixiong, reach back," the sharp voice commands, as Qi-ge pulls his mouth away again only to break into gasping sobs.
"Qi-ge?" Shen Jiu tries to say. He cannot speak. Cannot control his breathing. That is the realm of the lips that cover his—the hands that press over his chest. The mingling qi in his system, none of it his, pours into the voids of him.
"You are going to live!" commands the sharp voice. "Fight, shixiong! Fight!"
"Xiao Jiu," Qi-ge sobs over him, the hands on his chest helping him exhale again—bruising and awful and—"Xiao Jiu, please, please, keep fighting, please—"
There isn't really a choice, is there? There's no choice. All the loyalty in Xiao Jiu's broken body—his broken heart—he gave it a long time ago to the man above him. He closes his blurry eyes, clenches his one working hand in the dirt, and fights to shove the qi through his shattered system as soft lips press air into him over and over again, and three sets of harsh hands struggle to force him back together.