Chapter Text
"Black Lesson isn't over yet."
Li Cu struggles to wake up. It’s a dream. He knows it’s a dream. He’s not back in the Wang Compound. He’s not being forced to fight and fight and fight again.
He isn't and yet... here he is. Grey walls. Grey light. Grey everything. These people love grey.
Something snarls behind him. A familiar presence. "Pay attention!"
The voice at his back sounds strange. Not human at all. And yet, "Wang Can?"
"Get out of my head. You don't belong here. ROLL."
"You can't be here. You're dead."
"You'll be dead if you stay here! SCRAM NOW! WAKE UP!"
In a rare moment of obedience, Li Cu did just that, jerking upright and getting glared at by his Logistics instructor. Bao Shang's trainers had high expectations and falling asleep in class did not meet them. "Sorry sir." It wasn't his fault. The last field excursion had wrung him out.
He just wished he knew why he'd dreamed about That Place and That Damned Bastard. It'd ended badly for Wang Can. Unfairly so? Well, perhaps. But how were they supposed to know he was on their side? That he'd spared Shen Qiong? That he'd helped send Wang secrets to Qiongqi?
It didn't matter now -- except it did -- because the man was blown up in the explosion he'd used to block the Wang from reaching them.
They'd never found his body, but nothing could have survived that.
Class ended not with a bang, but a whimper; homework. A long list of supplies that they had to source, price, and justify to a hypothetical employer, and heaven forbid they leave anything out or they wouldn't get it, the next time they were on field training.
He was cursing over the amount of ecological research he was going to have to do to find the relevant antivenoms when he felt a hand on his collar and hurried to shove his workbooks into his bag even as Hei-ye dragged him backwards out of the stream of college students, office workers and miscellaneous tourists also making their way to the train station.
Needless to say; he was pretty sure he wasn't going to be taking a train.
"Hei-ye! Oi! Bastard!" he squirmed, trying to get enough slack in his collar that he could turn around and walk forwards.
"Children shouldn't swear, you little shit," Hei-ye scolded, grinning and giving him one last shake.
Released, Li Cu shook himself so his jacket settled back onto his shoulders, and lengthened his stride to match Hei-ye's cheerfulness. "What is it? Is there a job?"
"There's a job! Wang bastards gave 'em'selves away. We've got more'n a lead; we have a target"
Li Cu whistled lowly, his tattoo already itching. It looooved Hei-ye time, and the promise of fighting. "I'll get my-"
"Nope, nope, Hua'er shushu is handling it, tell your friends you're going on training, then give me your phone."
Li Cu hurried. Hei-ye meant it, and had zero compunctions about stealing people's precious devices. He fired off a text to the group chat; Training with Hei-ye, going off grid! 💪 !
He'd fallen behind a bit while he texted, so he skipped a few steps to catch up, and Hei-ye held his hand out. Li Cu locked his phone, reconsidered, unlocked it and turned it completely off, then handed it over.
Hei-ye grinned wide enough to be creepy, and winked so hard that his visible eyebrow dipped. "You're learning. Get in the car, let’s go, let’s go!"
A rush to the airport followed, in the nastiest car Li Cu ever did see; and he'd seen some real wrecks in his short time. He didn't even need to ask where all the holes came from. Not where Hei-ye was concerned.
"How the hell is this thing still street legal?" he demanded, listening to the parts rattle and watching the door jiggle slightly open with trepidation. "Surely Xie-ye can afford better."
That old grin of Hei-ye's, the one that - from the first - said he was Not To Be Trusted. "Oh, he can, he can. But we don't want to be noticed."
Gods. "How the hell is this not noticeable?"
"Oh, it's noticeable, but it's what I usually drive. The Wang would know something was up if I took you anywhere in one of Hua'er shushu's pretty pretties."
Li Cu eyed him. "Xie-ye wouldn't let you have a pretty pretty would he?"
Hei-ye sobbed. "You're so mean, Li Cu. How could you say such a thing? Even if it's true."
Sighing, clinging to the door so it wouldn't fall open and take him with it, Li Cu watched the scenery pass and hoped they'd get there soon.
The plane they took wasn't much better than the car. Seriously, was Hei-ye testing Li Cu's patience, his courage or his stomach? After Gutongjing and playing cat and mouse with the Wang, all three were in pretty good shape.
"So!" he shouted over the noise of the laughable excuse for a two-seater's engine, "What happened? I thought it was going to take longer to find them?"
Hei-ye looked about as thoughtful as he ever did - which wasn't much. "We had a breakthrough. Found something they want - and no, not telling, don't ask - and they stuck their heads out more than they ought. More important, we found out they have something we want."
Something 'we' want? Li Cu almost opened his mouth to ask what that was but knew better. Hei-ye never stopped talking but you couldn't get a real fact out of him if he didn't want to share. "Are you sure the info's good, though? Not like them to have loose lips."
"Mm. Not completely impossible they baiting us, but... they didn't know what our source can do."
"Source? Or is that top secret too?"
"You'll be meeting him pretty soon. You'll like him. Pricklier than you, really." That grin again. "Soundmapper named Liu Sang."
Li Cu frowned. He'd heard that name. "Isn't he the one who lost his whole party in that one tomb raid? You trust him?"
"Don't mention that to him. It's a sore point. But, yeah, I do. He's a good kid. And that thing the Wang have? It's something he wants safe, so don't worry." A pause. "He's sort of related to me, too. Be nice to him."
Li Cu was about to claim he was always nice but Hei-ye was suddenly busy with the landing gear and getting their scrapheap of a plane down onto the tiniest strip of clearing Li Cu'd ever seen. He held tight, hoping everything would hold together.
Thank goodness, it did, and a man - Mop, wasn't it? - ran up and switched places with Hei-ye, who told him, "Careful. Right engine's a bit puffy. Get her to the mechanics as soon as you land."
"If I land," Mop grumbled, looking morose before remembering himself. "Er... sorry sir. I mean, yes sir!"
A clap on the man's shoulder that nearly knocked him over, then Hei-ye was running for the trees, Li Cu following behind.
Within minutes they'd come to small clearing full of spiky weeds and moss. A single path led to a doorway into the ground and Hei-ye opened it, shouting, "Hi honey, I'm home!"
Xie-ye's voice echoed back up a long stairway. "Don't be an idiot. Get in here, now."
"You heard your shushu. Hurry up."
Li Cu found a moment to ask, "Isn't all this secrecy pointless with a path pointing right to the door?"
A chuckle. "Oh, don't worry. We have that covered. Go on, kiddo. We have a lot of prep to do."
So Li Cu headed down the stairs, a soft rustle, like the plants were shifting position behind him, echoing after. He almost paused to look, but another nudge from Hei-ye set him in motion again.
There'd be explanations, he was sure of it. He just hoped they'd be good ones.
The stairs were cut directly into the dirt, but there was a stone door at the bottom, standing ajar on a 14th century swivel hinge that dated this place pretty much to 'yesterday' because stone swivel hinges did not fucking survive four hundred years in contact with the dirt. From that, Li Cu concluded two things: Wu Xie was a dramatic fuck, and that his lectures at Bao Shang were pretty good, actually.
He kicked the door with the side of his boot on the way past. "This is concrete, who faked this?" he grumbled. "Did you paint it with your fingers?"
"He may as well have," Xie-ye drawled. "It did what it needed to do."
A snort, and Hei-ye dragged the door open so Li Cu couldn't put off going inside. The room was round, a few doors, altar in the middle. Pang-ye, sitting on it, raised a hip flask in greeting. Trestle tables littered the open space, covered in the usual logistical crap that was his bread, butter, bedding and homework at college. Radio, cables trailing into the ceiling, Wu Xie with his boots up on the desk, smoking an e-Cig.
"Why'd you need a fake tomb?" he asked, missing a vine snaking across the floor and tripping over it, briefly ending up in a tangle of ankles.
"It fooled the Chen. Again. Few years ago now," Wu Xie informed him, waving his cigarette at the door. "Locked Lao Chen in here and raided his filing cabinets while he was distracted."
One of the tables had a map, with some very helpful circles and arrows, so Li Cu sidled over; no one stopped him.
"Xiazi, did Mop get off alright?"
"Kiss and run; success!" Hei-ye sang, making a heart with his fingers that he thumped twice in Xie-ye's direction.
"Liu Sang; report!" Xie-ye said next, except there was no one in the room that could be the soundmapper, so Li Cu turned towards the side chambers expectantly.
The radio hissed instead. "That plane is a deathtrap."
"But it went," Xie-ye said to empty air, without bothering to turn on the radio.
"But it went. Poor Mop, hah," the radio answered. Li Cu had to assume listening equipment, at that point, and the skin between his shoulder blades crawled weirdly. Ew, spies.
"Come down and say hi; assuming you're done, of course."
"Of course," the radio drawled, arrogant. "Just a second."
"Sang'er is an expert landscaper," Hei-ye muttered proudly, slapping Li Cu on the back. His tattoo stung, rather then calming down, so he reached back and gave it a good scratch to get it to shut up.
"Hah... don't think that's gonna help this time, kiddo," Hei-ye muttered.
But then someone with long legs and no sense of stealth came clattering down the robbers tunnel and Li Cu's tattoo tried to crawl right over his shoulder.
"What the fuck?!" he squeaked, shoving his hand down his collar as though it might have started bleeding.
A gangly, ginger haired gender-indeterminant person blinked back at him from the doorway, mouth slightly open and glasses slipping down their nose.
"You've got a tattoo?!" the guy said, voice deep enough to clear that up.
"What of it?! It's not like it was my choice-- wait, how the fuck do you kno-- Hei-ye, it’s doing that thing, could you please--"
Hei-ye put his hand over the worst of it, just like he had down in Gutongjing, and shut the cursed thing up with a stab of his thumbs.
"Hey, what the fuck?" new guy said, stalking closer in a way that really wasn't helping.
"Liu Sang, meet Li Cu; we think he's met your brother. Li Cu, meet who we think is Wang Can's sibling."
"WHAT?!"
Now that Li Cu wasn’t stuck on how loudly the person had walked down the stairs, or the differences in hair colour, he could see a face that he’d dreamed of only that morning.
In light of recent discoveries, dreaming of this guy’s brother might not be the thing to mention right now. Too many things going on…. Maybe that was why he dreamed of Wang Can?
“What do you mean, brother?” Li Cu repeated his question, slightly less loud now that the person, Liu Sang, hovered within arm’s reach, still staring at where the tattoo was crawling under Li Cu’s skin.
"I'd try to tell you about birds and bees," Hei-ye started, setting off an instinctive and rapid defensive horror in Li Cu's gut. "But I'm not sure that's actually relevant. C'mon, get a bit of distance. Sang'er, try not to mess with it, ah?"
Li Cu let himself be pulled away, his back writhing in a way that he really couldn't explain away with tomb shit and nerves, but that felt familiar anyway.
"Wang Can and I have the same sk-- bone structure. Pangzi thinks he might be my… relative," Liu Sang explained, clarifying nothing.
"Did you... misplace? A relative?" Li Cu guessed, optimistically.
"The Wang stole him," Hei-ye answered, while Liu Sang gawped like a fish.
"Wang Can was a ...hostage?" Li Cu didn't believe it. Nope. He did peel his shirt and jacket off in one lump when Hei-ye tapped at it. Instinct at this point, to show his back to them.
"Hah, it's woken right up," Hei-ye said, cryptically.
"There can't be code doors up here; Wu Xie built it!" He protested.
"There aren't," the man himself agreed, taking a long drag on his e-cig.
Liu Sang twitched out of staring, like everyone did, at Li Cu's back and stalked over to snatch the e-cig right out of Wu Xie's hand.
"Just because Ouxiang is busy doesn't mean you can cheat!" Liu Sang scolded.
Every angry step away from Li Cu made his tattoo chill out a bit more, until Hei-ye's usual method made it shut all the way up and go still.
"The fuck did you put in my skin, Wu Xie?" He grumbled, twisting to try and see himself.
"Wasn't me. That tattoo did it all by itself. Which is the crux of the matter," Wu Xie drawled, eyes hooded and sleepy. "The Wang want to know how to make those," he pointed at Li Cu's back.
"Gutongjing’s empty, there's nothing on the other side of the lock," Li Cu protested, but Wu Xie threw something black at his head.
"Cover your eyes, and tell me where Liu Sang is."
He threw the makeshift blindfold back at Wu Xie, but closed his eyes.
Liu Sang was easy, he was whispering angrily with Xie-ye.
"And Xiazi?"
That was harder, but not impossible, since he'd been near enough to touch when Li Cu had closed his eyes. He pointed, and Hei-ye swayed forward enough that he bumped into Li Cu's hand.
"And Xiao Hua?"
Li Cu stopped, stumped. Near Liu Sang, presumably? But then Wu Xie laughed, so he glared and gave up.
"How do you open a topic like this?" Wu Xie asked, lacing his hands over his stomach and tipping his chair even further back.
"No easy way," Pangzi added. "Kid’s already part of this, so knowledge is power."
Hei-ye laughed awkwardly, almost shy, so Li Cu turned his attention to him, frowning.
"Yhhhhm. I. Don't know. Either. Maybe I'll just demonstrate."
And then he melted.
What remained of Hei-ye was a basketball sized lump of black gel. Eyes... not two, not four, not even eight but dozens of them all swirled to the blob's surface to stare at Li Cu.
"Ugh. Xiazi, that is disgusting. Put them back. Why do you do that?" Liu Sang demanded. "It takes so much goo to get them right and for what?"
Li Cu took a deep breath. He was not, absolutely not, going to scream. "I always knew there was something wrong with you, Hei-ye."
The blob sniffled. "Hua'er, my godson is being meeeaaaannnn again! No respect!"
A scoff. "When you earn respect you get respect. Stop whining and start talking."
That didn't help because the blob immediately slithered his way over to Xie-ye and stretched up as if asking for pets. Disgusting. Far too much PDA going on here, especially when Xie-ye poked the blob with his staff and tugged him back and forth. Seriously? Li Cu wasn't old enough for this stuff.
Using the moment to think, to really think, Li Cu turned his attention on Wu Xie. "My tattoo. It's related to whatever it is Hei-ye is."
An approving nod of agreement. He did not feel any sort of pleasure at the approval. He totally did not. "It isn't Xiazi's, though."
They all seemed to be waiting, letting Li Cu work things out. And, really, he was sort of getting it. The Wang had used some weird stuff to make his tattoo resonate with that lock down in Gutongjing. There was no such lock here but it was resonating, sort of, with something else.
No. Not something. With some one else. He turned to look at Liu Sang, leaning against a table, lips curved in a very familiar sarcastic expression. Waiting. He had a tattoo too? Or, no, wait. What had he said? "It takes so much goo?" Li Cu repeated. "How much goo does it take, Specialist Liu?"
A shrug. "Y'know, I never really measured?"
“Never measured, huh?”
“Nope,” and that smirk was definitely familiar, if the haughty arrogance was a little more reserved than the looks Wang Can had given him during training. There was the possibility that it was Liu Sang that made up his tattoo, but Pangzi had said something about siblings, and…
“Wang Can is your… blob-twin, right? I’ve got bits of that bastard in my tattoo?!?”
"Well it's not bits of me, and if it was bits of that--" Liu Sang pointed at Hei-ye, who had achieved lap-blob status and was being kneaded into strange shapes by Xie-ye, "--then it would calm down when Xiazi told it to."
The urge to scratch his tattoo right out of his skin was rising rapidly. Not helped at all by the fact that it seemed to want 'out' all by itself. "Yeah, no, not calming down. It came out of that. Puzzle box, thing. Jumped right into my face."
Wu Xie stood up, looking serious. "They're surprisingly vulnerable organisms. They need the right conditions. That piece was probably struggling to survive."
Liu Sang came closer too, and Li Cu had to turn so the tattoo was facing him, or it was going to crawl to him right through Li Cu's skin. The relief when Liu Sang rested a cool hand right over it was immediate and complete; the whole tattoo went dormant and stopped itching, let alone crawling and squirming.
"I can just about communicate with it," Liu Sang muttered. Li Cu craned his neck to look at him, and his eyes were closed in focus. "It's very... obsessed. With a key code? ...a host ...died? Wait, not a host, a friend."
"That's probably my guy," Wu Xie said, very calmly for someone about to admit to being buddy-buddy with a psychopath. "The person who picked it up in the desert, he went...mad, and carved these scars."
"The guy fucking left it in my bag," Li Cu growled, twisting the other way to try and look at his back. "I opened it in class."
"Caused you no end of trouble, hah," Wu Xie admitted, smiling like a bastard and patting Li Cu on the head. Li Cu smacked his hand away.
"It tried to live in the scars as they healed," Liu Sang informed them, sounding dazed. "Because there was a code that it was absolutely vital it remembered."
"It remembered alright," Li Cu bitched. "By stabbing me in the back with them."
"I can tell it you succeeded. That it can stop?"
"Absolutely, the only people still trying to get down there are the fucking Wang, and they can eat sand."
His back went cool, finally. Still, for a second, but then squirming and writhing so hard that he was sure he had gotten those fucking worms after all and they were trying to crawl out of his back.
"Sorry... sorry... I can't make it bond to you the way it should, I'll just... get it to sleep..."
With this Liu Sang at his back, working away, and him unable to watch, he ended up making awkward, semi naked eye contact with Xie-ye, who was wearing Hei-ye as a scarf. An eyeball covered scarf.
"You can guess why Xiazi met you in the desert now, I imagine," Xie-ye drawled, pinching up a bit of Hei-ye and wiggling it. Gross.
"Yeah. Why didn't you tell me then? It hurt!"
A black slot opened up in Hei-ye's surface. "Knowing wouldn't have made a difference to that."
It was Wu Xie who had an actual answer, though. "We knew the Wang would try to steal you. The tattoo technique is one of their highest goals, just under world domination. Couldn't give them a reason to torture it out of you."
Liu Sang flinched behind him, and pulled his hand away; the tattoo stayed calm under his skin though.
"Oh hey, you done?" He asked, twisting pointlessly.
"Yeah, it's dormant. It's mostly reacting to the bit of our...dad? Progenitor, that I'm looking after. So I told it that it's safe and it believes me. It might act up if you get too fight-or-flight, though. Right Xiazi?"
"Right! You're learning!"
Liu Sang stalked out from behind Li Cu, sneering, and went over to poke Hei-ye. Xie-ye held him out in a show of full cooperation, and Hei-ye squirmed out of the path of the prodding by twisting himself into improbable shapes.
"I'm not learning how to parasitise anyone, you awful, disgusting ancestor," Liu Sang insisted.
...Li Cu put his shirt back on, scrubbed his hands over his face, and stole a camp chair to have a brief but extensive mental breakdown.
Something cold tapped Li Cu's neck. Pangzi, grinning broadly. "Hydrate," he said, handing a bottle of water to him, the red label wrinkled and damp with condensation. "You're going to need it."
Li Cu needed something a lot stronger than water. He knew better than to say so, even if he was old enough to drink. Later he might get wasted. For now, "Does... does he know what happened to his brother?"
"They told me." Liu Sang's answer came without him turning around from arguing with Heiye, trying to convince him to be human again. "Sounds like everything went to hell all at once."
Now that? That was putting it mildly. It'd been over a year and Li Cu still found himself replaying that last day in his head, trying to think how he could have done things differently. He still didn't know.
"He was a good actor," he said. "Your brother. He made it look like he was deathly jealous of me and Shen Qiong. It was easy to believe he'd kill her when she tried to buy us time."
Pangzi scoffed. "He was a lousy actor when it came to pretending to be a Chen guard. Couldn't help looking like a soldier. Never mind Master Lan feeling his presence; I would have noticed him if I'd been looking."
Li Cu didn't know anything about that. He continued, hoping Liu Sang would understand how his twin had died and how they'd never had a chance to change course. "Su Nan and I went to stop the Wang from setting off a self-destruct device. He was there already and, well, we were sure he was set to guard it." He scoffed at himself. "It didn't occur to either of us that that meant he was being sacrificed."
"You couldn't know he'd been persuaded to change sides," Wu Xie said, as he'd said many times before. As if the old bastard - with all his dead - didn't know perfectly well you didn't get rid of something like that so easily. "And it was Su Nan who stabbed him in the neck, not you."
Did that matter? He'd realised there was a data transfer going on as soon as he'd reached Mister Wang's computer. He should have known that was what Wang Can was guarding. He should have said. "If Shen Qiong hadn't shown up just then, I'm sure she would have finished him." And if she'd shown up just a bit sooner he wouldn't have been so close to death that he'd chosen to throw himself and his grenade into the poison gas to keep it from escaping.
"I won't say it's my fault he's dead. He chose to sacrifice himself but...." Something about Wu Xie's expression drew Li Cu's attention. "What?"
"Wang Can's my kind," Hei-ye said, stretching his body back into its human shape. "A little thing like an explosion and poison gas? Wouldn't kill us. Besides, we never did find his body."
Oh?
Oh! "Wait. You're saying he's alive?" But if he was alive, why had he disappeared? Had the Wang taken him with them when they'd escaped?
"We think he's alive. We think, based on some things we overheard, he may have been on the loose for a bit. We're almost certain he's been recaptured." Wu Xie tapped the papers on the table beside him, grinning. "He's part of what we'll be looking for, when we go a-hunting."
"The other part?"
"We don't know how many of our kind the Wang have," Liu Sang told him grimly. "My brother. My parent. Other siblings I don't know about? Other ancestors? Whatever it is, we can't let the Wang keep them. They're people. We're people. We don't want to be experiments anymore."
Before Li Cu could react, a beefy man - Kan Jian? - came in from one of the side rooms and flung himself around Liu Sang. "Don't worry, Sang'er! We'll find them! I promise!"
"You!" Liu Sang protested, levering the President’s mook off himself pretty much unsuccessfully. "You're supposed to be practicing."
"Xiaoge let me go," Kan Jian protested, making sadder eyes than Su Wan.
"He's here?" Li Cu asked, sitting up and asking Pangzi directly. The man's smile was weird. Soft and too warm. Li Cu shrank away from him, where had this soft person come from, and where had the grenade-wielding version gone?!
"Xiaoge! Come out and introduce yourself!" Pangzi called.
"Loud," the dark-haired, dark-clothed, dark-eyed hole in the world said, from the doorway Kan Jian had appeared from. He was tall, narrow, sharp. But soft around the mouth and eyes. Wu Xie and Pangzi both shifted to keep him in the corner of their eye, and Hei-ye oozed in his direction like ferrofluid reaching for a magnet. Liu Sang's eyes widened and his shoulders drooped, and he smiled, for what Li Cu realised was the first time. First genuine time.
"If I'm loud, it's because I'm using all your allocation. This is Li Cu, we told you about him," Pangzi continued, messing up his hair. Attempts to retract his head into his collar were unsuccessful.
Xiaoge turned his gaze on Li Cu then, and he froze in place. It wasn't ice or dread, exactly, but Li Cu knew he wouldn't get away unless he was allowed, in that moment. But then Xiaoge blinked slowly, like some bizarre nod, and the chill vanished again. The vague shadow of a person from the background of video calls became a real person in Li Cu's mind and locked into place, right next to his 'ways in which Wu Xie is Fucked Up' list. This made so much of that make sense.
He imagined for a second, the kind of second that sniffing snake venom could make, knowing this person, relying on them, being protected by them, and them being taken away. And then he looked at Wu Xie and every hair on his body stood on end as their eyes met.
He took a breath, and shook himself into normal time. When he looked back, Wu Xie wasn't looking at him any more and neither was Xiaoge. Zhang Qiling.
"Li Cu's tattoo is weird," Liu Sang was saying, holding a palm out and --what? Li Cu shuffled closer, and Liu Sang showed him too; his hand had liquified and shaped into the weird squiggle language that was scribed into his back. "The scars are normal scars except for some kind of scarification powder--"
"My fault, I'm afraid," Wu Xie said, slapping Li Cu on the back, right over the sleeping tattoo. "I had to make the scars permanent, and Yali one of the family; it was expedient."
Liu Sang pulled a face, which Li Cu agreed with. Bone ash really was gross; his back itched all over again.
"Haunted," wailed Hei-ye, to Xie-ye's muttered scolding.
"Anyway, the bit of blobstuff is really, um, not happy? I'm pretty sure it is my brother... He was-- yeah."
Xiaoge listened to all this without blinking, then nodded at the end. "Show me."
Li Cu sighed, hung his head, and stripped. Again.
This time, he hopped up on the casket next to Pangzi's bag of peanuts and didn't wait to be offered one before snacking.
"See, it's hanging out in the scars, but they're not actually it," Liu Sang said, his gestures making a faint warm shadow on Li Cu's back.
"The itchy wriggling shit moves around depending how I'm posed," Li Cu told them, mouth full and not caring at all.
"...sorry?" Liu Sang asked.
Li Cu just shrugged.
Then there was a weird, liquid hush sound and various people surged towards the people at his back. A cold hand fitted over his scars --not Liu Sang this time, longer fingers-- and smeared a hot stripe across them. It cooled quickly while people scolded Xiaoge for something, and Li Cu sighed massively. Another bizarre thing had happened, he was sure of it. His tattoo squirmed again, digging deeper into his back. Now he knew it was a physical thing, these sensations made a lot more sense.
"Was that blood?" he asked, glumly eating another peanut. Pangzi nudged the bag closer with a grimace.
"Ouxiang! Why would you do that!" Liu Sang was whining, yes, Xiaoge, why? Please, why.
"I'm sure he has his reasons," Wu Xie said, fucking twinkling. Sure he does! Everyone else would like to know too!
"An offer; rejected. Sorry, Li Cu."
Li Cu shrugged, again. Things were happening, none of his business, yadda yadda.
"Thanks for trying? What were you uh, offering?"
He came into view, his hand wrapped in something glossy and green while Liu Sang fussed. His stare was arresting again, how did he do that? "Zhang physiology is compatible with them."
"Yaba was offering it a new host, kid," Hei-ye said, bouncing down to the floor and then stretching out a bit of blob to pat Li Cu's shoe. "Don't make him talk, it's just painful to watch."
"I'm smeared in Zhang blood now, aren't I? Will I need mosquito repellent after this?" he joked, reaching back to itch at the wet smear. Kan Jian handed him a towel, then immediately took it back and wiped the mark away himself, muttering apologies.
All the fiddling around had the tattoo... the blob... Wang Can's blob - ewww - fussy again. Which, in turn, meant Liu Sang had to calm it down. "I don't suppose there's some way you can convince it to listen to what I want?" Li Cu demanded.
"Uhm... I'm not sure. Did you and Wang Can get along?"
Li Cu nearly choked on a peanut, which netted him another pat on the back, this time from sunshine boy. "Yeah, sure. Like a house on fire," he muttered. Funny thing was, every so often he'd catch Wang Can reacting to one of his stupid jokes like he actually thought it was funny. Not that he ever admitted it. "Your brother's an asshole, you know."
As he finished settling the blobstuff... blobink? whatever? down, Liu Sang said. "I don't know him at all, to be honest. We were separated when we were very young. Just enough to be self-aware, to know there was another. Not really enough to interact." He handed Li Cu his shirt back. Again. "But I'm pretty much an asshole myself, so I wouldn't be surprised."
Kan Jian protested and he patted sunshine boy on the head. "You're just too nice," he told the man. "Not that I want that to change."
The pair of them moved off and Li Cu made note of how close they seemed to be. He set the thought aside, what two adults did with themselves wasn't his business, no matter what the species.
"So," he said, returning his attention to Wu Xie - only because he was supposedly in charge, "What's the plan?"
"We've worked out the probable location." Wu Xie pointed at the map. "An office building in Xi'an."
Wait. "In a city? In Xi'an?" The Wang didn't like to be noticed. Wouldn't building their hideout in the middle of a heavily populated city like Xi'an be risky?
"Purloooinnnneed letter," Hei-ye hummed, or whatever it was he was doing. "Complex dug below. Liu Sang could hear it."
"I couldn't go in without risking notice," Liu Sang added, "But Xiao Hua's brother's drones have good sound systems. My map isn't as accurate as I'd like, but I could tell the basement goes down a lot deeper than the city blueprints say. It's a maze down there, I'll need to map as we go. But first we have to get in."
"And that's where you come in. You and Liu Sang - who Xiao Hua's going to disguise - will be attending a little costume convention being held in a nearby hotel and get lost."
A. Costume. Convention. "Like those things Su Wan goes to with Yang Hao?" At Wu Xie's agreement, Li Cu sighed. "Why me, though?"
"Because your tattoo reacts to related blob stuff. If Wang Can is alive, we're hoping it'll help us find him. Liu Sang, of course, is going for the same reason." Wu Xie eyed Li Cu. "You've been training hard, Yali. This is the sort of thing you've been preparing to do. It's a rescue mission. Get in. Find any blob prisoners and - if possible - break them out."
"And if it isn't possible?"
"Get out and stay safe. If nothing else, you'll be confirming they're there." A stern look. "Do not put rescue above your safety, understood?"
Hmph. As if Wu Xie ever listened to that advice. Li Cu pretended to accept it and got a familiarish side-eye from Liu Sang. "What?"
"Oh. Nothing. Just I hear lies."
"Yali."
Li Cu sighed. "I understand. We'll get out if there's any sign we've been made." He cracked his fingers. "Next question. When do we start?"