Chapter Text
A LONG TIME AGO
Meng Yao was twelve years old when his father kicked him down the steps of Jinlin Tai.
He laid in the dirt for what felt like a long time. There was blood in his eyes. Someone very far away laughed. His vision blurred in and out, the blue sky above fading to white and back again.
If it had been cold Meng Yao might have never moved again, consumed by his own despair, but the sun beat down until the blood running down his face dried and his skin started to flush and burn. He sat up, drew his knees towards his chest and rested his forehead against them, breathing through the nausea. His ears rang. When he could stand, he stood.
He walked without direction. His head didn’t hurt but it throbbed, as though his skull was contracting and expanding. The sunlight hurt his eyes and the noise of Lanling, its people and their animals, made him dizzy. More blood trickled into his eyes. He stopped wiping it away after the first few times. No one looked at him.
☾ ☽
Meng Yao was three years old when he began to dream of coming to his father’s house. His mother filled him to the brim with stories of the vibrant markets of Lanling, the elegant banquets at Jinlin Tai. She painted silhouettes of the pagoda onto her fan and embroidered white peonies onto his handkerchief. She taught him to sing and play the suyue songs of the peasantry, so he could earn his keep playing in the brothel’s common room; later, in secret, she taught him the yayue style favoured by the gentry.
On the hard days – the days where business was slow or the madam was cruel – she whispered promises into his ear, each of them prefaced with one day, when your father…
One day, when your father comes for us, we will eat fresh meat every day.
One day, when your father takes us back to Lanling, we will drink baijiu from the finest Ru-ware cups.
One day, when your father recognises you, he will give you a golden guan, and I will wear matching buyao in my hair every day.
Not once did his mother say one day, when your father sees you at his door, he will deny you utterly. He will reject you. He will throw you from a great height and leave you bleeding on the ground.
☾ ☽
Meng Yao was seven years old when he began to hide money; a coin here and there, earned begging, or given by his mother’s patrons, or paid to him to take over the tasks the other workers found distasteful; laundry or mending or emptying chamber pots. He never hid it from his mother – he could never hide anything from her – and in return, Meng Shi never touched it, even when they had spent themselves down to the last coin, even when they were hungry or cold or sick. Meng Yao had offered it to her many times. His mother had smiled and kissed his forehead and told him they would manage, and that one day, his father—
Meng Yao spent five years squirrelling away every ingot he could spare, hiding them in his thin straw mattress, sewing them into his sleeves, waiting for the day he might need them.
☾ ☽
Meng Yao was eleven years old when he arrived in Lanling for the first time, far too late in the day to intrude upon the gentry. He walked the market instead.
He ignored the stalls selling food; he was too anxious to eat. Besides, he had travelling rations in his belt, enough to get him back to Yunping. He passed by the stalls selling fabric or clothing; Meng Yao’s robes were humble, but they were as clean and neat as they could be after the hard journey and the embroidery along the hems was his very finest work, the fruit of hours of labour in dark rooms.
He stopped at a stall selling hair pins carved from bone. A matched pair of fazan caught his eye; two cranes in flight, curving towards each other, with tiny chips of dark polished shell for eyes. Meng Yao asked after them and haggled ruthlessly enough that he parted with only most of his money. They were the best omen he could ask for, symbols of longevity and rising status and the filial bond between a father and son. He thought he could present them to his mother; that they could wear one each when his father brought them back to Lanling.
He visited one of the local pleasure houses and bartered an evening of pouring wine and washing cups for a place to sleep that night; an out-of-the-way corner, where the madam could be sure none of the clients would see him and his robes wouldn’t be dirtied as they would if he tried to sleep in a barn or stable. He was careful to hang his robes neatly and brush them down as best he could before he slept. It would be important to look his best, when he presented himself to his father.
It was the day before his birthday.
☾ ☽
Meng Yao was twelve years old when he considered selling one of the crane pins to a merchant. He haggled ruthlessly to purchase them at all; he was sure he could do the same to sell them. After all, who was he to say that the eyes were shell and not jet or obsidian or perhaps even garnet? Who was this amateur to say that the craftsmanship is anything less than worthy of a prince? He could get more than half of what he paid for the pair.
He kept them, and bartered away his rations instead.
☾ ☽
Meng Yao was twelve years old when he first learned of Yiling Laozu.
“Boy!” A woman squinted at him from a market stall, one hand shading her eyes from the sun. “What happened to your face, boy?”
Meng Yao touched his face. His fingers came away red and sticky.
He walked on.
He managed to stumble into an alley before he vomited, his body expelling the contents of his stomach with the perfunctory manner of a merchant counting coins. The streets of Lanling are broad and well-lit, but Meng Yao might as well have been wandering in the deepest night, the thickest fog. He remembered the path he took to get to Jinlin Tai with exact precision. He knew precisely how to make his way home. He could not take the knowledge from his mind and use it to direct his feet.
“Boy!” The woman has followed him. Meng Yao watched her take him in. He supposed he made an unpleasant picture: the blood on his face, still flowing; his robes, torn and dusty; the vomit by his feet and clinging to his chin. She came closer to him, heedless, and crouched in front of him. Her fingers were like cold iron against his chin when she gripped it. She turned his face from side to side.
“What happened to you?”
What had happened to him? Meng Yao wasn’t sure that question had an answer he could provide. He said nothing.
The woman’s gaze softened. She tugged his handkerchief out of his pocket, wadded it up and pressed it to the cut on his forehead. When Meng Yao only stared at her, she took him by the wrist and used his own hand to hold the cloth in place. It stung sharply enough to cut through the fog.
“Who hurt you, boy?” she asked, in a tone that almost managed to be gentle.
This, Meng Yao could answer. “My father.”
The woman’s face went hard and cold. Her grip on his wrist tightened briefly before she released him.
“Keep pressure on that,” she said.
Meng Yao felt that his bones could fall out of his body, that he could rise from his flesh like a ghost from a grave. He pressed his wrist harder against his forehead. He was only grateful that the nausea was gone, at least temporarily. His vision was still faded; he couldn’t focus enough to see the woman’s face clearly, even when she leaned in to wipe ineffectually at the blood on his face.
“As if there weren’t enough pain in the world,” she muttered. “May the Yiling Laozu take the man who did this.”
Meng Yao was acquainted with the tone of voice adopted by someone who did not want a child to understand them. Meng Yao was also acquainted with the desperation of his circumstances.
“I don’t know this Yiling Laozu,” he said. His own voice sounded far away, as though it was coming from behind him.
“Ah, he’s a story for scaring children. Nothing more,” the woman said.
Meng Yao was acquainted with liars.
“What do they say about him in the stories?” he asked.
“They say he snatches up children and devours maidens for breakfast.” The woman scoffed. “Nonsense, of course.”
“Nonsense,” Meng Yao repeated dutifully.
The woman hummed, satisfied, as she wiped at his face. “They say he rises from a pool of blood in the middle of a mass grave. If you can find him in his lair, if you can pay the price, he will bless your life or curse your enemies.”
Something at the back of Meng Yao’s mind, some raw and wounded instinct, came shivering awake.
“He must be very powerful,” he murmured.
The woman huffed. “Perhaps. Though I confess I’ve not yet met someone desperate enough to chance Luanzang Gang for such a bargain.” She sat back on her haunches and looked at him. “Do you have somewhere to go?”
Meng Yao made a choice.
“I do.”
☾ ☽
Yiling was a long way from Lanling, but not far at all for a boy who had just been handed the key to his heart’s most savage desire. Meng Yao barely noticed the time passing, barely noticed his hunger and pain and exhaustion. He developed spectacular bruises, black and purple, across his face and body, and that helped; people pitied him, offered him alms or free meals or safe places to sleep. He looked like a child who had been savagely beaten by his parents, or a servant by his master; in essence, he supposed that was accurate.
If he had not been so conscious of the time, he would have stopped in Yunping, perhaps asked his mother to go with him, but she was so ill. Meng Yao had so little left to give to her. Just this one thing, perhaps. Then she could rest. Then, perhaps, they both could.
He travelled with merchant caravans and river boats when he could, walked alone when he couldn’t. If he slept, it was in the back of someone’s cart, atop a heap of radishes or sacks of rice. If he ate, it was by the charity of those with whom he shared the road. That only came rarely. If he was hungry, he didn’t notice.
The village of Yiling did not seem like the kind of place afflicted by anything like a demon. Meng Yao knew his cultivation was not strong, that the manuals his mother purchased for him were not producing the results she hoped for, but he had learned enough to sense malevolent or resentful presences. There was nothing here. There were none of the other signs of a dark influence, either – the market was bustling. People looked healthy. The children grew tall and strong. There were a handful of street cats, but not a single stray dog to be seen.
Meng Yao was not sure where to find Yiling Laozu, but he did not have to look; he only had to listen. It was only an hour or so of wandering the market before he heard the right conversation. Two women, huddled together behind a stall selling silk tassels, whispering.
“When will you go?” the older woman said.
“Right now,” said the younger. “I only stopped to let you know, in case the offering isn’t – isn’t enough.”
“Here,” the older woman said. She pressed a money pouch into the younger woman’s hand. “Go and buy some potatoes from Lao Wang, and maybe something from the butcher. Just in case. I’ll see you back here tomorrow, do you hear me?”
The younger woman looked like she might cry. “Yes – yes, thank you—”
“Don’t thank me, hurry and go! The older woman nudged the younger’s shoulder. “You don’t want to be anywhere near Luanzang Gang when it gets dark.”
Meng Yao followed the younger woman at a distance as she went to Lao Wang’s stall for potatoes. He followed her to the butchers, where she haggled for a whole fat duck. He had learned the tricks of being invisible in a crowd, but his work became harder when the woman squared her shoulders and marched out of Yiling, towards the dreary hills behind it, a place hemmed in by grey mist and heavy clouds, with trees that looked, if not dead, then profoundly unwell. Only the woman’s single-minded focus on her goal kept her from seeing Meng Yao.
He could certainly feel resentment now, as they left the shelter of the village behind, but it was neither so much nor so aggressive as he had expected. It felt almost restrained, in a way, as though there was something holding it back. Meng Yao had heard of Luanzang Gang, of the battles fought here; perhaps cultivators had, at one time or another, placed wards around the village to keep it safe from undue influence.
The woman came to a crude shrine which had been erected on the road, little more than a few slabs of wood leaning against each other, with Yiling Laozu hastily carved into a tablet with a knife that had not been quite enough for the job. Meng Yao crouched behind a dense, thorny patch of scrub, and waited.
The woman knelt down before the shrine and set out her offerings – the potatoes, the duck, a small sack, a jade pendant. She bowed, pressing her forehead to the earth.
“You don’t need to be so formal,” said a voice.
Meng Yao was not sure what he had expected Yiling Laozu to sound like – perhaps a menacing growl, or a malevolent whisper – but what he heard was quite like the voice of a child, no older than Meng Yao himself.
The woman sat up and wiped at her face. Meng Yao realised she had been weeping; he could hear it in her voice.
“Yiling Laozu,” she said, clear, for all that she was shaking. “I come to you with a request for aid.”
The mist around the shrine swirled thicker for a moment, and then all at once there was a boy standing there. He looked to be no older than six or seven, although he was terribly thin – Meng Yao supposed that the boy, like himself, might have been undersized from lack of food, rather than simple youth. The boy came and sat down in front of the offerings, drawing his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them.
“Didi?” the woman whispered.
“No,” the boy said. “But he says hello. He says he misses you. It wasn’t your fault, what happened. It was just an accident.”
The woman said nothing, but she covered her face with her hands.
“What did you want?” the boy asked. He nudged her offerings with his toe, brightening a little when he touched the sack. “Are those chilli seeds?”
“Yes,” the woman said, hoarse. “Chen-furen said you – you liked them, when she brought some to you.”
“Oh, Chen-furen! How thoughtful of her to remember,” the boy said. “You should tell me what you want, though, so I know how much of this I should keep. You must be asking for a very big favour.”
The woman leaned forward. She spoke in a very low, urgent voice that Meng Yao could not hear. The boy looked as though he was listening intently. When the woman finished and sat back on her heels, he nodded.
“I can do that.” He looked down at the woman’s offerings, hummed thoughtfully, and nudged the jade pendant with his toes. “You should keep this. It has too much history to be given away to the likes of me.”
The boy sounded wistful, though. Meng Yao felt a jolt of hope somewhere in the depths of his ribcage – hope that his twinned crane fuzan might be enough of an offering, that his gift would be found worthy for the enormity of the favour he had to ask. If Yiling Laozu liked pretty things…
“Thank you,” the woman said. She snatched up her pendant and scrambled to her feet, bowing and walking backwards. “Thank you, thank you – I will wait—”
“No need to wait,” the boy said. “Go home and make sure to lock your doors. It will happen tonight.”
“Thank you,” the woman said, and turned and fled.
Meng Yao waited, but the boy did not leave. He simply leaned forward to gather up his offerings, shoving them into an ancient and battered qiankun pouch.
“You can come out now,” he said, pitching his voice a little louder. “She’s gone.”
Meng Yao felt something cold and slick, like a finger of ice, side up the back of his neck – he scrambled forward onto the road, looking behind him, but saw nothing. When he looked forward again, the boy had finished putting the potatoes away. He was looking at Meng Yao.
The boy didn’t look like a demon. He looked like an ordinary human child – underfed, perhaps, but the same could be said of Meng Yao. His hair was a terrible tangle. His robes were threadbare and too small, but that made him no different from the other orphan children Meng Yao saw anywhere and everywhere.
Meng Yao brushed off his robes, walked forward, and knelt down in front of the boy.
“Are you Yiling Laozu?” he asked.
“That’s just what they call me,” the boy said dismissively. “I tried to tell them my name, but they started calling me the Foundling Ghost, and then the Graveyard Demon, and, well, Yiling Laozu is better than those, I think. At least they don’t treat me like a baby.” He looked at Meng Yao and smiled. It was a sweet, sunny smile, the kind Meng Yao usually only saw on babies and drunks. “But you look like you need help.”
“I do,” Meng Yao said. His heart was hammering in his throat. Very carefully, he took the box holding the fuzan out of his robes and opened it. “I have nothing to give you but these.”
He set the open box in front of him and then bowed low, the way the woman had, pressing his forehead into the dirt.
“These are meant for someone you love,” the boy said. He sounded strange – nostalgic, perhaps even envious. “I can feel it in them. You worked hard for them. Now you’re giving them up to me. You must want something very badly.”
Cool dry fingers brushed the back of Meng Yao’s hand.
Meng Yao looked up, startled by the touch, only to see Yiling Laozu slightly out of arm's reach, holding the box. He could not have touched Meng Yao’s hand.
He must have imagined it. Nothing more.
Yiling Laozu smiled down at Meng Yao and closed the box, cradling it to his chest. “Will you tell me what you want?”
Meng Yao told him.