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Preparing for the sacrifice ritual is, ironically, one of the most peaceful moments of Mo Xuanyu's life. He does not know what and how will happen, but the torment waiting game life he knows will end soon. He doesn't much care for whether he'll reincarnate or not, whether he'll be in pain or not, wheter it'll be drawn out or not. He just wants- he wants whatever his life is now to cease. Anything awaiting him in diyu - or better yet, the nothingness shattered souls supposedly experience - would be preferable to the everyday abuse, humiliation and starvation he suffers through at Mo manor.
Drawing the sacrifice ritual is, in comparison, mostly painless, almost meditative work, the unknown deal sweetened by the promise of change. Mo Xuanyu doesn't even care all that much for whether Nie-zongzhu is right about the Yiling Laozu being a not particularly terrible person. If he is, so what? It's not like him taking revenge on the Mo family or the cultivation world which wronged both of them would hurt him. For one, he'd be dead - and for two, it's not like the members of the cultivation gentry were much kinder to Mo Xuanyu than Wei Wuxian. Let the man wreak havoc.
They have it coming.
The pig blood he'd stolen from the butcher and set aside in a bowl for the ritual runs out right before he can paint the last three strokes of the summoning array's innermost circle. Mo Xuanyu needs to complete the ritual and needs to do it in the immediate future but Mo-furen and Mo Ziyuan had been sending just enough food and drink so he wouldn't die and Mo Xuanyu really doesn't want to mess the ritual up by fainting and smudging the radicals. But...
Needs must. He pricks the tip of his finger.
The wood lacquer and dust on the ground stings, but the pain helps him ground himself. Then, four cuts on the inside of his left wrist: three for the Mo main family, one for his brother - and then Mo Xuanyu connects the last line to another previously drawn in the array.
The summoning circle is complete - it has already started glowing a faint red. Mo Xuanyu takes one of his last breaths and begins reciting the summoning spell he'd written and memorised. "This current life is unendurable... I'd rather be de-"
His jaw locks, without any discernible reason. Mo Xuanyu almost bites his tongue, the spell cut off - but perhaps not without serving its purpose? The array brightens, then something in the corner of Mo Xuanyu's vision seems to pull the light, all light in the shed, towards itself. The light condenses into a bright ball of... energy? Then something, perhaps the light itself, changes its shape, reaching for five different directions - in the shape of a star that consistently grows bigger and more human-shaped. The light thins out unevenly, twelve small brighter patches - about the same place where zang and fu organs are supposed to be - and a thirteenth, most luminous spot at the lower dantian. There are barely-visible tendrils of light connecting all thireeen spots in various configurations that could be meridians.
Mo Xuanyu hasn't the faintest idea what he's witnessing but he has the distinct impression this is really truly not how the ritual is supposed to be conducted.
The human-shaped light disperses between one blink and the next, its place taken by a very attractive - if slightly malnourished - tastefully scarred and very naked stranger. Who promptly falls on his ass, because the human-shaped light whatever had been hovering about two chi in the air and once the light dispersed, nothing prevented the stranger from falling to the ground.
Which he did in a most undignified manner, accompanied by a loud yelp and no small amount of grumbling and- oh but his voice is nice.
The stranger sits up - again, without much propriety but at least now Mo Xuanyu did not have to worry about accidentally ogling the man's private bits - then looks him squarely in the eye and oh dear heaven.
See, here's the thing. Mo Xuanyu is a cutsleeve. He knows it, his mother and brother know - knew - it, his bullies all seemed to somehow always know it. Finding men attractive - when the lady populance shared his opinion and also when it did not - is nothing new to him. But the response this stranger elicits in him is something else. Even with his face partially obscured by, for lack of better adjective, soggy and uncombed hair he is a sight to behold. His face is perfectly balanced and classically handsome, right on the fence of strongly masculine and willowy, androgynously delicate. His brilliant quicksilver eyes almost glow in the half-shadow of Mo Xuanyu's shed and his mouth looks like it's made for a heartrending smirk.
Mo Xuanyu gets so distracted by the bobbing of his adam's apple, the little mole below the stranger's lower lip and, of all things, the shape of his eyebrow that he comprehends exactly one word of his question - knife. Even the stranger's voice is mesmerising, a softly vibrating baritone practically straight out of... Well. Places he'd rather not fantasize about right now lest he further embarrass himself.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"I asked," Gorgeous Naked Stranger says with hints of a bemused smirk lurking at the edges of his mouth, "if you planned to use that medical disaster of a knife on yourself now or could I scavenge for a robe before tackling you?"
Mo Xuanyu blinks at the stranger. His gaze falls to the knife still clutched in his right hand, then back to the stranger and down to the knife again. Well, true, it's not the sharpest blade in the world, but it's not like he has a lot of options, what with him being confined to a, honestly slightly claustrophobic, shed-
"Also, not that I have anything against being alive, but- I'm supposed to be dead. Know anything about that?"
As it turns out Mo Xuanyu did, in fact, summon the Yiling Laozu back into the realm of living and he is, in fact, oathbound to fulfilling Mo Xuanyu's plans- well, more like requests of revenge or else his body and soul will be torn apart, this time permanently.
He just, somehow, fucked up - but not quite? Wei Wuxian says he'd passed the critical time interval and thus is not expected to die a horrible death... from the ritual at least - the sacrificial summons to not require, well. Sacrifice.
Or at least not much of it. Using his own blood to draw part of the array seems to have fulfilled all requirements. Wei Wuxian's soul may be bound to his by the revenge contract, but it's a frail thing that is only not dissolved because the Yiling Laozu himself isn't certain it won't harm his soul - and thus his chances at enacting bloody revenge on the sect cultivators. But, all that aside, they now seem to be two whole men probably not at the cusp of qi deviation free to do however their hears desire.
So then... What happens now?