Chapter Text
Liu Mingyan jerks into consciousness like a knife between the third and fourth rib, rolling into a defensive stance despite her aching limbs and pounding head. A thousand little things had put her on high alert: this wasn’t her bed, nor had she fallen asleep in one; the air was different, sweetly herbal instead of sulfuric and ashen.
Scanning the area for threats is second-nature; so is lunging forward when she sees the face of an enemy thought dead. It wouldn’t be her first time facing a crafty opponent, and the once-sect leader of Cang Qiong is nothing if not crafty.
The room around her is still frozen in surprise, a tableau of figures in the midst of tea-taking and conversing. A foolish lapse she will take advantage of. Liu Mingyan tears herself from the grasp of the healer—Mu Qingfang? Have all her dead and buried come back to haunt her?—like his grip is so much fragile silk, her body an arrow hurtling through the air to sink through a soft throat. Cheng Luan is not with her—undoubtedly they had stowed away her sword, thinking her harmless without it. Another mistake. It would be their last.
It would have been, except an arm like a steel band wraps around her and smashes her back into the wall, making her aching head ring. The blow to the head doesn’t stop her—she would never allow such a thing—but what she sees when she whips her head around is. Impossible.
For the first time in three decades, she is seeing Liu Qingge’s face outside of a mirror. The shock of it stops her cold. She can’t quite seem to draw in a full breath.
So this was hell, then. All her dead in one room, come to torment her for her misdeeds. She relaxes into the steel band, letting her head loll with the futile hope that it might hurt less.
All around her, figures of the dead are belatedly rushing to react. Mu Qingfang has his sword half-drawn, a novel sight from her healer shishu. Shen Qingqiu—of course he was here, why wouldn’t he be here—throws himself in front of a still-stunned Yue Qingyuan, an amusing reversal of their usual roles. Strangely, Luo Binghe has also put himself in front of Shen Qingqiu, making them look like a queue of three startled, puffed-up cats. She looks around for Qi Qingqi absently, but her former shizun is nowhere to be found. Shame.
Mu Qingfang, ever the skilled peacemaker, breaks the silence first. “Ah—please, there’s no need for hostilities. I understand that you may have been startled, daozhang, but I assure you we mean no harm. You are in Cang Qiong Sect’s ward of healing.” He sheaths his sword, and pointedly eyes the arm around her until it hesitantly slackens, then moves away.
Funny words, those are. As if all the messy history they share has been wiped clean, strangers again. As if the peak he refers to has been anything more than ash for decades. Something here is not right, but—fine. If they want to play this game, they can. She will get her answers regardless.
“How did you find me?” Her voice, cold and clinical, seems to be coming from somewhere outside her. This, a mission debrief, she can do. She does not allow her gaze to stray to the far corner of the room, where her brother the man who looks like Liu Qingge stands protectively in front of Yue Qingyuan. Doesn’t meet his eyes, but knows that if she did she’d be faced with his hostile, accusatory scowl, the likes of which had never been directed at her in her life.
Shen Qingqiu’s face, that hated visage, is tense with hesitancy, but he steps forward. She has only ever seen it so once before, the last time they had met face-to-face. (She’d felt no need to visit his prison cell in the dungeons below, especially after he had begun losing limbs.) She had been leaving Cang Qiong, him returning, and they had happened to pass by each other on the Rainbow Bridge. Liu Mingyan had then had the singular pleasure of seeing his distant, lofty expression shatter into something raw and frightened, taking satisfaction in skin gone spoiled-milk-pale. Good, she had thought spitefully. The past should never cease to haunt you. The dead may not remember, but I will. It was what had initially driven her to take up her brother’s sword, his Bai Zhan whites. Let Liu Qingge’s ghost haunt them. They deserved the reminder of their failures.
The memory of cracking his facade like spun-sugar glass allows her to power through the disgust that bubbles up within her when she hears his voice again for the first time in decades, spinning some ridiculous tale of anniversary honeymooning and unexpected rift-valleys and unconscious women slumped over enormous rare beasts. The Luo Binghe by his side, who is the very image of her husband if through distorted glass, looms behind him protectively, perhaps sensing her rancor. She looks him dead in the eyes and thinks, I killed you five days ago. If I wanted to do it again, I could. Then she closes her eyes and tries not to think of anything at all.
But no matter how harmless she tries to appear, they’re wary of her. For good reason, given that the first thing she did upon waking was to try to kill their sect leader, but it’s irritating regardless. She doesn’t have the time or patience to deal with this nonsense, not when every second of Cheng Luan being out of her sight feels like a betrayal to a person and a cause she has held dear for so long. When Mu Qingfang tries to redirect her for the nth time, she—well, she snaps.
“You will give me my sword,” Liu Mingyan says, voice implacable for all that her internal composure is cracking, “because if I wanted to burn Cang Qiong down again, I would, with or without it. And you should not give me a reason to want that.”
The man who is not her brother tenses at that, the hand still on his scabbard tightening. He is poised to defend, to attack, to be whatever Cang Qiong needs its war god to be until it no longer has any use for him.
“Who are you? State your intentions,” he barks, in the tone of voice he uses when trying to diffuse a hostile situation he sees no peaceful resolution for, after he has already resolved to draw his sword and draw enemy blood if need be. Her chest is tight.
“I have no name,” Liu Mingyan says, because that much is true. She has lost everything that had made ‘Liu Mingyan’ who she was, sword, brother, sect and all; some of it she’d cast away herself. “But you can call me Liu Qingge.”
The others draw back at this, shock evident on every face but Shen Qingqiu’s—something to watch out for, that one—but the man who isn’t her brother isn’t fooled.
“Mingyan,” he breathes, like his heart is breaking, like she’s just run a sword through his chest like that rat bastard Shen Qingqiu had. “Mingyan, meimei, is that you?” And god, he sounds just like her gege. She cannot pretend this is a dream anymore; it hurts too much to be anything but real.
Somewhere in the background, a teacup shatters. Liu Mingyan wishes she could escape this conversation that easily.
She’d gotten away with giving a bare-bones version of her world’s history, fat as it was with blood and bodies. But nobody in this room was a fool; at her recounting of the Demon Emperor Luo Binghe’s rise, Mu Qingfang had gasped, softly. He’d looked sick, but his hands were stone-steady as always. A good man to have around in emergencies. Just not in the ones that matter.
Yue Qingyuan’s noble brow had creased, probably mulling over power struggles and diplomatic overtures and the differences between their worlds. He’d been her favorite once, before everything, so measured, so thoughtful. She’d maybe taken a bit too much relish in describing his arrow-ridden body, more holes than flesh, really. Not even enough to interest the carrion birds. His slightly-queasy grimace had been a delight.
Liu Qingge had frowned but nothing more, even at the news of his death. Oh, her stoic gege; he’d likely worn that face even in death, not that they’d allowed her to see the body. She peers at his face, unlined and unaging as all immortal faces are, but older, nonetheless. More settled in his skin. His eyes speak of stories to tell and horrors survived. She crushes the useless wish that her own brother had gotten to live those stories and survive those horrors. She’d had ten long years of practice, after all.
Neither Luo Binghe nor Shen Qingqiu—for those two seemed to always be connected, even if in this universe it was a relationship with significantly less dismemberment—seemed surprised at the story of the Demon Emperor. Shen Qingqiu had actually nodded along knowingly at some parts, though he’d halted himself immediately after, looking embarrassed. He was so much softer, so much more foolish than the one she’d known. It’s almost disappointing; at least that one had had some substance behind the lofty bearing. But foolish as he appears, he knows much more than he has let on, and she has no idea what he plans to do with that knowledge. She’ll have to find out.
She doesn’t tell anyone of how the Demon Emperor has been murdered. Let them think twice about investigating her world with the threat of an unhinged Xin Mo wielder pursuing them. Let them think her harmless beyond her complicity in his crimes. Let them underestimate her and pay for it, if need be.
There is something to be said about the charm of a girl too persistent for her own good. That is to say: it is completely charmless.
“Do not,” she warns. She thinks she knows roughly what will come out of this softer self’s mouth, and it’s already making her angry. It won’t stop her, of course; never in her life has she been that smart. But at least later she’ll be able to truthfully claim that she tried.
The girl is undaunted. She thinks herself righteous, pursuant of truth and justice and morality, all these lovely concepts that do not and have never existed. “How could you do it? How could you stand aside and let them burn your sect? —Or worse, take up a torch yourself?”
God, it is the least pleasant glimpse back into the past possible, for all that this girl is older than she was when her innocence died, had gotten so many more years of her brother—had wasted so much of it writing awful porn about her shibo and a demon traitor under the most unimaginative name possible—
“You stupid girl,” she bites out, not even sure what she’s most annoyed about. The squandering of that precious time, the condescension in her tone, the assumption that these softer versions of the peak lords wouldn’t do exactly the same as hers had; it was all so infuriating. “Do you really want to know the truth? The truth is that it was easy .”
Liu Mingyan begins advancing on the girl, one soft, measured step at a time. She looks wary. Good. Let this teach her a lesson about provoking those stronger than her.
“The truth is that I stared each of them down as I gutted them and watched the life leave their eyes, and I enjoyed it. Your martial so-called aunts and uncles died by my hand, in agony, knowing just who had come for them and why. Knowing they deserved it for what they had done.”
She smiles, perfectly composed. Oh, this feels so much better than she had thought it would. “Qi Qingqi too, of course. Blood from the heart tastes so much sweeter than when drawn from anywhere else. Hers, in particular, was delightful.”
The girl has blanched, taking a step back. Her mouth is undoubtedly parted in shock beneath that stupid veil.
“Oh, but don’t misunderstand me,” Liu Mingyan continues. “I didn’t claim all of their lives—Shen Qingqiu, for instance; Luo Binghe had a… prior claim. He had much fun with that one. I think death was a mercy, in the end.” Her grin is wide and sharp as an ancient horror rising from deep beneath the seas.
“You’re a monster,” the girl breathes. Her eyes are reproachful even now, accusatory.
Liu Mingyan laughs, a hacking, bloody sound torn from her throat. “Of course I am. I’m the monster they made me, your beloved martial family. I’m the monster I needed to be, to get what I wanted.”
Unfortunately, not all her pursuers are as easy to shake. This alternate version of her once-shizun is as persistent as her own ever was, a predator that has set her jaws into a target and now refuses to let go. Her eyes, elegantly lined with kohl and painted with care, draw across every inch of Liu Mingyan’s body from atop her fan, just as she had when Liu Mingyan was still her disciple, and if Liu Mingyan were anyone else she might feel small and hotly embarrassed.
“You’ve caused quite a stir,” the impostor begins, and suddenly Liu Mingyan can’t stand the grating of her voice, a phantom come alive after all these years. She sounds exactly how Liu Mingyan remembers, worn though the memories are like paper folded and unfolded too many times.
“I have nothing to say to you,” Liu Mingyan responds shortly. It’s true. The woman she wants to rage at, cry at, take tea with, spar with, kill all over again is a universe and several feet of grave dirt away. She is not this impostor. Or maybe the impostor is a good enough replacement, because it seems to Liu Mingyan that woman had never really existed, having left her to the wolves in the hour of her greatest despair.
This is what she hates most about this universe, the way it so effortlessly blurs the lines she has been drawing for years now.
Unsurprisingly, this does not deter the woman. But she doesn’t try to draw blood with a sharp little comment like Liu Mingyan expects. Instead: “I’m sorry, Mingyan.”
The softness of her words, in her gaze, is unbearable.
“ Fuck you, ” she snarls, almost despite herself. What was Qi Qingqi even apologizing for? She hadn’t had the opportunity to make the same mistakes Liu Mingyan had killed her for in another world, sure; that didn’t mean Liu Mingyan wanted anything to do with her. It wouldn’t buy her any leniency if she continued to pry into matters that were rightly none of her business.
Qi Qingqi, of course, is unfazed at the display of temper as she always is. In fact, it only softens the sinewy lines of her body with secondhand grief. As if Liu Mingyan had asked for her sympathy. As if she needed anything of the sort.
“I know I’m not the right person to be apologizing to you—not that I’d deserve to give you one, if I was. Nevertheless, it bears saying.
“Forgive me if I overstep, but…”
Fuck, whatever is about to come out of Qi Qingqi’s mouth is going to make her incandescently angry, she knows. She should turn away and leave before she has to hear it. She should simply mount Cheng Luan and fly away until this encounter is far behind.
She doesn’t move a muscle. She’s utterly rooted to the spot, helpless to do anything but continue to listen.
“No pain lasts forever. I hope you find—if not happiness, then peace of mind.”
Her face goes numb with a sudden flush of anger. The sheer presumptuousness of it all—god, she should have fucking expected it. Sagacious damn advice from Qi Qingqi of all people.
She hisses, “If only you’d felt the same care for my happiness, my peace of mind, when you told me to desecrate my brother’s spirit and look grateful for it. If only you’d not exonerated his murderer before his body even cooled.” She might be shaking, but it’s too distant to register. She thinks this might be what shock feels like.
Qi Qingqi half-smiles, but it’s a small, painful thing. (Good. What right does she think she has?)
“I know. Too little, too late. But I suspect this is the only closure you’ll get from your shizun; dead women say nothing, after all.”
And fuck, is she supposed to—feel guilty for it? Bare her wounded heart and confess her fears that maybe it wasn’t all worth it, maybe she’d made a mistake, maybe she should have laid down in the grave dirt of the Lingxi Caves and died with her brother instead of making a mess of his name and legacy?
As if Qi Qingqi, any version of her, was entitled to the nightmares that plagued her restless sleep, to re-rousing all the doubts she’d felt when revenge had brought her nothing but more heartache?
She snarls, and makes her long-overdue escape from this terrible conversation. Cheng Luan cuts through the air in a sweeping arc of light to score a deep line in the earth between them, sending up clouds of fine dust. A clear warning: do not follow.
She throws herself into the air, soaring higher and higher until the dizziness from the thin air drowns out the deafening pounding of her heart and her even louder thoughts.