Chapter Text
Chung Myung stumbles upon it by accident.
Hidden deep inside the Tang Estate, behind layers of forest and an excessive amount of qi-suppressing talismans, stood a lone house.
Vines curled and weaved themselves around and up the dilapidated exterior walls. Mold darkened the roof with some portions on the brink of, if not already, collapse. The wooden window frames were visibly rotting and broken even in the darkness of the night.
Chung Myung would think the house was abandoned were it not for the blurry silhouette he could see moving around the second floor cast by a flickering candlelight.
From his comfortable spot perched on the tallest tree in the Tang Estate, Chung Myung finishes up the remainder of his alcohol and carelessly tossed aside the bottle down below him.
He debates between heading back and asking Tang Gunak about the strange solitary house or checking it out for himself as his alcohol-addled mind was urging him to do. He hears the bottle he threw aside crash against the forest floor and suddenly recalls that the alcohol he had just finished was actually stolen from Tang Gunak's personal stash.
So Chung Myung shrugs, wiping away the last drop of alcohol on his lip with his sleeve, and decides to go with the second option.
He casually jumps through the layers of trees, allowing the slivers of moonlight leaking through the leafy canopies to guide his path toward the strange house. He curiously notes the lines of qi-suppressing talismans that seemed to only grow in number as he moved closer and closer to his destination.
Chung Myung pauses as he finally breaks through the end of the forest and lands on the edge of the clearing where the house is located. He reflexively takes a step back when he notices something strange about the grass that surrounds the area.
He narrows his eyes because it wasn't simply a trick of the night. The grass was tainted black. And, Chung Myung scrunches his nose at this, it smells of cloying decay and poison.
"What the hell?" he mutters to himself. Chung Myung was pretty sure that Tang Gunak wasn't the type of person to leave a part of his family's estate in as bad a state as what he was seeing. Why did they even keep this here in the first place?
A bit more wary, he tries to observe the area with a much sharper eye. More than just the surrounding trees, the walls were painted with layer after layer of qi-suppressing talismans.
He frowns at the clumsier-looking ones that seem to have been slapped on top of the others just for the sake of it. It was as if they were just trying to throw in as many talismans as they could with the hopes that at least one of them stuck.
Added to that, what he couldn’t see from his previous perch, the doors and windows were all barred and chained with thick and long-winded immortal binding cables wrapped egregiously around and across each other.
It was almost as if the people who tied them together were in a rush and didn't bother affixing them properly, only making sure that they were knotted just enough to keep their hold.
But even still…
"Isn't this a bit overkill?" Chung Myung scratches his nose, thinking about how rich the Tang family must be to afford this much for one rotting house. "What kind of spiritual beast are they keeping in here anyway?"
Chung Myung peers around the house’s exterior a bit and doesn’t see anything else out of the ordinary, really.
No claw marks. No dead animals. No leftover bloodstains.
If their goal was to make sure the beast stayed inside the confines of the house, then the Tangs did their job well enough—even if they did do it a bit messily, Chung Myung thinks as he sees a small gap in one of the windowsills on the second floor.
Hm? If the Tangs were just keeping this beast here without any use of it...
Chung Myung wonders if he could take it away from their hands. They probably won't get angry at him if he beats it up and sells its meat or something, right?
If anything, he'd be helping them save money by getting rid of their need to use these expensive immortal binding cables on a stupid, abandoned house.
Or maybe he could also steal—ahem, take —the wires and sell them too!
(("That's still stealing, you damn brat!"
"Hush, Sahyung, being stressed out isn't good for you."
" This...! "))
Chung Myung jumps over to the slightly open window and begins untying the spiritual ropes that blocked it off from the outside world. He quietly giggles at the idea of how much he could gain from this single night.
But then he's abruptly torn out of his thoughts by an eerily unfamiliar, yet oddly familiar deep voice.
"What are you doing here?"
Not a spiritual beast then.
Chung Myung stiffens from his spot, hands still gripping onto the heavy weight of the immortal binding cables, and looks up at the man standing inside, a green eye gazing at him with cool apathy through the small slit from the opposite side of the window.
Chung Myung decides to play it easy and pulls out his go-to ‘I’ve done nothing wrong’ smile, but his lips twitch stiffly as his face falls into shock when the man pulls back the window pane and reveals his face.
Chung Myung's breath is taken from him with a suddenness that he doesn't think anything could ever rival.
His eyes lock with Tang Bo. And his world stops.
"You..." Chung Myung mouths uselessly, heart ringing in his ears. "You're supposed to be dead."
A dark expression clouds his closest friend's eyes. He sweeps his long white hair behind him as he looks resentfully at the numerous chains that bound his wrists to an unseen source from inside the house.
"Oh, trust me," Tang Bo answers darkly. “It’s not for a lack of trying.”
The weight of the resentful expression that flickers across his face startles Chung Myung badly and it’s only sheer instinct and muscle reflex alone that his hands retain their grip on the window frame keeping him from falling to the ground floor.
Tang Bo seemed to recognize how spooked Chung Myung was. So he hides the twisted expression on his face by closing his eyes, telling the now-younger man softly, "You should leave, child, before the elders mistake my intentions and perhaps finally abandon me altogether. That would certainly be better..." He adds the last part as a weary mumble.
Chung Myung shakily swivels his head around, towards the chains, and the talismans, and notices the absolute lack of spiritual energy around their vicinity. Reality was painting a picture that Chung Myung was struggling to comprehend.
"Tang Bo, why...?" is your own family keeping you prisoner?
Why have they been telling me the world that the Dark Saint has long since been dead when clearly you're still here?
A sharp flicker enters the man's eyes. "How the hell do you know my name?"
The man's hand snaps towards Chung Myung's wrist and grips it in a bruising hold.
Chung Myung is so caught up in his agitated and racing thoughts that he fails to notice the way his qi instinctively reacts to Tang Bo's touch.
It reflexively flows into the other man's system, burrowing its way into Tang Bo like a second home. Tang Bo’s qi welcomes Chung Myung’s greedily, allowing it to settle and leak into his in a long-awaited, comforting embrace.
The Dark Saint's eyes widen at the familiar dance—the familiar push-and-pull flow—that he has not felt in over a century.
The qi feels purer than what he had experienced in the past. But oh-so similar that he doesn't think he could ever mistake it as someone else's.
"Hyung-nim." Tang Bo breathes out as he pulls the startled younger version of his former almost-lover (had he known their fate, he would have confessed the moment they met) through the window and into his arms in an inescapable hold.
A shadow falls over Tang Bo’s eyes as, for the first time in half a century, he begins thinking of a way to release himself from these annoying chains. And, if he can’t escape, how he would trap the child—who was clearly a reincarnation of his hyung-nim—with him forever inside this house.
It was ironic in a cosmic way.
Tang Bo’s current prison was the home he had promised Chung Myung they would live in once the war was over.
He had it built specifically away from the rest of the Tang Estate buildings because he wanted them to have the peace and privacy they never got to fully experience, as constantly present as they were on the battlefield.
How funny it was that his own family turned on him and trapped him in a home of his own making.
Tang Bo didn’t expect to wake up a few years after his ‘death’. By some miracle, the Tang Family healers were able to keep his body in a long enough stasis that his powerful core had been able to slowly mend his life-threatening wounds.
Tang Bo wishes it could have been the same for Chung Myung.
Nobody wanted to tell him what happened to the man’s body. None of them bothered to retrieve it, allowing the other Ten Great Sects to bury him alongside thousands of others after the beheaded Cheon Ma was discovered.
Despite hailing the Plum Blossom Sword Saint as a hero of the cultivation world, they treated him and his legacy as a joke.
Perhaps, the head of the Tang Family could tell Tang Bo’s desire to exact revenge because the moment Tang Bo tried to leave through their estate’s gates, he was immediately surrounded by several elders and family members.
They held their daggers and poisoned weapons towards him—a threat.
“Elder Tang Bo, please don’t force our hand.”
But he did. And Tang Bo lost, weakened still as he was by his long healing slumber. They slowly pushed him back into the depths of the Tang Family Estate, directing him to the house he had built by the local carpenters a few months prior to his ‘death’.
They threw talisman after talisman, pushing Tang Bo further and further away from any exit and escape, weakening him with each one. They trapped him in immortal binding cables and qi-draining chains, shutting him in the darkness of the house.
He breathed raggedly in silence. There was no one else in the house with him other than the ghosts and phantoms of what could have been—what should have been.
For years, he bided his time. Waiting for the day, he could gather enough strength to break free.
But with each decade that passed, weariness and his heavy heart took a toll on him. His righteous anger faded into melancholy and guilt. Regret became a constant in his life.
If only he had been there during the final battle with Cheon Ma by Chung Myung’s side.
If only he hadn’t taken so long to wake up.
If only he was a weaker man and fate wasn’t the cruel mistress that cursed him with immortality and the inability to die—
If only—
Tang Bo takes a shuddering breath, inhaling the plum blossom scent from the boy who had fallen limp in his arms, his hands loosely gripping onto Tang Bo’s robes. He absently feels a wet patch forming on the shoulder where Chung Myung’s head rests.
Tang Bo’s perfervid brain races with an onslaught of thoughts about a future that he never thought would ever come to fruition. Now, it seemed as if the world had graced him with a chance to make it all come true.
He'll leave the cultivation world with this reincarnation of his Hyung-nim. No matter what it takes. Even if he has to do it by force, he’ll drag this Chung Myung away kicking and screaming if he has to.
And if that doesn’t work—Tang Bo discretely glances at the chains that bound him, slightly loosened after decades of attempts to pull them apart and break them—the Tang Family had so kindly graced him with all the tools and bindings and talismans he could need at his disposal.
People could try looking for this incarnation of his Chung Myung, but who would ever suspect that he would be here?
Nobody visits the forgotten Tang Elder’s home.
Everyone is warned to stay clear of the blackened, cursed house inside Tang Estate. There was nothing here but poison and a promise of death should they even bother knocking on his front door.
And if a thick, permanent poisonous fog grows to surround the house and make it completely impossible to come near? There was nothing outsiders could do.
This time, Tang Bo won't let anything ever pull them apart.