Chapter Text
The Burial Mounds are burning.
That’s all he knows. All he can sense as sound hollows out, sight blurs. He still feels the heat of it, the fire, still detects the crackle that singes the hair on the back of his neck. Or maybe that’s Zidian? He recalls, distantly, having seen Jiang Cheng outside among the cultivators who came to… kill him. Arrest him? It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.
He’s dying.
No, he’s already dead.
They murdered him with the rest of the Wens. The people he’d sworn to protect, their bodies discarded like week-old trash into the blood pool. His friends.
His family.
Wen Qing, Wen Ning, Granny Wen, everyone…
All gone.
No, not all. A-Yuan is alive. A-Yuan is safe, tucked away where no one should be able to find him until the chaos dies down. Until the fires burn low. Then…
Oh, gods, then.
A-Yuan will be all alone. A child with no one to look after him – to wander cold, unforgiving streets fighting stray dogs for scraps.
It’s almost enough to bring Wei Wuxian back to life.
Almost.
My little radish is tough. He’s smart, resourceful. He’s grown up in a war, after all. He’s lived in the Burial Mounds. He’ll… he’ll be alright. Won’t he?
Won’t he…?
He won’t, a darker voice tells him. Cruelly.
Wei Wuxian sobs in anguish as the Yin Tiger Tally struggles against his forceful suppression. Resentment warring with resentment, his emaciated body already so saturated with it that there is no telling the difference between his living self and this inanimate thing he created. He can no longer tell where it ends and he begins.
If he’s being honest with himself, it’s been that way for a long time.
Only now has it reached the point of no return.
I’m sorry, A-Yuan. Xian-Gege can’t stay with you. Xian-Gege must leave, or no one will be safe. Not you, not Jiang Cheng, not Shijie’s child, not…
No. He doesn’t even dare think his name.
I’m sorry, Wen Qing. Wen Ning. I couldn’t protect them. I failed you. I failed all of you.
It’s all he seems to know how to do, really. Fail. If he wasn’t in so much pain, he would probably laugh at the absurdity of it. Wei Wuxian, the Jiang clan’s best and brightest, senior disciple, one of the twin prides of Yunmeng, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Supreme Evil Lord, the great Yiling laozu…
Dead by his own fucking artifact.
What a joke.
He gasps, a hollow, broken sound lost in the swirling miasma of resentful energy. The world narrows to shades of gray and crimson, his vision swimming with memories of what was and what could never be. Every breath feels like swallowing glass, every heartbeat a reminder of everything he’s about to lose… and everything he’s already lost.
“…Wei Wuxian!”
He doesn’t hear the call over the growls of the fierce corpses. Doesn’t feel the tearing of his limbs beyond the pull and release, the unholy rhythm of it. Barely noticing the desecration of his own body.
He’s too deep into a different kind of agony to notice.
“He’s destroying the Yin Tiger Tally! Stop him!”
Wei Wuxian gives a bloody grin. Or, well… he thinks he does. He can’t feel his face.
This, at least, he has not failed to do. Taking this infernal thing out of the world before he goes with it…
It makes the sacrifice of his soul worth the effort.
Just a bit longer…
“Wei Wuxian!”
A crack of purple lightning surges, stirring the corpses into an even more ferocious frenzy.
No.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Not yet! he wants to scream, but there’s nothing left now to connect him to that gory lump of flesh he once inhabited.
He loses control.
The Yin Tiger Tally senses him slipping, frighteningly sentient, and lashes out, its power spiraling wildly as if to anchor itself to whatever scraps of him remain. The world fractures, sounds distorting into a cacophony of wailing spirits. He fights to hold on, desperate to see this through, but his creation is relentless, hungry, pulling him deeper into the void.
It latches onto him as his soul plunges into nothingness.
~
Silence.
Not the peaceful kind. This one hums. It crawls under the skin that no longer exists, a vibration deep in the marrow of a soul that should have scattered.
It’s because I failed. Again.
I couldn’t destroy the second half of the Yin Tiger Tally. I died before I could manage it.
“You mean this?”
A voice, smooth as lacquer, breaks the suffocating silence.
Wei Wuxian breathes. Or he attempts to. He has no body, no lungs for inhaling and exhaling, no mouth for speaking. He senses more than sees his surroundings. Feels more than hears the joss paper spiraling through the air, imagines the liminal field of quiet gray light where resentful energy corrodes into an abyss, nothing left to replace it.
His talismans drift on a nonexistent wind, every single one he ever wrote and burned away.
Each represents a soul he tried to help. A demon he defeated. A world he once hoped to protect.
The god – for that’s what the voice must belong to, right? – gathers Wei Wuxian’s talismans like evidence, plucking them from the air with light fingers. From their other hand swings the last battered remnant of the Yin Tiger Tally, and he realizes the god was waiting for him to notice it.
The god snatches it back up into their palm and says, “You didn’t fail. The Yin Tiger Tally no longer exists in the mortal realm.”
If Wei Wuxian still had his body, he would have sagged in relief.
“All is not well, however,” that smooth voice goes on to say such terrible things in such an unbothered way, “It did not go as you planned, as I’m sure you’ve already surmised. When you forced The Yin Tiger Tally to collapse, it didn’t shatter. It returned, seeking its source, and drew the soul of its creator into itself.”
The god pauses briefly, staring down at the fistful of cleverly devised talismans in their hand.
“But the resentment you mastered was too much for any one vessel to contain, so it imploded. Now, there is no separation between you and it. The Tally is gone from the mortal realm because that which remains of it – you, to be exact – is also gone.”
Wei Wuxian’s thoughts go blank. Which is odd. His thoughts never go blank; his words never stall. Granted, he’s also never been dead before, and he’s never talked to a god face to… soul…
So he supposes there’s a first time for everything.
But… does that mean…
The Yin Tiger Tally is inside of him?
“No. If anything, you are inside of it. Though that is also a poor description for what's become of you.” The god’s smile doesn’t reach their eyes. “You made yourself – your soul – a bridge between life and death. The Yin Tiger Tally, in its final moments, merely followed its master’s design.”
So, that’s it. I tried to end it, and instead I became it.
The god inclines their head. “A fitting symmetry.”
Then… what happens next?
“Just as your artifact was a conduit for resentful energy, so, too, will your soul be.”
A conduit? In what manner? There is no physical object to use as a channel. I no longer have a body. How…?
“Leave it to desperate mortals to find a way. It is not my tendency to ruminate on such things. If there is no vessel for the amplifier of resentment to inhabit, one will be supplied.”
You mean… I could become…
An artifact? Like the Yin Tiger Tally? How would that work exactly? Would he still be sentient? Is that…?
Oh, gods. Is that why the Tally always felt so… aware? So alive?
Is he to meet the same fate?
“Not necessarily. There are other methods. I believe a certain sacrificial ritual has resurfaced after many centuries left buried, all thanks to the rather morbid curiosity of the Yiling Patriarch.” The god raises a perfectly groomed eyebrow at him. “It would procure similar results. But there are very few in the mortal realm at present that could equal your ingenuity, and as such the Yin Tiger Tally artifact will not be so easily replicated.
“The surest method, then, would be to offer up their own bodies as vessels instead.”
Wei Wuxian winces – in spirit. He really should have destroyed his notes before dying. It’s not like he created the damn ritual, but… he had done extensive research on it, compiling pages and pages of detailed journalistic analysis.
Just for fun.
What a fool you were, Wei Wuxian.
The god continues to gather his talismans. There are thousands of them floating through the air. Each one becomes a droplet of light in the god’s hand that then floats and settles on the ground near Wei Wuxian’s… feet, if they can still be called as such.
What is this place, then? It’s not the… end.
“It should have been,” the god acknowledges quietly. “But Heaven saw what you did.”
Wei Wuxian subconsciously attempts to flinch away. Heaven.
“You protected those no one else would. You fed the hungry, sheltered the hunted. You pitied even the damned, all while you yourself were little better off. Heaven recognizes this. But you also raised the dead. You stepped beyond mortal bounds. You created an abomination that should never have existed and brought yourself to this state.”
The god tilts their head as they study him closely.
“The balance has been broken, and we do not ignore imbalance.”
He feels it before he understands it – a soundless pulsation, deep and resonant, moving through what’s left of him with increasing intensity. The remains of the drifting talismans around them shiver, their edges curling as if touched by unseen flame. They fall like stars and land in the formation of an array the god, he realizes, had been assembling from the beginning.
“What is this?” Wei Wuxian asks, and he looks down in surprise. His soul has found its shape, looking much like his body, although somewhat transparent and… well, entirely naked. He can’t find it in himself to feel embarrassed about that, though. Not in this situation.
“An array to keep your soul from scattering,” the god answers. “It wasn’t easy, given the state of you. Your death was… particularly unpleasant.”
Yes – he’s aware.
“But I’ve managed to piece you back together. Enough to keep you here, at least.”
The array hums beneath him, its light weaving patterns that pulse in time with his own existence.
A pretty prison, he thinks dismally. Of course he would end up with the kind of afterlife that would prevent him from moving outside of a five-step radius. Had the events of his mortal life ever led him to believe he could hope for anything different?
Anything better?
Happier?
He can almost hear Jiang Cheng scoff. Be realistic, Wei Wuxian.
“Indeed,” the god says. “You will not rest. The Yin Tiger Tally has been unmade, but the power that bound it to you remains. Heaven has found a use for that bond. It will be both your salvation and your penance.”
Wei Wuxian stares at them. “I’m almost afraid to ask…”
“Mortals will cry out for vengeance,” the god says, tone patient, almost instructional. “They will pour their blood into the earth, begging the darkness to hear them. And it will. Through you.”
He now thoroughly resents this strange imitation of his body because, unlike before, he can feel it, like a phantom limb haunting him with its absence. The light of the array threads through his legs, his chest, his throat.
It hurts.
“Each time hatred calls your name, you will answer. You will rise where resentment gathers thickest. You will wear the faces of the despairing and deliver their wrath. The debts of their abusers will be paid in your hands, their grievances absolved in your blood.”
Panic grips him, and his lungs that aren’t really lungs burn from the tension, from the lack of life-giving breath. His pulse – or what passes for one – stutters.
“That’s not salvation,” he rasps. “You’re subjecting me to eternal torment. Torment that doesn’t even belong to me.”
The god sighs. He holds up the Yin Tiger Tally and Wei Wuxian watches with wide, disbelieving eyes as it dissolves into nothingness. As though it never existed.
“It does now.”
Wei Wuxian shudders. “Please…” he begs. Begs. “Just let my soul scatter. I don’t need to reenter the cycle of reincarnation. I don’t need resurrection or reanimation or anything of the sort. I don’t care. Just let me go. Break the array. Let me meet the oblivion I sought when I first set out to destroy the damn thing. Please. I’ll do anything.
“Anything but this.”
“This is balance,” the god replies calmly.
He laughs, hollow, shaking. “And when I’ve answered enough cries? When the balance is restored?”
The god’s smile is soft, patient, which somehow makes it all worse. “Then there will be no more vengeance in the world. No more resentment left to call for you.”
The array flares brighter, as if sensing Wei Wuxian’s distress. Its edges sear gold. The talismans that formed it have all crumbled to ash, leaving only light and more light.
Light so bright it’s painful to look at it directly.
“Be grateful, Wei Wuxian. You will continue to serve a purpose. Few souls outside the reincarnation cycle are granted such grace.”
Grace.
That word hits harder than any strike from Zidian.
He wants to fight, to argue, to dispel this choking panic in his chest somehow, but his voice is fading again. The humming in the air deepens to a vibration in his nonexistent bones. The light wraps around him, a coil of fire that isn’t flame.
“Heaven does not forget kindness,” the god murmurs, stepping back as the array ignites. “But it never forgives disobedience.”
The gray world splits.
Wei Wuxian screams gutturally as the light becomes chains of burning gold that bite into his wrists and ankles, rooting him to something far away. Somewhere, he hears the sound of a knife slicing into flesh, the slick shuffle of blood on stone, the words of a desperate prayer spoken through gritted teeth.
The god’s voice fades with the fog:
“Rise, Yiling Patriarch.”
And Wei Wuxian does.
He wakes, choking on borrowed breath, in someone else’s broken body, surrounded by the stench of blood and incense and a world that’s already made up its mind that suffering, whether in life or death, is all he deserves.