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The night air was bitter and cold when Mo Xuanyu woke up for the first time post-ritual. He was weightless, almost unmoored but for one tether. Yells and screams filled the air, accusations of murder flying left and right, all directed at one person. Him. Except… not? The angry mob was certainly sneering his name, but their hateful glares weren’t aimed at him. No. Instead they landed on someone but a few feet in front of him. The one he was tethered to.
They dragged Not-Mo Xuanyu to Mo Manor’s main courtyard, leaving a trail in the gravel where his feet remained stubbornly still. Whoever this was, they looked almost bored. Not only that, but they looked familiar too. White and red paints that Mo Xuanyu was so intimately familiar with were smeared across their skin, a smudged mess akin to what he’d been wearing before he died. Better yet, it was the paint he’d worn when he died. The person he was tethered to was none other than himself — or Wei Wuxian in his body.
As he made that revelation, he saw sudden recognition in those dark brown eyes — almost red in a way his own had never been — as if they were seeing something previously hidden from them. Mo Xuanyu glanced around, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, so what…?
“It’s you! Mo Xuanyu—” Wei Wuxian looked like he had more to say, but he was cut off by a harsh whack to the head, followed by a scolding over spouting nonsense. Truly, the people of Mo Village never changed.
The spectre that shouldn’t have existed crept closer to the body he was tied to. Really, the more that he thought about it, his presence there made absolutely no sense. Had the instructions for the ritual not said in plain words that his soul would no longer exist? How could he be there, even as a spirit without a body, if he was supposed to be erased from existence entirely?
He followed in a daze as the group stopped in front of an aged corpse. Mo Ziyuan, if the mob was to be believed, only further proven by the wailing of his aunt. In Mo Xuanyu’s opinion, the thing didn’t look like his cousin at all. It was too old, in multiple senses of the word. Still, he supposed he’d have to thank the Yiling Laozu for how quickly he’d taken to fulfilling his final request. For a moment there he’d really thought Nie Huaisang’s back up plan would be necessary…
…
It was a little suspicious though, that his cousin was missing an arm.
He spotted the shining glint of a hidden blade from the corner of his eye, and only too late did he realise that his aunt was lunging at him— at Wei Wuxian. There wasn’t enough time to yell in warning, she’d get there before he could, the only thing he could think of was to push. His hands flew into his body’s back, shoving it out of the way, and suddenly he was in freefall. Mo Manor had disappeared from around him, replaced with a blur of colours that was almost enough to make him pass out again.
When he came back to himself, he felt heavier, and his back smarted as if he’d been hit with a chair. Madam Mo’s shrill yelling sounded so much clearer, so much closer. He looked down at the ground. His hands were no longer in a state of being both there and not, in that way only spectres’ hands could be, but instead they were solid. Flesh and bone. Somehow, some way, he knew he’d taken back control of his body.
“Huh. Nice save.” a voice rang out from behind him. It wasn’t any he was familiar with, but he knew deep in his bones that it must’ve been Wei Wuxian. “You know, as much as I’d love to leave this to you and go back to my slumber, I have this feeling that things will be getting out of your depths sooner rather than later. And you don’t want to be there for that, do you?”
It took all of Mo Xuanyu’s willpower to not visibly respond. He gave a subtle nod of the head, something that could be mistaken as a slight twitch, but the man he’d brought back understood all the same.
“Great! I mean, we’ll have to experiment with this later, but for now… how did you do it? You just—” the next thing Mo Xuanyu knew he was falling back out of his body, hitting the ground again with a graceless thud.
He’d read theories about body-sharing before, but seeing it in action — being one of the people involved — was something on a whole new level. Above all else, he just really hoped it wouldn’t interfere with the plan. But it couldn’t be that hard to hide a secret, or ten, from one man… could it?