Archive of Our Own ^beta

Wei Wuxian takes the apartment without a viewing. In hindsight, that's where all the problems begin.

There hadn't been a lot of choice in apartments – there's both a university and a college nearby, and the academic term started recently so the housing market has mostly been snapped up by students. The apartment is small and in an unfavourable area (or so it's implied from the way the estate agent couches her words) but it seems serviceable and there is only one other person renting it.

Wei Wuxian smiles a lot, nods a lot, signs a lot of things. There's a number of things he doesn't have that are apparently essential for the house renting process – ID, for one – but he bluffs his way through using little spiritual tricks and distractions. A moment of hypnosis here, a slight tap of qi there, and he leaves successfully with house keys in his hand and a dazed and confused estate agent behind him.

Things have changed a lot since he was a mere mortal. Back then, even if he didn't have a room to sleep in, he could rely on some packed dirt and a layer of grass. And in the Heavens, if he got a bit too drunk on wine and passed out in someone's courtyard somewhere before he could get home, all the grounds are made of clouds, perfectly fluffy and soft.

Here though, all the roads are paved over with stone, flat and way too hard to sleep on. He'd tried for the first few days, because human society is difficult to figure out and he had originally hoped that he could get everything sorted quickly enough not to need lodgings before caving, but all he can say is: it's a good thing he doesn't actually need sleep anymore.

*

"Nice to meet you," says Wei Wuxian when he meets the other flatmate. He's tall and standing in the middle of their living room and frowning. The frowning is justified, Wei Wuxian discovers quickly.

"There is only one bed," says the other man, instead of introducing himself.

Wei Wuxian checks the little info pack stapled together, flicks through the pages until he gets to the right details. "I thought there were two rooms."

"There are," says presumably-new-flatmate. He gestures to the open door on the left. "But there is only one bed."

Wei Wuxian peers around the expanse of his shoulders to take a look. And so there is. There is one room, with a queen-sized bed, and another room, with a desk and a chair and three bookshelves. He tries to think back on his conversation with the estate agent – and hm, yes, he can see how it might have been useful to get all of the information out of her before he started messing with her memory, because she really wasn't very coherent by the end. He's suddenly not so sure that she had actually mentioned that there would be two beds.

He flicks a glance at the new flatmate. He seems... well, calm. Annoyed, certainly, but he's not throwing a fit about it.

"I didn't realise that was something I had to specify," he says, and Wei Wuxian can almost see the little note he's making in his head 'for future reference'.

"Ah, a first-time renter? You have to be specific with estate agents about what you're looking for." Wei Wuxian nods, wisely, sagely, like the all-knowing thousand-year-old entity he is. He does not mention that he also did not know it was something he had to clarify, but his new flatmate looks only a bit older than Wei Wuxian was when he ascended. He probably just doesn't have enough life experience yet, whereas Wei Wuxian's knowledge of the modern world is patchy due to only sporadically paying attention to what's happening down here. "Are you a student? It's pretty late to be looking for a place, I guess you didn't have that many options."

"More or less."

"We can share," says Wei Wuxian confidently. "I don't snore or move much in my sleep."

"I can take the... sofa," says new flatmate. They both swivel their heads to look at the sofa, which is brown but was probably originally beige, or maybe grey, and sags so much that the middle touches the ground.

"We can share," repeats Wei Wuxian. Back when he was a human, he vaguely remembers sharing sleeping space with other people all the time. Only rich people had their own quarters, and it's only since he became a spoiled little god last millennium that he got a whole palace to himself. He keeps glancing at new-flatmate though. Maybe he's rich and not used to sharing.

Except he nods. "Acceptable."

"Great, I'll take the right side. I'm Wei – Ying." The hesitation is minute, when he remembers that he should probably not introduce himself with his godly name. He blinks. Oh, that feels odd. No one has called him Wei Ying in so very long.

"Lan. Lan Zhan."

*

The wardrobe is a bit of a reminder that Wei Wuxian suddenly has all these boring little life admin things he has to sort out now he's on earth again. It's not like he had time to bring all his robes with him from the Heavens when he got sent down to earth, so he's going to need clothes. (Cast out is such an ugly term for it. It's not like he can't ever go back, it's just, you know, he's got some stuff he has to do before then.)

Besides, even a passing moment spent on earth has informed him that even the most fashionable fire-trimmed robes in the Heavens would be out of place here. His new flatmate, for example, is wearing what seems like perfectly normal human attire – white trousers that match his shoes that match his shirt that match his suit jacket that match his tie that match his scarf that match his hat.

"Oh, I just left my things – at a friends'," says Wei Wuxian when it becomes obvious that he has no belongings with him.

Lan Zhan nods. "I will leave you half the space."

He pulls out a small bag and starts taking items out, folding clothes neatly into one of the cubbyhole space. Oh, that's interesting, Wei Wuxian didn't think that qiankun bags were still popular amongst mortals.

*

As much as Wei Wuxian would prefer the second room to be a bedroom, he has to admit it's handy for when Lan Zhan asks if he minds that he does some work in there, and closes the door firmly behind him. It means that Wei Wuxian can spread his own documents out over the low coffee table (actually a perfect height for a desk given the sunken sofa) and have advance warning of Lan Zhan heading out so he can hide his own work.

The case he's been sent down to investigate is a tricky one. Some sort of disturbance, disrupting the natural cycle of things. The report had been clearly written, but the sequence of events are confused, which just means that the reporter has no idea what's actually going on.

There have been a number of strange happenings with regard to the dead and their souls, or possibly the living and their souls, and although it's not technically Wei Wuxian's purview, it kind of looks a bit bad for him because this is supposed to be his patch of land that he looks after. Or, well, it used to be before he'd ascended.

It had been a hill then, unnaturally formed around and over the mass graves of a time considered in the distant past even when he had been mortal. He's read the report enough times to know it by memory now, but having a roof over his head makes it easier to spread the pages out without worrying that he's going to get rained on or a page gets blown away or a pigeon craps on it. It's also much easier to draw out some basic talismans with a table. The bureaucracy in the Heavens rivals no other realm so at least his handwriting is still up to scratch, but he's definitely got to be careful about relying on his Heavenly powers here.

The best thing about modern clothing is that he can get things with pockets everywhere, so he stacks himself up with talismans and then goes out to explore.

The resentful energy surrounding Yiling had made it barely habitable in Wei Wuxian's day, but it looks entirely different now as he strolls around. There are houses, and shops, and schools. There are cars in the street and kids in the roads and no one looks like there's the aura of ten thousand murdered people attempting to crush their souls. Tucked out of the way, there's a small temple shaded by an uneven row of trees that seems familiar to him somehow, although Wei Wuxian can say with certainty that he's never seen it before.

Even when Wei Wuxian concentrates, he can't feel the residual resentful energy that the very earth itself had seeped back then. He beams, suddenly. So his legacy lives on then. Unknown to the humans here now, perhaps, but their very existence here speaks to his success.

But if he can't sense lingering malevolent energy, that means that whatever is happening here will require more investigation. He heads into the temple. If anything will have knowledge of the esoteric or spiritual history of the area, it'll be this place.

There's a small wooden sign just inside the entrance that informs him it's a shrine to the Yiling Patriarch. The courtyard is small and bare, decorated with rows of wooden carved charms lining the roofs on all four sides. Most of them are old enough that rain and wind have faded the carvings, with only a few that look newer, clearly replacements once the originals broke. There's a covered well in the middle, with a damp bucket that implies that it is still in use.

The only doors are on the far side of the courtyard – one in the middle that leads into the shrine room, and two either side that look more like they're storage areas rather than more rooms in the temple. One of the doors is leaning off its hinge, currently tied into place with rope.

Wei Wuxian crosses the courtyard with two steps into the interior area and when he steps inside the main building, it's small enough that even the entrance of a single person is noticeable.

"Good afternoon," a young woman behind a table in the corner bows slightly to him. He bows back. "Are you looking for someone?"

"Not in particular. I just came to pay my respects."

"Hmm. We don't get many outside visitors." She comes out to pull back the screen partitioning the entrance hall from the shrine itself. "We don't tend to keep the shrine on display since it's usually just locals, but here you are."

The shrine is not grandiose, carved out of gnarled wood, but it's clean and well-kept and there's incense smoking gently, and oranges on the plate in front of it. Full, fat oranges too, not those piddly satsuma things. Wei Wuxian feels a knot form in his chest as he reads his own name at the bottom. It has been so long but there is someone here still, tending to his little shrine that gives him his Heavenly powers. It feels odd to bow to his own shrine, but odder still to not do anything at all now that he's said he's here to pay his respects. He lights some incense, and places it into the holder. Maybe it will help towards getting him back into the Heavens.

"Thanks. And sorry, I didn't realise I'd be intruding."

"You're not. It's just that tourists don't tend to bother with us," she says. She doesn't seem to be waiting for him to be done, per say, but given he's the only person here, she probably is.

Wei Wuxian considers things for a moment. Seeing a shrine to himself was a – pleasant – surprise, but he was rather hoping for a priest or a practitioner or someone around who might know about the spiritual happenings. He asks anyway. "I thought I felt something strange in the energy around here a few days ago. Did anything happen?"

The woman looks at him. Her face is neutral – too neutral. "You can sense qi? Not many people can, these days."

"I'm a cultivator," says Wei Wuxian. It's the simplest explanation. And besides, he might be out of practice but he was one, once.

She nods, slowly. "Something unusual has happened a number of times recently," she says. "I sensed it too." Wei Wuxian notes that she didn't actually answer his question.

He's trying to think through what he wants to get from this conversation and what line of questioning he should go through, when the curtain over the door shifts again, and another person steps through.

"Oh – Lan Zhan!" Wei Ying raises half a hand awkwardly. "What are you doing here?"

He has to stoop to get under the low door, and straightens up. It takes a moment for Lan Zhan to focus on him; probably his eyes adjusting to the sudden dimness. "Wei Ying," he says even, eyes glancing slowly but carefully around and taking everything in: the small entrance hall, Wei Wuxian, the single temple attendant, the shrine, back to Wei Wuxian. "I am here to pay my respects."

Maybe it's because Wei Wuxian has just used the exact same lie, but the temple attendant's left eyebrow doesn't look convinced.

"Are you also a cultivator?" she asks, cutting to the chase.

Lan Zhan looks at her, and then at Wei Wuxian. His eyebrows do not raise, but Wei Wuxian still somehow feels that was the intended effect of the look. "No, I am a clerk."

That's... unexpected. "Really?" asks Wei Wuxian.

Lan Zhan ignores him. "I merely felt the unnatural disturbances in qi and thought I would see if there was any issue with the local shrine."

"There's nothing wrong with the shrine!" snaps Wei Wuxian, defensive of his little temple all of a sudden.

"There's nothing wrong with the shrine," repeats the temple attendant but more calmly. Lan Zhan looks at the two of them some more. Well, now it definitely looks like there's some sort of conspiracy going on here.

"Are you even a temple attendant?" asks Wei Wuxian, narrowing his eyes.

"Not usually," she says, unfazed. "I'm a doctor actually. Wen Qing, nice to meet you. My brother usually attends to the shrine and he's unwell right now. Our family have looked after this place for many years, so I'm here for now."

Lan Zhan has stepped closer to the shrine. It's nothing more than blind panic, but Wei Wuxian feels the urge to stop him, make sure he doesn't read the plaque or the information display pinned to the nearby wall. It feels a little bit like letting someone in to see more of him than he had expected, which is a silly way to feel seeing as how Lan Zhan doesn't even know that Wei Wuxian is Wei Wuxian.

"There is nothing wrong with the shrine," agrees Lan Zhan. "Has anything else of note happened recently, Qing-xiaojie?"

Wei Wuxian bites his lip against telling him that's what he'd just been trying to get out of her before Lan Zhan interrupted them both.

"Yiling has always been a hotbed of unusual activity," she says, stepping around her desk to rifle through the drawers. When she finally finds what she's looking for, it's a tourism booklet titled Welcome to Yiling! where colourful cartoon characters make jazz hands at them.

She flicks through the usual local maps and food and restaurants recommendations in a tourist brochure, and shows them a section on The History of Yiling. "Since the time the area was used as a mass grave, there have been numerous reports, both historically verified and urban legends, of undead activity. You can see most of them here. I only have one of these left though, sorry."

"We can share," says Wei Wuxian, absently already skimming through it. "We're housemates."

Wen Qing continues: "Our unique history means that we've always had plenty of cultivators coming in and out for periods at a time to nighthunt or to help with cleansing, but no major sect ever claimed it as their territory."

That's the first real clue that Wei Wuxian has had. He can see how a rotating number of cultivators in and out with no centralised control could create an environment where unusual spiritual happenings occur. "Are there any cultivator groups around at the moment? Apart from me, of course."

"Several independent cultivators that I know of. And – the main branch of my family practises as well." Wen Qing's face looks like she's just bitten into a particularly sour lemon. No love lost there then. She scribbles down some names for him. "If you have any other questions, feel free to come back and ask."

It's not a dismissal as such; it's too polite to be, but it certainly pushes the both of them to leave.

"Who knew you were also qi sensitive," says Wei Wuxian as they bow to Wen Qing and leave the temple. It already feels like leaving a little bit of him behind. The roads are busy in the early evening, teeming with cars and cyclises and pedestrians, a wall of sound that hits him as he steps over the temple threshold. So suddenly, in fact, that Wei Wuxian takes a moment to check. Ah, so there is a barrier around the temple; it must also be filtering out some of the sound.

"Mn," says Lan Zhan, which is annoyingly uninformative. Alright, so Wei Wuxian is also keeping a hundred and one secrets close to his chest, but Lan Zhan doesn't have to be so obvious about it.

Wei Wuxian waves the piece of paper from Wen Qing at him. "Do you want to come check out these people with me? I know you were just passing by, but we can do it around your classes. Oh, wait, and you're a clerk? Studying and working at the same time, that's probably already a lot."

"I would like to," says Lan Zhan. "I also come from – a cultivation family."

*

"Do you think you can find them on here?" asks Lan Zhan. He's referring to the incredibly swanky tablet in his hand. Aha, Wei Wuxian was right earlier, he must be some rich kid.

"I'm sure I can manage it. I'm not that much older than you." Which is a lie, of course, but his body looks like it's in its twenties. Wei Wuxian doesn't have a lot of exposure to tablets, but this one seems particularly high tech; it seems to almost anticipate what he wants to do next. So the fact that it takes him longer than he would like to admit to get it open and figure out how to make it write characters using his finger strokes rather than typing sort of evens it out. Luckily Lan Zhan is too busy puttering around their kitchenette to notice either his tech struggles or the occasional moment Wei Wuxian is distracted watching his shoulders as he chops things.

Several of the people they're looking for have social media profiles, which is useful. There's an independent cultivation pair who specialise in wandering spirits who seem to live largely off the grid whose website just has updates on where they are so people can ask for help – their latest post indicates that they'd left Yiling over a fortnight ago.

There's Wen Qing's family. There's a lot online on them, some sort of old traditional cultivation family that has made its fortune commercialising the art, and Wei Wuxian opens up some tabs on several prominent members for later reading before he gets too lost down this hole. And then there's Xue Yang, a rogue cultivator whose Weibo says he can be 'the demon you don't want to exorcise'. Wei Wuxian can't tell if it's ironic or not.

"Hmm okay, I think that – Lan Zhan!"

Wei Wuxian yelps, as flames leap a metre into the air. Lan Zhan looks like he's trying to physically shove the flames back down using his hands. Oh fuck! He can't let this little human die on his first night living away from home. Wei Wuxian reaches out before he thinks it through, grabs a fistful of the nearest cloud, pulls it to him and throws it at the fire as it turns from Heavenly cloud into mortal water when it passes into the plane. The fire sizzles out, smoke and the kiss of evaporating water filling the kitchen instead. The smoke alarm attempts to go off, and Wei Wuxian stabs a fingerful of spiritual power at it before it really gets going. It dies with a miserable little eee-ep.

Belatedly, he turns on the kitchen tap.

"...Thank you," says Lan Zhan eventually, even though his entire right side is soaked in water.

"No problem," says Wei Wuxian, peering at what is probably an unsalvageable pan. "Don't worry, this happens to everyone when they first have to cook for themselves! We're okay, nothing's burning down. Wow, I can't believe you managed that amount of fire with an electric stove."

"Oh?" asks Lan Zhan. Poor guy, he's probably suffering from shock right now. He empties the contents of the pan onto the bowls he has set out and – huh, the stir-fried noodles he made actually look pretty edible. The pan is definitely dead though.

"Damn, that's so lucky," says Wei Wuxian, finally turning off the tap. Lan Zhan probably didn't notice him violating several Heavenly edicts there.

"I'll replace the pan," says Lan Zhan, and pushes one of the bowls towards Wei Wuxian.

*

Lan Zhan is already in bed, neatly arranged in a straight line on his back on the left side of the bed in a white silk nightdress, by the time Wei Wuxian finishes reading up on the different cultivator groups in the area. That's fortunate, because it means he doesn't have to actually go through the motions of pretending to go to sleep. He settles in on the bed to meditate a few hours away before getting up again.

It's the hour before dawn when he feels the spiritual disturbance. Clawing his way out of a deep meditation is almost as jarring as being woken from a deep sleep. He opens his eyes after settling his qi circulation and slides off the bed – and screams when he comes face to chest with Lan Zhan standing at the foot of the bed.

Wei Wuxian inhales the rest of his scream quickly, choking it down.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," says Lan Zhan.

"I –" Wei Ying is about to correct him but no, actually that's a better cover story. "It's fine. I was just going to – wow, you're up early." Wei Wuxian is a master of deflection. He has had so much practise.

"I'm often up early. I was going to go for a run," says Lan Zhan as he finishes buttoning up his crisp shirt over his skinny jeans. Both an impeccable white, even in the darkness of the room. It doesn't look very comfortable for running in (though it does highlight his great ass), but what does Wei Ying know about fashion for mortals? It's not really that easy running in five layers of robes either and he does that on a regular basis.

"Have fun," says Wei Wuxian dubiously, and pretends to go to the bathroom instead.

He waits for long enough that Lan Zhan has left the apartment before he shucks his own clothes on and makes a run for the direction he felt the spiritual disturbance. He's not sure what it was – all he can feel is the uneasy aura lingering in the air, making him feel lopsided and like the world is off-balance.

He ends up in a part of the town he doesn't know anything about. It's at the top of the hill, near where there used to be a cave that he sought shelter in a few times. The hill is high and uneven and even Wei Wuxian realises that it would have taken major landscaping for regular buildings to be viable up here. The only buildings around are single-storey and built on an odd angle, several abandoned and run down. He's breathing heavily after climbing the hill. It sure takes a lot of fucking effort to be mortal.

It's quiet here, as quiet as Wei Wuxian would expect anywhere to be just before dawn.

At least, it is until a fierce corpse lurches out of one of the abandoned buildings. Wei Wuxian only notices when it shuffles forward slowly, dragging their feet as they struggle to relearn fine motor ability. It groans upon seeing him, and changes direction so that they're coming straight for him.

Perfect, this is exactly the sort of thing that he was hoping to see. He draws his sword – which he's kept hidden so far because mortals are weird about people carrying swords around, even cultivators – from the hidden miniature sheath down his spine.

Suibian slides out and grows to full size with a nudge from Wei Wuxian's spiritual power and he uses the momentum for his first stab. The fierce corpse raises its head and screams at him, which is – unexpected. Wei Wuxian's body takes him through the motions of chopping it down; ankle tendons, foot to the back of the knee, stab through the ribs, spiritual power to slice across the neck to severe the head. It barely takes ten seconds.

And when it's over, Wei Wuxian stares down at the felled body and regrets it immediately.

He shouldn't have done that. There was something unusual about the fierce corpse, and he should have tried to discover what it was exactly. Fierce corpses aren't sentient, not really. They're reactive, as in they'll fight back if they're attacked, but this one realised that it was going to be attacked by Wei Wuxian and reacted before he had made contact. That's not right.

He intones a quick prayer over the body to guide its soul onwards, and heads towards the building it came from. Except just before he can duck into the darkness that lies beyond the open door, something extraordinarily fast barrels out at him.

Wei Wuxian dodges just in time, has only long enough to see that it's another body. It's moving so quickly that by the time Wei Wuxian manages to pivot his ankle, push off the ground and take chase, he can no longer even see where it is. He's only managing to stay in the chase because it's leaving a trail of resentful energy behind like a lingering scent of perfume.

It's difficult chasing across the rooftops of a town he doesn't know very well, and Wei Wuxian smacks himself in the forehead when he remembers he doesn't have to do it this way anymore. He reaches his hand up into the Heavenly plane, not enough for him to pass the border between the worlds, but enough that he scrapes a fistful of clouds out of the bottom of the ground and yanks it down to himself, just enough for him to jump on and fly ahead, leaving behind the labyrinth of sloped roofs.

He's catching up. The fierce corpse, if it can be called that, doesn't seem to want to leave the top of the hill for some reason, which means that it's veering back around. Wei Wuxian draws his sword, preparing to incapacitate this time.

Except he never gets the opportunity to. The slight zing and smell of metal in the air alerts him to something flying towards him in the dark and he swerves to the side for long enough to hear something clatter to the roof tiles below him. Small, and several of them. Needles? Whatever they were, it takes him long enough that he doesn't have the time to counter the talisman sent his way. The most he can do is land on a roof before it throws him out of the air.

He throws Suibian out in the direction the talisman came from, but nothing connects with his blade.

The fierce corpse is gone, vanished into the shadows.

Wei Wuxian swears. Something, or someone, had intervened for just long enough to distract him away from the fierce corpse. He tries following the last direction it had seen it go in, but the trail of resentful energy never picks back up again.

He plucks the talisman off the ground instead, now just scribbles on joss paper deactivated, and makes a note to study it later. Perhaps if he goes back to the original building, there will be some sort of clue there instead.

No such luck. The room is completely empty, although it doesn't look abandoned. The floor isn't covered in dust at all, which means that it was in use until very recently. Wei Wuxian entertains the thought that the fierce corpse was just a distraction designed to lure Wei Wuxian away so that whoever was previously here was able to clear out. That's not a helpful thought at all, because it would mean that his lack of clues is due to his own bad problem-solving.

Wei Wuxian sighs after upturning all the chairs and bookshelves one last time to make sure that there's nothing left behind, and then heads out. He should probably deal with the body of that first fierce corpse he had beheaded earlier. Normal humans don't tend to react well to decapitated corpses lying in the street, and Wei Wuxian doesn't want someone well-meaning to report in a dead body on the top of the hill, especially not when he's the only person around.

He collects the head from where it's rolled off to the side, and brings it back to the body just in time to hear footsteps approaching. He freezes, which is how Lan Zhan comes up on him standing over a dead body with its head tucked under his arm.

"…Ah," says Wei Wuxian. "Good morning. Have a good run?"

 "Yes, thank you," says Lan Zhan. He looks between the head and the body. "You couldn't get back to sleep afterwards?"

"Yeah, well. Once I'm up for the day, I'm up," says Wei Wuxian, which is not even close to the biggest of lies he's told today, and dawn hasn't even broken yet.

"Is this related to the irregularities in spiritual energy? I thought I sensed it again earlier."

"Yes! I was – it – it was like this when I arrived. I was just going to put it back together and maybe–" burn it? Call the police? "– see if it would provide any clues as to what's happening." Wei Wuxian doesn't know whether to be relieved or suspicious that Lan Zhan doesn't seem fazed by the situation. Normal humans are usually freaked out by dead bodies, right? They can start to get disgusting, particularly ones like this which had partially started decaying by the time it had become a fierce corpse again.

Wei Wuxian places the head above the neck again. The spirit of the deceased is presumably still here; it pulls the head back onto the neck the last few inches, the flesh knitting itself back together crudely. Lan Zhan squats next to the body to watch it, and pulls out his tablet. How he fit that thing in the back pocket of his very tight jeans, Wei Wuxian will never know. He'd definitely have noticed if there was a flat slab on the back of that ass.

"Excuse me, would you mind answering a few questions for me?" asks Lan Zhan, and Wei Wuxian raises his eyebrow before realising that he's talking to the corpse.

"Urrrrrrnggghhhh," replies the corpse, its jaw dropping open as it groans. The head sort of rolls over sideways until the cheek hits the ground, and its eyes snap open, staring unfocussed ahead of it.

Wei Wuxian screams.

"Shh," says Lan Zhan. "Thank you. Do you remember how you died?"

The corpse groans again.

"The first time." Lan Zhan types notes into his notepad, fingers clacking over the touchscreen, as the corpse moans in reply to each question. "And it was a natural death? I understand. What about the second time? Oh?"

His eyes flicker to Wei Wuxian. His second death must have been when Wei Wuxian cut him apart then. Awkward. "I was defending myself!"

"What made you attack Wei Ying?" Lan Zhan tries next. The corpse's groan is longer this time. "Do you know where he is? No, that's very helpful, thank you. Yes, you may move into the queue now. Thank you for your time."

 Wei Wuxian waits impatiently until the corpse goes limp again, the eyes rolling upwards. Lan Zhan gently straightens it up. "I thought you said you weren't a cultivator."

"I'm a clerk," says Lan Zhan, and shows Wei Wuxian his tablet with its neat bullet pointed notes.

Wei Wuxian does not swear at him, mostly because he's the one who can apparently understand corpses and that's a useful skill to have. Besides, it wouldn't explain everything anyway. He couldn't just talk to corpses like that when he was a cultivator. "Did he say anything useful?"

"He was waiting to move into the afterlife when his spirit was forcibly put back into his body by someone, who then ordered him to do things he didn't want to. A young man, with long black hair and a grin."

The only people Wei Wuxian has seen so far who match this description are him and Lan Zhan. And scratch that, he hasn't seen Lan Zhan grin. "It wasn't me," he says instantly.

"No," says Lan Zhan. "I doubt you would have ordered him to attack yourself."

Oh, right. "Okay well that's a good start. There was a second fierce corpse but I lost it. I knew there was something unusual about them though. Neither acted like normal fierce corpses. This one had too much sentience – which makes sense if his spirit was still in the body as he says – and the other one was inhumanly fast."

Dawn starts to eke into the sky, and Wei Wuxian can hear the occasional thrum of cars now. The town is starting to wake up, and they need to wrap this up. "Okay, before we dissect this some more, we need to figure out what we're doing with the dead body. We can't just leave it here."

Lan Zhan nods. "We could burn it now that his spirit has moved on."

"Do you have anything that would help? I don't carry a lighter." Maybe he should.

"Stand back," says Lan Zhan and sketches an array in the dust around the body. He knows an awful lot of cultivation techniques for someone who isn't a cultivator. But also, his array isn't going to work, there's a bit missing from the outer ring and – the body bursts into flames when Lan Zhan claps his hands together. Oh, maybe it will.

The watch in silence as the fire spreads quickly, creeping over the corpse's clothes and limbs, until the fire is three metres tall.

"Um, that's probably enough fire," says Wei Wuxian. "We probably don't want anyone seeing a fire from a distance and coming down."

Lan Zhan waves his hands at the flames as if he's shooing away a stray dog, which is not the correct way to neutralise an array. Wei Wuxian reaches out with one foot and scuffs the ground that the array is on instead. Between them, the flames calm to a constant smoulder.

They stay for a moment longer, in case someone turns up to claim the empty rooms or come find the body or the other fierce corpse, and then start heading home. Wei Wuxian's head is filled with the possibilities of trying to find a man with long black hair using the limited knowledge they have.

"I could do with a drink," says Wei Wuxian when they're almost home. "Want to join me?"

Lan Zhan looks at him aghast. "It's six in the morning."

"Yeah, and?" Time means very little to Wei Wuxian anymore.

"I don't drink," says Lan Zhan instead.

"Your loss." Wei Wuxian casts one longing look at the little convenience store where he could probably get something cheap to drink. But it probably is a bit sad to be drinking alone just after dawn.

*

What Wei Wuxian is missing at this stage is information. If he were still in Heaven, there would be a hundred celestial libraries he could visit. Instead, he's here on the mortal plane where cultivators are already rare enough themselves. The internet has some information, but given half the articles he's read are already riddled with misinformation, he's wary about trusting anything on there.

His other problem is that - well, he has two problems really. The first is the one he's here to figure out, what is going on with the fluctuations in spiritual energy in this area. It must be linked to this young man creating fierce corpses and tampering with their souls somehow. The other problem is what on earth is up with Lan Zhan. He's dead certain that there's something suspicious going on with him, with his above-average cultivation knowledge and unexplained powers and so on, and it's only a problem because he seems very nice and good looking and going out of his way to help Wei Wuxian with his investigation and hasn't used his mysterious abilities for anything bad yet.

Oh wait, it looks like Wei Wuxian actually has a third problem, which is how hard its proving to conceal his own abilities from Lan Zhan already. It would be much easier if he was a regular plain rice variety of human, but Lan Zhan has enough esoteric knowledge that Wei Wuxian isn't going to be able to get away with anything unusual.

He scribbles away on his notes, which are starting to go around in circles as he is wont to do without enough information, and only snaps out of it when he hears the front door click. The realisation that he has already spent most of the day on this sinks in – that must be Lan Zhan coming home after a full day of classes.

"I'm home," says Lan Zhan, neatly lining his white shoes up at the door and changing instead into his white slippers.

"Welcome home," says Wei Wuxian absently. Lan Zhan pauses in front of the coffee table, which Wei Wuxian can tell because he can see Lan Zhan's knees. He'd changed out of his running outfit into something more casual for classes, he presumes, because he's now in a pair of white baggy shorts and a blazer with only one button buttoned over it. Still white, of course. It must make coordinating outfits so much easier.

"You're still working on it?" He sounds... impressed. Maybe? Possibly confused, that Wei Wuxian has spent days on this. His tone is very hard to read.

"Yeah, I'm investigating it." He doesn't mention the bit where he's not going to be allowed home if he doesn't manage to sort it out. The spiritual power over this patch of land is fluctuating so much that anyone flying in Heaven over Yiling experiences turbulence. It's very unsettling.

"Officially?" There Lan Zhan is again with that odd stilted tone.

"I mean. I'm a cultivator right? So it's not like I have to–" (A lie.) "– but yes, it's my job."

"Hm," says Lan Zhan.

Wei Wuxian waits for more, but there's nothing else. He looks up finally to see Lan Zhan looking down at his haphazard notes, and suddenly feels the need to shuffle them into some semblance of order. "Hey, you said that you come from a cultivation family, right?"

"Indeed."

"Is it a traditional one? With a library? I want to see if there are any records of other fierce corpses doing unexpected things."

"It's quite far from here, I'm afraid. We have some digitised records though." Lan Zhan logs on to his tablet and scrolls through to some custom app. "Do you know what a boolean search is?"

Oh, technology! Wei Wuxian appreciates this, it would have been weeks of just trawling through books back in his day. He takes to it easily enough since a boolean search just seems to be a logical statement, he can figure that out. "You don't mind me borrowing this for a bit? You don't have homework or anything?"

"I can do without for a few hours," says Lan Zhan. "I'll start dinner for us."

Wei Wuxian freezes with his finger halfway through typing the character for 'fierce'. "Uhm. You don't have to? I mean, we're roommates but you don't have to cook for me."

"It is no problem," says Lan Zhan. Wei Wuxian keeps his senses on the look out for the smell of sulfur again. There's an awful lot of fire around Lan Zhan.

Lan Zhan's family library is remarkably useful. He can tell there are huge gaps of knowledge where perhaps sections or topics haven't been digitised yet, but what is available is well indexed and thorough, collecting documents, articles and research from across history. He really wants to know how he can get his hands on this collection for real, but the app is just called 'Library' and he doesn't want to go snooping through Lan Zhan's tablet.

There's a number of relevant records that indicate that experimenting with fierce corpses has been tried a few times in the past. The results each time have been unpredictable and varied, and there's no pattern to indicate that whatever's happening this time is linked to any of the previous incidents – the last recorded circumstance was in 1943 – but along with these results come the records of what cultivators did previously to manage the situation.

Most of them just involve cutting down the fierce corpses and burning them all and then killing the mastermind, but there are a few tidbits that Wei Wuxian thinks would help. A fierce corpse's strength is normally based on the strength of its resentment. That much is common knowledge, and dispelling the cause of its resentment can often calm a fierce corpse – which often involves the fierce corpse killing whoever it deems has wronged it – but from their corpse informant, there's someone who can forcibly make the fierce corpses do his bidding.

That means there has to be some sort of mechanism to force servitude. He wishes they'd had more time to question the corpse, but he wouldn't have known the right questions to ask then.

He whiles away the rest of the time thinking of various methods he can think of to force a corpse to do someone's bidding, the list getting increasingly more unethical and gruesome as he adds to it. He doesn't even notice that dinner is done until Lan Zhan slides a bowl of rice onto the coffee table next to him.

"Oh, wow," says Wei Wuxian, shoving everything aside so Lan Zhan can follow up with the rest of the dishes. "Thanks."

"Storing resentful energy within an object?" asks Lan Zhan, who is reading his notes again.

"Mm, that's one of the possibilities. Some sort of conduit that allows you to harness resentful energy that belongs to a person not yourself. The other most viable one is probably qi disruption of some sort. But there would need to be some sort of compulsion spell or array as well. I'm still working on it. I won't know for sure what it is until we come face to face with whoever is doing this, but it at least allows me to come up with precautions. I'm going to have to invent some talismans or something."

Lan Zhan looks impressed, almost. Wei Wuxian doesn't answer to him, but there's definitely part of him that wants Lan Zhan to approve. Maybe it's because Lan Zhan always has a blank face like whatever Wei Wuxian thinks of has already occurred to him. He has intelligent questions about Wei Wuxian's methods, and he nods approvingly when Wei Wuxian gushes about how great his family library is. They start out on opposite sides of the sofa, but when Wei Wuxian leans over to show him a bit he highlighted on the tablet they start to slide closer together, drawn together by the sinkhole in the middle of the sofa until Wei Wuxian's shoulder knocks against Lan Zhan's when he lifts his chopsticks. Lan Zhan doesn't seem to mind; he doesn't move away, at least. Maybe there's something about illegally burning a dead body together that binds them together now.

"I'll wash up," Wei Wuxian says eventually, even though he doesn't really want to move away from the warmth of Lan Zhan against his side. "It's only fair since you cooked."

"Thank you. Then please excuse me, I must make a family call." Lan Zhan retreats into the spare room to make his call. Wei Wuxian watches him go. He's such a dutiful young man, his family must be so reassured.

The dishes are minimal, like Lan Zhan washed up as he cooked. It's not until Wei Wuxian gets to the rice cooker that he squints at it in suspicion. Rice cookers, he is told, are very easy to work. He'd used it himself earlier today for lunch even. Rice, water, set to cook. Except now there is a thick crust of rice burnt black stuck to the bottom of it. How did that even happen? He sighs, and sets it to soak.

*

Wei Wuxian isn't expecting anything to happen for a while after the first night. By all accounts, the fluctuations in spiritual energy have been on and off, not very close together. So he goes through the pretence of being a later sleeper, and waits until the early hours of the morning before also retiring for the night.

Lan Zhan is always asleep in his impeccable posture – if Wei Wuxian didn't know better, he'd assume he was also meditating instead of sleeping. He's always tempted to take his hand and move his arm down to his side and see if it springs back into place. Wei Wuxian takes a moment to just look at him. Even though he's only known him a few days, Wei Wuxian would say that Lan Zhan has in general a neutral face. It's not particularly happy or particularly sad or particularly angry or anything at all. It's not until he has the chance to see him asleep that he realises how much tension Lan Zhan carries in that blank face.

It melts away at night, leaving his face softer.

Wei Wuxian climbs into the bed, trying not to disturb him, and makes himself comfortable on his side. After a moment, he realises that he's still staring in the dark. There's just something about how the streetlamp light filtering in through their mediocre curtains hits the profile of Lan Zhan's face. He looks familiar somehow, the more Wei Wuxian stares at him, but he's certain that they've never met before. He would remember a face like that. 

Meeting him was fortuitous, really. When Wei Wuxian had dropped back into the mortal plane again, it had been harder to readjust to than he would like to admit to himself.

Living on the street felt nothing like it had previously – a carefree and chosen lifestyle over a thousand years ago was not the same as being forced into a modern day he knew nothing about. Back then, he'd been able to rely on his charisma and his smile going a long way and exchanging his cultivation services to pay for things. Now, every interaction has a price in a currency he doesn't own. Not to mention the thousand years in between in Heaven. Even as a very minor immortal, he's been spoiled.

But meeting Lan Zhan has accelerated his progress in this case so much that he's actually hopeful he might be able to solve this case before he inadvertently gives himself away. He just wishes that he could be honest about who he is; that bit is still tiring.

He pulls the covers up a little higher over Lan Zhan's shoulders, and closes his eyes, sinking into meditation.

*

A gasp jolts Wei Wuxian back to awareness. He opens his eyes in time to see Lan Zhan staring at him from the other side of the bed – and oh, damn, he has just long enough to realise that he's floating in the air before he loses concentration for long enough to drop the half metre back onto the bed with a whumph that expels the air out of his lungs.

Wei Wuxian laughs nervously after he manages to inhale, desperately casting around for a feasible explanation as to why a mere mortal human might be levitating instead of asleep on the bed. "Sorry, did I startle you? I was just – practising my sword flying."

He whips his sword out from – crap, where did he even leave it last? Not his usual sheath in bed. Oh, right, he shrunk it for convenience and put it in – his hair, growing it to full size in the same instant. He looks at Lan Zhan hopefully. Maybe he hadn't spotted the moment of groping for his sword; it is still the middle of the night and therefore still dark after all.

"You sleep with your sword?" asks Lan Zhan.

"You don't?" asks Wei Wuxian defensively, before remembering that Lan Zhan isn't a cultivator or immortal.

"Hm," says Lan Zhan. "I will consider it. There appear to be advantages." And then he leans over the side of his bed and draws out a wholeass sword from under the bed. Hey, what the fuck? Has that always been there? It even glows a translucent white in the dark.

Wei Wuxian recoils against the sudden light. A hank of hair, long and straight, falls loose off his shoulders onto the bedsheets. Oh, for fuck's sake. He must have sliced it off when he was drawing his sword. He's never going to keep it in his hair again.

"See, that's why I need the practice," he says weakly, gathering up his hair and looking around for somewhere to put it. They don't have a bin in the bedroom. He should change that. He settles for curling it up on the bedside table.

"You practise horizontal flying?" asks Lan Zhan.

"Of course! For – tunnels," says Wei Wuxian. His lies are smooth as his favourite heavenly wine. "Are you sure you're not a cultivator?"

"I'm – not," says Lan Zhan, yet again. Since he doesn't drink, he probably has no idea how to make his lies as smooth as wine.

All right, so they're both acknowledging that they're hiding something from each other. That's fine. Acceptable. Great, even. They both sit in silence for a moment, stewing in their respective lies or something like that.

Wei Wuxian bets Lan Zhan wasn't even sleeping.

"Want to come check out the hill again?" he asks eventually. Lan Zhan nods.

*

"I realised something about the fierce corpses," says Wei Wuxian. "They're only active at certain times. Otherwise an influx of fierce corpses would be on the news. Which means that–"

"They're being kept somewhere," says Lan Zhan, not so much interrupting Wei Wuxian as completing his thought.

Wei Wuxian points at him. "Exactly! And Wen Qing said that there were occasional cultivator groups that came in and out of the area but we also haven't heard anything about a nighthunt here, so it's not that there's someone else getting rid of them. If we assume that I'm the only one who killed one, there must still be a number of others. One or two fierce corpses isn't enough to generate the amount of spiritual disruption that attracts the notice of – uh, people who care about these things."

"Fifty-nine," says Lan Zhan eventually. Wei Wuxian thinks he knows what he means, but he waits for Lan Zhan to say it himself. "There are fifty-nine souls missing from the reincarnation cycle."

Wei Wuxian considers it. Not just the number of missing souls – fifty-nine is a lot more than he had expected, and far more than any other fierce corpse experimentation had involved – but also the revelation from Lan Zhan. Not many people have access to the Diyu reincarnation records. He inclines his head in acknowledgement of the trust involved that let Lan Zhan tell him, and replies with merely, "I would trust a clerk to have all the details."

Lan Zhan's lips twitch into something that's almost a smile.

"There must be somewhere all these fierce corpses are being kept when they're not active and wandering around, or some general member of public would have noticed. And something I noticed about the one that got away from me was that it changed direction at some point. I didn't think anything of it then, but I think it didn't want to get too far from the hill. It turned so that it could stay within the boundaries."

"There aren't many places big enough to hide fifty-nine fierce corpses."

Wei Wuxian nods. "There aren't a lot of buildings on the hill and they're not that big, I don't think they would fit all of the corpses unless they're in every single building. But the hill is partially hollow. There's a cave – or there used to be, at least – that extends into the side. It would be big enough."

Lan Zhan is watching him with little sideways looks under dark lashes. Wei Wuxian knows this because he is doing the same, and every so often their glances graze each other, each one lingering for a moment longer than the last. It is Lan Zhan who eventually pulls away first, the tips of his ears pink. "That's where we're headed now?"

"Yep. There's two entrances. One at the top of the mountain, near where we were last night."

"The other?"

Wei Wuxian had built that second entrance himself, after an incident with the major cultivation clans of the time, which had shown him the necessity of a secondary exit route. And by then, he was tired of having to always walk up the hill to get to his cave.

"At the bottom of the hill, near the shrine." Wei Wuxian says triumphantly. "Let's pay Wen Qing another visit."

*

It's still very early by the time they get there. The temple is already open, one front door eased open to indicate so. Wei Wuxian hadn't figured it out last time because the area has changed so much since he was last here, but poring over a map had confirmed that his shrine is built right on top of the second cave opening.

There's no one else around again, so Wei Wuxian walks to the far side of the courtyard. The broken door hadn't raised any suspicions the first time around because it was a shrine, and a shrine to him no less, being a bit run-down was to be expected. But a closer look shows that the top hinge is broken in a way that implies that something strong and powerful had thrown itself onto the locked door from the other side. Judging from the way the temple is structured, the equivalent matching wood panel on the other side of the courtyard is just a small storage cupboard – so what could have exerted this much force from the inside of the door?

Wei Wuxian unknots the rope tying the door together and lets it swing open, door dangerously threatening to creak off its remaining hinge. There's a number of talismans stuck to the back of the door designed to stop any intruders, both spiritual and mortal. They look like they've only been recently applied. And as suspected, the 'storage cupboard' space extends into the wall, a dark tunnel stretching out before them that leads into the hill itself. "Ah, here we are."

"Excuse me?" rings out a voice in the early morning silence. "What are you – oh, it's you." Wen Qing looks at them. She doesn't look surprised to see them, but she doesn't look happy either.

"Good morning, Wen-guniang." Wei Wuxian reaches into his pocket – no, the other. Not that one either, perhaps – ah, the one by his knee. These cargo pants possibly have too many pockets – it's so much easier to keep track of where everything is with robes with qiankun sleeves. He finds the talisman that was thrown at him the last time here was here. It's a little crumpled now, but he smooths it out and shows it to her. "I believe this is yours."

He feels more than sees Lan Zhan's attention perk up.

Wen Qing sighs, and takes the talisman. "I knew it wouldn't take you too long to figure out," she murmurs.

"It was mostly luck," says Wei Wuxian. "If you remember, you also wrote down a list of names for me when we were here last time. I recognised some aspects of your handwriting in your calligraphy. Besides, once I worked out what the talisman did, I found it odd that someone would throw something that was essentially harmless but distracting at me."

She tips her head to the temple area. "I would like to explain."

"And we would like to hear the explanation," agrees Wei Wuxian.

This time, Wen Qing hunts down some stools for them to perch on. "As you know, I'm not a cultivator, but I come from a cultivator family."

"Are you really a doctor?" asks Wei Wuxian with a sly look at Lan Zhan.

"I'm a clerk," he says, deadpan, and this time Wei Wuxian senses that he's joking along with him. Amazing.

Wen Qing looks between the two of them, slightly confused. "No, I really am a doctor. Western medicine but also Eastern medicine. The training overlaps with cultivation at times, so I can sense spiritual energy. I first sensed something odd happen maybe four or five months back. I didn't think too much of it because strange things happen in this place all the time, but I sensed the same fluctuation the night that my brother disappeared. Wen Ning. That only happened two weeks ago. He's not – he's usually here day in, day out, so I knew something was wrong immediately. I tracked him down, and–" She presses her lips together until they're white. "He wasn't the same."

"Your brother is who I was chasing the other night?" asks Wei Wuxian.

Wen Qing nods. "He's not in his right mind. He would never attack people willingly. But I haven't been able to figure out what to do. And he won't listen to me. I don't think he can hear me."

"You've been watching over him."

"When I can."

Wei Wuxian mulls it over. "Did you know about the cave opening?"

Wen Qing shrugs. "Theoretically, I knew it was there, but I don't know where it leads. It's always been there, I suppose, but no one in the family knows what it's for. But you're right in that it's connected. I found the door broken off its hinges the day Wen Ning was taken, so I can only assume that whatever it was came out of there. I closed it over and put some protection talismans to stop it from happening again. I haven't been inside the tunnel though."

Wei Wuxian glances at Lan Zhan. "That's my next step then. You in?"

Lan Zhan nods, and they rise. Wen Qing walks them back out to the cave entrance. "If you see him – please, try to save him." The steel in her eyes tells Wei Wuxian that she already knows that he's a fierce corpse. That her brother is dead.

"I will."

Lan Zhan ends up going first, because he's the one with the sword that glows in the dark. Honestly, Wei Wuxian should have just stopped at a convenience store or something to pick up a flashlight. Bichen – the sword, that is – is an icy kind of glow and Lan Zhan moves forward carefully. Wei Wuxian can feel the stone pressing in around them as the ambient sounds in the temple become a muffled silence.

"The Yiling Patriarch the shrine is dedicated to," says Lan Zhan, his voice quiet in the dark. "His surname was Wei too."

"Yeah," says Wei Wuxian softly, answering the question unasked. He pauses. "You know, two of the guardians in Diyu are called the Twin Jades of Lan."

"They're not real twins," says Lan Zhan.

Wei Wuxian smiles at his back. "Well I'll just have to meet them and see for myself."

"Mm," says Lan Zhan, and it sounds like a smile.

*

There's a series of steps up ahead that Wei Wuxian remembers carving out himself, interspersed with steep slopes up around the inside of the hill. Even without the talismans on the door into the temple, it's unlikely that any fierce corpses could have come down here. The mobility required for this number of stairs is impossible for corpses without that fine motor control, which means that it was someone living who came down to attack Wen Ning.

It takes a good twenty to thirty minutes to walk from the base of the hill to the top; it doesn't take less time just because they're inside it. Wei Wuxian spends the time describing the inside of the cave as best as he can remember to Lan Zhan. "But remember – it might have all changed by now."

"Be ready for anything," agrees Lan Zhan.

Wei Wuxian hears the sound a split moment after Lan Zhan does; Lan Zhan immediately lowers his sword, the light going out, whereas Wei Wuxian accidentally takes one extra step and ends up smacking his face into Lan Zhan's shoulderblades, because Lan Zhan is taller than him. He throws his arms out to steady himself, his hands inadvertently grasping at Lan Zhan's hip. It's only when Lan Zhan reaches back and grabs his wrist that Wei Wuxian rocks his weight back onto his own feet. He squeezes Lan Zhan's hand gratefully, not want to give them away by saying something.

Lan Zhan keeps his hand around Wei Wuxian's wrist now that they're in the pitch black, and moves slowly forward. Wei Wuxian stays close, practically pressed against Lan Zhan's side; it's only by feeling the warmth of his body shift that he can tell where they're going. At one point, he can feel Lan Zhan breathing down onto his head.

The noise they'd heard gets louder as they get closer, and resolves itself into the sound of someone... rapping.

It honestly takes Wei Wuxian a couple of moments to realise that's what it is instead of the chant for some spell, because it's pretty bad rapping.

"Ey, ey, oh oh!" comes from somewhere around the last bend.

Wei Wuxian slides Suibian an inch out of its sheath, but where he's expecting to burst in and instantly start pointing blades, the reality is much more subtle. They come up into the light and Wei Wuxian's heart leaps as there are two, three, half a dozen people standing just past the tunnel entrance. These must be some of the missing fifty-eight fierce corpses. But they stand still, no indication that they've noticed Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan come up behind them. And there's no reaction even when they inch closer, the barricade of people blocking their view of whoever is rapping.

It's not until Wei Wuxian is right next to one that he realises that their eyes are closed and they're just standing there, eerily still like puppets whose strings have been cut. He shivers. He's seen plenty of fierce corpses over the years, but this amount of control is chilling. Yes, there are cultivators who can affect fierce corpses – but they still remain fierce corpses. These are like shells of human bodies.

The closer they get, the better Wei Wuxian can see that these fierce corpses line the perimeter of the cave three deep, all completely still and facing into the centre, eyes closed. Waiting.

They peek in between the shoulders of various corpses to see a young man with long black hair. No evidence of a grin right now though. Spit sprays out of his mouth as he raps, seemingly to himself since he doesn't have headphones in, and he's facing the open mouth of the cave with his back to them, peering at something that Wei Wuxian can't make out. Wei Wuxian can feel the resentful energy rolling off him, uneven waves and swells of power.

It's difficult to know what to do. With this many fierce corpses right here, the two of them could get torn apart if the young man manages to mobilise them in time. But the essence of surprise is their main advantage – he's likely not expecting someone to come up from the secondary exit to confront him.

Wei Wuxian very discreetly taps his blade with one finger, and then pulls it across his throat. Aiming for the young man's throat? That might be useful, he can't give orders if he can't speak. But Lan Zhan shakes his head, and makes a rolling gesture. Wei Wuxian has no idea what that means. Lan Zhan does it again. The lack of additional input doesn't do anything for him. Lan Zhan changes to flapping his fingers together in a rough estimation of 'talking' – oh, yes. They should question the young man at some point, just in case he's done anything unexpected that they're going to need more questions on so they can't silence him too early. He nods: message received.

He also needs to find Wen Ning somewhere in this crowd. It's difficult, because the fierce corpses are packed in tightly and largely in the shadows. There's a few who fit the bill – young men who look a little bit like Wen Qing, whose body looks like it hasn't been dead that long. He points downwards a couple of times ('Wen Qing') and then does a little circle with that same finger ('somewhere in here?' and hopes Lan Zhan understands.

Lan Zhan nods, and points at one on the left side in the front row who was one of Wei Wuxian's guesses as well. Wei Wuxian does the 'Oh yeah, possibly' head tilt and shrug. That's a universally recognised gesture, he hopes.

When he looks up to take a closer look at possibly-Wen Ning, Wei Wuxian's heart skips a beat: he locks eyes with the young man. Who's watching the both of them. And oh, there's the grin. How long has he been watching them do their little pantomime?!

"Did you think I wouldn't notice two people creeping into my cave?" His voice rings out, loud and echoing.

"Ah," says Wei Wuxian. "We seem to have been discovered."

"With the amount of spiritual energy you're both toting around, you might as well have burst in screaming," says the young man. "Which should be interesting. I haven't fought anyone as strong as you two in a long time. Maybe I'll add you to my collection."

He gestures to the fierce corpses. As one, all the fierce corpses' eyes snap open, and the heads swivel in their direction to stare at them, unblinking. Well, that's beyond terrifying.

"I must politely decline," says Lan Zhan, as if it were something as mundane as a job offer. For some reason that makes Wei Wuxian giggle.

The young man laughs as well. Wei Wuxian rather hopes it's for a different reason to his. "Or you could join me. I'm Xue Yang. You may have heard of me."

Oh. "I'm the demon you don't want to exorcise," says Wei Wuxian weakly.

"I beg your pardon?" asks Lan Zhan.

"No, that's – it's how he described himself. Online. On Weibo."

"Why would you not want to –"

"Never mind, it doesn't matter."

"Are you done?" asks Xue Yang. He's scowling now, annoyed that somehow they haven't heard of him and his accomplishments, whatever they are. There are some benefits to being a thousand years old and social media illiterate, Wei Wuxian supposes.

There's a low thrum in the air, and it takes Wei Wuxian a moment to realise that it's the sound of fifty-eight fierce corpses gearing up to start groaning. Right, that's not good.

The distance between them and the closest layer of fierce corpses is barely an arm's length. Their best option tactically is probably to retreat into the tunnel, which will bottleneck the number of corpses that can come after them in one go, and if they get as far back as the first set of steps, the stairs will trip them up. But that would mean potentially losing Xue Yang if he decides to slip out of the top entrance.

The other option would be to jump over the fierce corpses now and meet Xue Yang in the middle of the room. That option involves literally surrounding themselves with fifty-eight fierce corpses though, which Wei Wuxian doesn't really want to do.

Lan Zhan makes the decision for him by kicking himself off the wall of the tunnel and somersaulting over the fierce corpses towards Xue Yang. Wei Wuxian follows.

*

He's not really sure what he expected. A swordfight, most likely. Lan Zhan engaging Xue Yang, Xue Yang sending hordes of fierce corpses onto them to physically tear them apart, Wei Wuxian doing his best to hold off the fierce corpses until Lan Zhan can overpower Xue Yang.

What he definitely did not expect, and in hindsight probably should have, is Lan Zhan hitting the ground with both of his palms and a pillar of fire rising instantly from the ground around Xue Yang, so hot that Wei Wuxian can feel it strip the first layer of skin off his face, roaring upwards until it hits the ceiling and almost instantly incinerating Xue Yang alive. He doesn't even get a chance to scream.

Ye gods.

Lan Zhan claps his hands together, and the fire recedes into tiny licks of flame that tickle the edge of his shoes – still white – before disappearing entirely.

"Uhm," says Wei Wuxian. There's a long silence. Lan Zhan watches him warily, as if waiting to see what he's going to say. Once Wei Wuxian's heart stops pounding in his ears in absolute terror and his body has mostly decided that it's not going to wet itself, he licks his lips.

"Are you sure you're not a cultivator?"

A tiny line in Lan Zhan's shoulders loosen. He shows Wei Wuxian his tablet. His current clothes don't even have pockets, the absolute fucker. Wei Wuxian cannot believe how long it has taken him to realise when Lan Zhan is messing with him.

"Yes, yes, I get it, you're a clerk," says Wei Wuxian. He turns to face the fierce corpses. They're not dead-dead, but they're also not here-here. "How do we deal with these? I thought we were going to try and question him."

Lan Zhan has stepped into the charred circle on the ground and leans down to pick something up. Good spot, because Wei Wuxian didn't even notice anything on the ground. He holds it up for Wei Wuxian, which is a good idea because it's apparently made of metal and still smoking and he's pretty sure he's not physically capable of holding it. It's a nail. Longer than any nail Wei Wuxian has seen, with a tiny, tiny array etched into the head. Objectively, it's exquisite craftsmanship.

"One of your ideas was a qi disruption," says Lan Zhan. Oh, yes, a nail inserted somewhere on the body would definitely be a qi disruptor.

They find them, eventually, two nails in the back of the skull. A number of the fierce corpses have been dead for months already, have been 'buried' or mourned by their families. The older the death, the more they are confused, caught between the mortal plane and Diyu, losing their grip on their human selves as their souls struggle to generate a new identity. The newer ones are more coherent, and ask to move on quickly.

Lan Zhan steadily checks them off his list, and sends their spirits on, and their bodies drop to the ground uninhabited. Wei Wuxian closes their eyes, tips their mouths shut, and line them up neatly on the ground.

They leave Wen Ning for last.

"He's not on my list of expected souls," Lan Zhan says quietly just before Wei Wuxian removes his nails.

"He was the most recent, I think," says Wei Wuxian. It takes a moment for Lan Zhan's words to sink in. "Do you think – he was alive when–"

"I don't know."

They likely won't ever know for sure. But Wei Wuxian pulls out the nails, and Wen Ning blinks, once, twice. "I recognise you," he says. "I attacked you the other day. I didn't want to, I'm sorry."

He's not breathing. And he doesn't have a heartbeat. But his soul is here, in his body, and isn't expected to be anywhere else.

"Your sister really wants to see you," says Wei Wuxian, and they take him down the stairs. He can do the stairs. A bit slower than normal, but still. Fierce corpses can't do stairs, everyone knows that.

Wen Qing cries when she sees him. They leave the two of them be, and head into the courtyard, pretending that they can't hear the sobbing.

Wei Wuxian looks up at the sky. It's not even noon. A good day's work. "I paid for three months' rent up front," he says. "What a waste."

"With mortal money?" asks Lan Zhan, which is a good point.

Wei Wuxian could go ahead and write up his report and probably be back in his palace before the end of the day. He probably hasn't even been gone for long enough for his friends to miss him. But there was – something. Something here, with Lan Zhan. The way they circled each other even when they were strangers, the way they complemented each other on the case. The way he's pretty sure he can tell when Lan Zhan is laughing internally.

"Did you even register for classes?"

"No," admits Lan Zhan. "I went on long walks instead. There are some very nice woods in Yiling."

"And the running?"

"Those jeans are very uncomfortable for running."

"I thought they might be."

They fall into companionable silence as they walk back to their apartment before Wei Wuxian eventually asks, "What next? Are you headed off home?"

Lan Zhan hums. His face is that carefully neutral blank again. "I sensed a qi disturbance in Qishan this week. There was a significant amount of paperwork involved in allowing me to cross realms and investigate personally. I thought I might save them the trouble by having a look while I'm already here." He slants a sideways look at Wei Wuxian. "Would you be interested in coming with me?"

"Qishan, that's where the main branch of Wen Qing's family's from," says Wei Wuxian, pretending to consider it. He's been missing this kind of purpose in the Heavens for a while, and he hadn't realised it until he'd started spending his days productively again. Going back to sit in idle pleasure for the rest of time suddenly feels so unappealing. "Sounds interesting, I'll tag along."

"I looked it up, and there's a direct train that goes from the centre of town."

"Say, Lan Zhan." Wei Wuxian bumps his shoulder against Lan Zhan's, and Lan Zhan humours him, bumps him back. "Have you ever travelled by cloud?"

"I have not."

"We should try it, it's really fun. I'm not sure if it'll work for you separately though. You might have to just hold on to me really tight." He looks straight at Lan Zhan as he says it.

Yeah, he's definitely sure he sees Lan Zhan smile this time.