content warning: mention of suicide, with disrespectful language used towards suicide victims

The facility in question happens to be the one near Luoyang that Mo Xuanyu mentioned to Nie Huaisang when he first arrived at the Unclean Realm—the one that Lanling Jin funds seemed to be disappearing into without explanation. It's there that Mo Xuanyu heads, taking the high speed rail early in the morning while the dark landscape blurs by outside and the sky goes from black to blushed with pale grays and pinks. It's the last time he'll be able to take public transport in a long time; maybe forever. After this, he'll be a wanted criminal. The backpack in his lap, heavy with tools he'll need, feels like a bomb in the weight and explosiveness of its incriminating potential.

Stay calm. The deed hasn't been done yet. Being hunted like a rabbit will come later.

The train pulls in to the station when the pink glow of the sun is just starting to peek over the horizon. Mo Xuanyu shoulders his backpack, steps out onto the platform, and heads into the bowels of the station. The directions he'd been made to memorize—because writing them down was too risky—float to the forefront of his mind. West exit, then downtown, then along several different streets in the blue-gray morning, the lights from the night still on. He walks at a brisk pace, although not fast enough to exhaust himself, and winds up at the entrance of a private parking garage. Slipping around the barrier, down the stairs, down more stairs, and to the specific spot number he'd been told to find.

The designated car has barrier arrays set up around it, invisible to a civilian, but simmering in the corner of Mo Xuanyu's perception. They dissolve as he approaches. The token of passage in his pocket, given to him by Nie Huaisang, might have something to do with it.

The keys are in the ignition, which is presumably why there were so many wards. Mo Xuanyu starts the car, pulls out of the parking spot, and heads up out of the garage and onto the road, again following the memorized instructions. His brain fogs with tiredness and tension; clears again. He needs to be focused for this.

An hour or so of driving takes him out of the city and into landscape that is almost approaching countryside. He is, Mo Xuanyu realizes, close to the facility. Step three—or two? He doesn't really remember the exact numbers—is to find the convenience store that the Lanling Jin guards tend to stop for food at, and get set up nearby.

There's an abandoned strip mall down the street from the store in question, and Mo Xuanyu sets up camp in the back parking lot, shielded from the road; parking the car, hiding the keys for it under the mat in the back, and setting up the barrier arrays. Several layers of them, to deflect passing eyes and keep people from stumbling upon the setup. It should be time soon. Quickly, he pulls up his shirt, checking the skin of his torso—the array he drew on there last night with deep-sinking skin dye is still there, still intact. Sunk in too deep for anyone to sabotage, even if they had access to his own hands. Dormant, awaiting his command.

All looking good. Mo Xuanyu pulls on his meager disguise—sunglasses and a medical mask—leaves the setup he just created, and heads inside the convenience store to do some professional loitering.

It's not long before the Lanling Jin guards start to filter in, the morning shift on its way to changing rotation. Mo Xuanyu watches them out of the corner of his eye, but they're all the wrong ones; none of them with high-level clearance. Nie Huaisang had made him memorize the names and faces of which cultivators were allowed access to their target, impress them upon his memory until the faces danced across Mo Xuanyu's eyelids in negative when he closed them. It is this, Nie Huaisang implied, that was such hard-won and time-sensitive information; the spiritual energy signature detectors on the locks change every week, and with it the cast of guards allowed into the most secret projects. If Mo Xuanyu fucks this up, there won't be any second chances.

Finally Mo Xuanyu sees him—one of the faces he recognizes, coming in through the door with a jingle of the bell attached to the handle. The tension jolts through him, but he keeps browsing snacks; he can sense he's reaching the limits of when the store owner is going to tell him to buy something or get out. Tall, muscular, hair tied back in a no-nonsense topknot, security vest with the Lanling Jin peony emblazoned on the back. Mo Xuanyu is vividly reminded of the guards watching over him in the basements of the Unclean Realm; grunt cultivators are all the same, away from the glamor and reputation of the figures that live in the spotlight. His target has picked out an energy bar and is heading for the register; Mo Xuanyu grabs a bag of chips at random and heads in the same direction, one hand in his pocket.

The collision is immediate. "Watch it," grunts the cultivator, and Mo Xuanyu experiences the instinctive fear of having pissed off someone bigger and stronger than him. He pushes it back down. No time for that right now. "Sorry," he says pleasantly. "Here, you go ahead."

The talisman is already stuck to his target's back. If there's one thing Mo Xuanyu has learned in his lifetime, it's how to have deft and sneaky hands.

The Lanling Jin cultivator pays for his energy bar and heads out; Mo Xuanyu immediately moves to the register and pays for his own bag of chips, taking up the cashier's attention so that no well-intentioned eyes can say, Hey, what's that on your back? When that's done, he heads back to the parking lot next door, heart beating faster again with nerves. He forces it to calm down—draws on the techniques his counselor in middle school taught him—because the spiritual energy talisman will already have penetrated through to the target's skin, and the whole thing uses his heartbeats as the counter. Too fast a heartbeat means the effect will set in too soon, and he wants to give himself enough time.

Timed-effect spells. Notoriously tricky and unreliable, until the Yiling Patriarch came along and perfected a formula that would make it consistent. Now, they're just tricky.

The array on his torso is starting to heat up warningly by the time he gets back to the car. He doesn't have much time. Quickly, he lies down in the backseat of the car, arranging himself in a comfortable position. His heart pounds in his chest despite his best efforts, accelerating the oncoming effect. It doesn't take long to write a simple unconsciousness talisman, and then he slaps it on his own forehead—

And then darkness.

The sluggish, drifting nothingness of sleep, and then…

…and then he nearly veers off the road. The morning landscape spins by in his windshield—hands that are not his own clench tight on the steering wheel, swerving back into the correct lane amidst a spike of adrenaline and a squealing of tires.

"Okay," he wheezes, in a voice that is not his own—it's so deep, what the fuck—as his borrowed hands regain control of the steering wheel. "Okay. Fuck. Okay!"

Success! All right! Mo Xuanyu, in the body of the cultivator he bumped into earlier, pulls over to the side of the road to run a quick check of everything. Namely, the new meat suit he's piloting. It's not his first time being in another person's body—that happened earlier this week, during one of his many tests of this technique with the Nie disciples—but the sensation is still always disorienting. A quick glance at his ID card confirms that the man's name is Zhang Guo, courtesy name Liran, thirty-eight years old, high-security clearance. And who apparently—Mo Xuanyu squints out the window—needs to update his contact lens prescription.

The spiritual energy always takes him by surprise. The inner Nie disciples he'd practiced with had different levels of golden core—Nie Huaisang clearly not discounting the use of spiritual weaklings like himself—but Zhang Liran's shines. The man is strong. Mo Xuanyu supposes you have to be, to be a security guard at a top-level secret facility. His spiritual energy pumps gold through the body's veins, a sensation of power that, to a low-level cultivator like Mo Xuanyu, is almost intoxicating in its strength.

Mo Xuanyu always knew his golden core was a lot weaker than the average cultivator. This ritual, and all the firsthand basis for comparison it provides, has been definitive proof of it.

There's no time to waste. Because Nie Huaisang is a convoluted asshole, Mo Xuanyu immediately has to turn around Zhang Liran's car and go back the way he came, back to the little hideout he created alongside the car and the array. The setup is only a faint shimmer in the air, and only then if you know where to look for it, but Mo Xuanyu's borrowed body manages to slide through the wards, and the view of the car unfolds in front of him. The open door. His own, unconscious body lying in the backseat, with Zhang Liran's soul locked, sleeping, inside.

That's freaky, what the hell. Mo Xuanyu will never be used to it even after a week of practicing, but it's even more hair-raising knowing that the soul inside would probably try to strangle him if woken up and given time to process the situation. The effects of the unconsciousness talisman can't be penetrated by sounds or movements, but Mo Xuanyu still finds himself moving slowly and cautiously as he reaches for the all-important backpack, opens the front pocket, and retrieves the envelop inside, from which he carefully pulls out a little paperman.

It lies inert in his palm, unmoving, but a familiar voice—albeit very tiny-sounding—says, "Xuanyu. You've gotten muscular."

"Ha ha," replies Mo Xuanyu flatly, lifting the paperman to his collar and tucking it securely in there. Another technique pioneered by Wei Wuxian—the notebook specified that breathing the soul directly into the paper, animating it, would reflect any damage to the paper back onto the soul. But Nie Huaisang, self-preserving bastard that he is, went straight for the admitted out—that if the spell is used only to transmit sight and sound, and the paperman is unable to move, then the user's soul will be safe.

And Mo Xuanyu ends up being the only one putting himself in serious danger, because politics are fun.

With Nie Huaisang nestled into his collar, Mo Xuanyu turns away from his own unconscious body, steps out of the wards, and gets back into Zhang Liran's car, heading in the direction of the facility—the memorized map spooling through his head along the way. He probably breaks a few speed limit laws—he's made Zhang Liran late. There was no way around it, really, no way to connect Nie Huaisang's senses to the paperman without Nie Huaisang himself writing the spell, which meant having to use one that Mo Xuanyu brought with him, but it's fucking inconvenient. An entire detour just so that Nie Huaisang can snoop and offer unwanted commentary!

And probably also any valuable information he has that could seriously affect Mo Xuanyu's mission, but Mo Xuanyu isn't in a mood to be charitable.

The facility rises up before them from among the sparse trees, sudden around the curve. Mo Xuanyu pulls into the parking lot. Parks the car. Does Zhang Liran have a habitual parking spot? Will someone notice the difference?

His heart pounds in his ears as they approach the gate. A rising crescendo, the sweat building on his palms—surely they'll notice something is wrong, surely someone will apprehend him, the most important thing is not to let his nerves show—

"ID," says the bored security guard.

Mo Xuanyu presents Zhang Liran's ID. Did he take it out of a different pocket than usual? The guard swipes him through, then directs him to a series of sensors in the wall by the door; Mo Xuanyu scans Zhang Liran's fingerprints, feeds Zhang Liran's spiritual energy into a sensor that will detect its unique patterns, and presses Zhang Liran's eye to a little camera. After that he is directed to step on an unfamiliar array.

No, wait, he recognizes it. Techniques developed by the Yunmeng Jiang sect, guarded jealously until they made the decision to release it to the public. Instant exorcism of any body possessed by a ghost.

Mo Xuanyu restrains himself from swallowing with tension as he approaches the array. The soul-swapping ritual is a new invention, guarded in Wei Wuxian's notebooks under tons of Qinghe Nie concrete and soil, and Nie Huaisang had mentioned that—in theory—exorcisms such as this shouldn't work on him, because his is a living soul still connected to its original living body. In theory.

Mo Xuanyu steps on the array. The guard presses a button, the whole thing lights up with spiritual energy, and—

—nothing happens. Mo Xuanyu's soul remains safely in its hijacked body. The tension drains out of him; he forces himself not to let it show as the security guard waves him through the gate without a second glance.

It's only once he's safely out of sight of the gate, buzzing himself in through the front door, that Mo Xuanyu lets the shaking start. And then it doesn't stop, and it's getting worse, and it's getting to the point where it would be pretty incriminating if someone were to come across him, so Mo Xuanyu peels off into the first bathroom he comes across, braces himself against the sink, and lets himself fall to pieces a little bit.

God. God. Really, it's not that he's not used to danger—not with the family he grew up in, and then not with being a cultivator. He's been on night-hunts, he's had aerial fights with a pack of spirits a hundred meters up and just barely clinging to his sword, he's felt the festering long nails of a fierce corpse slice at his throat just shallow enough to avoid the jugular. Being in danger is nothing new. But being in danger this huge... this all-encompassing... one lone prey animal against the full thundering might of the hunt... that's what's new. No, more than that, a prey animal sneaking straight into the lion's den. The weight of it presses down on his head like tons and tons of concrete, like an entire building about to collapse on him.

Get over it, he tries to tell himself, you've been in danger of dying before and you're in danger of dying now, it's only the context that's different, except it's not just the dying. He could easily be tortured. Locked in a solitary confinement in a Lanling Jin cell somewhere, his golden core ripped out and with it the last dregs of his mental stability, dragged back before Jin Guangyao's pleasant empty smile—

The door to the bathroom opens. Mo Xuanyu doesn't even have time to try to get it together before a voice said, "Liran, are you okay there?"

Another Lanling Jin cultivator, in a similar guard uniform. This is very bad - Mo Xuanyu is now close under the eyes of someone who could easily detect any slip in character - but somehow, the concrete problem at hand is stabilizing. Focus on getting through this, and blot out all the rest. "I'll be all right," Mo Xuanyu says, in Zhang Liran's deep voice. "Too much coffee this morning, I think it's giving me the caffeine shakes." He holds out a still-trembling hand. "See?"

Mo Xuanyu knows a thing or too about lying and being sneaky, given his long history of it. Trying to hide suspicious behavior is rarely as effective as calling attention to the suspicious behavior, casually and easily, and attaching a concrete explanation to it. The other cultivator tsks in sympathy. "That sucks," he said. "Hey, wait up for me while I piss, okay?"

Mo Xuanyu is left listening to the sound of energetic pissing in one of the stalls, debating whether to just leave. The last thing he wants is to be subjected to a close reading of his act, even an unwitting one; but as he's still teetering on the edge of the decision, the other man emerges from the stall and the time to flee is gone.

"Be careful," hisses Nie Huaisang in his ear, a low whisper just for him.

"So where are you headed?" says the other cultivator, opening the door to the bathroom. He didn't wash his hands, notes Mo Xuanyu with distaste. The name tag over his peony badge reads Yu Guandeng.

"Downstairs," says Mo Xuanyu. He's obeying the natural rhythm of the body's muscles, and Zhang Liran's body seems fine with not talking much. Yu Guandeng seems to cotton on to his meaning immediately, though.

"Ohhh," he says. "The package?"

Mo Xuanyu nods.

"Hey, I just got off my shift sorting depleted spiritual weapons, you want me to come with? For the double key thing? Unless you've already got someone for that."

There's a double key. Suddenly, Mo Xuanyu stops regretting having run into someone else; his blood goes a little cold at the thought of how easily they might have missed that. What other information he might be missing. "Sure, you can come. I don't have anyone else yet."

"Nice," says Yu Guandeng, and nods. "Man, I'll be glad when they take him off our hands, all the increased security is a pain in the ass. I mean, iris scanners? Really? The other day I got yelled at just for stepping outside real quick to throw away a coffee can! Everyone's on maximum tension because of it, they'll take it out on anyone."

Mo Xuanyu grunts in agreement. It seems the safest course of action.

"Oh, I heard the wound reopened, though," says Yu Guandeng casually, "so be prepared to deal with that."

Mo Xuanyu has no idea what they're talking about here; he makes a wild guess. "Bandages?"

"No, thank god," snorts Yu Guandeng. They're headed into the elevator. Mo Xuanyu fervently appreciates how Yu Guandeng sets the pace easily, and Mo Xuanyu can simply follow without worrying about directions. "Just a preservation talisman, I think. Kind of fucked up of him to do that, eh?"

Another grunt. Yu Guandeng seems happy to do most of the talking, which is another blessing.

"I mean, really, did he think he was going to escape that easily?" Yu Guandeng snorts. "What a coward, really. All arrogance and bravado until it seemed he might face consequences for his actions, and then he tries to take the easy way out by running himself through? Selfish to the end, huh."

The elevator lurches into motion, and with it the deep pit of Mo Xuanyu's stomach.

"Hey, Liran?"

"Sorry," says Mo Xuanyu, mechanically. "Upset stomach for a moment there. I really shouldn't drink so much coffee."

"You can't drink it on an empty stomach, that's the key," says Yu Guandeng sagely, while Mo Xuanyu's mind churns. Escape. Ran himself through. Coward. Selfish.

He doesn't have the full picture yet, but something is certainly coming together in his mind. Jagged words sprawled across the page, bitter and bleeding. A tent city trampled into dust. No, whatever they're talking about, Mo Xuanyu is pretty sure it wasn't to escape justice.

That could have been me, he thinks, nonsensically but so very vividly. That could have been me you're talking about like that.

It does't make any sense to think that, and yet it does.

The elevator plunges down and down, and Mo Xuanyu thinks of being in Nie Huaisang's maze again. Underground secrets, all of them the same, what any great sect sits on top a mountain of. Finally they stop, and the doors give a rusty ding.

"Hey," speculates Yu Guandeng, strolling out, and letting Mo Xuanyu follow. "You think anyone here would ever try to just… finish the job? Pull the plug, so to speak?"

"If they have a death wish," says Mo Xuanyu dryly. From context clues, and the heavy security, it's not hard to guess that that's an appropriate response. Yu Guandeng barks a laugh.

"Ha! Yeah, that's the point, I guess. Still, can't imagine some people aren't tempted." Yu Guandeng pulls a key from his belt, spins it around his fingers as they approach the door at the end of the hall. "What do you think they even want him here for?"

"Beats me," says Mo Xuanyu, pulling out Zhang Liran's ID card as they get within reach of the card reader on the door. It won't do to let Yu Guandeng lead all the time; not to the point of suspicion. The door swings heavily open.

Mo Xuanyu lets Yu Guandeng walk in ahead of him again; takes a moment to adjust the paperman Nie Huaisang in his collar so he can get a visual. The room is long and narrow, lined with—fridges toppled over, thinks Mo Xuanyu for a wild moment, but no, they're bizarre coffins—no, they really are fridges, human-sized and then some, lined up against each wall like beds in a hospital ward. There's a little light in a panel above each one, but only a few of these are actually glowing; those that do have a light on also have seals spray-painted on the sides. Longevity and preservation. Mo Xuanyu's pulse rises, something thickening in his throat; very discreetly, he pulls at his senses around him for resentful energy, and is met with thick eager curls of it. He has a very good idea what's inside these.

The two coffin-fridges at the very end of the room are spray-painted with rather more talismans; capturing, binding, suppressing of resentment, layered on each other so thick he can barely make out the characters. One has its light on, the other off. Behind these two is the wall, and in that wall, as though flanked by two sentinels, is a door.

With some really fancy lock work on it.

Mo Xuanyu's pulse is hammering in his throat by now. Here it is. Whatever it is Nie "maddeningly vague" Huaisang sent him in here for—and, vagueness or not, he's getting an increasingly clear guess at just what it is—this is where it lies. Past the haze of tension, Yu Guandeng is cheerfully fiddling with his belt. "Ready when you are," he says, holding up a key with a thick plastic head, for easier turning.

Mo Xuanyu finds his own equivalent of said key, on a ring inside his vest that pulls out on a spring-loaded elastic. There are two keyholes on either side of the fateful door; he gets the picture, and moves towards one while Yu Guandeng moves towards the other. They each slide their respective keys into their respective keyholes, too far apart for one person to reach both, and share a glance. "On three," says Mo Xuanyu, pulse hammering in his palms. "One, two—three."

The two keys turn. The locks on the door click and whirr, spinning into place, and then the door pops open.

Yu Guandeng opens it the rest of the way. Behind it is yet another fucking door, the kind made of two sliding panels that lock together. In the center is a card reader, iris scanner and spiritual energy signature reader. "All yours, bro," he says. "I haven't handed in the key from last week yet, but my card doesn't have clearance anymore. You wanna take it from here?"

Mo Xuanyu nods. Yu Guandeng turns and leaves, giving a wave over his shoulder as he goes.

The door to the room thuds shut behind him. The lock clicks back into place.

"You realize they probably have cameras in here," says Nie Huaisang from his collar. Mo Xuanyu almost forgot he was there.

"Mn," agrees Mo Xuanyu, reaching for the final card reader lock.

"So you'll want to avoid acting suspiciously for as long as possible, until you're sure you can handle whoever they'll send your way when you do. Wait a second." Mo Xuanyu withdraws his hand. "First you'd better check what kind of backup you're working with."

Mo Xuanyu pivots back to face the two fridges closest to him, the ones with a mass of talismans spray-painted to their surface. "These?"

"Yep! And because I need to check on the contents, for informational purposes."

The one displaying a little light seems more promising. It's locked with both a card reader and a spiritual energy scanner, and Mo Xuanyu opens both in quick succession. The lid pops ajar with a click and a pneumatic hiss, and Mo Xuanyu pushes it the rest of the way. Cold air rushing out against his arms; it's clearly a fridge and not a freezer, he can tell, no frost on the walls, and nestled inside the smooth white box of the interior is—

A corpse. As expected. Lying asleep for now, but marked with the black veins of the unquiet dead. As with the drawings hidden in the notebooks underground, it takes Mo Xuanyu a moment to place the face—it's the Ghost General, Wen Ning.

Okay, thinks Mo Xuanyu, and has to take a moment to absorb it. Wen Ning's face, far from the blank-pupiled snarling and roaring Mo Xuanyu is used to seeing in pictures, is relaxed into a sort of limp melancholy. Wasn't he supposed to be dead? As in, dead dead, ground into dust or burnt to ashes or something like that?

So the Lanling Jin sect lies. That's not new information.

"All right," says Nie Huaisang. "That's going to be useful. Now, the—" His voice runs dry for a moment. "The second one."

Mo Xuanyu turns to the fridge lying across the aisle. "The light on that one is off. Pretty sure that means it's empty."

"I know." Nie Huaisang is quiet. "But I need you to check. It's vitally important."

"To this mission?"

"To my own plans. Not your concern."

That makes more sense. Mo Xuanyu turns to the second fridge, leaving Wen Ning's open, and runs his card through the reader, feeds his spiritual energy into the scanner. Faintly, he can hear a long shaky inhale from Nie Huaisang's paperman, like a first clenching tighter and tighter.

There's nothing there. The fridge is empty.

The fist opens; Nie Huaisang lets out a burst of an exhale that rushes into Mo Xuanyu's ears in a sound almost like static. "All right," he says. "That's… good. Just as I thought. Everything can proceed as planned. Good. Good. It's good."

He sounds like he's talking to himself more than anything else, distracted and mumbling. "Sect Leader Nie," Mo Xuanyu says tightly.

"Right, of course. Sorry. Got distracted. All right! Ready to open your present?" Nie Huaisang is back to his usual chipper facade now; it grates on Mo Xuanyu's ears as he shuts the two coolers and turns back to the second door behind the one he and Yu Guandeng opened. His palms are sweating. His heartbeat is pounding in its ears. The air in the room seems to draw all of itself in towards that door, like the pull of a black hole.

He swipes Zhang Liran's card, presses his eye to the scanner, feeds in his spiritual energy. There's a click, loud in the stillness, and a hiss and a hum as the two doors slide back into the wall.

What unfolds from behind the sliding doors is an alcove lit up from within, the light reflecting off an army of talismans plastered to its walls. Just wide and deep enough to accommodate the body within, kept upright by black Velcro straps. A shapeless pale garment like a hospital gown, with the faint brown of an old bloodstain over the abdomen; more talismans adorning limbs, clothing, skin. Mo Xuanyu's breath has left his lungs entirely, as though squeezed out by an invisible hand.

Not two feet away from him, pallid and still, is the face of the Yiling Patriarch.