It's him. It's unmistakably him; Mo Xuanyu has seen enough old photos and videos to recognize the face of Wei Wuxian. At the same time, though, he looks unrecognizable—bags under his eyes, his skin waxy and stretched over his cheekbones, his lips pale. The mole under his mouth stands out stark against his white skin; Mo Xuanyu has seen Internet fanpages dedicated to that mole, has half kept up with them until they were shut down for glorifying a war criminal. He looks like a corpse, and when Mo Xuanyu holds a hand up in front of his nose and mouth he can only make out the slowest, faintest wisp of breath. His skin looks like it's made of cold clay and his hair is matted and dull and he does not look even a little bit sexy.
"Long time no see, Wei-xiong," says Nie Huaisang in his ear, softly, with a bit of an ache to it. "You've looked better."
So the Lanling Jin sect lies, thinks Mo Xuanyu again, numbly. That's nothing new. He can't really say he wasn't expecting this—not with Yu Guandeng's comments, not with discovering a room full of bodies—but seeing it in front of him is another matter. Somehow, he hadn't considered… of all the things the Lanling Jin sect lies about… Why not this? Why not this too? Why not fool the entire world with a lurid tale of the main villain of the era blowing himself up, only to steal him and hide him away underground for… for what?
The shapeless garment covering the Yiling Patriarch's body is held shut with ties down the front; Mo Xuanyu undoes them over the abdomen, focusing on where the blood has stained the fabric a little. Sure enough, there's a half-healed wound right above his navel, about the width of a sword blade and leaking a sluggish trickle of coagulated blood.
"Mostly healed," notes Nie Huaisang. "My guess… is that they would have tried to keep the wound open, to have him dependent on their medical services if they ever brought him out of stasis. But keeping it open over that long a timeframe wouldn't be sustainable, so they've been healing it as slowly as they can manage since then."
Mo Xuanyu notes that the talismans pasted on Wei Wuxian's abdomen are indeed for preservation rather than healing. Not that a healing talisman is a good substitute for real medical attention, whether physically or spiritually focused. "Will that be a problem for us?"
"It shouldn't be," replies Nie Huaisang. "His body has been kept from healing on its own this whole time, but once he's out of stasis, his own natural processes should take over. Of course, there's always the risk of infection or complications, which could be pretty troublesome if that's allowed to take place." He sucks in a breath through his teeth, or at least that's what it sounds like from the little paperman audio. "I wasn't expecting him to be still wounded… we'll have to be careful."
Mo Xuanyu makes a mental note to raid a pharmacy when he makes his escape. As Yu Guandeng said, the preservation talismans on Wei Wuxian's abdomen need changing; might as well do so, both for his own goals and to keep the cameras entertained. He pulls fresh talisman paper out of Zhang Liran's pocket and draws a simple healing spell—a change from the previous one. He's not looking to keep Wei Wuxian held in permanent stasis; he's looking to do what can to speed up the recovery process.
"Hmm," said Nie Huaisang as he pastes on the talisman.
"What?"
"Those scars…" The expanse of skin exposed around the wound bears two scars; one over Wei Wuxian's hip, short and tilted, and another long, thin, surgical-straight one that bisects his navel and stretches down into the beginnings of a trail of hair that Mo Xuanyu is perfectly content not to follow. "That smaller one must be from when Sect Leader Jiang stabbed him. But the longer one… what do you think?"
"Dunno," says Mo Xuanyu shortly. It's really none of his business. He stands there for a moment staring at Wei Wuxian, trying to figure out his next steps; once he really gets moving, he'll have only a short window of time before the Jins send people down here to stop him. Speed is of the essence.
All right, he thinks he's got it.
A ticking countdown starts in his mind as he pivots away from Wei Wuxian's body and turns back towards the coffin-cooler with Wen Ning lying inside and opens it once more. Then he takes a brief but crucial moment to steady himself, taking deep breaths and letting his senses extend out around him. They ripple out with shocking speed and force, with Zhang Liran's cultivation behind them, but the thick, swirling clouds of resentful energy seeping from the corpses in the fridges all around him are new and alien to this body's spiritual energy in a way he hasn't experienced in a long time, not since he first started dabbling.
It's hard, using demonic cultivation in a borrowed body. The once-familiar resentment scrapes painfully through his meridians as he draws it in, hot and prickly and raw, like the first inhale of smoke through a throat not used to it. Mo Xuanyu pulls in the resentment, draws it up into his mouth and voice like an unsteady rasping breath, and thrusts it into his voice as he says, "Wake up."
Wen Ning's eyes open, and he sits up; Mo Xuanyu nearly wobbles on his feet. Wen Ning is powerful. Mo Xuanyu isn't sure if he's feeling a drain on his energy from the strength it's taking to control him, or if the resentful energies coming off of him are disorientingly stronger than he's used to; probably both, really. Wen Ning climbs out of the cooler and stands before him, wearing the same pale shapeless hospital-gown-like cover that Wei Wuxian is, gazing blank and unseeing at Mo Xuanyu.
This is, um… weird. Wasn't Wen Ning supposed to be famous for being the first fierce corpse to retain his full consciousness and awareness? What happened to that? Mo Xuanyu waves a hand in front of his face, and Wen Ning doesn't react at all.
Weird, and unsettling. But the clock is ticking, and Wen Ning has proven himself to at least be able to take orders, which is what matters. "I'm breaking Wei Wuxian out of here," Mo Xuanyu tells him, still imbuing his voice with spiritual energy. "Cover for us and make sure no one stops us."
Wen Ning dips his head, a slow and dreamlike gesture of acknowledgement.
"I'll let you take it from here," says Nie Huaisang, helpful as fucking ever, "I've got a meeting and I'm kind of already late, okay?"
"Sure, whatever," says Mo Xuanyu vaguely, and turns back to Wei Wuxian and sets about undoing the straps and buckles holding him in place. Wei Wuxian sags forward onto him the further down he goes, a tree being felled by measures, limp and heavy. He kind of smells. They probably haven't been bathing him. Mo Xuanyu has an absurd flashback to the diary entries where Wei Wuxian spoke blithely about the settlement's lack of reliable access to a shower; outcasts, am I right? flits nonsensically through his head before the last buckle comes off and Wei Wuxian is all his. Mo Xuanyu takes a moment to check the back of his neck—as he thought, there's a series of needles sunk in there, that must be what are keeping him unconscious. He's not going to touch them, for now. An unconscious body is much easier to haul around than a medical patient waking up from a coma. Hoisting Wei Wuxian over his shoulder to leave his arms free, he turns to Wen Ning. "All right, we're going."
This technique, he hasn't actually been able to practice, although he's studied it in depth and detail. The Distance-Shortening Array takes a massive amount of spiritual energy, accessible by only the most powerful cultivators, and even then it's deeply draining—Wei Wuxian's more small-scale version, that his notes described as "more of a catapult, really?", is not quite on that level, but still takes a great deal of spiritual energy and power to execute. But fortunately, unlike in the basements of Qinghe, he's currently surrounded with a substitute; volatile, unpredictable, but with an extra power behind its explosiveness, like gunpowder to the bullet. Taking a deep breath—palms sweating, again—he drops into a squat.
He doesn't know how long he's got. The elevator with the forces to arrest him could be at this floor for all he knows.
Mo Xuanyu closes his eyes and reaches for the resentful energy again, pulling at every last tendril and curl of it around him, heedless of the way Zhang Liran's meridians protest. Demonic cultivation can be very dangerous for a beginner to take on too much at once, but fortunately it won't be his body suffering the fallout. Mo Xuanyu pulls—pulls—piles it on—gathers it all up into him until it feels like a great big water balloon about to burst—then draws the array with practiced speed as he lets it all explode down his arm, the gunpowder of it going off.
The array starts to glow. Mo Xuanyu adjusts his grip on the unconscious Yiling Patriarch and grabs Wen Ning by the wrist, and then the world turns upside down and Mo Xuanyu is slammed into leaf-covered ground, bruising his hip.
"Ugh," he says, and has to struggle not to vomit as he pushes himself back up. His stomach didn't take kindly to the sudden displacement. That's not important, though—the release of energy will have given away where the array spat him out, and it won't be long before the facility, just visible through the trees, sends cultivators after him. Every second counts. Mo Xuanyu reaches down Zhang Liran's spiritual link to his sword, flies it out of its sheath—how easily it moves, compared to Mo Xuanyu's own clumsy gasping past attempts at sword control—and mounts, hoisting Wei Wuxian more securely over his shoulder.
"Get on," he says to Wen Ning, imbuing his words with spiritual energy, and Wen Ning obediently climbs on behind him. Mo Xuanyu cautiously navigates the sword up through the top of the trees, then once he's clear of that obstacle shoots forward with all the speed he can muster. It'll be easier for them to track him if he's out in the open like this, but better that than splatting against a tree trunk.
Zhang Liran's sword moves fast, even weighted down as it is by three adult bodies. Mo Xuanyu pours as much spiritual energy as he can into it, speeding over the treetops with the wind whipping in his hair.
There's the faint, deadly throb of helicopter blades making its way into his hearing by the time the parking lot where he set up camp comes into view; Mo Xuanyu directs the sword at the ground and lands in an unceremonious collision, Zhang Liran's reflexes saving himself and Wei Wuxian from injury. Wen Ning, not as lucky, faceplants into the ground like a rag doll and pops up a moment later hardly the worse for wear, by which time Mo Xuanyu is already stepping through the wards and opening the car doors.
"In," he says harshly to Wen Ning, hands shaking. His own unconscious body, with Zhang Liran's soul still slumbering inside, is still sprawled across the backseat; Mo Xuanyu unceremoniously pushes it to the floor to make room for Wen Ning and Wei Wuxian. Wow, notes part of him, violence against a duplicate of himself, not like that's going to feature in some intensely symbolic mental illness dreams from here on out. Whatever. He's a little hysterical. The buzz of the helicopter is drawing closer, like a massive deadly insect, and Mo Xuanyu pulls out of the parking lot and screeches onto the road just as the first spray of bullets manages to catch the back of the car.
As near as he can tell from the noises, they don't penetrate it—the car is armored, he knows that much—but the sound of gunfire jerks his panic levels into overdrive nonetheless. They're not even bothering with spiritual weapons. He's so dead. He's so fucking dead. Desperately he takes one hand off the steering wheel to scribble the outline of a protection formation on the dashboard, and—oh right, he remembers as the wards blossom out around the car with surprising force, he's still running off Zhang Liran's much more powerful golden core. The original plan had been to switch back to his own body in the parking lot and ditch Zhang Liran as he drove away, but now he couldn't be more thankful that he didn't have time to implement that; he still has all of Zhang Liran's spiritual energy at his fingertips.
The next round of bullets bounces off the wards, the impact like dull bruises against his awareness, but Mo Xuanyu can feel the drain on his qi; equal and opposite reactions being what they are, it takes a lot of energy to counter the destructive force of a bullet, and he's pretty sure it won't hold a second time. Fear spikes into his throat. He pulls at some of the resentful energy still swirling off of Wen Ning's form and sends it to fortify the bubble, then looks at Wen Ning and says, "Can you take them down?"
It's his only hope, at this point.
Wen Ning blinks at him and tilts his head, and Mo Xuanyu wonders why he bothers asking questions of a puppet, but then Wen Ning opens the door and vaults onto the car roof and, great, fine, hopefully he got the message! He didn't close the car door behind him, either; the wind from Mo Xuanyu breaking the speed limit twice over howls into the car and whips at Mo Xuanyu's hair. Another round of bullets—some of these make it through the wards this time, and Mo Xuanyu feels them thud against the roof. He doesn't hear a bigger thud that would indicate Wen Ning getting felled by the spray, though, and a moment later the car jolts with a motion that Mo Xuanyu takes a moment to register as Wen Ning taking off from the roof in a great leap.
Good for him! Hopefully he'll accomplish something out of that, otherwise he's fucking dead! Mo Xuanyu keeps driving, pedal to the metal, and hears more gunfire from behind him—not aimed at him, though. Hopefully the legendary Ghost General won't stop being famously immune to bullets at this critical juncture. There's the sound of metal thudding and clanging; the thrumming of the helicopter blades shifting in pitch as the craft move around, dipping uncomfortably low and close to the road, and then—as Mo Xuanyu's nails score nervous scratches into the leather of the steering wheel—an immense crashing and smashing sound as a wave of heat and debris rolls into and past the car, pushing it forward a little further.
Mo Xuanyu dares to hit the brakes, slowing down just enough to swivel his head around and take in the scene. The two helicopters are in shambles on the road, on fire, crashed into each other; the dark shape of Wen Ning, his outline wavering with heat is running towards the car. "Holy shit," wheezes Mo Xuanyu, and slows down further so the fierce corpse can catch up. Wen Ning draws abreast to the car, his gait an odd, loping, inhuman run, and pulls himself inside once Mo Xuanyu pops the door open for him. As soon as all his limbs are contained Mo Xuanyu hits the gas again, speeding out of there.
"You took down two helicopters," he says, dazed, to Wen Ning's silent and unresponsive face. "You took down two helicopters bare-handed."
Wen Ning gazes back at him, his face blank as the moon. The shapeless hospital gown garment he's still wearing is smeared with soot and torn in places.
Mo Xuanyu keeps driving like hell, but no third helicopter surges up behind him; they appear to have bought a delay. The turnoff point is approaching in his map view, and he doesn't want to bring Zhang Liran's body there; it's now or never. He pulls over to the side of the road—heart hammering in his throat, his instincts blaring at him to resume his escape—and retrieves his own unconscious body from the backseat, unceremoniously elbowing aside Wei Wuxian's body to do so. Then he props himself—or, rather, a sleeping Zhang Liran—into the front seat, undoes his own body's jacket, lifts up his shirt, and paints the cessation symbol onto the array still dyed onto his skin, adding in the formula for a timed effect. Then he does the same for the talisman currently keeping his body unconsciousness, setting its effect to end in fifty heartbeats.
All right, here goes! He runs in the opposite direction from the car's trajectory, unsheathing Zhang Liran's sword and sending it zooming off into the woods as he goes, sprinting to put as much distance as he can between himself and… and, well, himself. Immediately it's clear to him how ineffective this measure is. When their consciousnesses switch back Mo Xuanyu is going to be unconscious in his own body for a crucial few seconds, giving Zhang Liran a head start on catching up; and even disarmed, a strong cultivator like him can deploy ranged spiritual attacks against the car if he runs to keep up. Mo Xuanyu is going to definitively need to remove the possibility of any pursuit, and do what he can about the possibility of spiritual attacks as well…
He can't seal off Zhang Liran's spiritual energy—he doesn't know what the effects on the switching back will be if it does. But this is probably going to keep the man too distracted to make any effective use of it. Mo Xuanyu stops running, braces one leg in front of him, and raises his hand high.
He doesn't know how adept Zhang Liran is at overriding the body's overpowering reflex not to cause itself harm; but Mo Xuanyu, as it happens, has had a great deal of practice at that. Zhang Liran's muscles give only a slight spasm of protest before the side of his hand comes down on his thigh with all the force of a trained martial artist, breaking his femur with a muffled and horrible crack.
Pain immediately floods all his senses. "Aaauuughggh," says Mo Xuanyu inelegantly, and falls over, fingers clenching uncontrollably in the leaf mold. "Agh, fuck. Oh god—" How many more heartbeats does he have? His blood is pounding in his ears, roaring out the countdown. Wait—shit—the little paperman still in his collar, they might be able to trace it, he pulls it out of his collar and between trembling fingers manages to squeeze through just enough spiritual energy to set it on fire; the next moment everything goes black.
Again that floating moment of mindless sleep, then he's slammed back into his own body, surging up from the seat with a wild gasp, the seatbelt cutting into his shoulder. Wen Ning watches him silently.
"Okay," he says to the unresponsive corpse, already slamming his foot down on the gas pedal, "let's get out of here, huh?" and zooms off along the road, even as he takes stock of his own body—it's the longest he's ever done the ritual with someone else, his test runs having only lasted a few minutes. Being back in here after piloting Zhang Liran's buff and spiritually strong meat suit is… something. He's by no means out of shape, having trained as a cultivator right up until the drama kicked him out of Koi Tower, but he's nowhere near on that guy's level, and his body feels like a limp noodle with a candle flame for a golden core in comparison.
The car zooms along the road as Mo Xuanyu clenches his hands on the steering wheel and mutters an incoherent stream behind his teeth. At any moment he's afraid of hearing helicopter blades behind him once more, and there must surely be bullet dents in the car's armor marking him out as an easy target. There's a further step in the plan, one last one before the "drive nonstop for days" step, that should take care of that, but where…
Right, Nie Huaisang programmed it into the car map, he almost forgot. Mo Xuanyu punches the requisite buttons and the car's navigation system lights up, guiding him forward; as it turns out, it's only another kilometer before he pulls into the entrance to the parking garage, the gates shutting down behind him. As soon as he's out of sight of the sky he feels a profound sense of relief.
The parking space and level are written down in a piece of paper in the glove compartment; Mo Xuanyu fumbles for the latch and retrieves the crumpled sticky note. 5th floor down, spot 105… He drives down to the requisite level, fluorescent lights passing in silent white bands over the inside the car, and is met with Getaway Car, Round Two.
"All right, Ghost General," he whispers, unbuckling his seatbelt, "here's where we get off."
There's not much to transfer from the bullet-dented car to the new and unrecognizable one—mostly just his backpack and Wei Wuxian's sleeping body, really. He shepherds Wen Ning into the passenger seat, too, because might as well; the inside of a parking garage doesn't seem like the best place to ditch him, although he'll have to eventually. There's a remote control sitting on the front seat; he presses the single button, and a part of the parking garage wall in front of him just opens up with a loud clanking noise, revealing a passageway barely lit by intermittent lightbulbs.
Here goes nothing, Mo Xuanyu thinks, and drives in. The doors shut behind him as he goes, slamming down with an ominous thud. He knows this step is necessary to throw the pursuers off his trail—emerging far from where he went in, in an unrecognizable car—but he's so sick of cramped underground spaces at this point. It's like they're swallowing him alive. Swallowing him up like the Lanling Jin sect did, and will, and will so much worse if he's found, crushing him under its terrible vengeful weight, dark and so so alone in this tiny tunnel with two half-corpses for company and enemies all around outside—
All right! Might as well take a moment to just fucking break down a little! Mo Xuanyu hits the brakes, leans his forehead against the steering wheel, takes a deep raggedy inhale, and screams. With the noise comes all the tension of the last half hour—he got shot at, what the fuck, what the fuck, he walked right into the lion's jaws and right back out, he's a nationally wanted criminal now, there are helicopters pursuing him like great glittering wasps and if he's caught the Lanling Jin sect can do any damn thing they want to him and he's sure they can think of a lot. What the fuck! The scream is followed by a series of ragged hitching sobs, and Mo Xuanyu lets it happen—might as well let it all out in here, in this little box, where he's the safest he'll be for a while. Better that than repressing it and letting everything burst out at a later time, a time when it could be much more dangerous for him to be vulnerable.
When he's done he straightens up, wipes the tear tracks off his face, and looks at Wen Ning. "Sorry you had to see that," he says, even though Wen Ning does not appear to be registering jack shit at the moment, and then gets going on getting the hell out of there. The tunnel continues on for another few kilometers, identical lightbulbs flickering past, and then a new gate opens up to let him roll out onto a one-lane road surrounded by grass and trees, quiet and still.
Mo Xuanyu breathes out, unclenches his hands from the steering wheel, and gets out of the car. There are a couple things to be done at this stage. First—there are blankets in the trunk, thanks Nie Huaisang, very thoughtful for a fugitive with nowhere to sleep—he wraps one of them around Wei Wuxian, covering up his out-of-place-looking hospital gown and arranging him in the backseat so he looks like he's having a nap, just in case someone looks through the back windows. Then he undoes Wen Ning's seatbelt and has him climb out of the car.
Wen Ning stands there, a dark-pallid thing, unnatural and undead among the green grass and whispering trees, gazing at him.
"I need you to leave," says Mo Xuanyu.
Wen Ning's head tilts.
"Leave," repeats Mo Xuanyu, and imbues the words with spiritual energy for extra effect. "You need to go away. Go into hiding, lay low, make sure no one catches you. Can you do that?"
Wen Ning takes a few shuffling steps back towards the car. Mo Xuanyu bites his lip in frustration, because Wen Ning has never disobeyed an order before, until he realizes that Wen Ning has in fact moved closer to the open car door through which Wei Wuxian's slumbering form is plainly visible in the back seat.
Ah. Of course. The Ghost General was known for his loyalty to the Yiling Patriarch. Mo Xuanyu chews at the inside of his cheek, contemplating this conundrum—he doesn't want to take Wen Ning with him. He's not sure what the Jins did to him to make him so… puppetlike, but that inhuman behavior could prove a liability. A giveaway, a surefire method for people to identify him. He's really not keen on hauling around a fierce corpse on top of the comatose body he's already toting; at least the body is just guaranteed to just still and not behave unpredictably. And given the Ghost General's reputation for flying into uncontrollable rages…
"Listen," he says, still threading spiritual power through his voice. "This is to help him. I promise I will keep Wei Wuxian safe, and not hurt him. But you have to go away for that to work, all right? You have to go away from here to keep him safe."
Wen Ning keeps staring at him. With his consciousness repressed, he shouldn't be capable of expressing emotion, but somehow he looks remarkably like a kicked puppy in this moment.
"Just for a while," says Mo Xuanyu. "Okay? I have my orders, and once that's done, he can go wherever he wants and you can find him there. I promise. But for now, it's safer for him if you leave, okay? Just for a bit."
Wen Ning's head droops. He takes a step away from the car, then another. Slowly, putting one ponderous foot in front of the other, he plods off into the trees, his footsteps rustling on the ground. The pale shape of him in its baggy paper-cotton disappears from view like a ghost.
Mo Xuanyu watches him go, feeling oddly unsettled. And definitely like kind of a dick. Nothing to be helped about it, though; Wen Ning's hurt feelings don't take priority over Mo Xuanyu not dying of plan-gone-wrong.
Swinging back into the front seat, Mo Xuanyu shuts the door behind him, flexes his fingers on the steering wheel, and takes a couple deep breaths. It's done. The hard part is behind him. Now all that comes is staying alive—fleeing, now and forever.
"Here goes," he says to Wei Wuxian in the backseat, who appears to be drooling a little. Then he starts the car again and heads off down the road.