Chapter 12: A Fear of Death (貪生畏死)
The heavy read doors opened to a stone garden that had seen a storm. Broken bodies stinking of fluid decay laid where they'd fallen in the stirred waves of grazel, blanketed by buzzing flies.
"Father!"
The courtyard rang with the yaoguai's bellow. It shook rifts in the black, buzzing masses, revealing stitched flesh and bone like the yaoguai's. The last echo faded. Daiwen heard nothing, but the yaoguai's nostrils flared.
The yaoguai ran to the west wing on all fours, flinging gravel from their hands and hooves. Daiwen grit their teeth against their bruises, aches, and pains. They ran after the yaoguai.
Every step shoved a lancing dagger through their soles through to their shins. Daiwen huffed and wheezed, breaking into a skin-prickling sweat. By the time they'd caught up to the yaoguai in a room at the end of the wing, their limbs had deadened to pure weight.
Daiwen dropped to their knees on silk carpet embroidered with the five-spoked wheel of Qi Zhong. The yaoguai towered at the center of the wheel over a stone coffin. Their skeletal fingers seized the lip of the lid.
Blue lightning, a magical ward, cracked from the lid. It seized back, wrapping the yaoguai in its jagged, wracking grasp. The yaoguai roared. They strained against the magic and stone, but the lightning cracked relentlessly. The yaoguai crashed to the floor with a sizzling pop.
The stink of burnt hair smacked Daiwen from the haze of pain. A tightness in their throat choked out their scream. They crawled to the fallen yaoguai, reaching out with a trembling hand. Their fingers brushed burnt skin. Their shoulders shook. Whatever magic the yaoguai's maker used to bind life to their piecework parts still held.
The yaoguai would be fine, after a few hours. The man in the casket might not.
"Fuck."
The yaoguai, as hardy as they were, had nearly died trying to open the coffin. There was no way Daiwen could touch it. They needed someone who could try without fear of death. They needed someone dead.
Daiwen passed their palm over the yaoguai's eyes, forcing the lids all the way down. They pushed unsteadily to their feet. They backtracked to the courtyard in a heavy slump against the wall, but they had to crawl off it to reach the edge of the gravel waves.
Daiwen sat on their knees, the many, dusty stones digging into their skin. The garden was completely still and silent except for the low thrum of feasting flies. Daiwen placed their palms together in front of their chest. They bowed to the dead in apology.
"Forgive me."
Their aura flared. The yaoguai's kin stirred. The gravel shifted and fell away from the four, rising forms like rain. The flies burst off the bodies into buzzing, whirring clouds around them. The dead walked, hobbled, and jerked behind Daiwen. They led them, limping, to the coffin room.
The four seized the lid. Blue lightning crackled over and through their bodies. Flies popped like kernels of corn into a sticky, black gunk that splattered onto the undead. The four twitched and jerked, but they lifted the lid.
The lightning continued to yank their nerves in every direction. The lid crashed to the floor. The lightning stopped.
"Thank you," Daiwen pointed east. "Please go back to where you came from."
The four lumbered back, taking the stink of decay and burning energy with them. When the angry buzzing of their flies faded, Daiwen checked the coffin. The yaoguai's father laid sinde, an older man with white hair and whiter skin. He was alive, if unconscious.
Daiwen slumped against the side of the stone coffin. They slid to the soft carpet. With their punching doll as a pillow, they napped with the unconscious family at the center of Qi Zhong's elemental wheel.
The yaoguai and their maker woke at the same time, three hours later. Their father was Count Cao Lanmeng (曹欄猛), a noble and student of history.
Three days ago, a group of powerful, magic-wielding bandits robbed him of a small, stone idol in his collection. The artifact was so old that no one knew what god it depicted, except, perhaps, for the bandits. After killing the count's constructed family, they'd left him to die in the ancient stone coffin.
The count thanked Daiwen at length for saving him and invited them to stay for dinner.
Daiwen accepted. Despite the wealth and variety of food Count Cao had to offer, they might as well have been eating ash as they waited for the right time to ask about the spirit gate. They finally got their chance after the count had brought out the end-of-meal soup, a delicate broth of pumpkin and ginger.
"But enough about me. What brings you to our humble abode, Daiwen?"
They told him everything as quickly and clearly as they could. The count frowned in thought.
"Mushenmen (木神門)," he muttered, rising from his seat with a silver-spooned clatter. "Follow me."
Daiwen followed Count Cao up flight after flight of stairs to the stone manor's attic. They stopped at a surprisingly simple wooden door. The count pulled out a ring of jangling keys and unlocked the door with a curious key made of wood as green as though it'd been carved straight out of a young tree only this morning.
The door opened to a small, windowless room of wooden boards. There wasn't a single piece of furniture inside. Its only distinguishing mark were small characters scratched into a central floorboard: 'Mushenmen.'
The count didn't follow Daiwen into the room. He spoke to them from the other side of the doorway.
"This room was never finished."
"What happened?"
"It was cursed during the manor's construction."
The construction team fell behind schedule, so the foreman stayed overnight to try to catch up. When his team returned in the morning, they couldn't find him. They searched the construction site for three days until the sound of weeping drew them to the room. It had been completely walled off from the rest of the building. They had to hack an opening through the wooden boards.
They found the foreman crouched inside, naked and covered in dust. He couldn't understand a word they said to him, only speaking one name over and over again: 'Mushenmen.' They brought him out of the construction site, but he bolted as soon as they reached the forest.
They found him digging what seemed to be his own grave at the foot of a black-boughed tree. He fought with the strength of ten oxen as they dragged him out of the hole and pulled them all down. He smiled as soon as hit the ground. He died smiling.
"They fell on him?"
"Yes, but the coroner said a toxin had stopped his heart before he'd been crushed."
No wonder the room had been declared cursed.
Daiwen sunk to a cross-legged seat in front of the scratched plank. With the foreman locked in for three days, the likeliest poisoner was the guardian of the wooden gate. They would just have to be on their guard while dealing with the spirit.
Count Cao hurried off without another word. Daiwen had to shut the door themself.
As the purple-wreathed minutes of flared aura stretched to purple-wreathed hours, Daiwen went from sitting to lying flat on their back in the cramped, stuffy room. How the foreman had managed to stay walled in for three days, they had no idea.
As for Mushenmen, nothing they did had managed to get the guardian's attention. They'd clapped their hands, stamped their feet, and shouted through the floorboards like a bad upstairs neighbor.
Daiwen sat up with a groan. Two black button eyes met theirs. Without dropping their flared aura, Daiwen picked up the punching doll. They tossed it up at the opposite wall. The doll had just enough bounce to fall back into Daiwen's lap. Smack. They tossed it again. Smack. Smack. Sm-
"What are you doing?"
Daiwen jumped in their seat. Their aura went out like a flame. The yaoguai caught the doll before it smacked the sheepish grin off Daiwen's face.
"I think the gate guardian might be sleeping."
"It's late. You should sleep too."
"I can't. I have to go."
"Why?"
"I don't belong here."
The yaoguai sat down beside them, passing the doll back.
"You belong as much as me."
Daiwen could say nothing to that. They set the doll in the corner instead. They crawled to a new seat behind the yaoguai, leaning against their sleek, burning hide.
"You could stay."
Daiwen shut their eyes against the images of the friends they'd somehow managed to make here in this other Shenmen.
"No. I can't."
They fell into a taut, prickling silence. It threatened to choke them with awkwardness. The yaoguai finally spoke.
"Maybe the spirit will take you in your sleep."
"May-wait! That's it!"
Daiwen sprang to their feet and hugged the yaoguai's muscled neck. The foreman had spent the night here working construction, which was much louder than any ruckus Daiwen could make. If that hadn't stirred the spirit, it had to have happened when he'd fallen asleep.
"Thanks, Yaoguai. That's exactly what I'll do!"
"This is goodbye?"
"Yeah, I-"
Had a problem. Unlike Mistress He and presumably the foreman, Daiwen had only just started practicing magic. Those two might've been able to keep their auras up and spells going in their sleep. Daiwen could not.
They rested their chin on top of the yaoguai's bovine head.
"Can I ask you for a goodbye favor?"
"What favor?"
"Would you...please make me cum so hard that I pass out?"
"What?"
"I needed my aura up to go through the last spirit gate, but I can't keep it up in my sleep. So-"
"I've never fucked anyone before. How am I supposed to make you cum that hard? Is that even possible?"
"It is. It's happened to me more than once, actually. I'll tell you what to do. I mean, if you were ok with fucking me."
The yaoguai sat as still as a stone, but heat burst from their hulking body. Daiwen let go and stepped back. The yaoguai stood, leaning over them. Their red cock hadn't yet risen from the skin.
Daiwen reached under their spider silk sheath and scooted their underwear down their legs. They stuffed it into their jacket pocket. They turned their back to the yaoguai, bending over to reach into their doll. The hem of their sheath pulled up, flashing the cupped, bottom curve of their ass. The yaoguai snorted behind them. Daiwen hastily stuffed their coins into their other pocket.
"Ok. The more I orgasm, the more intense they get, so I think five should be enough to knock me out."
"Five?!"
"It'll be fine, just make me cum four times before you start banging me."
"What do you need me to do?"
Daiwen grabbed the hem of their sheath and pulled it just high enough to expose the tip of their slit. Their aura flared purple.
"Eat me."
The yaoguai lowered their head as though reading a charge. They stalked toward Daiwen.
Daiwen instinctively retreated. Their breath hitched as they hit the wall behind them.
Without stopping, the yaoguai crouched and hooked their arms under Daiwen's legs. They slid Daiwen up the wall. Daiwen squeaked. They grabbed onto the yaoguai's horns with their flailing arms.
The yaoguai shifted Daiwen's knees over their shoulders, Daiwen's cunt at the height of their snout. Daiwen gulped at the warmth reaching up their sheath, but they scrunched the bottom hem up over their hips, completely exposing themself to yaoguai and their wall of heat. The yaoguai looked from their cunt to their clit to their eyes. Daiwen nodded, bracing against the yaoguai's horns.
The yaoguai placed their skeletal hands on either side of Daiwen's hips, pinning them to the wall. They walked forward, the soft underside of Daiwen's thighs sliding over the stiff fur of their shoulders. Daiwen whimpered and squirmed, kicking the air at the bristling tickle, but they had nowhere to run.
-/-
Explicit encounter on AO3