“I’m not Lu Yu.”
After saying this, Lu Yu looked at the other three, only to find that none of them seemed surprised.
“Then who exactly are you?” Ji Luo stared at him fixedly.
“I can’t remember.” Lu Yu lowered his voice. “Two hundred years ago, my brothers and I drowned in the river while suppressing evil ghosts. Our bodies sank to the bottom. A kindhearted fisherman pulled my corpse from the water and buried me, and I never forgot the debt I owed him. More than twenty years ago, I finally found his reincarnation and wanted to repay him.”
Ji Luo’s feelings were complicated. “I was that fisherman?”
“No.” Lu Yu’s voice dropped even lower. “Ji Chen was.”
Ji Luo nearly choked on his own breath. Too furious to speak, he grabbed the teapot from the table and hurled it at Lu Yu, then paced once around the room, trembling.
“Bastard.” His face was ashen, and even his eyes had reddened with anger as he pointed at Lu Yu. “If Ji Chen buried you, then go repay him! Why drag me into this? You bastard.”
Lu Yu did not get angry even after being struck. He hurriedly caught Ji Luo’s hand. “Listen to me. At first, I mistook someone else for him. I thought it was the real Lu Yu, but that child slipped and fell into the water. I couldn’t save him. His body was still warm, so a wicked thought occurred to me and I used his corpse to return to life. I planned to leave once I found my benefactor and repaid him, but… being human again felt so good that I kept putting it off.”
“So you joined forces with Ji Chen to harm me?!” Ji Luo wanted nothing more than to slap him.
“No!” Lu Yu said aggrievedly. “Ji Chen had a hard life in the residence. I originally just wanted to give him some silver, but he was terribly jealous of you and kept making wishes to me. I was determined to repay the debt, so I deliberately approached you, thinking that if I killed you, he would become Ji Xin’s only son. But you were far too kind. Whenever you had something good, you always thought of me, and I could never bring myself to do it.”
Ji Luo sneered. “What, am I supposed to thank you for sparing my life?”
Lu Yu did not dare meet his eyes. “At first, I only thought you were a very good person. As we grew older, I liked you more and more. Life in the underworld was unbearably hard, and I wanted you to come down and keep me company. This body happened to have only a few years left anyway, so I tempted you into eloping with me. The truth is… I wanted to bring you down here.”
Ji Luo’s expression darkened. “So what would have happened if I had gone to the river that day?”
Lu Yu said quietly, “I planned to drown you, then make it look like we had died together for love.”
Ji Luo laughed through clenched teeth. “Today I’ve finally learned what it means to be a heartless ingrate. Tell me, was the reason I failed to become top scholar because of you and Ji Chen?”
“Yes.” Lu Yu pressed his lips together. “If you became top scholar, the purple qi of official fortune would protect you, and I would never be able to approach you again. Ji Chen was greedy beyond measure and made wishes to me every day, so I arranged to swap your fortune with his. You failed the examination, and he passed as a jinshi.”
“I’ll kill you!” Ji Luo shot to his feet, grabbed the Clear Breeze Sword from the table, and hacked at him.
But Lu Yu was a fierce ghost and a dead soul, while Ji Luo had no spiritual power. The Clear Breeze Sword was useless against him. Lu Yu lowered his head guiltily. “I’m sorry.”
“What use is sorry?” Ji Luo raged. “If Daoist Yue and Young Master Xiao hadn’t exposed everything, you were still planning to keep me in the dark! What did I ever do to deserve this? What right did you have to ruin my whole life for Ji Chen?!”
“It wasn’t for Ji Chen.” Lu Yu raised his head and stared at him. “Everything I did, from beginning to end, was because I wanted to be with you.”
Ji Luo felt as though all the strength had been drained from his body. He gave a self-mocking laugh. “Do you really think you and I can still be together now?”
Lu Yu said, “As long as you’re willing to stay, I’ll do anything you ask.”
“Fine. Then go kill Ji Chen, and have your soul scattered along with his,” Ji Luo said expressionlessly.
Lu Yu sprang up in anger. “There has never been anything between him and me! When I was pretending to be Lu Yu, I barely even spoke to him! I always appeared in his dreams in the form of an old man and listened to his wishes that way!”
“Hah. What if he likes old men?” Ji Luo scoffed. “You still hurt me because you wanted to repay him.”
“Why can’t you understand? This has nothing to do with whether I wanted to repay him! I first approached you because of that debt, because you were the person he envied most. But once I fell in love with you, it had nothing to do with him anymore. Even if I’d never owed him anything, I still would have killed you and brought you down here to stay with me!” Lu Yu said with passionate sincerity.
“What in the world do I owe you that you insist on killing me?” Ji Luo asked, baffled.
“I like you.” Lu Yu’s eyes reddened. “I’ve been a fierce ghost for so many years, and you’re the only one who ever treated me well. I want to be with you forever.”
“Ji Chen only fished your corpse out and buried you in his previous life, and you gave him this and that. I treated you well, so why didn’t you give me gold and silver, help me become top scholar, and fill my courtyard with handsome men and pretty women?” Ji Luo demanded resentfully.
“What about me?” Lu Yu said unwillingly. “You get to live a good life, but I can’t reincarnate, life after life. You expect me to stand by and watch you be with someone else? I can’t do it. I want to kill everyone around you!”
“I must have committed every evil imaginable in my last life and been the one who sank you in the river, so now you’ve come back to take revenge on me.” Ji Luo shoved him away. “Get out!”
Lu Yu said, “This is my house!”
Ji Luo turned toward the other two. “Daoist Yue, Young Master Xiao, let’s go. He’s a lunatic ghost!”
Yue Jingming rose with his sword in hand and looked at Lu Yu. “Young Master Lu, everyone has their own fate. It cannot be forced. You and Ji Luo belong to different worlds, one human and one ghost. If you cultivate properly, you will have a path of your own. Let this end here.”
After saying that, he glanced at Xiao Chunhe and walked out.
Xiao Chunhe closed his fan. Before leaving, he turned to look at Lu Yu standing in the middle of the room. The tall fierce ghost’s figure was half-hidden in the darkness, ghost qi curling around him.
Xiao Chunhe stopped and warned in a low voice, “Don’t push your luck.”
“Chunhe.” Yue Jingming’s voice came from outside the door.
Xiao Chunhe’s tone changed instantly. “Coming!”
The fierce ghost inside the room gave a soft laugh and vanished without a trace.
* * *
“You finally came back.” Liang Yun leaned weakly against the ghost gate, his soul itself looking pale. “This is too much… really too much. All of you have spiritual power, and yet you made me, an ordinary mortal, deal with the strongest monsters here… I’m going to complain about all of you to the King of Hell.”
“You’ve worked hard, Brother Liang.” Yue Jingming helped him up and let Liang Yun lean against his shoulder.
“Hehe.” Liang Yun turned his head and stared eerily at Xiao Chunhe. “Don’t you stand there doing nothing.”
Xiao Chunhe spread his hands, then took Liang Yun’s other side with Yue Jingming. Together they supported him and bundled up Ji Luo, whose soul was nearly dissipating, before floating out through the ghost gate.
…
Splash.
Several people surfaced from the water one after another and swam to shore.
Ye Shijiu hauled Liang Yun up and patted his back with concern. “You all right?”
Liang Yun grabbed his cheeks and said sinisterly, “Stinking Little Ye, if you dare shove me out to do the work again, you’ll be my grandson.”
Ye Shijiu smiled with an innocent, obedient expression.
Ji Chen and Ji Luo were tossed onto the rocky bank. Yue Jingming frowned.
“What is it?” Xiao Chunhe formed a hand seal to dry both his and Yue Jingming’s clothes, then his expression changed. “Are you hurt?”
Yue Jingming shook his head. “My meridians are fine. There’s only some discomfort around my dantian. It’s nothing.”
“What kind of discomfort? Let me see.” Xiao Chunhe reached for his belt.
“Chunhe.” Yue Jingming caught his hand and said helplessly, “It’s only an external wound. Shijiu arrived in time. Ji Chen didn’t succeed.”
“I still need to see it.” Xiao Chunhe was anxious. “Who exactly was that woman in red Ji Chen mentioned? You have golden light protecting you, and she still managed to injure you.”
Yue Jingming cleared his throat. “This isn’t the place.”
Xiao Chunhe paused. “Then let me feel it.”
Yue Jingming still refused. “It would be improper. I really am fine.”
Xiao Chunhe stared at him in disbelief. “And when you kiss and hug me, that’s proper?”
Yue Jingming fell silent for a moment, then turned and walked away.
“Hey, Yue Jingming!” Xiao Chunhe hurried after him. “I’m not trying to take advantage of you. I’m seriously worried…”
After everything that had happened, the group could only return to the city for the time being. Going back to the Ji residence in their current state would clearly be inappropriate, so Liang Yun used his connections to arrange lodging at a few inns, where they settled the bound Ji Chen and the unconscious Ji Luo.
When Ji Chen woke, he saw Ji Luo standing by the window with a deathly pale face and nearly rolled off the bed in fright.
Ji Luo looked at him coldly. “Ji Chen, tell me the truth. Back then, when Lu Yu and I agreed to elope, were you the one who told Father?”
Ji Chen’s eyes darted away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ji Luo held a knife to his throat. “You’d better tell the truth, or I’ll send you down there myself.”
Ji Chen’s expression changed slightly. He gritted his teeth. “So what if I did? I did it for your sake.”
Ji Luo sneered. “For my sake?”
“That Lu Yu was deeply sinister. He wanted to kill you!” Ji Chen said. “When the two of us went to the capital for the examinations, he suddenly gave me a set of clothes. I barely knew him, but after I put them on my mind grew foggy and I couldn’t write a decent essay at all. And his behavior had always been strange. He was forever slipping out to the charity mortuary in the middle of the night. I suspected long ago that he was plotting something…”
“You couldn’t write a decent essay in the first place, and you blame the clothes? I’m the one who should be blaming them.” Ji Luo said bitterly, “I could have become top scholar, but you stole my fortune and made me fail!”
Ji Chen frowned. “Elder Brother, I swear to Heaven I never stole your fortune. I… I was only worried about you…”
As he spoke, a splitting headache suddenly struck him, but he forced himself to continue. “That Lu Yu deceived you. He wanted to kill you.”
Ji Luo looked at him with complicated emotions. “Forget it. You’ve gotten what you wanted now. From this day forward, I don’t want to see you again.”
Ji Luo left the room in a daze.
Ji Chen pressed a hand to his temple, looking confused. He felt that he must have forgotten something extremely important, yet no matter what he did, he could not remember it.
Before long, Xiao Chunhe and Yue Jingming came to question him again, but Ji Chen could no longer remember what the woman looked like, much less what she had told him to do.
Xiao Chunhe walked over, rubbed a finger across Ji Chen’s collar, then brought it to his nose and sniffed. He turned to Yue Jingming. “Charm incense.”
Yue Jingming asked, “Red-fox charm incense?”
“The red-fox clan’s incense isn’t powerful enough to do this.” Xiao Chunhe rubbed his fingertips together. “It was a charm demon.”
Yue Jingming already had an answer in mind. “Feng Qingying?”
“That charm demon still refuses to give up.” Xiao Chunhe flicked his hand in disgust.
Yue Jingming handed him a handkerchief. Xiao Chunhe wiped his hand, then tucked the cloth into his own robe as naturally as could be.
After leaving the room, Yue Jingming looked down at the lively crowd in the inn’s main hall and said quietly, “Something feels wrong.”
“I think this whole thing is off too.” Xiao Chunhe rested his arms on the railing. “That Lu Yu doesn’t seem like the type to let matters end so easily. Would he really just watch us take Ji Luo away? And Ji Chen and Ji Luo… tch, I can’t put my finger on what feels wrong.”
For some reason, he felt unusually uneasy.
“No. I need to take a proper look at your wound.” Xiao Chunhe suppressed his restlessness, grabbed Yue Jingming’s hand, and forcibly dragged him into the room.
The room was still humid with steam from a recent bath. Xiao Chunhe yanked Yue Jingming’s belt loose, and Yue Jingming hurriedly caught his hand. “This is improper.”
Xiao Chunhe narrowed his eyes unhappily. “I accepted your love poem. How is it improper? I count as your fiancé now.”
Yue Jingming froze. “We haven’t even completed the betrothal rites. How can that count?”
“Tch. I say it counts, so it counts!” Xiao Chunhe tugged his robe down and immediately reached for the wound.
Yue Jingming had undressed in front of him before, but Xiao Chunhe had been a fox then. Now there was a living, breathing man standing before him, and he felt deeply embarrassed. “Xiao Chunhe.”
Knowing Yue Jingming would not truly strike him, Xiao Chunhe wrapped his fingertips in demonic qi and carefully felt along the knife wound. It was extremely shallow, barely bleeding and nowhere near a serious injury. Still uneasy, he checked Yue Jingming’s meridians as well. Only after confirming that nothing was wrong did he finally release him.
“…” Yue Jingming lowered his eyes and hurriedly retied his belt. “Nonsense.”
Xiao Chunhe leaned lazily against the wall, lifted his fingers to his nose, and sniffed them. Smiling, he said, “You switched back to the soap-pod cleanser you used before? Did your junior brother send it to you? Give me a piece.”
Yue Jingming’s expression showed faint anger. “If you keep behaving like this, I—”
Xiao Chunhe wrapped an arm around his waist and kissed him, blocking the rest of his words in his throat.
Yue Jingming pushed him away, but the fox demon caught his hand and slipped it beneath his own clothes, placing it over his dantian.
The skin beneath Yue Jingming’s fingertips was cold and smooth. He froze completely. Xiao Chunhe then took the same hand and guided it, unobstructed, around to his lower back. In a low voice, he said, “Dear Jingming, I’ll let you touch me too. Don’t be angry.”
Yue Jingming’s breathing immediately faltered. The fox demon only grew bolder, leaning bonelessly against him while placing his other hand on Yue Jingming’s back. His fingertips traced slowly downward along the hollow beside Yue Jingming’s spine.
Yue Jingming instinctively held his breath, jaw taut as he closed a hand around Xiao Chunhe’s wrist.
Xiao Chunhe curved his lips in a smile. His half-dry hair lay messily across his collar, and the red mole between his collarbones rose and fell lightly with his breathing before disappearing beneath his hair again as he moved.
“You…” Yue Jingming instinctively wanted to turn his head away, but did not. “When you forcibly changed back into your demon form down there, did it bring that gu parasite out again?”
Feeling the strength in Yue Jingming’s hand loosen, Xiao Chunhe took advantage at once, becoming even more unrestrained as he ran his fingers over the bones of Yue Jingming’s back. His shoulder blades felt very good too. Xiao Chunhe smiled carelessly. “I’m not even stirred. Why would it come out?”
Yue Jingming said in a low voice, “It seems able to make your demon form stronger. Those black tendons were brought out by it.”
At that, Xiao Chunhe pressed his entire body against him. “I can control it. Hold me for a while. Just a little while.”
The fox demon was icy cold, weak yet utterly dependent as he leaned against him. Yue Jingming lowered his eyes, wrapped one hand directly around Xiao Chunhe’s bare waist, and tightened the other at the back of his neck, holding him firmly in his arms.
Xiao Chunhe buried his face in the hollow of Yue Jingming’s neck and lightly traced the old scars across his waist and abdomen. He sighed. “Kiss me.”
Yue Jingming seemed about to push him away, but the person in his arms was frighteningly cold. After a moment of silence, he asked, “Kiss… where?”
“Anywhere.” Xiao Chunhe closed his eyes. “Back on Zixu Mountain, whenever the other little foxes were hurt, other foxes would lick their wounds for them. I used to hide in the grass and watch, terribly envious. Later, when I got hurt too, I wandered in front of them hoping they would do the same, but they took the chance to bite me instead. Luckily, my fur was thick.”
Yue Jingming pressed his lips together, lifted Xiao Chunhe’s hair aside, and lowered his head to place a light kiss on his neck. The rich fragrance made him instinctively hold his breath. Xiao Chunhe laughed. “Good Daoist, are you trying to tickle me?”
Yue Jingming’s expression tightened. He lowered his head further and, awkwardly yet restrainedly, gave the spot he had just kissed a light lick. His voice had grown a little hoarse. “Like this?”
Xiao Chunhe’s breath caught. He immediately bit hard into Yue Jingming’s shoulder.
Yue Jingming winced and released him at once, grave confusion in his eyes.
“Heavens.” Xiao Chunhe drew a deep breath and covered his burning face. “I really am going to die. Hurry and get out.”
Yue Jingming frowned. “No. The gu parasite is acting up badly right now. I’ll stay and watch over you.”
Xiao Chunhe tugged at the hem of his clothes and sighed. “If you want to watch, fine. If you want to help, even better. I’m only afraid you’ll lose your temper with me again.”
“What?” Yue Jingming looked down, suddenly understood what he meant, and froze on the spot.
Resigned, Xiao Chunhe rubbed a hand over his face, then pushed Yue Jingming by the shoulders toward the door. “Go, go. Don’t hold me up.”
The door shut abruptly behind him.
Yue Jingming stood stiffly in the corridor. The room was one the restaurant had temporarily converted into guest lodging. People passed along the long hallway from time to time. Across the railing, he could see guests drinking and talking downstairs as well as pedestrians strolling along the street. He turned, pasted a barrier talisman onto the door, then awkwardly turned his back to it and stared blankly at the crowd below.
And yet a faint fragrance still slipped through the crack beneath the door. It resembled charm incense, yet was different, more like the light scent in Xiao Chunhe’s hair, or the warm fragrance of the delicate skin at his neck… The talisman blocked every sound from inside the room, but the fox demon’s soft sighs and low laughter still seemed to echo beside his ear.
Before his eyes rose the rough, sudden kiss at the cliff when life and death had hung in the balance; the morning after the storm, when Xiao Chunhe had leaned against the bed and smiled at him with soul-stealing allure; the two of them beneath the tree, necks entwined and lost in passion; and the warm, faintly trembling body in his arms just now, filled with complete dependence—
Yue Jingming suddenly squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. The metallic sweetness in his throat rose together with the surge of feeling in his chest.
On the other side of the door, Xiao Chunhe leaned against the panel, breathing in the familiar pinewood scent so close by. Pleasure and pain followed him like shadows, but that person’s scent remained beside him throughout. He sighed helplessly. “Ancestor, why are you standing outside instead of leaving? You’re killing me.”
Desire and composure remained tangled together, threaded through with a faint scent of blood and a rich, heady fragrance. The barrier talisman separated the inside of the room from the outside.
The young Daoist could not hear his soft sighs or panting. From beginning to end, he remained outside the door without taking a single step away.