Chapter Text
Cang Jiumin knows he should be unleashing the God-Killing Crossbow on humanity by now, but he lingers for a moment. Here is Li Susu, veiled and adorned in wedding finery to match him. All the forces of the demon god are assembled to wait on them, and all the remaining cultivators’ sects are transfixed–with horror, perhaps, but still, transfixed–as they are married. As the events of the day have progressed he’s marked the stiffness of Li Susu’s figure as she blankly follows the motions of the ceremony. As she gathers herself to expend all her resources for a battle to the death.
The moment is here, in danger of passing by. He steels himself.
And then Li Susu’s hand trembles. For a moment he loses all self-control. He raises an illusory curtain of flames around the two of them, sheltering them from the eyes of the masses. Desperately, he pulls her into his arms. He’d wanted to comfort her, protect her from the horror unfolding before her and the sting of his betrayal, but he realizes that he is the one clinging to her, weeping like he never wept as a child. She has already lost so much that she’d once recovered, and now he’s about to do the one thing he’d promised never to do.
He wants to go back and linger in the memory capsule, wants to find safety and warmth and love in her again. Eclipsed by his anticipation of today, it seemed impossibly small.
He’d expected her to attack him–he hadn’t cared–but the moment he touches her she can read his every intention.Then her arms cling to him just as tightly as his around her, and then she is kissing him. Her face is wet with tears that could be her own or could be his. “I knew you were lying, I knew it,” she murmurs, and she kisses him again, and again, and again. He gives in to relief.
Just another moment here, he thinks. Just a little longer before he accepts his fate. He is willing to die to save his fellow cultivators and a world of innocent mortals. He is more than willing–some ruined part of him perhaps even eager–to die at Li Susu’s hand. But oh, how long he has craved this warmth. How he feared he might never know it again before he died. How it has distressed him most of all, to think that its memory would be erased, when he is gone and Li Susu no longer feels any love but the generous love she has for all beings.
“The Way of All-In-Distress is tied to my life and death,” he confesses. “It can’t be destroyed unless I die. And unless the Way of All-In-Distress is destroyed very soon, countless people will die.” Li Susu clings to him even tighter, not seeming to care that the elaborate fixtures of the Demon God’s robes dig into her skin.
“What a fool you are, Cang Jiumin,” she says as the pieces come together, and she presses her face against his chest, like she’s trying to hide that she’s crying even though he can hear it in her broken voice.
“Just a little longer,” he begs, “Please, just give me a little longer. I waited so long for you. I’m not ready yet.” And she kisses him again, hard, like she wants to hurt him or wants to hurt herself.
“Don’t you know to keep yourself alive? Didn’t you always value your life above all else?!” Angry now, angrier than when she was trying to kill him. She’s talking nonsense; she knows just as well as he does that they’ve reached a point where their options are exhausted. She’s already caressing him again, touching his hair, mapping the features of his face with her fingers.
“You shouldn’t forgive me,” he says, suddenly afraid. He’s lost his progress at breaking her trust. Li Susu is an apt judge of character. She won’t be swayed by an easy lie again. Time for the last resort, the one with a seed of truth. “My illusion will break within a few moments. I won’t be able to resist–him–after that. The Cang Jiumin that you knew will be dead by then.” Maybe if she thought of him as having died she could let him go.
“Why won’t you let us face this together?” she asks. “Did you think this could stop me from dying with you?”
Yes, he thinks hysterically, facing the obvious solution she is still refusing to even acknowledge. Yes, if he were strong enough to press her a little further. “You’re a Phoenix,” he says. “You have the greatest potential of any living person to ascend. Only you can use your divine power to defeat the Demon God.”
“I can’t ascend.” She looks him in the eye as she admits, “I have strings of attachment that I can’t break.”
“You must break them!” he says, though he knows he himself would be incapable of it. “This is the only way forward. We’ve run out of options–” His flame illusion begins to thin out into smoke. “We’ve run out of time.”
“Time,” Li Susu says. She looks thoughtful. “If only we had more time.” She moves as if to reach into some fold of her robe. Something falls and shatters.
His illusion dissolves. Things happen quickly after that.
Li Susu tries to maintain her dignity as Chuntao leads her through the household. Chuntao fills in her awkward responses to servants and family members, whispering names and context to her when there’s a spare moment. The servants treat her with respectful fear, but Li Susu sometimes thinks she sees a hint of contempt on some otherwise pleasant faces. Ye Xiwu has lived a very privileged existence, and she has not lived it kindly. She thinks she might voice similar contempt for Ye Xiwu herself, were it not for the specific circumstances of her mission.
“By the way, Chuntao,” she ventures after a few disorienting hours, “Have you ever heard of a person named Tantai Jin?” She makes an effort to sound nonchalant.
Chuntao’s eyes widen with disbelief. “Xiaojie, you must’ve hit your head harder than I thought. Lao-furen is going to be furious with me!” When Li Susu blinks in confusion Chuntao sighs. “Tantai Jin is your husband, xiaojie.”
Well, that is surprising news. Li Susu tries to take it in stride. So the Demon God is in close proximity. That’s perfect for her mission to extract his bone of evil and kill him. Maybe after all the effort to get her here, it will all go very quickly. She will succeed or she will be dead, maybe passed to a future life with a better chance at peace. One’s life is all anyone can be expected to give. She’s already giving more than that, she tells herself.
“Xiaojie?” Chuntao looks at her quizzically. She’s distracted herself. Li Susu–no, perhaps she should try to think of herself as Ye Xiwu–Ye Xiwu clears her throat.
“Then, do you know if Tantai Jin has any weaknesses? Are there any people he particularly fears?” She doubts it.
“But of course! Who could he fear more than you, xiaojie?”
Cang Jiumin has faced the wrath of all righteous people. He has had his character slandered. He has thrown away his painstaking progress on the slow road toward being humane and capable of being loved. He has sacrificed his reputation. He has even sacrificed his own hard-won good character. Separated himself from the camaraderie of his shixiongdi. Struck terror into the woman he loves. Killed his shifu–
And even before the latest time it all went wrong, Tantai Jin has lived an existence characterized by suffering. Near-starvation since infancy. Lashes across his back. The gouging of his eye. Six nails piercing his heart. He has an intimate familiarity with death, not only from its gloom that covered his childhood and youth, but from years spent overreaching into the underworld, letting his flesh be eaten away by the ghastly waters in hope of a touch, a glimpse, a shadow of her –
So when he wakes, he is more surprised than pained by the biting cold. He pulls his eyelids open with some effort, finding that his lashes have frozen together. He takes in his surroundings. He is kneeling on ice. That explains the cold, then. Across the courtyard, a servant hurries by with an armload of firewood. Inexplicably, he’s back at the Ye Manor, long destroyed with most of Sheng’s old architecture.
He’s kneeling on the frozen pond, where Ye Xiwu once punished him to kneel for three days after he tried to save the wrong sister from drowning. Then, he’d thought the ordeal might finally be the thing to kill him, and the unfairness of it had stung. Kneeling on the same ice again, he’s brought back to his past frame of mind: revenge. Revenge on the whole Ye family. Revenge on Ye Xiwu.
Cang Jiumin breathes out a grateful little laugh. Somehow he’s found himself back in another capsule of cherished memories. This is the first morning that warmth came into his lonely, miserable life. This is the morning that Li Susu transmigrates into Ye Xiwu, the first time she ever looks at him with kindness. He shivers, with cold but also with excitement, anticipating the moment. Let her hate him, let her fear him. Let him relive every wretched moment, if it gives him more time to savor her presence.
And there she is, coming around the corner with Chuntao. She is wrapped up in furs but her cheeks are still pink with cold. He tears his eyes away just as she approaches him. She is here, so near he can reach out and touch her.
How silly this is, after all. She puts on her sternest tones for him, pulls his head like a doll’s to face her. He wonders how malleable this dreamscape is, how much he can change past events and act out what events might have gone differently. When she tells him to make a cruel expression, like he wants to kill her, he finds himself smiling instead. He knows how to wear cruelty like a mask. But he’s tired of speaking hatred to the ones he loves. He’s in love, this morning, and he’s too full of fondness to hold it back.
His wide, awkward smile doesn’t appear to be the reaction Li Susu was dreading, but she seems unnerved by it nonetheless. She pulls back her hand and turns to leave. He’s going to be alone again, kneeling for hours.
“Er-xiaojie,” he says. Li Susu freezes. He knows he’d have no chance at mercy from the former er-xiaojie he originally married, but he knows Li Susu better by now. She has a broad mind and a compassionate heart, and he wants to wheedle his way into it sooner if he can. Seeing her again in Ye Xiwu’s form, he’s filled with nostalgia for the way she used to taunt and torment him with her barbed words. Perhaps this time around, he can give her a taste of her own medicine.
“The weather is very cold and I’m not wearing an outer coat. If I stay out here for much longer, I’m afraid I’ll freeze to death,” he says innocently. He tries to blink the way she often does, when she wants to look pitiful.
“If you were comfortable, it would go against the point of a punishment,” she says uncertainly. His wife’s face scrunches up. “You should do some self-reflection.” But she unclasps her cloak. “Forget it. I’m tired of this old thing anyway. I guess it doesn’t matter where I throw it now,” she says as she leaves it.
Tantai Jin holds the cloak with some reverence before he puts it on. Her first act of kindness to him, back when she knew nothing of him but that he would grow into someone cruel and that he was miserable now. How much more of that kindness might he have enjoyed if he had never given her a reason to doubt him? Could he have basked in it forever, been kept by her for a lifetime? In this dream he has her cloak a little sooner than he’d had it before. What else could he change, if only in this pocket of his mind?