The Reckless One, Part Two

Wei Wuxian had no sooner opened his eyes than someone kicked him.

A thunderclap of a voice burst beside his ear: 'Quit playing dead!'

That kick to the chest left him near to bringing up blood; the back of his head struck the ground, face turned to the sky, and through the haze he thought: bold of you, to kick this old patriarch.

It had been more years than he could count since Wei Wuxian last heard a living person speak, let alone curse him this loudly; dizzy and bleary-eyed, with a young man's quacking-drake voice droning through the ringing in his ears: 'Don't you ever think about it — whose land you're living on now, whose rice you're eating, whose money you're spending! What's wrong with me taking a few of your things? They should all have been mine to begin with!'

Hard on its heels came the clang and crash of chests overturned and floor and ceiling battered, all around him. It was a long moment before Wei Wuxian's eyes gradually cleared, and into his sight floated a dim rafter, beneath which a face — brows slanting down, the whites of the eyes a sickly green — hung above him, spitting as it shouted: 'You still dare go and tell on me! You think I'm actually afraid you'll report it, you think there's truly anyone in this house who'll take your side?'

Two burly men in the manner of household servants crowded over to one side. 'Young master, we've smashed it all!'

The drake-voiced youth said, 'How are you done so fast?'

A servant said, 'This shabby room — there wasn't much in it to begin with.'

The drake-voiced youth was thoroughly satisfied. He rounded on Wei Wuxian, his forefinger all but jabbing the man's nose back into his skull: 'Brave enough to go tattling, and now you're playing dead for whose benefit? As if anyone wants this scrap-metal junk and waste paper of yours — I've smashed every bit of it clean, let's see what you tell on me with from now on! Spent a few years with the Cultivation Clans and you think you're something? Still got driven back home like a stray cur!'

Half-dead, Wei Wuxian turned it over in his mind:

This person has been dead and gone for years. It really isn't an act.

Who is this?

Where is this??

When had he ever gone and done a thing like Body Possession???

Having kicked the man and smashed the room, his temper amply vented, the drake-voiced youth swept out the door with his two servants in tow, slammed it, and barked: 'Watch him close — don't let him out to disgrace us!'

The servants outside answered yes, yes, in chorus. Once they had gone far off and both inside and out had fallen quiet, Wei Wuxian thought to sit up, but his limbs would not obey, and he sank back down again. He could only roll over, taking in the unfamiliar surroundings and the wreckage strewn across the floor, still reeling and dizzy.

Nearby lay a bronze mirror that had been flung to the ground; Wei Wuxian reached over and took it for a look. A face of startling whiteness appeared in the glass, two blotches of crimson sitting unevenly and unsymmetrically on the cheeks, one to the left and one to the right — give it a long red tongue to loll out and it would be, to the life, a hanged ghost.

Finding it rather hard to accept, Wei Wuxian threw the mirror aside and swiped at his face, coming away with a handful of white powder.

Mercifully, this body was not by nature oddly featured — only oddly in its tastes. A grown man, of all things, with his whole face daubed in rouge and powder, and the crux of it was that he had daubed it on so very ugly.

The fright had jolted a little strength back into him, and he managed at last to sit upright; only then did he notice that beneath him lay a ring-shaped curse array. The ring was a livid scarlet, the circle irregular, seemingly drawn by hand with blood for ink, still damp and giving off a rank smell, the array filled with twisting, frenzied glyphs, a few of them smeared away by his own body, the figures and characters that remained breathing an eerie chill through their malice. After being called, for so many years, the Supreme Sinister Lord, the Founder of Demonic Cultivation, and the like, an array so plainly up to no good was naturally something Wei Wuxian knew inside and out.

He had not seized another's body — he had had a body offered to him!

At its heart, 'offering the body' is a kind of curse: the caster who sets the array mutilates himself with a cruel implement, cuts wounds into his own flesh, draws the array and the incantations with his own blood, and sits at the center of the ring; offering his body to a malevolent spirit and his Soul to the earth as the price, he summons a Fierce Ghost or evil deity steeped in the worst of crimes, praying for it to take possession of him and fulfill his wish. This is the exact opposite of Body Possession. Both are forbidden arts of ill repute, only the latter is neither so practical nor so popular as the former — for few wishes burn fierce enough to make a living person give up all that is his willingly, and so it was seldom practiced, and over a century had all but passed from memory. Of the cases recorded in old books, no more than three or four across a thousand years could be verified, and the wish of each of those three or four was, without exception, vengeance; the Fierce Ghosts they summoned all fulfilled those wishes flawlessly, in ways cruel and bloody.

Wei Wuxian was not having it.

How had he gotten lumped in with the 'Fierce Ghosts and evil deities steeped in the worst of crimes'?

His name might be on the poorer side, his manner of death exceedingly grim, but he never haunted anyone, never took revenge; he'd swear that, search heaven and earth, you'd never find a more law-abiding, well-behaved lonely wandering ghost than him!

The thorny part, though, was that the offering puts the caster's will first; however much he objected — he was already in, already possessing the body, and by that the contract was deemed sealed between the two of them, and he must fulfill the caster's wish, or else the curse would turn back on him, the one who had taken possession would be annihilated, spirit and soul, never again to be reborn.

Wei Wuxian pulled open his robe-ties and raised his hands to look, and sure enough, both his wrists were crosshatched with several savage scars where a sharp blade had run. The blood from the wounds had already stopped, yet Wei Wuxian knew well these were no ordinary cuts: if he did not fulfill the body's owner's wish, these wounds could not close. The longer it dragged on the worse they would grow, and past the appointed term they would tear him — the one who had received this body — body and soul, alive, to pieces.

Having confirmed it beyond all doubt, Wei Wuxian said 'The very idea!' ten times over in his heart, and finally, bracing against the wall, forced himself to his feet.

The room was large enough, but barren and threadbare; the bedding and quilt, unwashed for who knew how many days, gave off a smell of mildew. In one corner stood a bamboo basket, meant for tossing away refuse, just now kicked over, its filth and waste paper rolling out across the floor. Wei Wuxian, seeing what looked like ink-marks on the paper wads, picked one up offhand and unfolded it — and sure enough, it was crammed end to end with writing. He hurriedly gathered up every wad of paper on the floor.

The writing on these pages must be what the body's owner had set down to vent in his hours of misery. Some passages were incoherent and disordered, the anxiety and dread leaping off the page through the distorted hand. Wei Wuxian read them through, sheet by sheet, with what patience he could muster, and the more he read the more wrong it all felt.

Half by guess and half by inference, he roughly pieced a few things together. First: the owner of this body was named Mo Xuanyu, and this place was called Mo Village.

Mo Xuanyu's maternal grandfather was a local man of means, his clan thin of kin and fated to have no son, so that for all his diligent years of toil he was granted only two daughters. The names of the two girls are never mentioned; suffice it to say that the elder, born of the principal wife, took in a husband who married into the household, while the second, though striking in looks, was the child of a family servant, and so the Mo Family had at first meant to marry her off any old way — Suibian, to whoever would have her. Who could have guessed she had a stranger fortune in store: at sixteen, a certain great clan head passing through the region fell for her at first sight, and the two made Mo Village their place of secret meeting, until a year later Second Madam Mo gave birth to a son, and that son was Mo Xuanyu.

The people of Mo Village had at first found such an affair rather beneath contempt; but the age revered immortals, and the Mystic Sect Clans who sought the Dao and cultivated immortality were, in the eyes of the world, favored of heaven, mysterious and exalted — and as that great clan head now and again lent a helping hand to the household kept outside, the wind shifted right around. Not only did the Mo Family take pride in it, others envied them no end.

The fair days did not last long. That clan head, having poached a wild morsel for the novelty of it, tired of the dish before he had eaten of it two years, and came less and less often. After Mo Xuanyu turned four, he never came again.

Over those years the talk in Mo Village turned again; the old contempt and mockery came back, and to it was added a disdainful sort of pity. Second Madam Mo, though she chafed, held firm to the belief that the great clan head would not simply ignore his own flesh and blood. And sure enough, when Mo Xuanyu reached fourteen, that clan head sent a host of people to bear the youth solemnly away.

Second Madam Mo lifted her head high once more; though she could not go with him, she swept off all her earlier grievance, vindicated at last, and to everyone she met she proudly proclaimed that her son would one day become Chief Cultivator, rise meteorically, and bring glory to his line. And so the people of Mo Village fell to gossiping a third time, their tune changed once again.

Yet before Mo Xuanyu could come to anything in cultivation, before he could inherit his father's estate, he was driven back home.

And driven back in the most disgraceful manner. For Mo Xuanyu favored cut-sleeve love, and had been brazen enough to harass and pester a fellow disciple; the scandal was laid bare before everyone, and with that, on top of his middling gifts and his failure to achieve anything in cultivation, there was no longer any reason to keep him in the clan.

To make matters worse, Mo Xuanyu — who knew what shock he had suffered — came back quite out of his wits, good one moment and gone the next, as though he had been frightened simple.

Reading this far, Wei Wuxian's brow twitched twice.

A cut-sleeve, fine — but a madman too. No wonder his whole face was daubed up into an old hanged-ghost; no wonder no one had thought a thing amiss just now at the great bloody array sprawled across the floor. Even if Mo Xuanyu had painted the entire room in blood, floor-tiles to walls to roof, others would not so much as blink — for everyone knew his mind was sick!

After Mo Xuanyu returned to his old home, the mockery came down like a flood, and this time there seemed no room left to turn it around. Second Madam Mo could not bear the blow; a knot of bitter rage lodged in her chest with no way out, and she choked on it until she died.

By then Mo Xuanyu's grandfather had passed, and Madam Mo held the household. This Madam Mo had, most likely, been unable to stomach her younger sister since childhood, and for her sister's bastard son she had nothing but cold looks of every kind. She had a single precious shoot of her own — the very one who had come storming in to plunder just now — named Mo Ziyuan. When Mo Xuanyu was borne away in such splendor, Madam Mo reckoned that this counted, somehow, as a thread of kinship with the immortals, and looked to have the cultivation emissaries who came for him take Mo Ziyuan along to cultivate too. She was refused, of course — or rather, ignored.

Naturally. This was hardly selling cabbages, where you could haggle and get one free with a purchase!

There was no telling where this family came by their confidence, but they all shared one strange notion, firmly convinced that Mo Ziyuan surely possessed immortal bones and inborn talent — that had it been he who went off in the first place, he would certainly have won the favor of the immortal house and never proved as worthless as his cousin. When Mo Xuanyu left, Mo Ziyuan was still young, yet having had such groundless ideas drummed into him over and over since childhood, he believed them utterly, and every other day he would corner Mo Xuanyu for a round of humiliation, cursing him for having stolen his own road to immortality, even as he could not bear to part with the Paper Talisman, the pills, and the little ritual implements his cousin had brought back from the cultivation gate, treating them all as goods in his own pocket, taking what he pleased and breaking apart what he pleased. Though Mo Xuanyu's mind was often troubled, he knew well enough that he was being wronged, and he bore it and bore it again — yet Mo Ziyuan only grew bolder, until he had all but emptied the whole of his room. At last, pushed past all endurance, Mo Xuanyu stammered out a complaint before his aunt and uncle. And so, today, Mo Ziyuan had come to make a scene at the door.

The writing on the pages was small and dense, and Wei Wuxian's eyeballs ached at it; what the hell of a life is this, he thought. No wonder Mo Xuanyu would sooner offer up his own body than fail to call a Fierce Ghost or evil deity to take possession of him and avenge him.

His aching eyes gave way to an aching head. By rights, when the array was set the caster was to recite his wish in his heart, and as the malevolent spirit summoned, Wei Wuxian ought to be able to hear his demands in full. But this forbidden art was likely some fragmentary copy Mo Xuanyu had filched and transcribed from somewhere, learned only in part, with this step left out. Though Wei Wuxian had guessed he probably meant to take revenge on the Mo Family, just how was the revenge to be done? To what extent? Snatch back the things that had been taken? Beat the Mo Family bloody?

Or… wipe out the whole house?

Wiping out the whole house, most likely! After all, anyone who'd ever passed through the cultivation world would know which words got used most in judging Wei Wuxian: ungrateful, deranged — and was there anyone better cast as a 'fiend and monster' than he? Since one had dared summon him by name, the wish would surely be no easily dispatched thing.

Wei Wuxian said helplessly, 'You've got the wrong man…'