The one closest to her, the one she had schemed so bitterly to covet.
“YOU FUSANG!!!”
Yan Rushi, flushed with shame and fury, shoved her away hard. “You—!”
You Fusang didn’t retreat — she advanced. “I, what?”
“You… I…” Yan Rushi shoved her again. “You — you are truly the worst!!”
With that, she snatched up the short knife from the ground, grabbed a handful of arrows at random, and stormed out of the forest without a backward glance.
You Fusang watched her back, and her smile slowly faded. Yet somehow, she couldn’t help it — she raised a hand to her lips, lowered her eyes, and laughed again.
It was a very sincere and very pure laugh.
Not to tease anyone. Only because she was happy.
— You Fusang had never kept Yan Rushi around for any “Bed Attendant.” Using phrasing guaranteed to set imaginations alight was only to watch Young Sect Master Yan’s fury and shame crest — to watch Yan Rushi go red to the roots of her ears, stammering, unable to string a whole sentence together. That was what made You Fusang happy.
And to a Devil Cultivator who had seen through all the world’s affairs, “happy” was a rare and precious thing to feel.
It had also been a long time since anyone had called out “You Fusang” by her full name — not the enraged cursing of the righteous pointing in her face, but carrying some strange emotion: a little flustered, a little stormy, a songbird with its feathers blown wide open — and yet, somehow, intimately… like a lover’s murmur.
This was something You Fusang had believed she would never taste in this lifetime — least of all from Yan Rushi’s mouth.
Heh, she thought. Sweetness wrung from her under duress in peril — is that not also a long-held wish granted?
You Fusang laughed at her own boredom, folded her arms, and let her eyes and her thoughts both follow Yan Rushi’s fading figure into silence.
And out of that endless silence, one barely perceptible emotion quietly rose to the surface. It was such a mood-spoiling thing that You Fusang deliberately refused to name it — but the moon sets, the tide withdraws, and the reef shows itself, impossible to ignore.
It was secret delight.
The moment she scented the Devil Heart kindling in Yan Rushi, You Fusang had felt a flicker of barely perceptible… secret delight.
Or, to put it another way: excitement.
A righteous cultivator falling into Devilhood — just as she once had. Yan Rushi would know an uncontrollable urge to kill; she would choose self-torment over slaughter; she would cut open her own flesh; she would hurt, break down, weep until voiceless; she would draw cold stares; she would be cast out by the world; she would grow fragile and helpless as the Devil Qi ate into her… just as she once had.
She would trust others too easily, depend on others too easily — and in such fragile moments, how convenient it would be for You Fusang to slip in through the crack.
She would slip in through the crack. And she would keep her safe.
Only — with that, the fine young lord of the righteous path would be dragged down into the mire.
Besides, this was the one closest to her, the one she had schemed so long and so bitterly to covet. To see her cast off the world’s judgments and conspire at her side — and then to feel the Devil Heart kindle in her — You Fusang felt disappointment, displeasure, resistance… and, all at once, plenty of secret delight and excitement too.
How filthy. How dark. As if she were some Chang Ghost dragging others down into the water with her.
Truly — utterly damned.
After that day, Yan Rushi never raised cultivating the Devil’s path again — who knew what she was thinking, but she did go find her Hand Warmer, and from then on never let it leave her body. She still lodged in the City Lord’s palace: out to practice her sword, in to rest, never avoiding suspicion, thoroughly righteous in her comings and goings; and whenever the servants exchanged knowing smirks, Young Sect Master Yan stared them down with a face of pure rectitude.
A straight body fears no slanting shadow. They were perfectly innocent.
Holding to the principle of “if the enemy doesn’t move, I don’t move,” You Fusang stopped deliberately teasing her, and Yan Rushi in turn never breathed those particular words.
She still could not return to the Yan Sect. The Yan Sect of today was strangled at every turn; going back would mean serving as a puppet, unable to see her mother, forced into hollow courtesies with Fang Miaocheng, her years of homelessness turned into a laughing anecdote — her scars flayed open for the whole world to gawk at.
When night fell, Yan Rushi hugged the Hand Warmer, curled into a ball in a corner of the vast bed, eyes closed, quiet, saying nothing.
But in her mind she still rehearsed the Startled Swan Sword Art of the Yan Sect’s Verdant Mountain.
You Fusang was right — the righteous sword arts truly did ward off evil and expel devils. These past days, Yan Rushi had taken up the long sword again, practicing the Startled Swan Sword Art her mother had taught her from the first volume — and indeed, the strange dreams stopped.
The Yan Sect was finished; who knew how many of its repositories of knowledge survived. But every form of the sword art was printed in Yan Rushi’s mind: wheeling like the Verdant Mountains, closing like a startled swan — when to slow, when to hasten, when the sword returned to its sheath. She had never forgotten.
She did not dare forget.
It was early summer night. The last of the daylight had drained away before sundown; darkness crept in, and beyond the Pagoda palace, stars pricked the sky. Yan Rushi doused the lamp and walked deeper in — when a wisp of cool wind brushed her ear with a metallic ring, like an ancient qin, or a ghost’s murmur; a strangeness she had never heard.
Alarm bells shrieked in her heart. She turned and struck out with her palm — and caught nothing.
Instead, she fell into an embrace scented with Ambergris.
She was caught steadily. You Fusang’s teasing voice came from above her head. “Is Young Sect Master Yan so afraid of ghosts?”
“Wh—” Yan Rushi froze, breaking out of the embrace at once. She swept a glance over You Fusang, took in nothing clearly, and gathered only by touch that the other wore a gold-threaded outer robe, freshly changed.
Confused, she asked, “It’s already the hai hour. Is the Venerable Lord… going out?”
“Is Young Sect Master Yan asking me to stay the night?”
You Fusang asked it deliberately, all innuendo. Yan Rushi stepped back half a pace, plainly without any humor: “The Venerable Lord shouldn’t speak such bawdy jokes. They only breed suspicion and wild speculation.”
Someone pushed her inch further: “Then speculate. Imagine. What are you afraid of?”
Yan Rushi stopped talking.
Her skin was thin, You Fusang’s bawdy jokes were many, and in any contest between the two, Yan Rushi always lost ground. After enough clashes she’d worked out a clever countermeasure: silence. The moment she went quiet, You Fusang, finding no fun in it, would stop the jesting.
…Probably.
No more bawdy jokes, no more contests of tongue — but a hand came up anyway.
It hooked Yan Rushi’s earlobe and gave it a light roll; the fingertips drifted lower, down her cheek, stopping at her chin. You Fusang gathered her up like a kitten by the scruff and sighed: “It seems Young Sect Master Yan’s night blindness is truly a hindrance. I’d meant to take you to the Ullambana Festival tonight, but I suppose that’s out of the question now.”
Curiosity won out. Yan Rushi caught her hand. “Th-the Ullambana Festival? What Ullambana Festival?”
In the darkness, You Fusang’s golden pupils flickered bright. She glanced out — her gaze settling on that white “wraith” by the lattice window that had startled Yan Rushi earlier — and laughed softly:
“The fifteenth of the seventh month… the Ghost Festival.”
Perhaps this world had no gods — but it truly had ghosts.
Devil Cultivators and Demon Cultivators were branded the Heretic Path, and the Righteous Path alone basked in the light. Beyond the sects of the Dao, the divisions of noble and low, royal and commoner — those were mortals’ divisions. Look higher, and all stood equal before birth, age, sickness, and death.
The division that transcended the mortal was only this: the dead, and the living.
The dead’s resentment burned fiercest in their first seven days — what is commonly called a lingering soul that will not scatter. On the seventh day, at sunrise, whether resentful or resigned, virtuous or vile, all must enter Reincarnation.
And every fifteenth of the seventh month, on the Ghost Festival, the Ghost Gate stood open. With heaven’s timing, earth’s advantage, and human harmony all aligned upon the Path of Rebirth, the Ullambana Ghost Market came into being. At this hour alone one could buy things unseen in the mortal world, and inquire after things no mortal inquiry could reach.
Cultivators of the Devil’s path — Geng Ying’s sort especially, whose pastimes were Gu insects, killing to refine, and, fourthly, watching entertainment — would naturally never miss such a bustling market as the Ullambana Ghost Market.
Nether River Lanterns, Ghost Masks, the Path of Rebirth; beneath the masks, the living and the dead mingled.
Here the mortal world’s laws fell useless; here the grudges of the living never dissolved — such was the Ullambana Ghost Market.
With nothing pressing this year, You Fusang dressed her robes and thought to go as well. She had barely entered the palace when she saw a Little Ghost squeeze in through the window seam — and Yan Rushi swatted it apart with one palm.
“If Young Sect Master Yan is interested, come along with me.”
They walked past the flickering river lanterns of the Nether River and stepped onto the long, seemingly endless Meng Po Bridge, at whose end stretched a vast thoroughfare named Rebirth. Upon it, towering buildings rose in ranks, resplendent beyond measure.
