Work Text:
He Xuan's death was not a gentle one. The very air burned from their lungs first, a molten rush of pain. Their flesh stretched and bubbled under the heat of the angry planet, then tore excruciatingly asunder into tiny crystalline motes as the world around them shredded. It was a cosmic unzipping, a catastrophic collapse, the very matter of the surface twisting with a deliberate, furious beauty.
Their last sight was of the lights of the 'ship, miles above, winking through gaps in the roiling noxious smoke. Like a meteorite falling in reverse, He Xuan thought, as the lights blazed once more and faded into the inky black.
And then He Xuan thought no more.
+++
Gods are subject to the whims of a capricious humanity, writ large, and so naturally they will dedicate their time in the Heavenly Courts to prolonging their existence. Ghosts are subject only to their own former humanity: the state of their ashes and their lingering, unfinished business.
Gods can rise and fall in favor. When their temples crumble, they fade. It's an exploitable vulnerability. Everyone knows what happened when Hua Cheng chose to exploit it.
And favor is falling all across the board.
This is what happens when humanity is spread between different star-systems, Ming Yi thinks. The elemental masters have a leg up, so to speak, because humans still terraform and travel from planet to planet. For all that space is known to precisely the extent where humans think it is also controlled, it holds its dark secrets and cosmic frailties. Humans, with their short lives and expansive dreams, will still pray for safe passage between systems and aid in cultivating livable worlds. But there is no cohesion to their beliefs anymore, and even the volume of reliable, lingering merits from the superstitious 'sailors falls away by an order of magnitude every Celestial Standard year.
Hence this current insanity.
"You really think this will work?" Hua Cheng asks, crossing his arms and raising one skeptical eyebrow.
Ming Yi does not, but Shi Qingxuan is nodding enthusiastically. "I don't see how it can't!" she says. She's fluttering that fucking fan of hers, a lazy counterpoint to the fervor of her words.
Hua Cheng shrugs, a study in indifference, but his eye darts to where Xie Lian is standing at the helm of the 'ship, looking out into the pitch black of the void they're routed through. He ignores Ming Yi's subtle eye-roll, which is for the best.
Xie Lian isn't at the same level of risk as the other gods. Not when Hua Cheng has an entire endowment arranged to just fund the generation of favor for Xie Lian over the millenia. But Ming Yi is pretty sure Hua Cheng doesn't want Xie Lian to be set adrift from the remainder of Heaven yet again, for all that Hua Cheng, at best, tolerates the rest of his peers. Like Shi Qingxuan, Xie Lian seems to care about the other heavenly officials for some unfathomable reason, and so Hua Cheng has followed him to support his quest.
Privately, Ming Yi thinks that this — like all recent efforts the Heavenly Officials have made — is futile. A publicity stunt that will, at best, stem the inexorable dissolution of the Heavens for a few centuries.
If even that.
But Hua Cheng knows Ming Yi's thoughts, and Shi Qingxuan does not need to hear them, so Ming Yi remains silent, watching Shi Qingxuan as she snaps her fan closed and pushes it into the holder on her work-belt.
"I just wish there was a more direct way to get there," Shi Qingxuan says. Not for the first time. It's a little rich, coming from the Lord Wind Master: She still gets more prayers from humans than most Heavenly Officials, to protect the humans on their interplanetary travels. But Ming Yi agrees with the sentiment. They prefer to have their feet on the ground with multiple escape routes at their disposal, rather than on a rickety little 'ship hurtling through the void of space.
"If it was easy," Ming Yi says, "It wouldn't be worth it."
"So true," Shi Qingxuan sighs. "The effort is much more impressive this way."
Despite themself, Ming Yi appreciates Shi Qingxuan's pragmatic side. It doesn't often come out — Shi Qingxuan prefers to present as carefree — but Ming Yi has always been drawn to people who are aware.
Ming Yi knocks their foot against Shi Qingxuan's. When she looks over, they raise an eyebrow at her, and she grins back.
Often, Ming Yi thinks hopefully about the transience of gods. For all that they are currently masquerading as the Lord Earth Master — the elemental master most frequently called upon for aid in terraforming initiatives — their allegiance lies elsewhere.
In Ming Yi's estimation, gods are more trouble than they're worth. Self-protective, prone to nepotism and favoritism at the cost of those humans who they're charged to protect. The very concept of Shi Qingxuan, as poster child for the worst that Heavenly Officials had to offer, was a particular thorn in Ming Yi's side when they were first clawing their way through defunct, crumbling arrays to the Heavenly Court to plead their case.
Shi Qingxuan is still a thorn in their side, but for different reasons now.
When Ming Yi glances up, Hua Cheng has a hand on Xie Lian's arm and a knowing eye on Ming Yi.
They're all on a claustrophobic long-distance 'ship, hurtling through the vast expanse of space at speeds that make Ming Yi's teeth grit together to think of them. There are no exterior windows, just monitors that present visualizations of the readouts from external sensors and show that they're still slipping through the appropriate voidstreams. They are less than a quarter of the way through what promises to be a twenty-year journey, and during every waking second, Ming Yi is palpably aware that they are not among friends. They don't need Hua Cheng's glance as a reminder of the fact.
With carefully feigned dispassion, Ming Yi looks away first.
+++
The planet erupted and it didn't stop erupting. It became a crucible of sulfurous fumes and methane explosions, noxious and consuming.
The building blocks of the planet's life were silicon-based, not carbon. It had been the treasure of the gods; a terrestrial super-earth that was the hallmark of successes and advances in terraforming cultivation. Humans and gods alike would travel from parsecs away to see this exemplar of what could be accomplished during this push of explosive intergalactic expansion, especially when gods and humans worked together to generate the change. And what a sight to behold it was! A paragon of artistic excellence meeting the vigor of cultivation and the doggedness of science. There were terraces flowing with wine and gardens so resplendent that even the stoniest hearts wept to behold them. The conditions were so optimal that one sanatorium high in the vaulted mountains could actually cure human face disease.
But while the silicon life forms that were extinguished in pursuit of a new earth died, their ghosts lingered, roiling in rage. They fomented the initial rupture, and all the carefully-wrought terraforming unzipped from there. The arrays were compromised, unstable, becoming more sausage grinder than wormhole; the first person to use them unspooled in one long, bloody spiral, leaving viscera and hair behind in the five closest arrays skirting the 'system. The second met a worse end.
The arrays were blocked off, after that.
He Xuan was supposed to be on the last 'ship out. They were an academic on the planet, studying the pH of the soils at the edges of the terraforming pools and publishing articles on planetary homeostasis. But when they arrived at the 'port, they were told that Lord Water Master Shi Wudu had vouched for the real human "A-Xuan,'' who was already aboard. There was no more room for anyone else. Especially not someone trying to masquerade as a passenger.
He Xuan wasn't the only human left on the planet. They weren't the only one to feel like their flesh was boiling off their bones. They weren't the only one to die.
But for centuries, as the surface of the derelict and ravaged planet continued to collapse in on itself, again and again, scabbing over and then rending anew, the minute remnants of the dead carbonate forms left behind were buried under hot earth, where pressure and heat forged some bodies into coals that sparked more fires. Others underwent a stronger, hotter crucible and became diamonds, strewn through the blistering lithosphere — a monument to the gods' betrayal.
Of all the altered carbon-based forms abandoned with the planet, He Xuan was the only one to come back.
+++
"You know," Shi Qingxuan says, fluttering her fan lazily in front of her face, "It's so stupid. Ge used to tell me all these stories about interstellar travel, and it would sound so exciting? And my first time on a 'ship I was young and terrified, so, like, adrenaline." She waves a hand, as if wiping the memory of it away from the very air between them. "So it's fine that I'm Lord Wind Master, but also, humans should be praying to me for excitement, not safe passage! This is so tedious."
Ming Yi rolls their eyes. "You just want to be drinking in that place again," they say.
"The terrace," says Shi Qingxuan, dreamily. "You know, the fountain flowed with actual wine? Not a holo or anything. I could just stick my cup in the stream and bam! More wine."
"Sounds messy."
"Oh, you're no fun," says Shi Qingxuan, tossing her head coquettishly.
"Neither is getting wine all over you," Ming Yi says. They're ignoring Shi Qingxuan's flirtation purposefully. She tends to get worked up when they're coming across as the implacable, granite-steady Lord Earth Master. Like the wind, Shi Qingxuan will shift directions every time, trying a new path. Sometimes cajoling, sometimes calling Ming Yi her best friend over and over, sometimes unzipping her jumpsuit, neck to crotch, and letting her broad soft torso make her argument for her.
Today, she squares her shoulders, sitting up straighter. Her breasts press against the front of her 'suit as she does, but not obscenely. "There are other ways to pass the time. Ming-er, we've been on this stupid ship for eight years, give me a break."
"Speak clearly," says Ming Yi, letting impatience bleed into their voice. "Stop beating around the bush. What are you asking for?"
"You and your anachronisms," Shi Qingxuan laughs. All the quarters on this ship are small, and Shi Qingxuan is fairly tall, so she doesn't have to slump to nudge her feet against Ming Yi's thigh. Ming Yi drifts their hand down and cups it around Shi Qingxuan's ankle, feeling the delicate bones under her skin, the way they shift as Shi Qingxuan stretches her toes forward. It's a grounding touch, here in the black ether of deep space. And while the Lord Wind Master, for all her complaints of boredom, was built to be mid-flight, keeping her 'ships tight and focused without even a shiver when they're passing through atmo or nebulae, Ming Yi was not. Ming Yi likes being planetside. Even arrays are pushing it, for them.
Shi Qingxuan knows this about them. She wiggles her toes, digging them into the side of Ming Yi's thigh.
"You're asking for more anacronisms," Ming Yi echoes, flatly unimpressed.
"No," she laughs, letting her head loll flirtatiously to the side. "All I'm saying is, time passes faster when you're fucking."
"Is that so," says Ming Yi. They run a thumb along the curve of Shi Qingxuan's ankle; dig it in. When Shi Qingxuan finally catches their eye, she lifts one well-manicured brow.
Ming Yi lets their lips curl up in response.
There are grimy-smooth corners of the 'ship, caked over in the residue of the oils that keep its mechanical core operational. They're soothing to Ming Yi: a reminder that under the sleek veneer of the living quarters, every 'ship is held together by more than just an array and a prayer. Cultivation can fail. Engineering can, too, but 'ships like this were built to be piloted by gods and cultivators and normal humans alike.
Today when they crowd Shi Qingxuan against the riveted bulwark outside the loud-thrumming engine rooms, the oil smears, dark, against the back of her jumpsuit. It gets onto their knees when she guides them down and presses a hand to her navel, flattening her jumpsuit over the soft swell of her dick, laughing as Ming Yi presses inexorably forward.
"Tell me I'm pretty," she says, cupping Ming Yi's cheek with one hand.
"Why should I tell you something you already know?" Ming Yi asks, twisting their neck just enough that they can capture Shi Qingxuan's thumb between their teeth and bite it, lightly. Teasing, almost.
Sex is grounding, and Shi Qingxuan is good at it. She's bossy and demanding in equal turn, but she's not afraid of letting Ming Yi know what she wants and how she wants it. She likes when Ming Yi mouths over her cock through her jumpsuit, likes when Ming Yi pulls the front zip-tab down far enough to cup their hands over her breasts and dig their thumbs into her nipples. She doesn't like to fuck or be fucked, but she loves getting loud and loose as Ming Yi pushes her legs up and back and buries their tongue in her hole.
This all suits Ming Yi just fine. They like the grounding physicality of it, but they've felt disconnected from their physical form for millennia. Losing themself in the musk and tang of Shi Qingxuan without the pressure of being expected to connect to their own body... appeals. When Shi Qingxuan is insisting that they kiss her here and touch her there, they don't need to worry about how to feel about arousal. They just feel it, or they don't.
After Shi Qingxuan is satisfied, if Ming Yi is willing, she'll finger Ming Yi over the edge of their arousal, pressing her hands against all the tightly-wound spots on their body. It's like an erotic massage, really. Before Shi Qingxuan, Ming Yi avoided the sensation of unspooling from any source. Pleasurable or painful, it would lance through them, burning and aching in turn, leaving the lingering taste-memory of decay at the back of their teeth. But with Shi Qingxuan, Ming Yi has come to appreciate the burn. Ming Yi can swallow the lingering flavor of Shi Qingxuan's sweat and it will overwhelm the flat, rotten taste rising up their throat.
Ming Yi might not regularly feel connected to this form, but they do know hunger. The ravenous, clawing ache of it is intermittent and unpredictable, but intimately familiar when it does arise. The core of Lord Earth Master is a volcano, silently forboding, bloated with the destructive force of an angry, undead planet. Dead things don't process energy like the living. The natural instinct is to consume it until Ming Yi can hold no more, then erupt the excess off in a miasma of liquid resentment.
But dual cultivation is another vent for the pressurized core of energy constantly building within Ming Yi. An intoxicating approximation of being a living, breathing human cultivator: consuming energy and immediately releasing it again. The cycle of hunger and release, constrained to one single act. And so when their hunger builds, Ming Yi seeks to bleed off the energy they consume as efficiently and as painlessly as possible.
Shi Qingxuan likes to use sex to pass the time. Ming Yi is just trying to survive.
And yet, they constantly hunger for Shi Qingxuan... and not just for the vitality of her life-force. For her attention, for her noises, for the taste of her heavy on their tongue. For the softness of her body and the sharpness of her smile. Hers is a generosity of spirit and an overwhelming, contaminating joy. For all that they frequently play-act indifference, when Ming Yi is in her presence, they can't help but think: it is good that she exists. She should continue to exist.
When Ming Yi is alone in their bunk, turning a razor-sharp shard of obsidian over and over in their hands, gripping it tight and letting it slice tiny cuts in the callused undersides of their fingers, they resent their affection. Truly, their feelings toward Shi Qingxuan are just as complicated as their feelings about wearing this body, and about the long span of nothingness that came before it. Shi Qingxuan is, after all, responsible for their current state, however indirectly.
And yet when Ming Yi looks at Hua Cheng and his all-consuming desire for Xie Lian to exist happily, they feel a reluctant kinship to him. They don't care for gods, but they care for one god. They want to be around her. She makes them feel good, even if her very presence means they can never forget their reasons for seeking her out in the first place.
The plan had been to destroy her and her brother as thoroughly as He Xuan had been destroyed. Ming Yi had wanted to do it with their own two hands: to gain their trust and use it to unzip their forms, first digging their nails into the siblings' flesh deep enough to bleed, then depositing chunks of their bodies on floes of molten rock to char and melt, and then finally rending their very atoms apart in a cataclysmic and excruciating implosion. They're not a particularly vengeful being, but it seemed appropriate, that the Shi siblings should feel the same horrors they left He Xuan to.
But plans change. Excluding the three times Ming Yi has stood by Shi Qingxuan's sleeping form and thought about ending their inner turmoil about her existence by wringing her neck, Ming Yi has brought Shi Qingxuan to a point of undoing twelve hundred times on this voyage alone so far with their hungry mouth and their steady, grasping hands. Not every day — these hungers, like all of Ming Yi's others, do ebb and flow — but often enough. And Ming Yi does not feel satiated. When Shi Qingxuan writhes against the bulkhead, clutching to her twisted 'suit with her big soft hands, tears springing to her eyes as Ming Yi works her over with sucking kisses and lingering, probing touches, Ming Yi wants more. More of her big clit in their mouth, more of the high-pitched whine she makes when her breath hitches against her tears. More of her cursing and calling out a name. Ming Yi's name, which Ming Yi feels as attached to as anything else about this body.
Ming Yi hungers for Shi Qingxuan to call them He Xuan. To hear her apologize; to hear her demand more of them. To have her know all of them, every scorched and rotten dark place inside of them.
"Pull my hair hard," Ming Yi tells Shi Qingxuan now, easing her jumpsuit zipper down. Their knees are already sore from the rough floor of this remote corner of the 'ship. They want clarity in their own objectives, but short of that: They want Shi Qingxuan to cry again. They want to feel the body that they're wearing.
+++
The planet was left to burn and, by extension, to rot. Everyone with the means to do so got out: the mission-critical few with their offworld vouchers; the loved ones they raised up to their level during the years on its gorgeously-terraformed face.
The assumption was that everyone left behind died with the planet. A lone lingering satellite transmitted the initial roiling rift in the ground, leeching lava and slow, noxious fumes; as the ensuing clouds dissipated over the course of a millennium or two, the satellite sent images of a world slowly submerging in a dark, oily water. The few remaining trees crumbled in on themselves; any unscorched grasses withered to lifeless, rotting stalks.
It was a wash. A misbegotten experiment, successful for centuries and in calculated projections, that failed in the face of genuine implementation. The Heavenly Court cut its losses and set their sights on new initiatives, trying to move humans away from their memories of this failure and onto bigger, brighter things that would yield more merits and greater longevity.
And then the satellite, on its derelict, degrading path through the heavens, encroaching ever-closer to the pockmarked, oozing planet, transmitted the distress beacon.
+++
Hua Cheng is in the ship's galley, drinking water. Ming Yi watches him — the long line of his throat as he tilts his head back; the glint at the corner of his mouth.
They touch their own neck, watching him. He wears this form effortlessly, though it's not the one they're most familiar with.
"Thirsty?" Hua Cheng asks, offering Ming Yi the glass.
Ming Yi looks at it for a long, careful moment. Then they look back at Hua Cheng. His eyebrow is quirked; so is the corner of his mouth. Shi Qingxuan is off on the bridge, poking at the nav system, and wherever Xie Lian is, it isn't here, so Ming Yi doesn't bother with the usual ruse.
Water was never what they came out of the crucible craving. Water they had plenty of, eventually; their hungers are more devastatingly wide-ranging. Hua Cheng knows it; Ming Yi knows it. Ming Yi also knows that Hua Cheng isn't truly offering them a glass of water. He's offering them a reminder — of their debt to him, and that he knows their motivations. That he's watching them, and is not afraid to intercede.
The water is also a question. Is Ming Yi continuing with their plan? Has anything changed since Hua Cheng bankrolled their entrance into the Heavenly Realm, or since they set off on this interminable quest together?
With the question comes a wrinkle: if Hua Cheng senses that Ming Yi's choices will put Xie Lian in harm's way, Hua Cheng will zip him away so quickly that the resulting vacuum will destroy Ming Yi a second time.
There's always so much to balance. Ming Yi's original plans with their ever-shifting feelings is hard enough, but they have to account for Hua Cheng's own objectives on top of everything else.
There's no symbolic way to respond to the offer of water, either. Hua Cheng knows a lot, but he can't read Ming Yi's mind. The options are to refuse or to accept, and neither illustrates the full scope of their current feelings.
"I'm all set," they say, at long last. "Not thirsty today."
They came into the galley for food, anyway, but their hunger is ebbing away now that they're here. Another fallow period, perhaps.
"We're getting closer," Hua Cheng observes, setting the glass down on the counter with a decisive clink. His tone is mild in a way that tells Ming Yi that, while he's not displeased with their response, he views it as incomplete. His statement is not phrased as a question, either, but when Ming Yi looks up and catches his gaze, there's still a (new) question written on his face.
It's true. Ming Yi can feel the tether to the little remnants of He Xuan's form that they left behind on the moldering planet grow as the 'ship continues its push through the cosmos. The Heavenly Courts are parsec-fathoms from the planet. A safe enough distance from their most catastrophic failure that, when Ming Yi was bribing their way into Lord Earth Master's palace, they could barely sense the rest of their essence. The filaments connecting their broken, disparate pieces were stretched so thin that they couldn't feel a single reverberation.
But as they move closer, those filaments and tethers are growing shorter and thicker. Soon, Ming Yi will be close enough to actually use whatever lingering awareness they left burrowing into the broken planet. When they reach out with their energy to prod the connection now, it does reverberate. Little sine waves of consciousness wriggling forward through the ether. So far, the waves haven't returned, but it's only a matter of time.
"It shouldn't be too long now," they agree.
Hua Cheng doesn't bother asking them any other questions; Ming Yi doesn't bother offering up any additional information. They have an understanding, the two of them.
+++
The planet didn't stop erupting, entirely, but as He Xuan's consciousness grew, so too did the moisture in the air. Primordial rot blanketed the cooling surfaces, hissing into volatile geysers of a choking steam when the liquid met molten, fiery pockets. As He Xuan gathered their awareness about them, they pressed it deep into the planet's surface. Volcanoes shrank back, finding haven over vast magma chambers in remote corners of the globe, safe from encroaching sludge.
He Xuan wasn't exactly sure what they were. Dead — that was for certain. The single carbonate ghost on the rock. The undead skeletal life forms forced to extinction by the first arrival of the gods flocked to them, swimming through the angry earth and into the pools surrounding He Xuan's solidifying consciousness: bony, terrifying fish that treated them, discomfitingly, as something of merit.
Their form was no longer that of the human scholar who had published on the limits of terraformed homeostasis just months before the most dire of their predictions was actualized. Some days they shifted into some errant humanoid figure; some days they were a great, anoxic lake dwelling under the surface of the rising putrid waters. For centuries, they had no control over the shifts: most of their attention was focused on the gnawing, grasping hunger suffusing whatever shape their being took.
There was little detritus of humanity left, after the epoch that passed since the planet first unzipped, save for the few carbon-diamond shards left deep in the planet's crust. Still, He Xuan found every remnant, and ate it. The drowned foundations of once-triumphant spaceport, the cracked and scabbed-up wine terrace with its fossilized vines, the first few satellites whose decaying orbits pulled them through the volatile atmosphere and onto the unfriendly surface of the planet.
And while their hunger was never satiated, with every fresh meal, their grip on their own existence grew more steady.
+++
"The return journey is going to be so much nicer," Shi Qingxuan sighs from her bunk. "Once we fix up all the arrays and it only takes, like, a day instead of forever."
"Twenty years is a fraction of our existences," Ming Yi points out, biting into a protein bar. Ming Yi knows this is true of both of them: they have learned Shi Qingxuan was precisely their age when they boarded that last 'ship off the planet. "And we're nearly done with it, too."
"Yeah, yeah," Shi Qingxuan says. She hums. "But this isn't a big 'ship, and after seventeen years with, uh, our companions, it seems downright tiny."
"That's true," says Ming Yi. They're not profoundly affected by their surroundings at any given time, but it is draining, to be around someone who knows their true purpose and several who don't.
Like, they can hack it. On their scale of 'difficult achievements,' it barely even ranks. But still.
Shi Qingxuan shifts in her bunk, moving to lay on her side, propping her head up with one soft arm. "Have you noticed that the merits are getting even more sporadic?"
Ming Yi has not. Ming Yi does not actually receive the real Lord Earth Master's merits. Hua Cheng has done something that provides them with a facsimile of access and an even greater amount of debt to him. "Maybe it's more noticeable when you're used to a lot," they say.
Shi Qingxuan swats at them with her free hand. "You've always done fine," she says. "And you know I'd always —"
Ming Yi knows, and hates it. They don't like being in debt in the first place. Worse still is that Shi Qingxuan has never considered it to be a debt. She just gives, and supports, and has historically seemed to be very much unconcerned with the downward trend of the gods' overall favor. Not for the first time, Ming Yi wishes the situation were just a little more cut-and-dry. But while they hate the gods in a vague sense, their vengeance is not so broad as the entire Heavenly Realm, and while they don't know what they do want, they know it's not to kill every god but one and leave Shi Qingxuan to face whatever eternity the gods have left by herself.
"Anyway," says Shi Qingxuan, with a little full-body shake. "All I'm saying is, I know it takes humanpower to shift forms when someone spurns the usual workarounds. So I just wanted to check in."
Ming Yi's approximation of a heart thrums. "I'm fine," they say. It doesn't cost merits for ghosts to shift. Ghosts of their caliber are metamorphic beings, transformed by time and resentment and intent into a new and mutable form. Having igneous origin, like Ming Yi, only increases that trend. It's gods who have to worry about energy and power. Gods, and their sedimentary nature: accumulating the belief and faith of the humans who worship them, subject to every new layer of myth that gets applied. Shi Qingxuan's situation is complicated by the disparate legends of her role, and history, and gender. Ming Yi, instead, just feels a total disconnect from all of it. They used to shift with Shi Qingxuan to ingratiate themself, and didn't much care what form they took, but that's fallen by the wayside of late.
Perhaps they should be the ones asking Shi Qingxuan about her feelings.
"And you?"
"I like my solution," she says, and laughs, ruefully. "But I really hope this stupid trick works."
Ming Yi doesn't have a response to that. They rise off the floor and move over to sit at the edge of Shi Qingxuan's mattress. She shifts a little to give them space, and they rest their hand on her calf. They feel, abruptly, fatigued.
Heavenly communications arrays don't work when you're traveling faster than light, so Shi Qingxuan hasn't yet heard that her merits are, in part, drying up because her brother met an unfortunate conclusion to his Heavenly Calamity, terraforming a super-Earth ocean planet. Ming Yi's thickening awareness of He Xuan has given them unique insight into the success of part of their plan: Ghostly skeletal silicon-fish swarmed Shi Wudu and dragged him through derelict arrays across a cluster of galaxies to the site of his greatest crime, where he lingers, trapped inside a rhyolite sea-cave beset on all sides by a mold toxic to mere humans and uncomfortable to gods, waning slowly away as he is separated from his dwindling supplicants and forced to confront the choices he has made. Some day, after some indeterminate span of eternity but before the gods have become completely obsolete, when He Xuan and Ming Yi are reunited into one form, they will fight Shi Wudu, and they will win.
Perhaps this is enough, Ming Yi thinks, watching Shi Qingxuan looking back at them. She smiles at them, flutters her eyelashes. Ming Yi imagines a universe without her laugh, and finds that this lingers near the top of their scale of 'horrifying outcomes.'
In quiet little moments like this, Ming Yi really regrets learning Shi Qingxuan's role in this whole mess. At first, she was just a friendly god they could use to make a show of assimilating to the Heavenly Court, and then, for thirty-four beautiful years, she was their most intimate friend.
And then, the century of prevaricating.
Shi Qingxuan is looking forward to the end of the journey, but when they reach the planet, Ming Yi really will have to decide what they're going to do about her.
+++
Time meant less to a ghost than even a god. It was but a few more millennia before He Xuan could walk the groaning surface of the planet in any form they chose. They tried on many, and liked few. The anoxic lake lying under fathoms of sea felt most comforting — even better than the form that was a facsimile of He Xuan's original human body. As a lake, they could sustain their dead fish and consume things which no body was meant to ingest. And when the time came to vent their energies, they could form a hydrothermal fissure into the ocean above and release their building pressure. New silicate bacteria evolved, eventually, and gathered around the vents for sustenance. He Xuan did not eat these — the tenuous return of decomposer life-forms held no appeal even on their hungriest of days — but their dead fish sometimes nibbled when the bacterial masses grew into microbial mats lapping at the fringes of the planet's turbulent waters.
But this death, relegated to the ruins of the hubris of humanity, was not sustaining. And so He Xuan found the destroyed arrays, and found that they were, while troublesome, not impassable for a ghost. They brushed against other dead in those endless stretches: the ghosts of civilizations past, human and alien alike, lingering in strings, light-years long and gossamer-thin, linking the defunct arrays.
These were short journeys, mostly to test the limits of what was possible. Passing through unstable wormholes felt an awful lot like being unzipped again, but He Xuan was able to travel to the far reaches of the system — far enough that the ravages of the dead planet were a minor thrum at the edge of their awareness, rather than all-consuming.
There they met Hua Cheng, and learned of the location of the Heavenly Court.
And that the man who took their place on the last 'ship out had since ascended to it.
"But not forever," Hua Cheng said, with a strange light in his eye. After He Xuan had failed to consume him — after he'd laughed in He Xuan's face, wiped the floor with them, and then given them a long, considering second look — Hua Cheng had invited He Xuan to talk. He had generated a feast from somewhere He Xuan couldn't suss out, and was laying it before He Xuan: stir-fried vegetables (vegetables) and chewy buns and meat glistening with fat and sauce, alongside a 'ship engine and a mangled solar array and a particularly savory ransacked temple altar. It had been so long since they'd had food meant for carbon-based beings, and they were falling upon it, gulping it as greedily as a drowning person gulps for air, interchanging each bite with the fare to which they were more recently accustomed. "The gods are losing favor."
"I need to go there," He Xuan decided. "Get my affairs in order."
Then they looked up at Hua Cheng, meat on the bone held tight in one hand, oozing grease over their hand as they swallowed a rusting circuit-board. They longed to be back in the safe embrace of their waters; these physical sensations, though a revelation, were now unfamiliar, verging on discomfiting. Their stomach was churning uneasily even as it screamed for more food.
They asked, "Can you help?"
And Hua Cheng's lip curled. It was a warning and a promise in one. He Xuan could feel Hua Cheng's power emanating from the form he chose to wear. They could feel, too, that if they wanted, they could match that power.
But they weren't interested in fighting more dead. Their sights were locked on the god Hua Cheng had mentioned. The one who took their place.
"It will cost you," Hua Cheng said, so matter-of-fact that it came across as cold.
He Xuan had already paid everything. They could do it again.
"Name your price," they said.
+++
Entering the planet's star-system again after so many years away, while wearing the guise of another being feels strange. Ming Yi had anticipated the strangeness, of course, but it hits them harder than they expected.
But aside from one sharply-assessing look, Hua Cheng has not been watching them closely, so Ming Yi must be masking it well.
They can feel the other half of their consciousness encroaching. It threatens to subsume them at times, the urge for their two halves to come snapping back together in a tsunami of energy and water alike.
"Hey," Shi Qingxuan says, as the 'ship curves around the gravitational well of one of the system's gas giants and starts its final de-escalation of speed. She nudges Ming Yi. "You ready for this?"
"No," Ming Yi says. They pause, and give Shi Qingxuan a careful look. "You used to live on the planet. Are you ready?"
"Well, it's not the homecoming I ever expected," she says, with a little snort of laughter. "I thought I was going to die there, you know? I'm glad Ge got me out, but, hm." She pauses for a moment, her gaze going distant. "It's bittersweet. I'm glad there's something to save. I wish I had known earlier."
"Mmm," says Ming Yi. "It's a complicated situation."
"It is," Shi Qingxuan agrees. She wipes her hands on her jumpsuit pants. "I don't really know what to expect, you know? The planet I remember was so beautiful. I barely even remember how it started to crumble."
Ming Yi can barely remember the planet before the disaster, at this point. They say, "I can't even imagine."
Shi Qingxuan laughs again. It sounds a little wet, but genuine enough. She leans her head against Ming Yi's shoulder. Pragmatically, she says, "Well, either this will work out, or it won't. But I hope it will."
"You just want that wine terrace of yours again," Ming Yi teases, partly because they like it when Shi Qingxuan swats at them, but partly to distract themself from trying to figure out how, exactly, they want all this to end.
"It would be nice," Shi Qingxuan says. She bumps against Ming Yi again and then does a little full-body wriggle. "Ahh. Ahhh! I'm buzzing. I don't know if I'm more anxious or excited?"
"Me neither," Ming Yi admits. The ever-familiar clawing in their gut is intensifying. Time feels funnier to them than it usually does. They can sense their fish now, circling around Shi Wudu's prison and flitting through the toxic waters and growing rot of the planet. He Xuan's sunken lake has grown and spread in the centuries Ming Yi has been gone. They're not going to be able to put off re-joining long after touching down on the planet.
+++
The worst part was splitting their awareness. He Xuan did not like fission. It was not physically difficult, but the mental hurdles were substantial.
They knew they were not burning.
They felt like they were on fire anyway.
The trip would be grueling. He Xuan had learned that destroyed arrays were easier for ghosts than fully-intact ones, and that, while the arrays within an entire galaxy-breadth of the planet had been left to founder in the Heavenly Court's eagerness to remove themselves from the nexus of their failure and due to their increasingly-strained resources, the ones closer to the Court were still fully functional. Still, if they concentrated, they could move thrice as fast as any distress beacon.
There were reclusive gods easy to replace, Hua Cheng had said. He had told He Xuan it would be smartest to leave the martial gods alone and seek a quiet civil god or elemental master — there were siblings who would probably note the difference if He Xuan were to target one of them, but there were other options.
They spent a year, carefully separating their essence in two. He Xuan was the dark lake at the deepest part of the growing ocean, a place where they could commune with their ghastly fish and send them to do their bidding. He Xuan was the shiftless humanoid ghost, ready to take on the guise of whichever god best suited their needs.
As they squeezed into their array, they sent one burst of resentful energy at the last limping satellite. While the power would rapidly increase its orbital decay, it was enough to activate its distress beacon.
He Xuan had not had a great deal of faith in gods for millenia, but they did have faith in the gods' hubris. Surely, with He Xuan's vocal encouragement, the gods would decide to investigate.
Surely, any gods who had been on the planet as it entered its death throes would be especially keen to go.
+++
"We're here," Ming Yi says, and staggers as the full force of He Xuan's consciousness overwhelms them.
Twenty minutes later, Shi Qingxuan guides the 'ship to rest on a spit of land that seems relatively stable. Calm seas surround the land. At the edge of the horizon, there's a gentle plume of smoke. A volcano, leeching lava into the sea: the planet's fight against its own watery consumption.
They all suit up and stumble out of the 'ship. Shi Qingxuan goes first, followed by Xie Lian. Hua Cheng slouches after him.
Ming Yi surveys the world from the porthole of the 'ship. They want to wrench off their helmet and breathe deeply of the scouring air. They hate this place. They missed this place.
They watch Shi Qingxuan take several disjointed steps forward and then fall to her knees. She fists her hands in the loose rock of the ground, pulling some up and then letting it fall. They can't see her face, but they imagine that it is horrified.
Her horror does not bring them comfort.
What do I do? Ming Yi wonders.
But when they take their own steps out of the 'ship, He Xuan's consciousness leeches back into their awareness. Ever fiber in their form is crying out to be rejoined, so loudly and with such strength and power that they cannot help but respond.
"I can't," they say, loud enough for the others to hear them. Already their core is being summoned to that anoxic sink under the ocean. "I'll be back, I —"
And then comes the almighty yank.
+++
The planet lay quiet. Death stalked its surface: sulfuric blooms of volcanic effusion spread and flattened over the quiet rippling waters. Algae grew and died and sank. In He Xuan's hibernation, the inhuman dead grew boisterous, and then settled into their own slumbers. Decay became the law of the land; time and water weathered the remaining rocks. It was not a pleasant place. It was not a safe harbor. The waters would not sustain life.
The prisons for gods dragged, screaming, through incompatible arrays were quiet. Haunted. Ming Yi's body crumbled as He Xuan's sending took over their role. Shi Wudu, a newer arrival to a cave half a planet away, jumped at every sound of water lapping at the exterior of his prison. His favor was dwindling; he had to use its vestiges to breath the cloying air and sustain himself without his usual comforts.
The planet itself was not sentient. It was not lying in wait of a ship hurtling through the void toward the fringes of its atmosphere, though many dead on its surface could sense a looming shift in its waters.
The surface seemed quiescent.
Appearances are always deceptive.
+++
It is good to feel whole.
He Xuan shimmers. Their waters lap against the saline sea above them, and mingle gently with it. It feels good. It feels refreshing. Too, they are connected once more with their ashes, painstakingly filtered from the ground and secreted away in a place only they can access, and it is reassuring to know that their life, such as it is, remains viable.
How nice, to not be forced into the guise of a god. Lord Earth Master rots with the planet. Shi Wudu, scourge of He Xuan's death, is tucked conveniently away.
It takes He Xuan a good few days to remember the gods and ghost they left wandering the horrible surface of this dead place. First comes the pain of the recombination. Then the delight of being one.
Then the strangeness of being water and not Ming Yi.
Shi Qingxuan, He Xuan thinks. What do I do with her?
When they send out their awareness, they can sense her on the surface. The trudging steps that she is taking as water laps over her boots. They cannot see the way the wind buffets her suit, but they can imagine it. Wind has always loved to make Shi Qingxuan look good. Even scouring, deadly winds. She wields it well.
They want to see it again: Lord Wind Master, gripping the breezes around her and setting them to do her bidding. She won't have her hair loose on a planet like this, but she'll still have her control and exert it in other ways. Maybe watching her use it will help them decide what to do.
And so they seek her.
He Xuan shifts form: first a giant long fish, undulating its way through the waters to the shores, then Ming Yi's body ensconced in a fabrication of the suit they've already devoured as they approach the outcrop.
"Ming Yi!" Shi Qingxuan hollers as they fight their way from the surf. "Ming Yi, it's you, what the fuck happened? I've been so worried. Where did you go? Ming Yi, are you alright?"
"I'm afraid not," He Xuan says with Ming Yi's mouth. Out of the corner of their eye, they see Hua Cheng swoop in front of Xie Lian and turn him away, back toward the ship. Xie Lian is holding back, twisting around to look, but Hua Cheng is moving with purpose. A protective retreat, perhaps.
He Xuan has been so good at shifting forms for an era or more, but it is hard to hold this one any longer. Already they can feel their fabricated feet dissipating into thick dark water, eddying around their shortening ankles.
"What happened to you?" Shi Qingxuan demands. She's pushing into the surf now, grabbing He Xuan's arms in her hands, knocking the fronts of their helmets together like she's forgotten they have faceplates keeping them apart.
The helmets clang together, jarring He Xuan; their ankles dissolve when their surprise diverts their attention from holding their form together.
He Xuan can feel, as much as see, the sudden swelling of Shi Qingxuan's grip on her favor. She shoves her spiritual energy through her own system with a blunt force she usually avoids, and then rips off her helmet, casting it aside. He Xuan can clock the moment that she falters at the poison on the air, but then winds are whipping around her in a new way and she seems unphased.
"You, too," she demands.
It is a relief to release their grip on the helmet. It melts down their body, rivulets of black water making trackless paths over their disintegrating jumpsuit.
"You're melting," Shi Qingxuan says with a frown, and then she's kissing them, forcefully, gripping the back of their head to hold it steady as she pushes her tongue between their lips.
He Xuan returns the kiss. This, too, is a relief. To take Shi Qingxuan into them in this way. Their legs are nearly gone, but Shi Qingxuan's grip is holding them to Ming Yi's usual height. They are connected to the growing dark pool below by the constant flow of their collapsing being, a steady stream of water slowly losing its shape, working its way up their body. There goes their groin in a transcendent release of matter. Now their abdomen is carving away. Their stomach is melting, but their hunger remains.
And they are ravenous.
They don't want to eat Shi Qingxuan alive, they realize, but they're still starving for her taste.
"What happened?" Shi Qingxuan asks, between kisses. "What's happening?"
"He Xuan," they tell her, even as their chest falls in on itself. All they have left are their arms, holding onto Shi Qingxuan, and their head, and the growing lake carving out a new sink-hole beneath them. "I've always been He Xuan."
She clearly doesn't understand, but she lunges for them anyway, catching onto their wrists, trying desperately to hold them aloft. "Who?" she asks, clinging even as they melt away underneath her fingertips. "I don't understand."
He Xuan is losing the last connection to this humanoid form. They're pretty sure they'll be able to wrangle it again, but not for at least a little while. It's been too long since they've been one whole intact being, and they're so very overwhelmed. As it turns out, when two halves grow separately, apart from each other, reuniting is... complicated.
"I can't," they say, and then they lose all grip on holding shape.
Shi Qingxuan stares at her feet for a long moment, horror dawning on her face as the floor of the shallow sea beneath them starts to crumble away.
But she does not sink. He Xuan has enough focus to make sure of that. She floats in place, buffeted on all sides by black water.
"Ming Yi," she says, desperately, and the waters around her froth and churn.
It's not what they want — have wanted for years. They want her to use their name. To know her role in their undoing and therefore in her own. Hearing their name, they expect, would feel like an absolution — a salve for the agony of having their form destroyed thoroughly again and again and again. A recognition that they existed.
Ming Yi doesn't cut it. Ming Yi was a weak god, unable to withstand He Xuan's relentless hunger.
He Xuan's waters swirl harder in response to their anguish, kicking up waves at least as tall as a mountain. They tower over Shi Qingxuan, but do not break over her head.
Shi Qingxuan watches the display around her. She doesn't seem scared — she's frowning, but not trying to swim away. With clarity dawning in her voice, she murmurs, "Oh. You're — the planet — you must have —" Understanding dawns in her eyes. "All this," she says, with a frown, and then, "You must hate me."
Then she shakes her head.
"He Xuan," she corrects. The name lances through the deepest abyss in He Xuan's depths. Despite themself, they can feel a hydrothermal fissure forming several leagues away from her, starting to vent in response to hearing it. It's not absolution, but it is — it is better.
"I'm sorry. I don't care who you are." Shi Qingxuan is babbling. "I like you. I'm sorry about—"
She falls silent. She's treading water now. He Xuan's natural form is corrosive to things not of this planet, but she was, of course, once a denizen. An invasive species, yes, but then, so was He Xuan before the unbecoming.
You haven't found out about your brother yet, He Xuan thinks. You might not like me then.
But they have no way of communicating this to her, and even if they did, there are other distractions. Shi Qingxuan's jumpsuit is being eaten away by He Xuan's waters, and it's not even on purpose. They're losing grip on time again. It's unclear whether they've been tangled like this, Shi Qingxuan floating in He Xuan's sink, for minutes or hours. Or days. How corrosive is He Xuan? Has it increased while they've been gone? It's impossible to tell.
When Shi Qingxuan's jumpsuit grows threadbare and stringy, she wrestles it off, head dipping below the surface of the water as she tries to tug her boots free of her feet. The corrosion was incidental, but as her clothes drift through the water, He Xuan can't help but swallow them down. They're so, so hungry, and they've always craved everything Shi Qingxuan has to offer.
And it seems that she has more. "Yeah," she sputters, as He Xuan eases a ripple of current around her body. They can feel her legs, soft and strong, working with them to keep her afloat. Her cock is half-hard, floating in the dark of the water; He Xuan swirls around it with the warmest patch of water within them. They are a cold lake, and the chill raises gooseflesh around the nipples of her buoyant floating breasts. But they always liked when her cock filled under the warmth of their mouth through her jumpsuit, and they like the way she shivers at the temperature distinction now.
Shi Qingxuan trails her hand through the water, passing it through the current like she's trying to stroke them, and they repay her efforts by forming a denser eddy that she can press herself against. She's never liked being breached by more than just their tongue, so they don't try and jet a hard, fast stream into her hole, but they move a current between her cheeks so that she can feel teased by them.
She's smiling. Shi Qingxuan is smiling. Her face dips under the surface again and again, but every time, she's twisting the noxious wind of the planet's surface and funneling it through He Xuan. At first it tickles, and then it feels good: an intrusion of her power, pushing back at them as they work to rock her to some form of completion. She sinks below He Xuan's lapping waves and pulls the air with her, breathing, somehow trusting He Xuan to keep her buoyant enough to make her way through them back to the surface as needed.
They are glad that she trusts them. She should not. They have not decided what to do with her, and their hunger pulls their focus.
Shi Qingxuan's breasts feel as good under He Xuan's currents as they did under their hands on the 'ship. The musk formed in the folds of her flesh taste as good on their water as they did on their tongue.
He Xuan likes her very much like this, thrashing through them, catching breaths and diving deep and letting them buffet her body back and forth. They feel connected to the physicality of a living body floating through them. Connected, and present. This is not a dreaded unfurling. This is a swelling. A consuming.
Shi Qingxuan sinks deeper into He Xuan as she shivers her release. She sinks, but her hair floats in an aurora around her, breasts and cock still buffeted by the currents He Xuan is using to support her. They pull a great tug of oxygen through the saline waters off to their side and pass it around her body.
And then they swallow.