Reading Time: 103 Minutes

Title: Twin Patriarchs of Yiling
Author: MeyariMcFarland
Fandom: The Untamed
Genre: Drama, Family, Fantasy, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Kid!fic, Suspense
Relationship(s): Lan Wangji/Wei Ying, Lan Wangji/Original Character, Lan Wangji/Wei Ying/Original Character
Content Rating: R
Warnings: Major Character Death, Murder, War, Discussion-Incest, Discussion-Rape, Discussion-Child Sexual Abuse, Discussion-Child Sexual Trafficking, Violence-Graphic, Discussion-Violence Against Children
Author Note: Twin fic; contains canonical elements of child neglect and abandonment, child homelessness, and child abuse.
Beta: Chiara
Word Count: 98,830
Summary: After Mama and Baba died, Wei Ying thought he could take care of himself, but winter was coming, and the wind had gone cold. The feral dogs were getting bolder, and Wei Ying had nowhere to stay safe. He just… needed help. When the terrified scream rang out, Wei Ying didn’t hesitate. Even if he didn’t have help, he could maybe help someone else and that was almost as good. Turns out, yeah, it was as good, in ways that Wei Ying couldn’t have seen coming.
Artist: Silver Dragonfly

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1. Dogs

The wind turned biting, cutting through Wei Ying’s grubby robes in ways that made him just a little teeny tiny bit worried about the winter that loomed over Yiling. The alley he’d claimed from the other street kids wasn’t very good. It was just a little gap between two ramshackle sheds back behind the red lantern house where the pretty jiejies worked, but it was narrow enough that the dogs couldn’t get in after him.

Still let the wind in. And the rain. And, soon, it would let sleet and snow and the whole winter land right on Wei Ying’s head.

Not good.

Last year, before Mama and Baba went off on their last night hunt and never came back, they’d traveled to Yunmeng, south of Lotus Pier. There’d been all kinds of rain, but it wasn’t too cold, ever.

He didn’t know what he’d do this year.

The man who ran the inn he’d been left at had taken everything Mama and Baba left behind with Wei Ying. Even when Wei Ying had cried and pleaded, clinging to the pack his Mama had made him, the man had just snarled and thrown Wei Ying out.

Since then, he’d seen his parents’ things and his things in other people’s hands. His Mama’s favorite comb, the one Baba made for her out of a broken oar from Lotus Pier, sprouted out of the potter’s wife’s hair. His quilted vest, the one that Baba had carefully embroidered with lotuses and mountains and protective arrays on the inside, ran by on the back of a little girl in a pretty pink dress. Every single thing that had been his or his parents was gone.

Even Wei Ying, the cheerful laughing boy he’d been, was gone. Replaced by a desperate, too-hungry street kid with wild eyes and a too-bright smile that made people nervous. The other street kids, especially A-Gang who was Wei Ying’s age, had told him he needed to be cheerful, not crazy.

That was hard. The cold was hard. Not having a home was hard.

No food, no Mama to hug him, no Baba to kiss his forehead. No shoes, or blankets or food.

Missing food was so hard.

Not as hard as it could’ve been. Mama and Baba had taught him enough that Wei Ying had a core. It was little and weak, but it was enough to let him try ineda whenever he couldn’t get something to fill his belly.

So yeah. Winter was…

…not going to be good. He’d been so sure that he’d find some way to survive before the winter cold and sleet and snow arrived, but that wasn’t going to happen. He could see it. Which meant finding a place that he could hide in when it got extra-cold, a place that no one would kick him out of when they saw him.

There weren’t many places like that in Yiling. Maybe none. At least Wei Ying hadn’t found them yet. But he would!

Somewhere.

Hopefully.

Dogs barked off towards the Burial Mounds. Wei Ying curled into a tight little ball in his narrow alley. Mama would’ve been out in front of the alley with her sword to defend him.

If she was still alive.

Baba would have picked Wei Ying up and carried him on his shoulders.

If he was still alive.

They weren’t. Wei Ying was alone. No one would help him. He’d learned that.

So he curled in tight, shaking as he hugged his knees.

The dogs got closer, barking and yipping with excitement. Hunting. They were hunting. That was the about to eat yips that the skinny, horrible dogs got when they spotted something good.

Like Wei Ying.

Or one of the other street kids.

A scream echoed through the street.

Not loud. Short and sharp. Wei Ying jerked and bit his lip.

That was A-Gang, the one who’d told him to smile different, to tease a little, to act carefree, not frightened.

Wei Ying didn’t remember moving, later.

He was curled up in the tiny alley.

Then he ran down the street behind the red lantern house. A-Gang’s scream was off near the edge of town, near the Cho farm. None of the Cho’s would help. They starved as much as Wei Ying, as A-Gang.

Terrible farm, edge of the Burial Mounds, too many daughters and not enough sons.

The dogs had A-Gang surrounded out past the farthest Cho field that always got flooded and covered in mud every winter. A-Gang had a stick in his hand, but there was blood on his arm and his face was white under the dirt.

Wei Ying screeched as he ran straight at the dogs. His arms flailed wildly as he leaped and yelled, trying to be as big and as scary as he could be. A-Gang flinched.

The dogs scattered and ran.

“Come on!” Wei Ying said as he grabbed A-Gang’s good arm. “Run!”

They ran.

Wei Ying had to hold A-Gang’s wrist, pull him and support him. A-Gang’s feet stumbled every few paces. But he kept going, all the way to the other side of town where the old abandoned quarry lay empty and cold.

Yiling wasn’t a big town. Wei Ying could just barely remember visiting the Nightless City with Mama and Baba. It had been big and hot and imposing, full of soldiers that Mama frowned at and scurrying people that Baba had pursed his lips over. He did remember Lotus Pier which had sprawled every which way, full of green and flowers and so many bright, happy people that Wei Ying thought about trying to go there every time the wind blew hard.

You know, if he had any money or a place to stay there. Which he didn’t. So that wasn’t going to happen.

What he did have after this long, hard, terrifying summer, was a few places that he could bolt to. Sometime, a very, very long time ago, Yiling had been a good place to get high quality stone. They had this old quarry that had transformed a perfectly normal hillside into an amphitheater full of gravel, scrubby grass, and sheer, vertical rock faces.

Those rock faces were marked by chisels. Some rock faces had big square blocks cut out. There were slabs of rock that had been split off the rock walls that looked like paper made for a giant, as thick as his thumb but as tall as he was. Most of those were broken and tossed aside like they were worthless.

It was cold. It echoed. Nothing could live there because there was no water, no plants, not a single thing to keep you fed or warm.

Some really cool pictograms on the rock faces here and there but Wei Ying couldn’t read them, so he’d only ever poked curiously at them before going somewhere warmer.

Cold or not, way back in the farthest corner from Yiling, it had a nice little spot hollowed out underneath a mammoth block of stone that had cracked when the workers tried to remove it. Not enough to fall off the wall of the cliff, no, but enough to make the block worthless for whoever’d started cutting it free.

Made for a great hidey hole against the dogs, anyway.

Wei Ying pulled a loose slab of finger-thick rock as big as he was across the gap, making it even more impossible for the dogs to get at them. The weak, watery light that filtered through the clouds came through the crack in the stone, letting them see even with the slab covering the entrance.

It was a squat, low space with barely enough room for them to sit up inside it. No standing, but hey, that was all right. The dogs wouldn’t be able to get at the which was what counted. If they even came out this way for some reason.

Unless Wei Ying stayed here for too long. Then they would come sniffing around and he would have to hide somewhere else. Happened before so he already knew what would happen if they stayed too long. Thus the red lantern house and it’s shacks and all Wei Ying’s other hideouts and bolt holes.

“Thanks,” A-Gang said, voice all hoarse and hands shaking.

“Got bit?” Wei Ying asked while checking A-Gang’s arm. “Oh, wow. Ow. That’s a bad one. They really bit you.”

A-Gang grimaced. “Yeah. I know. I just. They surprised me. I couldn’t…”

“Couldn’t get away,” Wei Ying agreed, rubbing the bite on his ankle that had finally healed up a week or two back. “I get it. It’s bleeding a lot. Can you focus and make it slow down?”

“…Focus on what?” A-Gang asked with a confused scowl.

Underneath the dirt and blood, A-Gang was too pale. Also afraid and confused and maybe a little angry.

“Didn’t your Mama and Baba teach you how to use your qi?” Wei Ying frowned and tilted his head to the side as he studied the blush rising on A-Gang’s too-skinny cheeks.

They looked a lot alike, actually. A-Gang had messy black hair that wanted to curl at the ends like Wei Ying. His eyes weren’t silver. They were kind of muddy golden-brown. But his nose was like Wei Ying’s and his chin was all pointy like Wei Ying’s.

They could be brothers. Twins, actually, since they were the same age.

A-Gang scowled. “I don’t remember my Mama and Baba. They dumped me in Yiling with my Granny and then she died but no one ever came to her funeral or came back for me.”

“Oh, wow, I didn’t know that,” Wei Ying said with horror. “That’s awful. Okay, I’ll teach you how. It’s not too hard. I bet you can pick it up super-quick.”

He really hoped that A-Gang could pick it up quick. That bite was bleeding an awful lot and it’d get infected if something wasn’t done. No one in town would help if it did go bad. Honestly, no one would help either of them. They didn’t help each other. Why would they do anything for a couple of street kids?

“Why would you do that?” A-Gang asked suspiciously even though he edged a little closer to Wei Ying and held his arm out.

“I’m not doing so good on my own,” Wei Ying admitted as he carefully marshalled his qi and then pushed it slowly into A-Gang’s arm. “You helped me before, you know, explained what I was doing wrong. I can help you now. We could team up, pretend to be twins. Watch each other’s backs. It’s always better when you have someone to watch your back.”

A-Gang didn’t answer, but that was okay.

His eyes were super-wide as he stared at his arm. Except no, it wasn’t the staring that was the big deal. Wei Ying could feel A-Gang’s qi sluggishly moving to match what Wei Ying did.

When Wei Ying pushed qi at the bite to clean out the yuckiness, A-Gang’s qi matched it, prompting a little surge of blood that flowed over Wei Ying’s hands. Then, when Wei Ying encouraged A-Gang’s blood to clot, A-Gang did the same.

The bleeding slowed. Then stopped. A big scab formed over the bite mark, covering all the little puncture holes and the big ragged spot where the dog had bitten down and then shaken A-Gang’s arm.

“We should stop there,” Wei Ying said with a huff. “I’m not sure it’s all cleaned out yet.”

“Yeah, fine,” A-Gang said as he delicately ran bloody fingers over the brand-new scabs. “That’s amazing. I didn’t know anyone could do that.”

“Yep, it’s cultivation,” Wei Ying said with his best, brightest grin. “Mama and Baba taught me before they died. I can teach you. It’d help.”

“…With what?” A-Gang asked.

By the time Wei Ying explained all the really cool things Mama had been able to do, all the really helpful things Baba had done, and the way it helped Wei Ying not starve to death or, hopefully, freeze during the winter, A-Gang was sold.

“Fine,” A-Gang said. He bit his lip. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Well, from now on you’re Wei Gang,” Wei Ying declared with a huge grin. “I’ll be the cheerful twin. You get to be the grumpy twin.”

Wei Gang snort-laughed, still gently rubbing his arm. Every swipe of his hand seemed to ease the bruising. The swelling was going down bit by bit which was pretty darn amazing for someone who’d never used his qi before. Wei Gang was a natural—that was awesome!

“I don’t think I could be cheerful,” Wei Gang said, lips quirking in a tiny smile, “so that works. What else?”

“Well,” Wei Ying said as he thought about it, “We need a place to hide that’s safe. I can teach you how to not need as much to eat. I’d love it if we could find a place to grow some food, you know, away from the haunted mushrooms and the dogs and all.”

Wei Gang nodded thoughtfully. “I have a place I’ve been hiding when winter comes. It’s not great, really small, but I think it might hold both of us. The food, that’s harder. But I love the idea of not needing to eat.”

“Mama always said that little kids need food.” Wei Ying grimaced. “Baba agreed. He was really serious about it. Until we’re grown up, we need to eat. Ineda, that’s not needing to eat or sleep, that’ll hold for a few days but after that we gotta eat and sleep. When we’re grownups we can do it for a long, long, long time.”

Wei Gang groaned and rolled his eyes as if that was way too long to wait and much too stupid a rule, which, you know, fair. When Mama and Baba told him, Wei Ying had done the exact same thing.

“What about fixing stuff in our bodies?” Wei Gang asked. “Can we do that now?”

“Mhm!” Wei Ying said, nodding. “Though we shouldn’t do anything big until we have some food to eat. But, like, I could change my eyes to match yours pretty easy.”

“No, no, I should match your eyes,” Wei Gang immediately said. “I’m supposed to be your twin and you’re a Wei.”

“Meet in the middle?” Wei Ying suggested. “Maybe one brown eye and one silver?”

That would look so cool. For a long moment, Wei Gang considered it. He finally shook his head no.

“I think I want to look as much like you as I can,” Wei Gang said. “You know, so that we belong together. If we’re twins, we should look alike. So I’ll make my eyes silver.”

“Fine,” Wei Ying said even though he thought the two-color eyes thing would be so amazingly cool. “We’ve got some time before night falls. Let’s work on that. I mean, it’ll be way too cold to stay here overnight, but we can stay safe for a little while.”

“Wait!” Wei Gang said, bouncing as his eyes went wide. “There’s this thing in the hideout I have on the other side of town. There’s a picture thing that if I press my hands against it and wish for warmth really hard, it starts radiating heat. Like, all night long. It’s open so I have to sit right next to the picture, but it’s still better than freezing.”

Wei Ying gasped. “Can you draw it? If you can, I bet I can power it up and we can, I don’t know? Make this little cubby all warm so we don’t freeze overnight.”

It took nine attempts before Wei Gang got the pictogram drawn correctly. He showed Wei Ying how he’d charged it, basically by wishing really hard which pushed a little bit of qi into it. That explained how he’d managed to heal his arm so quickly. Wei Gang had no training in cultivation at all, not a single minute of it, but he’d managed to puzzle out a few things that made life easier.

Like pushing qi into the arrays and pictograms and stuff around Yiling.

Like keeping himself warm even without a warmth array.

Like knowing, without any doubt, where resentful energy pooled around town.

Super-useful, that trick.

Once Wei Ying taught his new twin brother how to make his qi flow properly through his barely there spiritual veins and meridians, how to make it coil in his lower dantian where his very small and very weak core flickered, Wei Gang picked it up almost immediately. Just like with his arm, he immediately started strengthening his spirit veins, deepening his meridians, and building his core.

“You are really good at this,” Wei Ying said, impressed and a little intimidated. “It took me forever to figure that out and you got it on the first try.”

“Survival,” Wei Gang countered even though he blushed and ducked his head to try and hide his shy smile. “Now, let’s see if we can make this place warm.”

The first pictogram they charged up made the floor of their hideout slowly warm up until it was comfy. Another one on the slab of stone didn’t work. Maybe something about how thin the rock was. But putting one on the ceiling of their little hideout, scratched with a piece of rock, warmed their hideout up until it was toasty and lovely and perfect.

“This is officially the very best thing ever,” Wei Ying declared. “I wanna go try and charge up every single one of these to see what they do.”

Wei Gang grinned, the first real smile he’d ever shown Wei Ying. “Me, too. I mean, we still gotta find food and a good safe place to live, but this is a great start.”

They grinned at each other before settling down to tell stories and cuddle together. There was a ton of stuff that Wei Ying wished for, like his parents and a home and safety and maybe a sword so he could be a great cultivator like his Mama and Baba, but a brother to share his life with was a pretty great start.

One way or the other, he had someone to guard his back against the dogs and that was worth most anything.

2. Shelter

The little hidey-hole in the quarry was a decent place to shelter for a night. It was awful for anything more than that. Too far away from town, no food, too much risk of being cornered by the wild dogs.

Which, Gang agreed, was not good. There were a lot more starving wild dogs than normal. Gang couldn’t ever remember them being this numerous or this bold. They’d attacked one of the Du sisters’ baby right on their front doorstep, not a shichen after Ying rescued Gang.

Not that they knew about it until a few days later. They only heard about it after they’d crept around town, stolen three whole utterly delicious pork bao without being caught, and made it to the other side of town where Gang’s hide-out was.

It wasn’t great. Better than the quarry, but only by a little bit: an old temple off on the side of the Burial Mounds that had fallen down for the most part. There was no roof, nothing but walls around a black, gaping pit where the temple used to be. That’d burned down a long time ago, way back when Elder Entai’s oldest sister had yet to be born, but it still had a gate strong enough to keep the dogs from shoving their way in.

Well. It would keep one dog out. It certainly wouldn’t keep all the dogs out.

“Why are there so many of them?” Ying whined as he and Gang hid up in one of the trees at the edge of the Burial Mound.

The dogs yipped and howled underneath them, scrabbling at the tree trunk like they wanted to knock it right down so they could get at Ying and Gang.

“I don’t know,” Gang said with a scowl that was so normal that Ying had started ignoring it. “It’s really weird. I heard one of the Cho sons saying that he thought he saw glowing red eyes, but it was daytime, and it was just the dogs.”

“Glowing eyes is bad,” Ying said firmly enough that Gang blinked at him. “No, seriously. That’s one of the things Mama and Baba paid attention to. Glowing eyes means yao and resentful energy and monsters. Mama used to say that if I saw any animal with glowing red eyes, I was supposed to run away immediately.”

“Great,” Gang groaned. He rolled his eyes up towards the heavy, dark clouds looming overhead. “Because we don’t have anywhere that we can hide that’s safe enough, Ying.”

“I know,” Ying agreed. He bit his lip. “Okay, what arrays do we have? Can we combine any of them? Maybe light and heat with something else that’ll, I don’t know, drive the dogs away?”

Light and heat almost set the tree on fire with them in it, but it was really great to set pinecones on fire and then lob into the middle of the dog pack. That scared some of the dogs away, but there were six dogs that just skittered away and then circled back to growl at the base of the tree.

All six of them had glowing eyes. And really long teeth. And claws on their paws that looked almost long and sharp enough for them to climb the tree.

“They’re yao,” Ying said as he stared down at the dogs with his heart hammering in his chest.

“How do you kill yao?” Gang asked.

He shook so hard on his branch that Ying was kind of surprised that he hadn’t vibrated right off it. Or shaken more pinecones free. Either way, Ying hummed thoughtfully.

“Usually with a sword,” Ying said slowly. “But Baba said that there were ways to, what was it? To… purify? To drive the bad energy out so that the spot or the critter or person wasn’t all bad anymore.”

“Purify,” Gang said with a hum of his own. “There was an array on the foundation of the temple that always felt, I don’t know, like one of those rains in summer where it’s warm and it washes everything off and then the sky is all blue and pretty. The grass looks brighter and the whole world feels like its new.”

“That!” Ying said, beaming as he nodded at Gang. “That’s purification. That’s the one we need. Let’s peel off some bark and scratch it into that.”

Took a good bit of work to get a big enough piece so that Gang could draw his purification array, but together they managed it. Gang drew. Ying charged it up. Then they held their breath together as Ying dropped it down at the base of the tree.

The dog-yao howled so loudly that it hurt Ying’s ears and Gang yelped in pain.

Then they darted away, off up into the hills around Yiling so fast that it was like they were there one second and gone the next. The other dogs had run away as soon as the dog-yao disappeared, which let them scramble down from the tree, taking their purification array bark with them.

Elder Entai took Ying seriously when he ran up and told her that he’d seen six dog-yao with glowing eyes leading the pack of wild dogs.

“I’ll send a message to the Jiang,” Elder Entai promised with a grim frown. “Hopefully they’ll send someone. You boys be careful. Do you need a place to stay?”

“Absolutely yes,” Ying said because he wasn’t an idiot, no matter what Gang hissed at him. “I mean, as long as it’s not with that creepy guy out on the edge of town farthest from the Burial Mounds. We both know what he wants and neither of us are that desperate.”

“Wait, what?” Elder Entai yelped with enough alarm that Ying skittered away from her to hide behind Gang and his thunderous scowl.

That turned into a whole thing, but they got to have dinner and a place to stay in the teahouse overnight and then breakfast the next day, so it was worth it. Better still, the whole Du family, from the oldest grandpa down to the youngest little two-year-old toddler, banded together to drive the creepy guy out of town because he was a suspected child molester.

“Suspected,” Gang grumbled after they’d been shooed off to “play” as if street kids played with winter coming up. “Every single street kid knows about him. There’s no suspected about that guy.”

“At least he’s gone,” Ying said much more cheerfully as he pulled the clump of wax he’d managed to steal from the teahouse kitchen candles before they were sent away. “Look. I bet we can make a more durable version of the purification array with this. It’ll be small but it’s a start.”

Gang blinked and then elbowed Ying while the corners of his eyes wrinkled which was his version of a hugely delighted grin. “Let’s give it a try.”

The wax worked pretty good, but it wasn’t very long-lasting. Gang snuck into the potter’s shop in the middle of the night a couple of days later when the Jiang sent back a message that they would send the message along to the Wen. He brought back clay that they made a little tablet out of. That worked way better.

A second raid on the potter’s shop netted them enough clay for a bowl-sized tablet with the purification array on it plus six beads that they baked in a fire outside of their hideout in the quarry because they didn’t have to worry about burning everything down, especially themselves, in the quarry. Only two beads survived baking, but hey, that was enough. One for each of them.

“All right,” Ying said once he’d charged his bead up and threaded it onto some string from the raveling hem of his pants. “You try.”

“I think I’m finally figuring out the charging thing,” Gang said as he scowled at the bead in his hand.

His qi did move properly into the bead, but then he pulled it right back out. Ying hummed and then put his hands over Gang’s showing him how to put the qi in and then not take it away again.

“Oh,” Gang breathed. He sucked a sharp breath between his teeth. “Oh! That’s what I’m doing wrong. Okay, one more try.”

This time he pushed enough qi into his bead that it glowed in the palm of his hand. Ying giggled and copied him so that they had matching glowing beads to wear around their necks. Then the two of them charged up their purification bowl so much that it was like looking into the sun.

“That should keep the dog-yao away,” Ying said thoughtfully as they stared at what they’d made. “But we still don’t have a place to stay that the other dogs can’t get into.”

“You know the Wen aren’t going to do anything about the dog-yao,” Gang grumbled. “They’ll claim it’s not important enough and that we should deal with it ourselves.”

Ying sighed. “Yeah. I know. But what can we do? We still need to find a good place to live.”

“There isn’t one,” Gang said as he scowled at the bowl. “I’ve looked and looked and looked. The only place I haven’t looked is the Burial Mounds because, duh, bad idea. That’s worse than here.”

Ying nodded.

Then frowned.

Then cocked his head to the side as he stared at their purification bowl.

“Wait, no, really?” Gang hissed at him. “You can’t be serious!”

“Well, we can try it,” Ying said. “I mean, even the dogs avoid the Burial Mounds. The dog-yao won’t go in. We saw that.”

“That was why we ended up in the tree right next to the Burial Mounds,” Gang muttered. He huffed. “But that still doesn’t give us a safe place to live, Ying.”

“Gang, there’s no dogs,” Ying insisted. “There’s no creepy men. There’s no one chasing us off and beating us. Anything that’s in there is going to be scary and bad, yeah, but it’s probably not going to try to eat us.”

“Other than the corpses!” Gang glowered at him.

Ying flung out his hands at the bowl which made Gang grimace. They argued about it for a while, but Ying won that battle. They stole several apples and a steamer basket full of delicious little dumplings from the red lantern house’s kitchen which meant that they had to run full-out to escape. The purification bowl bounced against Ying’s back as he ran, held in place by a sleeve torn off of his under-robe that they’d carefully turned into a rope harness thing, but hey, food.

Food was always good, and every single bit of hesitation Ying used to have about stealing had gone right out the window once Mama and Baba died. He wanted to live and living meant eating, even if he had to steal the food.

Just couldn’t get caught.

They hid in a bush about halfway around the Burial Mounds, doing their best not to breathe until the men who’d chased them gave up and went back to town. Then they snuck even further away from Yiling before eating their apples and dumplings. Ying was going to abandon the steamer, but Gang scowled at him and hung onto it.

Made sense. They did need a way to cook things, always provided they could find something to cook that was edible.

“Okay, so, my idea is that I’ll go about one pace past the barrier stones,” Ying said once he had the purification bowl out from its harness. “See if it does anything. If nothing bad happens, then you join me. We go another couple paces the same way. Hopefully, if we’re really lucky, it’ll let us go over to that spire over there. There’s fallen branches and I think I see wild radishes. If we shelter by the spire, then we’ll be able to have something to eat and something at our backs.”

Gang nodded slowly. “Okay, that makes sense. But I’m dragging you right out if anything weird happens. Or one of the corpses shows up.”

Neither of them commented on the clouds of resentful energy looming over the Burial Mounds like fog. Or the ghosts wailing in the trees. Or, for that matter, the white bones lying about on the ground in plain sight.

No point to it. They had to do what they had to do so there was no need to talk it to death.

Still, Ying’s heart just about pounded straight through his chest as he held the purification bowl in front of him. He had to force himself to take the first step. Then the second step that took him past the big stones the Nie had put along the edge of the Burial Mounds.

Nothing happened until he was three paces past the stones.

Then, as Ying stood there with his knees knocking together and his heart hammering in his ears, two things happened at the same time.

First, the dog-yao howled behind him.

Second, tiny glowing lotus flowers bloomed on the ground around Ying. Globes of glowing red, blue, purple, yellow, and green light drifted up off the lotus flowers. They were beautiful and soft and somehow so very sad, but not scary at all.

Gang whined and then darted in to press up against Ying’s back. “They’re back. They’re hunting us, Ying!”

“Shit,” Ying turned and screeched because there weren’t six sets of glowing red eyes peering at them out of the dark pine forest surrounding the Burial Mounds.

There were dozens.

A growl so eerie and loud echoed in the air as those glowing eyes crept closer.

“Run!” Ying screamed.

Gang and Ying ran towards the spire and then past it and then onwards up the mountain, dodging glowing lotuses and drifting globes of light. There were corpses, rotting and gross, that loomed up out of the resentful energy fog, but they didn’t grab at Ying or at Gang.

They still screamed to see them. That was just normal, you know? Something like that was scary! They were kids. They had the right to be terrified by walking corpses with clothes rotting off of them right there in front of their faces.

Still, the eerie howls and growls of the dog-yao pack fell behind them once they dashed past a circle of inward-curling rock spires that looked like of like claws. There were still roars and howls and lots of yelping, but neither Ying nor Gang looked back to see what happened.

Instead they ran and ran and found a ruin that had a cave that they both dashed straight into.

Ying whirled and put the purification bowl right in the doorway, pushing as much qi into it as he could manage in the hopes that the thing would keep the dog-yao out. And the corpses. And the ghosts and whatever else was in that creepy fog.

“Let me help,” Gang said through his panting.

Between the two of them, they got the purification bowl blazing like the sun which did a pretty darn good job clearing the fog away. Ying wheezed as he collapsed on the floor of the cave next to the bowl.

“That was awful,” Ying complained.

“Nice cave, though,” Gang agreed with a tired nod. “It’s big.”

It was big.

Huge!

They rested until they weren’t sweaty and panting before they explored, but even from the doorway they could see just how enormous the cave they’d found was. Fortunately, their purification beads glowed brightly enough that they could still see once they moved away from the entrance of the cave.

While the entrance was super-small, basically the size of a regular doorway, the cave opened up into a huge echoing cavern that went off into the mountainside. There were passages and a toppled statue with water coming out of its mouth and just all kinds of room.

Everywhere they went, there were faintly glowing arrays on the walls and the floors.

Single ones and ones arranged like sentences in a book. Some that looked like they were poems, couplets of the pictograms arranged together with a border around them carved into the stone.

“I wish I could read better,” Ying said as he ran his finger over one of the poems.

“I wish I could read,” Gang said with an amused little snort. “Come on. I bet the purification bowl would purify water like it does the resentful energy.”

“Ooh, nice idea!” Ying said, grinning at him. “You have the best ideas.”

“Nah, this is the best idea,” Gang said as they went back to the entrance. “This could be our home base, Ying. We can, I don’t know, make grass nests to sleep on. We can probably figure out a way to cook in here.”

“Heat array,” Ying said, wagging a finger at Gang. “Just put on a flat rock. Then we’d only need pots or something.”

“Oh, yeah,” Gang said.

A rare smile spread across his face. He’d been slowly adjusting his eyes since they decided to be twins. They gleamed silver now with a few hints of golden brown around the iris that Ying thought was the prettiest thing ever. Ying had made a point of carefully adjusting his nose to match Gang’s so that Gang wasn’t making all the changes.

They were the same size, the same age, and now they almost looked identical. Add on a potential home, maybe a way to stay safe from the horrible dogs, and things were looking up for the first time since Mama and Baba died.

Outside the cave, the dog-yao were long-gone. Instead, there were about eight or nine corpses staring into the cave. They stayed well away from the glow of the purification bowl, which was super-reassuring.

If Ying didn’t know better, he’d say that the corpses looked appalled to see two kids in the Burial Mounds, but that was silly.

“It works,” Gang whispered as they stared at the corpses that stared back at them. “They aren’t attacking!”

“I know!” Ying giggled, clinging to Gang’s arm. “I’m so happy. And relieved. And sleepy. We should set up some heat arrays and sleep. We’ve got shelter for the night.”

Gang nodded. “Tomorrow we can worry about food. And beds. And everything else.”

As they turned away, back into the cave, Ying thought he saw the corpses turn to stare at each other. He’d seen so many grown-ups do that turn and look at each other appalled about something thing that he would’ve sworn that the corpses did the same thing.

That was… silly, though. They were corpses. They didn’t have feelings or think or anything anymore.

Yeah. Couldn’t be. No way.

Maybe?

No, couldn’t be.

 

 

3. Dreams

“A-Ying. A-Ying, it’s time to get up, baobie.”

Ying grumbled and swatted at Mama’s hand on his shoulder. He’d only just gotten to sleep! It wasn’t time to get up yet. Couldn’t be.

His hand didn’t connect with anyone, which was odd. Mama always kept her hand right there on his shoulder to wake him up because otherwise he would curl up deeper under the blankets where it was warm and comfy just like now…

…Wait.

Blankets?

Ying opened his eyes and stared around the little room at the inn where his parents had left him before they died. Their gear was off on the far side of the room, neatly stacked. A tray full of congee with sliced fruit and piping hot tea waited on the low table in the middle of the room.

“What is this?” Gang whispered behind Ying. “What’s going on?”

“I… think this is a dream?” Ying said. “Maybe? Or something in the Burial Mounds has trapped us in a dream. That’s possible, too.”

“I like the dream,” Gang said as he slowly and carefully eased out of the bed and went to poke the congee with one grubby finger. “Warm. Feels real. If you eat in a dream, will your belly actually be fuller?”

“No,” Ying said. “Trust me on that one. I’ve eaten in dreams and woken up twice as hungry before.

He got up to rummage through his parents things for Mama’s old silver lotus pin that Baba gave her when they eloped. It was there, cool and dinged with a thousand tiny scratches. Ying clutched it to his chest. Mama had been wearing it before she left the last time so obviously this had to be a dream.

“What is it?” Gang asked, peering over Ying’s shoulder.

“Mama’s hairpin,” Ying said as he showed Gang. “She was wearing it when she died. Obviously, this has to be a dream. But how? Why?”

“Good question,” Gang said.

His scowl reasserted itself. The two of them slowly checked out everything in the room but there were no clues. By silent accord, neither of them ate the food waiting in the middle of the room. Mysterious dream food produced by who knew what for unknown reasons didn’t seem like a good idea.

Instead, they pushed the door of the room open.

The cave in the Burial Mounds waited on the other side. Instead of dimly lit pictograms on everything, the pictograms blazed with light. They were like the purification bowl, as bright as the sun and just as warm.

“Wow,” Ying breathed as the two of them slowly made their way into the part of the cave where the statue was. Instead of the statue being on the ground, toppled, it stood tall and imposing on the far side of the room. Kneeling, actually, with its feet tucked properly under the weight of its huge stone body.

“That’s even bigger than I thought it would be,” Gang commented.

His fingers were so tight around Ying’s hand that it hurt, but then Ying gripped his hand back just as hard.

A little cave entrance sat next to the statue, unremarkable.

And unseen until now.

Ying and Gang exchanged looks then the slowly, carefully, reluctantly crept into the new cave. The doorway was several paces deep, dark as night while you were in it, but then it opened up into an amazing little room. Perfectly square and obviously cut by hand out of the living rock, the room had niches on the wall full of silk-wrapped scrolls on the left and right walls. The wall you faced when you entered had a blazing map of Yiling full of rainbow-colored arrays that blinked and pulsed and glowed steadily.

A soldier stood next to the map, frowning at the two of them.

He was older, maybe in his late fifties. It was pretty obvious that he’d gone through something awful because his armor was bloody and cut up. The blood hadn’t yet dried on his face or hands. It dripped slowly to the floor underneath him.

And he was so exhausted. Ying’s heart hurt for how tired the soldier looked.

“You boys shouldn’t be here,” the soldier said. “It’s not safe.”

“No, but we don’t have anywhere else to go,” Gang said with his most defiant jut of the chin and most angry glare.

“We really don’t,” Ying agreed with his brightest grin and a bounce on his toes that always made Elder Entai shake her head and pass him a treat when no one was looking. “Our parents are dead and there are dog-yao in town. None of the sects will do anything about them.”

“Plus winter is coming and we need a place to live that isn’t open to the air,” Gang said.

“Or in the quarry,” Ying said, nodding.

The soldier stared at him, appalled. “The quarry? What happened to the orphanage? The temple? You should at least be able to stay at the school until a place is found for you.”

Ying and Gang exchanged looks. Gang grimaced because he’d say it way too blunt for whatever this entity really was. Ying was the only one between the two of them that had any kind of ability to be, you know, not insultingly bluntly rude.

“I think you remember Yiling very differently than we do, Sir,” Ying said slowly. “The temple burned down a couple of generations back. It’s just a wall and a hole in the ground now. No one knows anything about an orphanage, and I’ve never even heard of a school in Yiling.”

“Elder Entai sometimes teaches people the most basic characters,” Gang offered as the soldier looked devastated. “But that’s it. I mean, the Cho family can read. They all teach each other generation to generation.”

“The Du’s, too,” Ying agreed. “But they need it because they’re the ones who do all the wood carving and build houses.”

“I think the Pan family teaches their daughters,” Gang muttered, scowling as he rubbed his nose. “Well, some of them, anyway.”

The soldier’s shoulders sagged. “It’s all gone.”

The bright lights of the map faded into occasional blinks. The cave that they stood in dimmed until they stood in a vast black space with just the three of them. Gang’s grip on Ying’s hand tightened so much that Ying leaned into him to reassure Gang. And, you know, himself, too.

“What is, Sir?” Ying asked.

“Everything I built,” the soldier said with a tired sigh. He rubbed a bloody hand across his face, streaking the blood that mixed with tears that slowly fell from his eyes. “I tried to make a safe place for my people, my friends and my lover and our children. I tried to create a whole new way for people to cultivate so that the common people didn’t get left behind. It’s all gone.”

Ying frowned. “Wait, what was that about the common people?”

The soldier huffed a broken little laugh. “I’d crafted the arrays underpinning Yiling so that anyone who lived here long enough, over a year, developed a basic golden core. They healed better, were stronger, smarter. It made sure that they wouldn’t fall sick and die like normal peasants. The cores weren’t exactly the same as a core built by effort the traditional way, but if someone wanted to, they could expand their core through practice.”

“Or they could just live their life with the core they’d developed,” Gang whispered, eyes wide as he stared at the soldier. “That’s still working. Ying is from outside of Yiling. I grew up here. Our cores are almost the same.”

“We’ve been practicing together and learning how to use the weird arrays and things,” Ying agreed. “There’s all sorts of stuff left over from whatever you were doing. It’s just not working the way you wanted.”

The blackness receded until they were standing in a grand audience chamber with silk banners on the wall and a heavy throne made of dark brown wood. No gilding or jewels or anything, just a big heavy chair set up on a dais one step higher than the rest of the floor.

The soldier sat on his throne, staring at the two of them. The corpses they’d seen outside the cave lurched in. The closer they got to the soldier, the more alive they looked. The one in the lead turned into a dashing young soldier, maybe thirty or so, with a scar over his nose.

“Sect Leader Xue,” the dashing soldier said as he bowed properly, “the border is secure again. We destroyed most of the dog-yao. One escaped but we believe that it will try again. It will certainly infect the other dogs in the area.”

“Thank you, General Kwan,” Sect Leader Xue said. “The boys say that everything we built is gone.”

General Kwan winced and rubbed the back of his neck. “They’re not wrong, Sect Leader. Our bodies are rotting away. Soon we’ll be reduced to ghosts. Most of the ghosts of our people have dissipated into clouds of resentful energy. And,” he sighed as he looked so desperately tired and heartbroken, “from what we can see, Yiling has become a slum within the Jianghu. They destroyed all your works as completely as they could.”

Ying stared at both of them, mouth open. Gang had his arms around Ying’s waist, hiding behind him even though Ying could feel how determined Gang was to keep them both safe. If anything came at them, Gang would haul Ying right off his feet and then run.

“You’re Xue Chonghai,” Ying said. “This is your cave? This is where the final battles against you happened?”

Xue Chonghai quirked a crooked little smile Ying’s way. “That I am. This was my home. The Jianghu decided that I was a monster. They killed my people, pursued me, hunted us all down. I’d been building a sanctuary here, but it wasn’t quite ready when they brought their armies against us.”

Sanctuary. All kinds of protections. A place that could, if properly prepared, hold off an entire army of cultivators.

Huh.

General Kwan sighed, mouth twisting as he tried to hide a grimace. “We fought to the death and beyond, but we failed. Once you fell, Sect Leader, we couldn’t repair our bodies.”

“Wait, what?” Gang squawked. “Repair dead bodies?”

Xue Chonghai huffed a laugh. “Yes, it was one of the things I was working on. It seemed like a decent idea. Sworn warriors who would protect my sanctuary and my people to death and then beyond death. The rest of the Jianghu viewed it as a monstrosity, though.”

“We all volunteered,” General Kwan snarled while glaring towards the dimly visible doorway into the audience chamber. “We said as much. No one cared. No one believed us. We’re still here and we’ll stay here until our bodies rot away, our souls dissipate and the mountain itself wears down into silt in the river.”

Ying’s eyebrows went up. “Wow. I mean, no, yeah, wow. That’s… wow. But um, back to that bit about it wasn’t all ready? Could it be fixed? Made ready somehow?”

“We lack the ability to affect the physical world,” Xue Chonghai said, waving a hand to himself and to General Kwan’s people. “There’s no way to do it anymore. We can’t touch anything or push energy into it.”

“We can,” Ying said. Offered.

“Wait a minute!” Gang protested. “What are you thinking?”

“Safe place with people, of a sort, to protect us from the dog-yao and all the mean people in town that hate street kids,” Ying explained to Gang. “There’s water. There’s shelter. We can figure out food.”

“…The sanctuary will naturally produce prodigious amounts of vegetables if the wards are set correctly,” Xue Chonghai said, blinking at them both with interest.

“See!” Ying exclaimed. “Food and shelter and water and lots of cool stuff to learn. If we start now, while we’re little, we can fix all kinds of things up and no one will even notice it.”

“You trust them,” Gang said in his flattest, most annoyed tone. “They’re dead ghosts and we’re trapped in a dream with them and you’re actually trusting them.”

“Mmm.” Ying shrugged and wobbled a hand doubtfully. “Still think the cave’s our best bet for the winter. And if the corpses actually are them, and there’s a way to keep them from being so creepy-awful and we can learn stuff while we’re here, I think it’s a good risk. I mean, we’re totally going to die of exposure if we stay in town.”

Gang sighed and rolled his eyes towards the dark-hidden ceiling. “Or get eaten by those awful dog-yao. Fine. We’ll try it. But if this gets too weird or too bad, we’re running for it.”

“Deal,” Ying said.

They shook on it, which made Xue Chonghai and General Kwan smile at them like they were adorable. True. They were adorable. But still, rude.

“All right,” Ying said as he turned back to Xue Chonghai. “If you’ll help us learn what needs to be done, we’ll work on fixing everything over time. By the time we’re grown up, hopefully Yiling will be what you wanted it to be instead of the mess it is right now.”

Xue Chonghai stared at them, just slowly blinking at them as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. There was a sort of edge to him, like the darkness that had filled the clouds over the Burial Mounds, like the haunted mushrooms around Yiling. It was dangerous and sharp and cold, but at the same time, it was familiar.

Ying knew this. He’d been living in the middle of this energy since his parents died. Gang just frowned at Xue Chonghai and General Kwan. He’d grown up here since he was like a tiny baby, so it was perfectly normal to him.

Whatever face Xue Chonghai put on, or maybe whatever the Burial Mounds did to put on Xue Chonghai’s face, this was still their best chance to survive.

“All right,” Xue Chonghai said finally. “I’m not fond of the idea of children in the Burial Mounds, not as they are right now, but I’ll clear the sanctuary of resentful energy and show you how to make things grow again. Even with the winter coming, there’s things you can do to get fresh produce from the land.”

“Really?” Ying and Gang said at the same time, though in completely different tones.

Ying was delighted. Gang was, as always, suspicious.

Xue Chonghai grinned while General Kwan snickered. “Yeah, really. The heat talismans will keep the ground from freezing up and without the clouds overhead, there’ll be enough sunshine for the plants to grow. We can sort it out. That part is easy.”

“I think the first thing you need to teach us is how to make them,” Gang hooked at thumb at General Kwan and his corpse-soldiers, “way less gross. Because yuck.”

“They are really nasty,” Ying agreed with a grimace and a shudder. “I mean, I don’t know what we can do, but if we can make them less all, you know, dead everywhere, it would be better.”

General Kwan spluttered as if that was a stupid, silly idea, but he shut his mouth when Xue Chonghai held up his hand. Such a casual little gesture, but it was deeply commanding. Mama used to tell stories about visiting Wen Ruohan and watching him order people around with casual little waves and mild comments. This was just like that.

“To defend you?” Xue Chonghai asked.

Gang shrugged. “That, too. But mostly because they’re rotting and its smelly and gross and awful. If it can be fixed, it should be fixed. Soon.”

“Really smelly,” Ying agreed.

General Kwan rolled his eyes towards the ceiling as if they were ridiculous, but Xue Chonghai snickered and nodded.

“Fine, that can be one of the first lessons,” Xue Chonghai said. “It’s mostly an automatic process. There’s just debris in the middle of the array for that so it won’t work.”

“Oh, we can fix that,” Ying said.

“Pfft, easy,” Gang agreed. “Now let us sleep properly so we wake up with energy instead of exhausted. We’ll fix things and start learning tomorrow.”

“Done,” Xue Chonghai said.

His smile was wry, a little sad and lonely. Ying could still see something dark in his eyes, something that tasted of resentful energy and felt like the dog-yao creeping out of the woods with their lips curled back to expose too-long fangs.

But it didn’t seem directed at Ying or at Gang.

If anything, the darkness swirling in the corners of the audience hall felt more protective than anything else. He didn’t know what to make of it, other than that they needed to be careful in the future.

As much as they could be. Shelter and water and food and education in all kinds of cultivation stuff that might save their lives was more than worth the risk of whatever it was behind Xue Chonghai’s eyes.

 

 

4. Water

Ying opened his eyes, halfway expecting to find himself in the quarry or camped out somewhere in the woods around Yiling. In the days just after Mama and Baba died, he’d opened his eyes and expected to find them just across from him, wrapped up together in their shared bedroll. Mama hated getting up, just like Ying did, so he always woke up to Mama asleep, and Baba’s wry amusement as he carefully eased out of the bedroll to make their breakfast.

He didn’t remember when that had faded away into a wary certainty that he’d wake up somewhere dangerous that he needed to be instantly alert for. It just had. Mornings were for waking up fast and running for his life.

But not today.

Today he opened his eyes to a cave that glowed with arrays and the sense of Xue Chonghai watching over the two of them. Gang was, obviously, already awake. He’d gotten up before Ying even twitched. He always woke up way before Ying did. It was like a rule.

“I found radishes and spinach,” Gang said. “There was some clay, too, really dark black clay but still clay. I think we can make a pot to cook soup in.”

“Oh, wow, that’d be perfect,” Ying breathed.

He scrambled out of their little nest of grass and rags to help Gang make a wobbly, uneven pot out of the black clay. Making sure that there weren’t any gaps that would leak or bubbles that would explode like had happened with the other beads took a good bit of work, but eventually they had a pot that almost looked like a pot.

“Right, now we need to bake it,” Ying said, clay-covered hands on his hips. “What does Cho Ming call it? Firing it?”

“That,” Gang agreed. “But for a proper pot we kinda need to fire it for real, don’t we? Otherwise it’s going to dissolve as we cook.”

A glowing pictogram appeared next to them, bobbing in the air. Gang skittered away from it. Ying stared at it curiously before poking the pictogram with one finger.

“Don’t do that!” Gang complained.

“Doesn’t feel like anything,” Ying said. “Okay, so Xue Chonghai wants us to use this pictogram on the pot? Yes, blink twice fast. No, fade out and then come back.”

“…I cannot believe you sometimes,” Gang said flatly enough that Ying snickered at him.

But only for a second because the floating pictogram faded away entirely before coming back after a count of ten. Ying crowed and thrust a fist into the air, totally ignoring Gang who grumbled at him. A whole series of yes-no questions later, they found the hidden library, picked a scroll that glowed off one of the shelves on the right, and then one particular array on that scroll.

Which, when scratched onto the ground with a circle around it, fired the pot perfectly without a single bit of wood to make a fire.

“Eeee! This is amazing!” Ying squealed, shaking Gang’s arm. “We can make bowls. Pots. Cups! We can make spoons!”

“We can make a water vessel with the purification array on it so that we know the water is good,” Gang said much more calmly and reasonably.

“Ugh, you are so practical,” Ying complained while hugging Gang who just snickered at him.

But really, that was a great idea and both of them set to work making it happen. Not just a really great, them-sized water vessel that they had to wrestle into place in the cave, but some clay scoops with long handles that would let them get water from it, and a lid.

It took the whole day, from morning until after nightfall, but by the end of that day they had fresh, clean water and they’d made some purification tiles that they put around the pool of water that came from the fallen statue’s mouth.

“Bath time,” Ying declared. “Bath and washing clothes.”

“Seriously?” Gang asked as if Ying was crazy.

“Yes, seriously,” Ying said. “Because tomorrow we have to figure out the whole fixing General Kwan’s body thing and I want to know that I can get properly clean afterwards.”

Gang opened his mouth and then shut it while nodding. The heat array did a great job heating up the water so that they had a lovely hot bath. Which, honestly was a terrific idea for putting on a little tile that they could drop into a pot to make instant-boiling soup. Charge the tile, drop it in, and poof! Boiling water.

“If we had tea, we could make tea with it,” Ying commented as he shaped, marked and then fired six little thumb-sized heat tiles. “Put it on the bottom of a cup and then charge it so that the tea stays warm.”

“Always warm soup would be nice,” Gang agreed.

He put six more purification beads into the fire the clay array, along with a bowl with the heat array on the bottom of it. The really weird part was that General Kwan showed up after dark with a whole stack of muddy, dusty, nasty clothes, presumably gathered from dead bodies in the Burial Mounds.

Ying tried to smile as General Kwan set the heap of clothes down outside the cave. “Um, thanks?”

“Definitely thanks,” Gang said, shooing General Kwan away with a flip of his fingers. “We’ll need to get soap to wash them all but, really, thank you. I wasn’t looking forward to winter with just the clothes we have.”

“Fair,” Ying sighed, rolling his eyes. “But still. Um. Um!”

He had the distinct impression that General Kwan snickered at the two of them, even though General Kwan didn’t have enough face left to smile or lungs left to laugh with. Didn’t matter. The clothes weren’t too bad, really. Mostly just dusty and stained. There were stab marks cut through them, places that had torn, of course. Despite that, the clothes were way more solid than what Gang and Ying had to wear.

“Soap, needle, thread, scissors, maybe a knife,” Gang said as he sorted the clothes out into things they could maybe use right away and things that would need a whole heck of a lot more work to be useful.

“That’s a lot to steal,” Ying said. “I mean, I know we can get some soap. The red lantern house leaves a lump behind the house for the laundry girls.”

“So do the Cho’s,” Gang agreed. “The needle and thread are going to be really tough. We might have to make the needle somehow. Thread, well, we’ll take the most worn-out stuff and unravel thread off that. Scissors is harder, though.”

“I bet there’s knives out there,” Ying said, looking out into the darkness of the Burial Mounds. “They might be rusty and stuff, but they’re there. General Kwan and his people can help us find some that aren’t too bad.”

They washed the best clothes, rinsed and bashed them against the side of the pool really, and then dried them with the heat arrays. Made for a really lovely nest to curl up in that night because the clothes stayed warm for long enough that Ying sighed happily once they were cuddled together.

“This is going to work,” Gang whispered. “I wasn’t sure.”

“I think it will,” Ying agreed. “Though we’ve got a lot more work to do before we get there.”

The next day was proof of that. They made their way back into town, skirting the edge of the Burial Mounds and watching for the dog-yao. Neither of them saw it, them, or even the wild dogs that were always such a plague for street kids.

No one in town had noticed that they were gone for a full day and a night, either. That was good. Stealing soap wasn’t hard. Ying literally just knocked on the red lantern’s kitchen door and begged in a broken voice and big, sad eyes to take the lump of soap they left outside. The cook huffed and let him do it, passing Ying two bao filled with tiny chunks of beef and a lot of lovely spicy sauce.

Gang didn’t ask at the Cho farm. He just snuck in and took the soap. He also snagged a tiny pair of scissors that one of the Cho daughters had left on the back porch. They were dull and barely big enough to snip thread, but they were better than nothing.

They hid their haul at the edge of the Burial Mounds and then went back into town to hear what the gossip was while begging for food. The gossip made Gang scowl. The food made Ying scowl for much the same reason. The Wen, rotten jerks that they were, had decided that dog-yao weren’t important enough to go deal with. The food that got tossed their way was rotten, too, which was just insulting as all heck.

But that was what the new people in town seemed to be like. The people who’d lived in Yiling for generations and generations and generations were bitter and sharp-tongued, smart enough to know that their lives were terrible but too stubborn to leave the only home they’d ever known.

The Cho family and the Du family and the Pan family and the Xin family were all old-timers who could count back a dozen or more generations living right here in Yiling.

They’d share what little they had with street kids, at least once every few days. It would be real food, good food, not something rotted and slimy. Ying knew outright that if they begged at any of the old-timer households, they would get at least a few mouthfuls that would keep them alive for another day or two or three.

New people, as more recent residents of Yiling were called, tended to be thieves, drunks, child molesters run out of other towns; all the worst sort of people who found happiness in making other people miserable because they were unhappy.

“Really hate that guy,” Ying complained to Gang after they’d had to dodge rotten pears casually tossed at their heads with a quip about it being food for them to eat.

“I know,” Gang grumbled. “Come on. There’s too many new people. We won’t get anything decent today.”

And a new creepy guy from the docks was prowling through town with one hand way too close to his crotch so yeah, definitely time to go somewhere else.

Out by the river, Gang chanced on an actual knife that someone had set down. The two of them looked at it, looked at each other, and then snatched it up. They ran right out of town, waiting for someone to shout about kids stealing from him.

They did hear someone shouting as they passed the Cho farm, but they were far enough from the docks that it could just be one off the brawls that the river workers got in all the time. Either way, they grabbed their haul and ran right back into the heart of the Burial Mounds with their purification beads blazing, glowing lotuses blooming at their feet, and soul globes bobbing in the air all around them.

“Oh, I hate doing that,” Gang wheezed once they dashed back into the cave.

“It’s so scary,” Ying agreed. “What is with the glowing lotuses?”

“And the globes, too,” Gang agreed. He shook his head. “Right. Let’s scrub some clothes and then see if we can figure out what to do about General Kwan and his people.”

Fixing General Kwan involved following bouncing arrays floating in mid-air, getting two scrolls from the secret library, and then cleaning off a whole bunch of fallen branches, dirt and rock from the place that the floating array indicated.

It didn’t look like much. There was a big boulder on one side of the circle. It had been inscribed with dozens and dozens of arrays, all with the weird pictograms, from the very top of the boulder all the way down underneath its edge. The circle had pictograms all around the outer edge and then it was crammed-tight with thousands more of them in tiny, perfect pictograms etched into the flagstones that lined it.

“I don’t know if we have the power to start this up,” Gang said as he frowned and traced his finger over the arrays at the edge.

“I… think? Maybe,” Ying said as he studied the two scrolls, “that it’s supposed to run on resentful energy. I mean, look at this. One of these is obviously showing how to use the circle to stop bleeding and keep someone from dying.”

“Okay, yeah, big old cut though the throat and stomach with blood spiling out does imply that,” Gang agreed. He snorted a laugh when Ying elbowed him.

“Yeah,” Ying agreed. “Now this other one doesn’t show blood. It shows… I think those are clouds of resentful energy? The clouds feed down into the body and that kind of looks like the body being knit back together.”

“Huh,” Gang said as he studied the second scroll. “Yeah. Maybe. I mean, if General Kwan is willing to try it, we can make an attempt. But I don’t know how to use resentful energy. I barely know how to use spiritual energy.”

Ying nodded, biting his lip. “Mama taught me about it before she died. I mean, she was really clear that it’s very harmful and you shouldn’t use it if you have any other choice, but it can be done. You just gotta purify all the resentful energy out of yourself after you’re safe.”

Gang nodded slowly. He studied both scrolls, running his fingers over the drawings as if he was memorizing them. Then he made Ying show him how the purification part worked, over and over and over until Ying was about to scream from sheer frustration because Gang just wasn’t getting it.

“Yeah, you’re going to have to do that part,” Gang said with a frustrated huff. “I just can’t quite get it. Yet. I mean, eventually? I think I’ll figure it out. Sometime. But not today. If we want to fix General Kwan, then I need to do the resentful energy side of things and you need to do the purification side.”

“But!” Ying squawked automatically only to pause and actually think about it.

Gang already knew how resentful energy worked. He’d been sort of kind of using it his whole life. That was a part of why he was so good at avoiding the haunted mushrooms and how he always knew when the creepy four-eyed snakes were coming or when the dog-yao were close.

And Ying, honestly, was just a lot better at using spiritual energy than Gang was. His core handled it better, was stronger, moved the energy faster.

“Ugh, fine,” Ying grumbled. “But we’re going to figure out how to trade off. I want to learn the resentful side, too.”

“That’s fair,” Gang agreed.

Either way, it was super-creepy when General Kwan lurched into the circle. He was such a rotting, awful, stinky mess that Ying had to breathe through his teeth so that he wouldn’t gag. Gang didn’t seem to notice, but then he’d knelt down on one knee with one hand on the ground outside of the circle and one on the big boulder.

Resentful energy swirled down out of the sky above Gang, then over his narrow shoulders and down around the arm supporting him in a slender rope that throbbed glowing red in time with Gang’s heartbeat.

He worked the resentful energy cloud into a slender thread of resentful energy, just like what the scroll showed, instead of a huge cloud like what billowed overhead all the time. To Ying, it looked like Gang was spinning the resentful energy like Elder Entai did when she spun flax into thread for the loom except Gang was the spindle and the spinner at the same time.

And he was crying, silently through gritted teeth, which Elder Entai never, ever did.

The resentful thread traced along the circle at Gang’s fingertips, then filled the arrays with glowing red light. Sweat bloomed on Gang’s forehead. He gritted his teeth, eyes locked on General Kwan who stood motionless in the center of the circle.

As Ying fidgeted, heart hammering in his chest, General Kwan’s rotted body started to shudder on his bones. It shifted and flowed, tendons and muscles and ligaments flying loose only to snap into place, whole once more. The muscles were lean and flat, not big and burly like the dock worker’s, but that was fine. It was okay as long as General Kwan was fixed up enough not to be a horrible, stinky mess and as long as Gang wasn’t killed by this.

The new skin that formed over General Kwan’s body crept up from the soles of his feet like moss crawling on caterpillar legs along his exposed, glistening flesh.

“Come on,” Ying whispered as he watched Gang sweat and grit his teeth and shudder. “Come on. Come on. That’s enough. Come on, Gang. It’s good enough. We can do more later. It’s good enough.”

Gang didn’t listen. He kept working until General Kwan looked like a normal naked man who’d been half-starved and had all his clothes taken away.

The instant General Kwan could halfway pass for a living human, Ying caught Gang’s shoulders.

“That’s enough!” Ying shouted. “Stop. Stop right now! We’ll do another round later. Stop it, Gang!”

Gang wheezed and slumped in Ying’s arms. There were black lines of resentful energy all along his arms and neck, wrapping around his ankles and calves where his too-short pants exposed his legs. Ying hissed as he drew the purification array in the air above Gang’s collapsed body.

The clay array that they’d used to get into the Burial Mounds the first time had been full of both Ying and Gang’s desperation. They needed a safe place, and they were literally willing to try anything to get it.

This purification array held Ying’s entire soul.

Gang had to survive.

He had to.

Ying couldn’t do this without his adopted twin, his brother, the one person who kept him grounded and who gave him wings at the same time. Maybe someday they’d find someone else who could accept and love and support them, but right now the one thing, the one person keeping Ying alive was Gang.

Just Gang.

“You have to live,” Ying said as the purification array blazed between them like the sun held in the palms of Ying’s hands. “You have to, Gang.”

It couldn’t burn Gang, so Ying softened the blazing light as he slowly, implacably pushed its purification energy into Gang’s body.

Ashy clouds billowed up around them, flowing off Gang in streams and ribbons and puffs that Ying thought might, possibly, be souls evicted from Gang’s body. The black lines retreated down Gang’s arms, creeping off his neck and calves and ankles until there was no more black anywhere on his skin.

It was still under the skin, lurking in Gang’s muscles and tendons and bones.

Ying sucked in a breath and let his eyes drift shut. In the distance, somewhere very far away, he could hear someone saying alarmed things, but whoever it was didn’t matter. Gang mattered.

He had to save Gang.

Ying slowly knelt down and hugged Gang with the purification array between them. The heat of his body pushed it deep into Gang. Gang’s fingernails began to glow. Then his hair. Then his face and his half-open eyes blazed with pure white light. The sturdy little core inside of Gang shivered as it took in the purification energy flowing from Ying.

Then Gang shouted and twisted, grabbing Ying’s shoulders.

He looked so scared, which, well, that was fair. He’d scared the heck out of Ying. But…

…Oh.

“Huh, put too much into you, didn’t I?” Ying said to Gang.

“Yes!” Gang squawked even though his core was handling it pretty well. “Take it back, you idiot! That wasn’t purification.”

It took a good bit before the two of them managed to get the qi they’d shared evened out. Gang pushed too much to Ying, which weakened him, then Ying pushed it back and overdid it.

But eventually, once they slowed down, they found a level kind of like water settling into a pot with two conjoined bowls. Then, as one, they eased apart so that Ying’s qi became just his and Gang’s qi became just his and they weren’t linked soul to soul, mind to mind, anymore.

And, like a bowl of broth set down a bit too hard, they both rippled a bit as they separated but since they stayed still and calm, fingers looped together, eventually their cores stabilized.

It just took way too long before they could open their eyes again.

“Huh, I feel way stronger,” Gang said once they were able to let each other’s hands go. “Did you give me too much?”

“No,” Ying said, rubbing his belly. “I feel stronger, too. That’s weird.”

“Children.”

They both started and whirled to find General Kwan staring down at them with the most alarmed dismay that Ying had ever seen on an adult since his parents died.

“I’d appreciate it if you would avoid dual cultivating until you’re grown up,” General Kwan said.

“Dual what?” Ying asked. “What’s that? Why? Is it bad?”

“But it worked, and it made us both stronger,” Gang protested with his best, most stubborn frown. “Why shouldn’t we do it when it worked so well?”

General Kwan opened his mouth and then sighed. He rolled his eyes towards the ashy clouds of resentful energy overhead. Which, huh, they were way farther overhead than Ying had ever seen them. And there was actually green grass around the two of them.

“I’m going to let Sect Leader Xue explain it in your dreams,” General Kwan finally said. “Just… avoid doing that unless you absolutely have to. Dual cultivation can go very, very wrong and you’re both much too young for it.”

Ying scowled along with Gang at being told no.

“Fine,” Gang grumbled as he struggled to his feet. “But Sect Leader Xue better have a darn good reason for us not to do it.”

“Agreed,” Ying complained as he battled his trembling arms and legs until he could stand up, too.

Whatever. Time for General Kwan to have a long bath and the two of them to eat something. Figuring out what was wrong with what they’d done could wait until tomorrow.

 

 

5. Food

Ying woke the next morning with his ears ringing from the long, horrified and very detailed lecture Xue Chonghai had given them during their sleep. As soon as his eyes opened, his face started burning in a huge blush.

“I am never, ever, ever doing that again,” Gang announced from the other side of the cave.

“I am never telling anyone that we did it, ever,” Ying countered as he sat up and patted his too-hot cheeks, “but I’m not willing to say that I won’t do it again. It saved your life, Gang. I can’t do this without you. You’re not allowed to die.”

“Fine,” Gang said as he started blushing just as hard as Ying was. “That’s fair. But we’re still not doing it again.”

“Pffft, there was nothing, you know, sexual about that,” Ying said just as he had about a thousand times to Xue Chonghai in the dream. “We’re too little for that. I still don’t see how that could be sexual.”

Gang frowned as he uncurled from the ball he’d been in, pressed up against the far wall of the cave as if he’d tried to get as far away from Ying as possible. He probably had. Xue Chonghai didn’t seem to think that little kids should be shielded from knowing about sex or sexual things, though he didn’t exactly tell them everything, just all the ways that other people would see it as a sex-thing.

“Yeah, I didn’t either,” Gang agreed. “But that doesn’t much matter. Let’s see if we can scrounge up some food. I’m super hungry.”

“Me, too.”

They took the big black clay pot they’d made out to the spring on the side of the cave entrance. As they worked to ladle water into it, the pot slowly sprouted leaks. Little ones at first. Then it cracked in several places before collapsing into a mass of broken shards and a gush of water.

“Gah!” Ying shouted as he jumped back with the clay scoop he’d been using.

“Well, that didn’t work,” Gang complained as he shook off the water soaking him. “Darn it. I think we’re going to have to steal a big pot from Cho Ming if we want to keep water in the cave.”

Ying nodded, frowning. “Yeah. We’ll have to do it when Cho Ming is inside the shop and it’s just Cho Dahong outside. If we make some pretty beads and little heat talismans, he might not tell on us.”

Gang nodded thoughtfully. “He might, at that.”

General Kwan marched over, wearing some of their less battered clothes reclaimed from who knew where in the Burial Mounds. “What are you two up to?”

“We tried to make a pot, but it didn’t work,” Ying explained. “So we’re plotting how to steal one from the potter in town without getting in too much trouble.”

“We can dig up money as easily as we can the clothes,” General Kwan said, sighing at them as if they were being idiots.

“No one would believe we’d earned it,” Gang said. “We’re street kids. Having money would just get us beaten up and maybe killed. Stuff we could plausibly make to trade, that’ll work. Actual money or jewels or whatever, nope.”

General Kwan nodded as if that was fair, but it was obvious that he didn’t like it. Either way, he helped them find and harvest a bunch of wild radishes that were growing wild in the Burial Mounds. There were bamboo shoots, pitch black but still edible according to General Kwan, and purple carrots and a whole bunch of black beans that had grown up and around a hunk of toppled wall behind one of the boulders on the far side of the Burial Mounds from Yiling.

Plus an apple tree that had a few apples still hanging on it beyond the edges of the Burial Mounds and two whole fish that they managed to catch with General Kwan’s encouragement from afar.

He couldn’t pass the boundary.

Not the boundary stones put down by the various sects. Those had no effect on General Kwan at all. The boundary that held him back was one set up by Xue Chonghai himself. Ying was pretty sure that it could be adjusted, but it would take some really intense work and Ying just didn’t understand enough to do it.

Not that General Kwan wanted to cross the boundary. He’d only shaken his head and waved off their apologies as the three of them trekked back to the cave.

“I’m here to guard Sect Leader Xue’s legacy, boys,” General Kwan said. “We all are. Protecting the two of you is important, yes, but it’s not my actual duty. Unless and until Sect Leader Xue gives you everything and you become the sect leader, my responsibility is to the Burial Mounds themselves.”

“But it is okay that we’re here, right?” Ying asked. “We’re not causing trouble, are we?”

“No, it’s fine,” General Kwan said with a reassuring little smile that almost look like he was alive. “The Burial Mounds were intended to be a sanctuary for Sect Leader Xue’s people, a place for them to retreat during an attack that could not be breached.”

Ying stared at him for a long moment. “Well, that didn’t work out, did it?”

Gang smacked Ying’s shoulder for it, which was fair, but Ying was still right. Even as little as he was, Ying had heard stories of how the sects had laid siege to Xue Chonghai in Yiling, killing all his warriors and then destroying the Burial Mounds.

They were supposed to be the way they were because of all the bloodshed and death that happened here. They were burial mounds, literally, piles of the dead all left to rot where they lay instead of having been given the proper rites and cremated as was normal.

Except, as General Kwan told them while helping them cook their fish on a flat rock heated by one of Ying’s heat arrays on the bottom side, the Burial Mounds were what they were because the sects had broken Xue Chonghai’s heart by killing his family and his sect for no good reason.

Baba always claimed that you couldn’t believe history without hearing both sides of the story.

Seemed like he was right about that.

They ate before making a bunch of beads and heating arrays that they could carry in a torn-off sleeve knotted at one end. Then they sorted the rags into piles that would make good blankets once they had a needle to sew with, and then went to sleep once darkness fell. Cold food was still food. It was nice to have a full belly two days in a row, too.

General Kwan wasn’t happy when they left the Burial Mounds to head back into Yiling to steal their pot.

The Cho pottery shop was on the far side of Yiling, well away from the Burial Mounds and the way it tainted the clay black. They had a four-chamber dragon kiln built into the hill behind their shop. It looked kind of like a big clay caterpillar humping along up the hillside. Ying had watched them fire it last month, awed by the way the fire at the base of the kiln traveled up through the chambers to the top where the flue roared with bright orange flames shooting up into the sky.

Right now the dragon kiln was empty and cool since Cho Ming and his whimsical young cousin Cho Dahong were throwing and glazing pots for the kiln. That was going to take months though. They needed a pot right now.

“Okay, I’ll go distract Dahong,” Ying said as they peered through the shrubs alongside the dragon kiln. “You get that big pot right next to Dahong.”

“I’m pretty sure I can get away with it,” Gang said slowly, eyes narrow as he studied the cooking pot’s bulbous body, “but I won’t be able to go far without your help.”

“I know,” Ying said. “It’s fine. That’s why we have the beads and stuff. Let me pull him away and then we’ll do it.”

Any plan that had Gang doing the talking was going to fail. He hated talking. Any plan that had Ying doing the talking had a decent chance of success because Ying could talk nonstop for hours and hours and hours with glee.

Gang snuck through the bushes closer to where the pot they wanted was. At the same time, Ying slipped out of the bushes and skipped over to Cho Dahong swinging his sleeve-bag full of neat things. Unsurprisingly, Cho Dahong glanced back at the shop to make sure that Cho Ming wasn’t looking before he smiled and nodded to Ying.

“Good Morning,” Cho Dahong said, grinning so widely that he looked like a kid instead of the barely-teen that he was. “What brings you to this side of town, A-Ying?”

“Gang and I tried to make a cooking pot,” Ying said.

“You did?” Cho Dahong said with delight. “That’s wonderful! How did it turn out?”

“Not so good,” Ying admitted. He sighed. “We figured out how to fire it but the next day it broke into pieces when we tried to fill it with water.”

“Did you fire it once or twice?” Cho Dahong asked with a little frown. “And how did you throw the pot? Did you rig up a wheel to turn it or did you use coiled clay ropes?”

“Ropes,” Ying said, fascinated and amused that Cho Dahong was perfectly willing to help figure out what they’d done wrong instead of trying to convince them to work there in trade for a pot or to save money or something. “It was kind of thick and thin in spots, but we did our best. For a first try, anyway. And we only fired it once. Do you need to do more than once?”

Cho Dahong nodded as he pointed the board of graceful little teacups he’d set out to dry in the sun. “See these? They’re just dry clay. If they got wet, they’d turn back into mud. These over here,” he pointed at another board with bowls that had a completely different shade of brownish-red to the clay, “have been fired once. That’s called bisque pottery. It’s not quite waterproof but you can plant things in it just fine. Then you put a glaze on it and fire it a second time at a really high temperature. Once it cools, really, really slowly, it’s good to use.”

“I had no idea it was that complicated,” Ying admitted as he followed Cho Dahong around the yard full of pottery in various stages of completion. “I mean, we made some little beads and stuff and that seemed to work well enough, though we made them more for, you know, pushing qi into so that they’d do stuff.”

“Really?” Cho Dahong asked, eyes wide as a huge smile bloomed on his face. “That’s amazing. Is that where you got your necklace?”

“Yep!” Ying said. “Wanna see?”

“You know I do!” Cho Dahong exclaimed.

They settled off to the side of the shop, away from where Gang was creeping in to get the pot and away from Cho Ming spotting them. It was kind of fun showing Cho Dahong the purification beads and how to charge them. It took Cho Dahong several tries to figure out how to leave qi in the bead, but once he did, Cho Dahong beamed and bounced in place like a delighted toddler.

Cho Dahong really was a super nice guy. Ying almost felt bad stealing from him.

“These heat up when you push qi into them,” Ying said, making sure to push the littlest one into Cho Dahong’s hands just as Gang got the pot and started hurrying away with it. “We were thinking that it’d be great for heating up soup or tea or something. You could stamp or paint it inside a teapot and the tea would stay warm. Or inside a cup—”

“And your tea would never go cold!” Cho Dahong gasped. “Oh wow, these are amazing, Ying. I wanna use them. Can I? Is that okay?”

“Can Gang and I have a pot?” Ying asked. “If you’ll let us take a pot, then you can use the idea all you want on the pottery. Both ideas actually.”

“That’s not an even trade,” Cho Dahong said sternly enough that Ying glared up at him. “You’re giving me way more, Ying. This is worth real money. Lots of money! Enough that you could live off it. How about this? I’ll use it, me only, and when I sell a pot or a cup or teapot or whatever with your stuff on it, you’ll get a quarter of the price.”

Ying’s jaw dropped for a moment. “Uh. Plus we get a pot.”

“Plus you get a pot,” Cho Dahong agreed. “Hey, you need a couple of bowls, too. And two mugs. And a teapot.”

“…You’re going to make that much money?” Ying squeaked at him.

“Oh, yeah,” Cho Dahong said with a grim little smile that looked so weird on his cheerful face. “You bet I will. And so will you. Deal?”

“Deal,” Ying agreed. “Though I don’t know how I’ll get all that back to our new hideout safely.”

“That I can help you with!” Cho Dahong exclaimed.

He turned and then froze as he realized that a pot was already gone. Instead of squawking or scolding or getting angry, Cho Dahong laughed. He had a really neat little array that he painted on the side of a straw basket to hold the bowls and cups and teapot. The basket was big enough that they could fit the pot into it, too. Plus it had good sturdy handles that would let Ying and Gang work together to carry it.

“Now, a little qi in this one,” Cho Dahong said as he brushed a hand over the array, “and the basket and everything in it weighs way less. I learned it from one of my cousins who works on the docks in Lotus Pier.”

“Oh, cool,” Ying breathed as he carefully hefted the basket and realized that he could carry it. Awkwardly but still, it was doable instead of impossible. “Thank you! That’s super-helpful.”

“I’m glad,” Cho Dahong said. “Off you get. Come back in a week and I’ll let you know how the pottery is selling.”

Ying beamed and hurried off. It didn’t take long to find Gang. He’d only got just off into the woods near the biggest circle of haunted mushrooms. The big pot was at his feet while Gang stared off at the mushrooms, twitching nervously.

“No worries, he gave us all of this because our heat and purification arrays are worth a ton of money, Gang,” Ying said.

“What?” Gang asked.

He stayed quiet all through Ying relaying the conversation and through repacking the pot and everything else in the basket. Then through the whole trip back around the outer edges of Yiling to the Burial Mounds. Gang even stayed quiet as General Kwan insisted on taking the basket and carrying it for them.

“Seriously, what?” Gang finally said as they cooked up a hearty soup full of vegetables and greens with one of the heating arrays on a fresh, new double-fired heat tile. “He’ll just give us money for nothing?”

“Nope, he’ll give us money to be the only person who gets to use our ideas,” Ying said. “Mama and Baba said stuff about that before they died. According to Baba, Mama could’ve been richer than all the Jin put together if she’d shared her ideas or sold them. Mama didn’t think it was the right thing to do. She got her ideas from her Master, Baoshan Sanren who’s an immortal. They did night hunts as rouge cultivators instead. It’s real, though. There’s cultivation inventors who make enough money to live off with just two or three ideas. If we’re smart and careful, we can pick a few little things and share them, sell them, and we’ll have money for good stuff.”

“Real clothes,” Gang whispered.

“Furniture,” General Kwan agreed with a firm nod. “A real home with a door to keep the elements out. Shoes and weapons and everything that makes life comfortable instead of a struggle. It’s a good idea. You’re lucky your potter friend didn’t cheat you.”

Ying snort-laughed. “Nah, we picked Cho Dahong specifically.”

“He’s an old-timer,” Gang agreed. “The Cho family has been in Yiling since Yiling existed. Cho Dahong’s super nice and very kind. We knew he wouldn’t be mean or hurt us even if we stole a pot. I just didn’t expect this.”

Ying shrugged. “I don’t know how long people will want to buy new pots and bowls and things with the arrays, but it’s a start. I’d love to have a bed again. And a real table to eat at.”

“Fine,” Gang said. “But we’re going to be careful about this and go for things like needles and scissors and thread first. No buying all-new outfits or something.”

“No way!” Ying laughed at the sheer idea. “That’s a stupid waste of money. We’ll make do with what we can and spend the money really, really carefully. There’s no point to new clothes, not for years and years and years. We’re going to grow way too fast for that to make sense.”

Now that they had a safe place. Now that they weren’t going to die in the night as the dog-yao tore them to shreds. Now that they had food and water and heat and someone to watch over them as they slept.

As they ate their simple vegetable stew, Ying couldn’t help but pinch himself. It all seemed like a dream. After so long alone and desperate, he finally had a chance to survive. Even better, if Cho Dahong was right, they had a chance to do so much better than just survival.

They might get to truly live.

 

 

6. Clothes

“Six whole coins,” Ying hissed to Gang as they stared at their little hoard. “Ten days got us six coins!”

“Yeah, and Cho Dahong said that he didn’t expect that he’d sell that much in the next ten days,” Gang said with his normal scowl. “We can’t trust that there’ll be more, Ying. We keep to the plan.”

“Ugh, fine,” Ying groaned. “Come on. The jiejies at the red lantern house should be willing to sell us some old needles and a pair of scissors.”

The jiejies at the red lantern house were delighted to sell them anything at all because that meant that Ying and Gang had managed to earn actual money. If anyone understood just how significant that was for Ying and Gang, the jiejies did. They’d ended up in the red lantern house because they wanted to earn a living for themselves, and it was their best option.

You know, instead of being a wife or working at the really scary flower house off by the docks where the girls went in but never came out unless they were in a coffin.

“You know how to sew, right?” Ruby, the oldest of the four jiejies asked.

“Some,” Ying said as he and Gang studied the slightly worn-out needles that the jiejies were willing to part with. “I mean, I can do a good even straight stitch and my Baba taught me how to embroider a chain stitch.”

“I’m really good at overcasting edges,” Gang said as he carefully polished the needle he had by repeatedly pushing it through a little bag full of emery powder. “Not much else but hey, we’re starting by patching rags together to make blankets and winter coats, so it doesn’t matter. We’ll get better.”

“We’ve got some scraps you can have,” Pearl, the youngest of the jiejies at only seventeen, instantly offered. “They won’t cover much but if you layer them between other rags, they’ll add some nice warmth.”

“Thank you!” Ying exclaimed.

The scraps were bright and colorful and mostly fairly sturdy fabric. There were bits of gauze but only a few bits. Most of the scraps were nice thick linen and cotton that would be good and warm when added to their planned blankets and coats. None of them were bigger than Ying’s head but that was all right.

They were warm and free and that’s what counted.

That early in the day, barely lunchtime, the red lantern house was quiet. The jiejie’s madam had gone to the market to get tea and other food, which meant that it was just the jiejies and the cook who looked on with quiet approval as Ying and Gang got a lesson on basic sewing skills.

“Soup,” the cook said, passing out bowls to everyone including Gang and Ying. “Eat up now.”

Neither Gang nor Ying needed encouragement on that front. The cook’s soup was way better than their soup, which had Gang over in the kitchen after they ate asking a million questions on how to prepare wild radishes and greens to be something other than bitter. There were, apparently, tricks to making it delicious.

“You two found a place to hide for the winter?” Emerald asked, biting her lip and then rolling her eyes when Ruby swatted her shoulder for it.

“Mhm,” Ying confirmed. “It’s a cave. Nice and dry, very stable, no snakes or mushrooms or anything. It’s a little close to the Burial Mounds, but we can cover the entrance so that the dogs can’t get in so it’s great. With our heat tiles, we can cook and stay warm and everything. There’s even water close enough that we can haul it pretty easily. Cho Dahong showed us a simple array for making things lighter.”

Ruby made a little admiring noise. “You two are setting yourselves up right. You’re going to have a whole new sect in a few years.”

“Oh! The Twin Patriarchs of Yiling!” Pearl exclaimed before breaking into giggles that Ying joined in on and Gang scowled over.

“We’re not starting a sect,” Gang complained from his spot on top of a stool where he was learning proper cooking. “We’re just trying to survive.”

It was a nice morning, full of laughter and teasing. They made their way home to the Burial Mounds with a basket full of scraps and their precious sewing needles. The madam had even given them a pair of old scissors that were dull enough that the madam was willing to part with them. The loop holding the two blades together had gotten twisted so the blades weren’t properly aligned anymore but there was still a finger’s width of the blades that would cut.

“Huh, not bad,” General Kwan said when Gang shoed off their new scissors. “I’ll sharpen them and get the blades realigned. Should work well once that’s done.”

“You can do that?” Ying asked.

General Kwan shrugged, a smile flitting across his lips at the awe on Ying’s face. “Sure. They won’t be as good as brand new and they’ll need to be handled carefully, but they can be fixed up a good bit.”

By the next morning, after a night of Xue Chonghai teaching them various stitches and showing them how clothes were put together with the help of a little old lady who’d once lived in the Burial Mounds with him. Old Madam Li was cheerful for a dead person who still had blood on her soul’s hands and a big hole through her chest.

“You boys make sure to leave room for growth,” Old Madam Li had told them just before they woke up. “With a better diet and safety, you’re sure to get big and strong. Those clothes will need to be longer and wider than you think.”

“We’ll plan for it,” Gang had promised.

“Absolutely,” Ying had agreed, grinning. “Thanks, Popo Li!”

The clothes that General Kwan had brought them made a good basis for new clothes for the two of them. With General Kwan’s help and their new scissors, they made four outer robes in a dusky black, two inner robes that were grayish-white, and a bunch of scraps that Ying laid out with their colorful bits to make two big, comfy, heavily padded jackets.

You know, after a ton of sewing.

The inner robes were pretty quick to make. Ying sewed the seams together. Gang overcast them. They both stitched down the collar and the hems using as careful of stitches at they could manage.

The outer robes took a bit longer, just because they were bigger, and the fabric was thicker. Finishing them took several days of concentrated effort. It also took running back into town and asking the jiejies about thimbles because pushing their needles through the thicker fabric was punching painful bloody holes in their fingers.

Unfortunately, the jiejies couldn’t spare one of their brass thimbles, but the cook told Ying that really poor people sometimes wrapped cloth around a bit of bark or a tiny sliver of rock and used that to stiffen their fabric thimbles.

A bit of leather wrapped with fabric functioned pretty well, so they stopped bleeding all over their new robes.

The jackets and blankets took much, much longer and a lot more work. So many layers of fabric were hard to put the needles through. It was even harder to pull the needles back out again. Ying couldn’t even count how many times he broke the thread before he got the trick of it.

Either way, the weather had turned to sleet by the time they had their jackets done. There was snow on the ground before the blankets were finished.

And they’d restored all but two of General Kwan’s men to full function. Those two had agreed to give up their bodies, joining the other ghosts in the looming clouds of ash-filled resentful energy overhead. The damage and deterioration was just too much for even Xue Chonghai’s array to fix. As winter fell, the cave was full of low voices and busy people making things to help Gang and Ying live a better life.

“But do we really need an oven?” Ying complained to Gang as he worked at sewing a nice warm quilted hat that looked like a fabric rendition of a helmet.

It had a long panel in the back that would keep snow and sleet off Gang’s neck, panels that came down to cover his ears, and enough layers that it would keep him warm no matter what the weather did outside.

Going to that much effort was only fair since Gang had made him a fur-lined hat that Ying could’ve worn to the Emperor’s court. The fur was dog fur, tanned by one of General Kwan’s men with a combination of normal physical effort and arrays that Xue Chonghai had created back in the day.

“Absolutely yes,” Gang replied, jabbing his needle at Ying instead of working on mending more clothes for General Kwan to distribute. “It’ll help keep this place warm and I’m looking forward to making dumplings at some point. Plus, if we ever get rice growing, we’ll be able to cook rice.”

“Oh, rice,” Ying crooned. “I miss rice. Okay, you convinced me. We can have an oven.”

Not that either of them were doing anything to build the oven. That was all General Kwan who’d taken over all the “make the Burial Mounds livable” tasks once they brought his people back to something close to functional state.

Every month or so, until the snow got too deep, Gang and Ying made their way into Yiling to talk to Cho Dahong. Every month, there were a few more coins for them to take away with them. Ying made a point of coming up with six more arrays for various little things like cooling stuff, freezing things solid, melting them quickly and three different methods for dusting that sold like crazy once Cho Dahong started putting them on pretty tiles decorated with his favorite colorful flowers.

“See?” Cho Dahong had said on their last trip into town before winter made it impossible. “They’re so cute that people just leave them out. Then when someone wants to dust, they just push a little qi in and poof! The house is dusted. They’re selling really well.”

“That’s amazing,” Ying had said to cover for Gang’s giggle fit over the silly little flowers that Cho Dahong had painted into the top side of the tiles. “I’m so glad people like that one.”

“They really do,” Cho Dahong had said proudly. “I’ve gotten people coming from other towns to ask about the tiles. So far I’ve said that they were designed by a pair of reclusive geniuses who live in the hills outside of town.”

Gang had coughed and cleared his throat as if he was trying to make his giggle-fit go away by pure force of will. “That’s perfect. Keep doing that. The less people know about us, the better.”

“Agreed,” Ying had said.

They’d splurged on a big bag of barley and a small bag of salt before they retreated back home. With careful rationing, the barley should last all winter. And the salt, if used sparingly, would be good through the whole year. Hopefully.

Either way, once the snow drifts covered the Burial Mounds, there was no going outside for Gang and Ying. General Kwan made a point of sending his men out to get more wood when it was needed or to dig up dormant carrots and radishes for them, but for the most part they were all in the cave all the time.

General Kwan’s men had pickled so many vegetables that they would have something to eat no matter how long the winter was. There were baskets with dark red apples and stacks of dried fish that Ying hadn’t even know the soldiers had caught. Plus a fish trap that should still be accessible during the worst of winter.

You know, as long as you were dead and didn’t feel the freezing weather.

“Time for you two to learn to read,” General Kwan announced. “And to fight. We’ll start with the basic characters Sect Leader Xue used and then work up to the full number of characters over the winter.”

“That sounds good,” Gang said. “I’ve been really curious for ages about the books in the hidden library.”

“Yeah, agreed,” Ying said. “But do we have to learn to fight? We’re just street kids. No one is ever going to come at us like that, right?”

Even as Ying said it, he knew that it was silly. Of course people would come at them. They had stuff now. The long-time residents of Yiling were very happy for Gang and Ying. They helped as much as they could, over and over again. The new people, on the other hand, were going to be a problem.

And then, there were all the outsiders who were poking around asking questions about their arrays. That would be a problem eventually. Maybe soon and they were too little to defend themselves properly.

“Never mind,” Ying sighed as General Kwan frowned at him and Gang rolled his eyes. “I answered my question for myself. Okay. I guess we will need to learn to fight.”

Learning to read wasn’t all that hard. General Kwan showed them how to close the door on the hidden library. That was creepy since it made the doorway go away entirely. Necessary, though, since it let them find the grammar book and it triggered this amazing spell that Xue Chonghai had come up with to help people learn the language in their sleep.

“I like learning that way,” Ying said once he and Gang woke up a full day after studying in the sealed hidden library. “I can read all of these now.”

“I know,” Gang agreed as he sorted through scrolls on the right side of the library where all the common-use stuff was kept. “Oh, hey. There’s a whole scroll of recipes. And one on growing bigger, healthier vegetables. Oooh! This one is all about fermented beans and sauces. That sounds delicious. We’ve got to try it.”

“Huh,” Ying said, reading over his shoulder. “Wow, yeah, that does sound good. But it takes so much salt. We can’t do it yet, not unless we can find another source of salt.”

“Ugh,” Gang complained. “So annoying. Right, well, let’s see if there’s anything in here about finding sources of salt. Or, maybe, finding things period.”

There were. There were scrolls on spells to find things, arrays to hide whatever you wanted. Wards and shields and some amazing ways to defend yourself if you had a little time to prepare. There were scrolls of history and poetry and some dramatic operas that the soldiers put on during the deepest part of winter to everyone’s delight.

Even the ghosts came out of the clouds to hover over Gang and Ying, clapping silently and cheering when the hero, who was a lot like Xue Chonghai in that he was a genius inventor leading his people to a safe new land, defeated the greedy, lecher of an Emperor who hunted them to the ends of the earth.

Ying liked that one even if it did hit a little too close to home with all of Xue Chonghai’s dead followers around them.

Along the way, General Kwan taught them how to punch and kick. He gave them wooden practice swords and had them whack at a wooden dummy until they could reliably hit the spot they aimed at.

His other men found and fixed up knives for the two of them. One of them, Xue Chen who was Xue Chonghai’s second son who’d died when he was sixteen and been turned into a living corpse by his grieving father, spent most of the winter teaching them exactly how to stab someone to cause the most damage in the least amount of time.

“You stab, pull the knife out and then run,” Xue Chen told them both every single time they trained. “No heroics. No bravery. You’re too little to survive a real fight. Stab, pull, run.”

“We got it,” Ying promised even though he kind of hated the idea of pulling the knife out.

If you pulled the knife out, especially with one of Xue Chen’s twisting, upwards-thrusting stabs that cut through like half a person’s internal organs, they were going to bleed out quickly. Which, yeah, was the point. Ying understood it. If one of the creepy guys down by the docks came after them, stabbing and bleeding out was the least they deserved.

“I definitely have it,” Gang said because he was always a thousand times more serious about staying safe than Ying was. “I’ll make sure Ying stays safe, too.”

“Come on, I said I had it,” Ying groaned at them.

He did make a point of stitching heavily quilted vests to wear under their clothes, ones that would function like light armor in a pinch. Gang nodded when Ying showed him the half-completed vests. Then Gang sewed up some nice thick gauntlets for their arms and lace-up greaves that would keep their pants from getting wet when stomping through the snow as well as protecting their legs from a kick or a haphazard sword strike.

“We’ve grown,” Ying said once spring came to the Burial Mounds with streams of ashy snowbanks melting and transforming the ground into sticky black mud. “My sleeves and pants have gotten short.”

“Mine, too,” Gang agreed. “We’ll have to add bands to the hems to lengthen them. Maybe really long bands, like as long as my forearm? Then we can fold them back and have added length.”

“Good idea,” Ying said. “Let me look through our remaining scraps and stuff to see what we’ve got.”

They had just enough fabric to make long cuffs on their outermost robes’ sleeves and to add a few fingers’ widths of cuff to their pants. Both Gang and Ying had spent the majority of the winter running around the cave in socks with soft fabric slippers that General Kwan had stitched for them. It worked well enough inside.

That wasn’t going to work outside. There were snowbanks everywhere and mud pits wherever the snow had melted, and it was a really long walk into town.

“We need shoes,” Ying said as he and Gang studied the outside world together. “Boots, really.”

“Yeah,” Gang sighed. “Right. Well, let’s figure out what we can sell to people in town to get enough money for proper shoes. A few coins here and there aren’t going to be enough for that.”

General Kwan sighed behind them. “I’ll get to work weaving you some straw boots. I think we have enough good straw left to do it. What I wouldn’t give for a full cow hide and some leather working tools.”

“That would really help. We could make so many things with some good leather and tools,” Xue Chen agreed back by the oven where he was carefully cooking them a thin barley stew with some of their precious pickled radish and the three handfuls of greens he’d dug up from under the snow.

Ying hummed, looking at Gang who had a similarly thoughtful expression. Boots would be super-expensive to buy, especially given that they were still growing. But if General Kwan and Xue Chen knew how to work with leather, well, that meant that all they needed was the proper tools and the materials.

That was much more doable.

“Tell us what you need,” Gang ordered. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Absolutely,” Ying agreed. “Once we know what to find, we’ll get it.”

 

 

7. Boots

Yiling had come through the winter sleet, mudslides, and snowstorms pretty well. They’d picked a day when a freeze swept through so that the muddy mess in the Burial Mounds wouldn’t suck their feet in and keep them there. That meant that the snow had a hard crust they could walk on and that pretty much no one was out and about once they reached town.

The dock workers that clustered along the river in the late spring to late fall were gone. They wouldn’t return for another month or so, after the snow had melted away. All the creepy people were gone, too.

All of them were gone.

“That’s weird, right?” Ying asked Gang as they made their way through the side streets towards the pottery where Cho Min and Cho Dahong should be working away on new pots for the first spring firing of their dragon kiln.

“Very weird,” Gang agreed with a suspicious scowl. “Most winters there’s more of those creepy new people picking fights and scaring the kids and girls. I can’t figure out where they all went.”

Their winter clothes were great for keeping them warm as they made the trek through the knee-deep snow.

The straw snow boots that General Kwan made them are a lot less wonderful. They were solid enough, sure, but it was kind of like walking with a basket on each foot wrapped round with ropes to keep them from flapping and falling off with each step. Functional and reasonably good at keeping the snow out, but not much more than that.

Ying really wanted proper boots like what Mama and Baba had.

Gang thought boots were ridiculously expensive and that they could wait. What he wanted was all the stuff that General Kwan and Xue Chen could make with some good leather. That was the only reason he’d agreed to make the trip before the snow fully melted.

The pottery had lights flickering in the shop. There was also a nice little fire in a big chunky pot in the shed where Cho Dahong glazed pots, though it was surely too cold for that right now. Ying’s breath puffed in the air like clouds or billowing smoke. The moisture turned to ice crystals that hung in front of Ying, glittering in the early morning light.

“Cho Dahong?” Gang called, popping his face out of the collar of his coat just long enough to speak before huddling back down into his coat again.

“Hey!” Cho Dahong exclaimed when he peeked out of the shed beaming. “You two survived! I’m so glad. When the sweep went through, I was afraid that you’d gotten caught up in it.”

“We’ve been stuck in our cave for months and months,” Ying said, pushing past Cho Dahong into the shed where it was marginally warmer. “What sweep? What happened to all the creepy guys?”

Cho Dahong waved for Gang to come in, too, making sure that he stayed on the far side of the shed, well away from the door, so that they could escape if they wanted to. Gang stayed by the door. Ying ventured in to poke and peer at the hundred or so heat tiles that Cho Dahong had laid out to glaze.

At least he was still making them, whatever happened during the winter.

“Okay, so,” Cho Dahong said as he studied the two of them and their patchwork coats and hats, “about ten days after your last visit, the Wen came through town. They’d finally come to do something about the dog-yao, not that anyone’s had any problems with those things in ages. I mean, Elder Entai sent them off into the woods. They tracked down the dog-yao pack and eradicated them entirely apparently. But then they came back to town and…”

He grimaced, rubbing the back of his neck while staring at the heat tiles.

“They saw our stuff and decided that they had to know who the inventor was,” Gang said flatly while Ying winced.

“Yeah,” Cho Dahong said. “I told them that it was a pair of twins, street kids who’d come up with some neat tricks, but the Wen didn’t believe me. Their commander was absolutely certain that it had to be someone in town.”

Ying groaned. “So he swept the town and took everyone he could?”

“Yeah,” Cho Dahong agreed. “None of my relatives got taken. Not a single Cho went. We’re not dumb. We know better than to trust any of the sects. They don’t have a clue how to help us and they are never trustworthy anyway. Same for the Du family and the Pan family. They all refused to go anywhere and made it clear that we’re all just farmers and craftspeople. Some of the Xin did go, but only Xin Mo and Xin Lin. They kind of fell head over heels for one of the soldiers so they decided to marry him.”

“They’re so dumb,” Gang complained.

Ying snickered. “Well, yeah, they totally are but maybe they’ll get some babies out of it.”

“You never know,” Cho Dahong agreed with a big grin. “Maybe they’ll come home someday. Either way, the town’s been super-quiet ever since the Wen swept through. I did get a bunch of orders for more heat tiles from the Wen about a month after that. I’ve done four batches and I have six more to do before the spring shipping starts up again.”

Ying’s jaw dropped open. “How much money would that be? I mean, for us?”

Cho Dahong waggled his eyebrows and pulled out a cash string heavy with copper coins. “This is your share. What are you going to get?”

Gang stared.

Ying stared, too.

“Uh,” Ying said, spluttering as he took the string with both hands. They spilled over and hung from the string. “Uh…!”

“I have no idea,” Gang said while staring at the cash coins like he was afraid that they would disappear if he touched them. “We’ll… figure it out, I guess.”

After a bit of chatting with Cho Dahong, they hide the cash string inside their jackets, half for Gang and half for Ying. Then they went to find Elder Entai who was at the teahouse sipping tea. She blinked at them and their patchwork coats, slapping her hand on the table with delight when they pulled their hats off.

“You survived!” Elder Entai exclaimed. “When you didn’t show up in town for so long, we were all convinced that the Wen got you after all.”

“Nah, we were just snowed in out in our cave,” Ying said, grinning and blushing at the way the locals in the teahouse smile at the two of them. “We didn’t even know that they Wen had been through.”

“The cave is pretty far out and really high,” Gang agreed. “Did any of the other street kids survive?”

“I found homes for them all over the winter,” Elder Entai said.

That was… Ying wasn’t sure what it was. A relief? He was glad that none of the other street kids died in the winter, but at the same time his heart sort of ached that they hadn’t gotten a home of their own with a family that loved them.

Not that they would have. Ying knew himself. He’d have said something that would have gotten the Wen’s attention. Both Ying and Gang would’ve been swept up and carried off to the Nightless City which Mama had claimed was a nightmare and Baba hummed and agreed with, though he always kept a neutral expression when Mama ranted about Wen Ruohan’s risky cultivation practices and poor discipline.

Anyway, knowing that Yiling’s other street kids were safe was a good thing, no matter how conflicted Ying felt about it.

She waved for tea and soup to be brought for them, having them settle down at her table like they were actual people of worth instead of grubby street kids making do. The soup was amazing, rich and fatty with bits of pork bobbing in it plus sliced carrots cooked until they were just soft. The tea was so good, too, full of the taste of dried fruit and a hint of cinnamon and cloves.

“You didn’t survive on your own all winter,” Elder Entai said, eyes sharp as she studied the two of them.

“Well, no,” Ying admitted slowly. “But the people we stayed with are um, not able to be part of, you know, society. But they’re teaching us how to read and write and how to protect ourselves. So we can help them with the things they need.”

“Like boots,” Gang agreed. “We were hoping to get some cow hide, properly tanned, and leather working tools.”

“Yeah, and now that Cho Dahong paid us our share of the heat tiles,” Ying said with a shaky little laugh, “we can even pay for them instead of scrambling for them.”

Elder Entai nodded slowly. “I didn’t think that the Wen got all the bandits and thieves. Well, if they’re taking good care of you, I don’t care what they might have done before. Let’s see what we can figure out for your new friends.”

And that was that.

With Elder Entai on their side, it was easy to get a bunch of older but still functional leather working tools. They bought them, at a fair price, even though both Ying and Gang winced for parting with some of their precious coins.

At least until Du Xilin, who was just an apprentice in woodcarving, sighed that he wished it’d been him because then he could’ve used the money to buy himself new chisels instead of the two-generations-old chisels he’d inherited from his great-uncle. Ying blinked at him, head tilting to the side, and then very carefully and deliberately bought a whole series of things.

Two brushes that were properly made instead of cobbled together out of bamboo twigs and bits of dog fur. A brush stand that Du Xilin put together right there in front of them, beaming the whole time. A wheel pestle with a heavy granite mortar that would last until their great-great-grandkids had grandkids. That one was expensive but very worth it in Ying’s opinion.

Gang frowned at him for it at first, but as people got excited about the things that they’d be able to buy now that they had a few coins, he shrugged and got himself a few things, too. Proper scrolls that they could record their inventions on, and ink sticks and a bunch of spices and dried herbs that promised to make their meals way better.

Plus more rice, a lot more, and two bamboo baskets with shoulder straps so that they could wear them like backpacks. Because wow, they bought a lot of stuff and that didn’t even include the entire cow hide that they tied to a bamboo pole and carried between them.

It was mid-afternoon by the time they were done and packed up.

“You’ll make it home safe, yes?” Elder Entai asked as she hobbled along next to them to the edge of town closest to the Burial Mounds.

“Yep,” Ying reassured her. “Everything’s still hard-frozen so we’ll make it fine. We probably won’t come back into town for another month or so. It’s super-muddy up where we are. That’s why we waited until it was frozen to come down.”

“And we wanted our hats done first,” Gang agreed. “Don’t tell the Wen where we are. Neither of us trust them.”

Elder Entail snorted and rolled her eyes. “I most certainly won’t. I haven’t trusted that man since I was a teenager. I almost cut his heavenly pillar off for his ridiculous flirting and just barely missed cutting his throat for him. I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire. Literally.”

Ying stared at her, grinning. “…Did Wen Ruohan set himself on fire while visiting Yiling?”

“Yes,” Elder Entai said, eyes gleaming with amused malice. “And I stared at him and then walked away. Ridiculous man. You boys be careful and tell your friends I expect them to take proper care of you. If you’re ever unsafe there, come back to Yiling. I’ll find a place for you.”

The offer made something squirm in Ying’s gut. Almost like the way his stomach had gone weird with the knowledge that the other street kids found homes over the winter, but not quite. There was too much of “Wen Ruohan wants us” mixing in with “an entire string of cash coins”. The image of their cave where General Kwan and Xue Chen and the other wait blocked out Elder Entai’s face for just a moment.

“Thank you,” Ying said with his most serious expression, the one that made everyone pause and stare, even Gang. “If we’re ever afraid, we’ll come right to you.”

Gang just nodded, face hunched down into the collar of his jacket.

Which just as good as said that no way was he ever going to take Elder Entai up on the offer. The two of them headed off into the hills, skirting around the edge of the Burial Mounds until they were absolutely certain that no one had followed them.

It took a while. The forest was cold and still, but not silent. Branches cracked and creaked with the weight of the snow. Every step crunched underfoot. Those crunches echoed in strange ways that had Ying’s heart racing for the longest time.

Eventually, though, as the sun settled behind the mountains, they turned inwards. Back towards home.

Unsurprisingly, General Kwan was there, waiting.

He stood in the darkness with only a light set of black summer robes on. They’d done enough work on his body that General Kwan looked like he was alive.

Until you realized that he wasn’t breathing. There were no puffs of breath freezing in the air around him. And he stood far too still for a living creature.

“We were getting worried,” General Kwan said as he took the roll of cow hide and slung it over his shoulder. “How’d you get all this? And what took so long?”

“So much stuff happened over the winter,” Ying said as they marched along at General Kwan’s side.

General Kwan started out gamely amused by Ying’s chattering. He pretty quickly went serious as Ying told him about everything that Cho Dahong had said. The sheer amount of money they’d earn didn’t surprise General Kwan at all, but he stopped dead in his tracks when Gang said that they’d bought a bunch of stuff specifically so that their money would move into other people’s hands.

“That’s… wiser than I thought you’d be,” General Kwan said, frowning. “Go back over the whole thing with Wen Ruohan. What did your Elder say?”

“Elder Entai,” Ying reminded him. “She’s amazing and terrifying and so ridiculously old.”

Going over everything related to Wen Ruohan and the sweep that’d taken all the scary new people out of Yiling took all the way back to the cave. Into it, too, which just meant that Ying had to explain it all over again while unpacking the stuff he and Gang had bought.

The others were delighted by the purchases. Xue Chen especially like Ying’s wheel mortar and pestle set, though he got stars in his eyes over the leather working tools. Plans for boots got sketched out immediately, starting with two pair, one for Ying and one for Gang.

“I’ll work waterproofing and warmth arrays onto them,” Xue Chen promised. “Plus the old sole-support ones.”

“I am going to lean over your shoulder as you do those,” Ying promised. “That sounds so interesting!”

“Back to the story,” General Kwan insisted, though he grinned at Ying’s groaning complaints instead of scowling at Ying.

It was fine, though. Dinner turned out really good with the spices that Gang bought. Having actual rice was amazing after so long without it. But eventually Ying ran out of words and General Kwan ran out of questions.

General Kwan frowned into the little fire in their oven that was keeping the cave warm. The amplification array that Gang came up with a few days previous did a lovely job making the tiny fire as effective as a much bigger one.

“The Wen are going to be an issue,” General Kwan finally said.

“Yeah, they are,” Gang agreed. “Not just to us but to everyone in Yiling. I don’t know what to do about it.”

Xue Chen sighed, hands pausing on his work of cutting out boots. “The thing is, this is almost exactly how things started for my father. He wanted to keep us safe. He’d found the love of his life, sired a kid, then adopted a couple of kids. Brought people in and made all these amazing inventions to make their lives better.”

“And then,” General Kwan sighed, eyes shut and expression desperately grim, “the Jianghu took notice. They hounded him, tried to claim everything he’d created. Started hunting us down. We couldn’t… couldn’t protect him. He couldn’t protect us, not well enough. By the time we realized what was happening, it was too late.”

Ying nodded slowly.

He could see that. Honestly, he really, really could. Gang had fussed over it ever since they created the first purification beads and found their way into the Burial Mounds. Every single thing that they were doing here was a threat to the rest of the Jianghu because it was different.

Different meant bad. It meant scary. It meant powerful and a threat and something to use as a weapon against the other sects so that you could be the strongest and not the weakest.

“Yeah,” Ying agreed, “but we have an advantage.”

“What?” Gang asked, huffing at Ying.

“Us,” Ying said.

“We’re kids!” Gang protested. “How could we be advantages?”

Ying grinned like Mama used to grin when she was about to get in a fight. “Gang, we’re kids. They’re looking for grown-ups. They’re going to be hunting for cultivators who look like them and were trained like them and who think like them. But we’re literally little kids who can run around in the woods and just do stuff because we’re little kids. If we want to go off into the woods and look for radishes, no one’s going to look at us twice.”

Xue Chen straightened up and stared at Ying. “There are markers out in the woods beyond the barriers. If you clean them up, charge them, it’ll raise the outer defenses.”

“That,” Ying said, grinning as he pointed at Xue Chen. “When the Wen come back to look for our mysterious bandits hiding out in the woods, they’re going to find nothing. They’ll assume that we lied to keep Elder Entai off us.”

Gang sucked a breath between his teeth as his eyes went wide. “And Elder Entai will assume we came up with some sneaky way to hide them. No one will look in here.”

“Exactly,” Ying sang as he started bouncing in place. “So we start raising the defenses. We fix the ground so we can grow all kinds of food in here. We fix things so that they can grow all kinds of food in Yiling. We keep working on understanding all this stuff that Sect Leader Xue left behind.”

“And we learn to defend ourselves,” Gang said with a determined little nod. “With fists and feet and knives and swords and cultivation, too.”

“All of it.” Ying looked to General Kwan and Xue Chen and the others.

They all stared at Ying and Gang with a sort of stunned surprise that made his cheeks go red. There was more admiration than he would have expected, especially for a pair of street kids reaching for the stars.

But that was fine. It was okay. They’d do their best and sneak around to make things safe for everyone on Yiling.

None of them deserved to be slaughtered because Wen Ruohan and the Jianghu were greedy jerks.

If they could keep that from happening, it would be a good thing.

 

 

8. Weapons

Learning to fight was not fast. Ying was so very disappointed about that. He’d thought that it would be faster and easier. Mama always made fighting look so easy that Ying figured that it must actually be easy once you got some basics figured out.

Nope. Nothing was easy and it was all a ton of work. Especially since the only weapons they had were rusted, falling apart weapons polluted by resentful energy. Most of them were too tainted for Ying and Gang to even touch.

Worse, the longer a piece of metal was in the Burial Mounds, the more resentful energy it picked up.

So learning to fight and finding weapons that they were good at had to be pushed off until after they dealt with the defenses around Yiling. If the defenses were working, there wouldn’t be dangerous amounts of resentful energy polluting the weapons. Gang and Ying could purify them enough that they could use them.

Also, raising the defenses meant that the hard barrier that kept General Kwan’s people inside the Burial Mounds was relaxed to the point that they could go all the way past the quarry if they wanted to.

“I am so looking forward to wandering,” Xue Chen said with a huge delighted smile as he followed Ying and Gang towards the boundary to the north side of Yiling where the river ran sluggishly. “I used to range all over the territory. Staying in such a small place has been bugging me for ages.”

“Honestly, I just want to flip things around so that the Burial Mounds turn back into the Sanctuary,” Gang said. “There are so many things I want to grow. And we really need to start growing them. Ying and I can’t survive on radishes and greens alone.”

“Nope, we need beans at the very least,” Ying agreed. “And fruit! What I wouldn’t give for a lychee tree.”

All three of them sighed over that. Once they had the Burial Mounds energy fixed, that might be possible. Right now, no chance of a fruit tree surviving.

Sadly.

The process for fixing the outer wards wasn’t complicated actually.

Xue Chen talked them through the first few along the river because they were close enough that he could see them from inside the boundary. All they had to do was clean the marker stones off, set them upright if they’d fallen down, and then put a little bit of spiritual energy into them.

They got all the ones along the river first since they were easiest to get to. Then they got the claw-like spires that surrounded the Sanctuary. There were dozens and dozens of arrays on each of those that Xue Chen was happy to explain in detail.

“Father wanted to make sure that this place was so secure that no one would get at his library,” Xue Chen explained as he ran his fingers over the array for “protect all within” which was placed above “preserve against all damage” with a swooping seal for “deny all entrance to interlopers”.

“Well, he protected the library pretty well,” Gang said as he and Ying worked to clean the arrays off and fix any places that were worn down by time and the elements. “Not the people or the town or even the palace in here, but the library was safe enough.”

“Be nice,” Ying said. “By that point everyone was dead anyway. What point was there to keeping the Sanctuary safe and alive?”

Gang grimaced without replying. Every time they left the Burial Mounds to hunt out marker stones, the two of them argued about it. They’d agreed not to argue on it where the others could hear. Xue Chonghai’s soldiers took it pretty personally when Gang and Ying debated whether it was better to leave the place to die with the people or to keep the place alive in the hopes that someone might someday come and live there.

Obviously, both of them thought living was better.

They were alive.

Dead people, no matter how marvelously preserved, had different opinions on that.

It was fine. Ying wasn’t going to be mean to Xue Chen or General Kwan or any of the others. They were what they were. Besides, this was their home long before it became his and Gang’s.

As winter melted into a sloppy wet spring, Xue Chen finished their boots and Ying worked with Gang to get the million or so markers fixed and charged up.

They were everywhere. In town. Outside of town. Up in the hills. Along the river, on both sides, which was a challenge to get to since they didn’t have boats or bridges or anything. Rushes made a decent basket, though, and when you inked in waterproofing arrays, featherlight arrays and a propulsion array, it turned a basket big enough for the two of them into a good-enough boat.

They may or may not have laughed themselves to tears zooming back and forth across the river one evening after all the boats heading to and from Yiling tied up for the night.

The docks were way quieter that summer than Gang was used to. Practically no outsiders came to live in town, which meant that very few boats stopped in town, too. Gang found it deeply suspicious.

“Wen Ruohan came and stole everyone who wasn’t a long-time native of Yiling,” Ying huffed as they fixed the arrays way off by the road that passed by Yiling to the east. “Of course all the creepy guys decided that it wasn’t safe to come back. He must still be looking for the Yiling Patriarchs.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Gang grumbled. “It still makes us stick out every time we buy things. I don’t like it.”

“Fair,” Ying agreed.

Elder Entai was keeping a much closer eye on them. They couldn’t come into town without someone commenting that Elder Entai wanted to see them. Ying was trying really hard not to see that as a threat to their continued survival and freedom.

Gang hadn’t bothered. He was so very suspicious of what Elder Entai wanted that he could barely stand to sit still even when she fed them.

Which, of course, was why they’d decided to do all the markers in town in one big rush and then piddle away at the rest of them outside of Yiling. Creeping through town in the middle of the night had been terrifying in ways that Ying hadn’t expected. He’d always made a point to be under cover at night when they were still living on the streets.

To actually move around town at night, long after the dock workers had drunk themselves to sleep and the town had gone completely silent, had been terrifying.

Ying wasn’t sure why. Between their under-their-clothes quilted-and-leather armor and the dozens of combat arrays, they weren’t helpless. General Kwan wasn’t satisfied with how well they could fight, no, but he was confident that they could stab someone who attacked them and then get away without too many problems.

It might just have been the sneaking, actually.

Either way, they’d gotten every marker in Yiling from the wells to the barn walls to people’s houses. They’d charged up the ones built into the foundation stones of the teahouse and the ones underlying the dock. They’d even made a point of pushing tiny bits of qi into all of Cho Dahong’s whimsical pottery and Du Xilin’s heavily carved beams and roofing trusses.

Such a relief to get those done! Summer was well established by the time Xue Chonghai announced in their dreams that they were ready to turn the Burial Mounds back into a Sanctuary.

“It won’t be very difficult now that you’ve raised the outer defenses,” Xue Chonghai said. He waved at the map of Yiling and the Burial Mounds. “We’ll want to get the outer defenses set this way. Then you’ll use a purification array on the spring. There’s a marker stone buried deep under the spring, you see, and once it’s purified, the rest of the Burial Mounds will be, too.”

Gang nodded slowly, tracing one finger along the spires. “These will keep anyone outside of Yiling from noticing, right?”

“Exactly,” Xue Chonghai agreed with a proud little smile.

“Okay, yeah, that’s great,” Ying said while staring at the map. “But what about the Wen? And the Jin. You know as well as we do that they fly over from time to time and drop people in. What are we going to do about that? We can’t have them just crash into the ground and we also can’t have those jerks realizing that something’s changed.”

Xue Chonghai grimaced and sighed. “Ah. Good point. Well, if you didn’t mind people knowing—”

“Absolutely not,” Gang snapped.

“No way,” Ying huffed at the same time. “We can’t afford anyone to realize that we’re in here. Wen Ruohan is the Chief Cultivator. It’ll be the siege of the Burial Mounds all over again and we’re not ready. No matter how good the defenses are, the two of us aren’t ready.”

“We’re really not strong enough or old enough yet,” Gang agreed. He put one hand on Ying’s shoulder, squeezing gently to calm Ying down.

Xue Chonghai hummed. “Well, let’s work on that, then. What qualities do the wards and defenses need to keep people from realizing that anything is going on? How far do they need to extend? How severe are you willing to be? Catching someone thrown in shouldn’t be too hard. We’ll just need to give the ghosts direction and set the wards to assist them in slowing people’s descent.”

No surprise, they didn’t get the Sanctuary set up that summer. In fact, all they managed to do was to set up a grow hut sort of thing where the ground was always warm, and the light talismans mimicked a nice warm summer.

It was enough to give them fresh food all winter, especially since they used the Grow Your Veggies Better and Bigger scroll to make sure that they could get a full season in about thirty days. So many beans! And so much barley the next month, followed by potatoes once they figured out how to manipulate the “weather” conditions in the grow hut.

Xue Chen and Lan Yitian, who wasn’t one of the original soldiers but who’d been thrown in about fifty years before Ying and Gang were born because she wouldn’t stop fighting the Wen jerks who’d decided to kidnap, rape and then forcibly marry her, built four grow huts for them, including one that was just right for growing rice.

“We’re actually going to eat well this winter,” Gang commented as they harvested their little plot of rice two months into the winter. Inside their rice growing hut, it felt more like a warm autumn day.

“Yeah, I know,” Ying said, beaming at him. “This is like the best thing ever. Once we figure out the whole thing of deflecting people’s attention, we need to tell Elder Entai about this. It might, finally, be enough to make her keep her mouth shut and let us alone.”

“Pfft, you’re dreaming,” Gang said, rolling his eyes.

Probably true but it was fun to argue about it. They spent the long, dark, snowy winter working through the complicated arrays and spells that they’d need to keep anyone outside of Yiling from noticing what was happening. Turned out, there was no way to make people not notice things that wouldn’t affect Yiling, too.

Unless they had properly charged beads.

“My Lan entry token is long-gone,” Lan Yitian explained in the early spring when the black plum tree had bloomed but no other plants were brave enough to wake from their winter slumber. “It would be the perfect example of what you need. The purification beads you wear, though, are the next best thing. I believe that a better version of them, perhaps one carved from stone instead of molded from clay, would work perfectly.”

The ghosts worked with Lan Yitian to find useful bits of stone that they could test. Most of the rock was just rock, nothing special. There were bits of obsidian high up on the mountain that might work. And there was a vein of jade that’d gone black as night under the influence of the resentful energy that was amazing.

“This,” Ying said as he tested on of the jade chips.

“Yeah, it’s just about exactly what we need,” Gang agreed with a frown. “Though I’m not sure how to carve it to shape with the tools we’ve got.”

Lan Yitian grinned. “That I can help you with. There’s a spiritual energy technique that allows you to sculpt stone as if it was clay. You could use your fingers or tools or even a sharpened stick.”

Both Gang and Ying stared at her.

Before climbing all over her while begging her to explain it so that they could do it.

The carving technique was actually about three techniques in one. You could find good stones to sculpt, ones without cracks or flaws or with hidden bits of gemstone inside the dull grey outer shell. You could shape the stone like clay, molding with your hands and your qi into whatever shape you wanted. And you could infuse your qi into a tool of almost any type and then use that to carve the stone without allowing your qi to affect it.

So much fun. Ying made about a hundred different beads with the technique, some just to be pretty but most with arrays and pictograms and spells on them. Gang mostly made bigger things like a much better oven and some wonderful mixing bowls.

His marking stones for their new wards that would make a bubble of safe space at the heart of the Burial Mounds while keeping the clouds of resentful energy and ghosts overhead were gorgeous. So were the stone stela that they made together for the Catch People and Don’t Let Them Die ward. Hopefully it would work. There was no real way to test it short of Ying or Gang throwing themselves out of a tree or something which everyone said no to.

Unfair, really, but Ying didn’t fight it too much. He pouted, of course, but he didn’t really argue it.

By the time the second spring was well established, and the apple and cherry trees on the mountains outside the Burial Mounds were in full bloom, they were finally ready to restore the Sanctuary.

Ying bit his lip as he and Gang stood by the spring where their water came from. Nasty slime mold coated the rocks around the spring. The water itself came out sludgy and grey instead of fresh. The only way that they’d been able to drink the water was extensive purification on it. Even the water they put on their fields under the grow huts had to be repeatedly purified before they could use it.

“You think it will really work?” Ying asked Gang quietly.

General Kwan and the others had all retreated out past the spires. None of them were sure what the Great Purification would do to them if they were inside the Sanctuary when it activated. Xue Chonghai thought that they would be all right. Thought. He wasn’t sure.

Sending them away was the best choice. Ying certainly didn’t want to lose the only adults they had to trust. General Kwan and Xue Chen and Lan Yitian and the others weren’t like parents, not really, but they were grown-ups. They knew so much more than Ying and Gang did.

They understood so much more.

Ying and Gang couldn’t lose them.

“I hope so,” Gang said, biting his lip in a direct mirror to the way Ying bit his lip.

They’d started mirroring each other way more over the last year like they were real twins instead of pretend twins. Gang had finished adjusting his eyes to match Ying’s. They were carefully matching moles and freckle patterns. Both of them were being super-careful about growing at the same rate and, despite General Kwan’s discomfort with it, they regularly blended their qi together in the kid’s version of dual cultivation.

It helped so much that neither of them would stop. Even Xue Chonghai had admitted that they were doing something different with their version of dual cultivation, not that he’d clarified why he thought that.

Ying sucked a breath between his teeth. “Then let’s do it. At worst, it’ll make the water easier to purify. At best, we get a lovely place to live instead of, you know, this.”

Gang snickered. “Point.”

They held hands. Then blended their qi together, passing it back and forth until it bloomed and shimmered with higher levels of power. When they opened their eyes, they were one person in two bodies. Qi gleamed over them like foxfire.

Gang sketched the Great Purification array over the spring. Ying pushed power into it. Gang stabilized it.

Both of them breathed in.

Both breathed out.

Together they pushed the Great Purification array down into the spring, searching for the marking stone that Xue Chonghai said was buried under the earth.

It was there, about ten feet down. A miasma of resentful energy swathed the stone, clogging it and transforming everything the stone was designed to do into destruction instead of life. Ying/Gang shivered at how simple it was.

Why destroy everything? All Xue Chonghai had to do to make his Sanctuary into Hell on earth was flip this one marker stone’s function to the opposite. And all that took was a malignant, despairing spell wrapped around it.

The Great Purification Array blazed down through the earth. When it hit the marker stone, the resentful energy shuddered. Fractured. Splintered away and then erupted up out of the spring in a blazing pillar of light to blasted up in front of Ying/Gang. The pillar hit the wards protecting the clouds and ghosts before swirling like a pinwheel that shed golden sparks all over the Sanctuary.

Distantly, Ying/Gang heard a sound like a bell.

Distantly, they felt the Great Purification pour over them like a golden blanket.

Distantly, they felt their bodies drop to their knees.

Ying wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he came back to himself. His knees were wet. Gang lay curled up with him half in the spring. The smell of mold and rot was gone.

“Oh wow,” Gang whispered. “There’s green grass.”

“Mm?” Ying murmured. He managed to open his eyes on the third attempt, then gasped because there was green grass between their noses. “Wow. It worked.”

“I’m glad,” Gang sighed as he shut his eyes. “Now I’m gonna rest.”

Ying snorted and shut his eyes, too. He could hear voices coming. Lan Yitian was especially loud, but Xue Chen was obviously right on her heels.

Good. At least they could relax now. The Sanctuary was fixed. They hadn’t killed their friends. It was all good.

Everything else could wait.

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