Chapter 78: The End of the Flashback

Zilin had only turned around to retrieve the fox clan's letter and compose a response himself. He had not anticipated coming back to find Yan Dan in the middle of that particular sentence.

Yan Dan produced a dry sound that was approximately a laugh. "Lord Zilin, you've completely misunderstood, really—" She stepped backward while trying to use Yu Mo as a shield, but Yu Mo chose this moment to flick his sleeve and simply stand up.

Zilin took two deliberate steps forward. "It seems you'd prefer to be put in the ground and planted. I'll oblige."

Yan Dan looked between the serene Yu Mo and the furious Zilin and, for reasons she would not be able to fully explain later, said: "So your true form is a mountain tortoise?"

Even years afterward, she would consider this moment an act of inspiration.

She reflected on it later and understood how it had happened: Zilin had said "buried in the ground," and somewhere in the back of her mind, the blurry rounded shape she always caught at the edge of her vision when looking toward Zilin's true form — yellowish-brown, earthen, dim — had suddenly assembled itself into an answer. She had been puzzling over that shape for months without getting anywhere, and it had arrived all at once in the worst possible moment to say it aloud.

Zilin stopped. Stared at her. Said: "How did you know?"

Yan Dan had no response. They looked at each other. Neither spoke.

Yu Mo, who had been moving toward the door, heard Zilin's voice climb suddenly: "Today I am going to skin you, you lotus spirit — don't you move—" Something flew past Yu Mo's head. Then a vase went past his sleeve and demolished itself against the door frame.

He smoothed the sleeve where he'd had his elbow on the table and looked at the remains of the vase. Something that was almost a smile sat at the edge of his expression.

Outside, a long cold wind moved through the plum blossoms, pulling the petals loose, spreading that clean cold fragrance across everything.

A hundred years could pass like a dream. He had thought everything would be different by now.

The world changed. The person didn't. The one he had always—

He was still thinking about it when he walked back inside.

---

From that day, Yan Dan was officially Zilin's enemy. The conflict grew for the next twenty years, layering itself into something that could fairly be called a long-standing mutual hatred.

There is a saying in the mortal world about pairs who bicker constantly. The word bicker did not quite cover what Yan Dan and Zilin were — they were bickering opponents, no qualifications needed.

Yan Dan had come into possession of a secret of genuinely catastrophic magnitude. For several nights running she woke up laughing about it. The great, dignified, imperious Lord Zilin — his original form was a mountain tortoise. Ridiculous. Wonderful. She was not going to waste this.

She used it whenever she could. Just the right pressure at the right moment, then sat back and watched Zilin's face do what it did when he was furious but couldn't do anything about it without confirming the whole thing. Being a tortoise wasn't shameful in itself — plenty of demons had perfectly respectable original forms — but what would happen if it became common knowledge was clear enough. Other demons would exploit it. The authority he had built over years would dissolve. So he couldn't say anything, and Yan Dan knew he couldn't say anything, and she walked past him beaming on a daily basis.

---

Winter passed. Spring came back. The mountain peach trees put out their buds, soft pink, tentative.

Yan Dan picked one and set it in a ceramic jar on the windowsill, with water drawn from the lake — blue and cold and clear. The damp fragrance of the blossom was pleasant in a settled kind of way. She had taken to spending afternoons by the lake, letting the spring sun sit on her, and sometimes falling asleep there, in the particular motionless peace of a warm afternoon when nothing is required of anyone.

She came back from the lake one day to find someone behind her door. He turned his head when he heard her approach, and she recognized him quickly. "Mountain Lord Yu Mo."

He made a sound of acknowledgment and said nothing else.

This was the first time he had come to her residence. He was genuinely an infrequent visitor.

She pushed the door open. "Please come in, sit down."

He took the tea she brought, had a sip, and said after a moment: "I was passing by. Are you comfortable here?"

He looked toward the windowsill — the ceramic jar, the peach blossom in it — and something in his expression changed slightly. "I always thought my own rooms were rather sparse. Now I see what they were missing."

"The peach blossoms here are very beautiful this year."

"Especially this year. And you happened to be here for them."

Yan Dan smiled at that, showing her teeth. "I must have good timing." The sun had put color in her cheeks.

Yu Mo looked at her for a moment and reached out, brushing his hand lightly past her temple — then pulled it back quickly.

He coughed once, looked down, and said nothing.

Sitting across from him like this, Yan Dan thought about Ying Yuan for the first time in a while, and found she could do it without the old weight. Ying Yuan, she thought, would not have noticed the jar and the flower on the windowsill. He was the Qingli Emperor, carrying the particular heaviness that came with that, perpetually occupied with the concerns that came with it. Small things slipped past him.

"Mountain Lord, that jar and blossom aren't especially obvious. How did you notice them?"

"I simply saw them." He paused, frowning slightly as though something had occurred to him. "Don't keep provoking Zilin."

"I don't provoke him. He gets angry on his own."

She looked at the light outside. The sun was going down. "It's almost time for dinner. Would the Mountain Lord like to stay?"

She asked it casually, not actually expecting yes. Bai Ling's cooking was exceptional — precise, elaborate, comparable to anything an imperial kitchen produced. Yan Dan's own cooking was limited to things that required minimal effort, and when she was particularly unmotivated, she just absorbed the essence of heaven and earth and called it sufficient.

Yu Mo nodded. "All right."

Yan Dan considered her options and determined they were limited. She put vegetables, radishes, and tofu on the table, glanced at his expression, and found nothing particularly readable in it. He also did not reach for his chopsticks.

She thought about it. "I washed everything thoroughly this time. There's no grit."

He made a sound of agreement and smiled. "I know." He took a piece and tasted it. "Your cooking has improved."

Yan Dan bit her chopstick. "You've come on a mediocre day, Mountain Lord. My fish soup is the real achievement — smooth as cream, genuinely excellent."

She saw his chopstick hand develop a very slight tremor. She blinked. "Did I say something wrong?"

"Smooth as cream. Fish soup." His tone was flat in the way that flat tones sometimes cover other things. "You're unaware of quite a lot."

After dinner, Yu Mo showed no inclination to leave immediately. He sat with it for a while, then said: "I've been planning to go out for some time. Yan Dan, would you like to come?"

She considered this. "Where?"

"The Jiangnan region. The weather there is right for it now."

Yan Dan counted the days. Jiangnan and back would take the better part of half a year, which meant the Dragon Boat Festival would happen while she was away. The Clan Chief had warned her when she entered the demon register that realgar wine during the Dragon Boat Festival was potent against demons. She thought about this and concluded that since she had no demonic aura to speak of, she was probably fine.

The prospect of going somewhere was immediately appealing. "Mountain Lord," she said, with her most winning expression, "I'll make the fish soup for you when we're back. You'll find it good."

Yu Mo kept his face precisely neutral, neither warm nor cold. "Is that so."

It wasn't until that same year in Nandu, when she met the flower spirit girl who had taken the strange eye from Yu Mo, that Yan Dan understood why fish soup produced that particular expression from him every single time.

It was, she admitted upon reflection, a reasonable reaction. Anyone would feel something peculiar seeing the cooked remains of their own kind placed in front of them, let alone having another person enthusiastically describe how smooth and delicious the preparation had been.

---

Twenty years moved past in the way years do — full of noise, accumulating by degrees, each day adding to the layer beneath. Zilin's face went dark regularly. Bai Ling's eyes crinkled with laughter in one moment and then she could produce a demon's full force in the next without transition. Dan Shu maintained the cheerfully slow expression that occasionally produced genuinely charming results. Yuan Dan stroked his chin and murmured that his wives were either too beautiful to be interesting or too interesting to be beautiful, and that this was a genuine ongoing problem for him.

Yu Mo stayed the same — calm, hard to read. Yan Dan was still not sure what he was thinking most of the time.

Then she came to the banks of the Zhangtai River in Nandu and met the young Celestial Master.

---

They had met when both were young.

When she looked back at that time — the bright moon over those evenings, the willows of Zhangtai, the sound of the Qiang flute carrying across the water — she remembered making a wager with Prince Lin and writing a poem about it. In those young days the willows and peach blossoms along the river were all in bloom at once. She had circled a long way and come back to where she had started.

"May I ask your name, Celestial Master?"

"Tang Zhou."

"Do you know who I am?"

He didn't. He also wasn't particularly interested in knowing.

"My immortal title is Qingli Yingyuan Emperor."

He had looked at her then, and she had thought: if I could see you again one day, I would know you at once.

But in the end, when they did see each other again, he did not know her.

He had told her once about a recurring dream: a place entirely unfamiliar, nothing visible but endless white mist, and a figure ahead that he was always running toward, always nearly reaching, always losing at the last moment. He thought it was something his memory had kept from long ago. Even after a century or more, he still carried that image — not the face, just the back of someone moving away. He had said he only wanted to see that person once more. So that when he looked back later, he would have something more to remember than a figure walking away from him.

Yan Dan had thought, hearing this: even if Yingyuan's eyes were forever closed, it wouldn't matter. She would be his eyes.

She had told herself that traveling with this mortal to find the ancient artifacts was the right thing — a way of settling the account with her own past, making up for something she had not had the courage to say clearly when it mattered. She had never openly told Yingyuan Jun what she truly felt. How could she make a joke of a thing like that? But in the end she had pulled back from saying it at all.

So she would do this instead. The long journey. The difficult road. She told herself this was correct.

She believed it.