Chapter 80: The Days of Youth (Part 2)

He longed for her, and they could not meet again.

Ying Yuan began spending his days and nights reading — not because the reading held him, but because it kept him in motion, and motion was preferable to stillness. He would succumb to exhaustion at his desk without intending to and wake from nightmares. In the dreams, Yan Dan jumped into the cycle of reincarnation, and he was there, and he could not pull her back. He reached and reached, and his hands found nothing, and she went on going down.

Later, even the nightmares stopped. What remained instead was something quieter and harder to dismiss — a vague, persistent sense of being watched, not with the attentiveness of someone studying him but with a particular quality of sadness, and he would almost hear his name — not Your Majesty, not the Emperor, but the other one: Ying Yuan. She had been the only one who called him that, and even she had stopped, eventually defaulting to the formal address like everyone else.

Some forms of companionship arrived so gradually that they were never consciously noted. They became simply what was there — taken as given, like air or light, until the day they were gone, and then all the small evidence of their existence surfaced at once, in the particular way that traces surface: not from nowhere, but from everywhere simultaneously.

Some time after, the Lantern Fairy was judged to have broken heavenly law and was sentenced to descend to the mortal realm in reincarnation.

A few days later, Lord Ying Yuan chose to descend as well — seven lifetimes of mortal tribulation, willingly entered. In six of those lifetimes, he did not find her. In the seventh, she was already beside him, and he did not know it.

The most devastating thing in the world is not failure. It is sustained, effortful reaching — the mind and soul bent entirely toward something — that moves in exactly the wrong direction with every step taken forward, so that the closer one tries to get, the further away the thing becomes. Not through malice. Simply through the terrible geometry of that particular pursuit.

---

"Your Majesty." Lu Jing stepped forward and inclined his head with the gravity that was his natural register. "It is not advisable to remain in the mortal realm. We should return to the Heavenly Court."

Tang Zhou made a sound of agreement and did not move.

Lu Jing sensed something wrong and looked up.

"Your Majesty — your eyes—"

Tang Zhou raised his hand to his temples. The throbbing there had been building for a while. He felt the warmth moving down his face before he saw it — a thin trail of red, tracking from his eye to his jaw, dropping from his chin onto his collar. He wiped at his eyes with his palm and looked at his hand for a moment, then smiled with the specific mildness of someone who has decided not to make more of something than it requires. "All right. Let's go back now."

He turned and looked once more.

Yan Dan was kneeling on the ground, her movements careful and deliberate, supporting Yu Mo and shifting her position to let him rest his head in her lap. Before she had fully settled, Yu Mo suddenly pushed himself upright — one hand on the ground, the other pressed over his mouth — and began to cough. He was trying to suppress it, the kind of suppression that took everything, and with each attempt, blood seeped through his fingers. He coughed for a long time. Then he stopped.

Then he vomited a substantial amount of blood. Then more. The ground beneath him darkened quickly.

Yan Dan's composure dissolved. She put one hand on his back and reached for her magic with the other, pressing both toward whatever could be done, while her voice went up: "Zilin, come now — you hit him too hard—"

---

She had meant to stop Yu Mo herself. He had been preparing to use his own power against the divine artifact Di Zhi, and the best outcome of that confrontation was mutual destruction — Yu Mo destroyed along with the thing he was fighting. Even if her master had been there, the situation would have been beyond recovery. She had barely risen from the ground when Zi Lin was already there, seizing her arm with a force that brooked no argument, his voice coming down on her like a falling beam: "With what you have, you cannot stop Yu Mo! You would only make everything worse! Get out of the way—!"

She had never been spoken to quite like that before. It stopped her completely, the way a sudden shock can stop even a body in motion.

In the moment she was still, Zi Lin was already in the air. Yu Mo's demonic power had burned itself almost entirely through — he was operating on whatever dregs remained — and then Zi Lin reached him and struck him cleanly in the chest, and all the demonic energy that Yu Mo had gathered dispersed at once.

Yan Dan watched this and could not move.

Zi Lin lowered Yu Mo to the ground with a care that was at odds with the violence of the blow, then sent him sliding toward her. "Keep hold of him. I'll deal with the rest."

Yan Dan caught him and reached for his chest. It was still beating. His body was cold. She understood what Zi Lin had done and why — there had been no other way to stop it, and this way had stopped it — but Yu Mo had already been damaged by the divine artifact. He did not have the reserves to absorb what had just been added to that.

Yu Mo moved her hand away from his chest. His voice, when it came, was depleted but still precise: "It has nothing to do with Zi Lin. Don't." A pause, broken by another cough. "Don't waste your energy trying to heal me. I can manage."

His expression was cold in the particular way it went cold when he was still angry. She had defended Tang Zhou. She knew that. She had seen his face when she did it.

This was not the first time she had done something that put the space between her and Yu Mo into this particular quality of distance. But this time, she could find nothing to offer — no words that were adequate, no deflection that was honest, no joke that would help. She turned the question over in her own chest: if she had known that Tang Zhou was Ying Yuan — that all of it had always been the same person — would she have acted differently? She did not know. The not-knowing made it worse. Her mouth opened several times and produced nothing.

She, who could spin nonsense into something that sounded like reasoned argument, who could talk her way around almost anything — had nothing.

Then Yu Mo said, almost to himself, barely audible: "Yan Dan, you've been crying."

She hadn't been. Absolutely not. She had made a specific internal decision, at some point she could no longer precisely locate, that she was not going to do that again.

"Seeing you cry—" He paused. "I'm actually quite glad."

She looked up at him.

"But." He reached out and his hand found her face — slow, careful, the touch of someone measuring what his remaining strength can do. He wiped at her cheek with the edge of his thumb, his expression carrying a weariness that had nothing performative in it. His voice dropped to something barely above a breath. "But why are you crying for me?"

---

Yelan Mountain had been destroyed.

The lakes had gone dry. The trees and flowers that had taken years to establish had been uprooted or broken. The mountains had shifted and crumbled into arrangements that were not theirs. The whole of the mountain realm had a specific kind of desolation — not the desolation of something that has never had life, but the desolation of something that had it and no longer does.

Dan Shu sat on a rock, his ears drooping toward his face, his eyes gone red at the rims, staring at the broken peach tree lying at his feet. He sniffled. "I planted this. I planted it myself. And now it's broken."

Yan Dan sat down across from him on the stone steps and put her hand on his head. "It's all right. We can plant new ones next spring." She said this and meant it, and also knew, at the same time, that Yelan Mountain without the immortal energy of Di Zhi would struggle to return to what it had been. The northern desert had always made it an unlikely home for the things they had grown here. Without the energy that had sustained all of it, what could be coaxed back was uncertain.

But she could not simply say that to Dan Shu.

The responsibility for what had happened moved through her in a way she couldn't set down. If she hadn't gone searching for the ancient artifact with Tang Zhou — if she hadn't blocked Yu Mo's sword at the last moment — the Yelan Mountain Realm would still be standing. She had made each of those choices individually, and each had seemed, at the time, like the only available choice, and together they had produced this.

Dan Shu got to his feet and wrapped his arms around the trunk of the broken peach tree, starting to drag it toward an open patch of ground with the determined incompetence of someone who has made up their mind. "Then I'll dig a hole and plant it properly. We'll have peaches to eat next year." He laughed once, a small, cheerful sound — heh, heh heh — as he hauled the tree in the wrong direction.

Yan Dan watched him go and rested her forehead on her knees.

Behind her, she heard footsteps, and then Zi Lin's voice reached her with the specific quality of someone who is approaching a problem they find annoying. "You're always calling me your 'princess' so enthusiastically, and now you're sitting here doing nothing?"

"Yu Mo is still angry with me," she said, without moving. "Besides — I've done so many wrong things this time. How could I—"

"Assassinating a Celestial Lord of the Heavenly Court is a capital offense." Zi Lin walked past her and glanced back as he went. "If you hadn't blocked that sword, Yu Mo would have lost his life. Or do you think Yu Mo's life is worth less than the Yelan Mountain Realm?" He kept walking. "Let's all slowly figure out how to restore this place. Don't you think that's a better use of effort?"

Yan Dan raised her head and looked at him with a sincerity she hadn't been planning on. "Zi Lin — I've known you for so long, and I've never realized until now that you're actually a decent person."

Zi Lin's expression darkened immediately with the specific disgust of someone who finds being complimented in this way deeply offensive. "I'm not Yu Mo. I'm not taken in by your nonsense. And I prefer Lin Lang, so don't flatter yourself."

Yan Dan exhaled in an exaggerated way, spread her hands slightly, and said: "I don't prefer the Mountain Turtle either. We're perfectly well matched." She got up off the steps almost in the same motion as the last word, ran to Yu Mo's door, and knocked.

She thought about it, standing there: when exactly had she left the Nine Heavens and found that she liked the world this much? She could tease Dan Shu. She could insult Zi Lin's original form with impunity. She could duck behind Yu Mo when Zi Lin followed through on his threats, and let Yu Mo deal with the resulting consequences. Life had moved without particular grief or tears—

Bai Ling opened the door quietly, keeping her voice low. "The Mountain Lord has fallen asleep. You can go in, but please don't disturb him."

Yan Dan nodded and went in on her toes.

She heard the door settle softly behind her. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the blanket up a fraction of an inch, then very carefully reached toward his face and let her palm rest near his eyes — close enough to feel his lower eyelashes trembling against her skin, not quite touching.

"What you said to me before." She kept her voice low. "I didn't pretend I hadn't heard it. I didn't file it away as something to deal with later and then not deal with it. I just — I don't know how to tell you. I genuinely don't know how."

She swallowed. Her throat had gone dry in the way it went dry when she had too much to say and couldn't find the beginning of any of it.

"Dan Shu just told me he planted a peach tree. He wants to eat peaches he grew himself next year." She could hear the sound of him still dragging it, somewhere outside the window. "Everyone likes this place so much. I've watched so many demons come here and settle in over the years. It gets so noisy in the evenings. It's become mine too." She looked at his closed face, the long lines of it. "Even destroyed, I couldn't just stand there and let it go."

A breath. Then:

"I ran away from the Heavenly Court because there was someone I couldn't face, and running was easier than facing them. I thought jumping through the Seven Reincarnations Path was something courageous. It wasn't. It was the worst kind of cowardice, and I didn't understand that until much later." The eyelashes under her palm trembled fractionally. She knew he was awake. He didn't want to speak yet, and that was all right. There was still room in the silence for what she needed to say. "Yu Mo. I'm leaving."

The silence held.

"I need to go to the Heavenly Court and finish what should have been finished a long time ago." She said this with the particular tone of someone who has finally stopped trying to go around a thing and is walking directly toward it. If it went well, there might be a way to think about restoring this place. She had told Dan Shu next year's peaches would be plump and large and sweet. She intended to keep that.

"I won't be long. I'll be back soon."

This was her home. She had not fully understood this until she was sitting in it while it was broken.

She stood. "I'll be back soon." Her voice had gone softer than she had intended.

She had come here with nothing to her name, and she was leaving with nothing packed. She didn't need anything from the Heavenly Court. She would not be staying.

Standing in the wreckage of the mountain realm and looking back at the twenty years inside it, she found they were extraordinarily heavy. Every place had left its mark. Every day, every ordinary moment — the noisy evenings, the arguments, the incense she made and the complaints she filed against the color of lotus blossoms — were perfectly intact inside her, etched more deeply than any of the eight hundred years she had spent in the River of Oblivion.

---

Bai Ling met her in the corridor with an expression that was trying to find the right shape for what she was feeling.

"You're leaving now? What do you—"

"I'm going to the Heavenly Court. Two or three days at most."

Bai Ling went still.

"But—" she began, and then the calculation arrived in her face. "One day in the Heavenly Court is a year on the earth. Two or three days is two or three years. What happens to the Mountain Lord while you're gone?" She drew a breath and said it plainly, the way you say things when you have decided that being tactful is no longer appropriate: "Yan Dan. The Mountain Lord wants you here right now. Can you really not see how much he—"

"I know," Yan Dan said.

She would not forget the look on his face when he had asked her, in that depleted, careful voice: But why are you crying for me? If she hadn't understood his feelings after that, she would have been less than a fool.

"You know, and you're leaving anyway?!" The anger that had been building in Bai Ling reached her face. "How can you—"

"Enough, Bailing." The voice came from behind them both — low, unhurried, with the specific texture of someone who has made a decision and is at peace with it. "Let her go."

Yu Mo was standing in the corridor in his dark robe, pale but composed, his features carrying no more or less than usual. He looked at Yan Dan and smiled — the small, quiet, entirely genuine smile that was only his. "I don't know how long you'll be gone this time." A beat. "If you find in the end that you prefer it there, then stay. Yelan Mountain Realm will always be open to you. If you're unhappy wherever you are, come back and rest here for a while."

Yan Dan stared at him. She opened her mouth and found nothing organized enough to say.

Yu Mo reached out and pinched the tip of her nose with two fingers, lightly, the way he had always done when she was working herself up about something. His expression was exactly the same as it always was. She looked at his face as carefully as she had ever looked at anything, searching for the seam between the composed surface and whatever was under it, and found nothing she could definitively name. "Without you here, my ears will finally get some peace. No one arguing with Zi Lin on a daily basis, no one causing trouble every other day. I won't have to clean anything up that you've knocked over."

She heard what he was doing.

"But I'll be lonely," he said, so quietly she almost missed it.

Yan Dan replied, in a voice smaller than she'd intended: "Then I'm going." Each of the things he had said was accurate. She knew they were accurate. And they still left a taste in her mouth she couldn't classify.

---

He watched her figure reduce in the distance until it was gone.

Then he turned back, pressed his hand to his chest, and coughed twice — the raw, involuntary cough of a body dealing honestly with itself now that no one was watching.

Bai Ling spoke from behind him. "Mountain Lord. You really, truly care for Yan Dan, don't you?"

Yu Mo glanced at her. "Yes."

Because he cared for her the way he cared for her, he did not want to cause her pain. He did not want to put her in a position she hadn't chosen. Whatever she carried for Ying Yuan — the depth of it, the years of it, the specific way it had shaped everything that came after — he had understood this for a long time. He did not resent it. It was simply what was true.

"Bailing," he said, after a moment. "If someone forces another person into love — if they push and press and maneuver until the other person has no room to choose — that is not love. That is control dressed in love's clothes." He was quiet for a moment. "I know that Yan Dan has never stopped thinking of Emperor Ying Yuan. I came too late." He said this without self-pity — simply as one states a fact that cannot be revised but can be accepted. "If she turns back one day on her own — if it's truly her own choice — then I will be here to watch her live freely and lightly. That is enough."

That, he had long decided, would always be enough.