Head pounding, vision clouded, senses overwhelmed by the clammy air of the cave, the cold, slimy press around him, the resentful energy that twisted upwards and flowed like smoke into his own lungs. Wei Ying’s voice was a life rope, but it was hard to keep hold of even that, when he couldn’t see him.

All he could see was—

His breaths came fast and harshly. He didn’t seem to be able to pull in enough air, between the physical exertion and the mental effort of regulating his qi, circulating it around his meridians in preparation for the crucial moment. Yes, he’d read surreptitiously about these techniques, hiding in the Library Pavilion after hours, but all the treatises had assumed a living partner, and he’d never had the opportunity to practice with the only one who interested him.

“That’s good, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying murmured from off to one side. “It’s almost time—hold off just a little longer, yeah?”

He really didn’t think that his finishing too soon would be their problem. The inescapable clench of dead flesh around his member was stimulating, yes. Now that he’d found his rhythm and the right angle to work at, every time he pulled out and forced himself back inside, he felt something not unlike pleasure. It had built for a while; now its level was steady, too low to overcome the knowledge of what—of whom?—he was thrusting into. Lan Wangji screwed his eyes shut and tried to imagine he was somewhere else. If he couldn’t release into the body beneath him, this whole gruesome ritual had been for nothing.

With vision gone, the noises he was making became louder and even more uncomfortably physical. Underneath the sound of his own panting, he heard the dry-leaf rustle of talismans brushing together, the queasy liquid smack of his body being driven in and out of another. The opposing flows of qi and resentful energy all around him, directed by the array painted on the rock floor beneath them, prickled his skin like an approaching thunderstorm. He bent forwards, closer to the grey flesh, the sharp shoulderblades. Wen Qionglin’s hair smelled of dust. Medicinal herbs that caught in the back of the throat, the pervasive reek of rotting blood.

“Now—now, Lan Zhan, it’s time—”

Wei Ying was too far away, speaking too softly. Touch me, he thought, desperately. Even a hand against his ankle would be enough. Even a fingertip.

He hadn’t wanted to watch Wei Ying prepare Wen Qionglin for this. It hadn’t been revulsion, but jealousy—he hadn’t wanted those hands on anyone but him, not even on a dead man.

Sweat was rolling down his back, now, leaving chilled trails behind it. He had to finish this. He folded himself more tightly down, moved his hands from Wen Qionglin’s hips to his shoulders. Worked his own hips faster, trying to bring himself off mechanically, as if the unyielding hole around him was his own hand and this was merely a compulsion of the flesh to be satisfied. He’d done that enough times as a youth, after all. When Wei Ying had attended the lectures, before the war, before he’d ever seen someone dead whom he’d met in life.

“Lan Zhan—” Wei Ying said his name, but the rest of his words were garbled and lost. He was getting there, finally. The last rise of the hill he’d slogged so far up was just ahead. Yang qi was rushing through his golden core, ready to be let out and flood Wen Qionglin’s dry meridians.

He thought of Wei Ying’s fingers, opening up his own body for Lan Wangji to use.

The groan he made, coming, echoed up from the depths of him. For a moment, he was only this: the lightning bolt of bodily ecstasy, the surge of his qi into the coiling resentment beneath him, and that deep, helpless noise.

He could move again, but he hesitated, putting off the horrible task of withdrawing from Wen Qionglin and feeling stale air against the filth on his skin. Shameful, to wallow like this.

Wei Ying’s hands roused him. Cool against his acupoints, though warmer than the corpse was, still. He tried to shake him off, to turn away and cover himself up, but he stumbled, grazing his toes painfully as his ankle failed to take his weight, and had to submit to his support.

As soon as Wei Ying had set him down, onto the heap of ragged blankets that served him for a bed, he was gone again, darting back to tend to the fierce corpse of his friend. Gently rolling him over, pulling back his eyelids and stroking the striated cheeks—making sure that Lan Wangji hadn’t injured him further, fucking him into the bare rock.

“Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan, there’s hot water, look. Lan Zhan, I… can wash you, if you don’t mind it, but I thought you’d rather—oh.”

Wei Ying’s eyes widened as Lan Wangji grabbed the rag from his hand. It wasn’t quite a flinch.

“Thank you,” he said, eyes lowered so he didn’t have to see if Wei Ying stayed close to him, while he did his best to get clean, or if he left again.

Voices outside the cave door. Quieter now than they had been, at first.

It was still daytime—he could tell by the light that filtered down, through a tangle of vines, in the places where the roof of the cave had collapsed long ago. Nowhere on this mountain was there a healthy spot for cultivation, but moving into that hazy sunlight to meditate would be better than sitting here in the dark, now that he’d pulled his robes back on. Still, Lan Wangji didn’t move. He couldn’t bear to be seen by the dead man’s sister, or by anyone else who knew what he’d tried, and failed, to do.

“Lan Zhan, you’re still here?”

"If you’re not leaving, you should eat this. It’s not much, but you need to get your strength back up. And hey, it’s still better than what they give you at the Cloud Recesses, right?

"There’s no chilli sauce for me either, you know. How am I going to teach A-Yuan what proper cooking tastes like without any spices, eh? Poor kid, living such an uncultured life up here! Maybe I should send him back with you when you go. Your uncle would love that. Hah!

"So…

"I think I know what went wrong. I couldn’t talk about it in detail with Wen Qing, obviously, she’s… not really up to helping with this right now. Pity—she’d be exactly the right person to ask about this. If it was, you know. Anyone else’s brother.

“Ah, fuck.”

…

"Sorry about that, Lan Zhan. Don’t ask me why I’m crying, there’s nothing wrong with me. Just tired, I guess. Anyway, I already scribbled down some diagrams, so you can see what I think would improve things. If we could concentrate the flow, here, in the building-up stage…

“Basically, it should have been obvious from the start. You see it too, right, Lan Zhan? We need a cauldron.”

…

“Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan?”

He’d thought he would just sit like this, cross-legged in the grit in a superficial mimicry of meditation, until some outside force jabbed at him enough to provoke a response. Even if that response was only collapse.

Sooner than that, though, he felt his head nod jerkily towards his chest. The space behind his eyelids was dark, and he realised that hai hour must be approaching. If he didn’t want to simply pass out in front of Wei Ying, he should get up and find somewhere more appropriate to sleep.

The cave was still shadowy when he opened his eyes, but there were small lights twinkling off to his right: candle flames, mundane ones, not from talismans. As soon as he recognised them, he could smell the cheap tallow burning, even through the other odours here. How could Wei Ying stand it? The candles were arranged closely around him where he sat, head bent over a pile of papers and brush gripped crookedly in his right hand. His desk looked like an old plank, propped up on whatever debris would lift it to a convenient height. Even at the Cloud Recesses, when he should have been trying to make a good impression, his writing posture had never been correct, Lan Wangji recalled. Now, he must have given up on it entirely.

Lan Wangji stood up. His sense of balance had recovered, he noted with relief. When he looked down at his feet, he realised that Wei Ying had let him rest on his own bedding all this time. How thoughtless he’d been!

The slim figure at the desk turned towards him. “Lan Zhan, you’re up! Feeling any better?” Wei Ying said brightly.

“Mn.” He could answer, at last.

The poor materials of the candles sent smoke up towards the cave roof in twisted black streams. He blinked. Was it an illusion, or—yes. Resentful energy mingled with the smoke, too, catching loosely at Wei Ying’s arms and the fine tips of his hair as it rose and fell.

“It is hai hour,” Lan Wangji said. Perhaps it wasn’t, quite, but he felt sure his body was an accurate timekeeper, despite the altitude here and his strange day.

Wei Ying laughed. It was muted, and that suddenly felt like the most unnatural thing Lan Wangji had seen today. “You Lans never change, do you?” He stood up, pausing to stretch out his back and shoulders. “Let me make you up somewhere to sleep. I’d say, ‘If you don’t mind sharing,’ but honestly, I don’t always get to bed at all these days. Too much to do, you know? So you might as well have the whole thing from the start.”

As Wei Ying bent down to the untidy bundle of fabrics where he had been sitting, Lan Wangji reached out to touch his shoulder. “There is no need, Wei Ying.”

Before he could make contact, Wei Ying skipped to one side like a drop of hot oil jumping out of a wok. He drew his arms back, out of Lan Wangji’s reach, and turned startled eyes up to meet his face.

“No need? But you have to sleep!”

“I can make up the bed myself.” If Wei Ying couldn’t even bear his touch on the shoulder, how would they ever manage—what they had agreed to do the next day?

“Of course. Right. Of course you can.” He shook his head, too quickly. “Sorry, Lan Zhan, I should have realised you’d rather do it yourself.”

Then he was turning away, walking back to his makeshift desk. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, Lan Wangji could see the equally improvised bier that lay behind it. The shape on top of it was obscured by the layers of talismans that kept Wen Qionglin’s corpse dormant, that stopped it from ripping apart every living being on this mass grave with its claws and teeth. Wei Ying had dressed it in soft robes like a convalescent might wear.

Lan Wangji spread out the blankets and lay down, fully clothed. He folded his hands over his chest and waited, waited for sleep to take him away from there.

“Wait. Wait, Lan Zhan, stop for just a moment.” Wei Ying was breathing hard. “I just need…”

Lan Wangji had frozen still at the first word out of his mouth. He knelt behind Wei Ying, one hand on his hip for balance, only barely breaching his body with his own. Those two points of contact felt like stars: bright and incomprehensibly far apart, while the rest of him was the void.

“What do you need?” he asked, when the rest of the sentence failed to arrive.

Wei Ying shivered. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again before answering.

“I need to be out of him,” he said. His head was already turned to one side, one flaming cheek pressed against Wen Qionglin’s spine, but he twisted a little more so that he could make eye contact with Lan Wangji.

Lan Wangji held it for as long as he could before retrieving his gaze. Less than a breath. He shifted backwards so that Wei Ying had room to move.

“It’s too much.” Wei Ying kept talking instead. “Being inside him while you’re—touching me there—I don’t think I can…”

“Wei Ying. Move.” He was calculating times and positions in his head: how much time was needed between his own expression of qi and jing into Wei Ying, and Wei Ying’s into the body of Wen Qionglin? How long would be too long? If they had to rearrange all three of them and start the ritual again—

“Mn. I’m moving.” Wei Ying’s tone had turned dreamy, and as Lan Wangji watched, he saw his hips jerk forwards, pushing him deeper inside. Lan Wangji wasn’t even touching him now!

“Move,” he said again, pairing it with a firm grip on Wei Ying’s hips to yank him backwards. The surprised noise he made at that, a grunt that turned into a long, helpless sigh, almost covered up the wet sound of his cock sliding out of the corpse. Almost.

Wei Ying fell forwards, caught his balance and reached out for the bluish-white buttocks in front of him. “Sorry, Wen Ning,” Lan Wangji heard him murmur, “didn’t mean to be so rough with you.”

There was no response. Wei Ying moved his hands up to the waist, smoothing them over the skin as though it were soft and pliant still. It wasn’t, Lan Wangji knew: if he thought about it too long, he would start to feel the chill again on his own hands, the iron rigidity with which a fierce corpse resisted the world’s intervention. Wei Ying’s head hung down; Lan Wangji couldn’t hear him speak, couldn’t see his eyes flicker in thought, but all his focus was turned away from him, directed onto the dead thing they were trying to make think and feel again.

It was too much to ask of him, to bear this.

With the speed of his fracturing restraint, he fell forwards onto Wei Ying. His arms flew up to wrap around his chest and shoulders from behind, squeezing hard, fingers digging in to feel the warmth of flesh. Muscles that had wasted since the days when they sparred as youths, but still flexed and swelled when Wei Ying instinctively fought back.

“Lan Zhan!”

They were pressed together from knees to shoulders as they wrestled—he was aware, distantly, of his erection colliding with Wei Ying’s buttocks, brushing between his legs. It was more important right now to catch and hold him, to get Wei Ying’s full attention back on him. The meat of Wei Ying’s shoulder was underneath his mouth. He seized it and snapped his jaws shut.

“Ah—!”

Wei Ying bellowed, but then he stilled; seemed, at least, to submit. The body in Lan Wangji’s grasp held its tension. He kept his grip on it.

“When I said Lans didn’t change—” A laugh that might just as well have been a pant of pain. “All right, Lan Zhan, I get it. No time to waste, right? You can.” He cleared his throat. “You can let go of me.”

He half-expected him to wriggle away once he’d done so, to reach for a knife or his flute or even Suibian. Instead, Wei Ying shifted his weight backwards, leaning into Lan Wangji’s chest before peeling one of Lan Wangji’s hands away and guiding it slowly down behind himself.

“Go ahead,” he said quietly.

Lan Wangji reached first for the clay bowl of slippery, ocean-smelling stuff he’d already daubed himself with once already, smoothing more of it along his cock and between Wei Ying’s cheeks. Then he took himself in hand and began, once again, to press inside of him. The angle was not as convenient, but bending Wei Ying further forward would push him towards Wen Qionglin, so it would have to work like this. Wei Ying had mostly lost his hardness, he noticed, wishing he had the boldness to touch him there as well, to push past what they had agreed to: his qi flooding Wei Ying, being refined into the spark that would relight his friend’s consciousness.

He moved in fits and starts, seeking his way inside Wei Ying’s body. It hadn’t been difficult in this way with the corpse—made navigable for him as it had been, by Wei Ying’s manipulations. Lan Wangji pushed in as far as he could go, pulled out and tried again. With his face buried in the back of Wei Ying’s neck, he could feel how he was trembling, hear the bite of air between his teeth. When the head of Lan Wangji’s cock slipped past the rim, he jolted; when he was all the way inside him, so that they were joined at the root, he let out a long breath that Lan Wangji could feel everywhere they touched.

“Lan Zhan,” he whispered.

“Wei Ying?”

“Nothing. I—nothing.”

If he thought about this too long—Wei Ying, saying his name as though it mattered who it was kneeling behind him, beyond the strength of his cultivation and the terrible weakness that had brought him here—he would lose his nerve, so he didn’t.

He rocked his hips back, thrust upwards and inwards once, to savor it, and then—he really began.

The force of his movements shook both their bodies. Wei Ying gasped at every stroke; Lan Wangji could feel the tension in his abdomen as he fought to keep their precarious balance, to stay here with him instead of being knocked onto the ground with the dead man. Before long, he was trembling. Clinging though he was to every one of Wei Ying’s responses, the sweat and heat and fibre of him, it took Lan Wangji shamefully long to realise: he was going to collapse if this went on much longer.

When he twisted them around and lowered Wei Ying to the stone floor, he went gratefully, even allowing Lan Wangji to pull at his arms and tuck the knobby elbows in at his sides, so their bodies remained within the centre of the array. Like this, there was a horrible symmetry between the living man and the dead one, whose hands were folded awkwardly beneath his chin, whose limbs were arranged to make him more convenient to fuck. Lan Wangji leaned forward over Wei Ying, so he did not have to see it.

It was easier, in this position, to drive in deep and fast. To build momentum. Pleasure rolled over him in waves, wilder and stronger, threatening to wash him away. He wanted to do this forever. It felt like he could.

Wei Ying’s soft grunts had slowly turned into moans and the cloudy half-shapes of words, never losing their tone of surprise. Now he lifted his head from the ground, eyes screwed up. Coherence costing him a real effort.

“Lan Zhan, that’s—too much. Feels too good.”

He didn’t respond, and Wei Ying tried again, “Seriously. Like that—I think I’m going to—to—”

Lan Wangji slowed down, just enough that he could speak clearly: “Then close the jade lock, just as in solo practice.”

He had forgotten himself that this was supposed to be a work of cultivation. Belatedly, he worked to move his qi through the correct circuit of his meridians, gritting his teeth in concentration.

Wei Ying almost sobbed when he sped up again. “I’ll try.”

A breath later, Lan Wangji felt him clench down hard on his cock. Wei Ying wailed, and it was that desperate sound, more even than the sudden sensation, that made him burst, jing and yang qi overflowing out of him and into Wei Ying’s body where they were connected.

Twin networks of rivers and tributaries, intimately joined. He could see them in outline, lit up suddenly in gold.

He could see the resentful energy that reached towards him, from its writhing nest where Wei Ying’s golden core ought to be.

The air throbbed. He couldn’t breathe. Wei Ying was choking underneath him, bearing too much of his weight. He couldn’t get up.

Someone was stroking his hair.

Someone had helped him curl up on his side, resting his head on something cool and solid. They were stroking his hair and the side of his face, and Lan Wangji must be sick, to be treated so gently. It had been a long while since he’d been ill like this. Perhaps they’d stay with him and keep comforting him, even now he was awake, if he was good and quiet enough.

“Lan Zhan,” a voice said. “That’s it, Lan Zhan. Open your eyes. Look up at me.”

It was dark, but there was something pale right before his eyes. He blinked to bring it into focus—“No, Lan Zhan, look up. Look at me!”—a life-size sculpture in white marble or jade?

Wen Qionglin’s dead face, he realised, and the cave swung around him as everything in it took on its real identity. There was no porcelain pillow beneath his cheek, and no comfort to be had here. Only a lifeless body, hunched over as if to protect itself from further attack, and Wei Ying, crouching above both of them.

“Are you all right?” Wei Ying asked him.

Lan Wangji rolled his head around on his stiff neck. Wei Ying stared intently down at him, his eyes burning in deep shadow, his lank hair falling forwards over his shoulders. He was blurred at the edges, no matter how much Lan Wangji tried to clear his sight: resentful energy buffeted his skin from both the inside and outside, fighting with the extra qi he’d caught and spun within himself.

He made some kind of noise, hoping it was the assurance Wei Ying wanted from him. It was hard to keep looking at him; even when he tried, some instinct bent his gaze away, wrenched his eyelids down to hide behind.

“Stay with me, please. Lan Zhan.” The hand on his hair took hold of it and tugged, not sharply but suddenly. “Please.”

When their eyes met, this time, they locked on to one another.

“I can’t do this without you, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying whispered. “And I don’t know what’s going to happen if I can’t finish it soon, but…” He didn’t have to finish the sentence. The energies struggling within him would come to no peaceful balance.

On his nod, Wei Ying groaned, and moved. He must have entered Wen Qionglin while Lan Wangji was still unconscious; now he pulled slowly out, slid back in with a shuddering breath. Lan Wangji reached up to catch hold of his hand. He wrapped his own about it and held tight, feeling its flexing birdlike bones, its frightening permeability.

Impulsively, he stretched out his other hand towards Wen Qionglin, brushing his knuckles against the icy flesh until he could grip his stiff, folded fingers.

It didn’t take long. Wei Ying mumbled fervently under his breath, a disjointed stream of reassurances—to himself, to Lan Wangji, to Wen Qionglin, or perhaps to all three of them. He grimaced with effort, and with pleasure that didn’t seem enjoyable. If he were fucking Lan Wangji instead of Wen Qionglin, would he look the same? Imagining it, Lan Wangji felt dizzy. All three of them were wreathed in resentful energy by now—if it didn’t batter at him as violently as it did at Wei Ying, that could only be a matter of time. Sweat stood out on Wei Ying’s forehead, but his flesh was growing colder and colder.

Wei Ying came with a helpless shout that echoed like a thunderclap. Every hair on Lan Wangji’s body stood painfully upright.

Wen Qionglin howled and convulsed like a victim of windstroke, squeezing down on Lan Wangji’s hand in a way that would break a non-cultivator’s bones, his arching spine tossing Wei Ying away from him like a doll. The restraining talismans burst into chaff and ashes. His face, so soft before, was distorted into a wolf’s snarl.

Yanked by the hand into range of a fierce corpse’s teeth, Lan Wangji knew he should try to pull away, but he found himself holding tighter to Wen Qionglin even than he had been. They rolled halfway over one another, until Wen Qionglin’s flailing heels found purchase on the ground and he could kick himself away—putting his back against the cave wall, Lan Wangji recognised.

Dragged along, he could only tuck in his head and follow until the fierce corpse went still. Lan Wangji was speaking, he realised to his consternation. Repeating the meaningless words Wei Ying had said, before: “You’re all right. It’s all right. We’re here, we’re going to help you.”

Black and white swam across Wen Qionglin’s eyeballs, oil and water stirred together but refusing to mix. When both were swept away, leaving only the wide, frightened eyes of a young man, Lan Wangji paused for breath. They were both naked and streaked with dirt, in a cave with a wicked array scrawled across the floor, haunted by resentment. If Wen Qionglin hadn’t started sobbing, his shoulders shaking and chest heaving though no tears welled up to roll down his cheeks, he would have been much more worried.

“Wen Ning, it’s all right,” Wei Ying said, slowly approaching with his arms outstretched. He wrapped one around Wen Qionglin’s shoulders and, to Lan Wangji’s surprise, the other around him. “You’re going to be well again, thanks to Lan Zhan.”

“Thanks to Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji corrected him.

Wen Qionglin let go of his hand, but only to pull both of them closer, nestling all three of their heads together. When he spoke, it was a slow but clear, “Thank you.”

“Don’t we make a good team, eh, Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying asked shakily, and Lan Wangji, in this strange embrace, found that his heart was perfectly clear: no fear, no jealous longing, and no sorrow, only calm and something that might, perhaps, be hope.