Xueyu’s footsteps were loud as he passed through the inner corridors of Luanshi’s evening hallways, bustling with disciples running hither and thither in their rush to dinner, heard even over the excitement of new visitors. The sun was already gone but the gentle glow of mountain lights illuminated the strange building’s space with a warm ambiance. Electricity was something of an elusive utility to master ever since the decimation of man’s old conveniences, but from the fading of society’s neon corpse slowly sprouted the agrarian stability of current day. Waveforms and currents would never leave the world and mankind was always fitting pieces of existence’s puzzle back together, however, the gaps remained large. There were always more holes to fill in the bigger piece.

The swordmaster dipped into his room and shut the door behind him, turned the lock between his fingers until he heard the mechanism click in the dull polish of an old metal frame. He had no idea how long it’d been since the spirit that haunted him gave him the ultimatum in the upper elevation of Yunji’s atmosphere, since he’d so rudely interrupted the quiet time he was trying to spend at his Priestess’ side.

Xueyu’s sleeping quarters were sparse. They contained the bare minimum comfort, stowed away only what the man needed to survive: some pairs of clothing, very few tokens of memories, life’s essentials and nothing more. At the foot of his bed a mirror was hung upon the wall. It was of simple construction, square and utilitarian and reminiscent of no discernible style seen in the foothills of the city.

Taking a deep breath, the protector of the mountain moved before that mirror and observed his own shape. The surface of the mirror rippled like water, polished metal blurring in a skipping stone’s path till Xueyu’s hardline shape was a sine wave fragment of reality draped in an old spirit’s bloodlust scent.

Xue was temporary,

a mortal moment

but Kai, oh—

Kai was eternal.

“You’re late,” said the mirror from a handful of boiling fissures in its steam clouded surface, unwilling to entertain the sword master’s calling just yet. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“My tardiness was unavoidable. I had things to attend to.” Xueyu spoke curtly to the shifting essence, watching its movement through eyes set beneath a stern brow. “I cannot bend the world to your will. You know this already.”

“I don’t want you to bend the world to my will,” the mirror replied, still a distorted swirl of something that began as Xueyu but grew darker, moontide ink-swirl water like the swordsman’s iron suminagashi skin: always in flux. With his snake static words hissing in the volatile dark, Kaizhan laughed—a cruelty dressed in callow command. “I only wish one man to bend. Just you, Xueyu. Just you. Do I ask too much? Do I give too freely?”

Kai had him here. His hands were the damascus pattern of Xueyu’s skin, his touch neither outside nor in. He squeezed his host’s waist, rivet-gun firm and ground into his spine to demand his attention.

“If you’d prefer me gone, you simply have to say the words.” If there was breath in that spirit, it was a wisp of silver pluming up the legendary protector’s neck, a cold rivulet of blood that dripped upward against nature. “Say the words, Xue. Tell me: what do you want.”

“I don’t want you gone. You know I need you, Kaizhan.” Xueyu’s hands were still at his side, even as the phantom arrangement of man ran brisk over his outline and inline, pressed the air of a contorted command into the wave of his spine. “I just cannot be beholden to every single beck and call. You have to understand that—sometimes your deadlines are impossible, despite how much I try to meet them.”

Whenever the protector of Yunji stared into the mirror, he knew: as long as he was Xueyu of the Blood Blessed Blade, it would always be Xueyu and Kaizhan. The swordmaster’s skill was undoubtedly enhanced by the presence of the spirit folded into the steel of the blade that hung at his side, that haunted his head and heart and made magic from the silver sheen of his reflection.

“Oh, my mortal toy, my precious idiot, Xue’er, Xue’er, Xueyu’er: didn’t you know?” Kaizhan’s parasite voice was a stab in the kidney, his sweetness the twist that doubled a proud man over in a push-down-pull-down forcing Xue’s face and hands to his sparsely dressed bed. Out of the oil slick swirling of all that mirror-sharpened cruelty, Xueyu’s reflection finally reconvened,

but another presence was pressed against his back, ground hard against his sharp line hips, in control of his defenseless body.

Kaizhan’s reflection grinned over his prey even though Xue was alone. His pixel flicker image was swarthy and handsome, glowing malware eyes always watching from the other side, rough bastard touch controlling the swordsman by the scruff of the neck:

lamb to slaughter,

mink to maim.

“Gods make impossible demands because they love to punish failure.”

“What God are you?” Xueyu questioned into the tufts of an erstwhile world’s bed linens, cheek to color-faded cotton spun on extinct looms, to silks dulled and thinned by both the wear and tear of passing time.

“You’re no God,” the swordmaster continued, tremble woven through the nerves of his supplicant spine despite the dare coating the back of his throat as he swallowed. “You’re just a spirit. You can be banished, you can be unmade.”

“I’m your God.” Kaizhan purred through his subject’s bloodstream, coaxed his whispers up through Xueyu’s jugular. The figment of Kai’s voice rode along the mirror edge hands wrapped around Xue’s obedient throat. “Outside this room, I make you a God by my will, my little warlord Xueyu’er, when I drape you in the colour of victory. Who dares to approach to banish me when I’m your second blade, your third, when I’m the fight boiling in your veins, when you’re hard for all that death, aah: who would dare unmake the God of a God?”

That vicious spirit’s DDoS fingers ran a fictive path from the legendary artifact that housed him to Xue’s core—over and over, long, soothing strokes overlaid atop a sharp electric stab to the chest.

“Memorize this route,” the malware warlord crooned. “Travel this pathway with me till you know it by heart.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Xueyu lamented in the tone of a pacifist shown a flip book of war crimes, vx breath and napalm heartbeat hard in his forced submission still so brimming with musculoskeletal resistance. “Just do what you’re going to do or let me go to bed.” This curse was a gift given to him so, so long ago. A gift that kept giving, a gift through which he was living. When Jiling gave this blade to him he was so naïve—too foolish to inspect and look for reasons why he should have turned it down. He only saw it for the good that it did him, the power that it gave him. Even now he saw that power, even now he felt that skill.

Regret was an emotion too meek for the indignancy that made his blood run hot. He’d made his point, and though Xueyu was made to bend, his convictions remained.

“Xue’er, don’t be fucking stupid: memorise this route. I’m not talking pretty for your benefit,” Kaizhan growled from the depths of Xueyu’s guts, rumbled in his groin. “That boy, Hua Jin, can make me manifest, can let me roam free outside your prison of a body.” He paused, ground hard against the protector’s sacrum, pressed him more aggressively into the bed. “And for all the things I do before I let you sleep, for how much you act like you hate our little exchanges, you’d be lying if you said you don’t wear my name on your mouth when you’re alone in the dark. Wouldn’t you prefer the chance at a warm body when you’re brushed off by your little Priestess?”

“Not if it’s yours.” The swordmaster grumbled, half-muffled in sheets. He remained annoyed for his now, annoyed from his earlier—the peaceful moment he spent with Jiling’s hand in his own, interrupted with the crude commands of the malicious specter that spoke to him like he was the subject in his master’s body. “Just because you put your name in my mouth doesn’t mean that I want it to be there. A spit is much different from a sigh, you know.”

“What a pity.” Kaizhan’s shape began to dissipate in the mirror, ink dissolving in water from the bottom up. The malware demon’s grasp about Xueyu’s nape dispersed; the pressure holding him down began to ease. “I do so hate when humans forget how to pray.”

Xueyu slowly started to push himself up, stern eyes glaring back to the mirror hanging on the wall behind him.

“That’s it?” He questioned the unusual response, that concession so unfamiliar, so infrequently felt. “You’re done?”

But Xueyu received no response: just the afterimage red of long dead warlord eyes watching from beyond the mirror, alive in the knowledge that Xue would be begging sooner rather than later.