Chapter Text
The ground beneath Jiang Zisuan’s feet suddenly began to liquefy, as the drab solid concrete transitioned to a sludge-like consistency. Regardless of what sort of trap this was, he had since lost the energy to react in any alarm. The slow but deadly mist of poison had corroded through all the layers of his epithelium, leaving behind a trail of blistering necrotic wounds as if to mark its path of bloodshed victory. As he felt the pernicious toxin seep into his systemic system, pumped through his body by none other than his own veins, Jiang Zisuan let himself sink deeper into the forming puddle.
With the small traces of light that reached the pits of the tomb, he almost swore the liquid seemed to gleam in an ethereal shimmer of golden glow.
Jiang Zisuan pressed his hand firmer against Liu Sang’s eyes, trying to lull him quicker into the comfort of deep slumber so he would not have to suffer the sensation of death eating away at his soul. Jiang Zisuan did not have a soul for the grim reaper to reap. He had given up his humanity to gain a one-way ticket into the world of assassination in order to seek vengenace for his sister; A Ning .
Suddenly without warning, the foundation beneath the dying boy crumbled and the body sank into the pooling body of golden water. His hand however, was still pressed against Liu Sang’s eyes, and by some mysterious force of nature, Jiang Zisuan felt himself being dragged into the depths along with the boy. As the aqueous chasm engulfed him, he felt a pair of familiar hands cupping the sides of his blistered face and tracing the contours beneath his eyes.
With a shot of water shooting up his nose, Jiang Zisuan opened his eyes in an attempt to cough out the fluid drowning his lungs.
Wrong move.
The sight that welcomed him only made him gag on more water. This had to be some sort of sick joke, because there it was… an image of his sister"s sad but smiling face burning the back of his retina.
Her caress seemed fleeting as her cold peripheries tingled against his cheeks.
“Jiejie [1] …”
Jiang Zisuan tried to return his sister’s touch with his free hand, but his stiff bones almost screeched as he felt each joint click in bizarre ways. A stream of bubbles replaced his harrowing cry as he felt his entire limb being cracked apart into a monstrous deformity, only to be broken back into place like a torturous form of metamorphosis. As the blisters on his face soon followed with a scorching burn of its own, Jiang Zisuan watched as his sister freed him from her embrace and disappeared like the wisps of an early morning mist.
A hazy film seemed to replace his field of vision, and he watched on, unable to move his body, as if his sleep paralysis demons had opened the red theatre curtains to a movie premiere.
As deep brown earth overlaid with a carpet of overgrown moss set the scene, verdant wands of evergreens waved in the air against a cerulean sky. He watched as a much more worn-out, dirt-smeared version of his sister kneeled down in front of a small river. A Ning cupped a handful of crystalline water and splashed her face, rinsing it of any debris. From within the calm ripples, a sudden rope-like creature sprung up with a splash and tightened its deathly coils around her neck. Ning fumbled to pull the snake off her neck, but her efforts proved to be fruitless as the reptile had already delivered its death sentence into her jugular veins. From behind the weaves of bushes, Jiang Zisuan saw a wide-eyed Wu Xie run over to his sister’s side shouting something that didn’t quite reach his ears. Two more figures followed, one dropping peanut shells along the way and another cladded in sleek black from head to toe. In the future through his personal investigations, he would find out that these two were part of the infamous Iron Triangle: Pangzi and Zhang Qiling. The male dressed in black killed the snake with a pinch of his fingers, just as Wu Xie dropped to his knees and held A Ning in his arms like a mother coddling her precious child.
He saw Wu Xie’s tears moisten the dry soil mound that now signified his sister’s tomb, and could almost taste the saltiness of the young master’s agony and regret.
So that’s what happened…
‘ Yes, that’s what happened. You don’t have to seek revenge for Jiejie. Go live your life yourself and remember, I love you.’
Jiang Zisuan couldn’t turn his head around but he knew it was his sister’s voice. He felt her cold hand clasping his own and she gave him one last reassuring squeeze.
As the ending credits rolled through the static screen, Jiang Zisuan felt a sense of vertigo take over as the golden liquid around him surged madly. With one last heave, he sat up and coughed painfully as soon as his lungs regained the taste of air. Looking around, he realised he was sitting in a water-filled tomb. The chilling cold air of the damp undergrounds quickly made his clothing cling to him like a second layer skin.
Jiang Zisuan looked down at his empty hands. His sister was still dead, and he now had to prepare to face the lonely harsh world on his own again. Except this time when he felt her leave him, he did not feel abandoned again. He felt loved.
Liu Sang let himself sink beneath the melting concrete, the hand on his eyes never leaving. He felt his body become immersed in fluid, with trickles flooding up his sinuses and into his ears. However, there was no reflexive urge to cough or choke. It was as if there was no lingering respiratory effort left in his rigor mortis body, as his former shell became a pile of limp meat sinking to the bottom of a forsaken ocean.
The water tickled his skin as it playfully traced the ugly detestable scars on his back. Liu Sang had always avoided turning his head when he was undressed in case there was a reflective surface behind him. Not wanting to perceive the manifestation of his own self reflected back to him in the mirror of a human being who was supposed to love him. He almost shivered at the foreign touch in an area that he had convinced himself did not exist through the shields of his own clothing. The warmth of the golden water however, caressed him gently, lulling him back to ease as if it could sense his rising panic.
His ears also tingled as he felt the fluid slosh inside his canal, slowly making its way past the external meatus into the deeper more fragile parts of its anatomical construction.
He didn’t know how long he stayed resting in the embrace of the golden shimmer, but for the first time in a very very very long while, was Liu Sang able to let go of his defences and sink deeper into his unconsciousness. Yet, the final darkness never came, and his old acquaintance Death did not want to progress their relationship to eternal vows on an altar just yet. As he felt his heart beat ever so strongly in his chest, Liu Sang opened his eyes and was shocked to be met with the sight of Wu Xie.
The tomb raider was also suspended in the same glowing water he was. Wu Xie was curled up in a fetal position, unresponsive, however the other man was holding Liu Sang"s left hand with his own. The young specialist tried to reach out and grab ahold of the other, but the increased pressure of being underwater prevented him from doing so. Liu Sang"s mind was clear, but his limbs had not caught up, remaining stiff and sluggish in movement.
He wasn’t sure if this was an interim stop between the living and the underworld, because he was so sure that his existence had already been wiped off the face of earth. The tormenting emptiness he felt when he could no longer hear the voices of his ‘friends’ ( yes, Liu Sang didn’t make friends, but when Wu Xie looked at him with such sincere concern and mouthed out his name, he genuinely felt like he was being treated like a confidant) only served as a stark reminder of his loss. Without his ears, Liu Sang might as well be a dead man walking. With the only form of self-protection he had honed over years of blood, sweat and tears gone, enemies who had bad blood with his previous clients might have even gotten to him first before he had the chance to run out of money from unemployment.
If this was truly the beginning to the afterlife, then…
Wu Xie!
Liu Sang refused to believe that the man who built a reputation from conquering all, tombs and people alike, would lose his fight to something as mundane as cancer. Yes, fuck our own cells that betray us in the form of malignancy, but compared to blood zombies and century old legends, death by physical disease was a smear to this household name in the tomb raiding industry.
He wasn’t sure why he so much as gave two shits about Wu Xie, even in his death. What Liu Sang did know though, was how much he wanted to feel Wu Xie’s fingers combing through his hair just one more time. To watch Wu Xie open his eyes and then be able to melt into the soft touches of those cyanotic fingers riddled with fainted scars worth more than a thousand words.
But Death was and will always be just acquaintances with a mere human. Mutuals who acknowledged each other"s existence at best, and never extended any form of personal kindness and pity to one another. And thus, Liu Sang’s wish for human touch was not granted.
Actually, rather the touch of a human, Liu Sang wanted the touch of the man before him, Wu Xie.
His right hand suddenly felt a cold hard concrete edge, and the change in the momentum of the currents tilted him over the edge of the water surface just as he felt Wu Xie’s grip on him disappear. As he sat up and breathed in his first gasp of fresh air in a long time, the initial jarring fact was how loud and clear his own breath sounds were.
Oh god. He could hear again.
The rippling of each water drop that fell from the tips of his hair. The rub of his thumb against the fading etchings on the rim of what looked like a large fluid-filled coffin. Wisps of wind as they whistled and chimed through the hollowing halls of the underground maze. Marching footsteps in the distance, as the metal bullets clinked in secure top-grade firearms with each thud and scrape of a boot against the ground.
His ears had somehow healed.
Not just healed, even more sensitive than before.
And without his noise-cancelling earphones to block out the world he had just been desperately trying to cling onto minutes ago, Liu Sang’s brain short-circuited as a sharp high-frequency ringing pierced his ears. His stomach twisted inside and he felt himself retching once again over the edge of the tomb he sat in. Just before he passed out from the never-ending assault to his senses, he faintly saw Jiang Zisuan pull him out of the pool of golden liquid.
Wu Xie jolted upwards and splashes of golden shimmer danced into the air, breaking the serene calmness of the aqueous surface.
The last thing he vividly remembered was feeling the hard impact against the water and fading into unconsciousness as he held the smithereens of Liu Sang’s everything between his fingers. Somewhere between drifting through the blurred edges of drowsy cognition, he felt a hand meet his own, and he gladly laced their fingers together in a tight interlock.
He instinctively knew who’s hand it was.
It was Liu Sang’s.
Slim bony fingers, with prominent interphalangeal joints and a slight kink in the distal pinky from what seemed like poorly healed trauma. Wu Xie had never held Liu Sang’s hand properly before, but for some reason he was absolutely certain that the boy (hallucination or not) had been sent to wave him goodbye as he boarded the one-way train to hell.
Now, as Wu Xie shook his head to regain his bearings, he heard his name being called from above. He raised his gaze to meet the relieved faces of his old teammates, and his eyes interlocked with Zhang Qiling’s. As his lover raised an eyebrow in question, Wu Xie drew in a long breath of crisp air. The frosty bite stung the back of his throat as it passed down his trachea, but that didn’t concern him because he could feel how clear and unobstructed his lungs were.
There was no longer a constant metallic taste in the back of his mouth, as the remnants of his haematemesis episodes reminded him of his impending demise.
So miracles did exist.
The legend had somehow been real, or at least true enough to cure a dying man from his terminal cancer. As Pangzi gave him a hand to pull him up, he saw Liu Sang lying a few metres away against a mural painting. Standing next to him was a man he recognised, one of Bai Jiao’s men, Jiang Zisuan.
“Who would’ve known. I bloody saw Jinx being carried out of the water by that sly bastard Jiang Zisuan. If we weren’t worried about him hurting Jinx and distracted by you still drowning underwater, you bet I would’ve shot him bam right centre in the forehead by now,” grumbled Pangzi.
“L-liu Sang was down there with me?”
“Yeah, I saw it with my own eyes, Tianzhen. Do you know how he got there? Our fourth sister here says Liu Sang forced her to leave him behind.”
Hahahaha. So that’s what happened, thought Wu Xie.
It wasn’t Thunder City that saved him after all. It was two people in his life who never gave up on him, even though he had already stopped fighting for himself the moment he was engulfed in a shower of golden liquid.
Zhang Qiling, who found the tape with the riddle-filled message.
Liu Sang, who literally painted his road to the legendary artefact with his hand-drawn map. More importantly though, who thought of him in his last fleeting moments of consciousness.
There was no magical tape that had ‘Life’ written on its cover. In fact, the one that Wu Xie conducted his friends to play had nothing to do with living.
On that tape, was the familiar scribbles of his Sanshu’s handwriting. Except it wasn’t encrypted like all the others. It simply said, in perhaps the most poetic way possible, the truest heartfelt wish that Wu Xie had hoped for when death came knocking on his door:
Beneath the Skies of Tomorrow With The One I Wish To See
In his own moments before death, he had thought of Liu Sang.
In Liu Sang’s last seconds before his passing, he must have been thinking of Wu Xie.
And perhaps if Jiang Zisuan had been in contact with Liu Sang at that specific moment when there minds were connected as one, then all three of them were transported into the depths of a wish-granting well together.
After all, here he was, ready to stand beneath the skies of tomorrow, with the one (and ones) he thought he would never be able to see again.
A gunshot pierced through the air, instantly putting an end to their celebratory revelation. Suddenly, a whole team of mercenaries marched through the entrance, each with a loaded firearm in their hands. As they spread out across the room, the man of honour walked down an imaginary red carpet of fine dust and dirt to greet him. In a white form-fitted suit, stood Gao Bai with a gun pointed directly at Wu Xie’s head.
It seemed like mother nature was a bitch after all, for the laws of natural order did not take kindly to the tampering of life and death. Luck and karma were merely two sides of the same coin, and the closer one came to death, the more death was attracted to him.
Wu Xie had just baited Death down an entire rollercoaster ride of twists and turns, and now it was back, ready to reap the only soul that had dodged past the sharp blades of its scythe.