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He Sheng dies alone, of exhaustion and blood loss. He collapsed in the middle of the street, and as he tries to struggle to stay conscious, he can hear people around him discussing what he just did. They seem to come closer the less he moves, curiosity winning out over their fear. But their voices fade. They seem to agree he's done something incredible.
He Xuan dies surrounded by onlookers, but separated from them by some intangible force. He dies alone.
It's a slow climb from ghost fire to Wrath. He Xuan's energy returns slowly. It finds itself starving, as hungry as it was when it was alive. Ghosts fight often -- it mostly keeps to itself, but when it fights, it often eats its opponent, and it finds that the powers they had meld into their own.
The strong eat the weak, and this makes them stronger. And He Xuan, while reclusive, is very strong.
It takes some time to wonder why its life was so cursed, those awful years towards the end. Why would a Reverend of Empty Words take so much interest in a restaurant owner's son from a small town? Things were never easy, before, but He Xuan had been happy studying and living with his family, working in their kitchens. Everything had changed so fast when the Creature had found him.
They have always intended to eat the Creature someday. They hunger for it.
But the tales of the Reverend speak of its modus operandi. Its methods for its victims. The way it finds someone at birth and stalks them for years, hunting them, feeding off their agony, until they die, usually in their fifties -- younger than average, for sure, but old enough for the Reverend to have sucked every morsel of happiness possible out of them.
The Reverend found He Sheng when he was nineteen years old. He died eight years later.
Something is wrong. Something is rotten. When He Xuan opens his mouth to eat the Reverend, finally, finally, he asks questions first. A few well placed hints.
The Reverend tells him, Shi Qingxuan. Shi Wudu.
And He Xuan is still hungry.
He Xuan finds it strangely easy to rip the divinity out of Ming Yi.
It can't remove everything, of course. Shi Wudu didn't even remove everything from He Xuan's own body and fate -- it has become a deity after all, has it not? Scholar He has a small but dedicated group of believers. Black Water Sinking Ships has even more.
Ming Yi accepts this with remarkable grace, He Xuan thinks. When it is apparent to him that He Xuan is stronger, and more desperate, and more ruthless, Ming Yi stops struggling. He sits quietly, seeming dazed, while He Xuan digests.
It places him in a room, deep in the belly of Black Water Manor, gives him a bed and a desk and a few stacks of books. An arowana skeleton floats by the ceiling, watching.
Ming Yi sits quietly on the bed, his hands folded in his lap. When He Xuan leaves the room and locks the door behind it, it listens at the keyhole for some time.
Ming Yi makes no sound.
Over the next few weeks, He Xuan comes to understand that Ming Yi is a pleasant person as well as an intelligent one. He only struggles a little bit, understanding quickly that He Xuan has overpowered him and eaten the divinity from inside his chest. He accepts imprisonment with equanimity, and attempts to escape only a few times.
All in all, He Xuan quite likes him. If they were more human, perhaps they’d feel bad about what they've done to him, what they're doing to him. As it is, they only use Ming Yi’s politeness to ask him many necessary questions.
A crash course on engineering. The necessary information on his life and achievements. More detailed information on engineering, which He Xuan has discovered an interest in.
Black Water has forgotten parts of its true form. He Xuan starts stealing parts of Ming Yi's appearance for his own looks; he has to spend so much time looking like Ming Yi while in the heavens, his face becomes their face. It becomes so easy to forget.
There is etiquette to follow when you ascend as a god. You must greet everyone, pass out gifts to the most important gods, and make friends with money. Bribery.
He Sheng, long ago, had not bribed the officials overseeing the government tests. And he had failed.
Ming Yi makes perfunctory overtures of good will, passes out some small presents with little enthusiasm. This seems to be enough. Nobody likes him much, but nobody proposes running him out of the heavens. And then, the final piece of this first part of his plan.
After he spends a few years solving problems for the mortals that pray to him, him-as-Ming-Yi, he makes an offer to Jun Wu. Let him spy on Ghost City, infiltrate the lair of the ghost king. As proof he can, he offers up a small tidbit of information Hua Cheng fed him.
This arrangement is beneficial for both of them, so Hua Cheng agreed easily. He Xuan gets an excuse to be absent from the heavens, so they can do what they need to as a water demon with a seat of power and also take time to nap for a while. Hua Cheng gets to control what information he lets leak from his city -- it’s likely that Heaven would send someone else instead, and in fact they have in the past, and it gets annoying killing them.
Jun Wu agrees. There’s a strange humor on his face as he does. It makes Ming Yi uncomfortable -- it makes He Xuan uncomfortable.
Surely he does not know. There is no reason, no way, for him to know.
There are other preparations.
He Xuan stacks up nonperishable food on the shelves of a small side room of their palace, and then whirls on their Middle Heaven officials, who have followed them there.
"Do not throw any of this out," they say, glaring. "I will know if you get rid of any of it, and I will open my jaw and swallow you like a snake. Do you understand."
This is a bit beyond what they've constructed for Ming Yi's personality. Their subordinate gods all nod obediently, however, most of them seeming to take this as expressive hyperbole and not the incredibly literal threat He Xuan means it as.
They explain, briefly, that they will be gone for long periods of time. They give orders to be followed in their absence. They direct the answering of prayers.
Then they quietly remove themself from the heavens and head home, back under the ocean.
He Xuan does not have to change themself very much, to be "Ming Yi." None of the gods knew the original personally, just via reputation. And Ming Yi was a quiet, studious man who preferred working to socializing.
Even now, in He Xuan's domain, he does not make much use of his freedom to wander anywhere he wishes to in the manor. Instead, he mostly sits in the library, reading the many books He Xuan brings back for him and writing his own treatises. He's designed multiple bridges and dams while captive. Sometimes, He Xuan sleeps for years, and wakes to find that Ming Yi has constructed a functional astrolabe the size of a small room.
He Xuan speaks with him more than he does with almost anyone else, save for Shi Qingxuan. Their conversations are deep and wide ranging. There is that glorious, charismatic spark of genius in Ming Yi, and He Xuan suspects he sees it in him as well. When they are speaking of tension and torsion, wood glaze and joining techniques, everything else about both of them seems to fade away.
Ming Yi writes lists of supplies for He Xuan to bring back to the manor for him. He creates technological marvels in He Xuan's courtyards. They no longer speak of the imprisonment.
To the best of He Xuan's knowledge, Ming Yi stopped trying to escape decades ago.
There are some things that the Earth Master is not supposed to miss. The annual lantern festival is one of them. The only thing that makes it tolerable is the food.
Shi Wudu brags about the amount of merits he has earned this year. He needles Shi Qingxuan -- she must do better. She must find a way to gain more -- look at him! Look at how rich he has become, now that he sinks ships that do not offer him tribute.
"I only had to sink a few boats before they got the message," he says, smug. "It was worth it."
It was worth it.
He Xuan is starving. It is starving. It must --
Ming Yi stands up abruptly. Shi Qingxuan grabs his arm. She looks up at him with pleading eyes. Don't go, Ming-xiong!
"I am leaving for a while," Ming Yi tells Shi Qingxuan. "Don't bother me."
Starving ...
It gathers all the food in Ming Yi's palace. It goes to Ghost City and buys out several restaurants, putting it on the tab it owes Hua Cheng. Then Hei Shui returns to its lair.
It eats. It eats until it is physically unable to eat any more, its form bloated. A fish sneaks in to try to steal a morsel; Hei Shui shifts to shoo it away and the motion makes its stomach roil until it vomits.
Hei Shui tips sideways. It curls into a ball. It sleeps.
Seven months later, after He Xuan has awoken and pulled themself back together, back into a semblance of a person, they let Shi Qingxuan drape herself across their lap.
"I missed you so much, Ming-xiong," she says. "Where were you? Were you so busy you couldn't even say hello to me once or twice? Ming-xiong!! I thought we were best friends!”
He Xuan is in their female form. Shi Qingxuan is too, of course, since her brother is away, and she nuzzles herself into He Xuan's chest. They pry her off.
"Ming-xiong!" she says. "Or Ming-jie?"
"Xiong." He Xuan says, flat.
"Okay!" Shi Qingxuan chirps, and buries her face in He Xuan's chest again.
This time they tolerate it. She's so warm, and so soft. It is always so cold underwater, and their bone fish are, well, bony.
They have never touched Ming Yi since that first day.
He Xuan likes talking to Ming Yi. He is a genius, fully worthy of ascension; his engineering skill is truly unparalleled. It's not bragging to say that He Xuan rarely meets anyone on a similar intellectual level to himself. Their conversations are refreshing.
Hua Cheng is brilliant, too, of course, but can hardly be called a scholar. He'd taught himself how to do everything from reading to sculpture, and his disdain for academia and the system of national exams (an institution younger than he is) is palpable. He Sheng, whose life had revolved around those exams, is more than a little miffed at the dismissal. Hei Shui, who had failed the exams multiple times simply because it had been too poor and proud to bribe the examiners, understands where he's coming from. He Xuan themself mostly doesn't care anymore. Becoming an official is so far beneath their own goals at this point arguments about it seem laughable.
The years tick by. Shi Wudu's second Heavenly Calamity comes and passes without incident. There are theories He Xuan wishes to test, and their plans aren't fully in place.
They calculate how long it will be until his next Calamity and have to sit with the feeling that that leaves in their chest. How long can you wait for revenge before it means nothing? His family has likely all reincarnated by now. There are no souls left to take satisfaction in Shi Wudu's future downfall.
He sits with his family's memorial tablets for six months. Ming Yi slips through Nether Water Manor like a ghost all the while.
So it goes. The years pass.
This is how the year of Shi Wudu's downfall begins: it comes on the heels of Ming Yi's death.
He Xuan returns from time spent with Shi Qingxuan, in a huff from an unexpected meeting with Crimson Rain and his crown prince.
Their home is silent, the walls echoing oddly. There are books and scattered other objects thrown haphazardly around the hallways.
He Xuan's bone fish inch their way towards them, visibly healing broken bones. Ming Yi is gone.
He Xuan is so furious they could swallow the sea whole.
They follow the flare, bright and obvious in the sky, to just outside of Ghost City. And they find him there.
Ming Yi is battered and bleeding, likely from the fights with He Xuan's fish. This makes them even angrier; how dare he hurt them? They had eaten from his hand.
When he sees He Xuan, his eyes widen, and he starts to babble. He lifts his bloody hands.
"I didn't --" he says. "It was, it was him, I didn't…"
When your whole existence focuses on one goal, you cannot hesitate. Ming Yi's escape attempt is problematic, and this symbol, this call for help, a deliberate act of sabotage. He has outlived his usefulness.
He Xuan has no room for sentiment. They ignore Ming Yi's half-mad ramblings. He didn't try to escape, he says? Then why is he here, wounded, crying for the gods to save him? Only a god or another Supreme could escape Nether Water Manor. This is no accident.
They rip out his throat with their teeth.