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There was a lone figure slumped over a messy desk in the darkened room, pallid skin illuminated only by the harsh glare of the computer monitor. He was slurping away at a blood bag the way any other person might enjoy a juice box, entirely oblivious to the smudge of crimson staining his jaw.
The obnoxious drinking sounds only stopped when the staccato heartbeat of consecutive message alerts punctuated the air. Long, elegant fingers flew across the keyboard, while his chest remained deathly still, so absorbed by the messages that he forgot to pretend to breathe.
Su Mucheng: Take a look at this.
Su Mucheng: The Met is doing an exhibition called “Romance through Time and Space”.
Su Mucheng: This is from the museum website:
Su Mucheng: The centerpiece of this exhibition is a recently unearthed treasure that originated from China over a thousand years ago, which experts believe is a courting gift named the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella.
Ye Xiu felt faint as he frantically navigated into the exhibition website, the panic clenching in his chest an unwelcome and half-forgotten sensation.
He had assumed that it had been safely hidden away in one of his storage houses, but thinking about it carefully, he couldn’t quite remember the last time he saw the umbrella. It had definitely been more than a few years ago… Had it already been decades?
Ye Xiu paused for a moment to regain his equilibrium. He and Su Mucheng would recover the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella, and Su Muqiu’s legacy would be safe again. He would accept no other outcome.
Ye Xiu: We’ll get it back.
Su Mucheng: Of course.
As Ye Xiu began to scroll through the exhibition listings again without the initial edge of shock clouding his actions, his eyebrows migrated up his forehead in incredulity before he leaned back with a soft huff of disbelieving laughter. More than a few of his acquaintances would be interested in this exhibition, for reasons that mirrored his own.
With a languid flicker of his hand, the murder of crows nesting in the wizened, craggy tree outside the apartment turned towards him unerringly with eerie synchronization before taking flight, the air ringing with the flutter of a thousand beating wings.
Being cursed souls eschewed by the natural order, no mirror could grasp a vampire’s reflection, and no camera could capture their form. The laws of physics held no meaning to them, for they could shapeshift into anyone and anything and even gravity’s grip could not hold them if they willed it otherwise. This was a mark of the humanity they had lost, but this was also the trait that made vampires such incredible thieves.
Although vampires only needed permission to cross the threshold of private residences, the Met was so steeped in culture and history that it had gradually developed a magical aura equivalent to that of a beloved home. After all, it was home to all the precious artifacts that dwelled within.
It followed that the first order of business for this newly formed heist team was to elicit an invitation to enter the premises. Being one of the most technologically adept of their number and the most enthusiastic about their adventure, Huang Shaotian had the idea to book a private tour group and made arrangements for it before anyone could get a word in edgewise.
The tour guide was a museum employee, a human with the right to be there and the right to allow guests inside. For a vampire, that was enough.
Or so Huang Shaotian thought.
For immortal creatures reborn in the forges of hell, Ye Xiu and Su Mucheng masqueraded remarkably well as average humans, albeit ones with every inch of skin carefully concealed.
“Mucheng, want to bet on who’ll show up looking like a complete weirdo?”
“I don’t have faith in any of them. Besides, Shaotian offered his services to dress anyone who needed help with ‘modern fashion’ so…” A quicksilver smile darted across her face.
When Huang Shaotian and Yu Wenzhou arrived, it became obvious that the plan was slated for failure.
Two thirds of Huang Shaotian’s face was covered by a large scarf emblazoned with the words GIRL POWER in a bold font. The remaining third of his face was masked by a pair of fantastically oversized sunglasses. The rest of his wardrobe was no less eye-catching, being a cow print onesie that he had paired with ski gloves and boots. Yu Wenzhou was dressed in the exact same outfit but despite that, he still managed to exude an aura of serenity and peace.
The others glided over to their meeting point soon afterwards, many dressed in classical hanfu and heavy veils to protect them from the sun, with a few attempts at western clothing in the mix.
It was obvious whom Huang Shaotian had dressed. The unfortunate Zhang Xinjie had asked for help and was now clad in a neon-green jumpsuit with orange Yeezy sliders on his socked feet and a furry hat that looked like a bear was eating his head.
“You look ridiculous, really ridiculous, the most ridiculous. It’s too late for you to wish that you had asked me to dress you in something cool and trendy. Do you regret it now? Do you do you?” Huang Shaotian gloated to Wang Jiexi, despite him being one of the only vampires in their group who looked ordinary, if a touch old-fashioned in his tweed jacket and bow tie.
Wang Jiexi flexed his illusionary powers in a clear display of threat, sprawling fields of red spider lilies blossomed and withered at his feet as he stepped forward in one fluid motion in response to Huang Shaotian’s provocation. His cursed left eye flashed red and demonic and grew even larger in his anger.
Before the Magician and the Sword Saint could start scuffling in earnest, the Queen of the Misty Rain vampire clan, Chu Yunxiu, distracted them with her arrival. She wore a beautiful hanfu with delicate floral embroidery intricately stitched around the hems of her gauzy skirts and long flowing sleeves. She had added a large traveling hat with thick silk floor-length veils to her attire and held a large parasol on top of that. Overall, she was more fabric than person, which drew many curious gazes.
Zhang Jiale, who insisted that he could dress himself perfectly well in the western style, showed up in full gothic dress, having gotten the century completely wrong. A couple of random bystanders took pictures of him without even bothering to be discreet.
Their tour guide hadn’t yet appeared when museum security swooped down on them and firmly asked them to leave.
It took a couple of hours, but once tempers had been calmed and ruffled feathers smoothed over, the vampires were ready for another try. This time, they successfully hypnotized a security guard into letting them onto the premises, and finally, the heist was underway.
“Are you really that size down there or did you ask the artist to paint you a bit bigger? Don’t be shy now, you can tell me the truth,” sniggered Tang Hao, staring at the series of nude portraits that Sun Xiang had commissioned of himself back when he was a human teenager with more money than sense. Sun Xiang squawked in rage as he swiped at Tang Hao, who easily leapt out of reach. If blood still flowed through his veins, Sun Xiang would have blushed crimson. He tried to open a portal to a pocket dimension but was so flustered that his control slipped, and the portal wavered out of existence.
A gentle hand on his shoulder calmed him, and his companion Zhou Zekai silently helped him shape his magical energy. Between the two of them, they held open a steady portal into which Sun Xiang vanished all traces of his embarrassing teenage indiscretions.
“Yunxiu, I hadn't realized there would be so many pretty things in the European Renaissance gallery,” exclaimed Su Mucheng as strings of diamonds and pearls dripped through her fingers.
Chu Yunxiu giggled at her friend’s excitement. “I was travelling through Europe at the time and had so much fun during the Renaissance! When I was in Italy, a painter begged me to sit for a portrait but I didn’t think it was very good, so he kept it. It’s in a museum now and humans have given it a silly name like the ‘Mona Lisa’ or something like that.”
Across the hall, Yu Wenzhou and Huang Shaotian were enthusiastically collecting trinkets that they thought would be appreciated by their ward, Lu Hanwen. They had taken in the boy when his parents had been taken by disease a few decades ago. When it had become apparent that he would succumb to the same fate, they had turned him to join the ranks of the immortal nightwalkers.
In their haul, they found a rare jade amulet that had been enchanted by a magic practitioner of great talent to ward malicious spirits away from the wearer. It would make a fine eighty-third birthday present for the child, and the Sword and Curse duo were very pleased with this find.
After Fang Rui had squirreled away the collection of love letters that he and Lin Jingyan had exchanged sometime during the Ming Dynasty, he sought out Ye Xiu, who was lounging around in an empty gallery, tenderly cradling an umbrella like it was something unbearably precious to him.
“What are you smoking?” Fang Rui asked, intrigued by the clouds of acrid smoke billowing out of Ye Xiu’s pipe.
“Dried garlic,” Ye Xiu smirked.
“Garlic?” He hissed, pupils dilating in horror.
Ye Xiu took another languid drag before saying, “Mm there’s a nice kick to it. Anyway, this trip reminds me, I need to collect a few things from Little Qin.”
“Little Qin? Xiao Shiqin?” Fang Rui questioned once he had recovered from his shock, referring to one of their vampire brethren.
“No, this brat was before your time. I’m talking about the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang.”
And Fang Rui was back to feeling shocked. Ye Xiu’s age had always been a bit of a mystery, but this offhand comment put him solidly over two millennia, blowing all previous estimates out the water.
“I babysat him a lot when he was a kid and he figured out I was a vampire, which was probably why he became obsessed with immortality. I asked him to hold onto some stuff for me, but he went a bit overboard and built the Terracotta Army to protect my things even from beyond the grave. Humans dug it up a few decades ago and put everything in a museum so I should try to get it back soon.”
Fang Rui had nothing to say. What could anyone say when they found out that one of the greatest treasures in history was actually a glorified storeroom built merely because the emperor was simping for their friend?
When the world was stained an inky blue that heralded the imminent arrival of morning, the vampire heist artists reconvened in their lair. Among them was Zhang Xinjie, who was famous among vampirekind not for his thirst for blood but for his thirst for knowledge. He had spent a productive night plundering the museum’s entire collection of antique books and now his glasses glinted menacingly when he looked around at his partners in crime.
“We should do this again,” he proclaimed, smile bloodthirsty and sharp, and appetite entirely unsated by the weight of his new treasure.
A dozen fanged grins answered him.