It was painful yet in a distant numb sense. As though someone held ice to his chest at the same time as nails pulled and the flesh was pinned.

Rui Yifu's consciousness was floating in a deep ocean. So deep that light was but a distant theory and yet the bodies of massive creatures moved further below that he could only just barely feel their wake. The ocean was dark and terrible yet comforting and familiar. But he could not bring himself to swim any deeper into the abyss. He simply floated in the darkness as the numbed pain continued.

During his first life, Rui Yifu remembered he had preferred to stay in the deep depths where the cold and pressure seemed safe from the above world as a child. A part of him yearned for that nostalgic time. Before the centuries and constant rebirth wore him down into a person with the personality of bitter vinegar.

Which body was he on now? He had lost count. His sixth? Ninth?

Somewhere above the darkness were murmurs. They came and went like the tide, and yet remained unintelligible to him. Yet he recognized one of the voices.

He tried to reach in the voice's direction above him, but his body was weak and immobile in the abyssal waters around him.

Rui Yifu could not see anything and he could not move but he still found himself able to smile. What a loyal dog, he thought.

A hand touched him. It came in through the darkness and the incredible cold weight of the water and rested on his forehead. The warmth from that palm spread through his body like a slow growing fire. Bits of strength dripped back into his weary limbs and his stiff chest.

When he opened his eyes, the hand was not there and he was instead looking up at a flat and uninteresting ceiling in relative darkness. The looming shadows of what briefly appeared to be small hills in his tired eyes were flickering to the flames of a several candles that had been somewhat strategically placed around what remained of the unoccupied ground. Rui Yifu turned his head, finding a pile of books which would have been hip-height if he stood up. The candle nearby was surrounded by a rusting metal sleeve with thin alabaster 'windows' inserted to allow the candlelight to eke through. Almost idly he recalled such things being popular imported foreign objects from some kingdom to the west. Their real value had been in their rarity, since the kingdom had perished to plague and taken its alabaster source with it. Rui Yifu remembered Wang Huaqing had managed to get him one while studying the transferability of yin-aligned White Flame through pseudo-meridians reinforced with coral.

That thing, along with dozens of books and painstakingly hand-written research had all burned to ash.

In the library, even after eating most of Wang Huaqing, it had not been enough. His body had reached its limit and had been slowly shutting down even as he did his best to use what remained of the vital energy of his impromptu revenge fueled meal to heal himself. He slipped a hand under his clothes to touch the spot he remembered being impaled on. He could feel small stitches of silk over the painful split flesh that was being tied together.

Why was he still alive?

He blinked as his eyes began to burn.

Why was he alive?

He was so tired. He had been hoping to finally slip into that darkness, who cared if it meant he would likely be stuck in his rotting unliving body. He did not know what the forbidden land's strange effects on Fish People would be, but he imagined or perhaps simply wished that his consciousness would just retreat to the pearl that lay beneath his heart while the body itself ambled around.

"Rui?"

The surprisingly soft voice pulled Rui Yifu from his frustrated self-pitying thoughts. He turned his head in the direction the voice came from. Bo was sitting with his back against a table that was crowded over with jars, his arms were wrapped around Liu Xie's sword and Zhu'er was sleeping with her head in his lap. Bo's eyes were shadowed with dark circles but he was somehow smiling with relief.

"Don't bark too loud, you dog," Rui Yifu said, his whisper coming out more hoarse than he intended. Yet he was smiling as well, surprising even himself with how a weight of negative thoughts and self-hatred had evaporated at seeing Bo again. He had been fully prepared to die despite giving one of his teeth to the man as a way to track them. It was supposed to have been a way to soothe Bo and Zhu'er, but it had ended up being useful anyway in reuniting them. Now they just needed to get Li back and help Liu Xie... and he supposed maybe Ji Ying as well. He opened his mouth to inquire about Li Chunning and Ji Ying when he caught another shadow, a hunched over shape behind another stack of books that rocked a little. "Ah...?"

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Bo turned his head in the direction of the shadow, "oh. Uh, don't mind that. We're staying in this house for a bit because Zhou Feng said you needed to recover."

"Who?"

"The guy who owns this place," Bo gestured in the cramped room around them.

"Is your friend awake?" The shadow spoke. It was a woman's voice, but tired and sonorous.

Bo nodded, "yeah!"

The shadow straightened up, revealing a tall copper-skinned woman whose amber eyes seemed to burn like tiny embers in the darkened room. In one hand she clutched a mass of bloody roots in a pale palm, while the other hand held a small knife and a soaked rag. She walked over to another table which was only slightly less crowded to put the items into a small bucket. With quick movements she had somehow produced a kettle from the pile of objects on the table without knocking anything over and carried it to the other side of the room where a tiny enclosed clay stove sat. He did not see any fire within, only a sullen red glow, and the woman placed the kettle on top of the tiny clay stove. He wanted to lay back down, sitting up was beginning to make him ache.

"Is Zhou Feng not gonna come?" Bo inquired after a moment.

"Feng can't wake up during the night," she replied. "He rests through the night and awakens during the day."

"Zhou Feng?" Rui Yifu tipped his head to the side, "is he the owner you mentioned, Bo?"

"Yeah, this lady here is Tirunesh, his wife."

The woman looked over her shoulder at them, "both of you are rather loud. Aren't you worried about waking up that child?"

"Ah... ah..." a new softer voice came, pained and meek. "Everywhere you look is dust... ah... why? Why?" the voice whimpered.

Tirunesh sighed and got back up to move back towards the whimpering voice.

"So, what happened?" Bo asked, his voice slightly above a whisper. "When you... sent us away. You sent us away, didn't you?"

"I went to the library," Rui Yifu answered while ignoring the rest of the question. "The legends about the imperial library were true after all, the place truly was massive. It had an artificial river built into it, I assume so that it would be easier to move people and materials around. If it wasn't for a certain ex-associate of mine showing up, I could have spent forever down there," he spoke breezily despite how dry his throat felt.

"You would have abandoned us for some BOOKS?" Bo's face puffed with anger.

"Don't yell," Tirunesh's even yet sharp voice came.

"You would have abandoned us for some books?" Bo repeated, quieter this time.

"It was a joke," Rui Yifu chuckled at Bo's reaction. "It would have been hard, but I would have found you two somehow." The little piping whistle of the kettle followed his voice, and Tirunesh returned to the kettle and began doing something with the cups and jars that lay near the tiny clay stove. She walked over to Rui Yifu's resting spot and held out a small glazed cup that a sweet smelling warm liquid sat in. "What's this?"

"Medicine," Tirunesh answered bluntly. "You are free to not drink it, I won't force you. It comes from the maple tree in our courtyard."

Rui Yifu eyed the concoction carefully, but decided that if he was still alive after fighting Wang Huaqing and dealing with Baichan then fate clearly had not yet tired of playing with him yet, so he sipped it carefully and found it to be a surprisingly pleasant sweetened tea. It numbed the ache in his body. "Thank you," he said, the hoarseness in his voice gradually vanishing. The woman nodded, then her eyes focused on him with curiosity. "...Yes?"

"Nothing, you just share some features of our other patient," she said. "It's the pointed ears."

"Ah?" He blinked. He had no idea what he looked like at the moment, and while he did have pointed ears without a human face, he was not quite sure what else had changed. It had been a very long time since he properly looked at his own real face. "I assume the teeth are different." He grinned with the sharp little needles in his mouth. Even the missing tooth was already emerging from his gum line.

"Yes." Her face was expressionless and her voice was flat. He thought she was nearly as bad as Liu Xie could be in his apathetic responses.

"...May I ask how you got here, Lady Tirunesh?" Rui Yifu asked.

She shrugged, "like most others we came here because we were looking for something. In this case, a cure. We had specifically gone to find a library, but..." she sighed, "it was leaving that became the hard part. We ended up failing, our guide had betrayed us. Now we remain here, clinging to our sense of self by helping passerbys. Typically it was pilgrims, but there have been no pilgrims for many months now, and with the red moon I doubt we will see any for many more."

"Red moon?" There were no windows in the room, Rui Yifu realized, so he could not look outside to see what she was referring to.

"A few days ago, the moon turned red and bled into the sky. Everything was red, and the creatures that wander became much more aggressive. It was around that time I found the young lady over there," she pointed to the hidden young woman who had cried out about dust earlier. "Then shortly afterwards, I found him-" she pointed at Bo, "-sleeping under a tree at the forest's edge."

"Haha, yeah, that was.. uh..."

Rui Yifu looked at the stacks upon stacks of books around him, thinking about the ill fated expedition Tirunesh had spoken of. "Do these all come from the Imperial Library?" He asked.

She nodded. "They're all the books Zhou Feng and I have gathered from our infrequent journeys back there."

Infrequent.

The amount of books all around him made him think that Tirunesh and Zhou Feng must have been stuck in this cursed land for quite a long time. He glanced back over to her, then back towards the books. Remaining, clinging to their selves. They had already died before, but in a land without death they could not truly perish. Baichan's leering face, breaking apart and oozing black liquid drifted into his mind. A god of annihilation, who had made the maddened land his nest. "Do you know if any of the books are about the White Flame?"