If Rui Yifu could have ripped off his own tongue and devoured his entrails, he would have. He did not care for gods or deities, and even though he had known Zhu'er had been dead he still could not abide by what was done to her. It was not enough for the Jade Prince to stab her, but also decapitate her corpse. How cruel! He thrashed in the murky water, his long tail swiping at the dense watery grass. He was choking. Not just on his anger but the muck around him as well but he could not find it within him to care. That mockery had been standing there and knew he was coming, Rui Yifu fumed.

When he emerged from the muck onto the pathetic spit of land beneath the statue he found Bo was sitting, pale faced, holding desperately onto both the head and the sword like all the world remained in them.

"Bo..."

The one eyed man looked up at him, his face full of grief, confusion, and anger. But rather than speak he hauled himself unsteadily to his feet and managed to gesture forward into the deeper mist. "We need to keep going."

"Are you sure?" Rui Yifu asked even though he also did not feel like staying around in their current spot. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction they had come. Things, indistinct and distant, moved in the mist now. He could feel their eyes. "You've barely rested."

"Not much use in me resting now," Bo grunted as he began walking ahead, getting back to the stone and wood platforms that marked the path. "Besides, this mist is making me sick."

Rui Yifu followed Bo, rolling his little monk focuses in his hand as he walked and kept a wary watch around them. To their sides and ahead he could see nothing but more mist, yet behind the sinking feeling prey got as a predator watched them filled him with dread. Rui Yifu did not like that sensation in particular because it was the feeling he typically gave to others. The truth was that Rui Yifu was a shark first, after all, and as civilized as Fish People were they still had the inclinations that their lesser minded relatives had. So he was quite familiar with the sensation of stalking. He ran his tongue over his sharp teeth and walked faster to stand beside Bo, whose unsteady gait was getting worse. "Let me help you."

"Okay."

Bo simply submitted to letting Rui Yifu sling one of his arms over his shoulder, supporting the more wounded man against him as they walked. Rui Yifu tried very hard not to look at the tangle of red that Bo clutched yet his eyes kept drifting back down to her. Zhu'er's eyes were closed and her lips were pallid, half open as though she were in the middle of a breath. Her hair was still wet and formed a tangle around Bo's arm like a strange splattering of blood which had soaked into his sleeve. It disturbed him how peaceful she looked there. As though she were merely asleep and might open her eyes at any moment.

"I don't... understand," Bo muttered. "I don't understand. Why did he do that? Rui, was she really...?"

Rui Yifu looked back into the mist pointedly, moving faster and pulling Bo along with him. It was true, she had been dead and he had refused to tell Bo the entire time. But he had not known she was infected. The more he thought though, the more he realized it should have been obvious that she was. Since Liu Xie had apparently been feeding her his blood... sap, then that would have been an ingress for Baichan's infection to begin worming through her. He did not know when she had died originally, so it was impossible for him to say how long her body would have been carrying those flowers. "...Yes," was all he could say after a few minutes of walking, the distant splashes and noisy croaking of frogs the only things to break the monotony of silence between them.

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"She didn't feel dead."

"I know."

"...He said this was a seed," Bo mumbled. "Will she come back?"

This was also another question Rui Yifu could not find an answer for. He had the awful gut feeling that her spirit was likely already in the hands of Baichan. Baichan said he loved her and yet she was still suffering the affliction he had so readily cursed upon others. But it was likely he simply had a much different interpretation of what 'hurt' was, after all he was a god. Who was to say a god saw the value of a mortal body the same as a human did? They, after all, could simply change their own as they wish or even create new ones to interact with the mortal world. He wanted to give Bo an optimistic answer, to tell him that she would, but he could not bring himself to say such words. He feared he would be lying to the other man, and the idea of lying anymore to Bo disgusted him on a visceral level he had not realized he possessed.

Something massive and dark was forming before them, or perhaps it was simply the mist could no longer hide the towering shape.

"I don't know," Rui Yifu mumbled quietly.

"I hope she does..."

The mist was scattering, growing thinner among the towering bows of bone-colored willows and thick roots larger than a man that jutted from the ground like the raised backs of dragons, emerging from the murk to only to dive back into the water. The stone and wood platforms grew more sparse with the water receding and being replaced by a tangle of dark wet grass and solid mud that in turn dried slowly into dark soil where the detritus of thousands of years of leaf litter made the air smell like some damp forest in the Southern Kingdom.

The mountain itself was more of a massive hill, he thought, happy to distract his thoughts for a while. Its stony surface was covered in roots and willow trees whose boughs swayed lightly in a non-existent breeze. The mist clung to the lower sides of the mountain like nails clawing into skin, flowing downwards slowly to become the blanket of white they had been walking through earlier. A clear path had been hewn into the stone at some point long ago and was apparently well maintained enough to resist the crawling movement of the roots. The path was lined with red stone, even the ground itself had red steps placed into it, although these had become slightly disjointed and a few pieces seemed to have gone missing over time. It gave the strange impression that the mountain was bleeding from a wound, the red stone forming a river of blood down to the ground.

The red stone path had continued upwards, terminating at a cave entrance that had also been carefully decorated. This time with white stone and the crumbling remnants of a door that was only barely visible because pieces of it tenaciously clung to the sides. There was no real sense of intentional artistry in these constructions, it felt more like the project of someone who had little sense of design but a deep need to demonstrate their piety. At some point in the past, there had likely been more decorations. As they walked closer, he could see the rotten remnants of tablets that were gradually sinking into the ground as they moldered away, writing completely illegible. The red path itself was filthy with abandoned offerings that sat in cracked bowls made of everything from clay to gold.

Rui Yifu kept Bo firmly at his side, even as the man continued to slow in his step as they approached the entrance. The smell of old incense drifted out from it, and ash sat in small piles around the top of the path, slowly falling downwards to join the trashed offerings below.

The roots were here too, trailing into and even emerging from the entrance. The darkness within seemed patient, waiting. As if it had been waiting for their appearance. Rui Yifu looked over at Bo, "do you want to rest before we go in?"

"No," Bo said, "I'm tired. If I sleep, I won't wake up. I can feel it. So we need to keep going."

Rui Yifu adjusted his grip on Bo, and together they walked past the rotting doors.