Laying out on an uncomfortable surface made up of broken logs, bones, and some quickly bought offal that now stained his clothes was not how Rui Yifu thought he would be spending his time when he had decided to impose his wonderful presence on Liu Xie’s group. The rope loosely laid around his wrists was beginning to itch much like his urge to break the jeering Bo’s jaw.

“Try screaming like you got kicked in the balls! Or at least pretend you have some to be kicked in!” Bo shouted from behind a bush.

“You aren’t helping the illusion that I’m a sacrificed woman!” Rui Yifu snapped back.

“If I was a girl who got stabbed, I’d be screaming a lot!”

“Fatal wounds are hard to scream through,” Liu Xie’s voice came.

“Sh-shhh!” The now somewhat calmed man, waved the two down, “th-they’re coming!”

Rui Yifu tried his best to relax somewhat and let his eyes glaze over in a mimicry of death. He had seen enough dead women to copy the dull empty gazy perfectly.

“Oh there’s one!”

“Only one though… damn, I always hate doing this kinda work.”

“Can’t blame you, the pay is great at least. Makes up for all this weird shit, hell I could even retire early!”

“What a beauty this one was! Shame she had to end like this… ah damn, rough life, look at those scars on her neck!”

“Eh, maybe this was a mercy then?”

“Better her than someone we know though, right? Like the boss said, a bit of sacrifice for the greater good and all that.”

A few faint shadows fell over him in the dying sunlight . But with his head twisted he was unable to see the approaching men although he perfectly felt them as they lifted him up with a grunt. “She’s a beauty but she weighs as much as an ox!”

Rui Yifu could barely stifle the scowl he wanted to make, although he took the opportunity to lightly kick the man carrying him as he was hefted over a shoulder like a sack of grain. “Ow!”

“That’s why you gotta carry them like they’re a bride, their limbs bounce everywhere when you carry them like that!”

“Well I’m not gonna spend more time adjusting her!”

The group of men began to walk, and Rui Yifu continued to do his best impression of a corpse as he dangled over the man’s shoulder. The man’s clothes were not rough spun ones of typical laborers, but seemed to be relatively well made, if a bit dirty. He smelled like cheap alcohol but walked with a stability often seen in heavy laborers.

Rui Yifu watched the back of the man’s heels, but his mind wandered elsewhere to look at old memories and wonder about where Zhu'er was. He hoped Li Baobao was staying put in the inn room.

Something white caught his eye, and he turned his head ever so slightly to see a pale white flower sticking out from the ground beside an old building. Its seven petals were thick and waxy looking.

He combed through his memories, the flowers familiar but he could not quite remember. Like a lesson from his boyhood he snoozed through. It did not help matters that his most recent cycle’s boyhood was quite a few generations ago.

Where, oh where, had he seen those flowers before?

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

There was a grinding sound of a heavy door being opened, and then Rui Yifu observed the earth below turn to worn filthy wood where ground-in blood tracks and mud mingled into the grain. He was carried in relative silence then, an oppressive sickly sweet smell filling the air that he quickly identified as rot and flowers. But something else seemed to cast a pall over everything, stifling any urge to speak.

Another door opened and he only barely managed to quell the urge as the smell became even stronger.

The man carrying him grunted in exertion as he climbed a few short steps. Then Rui Yifu felt shifting, the man pulling him off his shoulder and pushing him into something where the scent made his eyes water.

He landed on something soft, wet, and squelchy.

There was the dimmest light of a lantern from somewhere far above, providing barely enough illumination for him to see that he had landed on a pile of irregularly shaped things. Once he was sure the men had left, he sat up and started pawing around until his hand came upon wood. His palm was flat and facing forward, so he followed the wood to find it went around in a circle. It had to be some sort of large container.

He dared to snap his fingers, a small flickering flame appearing above his index and thumb, casting a dull glow around him.

Rui Yifu was surrounded by half-rotten corpses sunken in a clear thin floral syrup that now caked him as well.

He covered his mouth and nose with his sleeve in surprise, looking down to see he had been crawling on top of dead bodies the entire time. He shivered in disgust, moving slightly. His hand landed on a smaller hand and his eyes followed it to its owner. It belonged to a small messy haired child, her own eyes still open in empty fright. She almost looked alive. Her skin had not yet lost any color, the blood on her clothes had not turned completely brown yet.

Rui Yifu felt his throat abruptly dry out and his heart bit itself.

He reached over to the little girl’s face and gently shut her eyes with his free hand. He looked back up to see the lip of the container he was in was within reaching distance. Feeling like he had to take one thousand baths to clean himself now, Rui Yifu pulled himself out of the container and flipped onto the small platform and stairs below. Sweet scented syrup dripped off his stained clothes and he swore quietly to himself as it stuck to his legs while he walked down the stairs. Then he took a moment to let out a few dry heaves, gripping his stomach as he thought about those empty eyes.

The wood container looked like an upside down bell with a stem that connected into the ground, the stairs with their platform hugging it. The room was otherwise empty except for large empty pots that had the same scent as the syrup. Rui Yifu scratched his head, then reached into his clothes to grab his own enchanted pouch. It could not hold an infinite amount of things, but it held enough items to be useful. In this case he had put his fan, his stone monk focuses, and a few pearled voices with pinkish colored thread looped through them.

He applauded himself mentally for his forethought as he heard a man’s grumbling voice coming up the hallway. He grabbed one of the pearls and swallowed it, coughing violently a few times.

“Who’s there!?” The man outside yelled.

Rui Yifu hummed softly in his stolen voice, the deep sultry voice of a noblewoman coming out. Satisfied, he stepped out of the room while keeping himself mostly shrouded in the darkness to hide the state of his clothes. “Oh, have you returned!?” He called out flirtatiously, “or, are you someone new?”

The man stopped in his tracks. He was wearing all black, his face mostly covered by a long scarf, fingers grimed with blood and dirt. “You aren’t supposed to be here!” He warned, stalking up the hall closer to Rui.

“Ohhhh, he had said that too,” Rui Yifu cooed, “but that’s what makes it better, isn’t it? The thrill of discovery…” he pulled on his outfit somewhat, exposing a slice of milk white flesh under the faded lighting. The man stopped once again, looking around behind him, then slowed his pace as he walked up to Rui Yifu. Rui held up one rather sticky sleeve to cover his face to hide his ugly sneer.

“Uh, so,” the man’s anger had all but evaporated. “...How much do you charge?”

“Depends,” Rui Yifu said, stepping back into the room. “How much are you willing to pay…?”

He kicked away the undressed shriveled corpse, wiped the blood from his mouth, moving some of the heavy pots around it to obscure it in case anyone popped their head in. The clothing he was now ‘borrowing’ smelled like sweat and desecrated graves but he preferred it over the sticky syrupy sickeningly sweet smelling mess his other outfit had become. He wished he had a mirror on hand so he could see what he looked like. His face probably made him look like a woman trying to poorly pass as a man. He reached into his mouth and hooked his finger around a string, yanking hard and grunting in discomfort as he pulled the pearl out, feeling it squeeze up his throat before it finally popped out of his mouth. He spat some foul tasting saliva on the ground.

Rui Yifu stepped out of the room to find two other people in the hallway now. “Liu? Bo?” He called out.

Both men did not answer, instead staring at him intensely.

For a moment, Rui Yifu wondered if they had gone mad. If they had, it would make further searching for Zhu'er very difficult. He took a step and both men took a step backwards in return, “stop playing around! We have a little girl to rescue and apparently a strange cult to stop.”

“Stand back Bo, this might be a demon copying Rui Yifu.” Liu Xie said, holding up his white sleeved arm in front of Bo.

“How dare you! I’m me!” Rui Yifu yelled, indignantly stomping his foot and then folding his own arms, “if you’re going to stand around insulting me, I’ll go look for her myself!”

Liu Xie sighed sadly, “it really is him.”

“Are you sure?” Bo asked warily as his eyes roamed over Rui Yifu’s body. “I mean, it’s in men’s clothes… it can’t really be the cutsleeve can it? It just looks… wrong.” Rui Yifu started fiddling with his fan, considering smacking it right on Bo’s nose. Bo’s face now fell as well as he was forced to face the truth, the fan was irrefutable proof. “You’re right, boss. It is him.”