It was a strange place, like a brewery of the dead. The group went through hallways where doors opened to more similar tanks where the same sickly sweet stench wafted out. Liu Xie finally stopped at one tank that looked rather pristine. The dirt of the ground had been dug up and iron piping ran through it and under the wall. Rui Yifu crouched down and used his fan to cover his mouth and nose. Bo stood over the edge to look at the pipe which had strange writing in vivid red ink. There were a few tables with drawings of the strange contraptions on them, and books that for some reason hurt Bo’s eyes to look at. Good thing he could not read, he decided.

“This looks like something from the Northern Kingdom,” Liu Xie said while touching the red ink, trying to chip it with his nails.

“Huh?” Bo looked over at Liu Xie. “What do you mean?”

“The North is more civilized and advanced then whatever backwater mud village you came from.” Rui was snide in his words. “What I believe the willow tree over there is saying is that the structures here are similar to some places which mass produce alcohol. But these aren’t producing alcohol. They’re making corpse syrup... but why?”

Bo decided he did not like the sound of ‘corpse syrup’. “What… what is corpse syrup? Please say it’s not stuff put into alcohol.”

“A syrup. Made from corpses and another ingredient,” Liu Xie replied as he stood up. “The exact art has long been erased and kept from the hands of mortals although once in a while someone gets the information. Usually they use things like demon blood or bone paste-”

“Neither of those sound good!” Bo shivered.

Rui Yifu tapped his chin with his fan. “Liu, I saw neither.”

“Saw neither what?”

“When I was pretending to be dead, they threw me in one of these tanks. It’s not full of demon blood or paste, it’s full of women’s corpses,” Rui Yifu explained. Both other men’s eyes widened with horror. “Besides, if it was full of demon remains, any immortal, cultivator, or would-be hero worth their words would have sensed it and come flocking over here like the great useless birds they are. No, this was a sweet syrup of some sort.”

Bo looked over at Liu Xie for some sign on how to respond. Liu Xie brought up his own hand and bit lightly into one of his fingers in thought. He was quiet for a long time with his face gradually becoming more pained as though the strain of thinking was beginning to take a toll on him.

Then his already corpse-white skin got paler.

“...I need to… go… meditate…” Liu Xie said abruptly.

“Excuse me, but I don’t think now is the time to start meditating,” Bo said in shock. Time was of the essence to save the bitey little sister!

“There’s always time for ‘meditation’,” Liu Xie said. “It’s not just sitting, but what I need to do is something private and dangerous.”

“Are you going to try to sink your soul into the ambient energy of this place?” Rui Yifu asked incredulously. He stood back up from his crouching position to walk over to Liu Xie. “You might get overwhelmed.”

“That’s exactly why I’m going to do it alone. All of this energy directed from the sacrificial altars in the forests, the corpses here, the syrup, it must be going somewhere. So I will find it.” Liu Xie explained while waving his hand vaguely behind him.

“But what if you die?” Bo asked.

“Rui should be able to use my remains to find it,” Liu Xie explained. Bo opened his mouth to protest again but Liu Xie had left the room. "Death isn't something I'm particularly concerned about anyway."

There was a soft sigh from Rui Yifu. “Leave him to what he’s doing, dog. It’s beyond your knowledge anyway.”

Turning on his heel, Bo tried to swallow the poison he wanted to spit at Rui Yifu. “Is ‘Bo’ really that hard for you to stay? Do you have so much dick in your mouth that making that sound is so impossible that you need to refer to me as a dog?”

Rui Yifu raised his brows, “are you offering? Because I don’t think there’s enough for me to put-”

“HA!” Bo yelled triumphantly, “so you DO admit to it!”

“Yes?” Rui Yifu tipped his head to the side, “I’ve never denied it.” He turned around with a grin as Bo’s victorious smirk deflated. He walked over to the books on the table and opened one up. “Huh, these books look... familiar.”

“They look painful to me,” Bo replied as he walked over to peer over Rui Yifu’s shoulder. The writing inside of the books seemed to writhe before his eyes like hundreds of thin snakes in boiling oil. Rui Yifu pushed him away from them with enough force that Bo toppled backwards into another rather old and musty table that gave out beneath him with an ancient creak. “OW!”

“I didn’t shove you that hard,” Rui Yifu huffed as he turned around to help Bo back onto his feet. Bo noticed that Rui’s eyes looked a bit redder than before, a thin uncomfortably red looking tear leaking down from one eye.

Bo regained his bearings and shuffled awkwardly away from Rui Yifu’s hands. “What is wrong with those books?”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“They’re enchanted,” Rui Yifu explained as he rubbed at his own eyes. “It’s a common tactic outside of the Four Kingdoms to enchant a book or scroll or whatever else to keep other eyes from seeing what’s within. But if you’re well prepared or you know what to expect, you can get around it.”

“How did you get around it then?” Bo asked. He expected some sort of special talisman or sorts, since Rui Yifu seemed to always have those.

“Because he’s seen it before,” a soft friendly voice called out.

The two turned around quickly to see a well dressed young man standing in the door way. His hair was tied back rather ornately and his clothes were in the light colors of autumn. His face was pleasant and filled with a warm smile that disgusted Bo for some reason.

“YOU!” Rui Yifu shrieked with such horrid contempt that Bo took a few steps from him in alarm. “YOU! I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN!”

“Oh Ran, you shouldn’t be so upset. We haven’t seen each other in ages, after all!” The smiling man said.

“Who are you!?”

“IT DOESN’T MATTER, JUST KILL HIM!” Rui Yifu yelled, before throwing himself at the smiling man with thoughtless rage. The smiling man’s smile shrank just a tad, but he moved lightning quick from Rui’s lunge, a violent lashing of jade light narrowly missing him. Bo ran to the smiling man’s other side and pulled his knife from his belt, dashing forwards to try bringing it down into the smiling man’s spine. The man simply seemed to spin lightly out of Bo’s way, then rammed his fist into Bo’s head, knocking him into the wall.

“My, my! Such violence!” The smiling man laughed as Bo doubled back and Rui Yifu’s hateful hands swarmed with seals. The man’s leg came out and knocked the knife from Bo’s hand and onto the ground. He stopped in his step and nearly fell over himself as his momentum caught up with him. Rui Yifu screeched as the smiling man grabbed him by the face and smashed him into the wall.

Bo grabbed the knife from the floor and lunged straight into a foot that kicked him onto the already broken table. A splintered bit of wood dug painfully into his leg.

The smiling man gazed at him, “there’s something to be said for persistence.” He laughed, his hand still squeezing Rui Yifu’s face.

“You’ll find I’m a lot more than persistent!” Bo said, trying to heave his bruised body back onto his feet.

“Let go! Let go of me!” Rui Yifu’s nails were drawing deep gouges into the smiling man’s arm although the smiling man seemed more amused by the wounding than alarmed. "I'll kill you, Huaqing! I'll eat your damn heart if it's the last thing I do!" Blood poured over the man's arms and Rui Yifu's hands.

“Oh but it’s been so long since we’ve last seen each other! We’re practically become entirely different people haven’t we? You, with your new face and name, and I, with my new body.”

Bo blinked, his eyes sliding back from Rui to the smiling man. The smiling man in turn looked at Bo once more. “...Did you know that he is a witch and a thief?”

“Well… yes,” Bo said although he felt like there were worms in his stomach suddenly. Nothing about the man looked right in any sense.

“Don’t listen to him, Bo,” Rui Yifu demanded. “Get back to stabbing him!”

“Oh? But Ran, don’t you care for the little soul still inside of me?” The smiling man asked softly. He brought his face close to Rui’s covered one. “You were always so concerned about the souls before.” Jade raced across the veins of the smiling man’s arms and his eyes widened as he released Rui Yifu’s face in time for the jade-tainted veins to split open and bleed. “Ah? Interesting, you’ve advanced on the path of the Jade Flame then.” He was still smiling although a trace of pain existed in his words like an echo.

“The soul of whatever poor child once had that body is long gone, you know that,” Rui Yifu wheezed. “I can’t save it, nobody can save a soul taken by the White Flame.”

“Something you have personal experience with and sought me out to help you learn that piece of knowledge,” the smiling man chuckled.

“What are you talking about!?” Bo yelled. “Rui, what the hell is going on? How does he know you?”

“Ah, I get it now! You don’t know!” The smiling man clapped his hands together, blood splattering over his other sleeve. “‘Rui Yifu’ is quite a bit older than he looks, but since his soul is unhinged, he can’t achieve immortality like I could-”

“You steal the bodies of children and devour their souls like a demon!” Rui Yifu shrieked, a snake of jade appeared in the air following his fingers before surging towards the smiling man who simply dispersed it with a wave of his hand. Then the smiling man reached out and caught Rui Yifu’s head again. His body went limp even as his mouth opened into a scream, white light tracing down his own veins.

Bo moved forward, his body acting by itself. As much as he hated Rui Yifu, he still wouldn’t stand to see him murdered!

Hard chains made of white suddenly wrapped around him, squeezing tightly as Bo tumbled back onto the ground.

“That’s no way to talk to your old teacher and love, Ran,” the smiling man shook his head before looking at Bo as he squirmed on the floor. “Here, let me show you. He steals the faces of beautiful dead virgin girls, that’s quite rude isn’t it?” He began to raise his voice to be heard over Rui’s shrieking. “I only take my bodies from the unwanted. Orphans. Those nobody would miss. Each body becomes truly my own, while this creature can only mimic the humanity he wishes to have.”

There was an awful tearing noise, like wet flesh separating from bone as the white lights vanished from Rui Yifu’s body. The smiling man placed a foot against Rui’s chest and pushed down, separating the flesh of the face from the body.

Bo watched as Rui Yifu slumped to the floor groaning in pain, black hair rolling about the ground like a large puddle of ink.

The smiling man held the flesh of the face in one hand as it began to burn. “Well, Bo was it? It’s very nice to meet you! However, I need to go speak to Lu so I will have to cut this short. But just know I, and my own teacher, are taking more students!” He gave a short bow, then turned around and walked away.

Only once the man’s footsteps faded did the ethereal chains on Bo fall away like they were naught but dust. He skittered over to Rui Yifu’s side and rolled him onto his back. He blinked in surprise, not seeing a red raw skull but something else entirely. Smooth pale white skin, a small nose, thin lips that hid rows of horrible looking sharp teeth, and large pitch-black eyes with a faintly reflective sheen in them. “Don’t look at me!” Rui Yifu hissed, covering his face.

“Rui,” Bo asked slowly, trying to find the words. “Is that your real face?”

“I said don’t look!” Rui Yifu howled in agony, rolling away and sitting up. He bent over, his bloodied hair forming a curtain around his face. “Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me! I want to go die! Just die!”

The face looked so familiar. Yet he had only ever had glances of it. When he was half asleep and his mother would come to check on him. Or when he went swimming in the river with his sisters and would dive beneath the water with them. It was not the same face, but it was similar. “You… look like them. Rui, why… why do you look like them?”