"This will be your room," he opened the door to a well appointed room, a little sparse but fitting for a scholar. There was a low varnished table that had a neat stack of paper, an inkstone, brushes, and other little accoutrements, along with bookcases with faintly etched in designs of blossoming trees on their sides. The window looked out into the courtyard although Rui Yifu was fairly certain they were nowhere near the courtyard at the moment, the pleasant scent of citrus drifting in and rustling the thin translucent curtains. The bed itself was also of note, made of a blue stained wood with blankets softer than silk laid over them.

"Ah, how interesting," Rui Yifu observed with his hands behind his back, stepping inside.

"What do you mean 'how interesting'?" Liu Xie asked while adjusting the sleepy child in his arms so her head didn't loll to the side. Ji Ying was watching from behind him, making rude faces at Rui Yifu.

"I'm surprised you're giving me a room in your own house," Rui Yifu replied, a smile on his face. "The Heavens and my people have not historically been on the best of terms." It seemed like whenever the bridge was to be built between them, some terrible thing would happen and drive them further apart. It was not that he held anything against Liu Xie personally, in fact he had come to like most of the group. Even that dog Bo.

"...Would you like a bathtub to sleep inside of instead?" Liu Xie asked, crossing his arms.

Rui Yifu was still smiling and imagined he must have looked either insufferable or bizarre to Liu Xie, "not at all. Thank you for accommodating me."

"Eh."

"How gracious."

"If you need anything, just call out," Liu Xie spent absolutely no longer at the doorway and quickly walked away after that. Rui Yifu caught Ji Ying lingering nearby for a moment. Her face was still in it's sour expression and the moment she noticed him watching her the expression took on the qualities of vinegar as she huffed and walked away.

Rui Yifu closed the door of the room and sat down on the bed. It felt remarkably comfortable but he was not quite sleepy yet so instead he moved over to the desk. Not all of the other assorted items on the desk were just decoration he realized. A palm sized sculpture of a sleepy looking animal turned out to be a small jar holding red powder. He felt a slight sense of purity from it, like something soaking lightly into his skin. He dipped the solid end of the ink brush into it to get a small sample of the powder. He knew it was cinnabar, but there was something a bit different to this one. He also knew well that whatever the source, cinnabar was toxic and preferred to not handle it with his bare hands. Humans might still be chugging down elixirs colored by it, but Fish People had long understood its negative qualities. Rui Yifu pulled a piece of paper close to him and dropped the tiny mound of it he got onto it. He tore off a corner of the paper and used it to smooth out the powder. Then he dipped the hairs of the brush into a small container of water that was shaped like a lotus and brought it down on the smoothed out powder, creating a simple character from it.

'Fire'.

The reddish ink sizzled suddenly, soft crackling and popping coming from it as thinner veins of color extended off from the character. They formed new smaller words barely visible to the naked eye, hidden sacred geometry swelling in other spaces. Rui Yifu watched with interest, it was not just any cinnabar after all but in fact a material only available to those of the celestial bureaucracy or above unless specifically gifted. With his suspicions confirmed he began to work on a plan in his mind.

It was a bit rude, he admitted internally. But his curiosity needed to be satisfied. He picked up several more papers and made fresh black ink, then he opened the door to his room and looked into the hallway. It was dark and he stood at the threshold to the room for a long moment before calling out, "may someone come?"

Truthfully he was not sure how to summon anyone forth, and yet within half a blink several of the identical beautiful women were already walking up the all to him. He stepped back into his room to allow them to file inside and looked them over. They had different hairstyles but that was all that existed to separate them from one another. Each one was as pale and beautiful as white jade and yet their glassy milky eyes made them look more eerie than anything else.

"I want new clothes," he ordered. "Fetch me some, but one of you stay."

Four of the women immediately turned away, walking back out of the room while the fifth one remained. Rui Yifu clasped his hands behind his back, holding the piece of paper in his hand with the word for fire inscribed on it. "Can you speak?"

No response.

"Do you know I'm here?"

No response.

"Can you hear me?"

No response.

"... Take one step forward."

The woman took one step forward.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Lift your left arm."

She lifted her left arm.

"Frown."

Rui Yifu stopped his pacing to stand in front of her again. She was still holding her arm up, her expression was fixed into a frown. She really did look exactly like Ji Ying, although her eyes still held nothing in them. He held up the paper, its vivid red ink brightening as he pressed it against her chest. Curls of light smoke rolled off it, then expanded outwards as orange flames looped over her silken clothing. She was unmoving as the fire began eating into her flesh, the licks of flames lapping up her hair. The faint scent of sweet pine trees obscured the smell of smoke, and Rui Yifu was rather surprised to find she was not putting off much smoke in the first place as she burned.

The woman made no sound, nor movement, as she burned before Rui Yifu. A small pillar of light in his room.

Ash settled around her feet and a body of amber and charred willow wood worked into the form of a woman stood there. Her left arm was still up.

She had just been a doll the entire time, Rui Yifu thought. He remembered that scene at the ruined shack... how long was it now? Weeks? Months ago? Liu Xie had come back from death as a wooden mannequin that regrew his flesh in a needlessly dramatic gesture. This servant was not much different in that regard, she was a receptacle for something. Liu Xie's body was sacred willow wood because a true mortal body would likely be devoured by the white flame, this servant's body was amber and wood because making it flesh would have been a waste of skin. If Liu Xie was an inferno, the servant wasn't even the light of a firefly. A doll who could only take orders, who could not actually see or hear, who felt nothing.

So what was Ji Ying?

This conundrum is what troubled Rui Yifu, there was no way her looking exactly like the servants was coincidental. Humans came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so how likely was it that some girl would have the cheap 'beautiful' features of these doll servants? But he also could not simply just burn her skin off like he just did with the thing in front of him. She had to be a more advanced type of servant, but she had been working for Lady Gu. Had she been sent to protect Lady Gu and pose as a simple human then?

Or had she been sent for another reason?

Rui Yifu walked away from the mannequin servant to sit down on the bed again in thought, closing his eyes as he thought of what to do next. He could not exactly burn her. He felt the weight at his side. The sword. His eyes opened to look down at it. It was a well made thing, the scabbard was painted a red so dull to look brown, the hilt was wrapped with shagreen made fragrant through jasmine oils, a touch he knew to have been common once with cultivators of an Eastern Kingdom sect that had collapsed as a cohesive entity centuries earlier. Their sword making style had remained popular, and he considered that perhaps No-Face had at once point trained under an inheritor of the old style. The blade itself was of a well-worked metal, a slight bluish tint to it.

Its edge had been kept keen enough that even lightly brushing his thumb atop it drew blood.

No-Face likely dreamed of the day it would go through Wang Huaqing's neck. Personally, Rui Yifu had long considered eating him instead. If Wang Huaqing would mock him for being 'a mere eel-like shadow' all those years ago then he wanted to humiliate him. But he had been too cowardly to do so, and even now he found himself wondering if he could do it. Wang Huaqing had made a powerful friend, after all, one that Rui Yifu knew precious little about.

What he did not know, he did not like.

He set the sword down on the bed and looked back to the door. Perhaps he should go check on Li? Then he remembered Li had left. He had been so upset and distressed he had seemed like a completely different person. No. Maybe, Rui Yifu thought, maybe he never really knew the boy in the first place. In truth he had only ever really wanted to leech off the Li family's money, steal the pearls on the mother's dress, and then maybe make his way back home and be granted some level of atonement for his crime. But plans had changed, and it was in reality his own insinuations of the old pilgrims paths to Madam Li that led to Li Chunning and his mother discussing it.

Rui Yifu's feelings were a mixture of some degree of shame and barely acknowledged guilt for Li Chunning. It had not all been his fault, nobody told him he had to do it! But he did, and Rui Yifu had been the one to suggest it. Honestly he had known Li's actual name all this time, but calling him 'Baobao' had been far more fitting. He had been chubby faced and childish in how he relied on others for direction in his life, just like a child would be so what else could Rui Yifu call him except what the entire family did? He had simply accepted it because it had been what a good son would do.

Perhaps he could go check on Bo? He wondered what Bo would be doing at this time of night. Sleeping? He found his thoughts settling deeply on the young man. He was likely to have become another Fish Person had his village not been burnt to the ground. Instead however he became an itinerant, a stray dog wandering through life with no master and no bone to chew on. It was only through some random happenstance they all came together. But even then, Rui Yifu could remember the brief thoughts he had of inflicting harm on them. The sight of Bo's face splattered with blood...

The course of thoughts were making an uncomfortably sharp sense of guilt grow in his chest, and he already had enough of that sitting in his heart so he instead focused on the books on the shelves nearby. Most of them were the standard fare you might find in any scholar's collection. 'The 10000 Mathematical Examples of Immortal Hou', 'The Sun Crane', 'Dream of the Blue Chamber', 'The General of 1000 Battles: Epilogue on the Night of the 37th Winter', 'Ethics of Mind and Sound', 'Guide to 45 Barbarian Spelling Systems' a collection of writing from 'Cult of the Romantic Poet'. Some of it was even quite familiar, like several different books by Chen Zihua. One book looked a bit odd. More recent, and was wedged between a book about the failures of the Eastern Kingdom's generals in taking the Fish Maiden Gorge and another book about negative numbers in relation to taxes on gathered hemp cloth.

He pulled it out and found it was bound with a soft cover made of wool encased in bark. The writing inside was... atrocious. His eyes burned trying to understand the characters. This person, 'Xiong Jing', was not very good at writing. They were talking about sincere trees, or maybe murderous ones? The character usage was not consistent at all! The more he tried puzzling out the confusing wording the more he suspected this had been written by a foreigner. Perhaps a woman, even, given the scant identification the writer gave of... weaving. He hoped it was supposed to say weaving at least. He gave them full marks for effort, but null for everything else.

He set down the book with a soft snort of derision directed at the mysterious writer when he heard voices coming from outside the room, floating down the hallway.

"-asleep?"

"I can't," Zhu'er's voice was muffled by distance.

"...Do you miss her?" Ji Ying's voice followed.