Chapter [B5] 18 — Confessions - II
My spirits arrived quickly, but Labby quieted when she saw the tears streaming down Yin’s cheeks.
“Why is Yin crying?” Labby approached her with small, careful steps. “Is everything okay, Yin?”
Ash stood beside me with Sheldon on his shoulder. Ash’s eyes narrowed at my master’s expression, the way they did when he was trying to decide whether he should intervene in an unexpected situation.
Yin shook her head at Labby, patting her head gently. “Nothing, Labby,” she said, voice even, though the dampness on her face betrayed the fragility of that steadiness.
Labby didn’t seem convinced. Her ears twitched, and she looked from Yin to me and then to Granny Lang, who stood further back than usual. Before Labby could ask more, my friends walked in—Zhang first, Liuxiang behind him, and finally Yan Yun. All of them carried a kind of alertness in their posture, the expectation that this meeting was not routine. Qiao Ying came in behind and closed the door, checking the latch twice.
I asked Sheldon to put up a silencing array so no information leaked, and he complied without question. Runes formed along the inside of the walls, neat and straight. My house hummed softly when the array settled.
“Why have you called us here?” Yan Yun asked. “The entire group is assembled, I see. And… Yin? Why are you crying?”
“Labby asked the same thing. Yin wouldn’t tell Labby, though.”
Zhang and Liuxiang looked at Yin curiously. Zhang naturally looked to Granny Lang next. Granny Lang’s gaze was steady but less bright than usual, and she stood without her usual comments ready at her tongue. Seeing that even Granny Lang was subdued, concern crept into Zhang’s expression.
“Please, all of you, sit. I have something to tell you.”They took their seats all too quickly, and then they were all looking at me again, that uncertain concern boring into me.
Do I really have to do this? Is this necessary? I’d already confirmed things with my master. Did I need to hurt them more already, so soon after they got me back?
But… I did need to, now that I could no longer pretend we could find another way. I wasn’t giving up; I was accepting things, adapting my plans. Not telling them now would be cruel. It was inevitable for such major figures in my life to know what was happening sooner or later, and it was better they heard it from me.
So I took a deep breath and explained. I told them what Ki had told me, that a transcendent’s sacrifice was the only guaranteed way to take down the Demon God, and that such a seal would allow a new cycle to be set in place, free of the corruption of miasma or the tyranny of the heavens.
The words sounded clear in my own ears, as if I were repeating lines I had practiced, but my hands were not steady and I found myself pacing to keep from visibly twitching.
For a second everyone looked at me blankly. Then Labby’s eyes fluttered, horrified. “No, no, no, no, no. You can’t be serious, Master. You can’t be serious.”
“Master will not be sacrificing himself. Master—Master won’t die, right?” Tears were already pooling in her eyes. “When Master says sacrifice, he means something else, right? The connection to the tree, or to cultivation, but Master can still do science and make drugs with Labby.”
She approached me, looking up desperately. I knelt to meet her gaze. “Labby, it’s… I know it’s hard to accept, but—”
“Master, you’re lying. You’re lying. Master is strong. Master won’t have to die.” Her voice pitched upward and she shook her head over and over. “We can take down the Demon God without doing this. There must be other ways.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I pulled Labby into a soft hug and gently rubbed circles on her back. “Labby, I know it’s hard to accept, but it’s necessary. I want to believe there are other ways too, but if I’m the only one with the needed capabilities, then perhaps a sacrifice really is—”
“No. There are other ways. You know there is an answer, a guaranteed solution. So we iterate. Work backward from what we know will work, even if we cannot find a different way entirely. We don't have to change everything, just enough for Master to..." Her voice broke as the impossibility of what she was saying caught up to her, as desperate hope turned to denial. “Labby won’t accept this. Labby won’t!”
So saying, she ran out of the room.
Zhang followed; Sheldon and Ash trailed behind her, glancing back at me once and then focusing on keeping pace.
My instinct was to run after her, but then I looked at Yan Yun’s expression. Her whole face had tightened at once and her hands had closed over each other, white at the knuckles. Liuxiang looked shocked, her face completely blank, although her throat moved as if she had tried to speak and chosen not to. RÃɴóꞖË𝘚
I opened my mouth and closed it again. What could I say to make this right? To make the loss more bearable?
I understood how they felt. If I were to lose any of my loved ones… I would be distraught too.
—
Yan Yun felt like the world around her was crashing down. What did he mean he’d have to die?
That can’t be true. Lu Jie can’t be dying. He’s the miraculous one—who defies the very heavens. He can’t die—not after we just got him back.
She’d come to terms with losing him, then he came back, and now he tells her he would die again? She couldn’t accept that.
Her breath turned shallow and fast. The room felt too bright and too cramped at once, the lamps throwing steady halos across the floorboards, the faint scent of the tea they hadn’t touched hanging in the air.
Every small detail pushed at her nerves. Her fingers curled and uncurled at her sides because she needed to move but had nowhere to go.
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The thought repeated, hard and dull: he can’t die. It knocked against her ribs until her chest hurt.
Lu Jie looked at her with an endlessly gentle expression. For a second she wanted to scream, to cry, to do something, anything, and then all the rage seeped out as she realized the rage was truly directed at herself. If only I’d been stronger, better—then Lu Jie wouldn’t have to do this. He wouldn’t have to die to take down the Demon God.
Images piled up against the back of her eyes—training grounds, dawn drills, missions where she’d told herself she was catching up, the hours she’d stolen from sleep to practice until her hands trembled. None of it looked like enough now. Not against the scale of what he was willing to do. Not against the thing that had warped the sky and thrown the world into weeks of storms and cold. Not against the sealed monster beneath the roots and the branches folded over the castle. She had pressed those thoughts aside each day to keep moving. With his words, they all came back at once.
The logical part of her might have argued otherwise at any other moment, but right now emotions consumed her. She could vaguely feel it was unreasonable, but that didn’t matter.
“Yan Yun, are you—” he began, then trailed off, because Are you okay? would be redundant.
Her lips trembled before sound came out. She swallowed, tasted salt, and forced the words through a throat that felt scraped raw. Yan Yun chuckled wetly. “I just learned I’ll be losing my first and best friend once more. How do you think I feel?” she asked.
She could vaguely hear Leiyu say something in her mind, a steadying pulse and a quiet, distant call to breathe, but she couldn’t quite process the words. She couldn’t quite process anything but the overwhelming emotions raging in her heart.
“I understand, Yan Yun. I don’t want to do this. If there were any other way, I’d take it. Even now, I’ll keep trying. I’m sure there’ll still be methods.”
She latched onto the words and found no anchor in them. She had asked him impossible things before and watched him turn them into plans. This time the weight behind his tone was not a challenge to be overcome. It was a boundary he had already measured.
Yan Yun shook her head. “I don’t want to lose you, Lu Jie,” she confessed, and Lu Jie’s expression turned bitter.
“I don’t want to lose all of you either.”
The words hit her twice—first as comfort, then as confirmation that he had already placed himself on the outside of a circle he still held together. She knew how selfish she sounded, how dumb she felt. She broke into tears, Lu Jie hugging her gently as she fell to the floor, the reality sinking in.
Her knees struck the mat and she barely felt it. The sound she made didn’t sound like her own voice. His arms came around her, careful and firm, pulling her against a chest that rose and fell in measured breaths. She clutched at his robe with too much force, felt the roughness of the fabric under her fingertips, the warmth of him through the layers. The warmth made it worse because it proved he was here, solid and alive, while he spoke of leaving. Her forehead pressed against him and damp spread where her tears soaked through. She tried to stop and her body refused to listen.
A second later, as she felt Lu Jie’s warm arms around her, her tears only intensified. It was unfair—so wrong. All of it was so unfair.
—
I held Yan Yun tightly as she cried into my chest. I rubbed gentle circles on her back until she grew too tired to cry and fell asleep in my arms.
Her breaths evened by degrees. The first ones shuddered and caught; the next came slow and low. I kept my palm moving in small, steady motions between her shoulder blades. Her weight shifted until she rested against me fully. When her fingers finally loosened their grip on my robe, I slid an arm under her knees and adjusted her so her neck wouldn’t cramp. The floor was hard, but the mat dulled the edge. I adjusted the pillow with a thread of Chi and set it beneath her head. My thumb brushed a damp track at the corner of her eye. She didn’t stir.
I looked at Liuxiang. She stood near the doorway with her hands folded inside her sleeves, posture straight, hair pinned with a simple bone stick. Her gaze slid from me to the sleeping form at my side, then to the window, then back. Her face didn’t move much, yet the tiny tightness at the corners of her eyes told its own story. She was counting, measuring, listing. She would have a dozen responses and none of them would break through the fact that I had said I would die.
Before I could say anything, I felt it—Zhang’s power unleashed as he shot to the sky.
The pull of his gravity Chi moved in a vertical line through the sect’s wards. I didn’t need to reach far to catch the signature. It was familiar. Focused. Labby’s spark raced with him—fast, bright, jagged at the edges, half-concealed inside his wake. The moment stretched for a breath as I acknowledged both presences and what their direction meant.
I spread my Qi, trying to sense what they were doing. Labby was atop Zhang and they were both shooting into the sky. Is she trying to reach the Lunar Court? My eyes widened. In her current state—going to the Lunar Court—I couldn’t help an ominous premonition.
I stood, lifting Yan Yun carefully so I could lay her on the rolled futon by the wall. I pulled a blanket over her shoulders and tucked it under her chin. Her breath stayed steady. Liuxiang stepped forward without a word, set a small charm on the pillow to keep the air warm and clean around her, then straightened and met my eyes. Neither of us spoke. I wanted to have a conversation with her, but not now; not when I was focused on Labby. That would be unfair to Liuxiang.
I ran out of the house, looking up. Sheldon and Ash also looked up, blankly, clearly not having tried to stop them. For a second I wanted to berate them, but I controlled myself. They were stuck in grief too; expecting them to hold back Labby at this moment would be unreasonable.
The courtyard air bit at my skin. Snow crystals, fine as dust, drifted down out of the sky as usual, but they felt cold instead of beautiful for the first time. The main ring hummed underfoot. On the east wall a pair of ward-lanterns pulsed as the defensive array adjusted to Zhang’s ascent. Far above, the line of his power thinned until it was a thread. Labby’s presence sat within it, a spark flickering in a wind.
I pushed the urge to call her back down and made myself think.
“They’ll be fine,” Sheldon’s voice rumbled in my head, making me blink.
I turned. Sheldon’s small form perched on the railing with his claws wrapped neatly around the wood. Ash stood beside him in human form, hands behind his back, jaw tight, gaze locked on the sky.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Labby has been trying to go to the Lunar Court for a while. And as mysterious a place as it is,” Sheldon said—speaking in full sentences for the first time in a while—“the Lunar Court is fundamentally a good place, a place where Labby belongs. They will not harm her.”
I gulped. “I see.”
“She must feel like she’s trying to do something,” Ash continued. “Taking that away from her would be cruel.”
His voice was flat, but not careless. The words were measured. He didn’t look down as he spoke. His eyes stayed on the sky, attention narrowed to two small figures carving a path upward against a cold blue sheet.
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Fair.
“Is there truly no other way?” Sheldon asked, his eternally smiling face turning into a frown for the first time since I’d met him. “Must you sacrifice yourself?”
The question pressed in from all sides. I had started forming answers for it the moment I understood the price. I had taken them apart and rebuilt them in the days since. None of the versions made the choice better. They only clarified it. I could only nod.
Ash stared at me for a few seconds, then bowed. “I cannot doubt your sacrifice. I respect it. However, my heart shall be broken irreparably nonetheless. Losing you once was already a sacrifice I could not accept. Losing you again? It will always hurt, Master.”
He lowered himself slowly, no flourish, hands flat on the stone. His head touched the cold flagstones and stayed there.
Snow dust gathered on his shoulders in a thin scatter. He didn’t brush it off. The bite of the air pinked the edges of his ears and he did not move. The posture would have looked formal from a distance. Up close, it was the clearest thing he could do to keep himself from shaking apart.
That broken acceptance… What could I say to that?