Chapter Text
The spirit beast had once been a mountain pheasant.
At least, that was what Sizhui thought it had once been. Now it was little more than torn flesh tangled in reeds, silvered wetly by the moon. Jin Ling crouched beside it first making no immediate movement to touch the body.
Feathers were scattered everywhere—floating in black marsh water, stuck to tree roots, plastered against blood-dark mud. One wing had been almost completely stripped bare. The exposed flesh beneath looked ragged and uneven, as though something had worried at it for hours.
Lan Jingyi grimaced openly. “That is foul.”
Ouyang Zizhen made a strangled sound as he approached with careful steps. “Oh, that is disgusting.”
Jingyi had covered his nose with his sleeve. “I told you it smelled worse over here.”
The corpse resembled sparsely of a living creature, though larger than any ordinary bird, with a short curved beak and faint spiritual glow still lingering beneath torn flesh. One wing had nearly been ripped free. The ribs were cracked apart unevenly, jutting out in odd angles, piercing through skin and feathers. Most of the organs were still there, half-rotted and glistening darkly under the moon.
Jingyi crouched beside it first making no immediate movement to touch the body.
The eyes were gone. So were the claws.
The feet had been carved apart crudely where the talons should have been.
Zizhen looked faint. “Why would someone even take those?”
The final note of the guqin had just rang out when Lan Sizhui’s brows knit slowly.
“There is no resentful energy,” he announced.
Jin Ling closed his eyes at that. “Again?”
Lan Shizui’s Qin language had always been exceptional, and now working with Dajiu along with Huanguang-jun, he could detect even faint traces of resentful energy around a corpse.
A talent that had aided them for many a night hunts together and provided hope did nothing more than amplify the hollow feeling of failure.
Sizhui nodded dismayed, recounting no blackened qi, no corruption, no traces of fierce corpses or demonic cultivation.
Jingyi nodded, expression twisting. “There never is.”
He nudged a broken feather aside with the tip of his scabbard.
These cases had been trickling into the smaller sects for months now: mutilated beast corpses discovered along forest roads and in the wilderness. At first, no one had thought much of them. Strange things turned up often enough in the cultivation world.
It was only last week, after Daijiu suggested the incidents might be connected, that the matter drew real attention.
Hanguang-jun had immediately requested that any similar disturbances be reported to the Lan Sect. After that, the number of complaints more than tripled. Reports poured in from a litany of smaller sects, rogue cultivators, and even remote villages with no cultivators at all.
Jin Ling knelt carefully beside the corpse.
“They look torn,” Zizhen said, crouching beside him. The marsh water soaked into the hem of his robes.
“No,” Jin Ling muttered. “Not exactly.” He pointed toward the beast’s throat, “The flesh there was cut before the rest of the damage.”
Now that he said it aloud, they could all see it. The feathers near the neck had been peeled back deliberately.
“This part was removed after death,” he said, pointing near the throat. “But this—” his fingers hovered over the torn chest cavity, “—might have happened while it was still alive.”
The buzz of the insects sounded much louder in the unsettled silence.
Zizhen swallowed hard. “That’s horrible. What kind of thing attacks spirit beasts like this?”
“Maybe another spirit beast,” Jin Ling said.
“No animal peels scales and removes venom sacs,” Sizhui replied softly.
Jin Ling looked irritated at being contradicted but did not argue.
That has been another of the troubling factors.
All these mutilations were unequal in its brutality. Sometimes spirit beast corpses would be cleanly cut with sharp blades, more often carved and torn to shreds. But the removal of organs remained varying: venom sacs, fangs, scales, talons, eyes, bones and sometimes feathers too, would be removed. Sometimes with clean practical cuts, mostly gouged out with raw strength. Though what remained consistent was the broken chest cavity in almost all the cases.
The body had to be dragged out before they could go any farther.
Up close, the marsh reeked.
Blood.
Rot.
Wet feathers.
And beneath it all—something medicinal. Bitter and sharp, but not overwhelmingly so.
Jingyi wrinkled his nose at that. “Does anyone else smell herbs?”
Sizhui finally rose to his feet, Guqin carefully wrapped in a white cloth, expression tightening slightly as he examined the soaked robes.
“Not wild herbs,” he said quietly. “These were added deliberately.”
Jin Ling’s expression sharpened at that. The scent had become so familiar over the years that he had stopped noticing it entirely. At Shizui’s comment, his attention was brought to it once again.
“Preservation herbs,” he said. “They are used in trade for transportation of live fish.”
For a moment, he could almost smell lotus ponds instead of marsh water.
Yunmeng’s fish were always fresher.
Even after the season ended, his jiujiu somehow still managed to have mandarin fish brought to the table. The ponds were treated with medicinal herbs to keep the fish healthy during transport—just enough bitterness to cling faintly to the water, gone after cooking.
Jin Ling loved it as a child.
Not that he would ever admit part of the reason was because Jiujiu always deboned the fish for him too, and as much as he loved eating it, he had never really learned properly deboning fish.
The memory vanished as quickly as it came.
All three of them had straightened without realizing it. The corpse no longer felt like some random killing.
Lan Jingyi stared at the body with undisguised dread. “I really hate this.”
“Then stop coming for night hunts,” Jin Ling replied.
“You volunteered too!”
“And I’m a Sect leader.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s a better answer than yours.”
Zizhen sighed dramatically. “You two would argue during an avalanche.”
“I would survive the avalanche,” Jingyi shot back.
Zizhen pointed at him. “You fell into a river last month.”
“That river attacked me unfairly.”
Even Sizhui laughed quietly at that.
The sound felt strange beside the corpse.
Jin Ling had turned away and now frowned down at the corpse, trying to look for anything they could have missed. Anything that would give them some direction. After a moment, he exhaled sharply.
“We should burn it.”
*
The corpse burned badly. Spirit beasts usually did. The smoke smelled thick and oily as it curled into the night sky. By the time the talismans dimmed and the remains turned to ash, the moon had climbed high.
Zizhen swallowed. “That’s the fourth spirit beast this week.”
“Third,” Jin Ling corrected automatically. “The dove in Yueyang barely counted.”
They walked back along the worn road in thoughtful silence. Lan Jingyi kicked a pebble off the cliffside path, groaning dramatically.
“I never want to smell burnt feathers again.”
No one disagreed, although they all knew that it would be inevitable.
It was Sizhui who finally broke the tension. “The local cultivators said villagers heard fighting in the forest last night.”
Jingyi snorted. “Villagers hear fighting if two cats cross the roads at the same time.”
Still, his hand remained near his sword. The reeds shifted softly in the evening wind.
“This was easier before.”
Jin Ling glanced sideways. “What was?”
“Hanging around.”
“That sounds pathetic.”
“It is pathetic,” Jingyi shot back. “You’re always busy now.”
“You think I enjoy sect meetings?”
“You sit like this now,” Jingyi said stiffly, folding his arms and arranging his face into an expression of exaggerated cold arrogance.
Ouyang Zizhen laughed immediately. Even Sizhui’s mouth twitched.
Jin Ling looked offended. “I do not look like that.”
“You absolutely do.”
“You sounded exactly like Sect Leader Jiang just now,” Zizhen added helpfully.
Jin Ling stopped walking. “I did not,” he said immediately, hoping to intimidate. Then, a moment later, something unhelpful and unmistakably pleased slipped through anyway.
“Did I?”
Zizhen and Jingyi nearly doubled over laughing. Sizhui walked beside them quietly, lantern swinging gently from his hand.
“Your posture even changed!”
“Your voice went lower!”
Jin Ling pointed at them, ears slightly red. “I am leaving.”
Lan Jingyi looked around. “We’re all going the same way.”
Before Jin Ling could retaliate further, a voice drifted through the darkness ahead.
Someone was singing. Off-key and in a deep gravely voice.
“…moon drank the tide dry,
fish bones laugh where sailors die…”
The words sounded strange, vowels stretched oddly, consonants softened by an accent none of them recognized.
“…salt in the wound,
salt in the eye,
sea keeps secrets better than I…”
They followed the sound.
A lantern swung lazily beneath a crooked tree near the roadside shrine illuminating an old man sprawled across the shrine steps with a wine jug dangling from one hand. His robes were faded nearly colorless from salt and wear. Gray hair hung loose around a weathered face burnt dark by sea wind and sun. A fishing rod rested beside him.
He kept singing, unaware in his indulgence.
Jingyi winced, remembering Wei Qianbei’s terrible flute skills in the Mo manor. “That should be considered a weapon.”
The old man cracked one eye open. “Hm?” His gaze drifted over them slowly. “You were the ones making all that noise earlier, huh? You little monkeys are loud.”
His voice was roughened by drink, sounding hoarse with its disuse.
Jin Ling bristled at once. They had burned the corpse and only talked a little quite a distance away, there was no way this old man could hear them from so far away on top of his awful singing.
“And who permits you to address us so casually?”
“Are you not?” The man waved a hand absently. “Roaming the forest at night? Careless, you lot! You would die by the hands of the Marsh ghosts!!! Puh!”
Jin Ling’s hand had already shifted toward his sword. “We are the ones dealing with the disturbances here. You would do well not to interfere.”
The man ignored him entirely and took another drink. The accent thickened when he spoke again, words slurring strangely together. “Disturbances?” he repeated, as though tasting the word. “You monkeys couldn’t deal with a dog fight, I bet!”
“You-!”
Jingyi exclaimed, annoyed by the rude words of the drunk man, just to be pushed back by Shizui giving a short bow.
“Senior,” he began in a respectful manner, “We are from the Lan Clan of Gusu. And that is Young master Jin and Young master Ouyang. We were sent here to solve the issue regarding the mutilated beast sighting in this area. Is the noise you mentioned perhaps related to that?”
For a brief moment, the man looked at him more directly. Then he blinked at them and gave a loud laugh as he made an undignified motion to stand up on unstable feet. “You lot smell disgusting!”
Zizhen looked startled at the sudden movement but extended a hand to steady him nonetheless.
Jin Ling narrowed his eyes slightly. “We just completed a night hunt.”
“Gah!” The old man smacked Zizhen's hand, as he leaned back against the shrine pillar taking another swing from his wine jar. “Then stop standing around blocking the wind. That smell is terrible, clinging to your clothes like that. ”
Jingyi muttered under his breath, “What a temper.”
Zizhen frowned. “Are you drunk?”
The question was entirely redundant. The man was almost completely inebriated.
Sizhui bowed politely. “Senior,” as the man turned away in a rumple of fabric and motion.
They stood there for a few moments. The old man took another long drink before starting to sing a different song now in a low raspy voice.
“…bones in the harbor,
bones in the foam,
sea swallows every name
that cannot find home…”
The strange accent carried through the dark like waves breaking against stone.
Jin Ling rolled his eyes. “Forget that ungrateful drunk,” as he was already walking ahead now.
Sizhui glanced back once. But for some reason, under the moonlight, his silhouette seemed oddly steady for someone so intoxicated.
“…teeth for silver,
eyes for gold,
young men die
before they’re old…”
Sizhui frowned slightly. The accent was unlike anything he had heard before. Coastal perhaps—but worn over the years somehow. It stirred something uncomfortable in memory, like a half-remembered dream.
“ — Just some rural accent you’ve never heard before.” Jin Ling said.
Shizui noticed them all looking at him, and his ears reddened at the thought that he had been caught staring. He was never this improper.
Jingyi nodded quickly, noticing his confusion. “Yeah. There are tons of dialects outside the sects. You can’t expect to know all of them.”
Sizhui said nothing more. But the feeling didn’t leave him.
*
Since it was past midnight by the time they reached town, they decided to stay the night in a nearby inn. They had said their farewells at night itself as Shizui and Jingyi had left early in the morning. Jin Ling and Zizhen woke at a more sedate pace, and walked together till Anxi village before they parted ways, Jin Ling for Carp tower and Zizhen for Bailing.
The next afternoon, the two of them stood inside the Lanshi before Zewu-Jun and Hanguang-Jun. Incense smoke drifted pleasantly through the room.
Jingyi stepped forward first, presenting the written report with both hands while Sizhui delivered the verbal account.
“There were no traces of resentful energy,” Sizhui recounted steadily. “By the time we arrived, the corpses had already been partially consumed by scavengers.”
Lan Xichen accepted the report without immediately lowering his gaze to it.
“And the wounds?”
“The injuries were severe, though not always fatal,” Sizhui continued. “The chest cavities appeared to have ruptured from within. Certain parts were removed with consistency—the eyes and claws of the mountain pheasant near the marshes, the venom sacs and scales of the serpent in Gui, the talons, saber teeth, and claws taken from the dove in Yueyang and the fox in Taili.”
“Some parts,” Jingyi said carefully, “looked like they were taken while the creatures were still alive.” Then slightly grimaced, remembering it. “The extremities were removed postmortem. And near the remains of last night, we detected traces of medicinal compounds.”
Lan Wangji finally spoke. “What compounds?”
Sizhui inclined his head. “I could not identify them with certainty. Sect Leader Jin claimed familiarity with the scent. He said similar herbs are used to preserve freshwater fish during transport or storage out of season.”
Lan Xichen’s fingers rested lightly atop the report. “And your conclusion?”
Neither junior answered immediately.
Sizhui spoke first. “The incidents all occurred near waterways—marshes, riverbanks, lakes, even shallow ponds. It is possible someone is harvesting these organs and preserving them with medicinal herbs.”
“A collector,” Jingyi muttered darkly.
Lan Xichen lowered his gaze then, finally reading the report in full. The movement was unhurried, yet neither junior dared speak again while he did.
“The marshland corpse,” he said after a moment. “The scent lingered there because the water was disturbed while removing the corpse.” It was not phrased as a question.
“Yes, Zewu-Jun,” Sizhui answered at once.
Silence settled over the room. Then Lan Xichen looked up.
“During the hunt,” he said evenly, “did either of you encounter anything else out of place?”
Sizhui and Jingyi exchanged a quick glance.
“No,” Jingyi replied.
Lan Wangji studied them quietly for another moment, before nodding once. “You may go.”
The juniors bowed deeply before withdrawing. Only after their footsteps faded beyond the Yashi did Lan Xichen speak again.
“The pattern is becoming clearer.”
***