The Nine-tailed Fox searches for lost souls

Xue Zhuan walks towards Wu Yun and drapes an arm around his shoulder, pulling him towards his chest. "Actually, Yu-ge, this is the same stray!"

Yu Songdi inspects Wu Yun from head to toe. His narrowed gaze runs over his face and body as if he's seeing him for the first time.

"That's not Ling Yan," he says, pointing at Wu Yun. "You always went on about how his beauty could topple a nation, how a single smile could bring down the Heavens. This human is clearly just average looking."

Lan Tian is offended in Wu Yun's behalf. He has never seen Ling Yan, but he doubts he could be any more beautiful than Wu Yun.

Wu Yun for is part is unbothered, and just smirks at King Songdi's outrage. He would like not to be Ling Yan, actually. The whole thing is making his head hurt.

"Look closer, you'll recognize Ling Yan's soul," Xue Zhuan insists, nodding towards Wu Yun, still pressed against his side.

Yu Songdi looks into Wu Yun's eyes. His piercing gaze makes Wu Yun fidget in place, uncomfortable under the intense scrutiny.

He eventually shakes his head and lets out a sigh. "It really is Ling Yan, uh? So, the annoying bastard managed to reincarnate after all. Only to end up dead again."

Xue Zhuan smirks. "Oh, I don't think so." He turns to Lan Tian. "Are either of you actually dead?"

Lan Tian doesn't think there's any point in keeping up the farce now, and admits, "No, we took a pill that allows us to appear dead and walk among the ghosts undetected."

Yu Songdi shakes his head. "That does sound like Ling Yan, strolling into the Underworld like it's a market."

Xue Zhuan holds on tighter to Wu Yun's shoulder and shakes him from side to side. "He might not remember me, but his soul missed his old friend, that's why he decided to pay me a visit."

Yu Songdi ignores Xue Zhuan's good mood and turns to Wu Yun with a baleful eye. "Was all that talk about your sickly daughter a lie?"

Xue Zhuan spins Wu Yun so fast it makes him dizzy, and looks at his face in wide-eyed wonder. "You have a daughter?"

How can Wu Yun even begin to explain Wan Mi and how the idea for the story he told Yu Songdi came up?

"Uhm, not exactly..."

"We do know a little girl called Wan Mi," Lan Tian says, cutting in before Wu Yun loses track of the conversation and ends up digging a bigger hole for himself.

"Does she really have that odd condition? I was fascinated by it." Wu Yun expected him to be angry, but he sounds genuinely curious.

Xue Zhuan smiles fondly at Yu Songdi and says, "Yu-ge is fascinated by rare diseases."

"Ah, she doesn't have that particular condition, but she suffers from being constantly annoying at all times," Wu Yun says.

Yu Songdi snorts. "She must really be your daughter, then."

His dour face softens for a moment, as his glazes fleets over Xue Zhuan's brilliant grin. "What are the two of you doing here then? I don't believe that you wanted to visit Xue Zhuan, no one likes him."

Xue Zhuan lets out a snort at Wu Yun's side. "He can't be looking for anyone's soul. He has no memory of being Ling Yan."

Wu Yun flinches, "Actually...."

He launches into the whole story of Jiang Tanmei's botched resurrection, and what led them to come looking for his souls.

Xue Zhuan can only gape between him and Lan Tian like a fish out of water, but Yu Songdi clutches his sides in violent fits of laughter.

"It's the same damn thing all over again! New reincarnation, new species, same Ling Yan."

"I can't believe you're a nine-tailed fox," Xue Zhuan manages to say, eventually, inspecting Wu Yun as if expecting to see any traces of fox in his current human appearance. "Well, it's a good thing your beast nature is suppressed, otherwise you would die as soon as you walked in here."

That makes Wu Yun think of something.

"You think that was done on purpose?" he asks, turning to Xue Zhuan. "Maybe someone made sure I would come back as a beast so I wouldn't be able to come looking to you for help?"

The same someone who was chasing Ling Yan, the same person who killed Shu Luan.

Xue Zhuan bites the tip of a fingernail and thinks over Wu Yun's words. "It's possible, and it would make sense" He starts pacing around the room, waving his arms around in the rhythm of his frantic thoughts. "Except, I'm the King in charge of sending souls forward to reincarnation. How could you reincarnate, without my knowledge?"

Yu Songdi's eyes take on a dark glint, and he stops Xue Zhuan's pacing with a hand on his upper arm. "But you weren't always in charge of the tenth court."

"No, he wouldn't." Xue Zhuan shakes his head, resolute in his conviction. " Bao Zhang wouldn't go behind my back like that. Regardless of what he feels about no longer being in charge of the tenth court, he wouldn't do that."

"I know you think he's a friend, but Yanluo still rules the Underworld, regardless of the Jade Emperor's decree."

Wu Yun takes notice at the mention of the Jade Emperor. His first memory is of wanting to kill him, but he has never stopped to consider that the Jade Emperor might be moved by the same sentiment.

"What did the Jade Emperor do?" Wu Yun asks, looking between the two of them.

Yu Songdi waves him off. "It was ages ago, but basically King Yanluo was the ruler of the Underworld, and in charge of the tenth court. The Jade Emperor eventually grew displeased with him because he was very lenient, and always reincarnated human souls as humans again. Very few people were being reincarnated as mindless animals in Yanluo's days."

"That sounds like a nice thing to do," Lan Tian says.

Xue Zhuan snorts and leans against the desk facing the courtyard, crossing his arms in front of his chest. "The Jade Emperor didn't think so. It kept the number of humans growing too much, and too fast. And what if the humans decided they no longer needed the Gods? Where would they get their powers from?"

"Yanluo was demoted to the fifth court, and Xue Zhuan took up the tenth," Yu Songdi says, looking at Xue Zhuan with a rueful smile. "Now everyone is happy."

Lan Tian might no longer want to take out Xue Zhuan's eyes with the nearest chopstick, but he still doesn't strike him as a very competent person.

He and Wu Yun found him in a brothel when all other Kings were at court.

"How so?" he asks, raising an eyebrow when his question is met with Xue Zhuan's insouciant smirk.

"Now that I have free reign over Youdu, no one wants to leave."

---

Xue Zhuan manages to talk Yu Songdi into helping them search for Jiang Tanmei's souls.

He grumbles and glowers, but eventually gives in when Xue Zhuan slides up to him, wraps his arms around his neck, and starts saying, "Gege is being so mean to me," in a cloying voice, which threatens to give Lan Tian a migraine but that makes Yu Songdi turn several shades redder.

Wu Yun is once again in awe of all the light and colour in Youdu.

He gawks openly when a demon with the body of a woman and the face of a serpent walks by. She flicks her forked tongue at him, and winks one of her huge eyes.

Everyone they walk past is in high spirits. Laughing in a group of friends, eating Youdu's unusual cuisine, or browsing one of the thousands of little shops that spring up from every corner where there's room to lay down a mat.

"How do the dead have money?" Wu Yun asks, watching a woman take a large stick of candied hawthorn from a vendor's hands.

"Paper money," Yu Songdi says, pointing at the same woman as she takes out a wad of blank circle bills from her sleeve pocket and counts them. "Their surviving relatives burn paper money in their name in the mortal world, and the dead can use it down here as currency."

"The very wealthy will even burn paper mansions and furniture, so their ancestors can have all the comforts of the mortal world down here," Xue Zhuan says, with a self-satisfied smirk. "Of course, everyone is supposed to be equal in death, so I decided to level the playing field."

Wu Yun is almost afraid of asking. "How did you do that?"

Yu Songdi snorts. "He created a wealth tax. Everyone whose surviving relatives are rich enough to burn a lot of paper items, must give half of their earnings to the Youdu treasury, which then relocates it to the ghosts who have no surviving relatives, or whose families are too poor to observe funeral rites."

Wu Yun looks at Xue Zhuan with a newfound sense of appreciation. He's reminded of the poem Jiang Tanmei showed him, about the peasants toiling in the fields. If they couldn't have easy lives, he thinks they deserve carefree deaths, at least.

Lan Tian is less trusting, "And you get nothing out of it?"

"Only the satisfaction of seeing the look on the rich young masters' faces when they have to hand over their riches."

He grunts in acknowledgement, he guesses he can let his feelings for Xue Zhuan settle at grudging respect.

He and Wu Yun keep pace with Yu Songdi and Xue Zhuan as they ask passersby if they have perhaps seen unthetered hun souls walking around.

From Xue Zhuan's hasty explanation, Wu Yun understands that Jiang Tanmei's souls split when his body returned to life, which prevented the proper funeral rites of being observed, and the souls from merging into a single hun soul which is what gives all the other ghosts in the Underworld their tangible and corporeal appearance.

Xue Zhuan warned them that Jiang Tanmei's souls would be restless, and that his actions and attitudes might not resemble the person they met in life.

Wu Yun doesn't know if he's ready to meet Jiang Tanmei, part of him fears that he'll blame him for causing his souls to splinter.

They still haven't found Lu Meng, which is also worrying. They look everywhere in the Garden of Tears where the imp should have left the innocent souls, but he's nowhere to be found.

"He probably got tired of waiting, and tried to find all of Jiang Tanmei's souls on his own," he says, after they've looked through the whole garden.

Xue Zhuan even made them look in the cursed grotto, whose sole occupants were a pack of demonic swans who tried to peck their eyes out.

Wu Yun leans his forehead against Lan Tian's shoulder, and lets out a sigh. He's so tired, he wishes they had more time, and that he could take a nap with Lan Tian.

He never feels more at peace than when he rests his face against Lan Tian's chest and closes his eyes, lulled to sleep by the steady sound of his heartbeat beneath his cheek.

Something touches his shoulder, just as he is considering closing his eyes after all. He turns around and sees Mu Ping, the old lady they met at the gates, the one who died of thirst.

"If you're looking for your friend, he went with that lady," Mu Ping says.

"What lady?" Wu Yun asks, suddenly alert.

"The lady who cries from her neck."