Shen Wei’s ten thousand years of watching Kunlun’s lives and, eventually, finding his own.
The humans were building a city around the sacred tree.
A city.
Over the gateway to the underworld.
Shen Wei wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or to despair.
Yunlan calls bullshit, at the very end, and everything changes, including himself. The SID can probably cope, but the Ministry may never be the same, to say nothing of Dixing.
It wasn’t, Zhao Yunlan thought, anything like what he’d have expected. He didn’t feel any great enlightenment or sudden attack of wisdom. It didn’t feel like a scroll of ages unrolling in his head, or like he was about to burst with the weight of memory. Returning divinity didn’t feel like anything appropriately dramatic, in his opinion. It was just…
He recognized this.
Yunlan calls bullshit, at the very end, and everything changes, including himself. The SID can probably cope, but the Ministry may never be the same, to say nothing of Dixing.
Knocking woke Yunlan up, and it took him a moment to figure out why, when he turned over to bury his head in the pillows, he wound up pressed tight against another body instead. “Ngh?” he asked, squinting at the expanse of chest in front of his nose.
“Do you want me to answer the door to your apartment?” Shen Wei asked, sounding both amused and far too awake.
Imagining the response of any of his team to that, Yunlan winced and pushed up onto his elbows. “I’m awake, I’m awake.”
Yunlan calls bullshit, at the very end, and everything changes, including himself. The SID can probably cope, but the Ministry may never be the same, to say nothing of Dixing.
Yunlan had seen Shen Wei fight and heal, entrance and command, but he’d never seen such delicate shaping as this—though that deep echo inside him felt like it had. Had even seen xiao-Wei play with his strength, perhaps—had coaxed or maneuvered him into it, most likely. Predictably, xiao-Wei looked entirely serious the whole time, as if this little whimsy was nothing but a functional test of control. Someone, at some point, must have convinced him that it was an appropriate test, though, and Yunlan was pretty sure that someone had been him. He gave his past self an approving internal nod.
Yunlan calls bullshit, at the very end, and everything changes, including himself. The SID can probably cope, but the Ministry may never be the same, to say nothing of Dixing.
He dropped Shen Wei off at the university, even though it meant circling back to the SID headquarters, and took away with him the tiny, wicked curl to xiao-Wei’s lips when Yunlan wished him a good day. The thought of xiao-Wei walking through his campus, greeting colleagues and students with a polite smile and trailing shock and disruption in his wake like a more entertaining version of his black cloak got Yunlan through the morning without giving in to the urge to sneak up behind his dreadfully earnest new office staff to see who was paying attention.
Much.
Yunlan calls bullshit, at the very end, and everything changes, including himself. The SID can probably cope, but the Ministry may never be the same, to say nothing of Dixing.
“You were always a morning person, weren’t you?” Yunlan asked from under his pillow, far too early the next morning. Why hadn’t he remembered that sooner?
“Just because we’re not going to the office doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do.” Xiao-Wei’s clear voice and unreasonably firm step approached, and something clinked on the bedside table. “If you’re not up in ten minutes, I’m going by myself.”
Yunlan calls bullshit, at the very end, and everything changes, including himself. The SID can probably cope, but the Ministry may never be the same, to say nothing of Dixing.
He was starting to understand, all the way up in his head, what xiao-Wei meant when he talked about the weight of gods in the world. He could feel the ground singing under his feet, feel the sky like it was something he could reach up and touch, feel the attention of the city’s river like it was alive and listening for his word and would rise if he just spoke.
Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei go apartment hunting.
At first Shen Wei had been amused by Yunlan’s team bringing another box of his belongings to Yunlan’s apartment every time one of them visited, as though he might not notice them moving him in if they just did it gradually enough.
Zhu Hong works on how to be Chief Elder, and falls hard for Ya Qing in the process. (Her uncle may have a point about her terrible taste.)
Zhu Hong had perfected the pout, the winsome look, and the hard fist as tools to make the world go her way, and she knew exactly how to use them. As time went on, and she’d started wanting to be stronger, she’d honed her natural abilities until she could do almost what any of her fully-transformed cousins could. She’d learned human ways so well she could blend in as completely as she wished.
None of that told her the first thing about how to be Chief Elder of the Yashou people.
Zhao Yunlan provides a temptation that Shen Wei has no intention of resisting. Even if they are in his office.
Yunlan waved an airy hand. “Oh, nothing urgent. Just a little matter I wanted to consult our consultant about.” He hopped up to sit squarely on the desk, planting his boots casually on Shen Wei’s chair, on either side of his thighs.
“Ah, I see,” Shen Wei agreed dryly, and crooked his fingers at his office door, beckoning it closed and locked for good measure. He leaned back comfortably in his chair, looking up at Yunlan, just as mild and enquiring as possible when there was a bubble of laughter trying to escape his chest. “And what is this little matter?”
The SID introduce Dixing to the police as ordinary citizens. The Supervisory Bureau may be having heart attacks in the background.
The first official visitor from Dixing had flown straight past “visitation” to a trial of citizenship, and Zhu Hong personally thought it had been planned to stress-test Minister Guo’s nerves. It would have done hers, too, if she hadn’t already known the whole thing was a put-up. As it was, she stood straight and serious beside the middle-aged police lieutenant who’d been assigned as her oversight partner, and carefully bit back her smirk when the gateway between realms misted into visibility and the man startled back.
“Is that it?” Tan Xiao asked eagerly, from behind them.
“Be patient, Mr. Tan,” she admonished. “She’ll be here in a moment.”
Shen Wei gets impatient and decides a desk is just as good as a bed, for somethings. Zhao Yunlan has to agree.
Yunlan slumped a little deeper into his desk chair and flipped to the next page of the long-and-only-getting-longer file on what he could only call Dixing tourism requests. Someone down there, and he darkly suspected the Regent, had declared that final decisions on who could come garden-viewing or shopping or whatever could only be made by the human Ministry, who had promptly passed the question on to the SID.
Four people are wakeful at night. Shen Wei thinks about Ye Zun. Zhang Shi thinks about her new life. Ya Qing thinks about Zhu Hong. Zhao Yunlan thinks about his own past.
Shen Wei leaned with his head propped on one hand and watched Yunlan sleep. Watched, on another level, the deep weight of him reach out to the world around them, touch the weave of the world with the same soft affection as he’d always had.
Watched how the brightness of Yunlan’s potentiality reached out to Shen Wei, in particular, now.
Professor Ouyang’s work isn’t through causing trouble, and everyone finds out why injuring Zhao Yunlan is an extremely bad idea. The Minster finds out a lot of things no one bothered to tell him earlier, and possibly wishes he hadn’t taken the job.
Shen Wei enjoyed the quiet times in his life, the times when he had no miscreants to chase down; when the humans were calm, not indulging in wars of conquest or moving their seat of government again; when his chosen profession had no crises and he could let himself be soothed by completing the small, daily tasks. He enjoyed those times very much, but he didn’t take them for granted.
Shen Wei has a judgement to make. Zhao Yunlan just wants to understand his family.
Zhang Shi opened the door quickly, at his knock, brows rising as she saw both of them waiting. “Did something come up at the Division?”
“No.” Shen Wei let the weight of his responsibilities settle over him, and saw the reflection of it in the half step back Zhang Shi took. “Things have come to my attention that must be addressed.”
Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan have a sort-of honeymoon trip, which involves conversations they should probably have had sooner.
It took most of a day to get up into the mountains near Dragon City, and to the currently empty retreat facility the University kept. Shen Wei had been there before, shepherding various classes to and from the biosciences observation center a little further north. It was a fairly familiar area, by now, which meant the wave of nostalgia that hit him as they unpacked the car took him by surprise.
Zhao Xinci invites Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei to dinner and an argument. Predictably, Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei are too busy trying to protect each other to bother about themselves.
“Yunlan?”
Zhao Yunlan looked up from his screen, a little startled. That was Li Huiliang’s voice, and Zhang Shi was usually careful to call him ‘Chief’ at work. “Yeah?” he asked, trying not to sound too obviously wary.
She stopped hovering in the door, at least, and came to hold out a folded sheet of paper. “This came for you. It’s from your father.”
Zhao Yunlan may have finally figured out a way to get Shen Wei to relax completely.
The apartment building was filling up with quiet life as the evening drew on, a little weight in his senses like a stone held in his hand. But not hard like a stone—lives were bright and a little skittery, like sparks on water. Taken together, though, all those little bits became a glare of brightness that flowed and pooled across the plain at the foot of the mountains, themselves a much deeper weight.
Which was actually really disorienting, because Shen Wei, currently wiping down the kitchen counters less than four meters away had almost as much weight in his senses as those mountains.
Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei go out clubbing, which results in Shen Wei getting a bit prowly.
So far, the thought had met with two checks. The first turned out to not actually be a check. In fact when Yunlan had, very casually and completely in passing, mentioned the modern, cosmopolitan (and only a little likely to be raided) notion of a dance club, xiao-Wei had laughed at him.