Come Back to Gusu

1. Prologue Part 1

It hurts. I hurt. Wei Wuxian looked at the destruction around him. Dead bodies everywhere. They deserved it. All of them. They killed my shidi and shimei. They killed Jiang Shushu and Madame Yu. They burned down my home. They threw me into the Burial Mounds and left me for dead. He snorted at that. Now they're the ones who are dead. I killed them. With no sword: just a flute and some of my favorite citizens of the Burial Mounds. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry.

He wanted to curl up into a little ball and sleep and only wake up when this aching, echoing abyss inside him healed. Or he got lost forever in it.

He was hungry. So incredibly hungry. He had tried not to eat in that endless gloaming. Hunger drove him to try the few wilting plants and the bugs and creepy crawlies that hid under rocks and fallen trees. The dead he befriended offered him flesh. He had been so hungry.... So tempted to ignore this final taboo and feast on maggot infested flesh. He feasted on the maggots instead, popping them between his teeth. A few times he caught fish. Skeletal and slimy, more bones than meat. There were so few fish to be found.

He was hungry. The soldiers would have rations in their qiankun pouches. The supervisory office had a kitchen; there would be fresh food waiting for the soldiers who would now never eat it. Or food waiting to be cooked. He scavenged the dead for coin, for clothing, for travel safe food. In the kitchen, he shoveled cold rice into his mouth, enjoying the bland taste after so many days without it. Heaven. There were fresh buns all rolled up and waiting to be steamed; he found the steamer baskets and started heating water. "Tonight I shall eat like a king." There was dried meat hanging; he was too hungry to cut it up and cook it. "Maybe I should have left one or two of them alive so they could cook for me," he mused as the water started giving off small whisps of steam.

He was hungry. He ate until his concave stomach was visibly bloated. He vomited most of it back up, his stomach unable to digest so much food all at once.

Then he packed. Clothing that looked like it might fit him, was clean, and didn't have the Wen brand. A bedroll that looked more clean than dirty and didn't smell bad. Blankets that also looked and smelled clean. He could wash them later now that he had money to spend. A knife went into each sleeve. Food went into special pouches already covered with preservation talismans. Wine... it was barely palatable. But it filled the hole in his soul, made his stomach glow with a warmth that nowhere came near to approximating the warmth of a Golden Core. It was all he had.

All he would ever have, now.

He was smarter with the next Supervisory Office. "Where is Wen Chao?" he asked the last man alive.

"I don't know!" the man squealed and pissed himself again.

"Find him. Tell him I'm looking for him. I'm going to kill him." Behind him, the scarlet woman ghost hissed and licked her face of blood. At his feet, a child ghoul grinned around the hand he was eating. The soldier ran off into the night, the smell of urine drifting in his wake.

Food. He'd planned this attack to occur just before dinner was served. The kitchen aromas set his mouth watering. Fresh rice and meat. He was more careful this time; he didn't want to waste good food now that he had a source for it. The wine, somehow, was even worse than before; it was sufficient to get him drunk. He awoke, fuzzy mouth and throbbing head, relieved the corpses of their coins and food, and set out. He had a direction now; the soldier the previous night ran east.

So east he would head, too. He had enough money, now, to stay in inns on the nights he wasn't fluting his ghosts to execute the soldiers in Supervisory Offices. He felt mildly... disturbed... at stealing for a living. They stole from me first. My home, my family, my core. It's not stealing. It's... repayment for damages they caused.

A week after escaping the Burial Mounds he found them: Wen Chao and Wen ZhuLiu. The Wen spare babbled wildly conflicting orders to his subordinates. The protector stood guard, face stony. Wei WuXian lightly jumped to the roof of a barn and set his flute to his mouth. There was a plant in the Burial Mounds (he'd discovered it the hard way) whose sap would cause skin to blister and hair to fall out. He fluted a request to one of his ghosts to run her cool hands, covered in the sap, over Wen Chao's head and any exposed skin. He could almost hear the skin crackling. Given time, the skin would heal.... Wen Chao would not be given time.

The ghoul child, emboldened perhaps by the screaming man, leaped forward and ripped a boot off. Though but a child of perhaps six or seven when he died, he had the strength of an adult undead and was able to hold Wen Chao's leg long enough to take several bites before the bloodied foot broke free and kicked him away. "Good boy," Wei WuXian crooned as the child scampered up the building to sit at his side. "Do you like your treat? You can eat as much as you want." The Core Melting Hand flew his master away to safety. "You can follow him, my friends," Wei WuXian stated, standing up and brushing dirt from his skirts. He didn't need to be present for his ghosts to keep rubbing the sap on any exposed part of Wen Chao's body, nor for the child to continue to eat the man. He followed at a leisurely pace, sometimes getting close enough to play his flute in warning before Wen ZhuLiu flew them away.

Torturing Wen Chao was fun. His pain and suffering was but a small portion of the amount he owed for the pain and suffering he had caused. But then... he met up with his girlfriend.

Wang LingJiao cried loudly upon seeing her lover's visage destroyed, skin blackened or red and peeling. By this time, the child had eaten every toe and one complete foot. Wei WuXian decided he needed to stay closer to the trio... give her the same opportunity to be tortured.

She, however, wasn't going to be tortured physically. No. Wei WuXian played his flute while she slept and sent her nightmares. She'd wake, panicked, to find ghosts reenacting her dreams. The night she finally went insane, she dreamed of leaving her lover. Upon waking (or was she still dreaming?), she tried to pack her belongings; the ghoul child hid inside her jewelry box. Hid under her bed, so that only his gleaming eyes could be seen. Mind fractured, she broke every piece of furniture trying to kill the ghoul. Wei WuXian's eyes glowed blood red as he fluted her to her death. Eat it, he commanded. She must have been at least partly dead because she obeyed his order, picking up the leg of a stool and shoving it down her throat. Good girl.

I should have branded her face first he realized only after she was cold to the touch. Let her become what she wanted for MianMian in the cave. He could still brand her face, of course. But what was a brand to a corpse? Nothing. It was the living being who would be shamed and hurt at seeing her face become ugly. Uglier.

The child crept into the room holding what appeared to be part of a leg. He gnawed on the end, started sucking out the mucus. "Is that Wen Chao's?" The child grinned. "I hope you don't get sick." Wei WuXian patted the happy child on the head. "Shall we continue to torture him? Or should we just kill him?" The child looked down at the leg, looked down at his bloated belly, belched, and looked up, accusingly, at his master. "Ahh... little one.... There are plenty of Wen cultivators for you to eat if I kill this one. You won't go hungry. I promise."

It was long past the dinner hour. The kitchen fires were down to coals, and the leftover food was cold. He'd eaten far worse than cold rice and gelatinous soup before. "It still tastes better than that medicinal food they serve in the Cloud Recesses," he informed his ghosts. There were large pieces of pork in the soup. "Ahh... if you were alive, I'd promise to take you to my shijie once this is all over. She makes the best soups. Especially her...." his voice trailed off. He had no idea if she was alive or dead. He had no idea if any of his friends were alive or dead. "Anyways... she's a great cook. The best. I know I promised that I'd set you free after this is all done.... But... maybe we can renegotiate a bit? ShiJie is the best woman alive and that... jerk... insulted her. Maybe torturing the idiot would be a bit extreme, but just a little bit of pain before we kill him?

"Yeah... you're right. ShiJie would be rather mad if I killed him. For some stupid reason, she still loves the asshole."