“Yes,” said the ghost of the man whose life he had transmigrated into, wryly. “Why? Having trouble remembering the first person you ever killed?”
The question caught Mo Jian – the living one – off guard. Shock gave way to… something else. He couldn’t have named it, couldn’t have articulated it even with a sword to his neck: a paradoxical mix of discomfort and relief. Like waiting endlessly for bad news, only for it to arrive at last, just as dreadful as expected, but mercifully no longer unknown.
He snapped back almost on instinct, a reflexive defense rearing up before he could stop it. “I didn’t kill you,” he said hotly, then deflated a fraction. “It’s not like I had a choice.”
Strangely, the Ghost of his Christmas Past took it in stride. He merely nodded, shifting the Netherworld Scorpion from his hand to his shoulder, seemingly unconcerned by how close its stinger hovered to his eye. And as Mo Jian – the living one, he reminded himself – looked more closely…
Something was off.
The ghost wasn’t exactly like him. He struggled to pinpoint why, but the resemblance faltered under scrutiny.
The face didn’t quite match. Or rather, the expression didn’t. Even with one eyebrow raised in response to Mo Jian’s inspection, the ghostly Mo Jian felt… different. Less inclined toward laughter, more sullen in the set of his features. There was a stoicism there, but a puckered sort of stoicism, tinged with faint disdain, as though he looked down on the world.
And he was heavier. Crass as the thought was, Mo Jian realized, perhaps for the first time, that the original owner of this body had been fatter than he was used to. Compared to the man before him, he, the living version, was noticeably fitter.
The ghost was nearly bald; Mo Jian merely had a widening bald spot. He dressed plainly, while the ghost… also dressed plainly. Yes, that line of comparison was rapidly falling apart.
Still, the point remained. The differences were just pronounced enough to leave Mo Jian with a brief, unsettling sense of dissonance, as though he were looking at himself through a warped mirror, one that reflected not who he was, but who he might have been.
He drew a deliberate breath to steady himself, and to assert, wordlessly, that he was the one still breathing and therefore in charge. He immediately regretted it.
The faint scent of damp stone and an even fainter floral note were utterly overwhelmed by a stench so vile it made his eyes water. It was rancid: hot sewage and rotting garbage left to fester under an unforgiving sun, thick with buzzing flies, all mingled with the unmistakable reek of a long-neglected latrine. He coughed, and then promptly regretted that as well.
The taste was in his mouth.
Mo Jian raised a hand, trying futilely to ward off the smell with the long, flowing sleeves of his robe. His ghostly counterpart appeared thoroughly amused.
“Go on,” the ghost said lightly. “Show off again.”
Mo Jian – still the living one, he reminded himself – glowered. “What is that smell?” he ground out, directing the accusation squarely at the only other (non)living presence nearby.
His pale, pallid, and altogether worse-looking counterpart arched his other eyebrow, but answered nonetheless, gesturing toward the river flowing between them.
“The Sanzu River judges the weight of all sins in the world. Those burdened by many sins are heavy; they sink deep, untouched by the current, and cross to the other side in time to reach Hell. Those whose sins are few are lighter, and the flow carries them away to the Wang Chuan River, where they drink the Soup of Oblivion and are reincarnated.”
He paused, letting the words and the smell linger.
“That’s why the river stinks. The weight of countless sins settles in its depths, while what little good there is gets washed away. You didn’t notice it at first because you were more alive than dead. Now…” His gaze flicked meaningfully to Mo Jian. “You’re getting used to this place.”
Before Mo Jian could respond or even begin to untangle the deeply concerning implications of more alive than dead, the ghost harrumphed.
“That’s what you get for trying to show off.”
Mo Jian – still gloriously alive, despite the ghost’s obvious nonsense – snapped back. “I wasn’t showing off. And you… how are you even here? What is this place? And most importantly, how do I get out of it?”
The ghostly Mo Jian – proving himself vastly inferior to the living one – ignored the questions entirely. Instead, true to his washed-out nature, he seized on the least important part. “Not showing off?” he scoffed. “Please. If that’s true, I’ll change my name.”
Mo Jian drew himself up, ready to rain (holy) fire and cutting words upon this sorry excuse for a ghost, when he caught himself.
Why was he so irritated?
Where was this passive-aggressive sniping coming from? He had gone from almost dead to (hopefully) alive, found himself face-to-face with the ghost of the man whose body he’d transmigrated into after crossing worlds, and his dominant emotion was… annoyance?
He drew a slower, shallower breath. He was Mo Jian; the better version of Mo Jian. He needed to control himself.
Forcing down his childish irritation, he reclaimed the initiative. “You should change your name anyway. I mean, Mo Jian? Really? Mo for demon, Jian for trample.” He shook his head with exaggerated sorrow, deliberately ignoring the irony of mocking his own name. “You might as well have been called Cheong Ma for all the good it did.”
For the first time, the ghost flushed.
It was a deeply unsettling sight: his silvery pallor darkened, his composure cracking along with it. “Don’t mock my name, you ignoramus,” he snapped. “It means He Who Reflects All Under Heaven. Mo for ink, and thus wisdom. Jian for mirror, and thus reflection.” He punctuated each phrase with deliberate emphasis. “He. Who. Reflects. All. Under. Heaven.”
Then he sneered. “If anything, your name is the stupid one. It doesn’t even mean anything. James. Honestly.”
Mo Jian, formerly James Matthew, stiffened. The retort died on his tongue. There was… a lot he wanted to say to that, but-
“So you know,” he began, then cut himself off at the obvious conclusion. His voice came out flat. “You’ve seen my memories.”
The ghostly Mo Jian met his gaze without flinching. “Of course I have. Your arrival didn’t even have the decency to kill me properly.” His tone sharpened. “I was shoved aside into this place, trapped and unable to leave. And every time you needed something, you rifled through my memories or borrowed from my knowledge.”
He gestured vaguely, as though ticking off points in the air. “Did you never wonder why it was so easy to control my Heaven Enshrouding Ding? Why some memories surfaced effortlessly, while others resisted? Why your – my – qi never warped under the pressure of a foreign soul? Or why you could fight so well, so soon after arriving in my world, as if it were second nature?”
He paused, watching Mo Jian closely.
“It was me,” he said quietly. “I was helping you. Because what choice did I have? If you died, what would happen to me? Would I remain trapped here for eternity?” A humorless smile tugged at his lips. “At least this way, I had a chance. As long as you survived.”
His eyes darkened. “And just as you borrowed from me, I took advantage of the connection. I saw into your mind. Everything, from your life… to your death.”
Mo Jian was silent for a long time. It was probably odd – no, definitely odd – for him to feel wronged about that. Had he not had access to the original Mo Jian’s memories and power from the moment he crossed over? He had never given it a second thought before. And yet, learning that someone had rifled through his memories in return, he felt… a little betrayed. He knew he shouldn’t. He really did. And even beyond that-
“Then do you know about the story?”
The ghost scoffed. “Of course I know. Of all the things in your mind, it was the one thing that caught and held my interest. And story does not do it justice. Though poorly written, and just as poorly understood in your world, it was clearly something from the higher realms that somehow fell into your world. Perhaps from Heaven itself.”
Mo Jian had no interest in discussing that. Whether he had crossed into a fictional world, or whether the Earth he knew had always been part of the Three Thousandfold World System, he didn’t care. To him, this was his reality now. The mechanics of his transmigration were interesting, but ultimately irrelevant to the truth of it. Instead, he focused on what he wanted to learn.
“Then you know what your fate would have been,” he said. “What the future of the entire world is.”
For the first time, the ghostly Mo Jian faltered. His certainty wavered. He looked away, refusing to meet the eyes of his living counterpart. When he turned his head aside, his expression twisted: worried, anxious, and defiant, all at once. He looked, the living Mo Jian realized, like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“That,” the ghost said, all his confidence bleeding away, his voice cracking, “that…”
He stopped, clenching his translucent hands, something like frustration etched into the rigid line of his shoulders. “I am not a villain,” he almost shouted, forcing himself to meet the living Mo Jian’s eyes for a fleeting moment before his courage deserted him again. “I… everything I did… it wasn’t wrong.”
He swallowed, repeating it as though saying it again might make it true. “I wasn’t wrong.”
Even though he had been the one to raise the subject, the living Mo Jian felt a wave of guilt. In many ways, he had been dismissive of the original Mo Jian’s life. He had called him a scumbag, a villain, a failure in his own mind more times than he could count. Yet had his life truly been that evil?
Looking back on Mo Jian’s memories, it felt less like confronting a monster and more like dealing with someone petty and ungrateful; someone who preferred solitude to company, who clung to grudges, and who was, ultimately, deeply selfish. But none of that meant he deserved to die. None of it warranted being branded a villain.
Mo Jian – the living one – realized that much of his antipathy toward the original soul came from the events of the book: where he had failed to help the heroine, where he had been killed by the hero. Yet those events had not happened. The man – the ghost – standing before him had yet to pass through the defining moments that would have forever tarred him with the label of villain.
In a strange twist, Mo Jian found himself defending him.
“You weren’t a villain,” he said at last, careful not to let pity creep into his voice or expression. He knew how that would be taken. “But your actions in the future would have made you one.”
The ghost laughed, short and hollow. "That's a terrible thing to say."
"It's the only honest thing I have."
The ghost’s lips twisted into a bitter line, and he still refused to meet Mo Jian’s eyes, turning his face away as if it physically pained him.
“… it wasn’t like I knew,” he said at last. “And the sect… Bai Zhou… I never had any real connection to them. They used my name to make themselves seem grander than they were, and I gained some money in return. There was never supposed to be anything more than that…”
Then, as if forcing himself to do it, the ghost looked up. His eyes were strained, his composure fraying. "I am not-" He swallowed, and then tried again. "I know what was in the story. I know what I was supposed to become. But I am not that sort of person. I wouldn't have-" His voice cracked on the word. He didn't finish the sentence. "I don't know what would have happened. I can't know. But I know myself."
The fight drained out of him mid-sentence, like a cord cut. His shoulders dropped. He looked, suddenly, much less like a ghost and much more like a tired man.
Mo Jian said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn't land wrong. Agreement felt like condescension. Disagreement felt cruel. And the ghost wasn't asking to be believed, not really. He was saying it because he needed to have said it, because dying without saying it would have been worse. Mo Jian understood that more than he expected to.
The silence stretched. A fresh wave of pity washed over him. It was difficult not to let it show, but he managed. What the ghost needed now was a change of subject, and perhaps, if Mo Jian was lucky, some small consolation.
“Well,” began Mo Jian lightly, “it’s not all on you. Ye Chen wasn’t exactly a paragon of rationality or tolerance either. Since the story was told from his perspective, I wouldn’t be surprised if every antagonist was made more cartoonishly evil just to justify his actions. And compared to a lot of the enemies that came later, you were… comparatively benign.”
It was, the Mo Jian who hailed from Earth would freely admit, a rather paltry attempt at reassurance.
Still, his ghostly counterpart seemed to take heart from it. Some of the tension eased from his posture, and he stood a little straighter, no longer quite so hunched.
“I’m not sure a comparison to Old Devil Fu, or Prince Xiang Chengxuan, or Mars – or worse, the Immortal of Slaughter – does me any favors,” he said, a faint chuckle escaping him, less grim than before. “But thank you for saying that.”
He shook his head lightly. “As for Ye Chen… who knows? Neither of us will be interacting with him in this lifetime.”
Mo Jian – living (and successfully so) – raised a flesh-and-blood eyebrow. “I will be,” he said, with a mix of confusion and an instinctive emotion he could only describe as making sure you haven’t hit your head, because why would you say that? “He’s bound to show up in a couple of years. And while I’d like nothing more than to stay at least a thousand li away from him at all times, we’ll likely end up interacting anyway, even if only because Bai Ning is-”
“There is no Ye Chen,” the ghost said, cutting him off.
The words were calm, almost gentle. His eyes showed a strange sort of pity.
“Ever since I’ve been trapped here, my understanding of the cycle of life and death has improved tremendously,” he continued gently. “Which is why I can say with complete and utter confidence that there is no person named Ye Chen alive on Tianxia who matches the hero from the story. I’ve searched, as thoroughly as one can from here: he does not exist. Anywhere.”
Mo Jian gaped at him, utterly taken aback. Panic and denial surged up his chest, but before he could speak, before he could even fully register the weight of that declaration, the ghost continued.
“I don’t know whether your arrival caused it, or whether Ye Chen’s absence came first, but…” His voice hardened slightly. “The hero does not exist. You need to understand that and plan accordingly.”
The hero does not exist.
The ghost kept speaking. Mo Jian heard the words, somewhere at a remove, the way you hear rain from inside a room that has just become very quiet. He understood them. He would be able to repeat them back if asked. He just couldn't quite make them land yet.
The hero does not exist. That sentence kept echoing in his mind, over and over again, until everything else fell away. He felt unmoored and flat-footed.
How?
The hero does not exist? That made no sense. What of the threats that were still to come? What of the Immortal of Slaughter? Who would deal with them?
Mo Jian drew a slow breath that didn’t quite reach his lungs.
If the hero did not exist, then the story he remembered; the careful chain of cause and effect, the disasters averted at the last possible moment, collapsed into dust. Those threats would not vanish simply because their designated savior had. The Immortal of Slaughter was undoubtedly real. The wars, the sect purges, the catastrophes he remembered from the book: those were real too. And they were coming, regardless of the hero’s absence. Calamity did not require an audience to arrive on schedule.
He lifted his head abruptly, cutting off whatever the ghost was saying. “You’re certain,” he said, his voice steady only because he forced it to be. It wasn’t a question.
The ghost inclined his head. “Certain enough to stake what remains of my soul on it.”
“Really certain?”
“I said so.”
Mo Jian wanted to close his eyes, to shut the words out entirely, but he couldn’t. He had asked, and he had been answered. "I know. I needed to hear it twice."
And yet…
Even beyond the looming threats, he felt lost. He had spent so long waiting for Ye Chen to appear, for the story to begin. Now it wasn’t merely altered. It was impossible. A part of him had always feared that his presence would change things, bend the hero’s path in unforeseen ways. But this was not different.
This was unrecognizable.
Without Ye Chen-
“-It’ll fall to you and your disciple,” the ghost cut in, as though reading Mo Jian’s thoughts. Given everything else, he probably was.
Mo Jian looked up at his spectral counterpart. The ghost was now idly stroking the equally translucent scorpion perched on his shoulder, looking utterly unbothered. Mo Jian tried to gather his thoughts, but his mind felt wrapped in layers of cobwebs, each thought requiring deliberate effort to reach.
“What?” he managed. It was marginally better than the Bwuh? hovering on his tongue.
The ghost raised a translucent eyebrow. Whatever sympathy he’d had evaporated as he spoke slowly, with exaggerated patience. “I said,”-he lifted his free hand, shaping his fingers around each word as if addressing an infant-“that the coming future now falls to you and your disciple.”
The fog vanished. Irritation surged back in full force.
In that moment, both the hero and the future were wiped clean from Mo Jian’s thoughts. He narrowed his eyes and said coolly, “Stop that. Or is that how you prefer to receive information? I assure you, I am nowhere near that slow.” He arranged his features into an expression of smug superiority.
The ghost – nothing more than a pale shadow of his living magnificence – snorted. “At least you’re not panicking any more. And I’ll forgive your words too, just this once. You are probably starting to realize for yourself why we’re rubbing each other the wrong way. In many ways, we were never meant to meet.”
He paused, voice turning wry.
“So the world is pushing us to either fight… or leave each other’s presence.”
Mo Jian stilled at that. Now that the ghost had said it aloud, he could feel it. The uncharacteristic irritation, the sharp edge of his annoyance, the instinctive urge to outdo the ghost (which he would never admit out loud). He had noticed it before, brushed it aside, sworn not to indulge in it.
And yet here it was again.
The world was pushing them apart? What did that even mean?
But-
It could wait. He had more important things to ask. And while he would never admit it, the ghost had pulled him out of the building panic that had been threatening to consume him. The past few days had been so relentless, so extraordinary, that he felt drained, almost dulled; his reactions slower, his understanding tinged with a mental fatigue he couldn’t quite shake. The tournament, Fu Zhan, Old Devil Fu, the Netherworld Domain… and now this revelation about Ye Chen not existing. He was barely keeping up, reacting instead of acting.
But, this was not something he could ignore.
He looked at the ghost, like a distorted reflection showing his (thankfully non-existent) ugly side, and forced his attention back to the matter at hand. “What do you mean it will fall on me and my disciple?” he demanded. “Are you saying that Bai Ning must step into the role of the hero, and I have to help her?”
………………………………………………….
AN: The next chapter continues directly from this moment; there are no scene breaks, just a single continuous conversation. If this stopping point feels a little odd, that’s because it isn’t really a stopping point at all; it’s simply the most natural place I could find to split one chapter into two.