Chapter Text
“Impossible to bring back, impossible to find.” 1
No matter how many times the butterfly demon Yuan Wuhuo performed the qiú qiān divination, sacrificing for it the years of his lifespan and his demonic cultivation, the answer always remained the same.
One might have thought the qiú qiān simply did not work — after all, not everyone who calls themselves a Daoist is truly a Daoist, and not everything called a magical artifact is truly an artifact — yet these very sticks had once accurately foretold to the disgraced nine-tailed fox Xiaowei where to find the reincarnation of her beloved Wang Sheng. It also helped Yuan Wuhuo multiple times to locate weaknesses in Daoist formations and escape death.
And yet, to this particular question, it always gave the same answer.
How ironic.
Sixty years ago, the Six-Eyed Butterfly didn’t need no life-draining artifacts to perceive the true nature of things. Such was the way they were born — to be able to see the unseen and to hear the unheard.
But there remained only three eyes to the Six-Eyed Butterfly, and, from that time on, everything invisible and inaudible laid beyond a veil of shadows for Yuan Wuhuo.
Sometimes it seemed to Yuan Wuhuo that the accuracy of the divination was adversely affected by the immense obsession of the original Yuan Wuhuo, which was now reigning supreme within the demonic heart of the current one Yuan Wuhuo. That mortal old man had proven astonishingly stubborn and strong-willed.
Sixty years ago, when the demon lord Jiu Ying sent the Six-Eyed Butterfly to obtain the memories of the old demon hunter Yuan Wuhuo who was dying from illness, the task seemed being simple: to weave a cocoon around the victim, to find a flaw within his heart, to wait for the cocoon’s demonic power to corrode said heart through that flaw, to dissolve the victim into a nourishing broth of memories, useful knowledge, and remnants of qì, and then to devour it all — and the task would be complete.
But the mortal old man proved tougher than any other creature unfortunate enough to fall into their grasp. His unspoken love, boundless regret, and heartfelt obsession were so enormous that it took the demonic cocoon decades to dissolve them. Had fate not decreed that this mortal’s path would end within the cocoon of the Six-Eyed Butterfly, he would surely have been reborn as a powerful vengeful spirit.
It turned out that even the Six-Eyed Butterfly themselves were incapable of remaining within the cocoon for so long, and they, too, began to dissolve. Had the old man been only a little more stubborn, the current Yuan Wuhuo would have vanished without a trace alongside him within that cocoon. In the end, even though the butterfly demon managed to get out of the cocoon alive, he no longer remained entirely himself.
The demon hunter, dissolved into memories, emotions, and regrets, had mingled with the dissolved parts of the Six-Eyed Butterfly against their will, depriving them the opportunity to choose which pieces of the victim to consume. Thus, the current Yuan Wuhuo got the victim’s overwhelming obsession with his deceased younger brother Yuan Xizai and with the fox demon who took the latter’s skin and place. If the divination were performed by this obsession of the mortal old man instead of the current Yuan Wuhuo, the answer would surely be the same — the soul that has already entered reincarnation circle cannot be brought back; the one who has already died cannot be found.
At times, it seemed to the butterfly demon Yuan Wuhuo that he also had gotten some sentimentality from the original Yuan Wuhuo. Demons are incapable of understanding human emotions — they know neither love nor longing — and yet he was sure the mortals would call this feeling exactly that way.
Sixty years ago, he could barely imagine that he would experience such a feeling himself. The Six-Eyed Butterfly had never possessed anything to yearn for, nor anyone to love. Inseparable since their very first metamorphosis, they had never even needed names by which to address one another, nor any human language to communicate — they had always existed as if they were a single whole, two halves of one organism, understanding each other without words, anticipating each other’s every movement, seeing the essence of all things in the same way.
They never longed for one another, because they had never been apart; nor did they love one another as one can love another being, because they were one.
The current Yuan Wuhuo could not imagine that such longing could be his own, and so he preferred to believe that these human emotions, like poison, had seeped into his bones within that damned cocoon.
At the end of his life, the old Yuan “no calamity” Wuhuo regretted that he had gained nothing in his life. The current Yuan “gained nothing” Wuhuo believed that the desire to obtain something had been nurtured the heart demon in that mortal hardhead. One should detach oneself from the thought of achieving anything, in that way one would become truly free.
Yet the butterfly demon Yuan Wuhuo himself was not free, just like the mortal demon hunter Yuan Wuhuo before him. Something within his heart — whether it was the old man’s longing or something entirely different — was forcing him now to spend precious centuries of cultivation on the illusory hope that this time, the divination sticks qiú qiān would give him a different answer.
***
The current Yuan Wuhuo had noticed Li Jie long ago — almost immediately after he found his way out of that ill-fated cocoon, all alone and irrevocably changed. Though his demonic magic still remained, it had been altered under the influence of memories, qì, and obsession of his victim: from an emperor saturnia moth he had become a mourning cloak butterfly2 and, although his third eye remained on the back of his left hand, yet the ability to open it vanished, alongside with the ability to see into the true nature of things.
Instead of it, he had gotten an unpleasantly nagging feeling in his chest, harrowing and wistful, like sorrow lingering within the ruins of an abandoned mountaintop temple whose only visitors for centuries had been snow and wind. Yuan Wuhuo felt as though he had been missing something important that once was his, but in his memory that something laid beneath the shifting surface of water, impossible to see clearly through no matter how hard he tried.
What he could see clearly, however, was the dead Yuan Wuhuo’s longing for his brother and for a demon wearing that brother’s face, neither of whom he had been able to save. The demonic despite for the pathetic human emotions within him wished to laugh at despair and weakness of a foolish old man. Yet now that despair and weakness belonged to him as well, and all Yuan Wuhuo could do was dwell on them and follow where they led.
The obsession of the old demon hunter drew the current Yuan Wuhuo toward the Shilin Sect. In a butterfly form, he flew toward its gates. The protective formation surrounding the sect did not allow demons to enter, yet his desire to remain near this place was strong enough to linger there for a long while, circling aimlessly above the heads of noisy merchants and excited townsfolk hurrying toward the river with prayer boats for the dragon deity.
That was when he saw Li Jie for the first time.
Li Jie looked exactly like the mortal Yuan Wuhuo had in his youth — tall, broad-shouldered, with a massive saber in his hand, not devoured by age or illness yet. And beside him walked Yuan Xizai. No— not him. It was the fox demon Ji Ling, who had taken that appearance after Xizai’s death. The whole scene looked like an idyllic family reunion, and the hollowness belonging to the old mortal man responded to it with a dull, dragging pain in Yuan Wuhuo’s chest.
The demon within Yuan Wuhuo merely smirked. Just as Ji Ling was not truly Yuan Xizai, this young and full of vitality man was not and could not be the real Yuan Wuhuo.
A family idyll of two impostors.
But then he could really be—
The butterfly demon rushed toward them. He did not dare fly too close, lest he attracted the unwanted attention of the sect members to his demonic nature, but he came near enough to sense that both of them — Ji Ling and this youthful Yuan Wuhuo — were ordinary humans. There was no demonic aura, no trace of demonic power.
How could that be possible?
Ji Ling had usually been using puppets in order to leave at least with a part of his soul the Shilin sect where he was locked, so the absence of demonic aura around him was understandable. But death could not be reversed, so how come Yuan Wuhuo became young and healthy again? The butterfly demon decided to fly closer and touch him, using his qì to make certain the man was truly mortal. Yet in the next moment, the need vanished. The puppet Ji Ling and his companion stepped onto the staircase leading to the sect gates, and the magical trigrams guarding the entrance merely shimmered with golden characters as the two of them passed through the barrier without hindrance.
Whoever Ji Ling’s companion was, he was not a demon. Which meant he was not the one the current Yuan Wuhuo was looking for.
The realization shook him so deeply that it overpowered even the old man’s obsession with this place.
The demon Yuan Wuhuo immediately seized the chance to free himself, even if for a while, from the lingering desires of the mortal Yuan Wuhuo, and hurried back to the Moon Sect, to the Demon Lord Jiu Ying, in order to tell him what he had managed to find out in the old man’s memories.
***
The Demon Lord Jiu Ying was displeased with how long it had taken the Six-Eyed Butterfly to absorb the memories of the old Yuan Wuhuo: during that time, Wu Shiguang — the tenth dragon created by the nine dragon deities for Jiu Ying’s terminal annihilation — had not only grown up, but had also mastered a great number of spells under the guidance of his powerful teacher.
Something inside the butterfly demon Yuan Wuhuo — whether demonic resentment or human mourning — stirred with irritation in response. Because of this task, the Six-Eyed Butterfly had gone through unwanted changes and lost not only their unique ability to see the true nature of things, but also each other.
Of course, Yuan Wuhuo did not tell Jiu Ying that. When Jiu Ying ordered him to find all the Great Demons who had placed their powers into Ji Ling’s Spirit-Binding Ring, Yuan Wuhuo only said impassively that he had lost the ability to open his third eye and therefore did not know where to search for them.
That was how he came to possess the qiú qiān sticks.
***
Jiu Ying, of course, did not personally hand the qiú qiān sticks to Yuan Wuhuo, nor did he warn him what using them would cost. He merely mentioned that the artifact had once been kept in the Shilin Sect, until it mysteriously disappeared right after the death of one of its members two hundred years ago. No further explanation was needed — if the disappearance of the artifact was connected to the death of a demon hunter, then one needed to visit the hunter’s grave.
The Shilin Sect’s hunters were buried outside the city, at the foot of a hill. The modest cemetery looked more like a family burial ground for poor peasants than a necropolis of a wealthy sect known far beyond its surroundings. However, it was not neglected: even the oldest burial mounds remained tall and free of weeds, the names on the tablets were regularly refreshed with ink, some graves had offerings of fruit and pastries in bowls, and the wind had not yet scattered the fresh ashes of burned spirit money in the round bronze basins — it seemed the sect disciples often came down the mountain to maintain the place. At least when the cemetery was in use: not far from the entrance, white mourning banners were waving in the breeze above a new grave.
Yuan Wuhuo looked around. Where could a sect member be buried if he was important enough for an immortal artifact to be placed in his grave? His attention was immediately drawn to a mausoleum almost hidden by the branches of blooming pagoda trees. It stood out sharply from its surroundings — too luxurious for such simple cemetery — and yet too abandoned. This must have been the place.
The butterfly demon walked straight toward the pagoda trees. The path snaked among old, half-forgotten burial mounds — clearly still maintained and re-inscribed by sect disciples, yet the offering bowls and spirit money burners were empty. When Yuan Wuhuo was about three zhàng away from the mausoleum, he suddenly felt the urge to stop. His gaze caught on three unremarkable old graves right beside the path. The memorial tablets in front of their mounds were clearly carved by the same hand. The inscriptions read: Yuan Xizai, Yuan Qingyuan, Lu Guangyu — a brother and parents of the real Yuan Wuhuo.
The demon Yuan Wuhuo felt— something. Perhaps, longing. Perhaps, regret. Perhaps, grief. He did not understand human emotions. The human part of the old Yuan Wuhuo, eroding current Yuan Wuhuo like poison, wanted to weep, to fall to his knees before the burial mounds, to bring them all back to life — those lying beneath these mounds. The butterfly demon within him— no, this time did not mock the human weaknesses which was inherited by him from the obsessed dead man. Instead, he felt that this lingering sense of loss of the real Yuan Wuhuo was something he could understand. It was a strange and new realization for him.
He stood there for a while, looking at the tablets of not his family, then slowly returned to the cemetery entrance where white mourning banners fluttered above a fresh mound. He took several large apples from the offering bowl and three incense sticks lying next to the burner, then walked back. Stealing offerings from the dead would be a grave sin for any human, but the butterfly demon was not human, and so he felt no guilt. Still, he did not fully understand why he did it. Perhaps for the real Yuan Wuhuo, whose emotions now laid like a heavy weight in his heart.
Standing before Yuan Xizai’s grave and feeling the full depth of longing and sorrow left in him by the human Yuan Wuhuo, the butterfly demon came to a thought for the first time: the qiú qiān divination sticks might prove useful not only to Jiu Ying.
***
“Impossible to bring back, impossible to find.” That was all the divination sticks ever answered when he asked where his— brother? double? other half? was now.
This was the first question the butterfly demon Yuan Wuhuo asked the divination sticks the moment they came into his hands. It was the same question he kept asking with enviable regularity after he discovered qiú qiān actually worked remarkably well, and even later, when he realized that each divination had been devouring his lifespan and demonic cultivation. And the more he asked, the more feelings the sameness of the answer stirred in him.
At first, a flat “I phrased the question wrong” gave way to an angry “the old man’s lingering obsession is having a pull on the answer,” then to a stubborn “even if I can’t find him or he is dead, I must know what happened,” and finally it melted into a desperate “I must not become like that old man and wish for someone who has already disappeared from existence for good.”
But one day, something mortals call hope replaced despair in Yuan Wuhuo’s heart. Jiu Ying’s plan was working — the nine-tailed fox Xiaowei had indeed withdrawn her power from Ji Ling’s Spirit-Binding Ring in exchange for information on where to find Wang Sheng. Seeing no trap, she immediately focused all her attention on saving Wang Sheng from the consequences of her own spells, at the same time dealing with his (her) admirer: a mantis stalking a cicada, unaware that a sparrow was watching from behind.
Yuan Wuhuo observed all of this from the side, unnoticed in his butterfly form. But the more he watched, the less acceptance he felt toward the outcome of the qiú qiān divination. Jiu Ying expected Xiaowei to dissipate the dragon power saving her beloved, and thus to prevent Wu Shiguang from having it. And Xiaowei would definitely spend it that way — her obsession with Wang Sheng was no less than the old demon hunter Yuan Wuhuo’s obsession. Jiu Ying wanted the dragon power gone, and he did not care how it would happen. Said dragon power could turn back time and resurrect the dead. So why should Xiaowei be the one to spend it on resurrection?
The only problem was that another’s power could not simply be absorbed — Xiaowei contained the dragon power because it had been granted to her by the dragon deity Chi Wen; Ji Ling could use others’ powers because he possessed the Spirit-Binding Ring — but Yuan Wuhuo had nothing that could hold dragon magic once it left Xiaowei’s body.
Speaking of the ring.
Ji Ling had once told the mortal Yuan Wuhuo that his ring had such unique properties because it was made from a fragment of the Spirit-Storing Jade. That jade had been personally retrieved by the dragon deity Chi Wen from the most perilous place on earth — the Xuedong Rift, and even for a deity it had been no easy task. According to legends, the rest of the Spirit-Storing Jade still laid at the bottom of the Xuedong Rift, but it was unlikely that any ordinary demon-yāo could return from there alive, let alone with the jade.
The butterfly demon cast the qiú qiān sticks and received their unchanging answer once again, then lifted his sleeve and looked at his forearm. The once youthful body was now on the verge of decay — the skin greyed and wrinkled like that of a centenarian. This shell did not have much time left anyway. So what difference would it make whether he died in a desperate attempt to learn his fate from the qiú qiān, or at the bottom of the Xuedong Rift trying to change said fate?