Without Xio and Lanhua to act as a buffer, the silence in the room became a storm—heavier, more oppressive than any thunderhead could ever be.
The only thing Lingxi could hear was Kage Ou's forced, calm breathing. The only thing he could see was the uncomfortable twitch at the corner of his friend's lips. He knew that look. That specific, contained strangeness in his bearing.
How could he not? He had seen it once before, lifetimes ago, just after the incident that had stolen his youth. Kage Ou had been the youth himself then, and Lingxi had been the one begging for the restorative bath. The memory was a ghost between them now.
At first, Lingxi said nothing. They both held the silence, a brittle thing. He could feel something was wrong. Profoundly, sickeningly wrong. But the poison muddling his mind wouldn't let him grasp what. His hand twitched with the instinct to reach out, a pull in his chest tightening when he saw Kage Ou swallow hard, a telltale knot of tension in his throat.
He's hiding something. Definitely hiding.
Lingxi was weak, yes. His head spun, his eyes felt scraped dry, his heart sat in his throat like a stone. He didn't want to remember how fragile this simple ritual had rendered him.
Or had it been simple at all?
His spiraling thoughts narrowed to a single, agonizing point: Why does Kage Ou look like this? So silent, so struggling, so deathly serious? When all Lingxi felt was a regression, a dizzying slide back to the raw vulnerability of his twenty-five-year-old self. He wanted to embrace him, to seek the anchor he'd never properly allowed himself to hold. But there was a long, scarred-over history behind that hesitation.
'My only friend… what if he disappears too, if I go close? Just as…' The unfinished thought said more than he ever could.
'But… I've hurt him. He always wanted a hug. Was it that hard to give?' He scolded himself, the guilt making his dry eyes feel leaden.
"Kage…" The whisper was so light it seemed to float on the stagnant air. He tilted his head, trying to see past the curtain of Kage Ou's black hair—hair that now seemed less like a part of him and more like a deliberate screen.
Before the name could fully leave his lips, hands that had always been so careful with boundaries shot out and gripped his throat.
It wasn't painful. Not physically. It was a memory given form. The breath hitched in Lingxi's chest, stolen by the sudden, familiar-yet-long-gone behavior. He blinked rapidly, trying to master his reaction.
"Couldn't you—listen to me for once?!" Kage Ou hissed through clenched teeth. His one visible dark eye held a raw, wild light—none of the usual mocking mischief. His face was so close Lingxi could feel the warm, agitated brush of his breath. "If you are so determined to die, I'll slit your throat open myself. At least it will be by my hand."
Lingxi could feel it. His friend was a maelstrom of anger and a deep, searing hurt. And he, Lingxi, was a fool for not knowing the reason.
He held Kage Ou's gaze. The sudden proximity felt… unexpected. Intimate in a way that had nothing to do with affection.
Then, a pain—sharp as a razor's edge and thin as a spider's thread—lanced through the unstable gem at his temple. A faint hiss escaped him. His eyes screwed shut of their own accord, but he didn't speak. His bottom lip trembled, quivering with a thousand feelings for which he had no words.
The human heart is a cruel organ. When true sadness crashes in, time collapses. Past and present become one crushing weight. Lingxi felt the entire aching catalog of his life flood over him: the lost family, the fall from grace as a glamorous angelic cultivator, the decades of borrowed strength, every failure, every silent plea.
"I'm—sorry…" The apology choked out of him, his voice cracked and frayed, almost unrecognizable. The earlier, absurd panic over his robe was a distant dream.
His broken state acted like a douse of cold water on Kage Ou's rage. The fury in his eye snuffed out, replaced by instant, gut-deep concern. The hands at Lingxi's throat loosened, then shifted to cradle his face instead. The touch transformed from a threat back to its old, painful tenderness.
Lingxi did not break down easily. He did not say sorry. That he was doing both now was the truest measure of his fragility. The gem's instability and the venom of the black water had eroded his emotional defenses to nothing.
"No. I'm sorry," Kage Ou said quickly, his tone softening, turning almost pleading. "For snapping like that. This… fucking way." He bit his tongue, a habitual check against the curses Lingxi despised.
Lingxi looked up at him through pale lashes, but not to scold his language. Instead, it was as if the dam holding back a lifetime of frustration had finally shattered. He no longer cared for propriety. "And why the fuck have I been as fragile as glass for sixty years?!"
Kage Ou froze under the outburst. He could see it plainly now—the deep, abiding hatred Lingxi held for his own weakness, for walking through life like a precious doll that constantly needed Kage Ou there to catch him before he shattered. He said nothing. He just let the torrent come, even when Lingxi's careless, agitated movement threatened to peel a strip of the delicate, artificially youthful skin from his own cheek. Kage Ou simply cupped the spot gently, his demonic energy a soothing press until the skin knit back to perfection.
"Is a man supposed to be like this?!" Lingxi's voice rose, raw and scraping. "Why am I always the one who ends up living on your back? And why do you always… always… put yourself in the path of my problems? I can't pay you back! I have nothing!"
"Because your problem is my problem," Kage Ou answered, his own voice rising slightly to meet the tide, trying to stem the flow of this dangerous, regret-fueled anguish. "Because we are friends. And friends shoulder things… even if the burden seems one-sided." He paused, a flat, bittersweet chuckle escaping him.
"You're saying this because of the Youth Spring, right? I never held a price over that. It was a gift. It's worthless to me if there's no one alive beside me to annoy…" The corner of his lips lifted in a gesture that was almost tender as he used his thumb to wipe away the traitorous tear that had escaped Lingxi's eye.
Lingxi swallowed hard, the words striking a dissonant chord. So the ability he'd spent a lifetime trying to unseal, the ice power… it was for nothing? The gem on his forehead now felt less like a treasure and more like a painful, useless tumor.
The fury returned, white-hot and directionless. He tried to shove Kage Ou away sharply, acting on pure emotion, not thought. He grabbed the loose collar of Kage Ou's robe. "You—you kept me on my feet for sixty years?! What kind of friend does that?! I can never be a demonic cultivator like you! I can't live like some beaten actor following your script!"
Kage Ou hissed as Lingxi, in his struggle, accidentally knocked their foreheads together. But he ignored his own pain. His hand flew instead to cover the violently shimmering gem on Lingxi's brow, stabilizing it with a surge of dark energy. He had no other choice. He used his weight and strength, pinning Lingxi down onto the bed.
"Release me!" Lingxi yelled, an order from a man who was used to being obeyed.
"No." Kage Ou's voice was calm, final. His visible eye held Lingxi's, unblinking.
"Kage…" A warning, weaker now.
"No. God knows what you'll do if I let go. So just listen , best friend, or…" his voice dropped, laced with a history of complicated titles, "…gege?"
Lingxi just glared up at him, stubborn and trapped. He felt like a wild bird caught in a net, being spoken to in soft, maddening tones.
"I really fooled a man twenty years my senior from the mighty Hàngwō Sect once?" Kage Ou mused suddenly, shifting the topic while maintaining his grip, pinning Lingxi's wrists above his head. He was careful, even now, to keep the right side of his face tilted away, his eye hidden. "Unbelievable."
Lingxi's eyes widened at the words—and at the reality of their position. Zero distance. Kage Ou was on him. He was beneath him. The memory of the robe-changing incident flashed back with ludicrous clarity, the situation now eerily, intimately flipped.
"Why… you… then…?" he mumbled, his voice finally descending from its frantic peak. His pulse hammered visibly at the base of his throat, a frantic bird caught in a cage of his own making.
Kage Ou fell silent.
Had he asked something wrong? Was the answer truly so difficult?
He didn't know. That's why he'd asked.
Seeing the poison of regret beginning to cloud Lingxi's eyes again, Kage Ou chose deflection. He aimed for distraction, offering absurdities to pull Lingxi from the brink. "You have two options for your question," he began, his tone adopting a false, conversational lightness. "Number one: I did it because I was greedy for the ice power you had. Or still have, somewhere in there. And option two…" he leaned infinitesimally closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur that seemed to weave a strange, calming magic, "…I just wanted a friendship that was never meant to be normal. One that could span twenty years of distance and still feel like this."
Lingxi blinked, feeling foolish. How was he supposed to choose? How could he decipher the intentions of a pure demonic cultivator? Where could good possibly reside?
He didn't answer. He was too afraid of being wrong. Instead, he turned the blade. "What have you done to your right eye?" he demanded, his gaze sharpening. "Why are you hiding it? Show me."
The tender, manufactured smirk faded from Kage Ou's face. He looked at Lingxi, a silent war raging behind his visible eye—to confess or to flee. His grip loosened just enough for Lingxi to make a sudden move, his free hand darting up to push the hair aside.
Kage Ou recoiled as if burned, his own hand snapping up to cover the hidden eye.
"What's wrong?" Lingxi pushed, the momentum of confrontation carrying him. "Answer me. If you think of me as a friend, why hold back?"
"Ling… you need to rest," Kage Ou countered, his voice tight. "Your gem… it's not stable yet."
"Stop twisting your words! Just answer! Or I won't answer any more of your stupid questions either!" Lingxi's stubbornness was a force of nature— like ice storm, a relic of the proud cultivator he'd once been.
A heavy, profound silence filled the room, thick enough to choke on.
Kage Ou's shoulders slumped a fraction, a semblance of defeat in the line of his body. When he finally spoke, his voice was so quiet it seemed to bleed from the shadows themselves.
"Would you believe me," he whispered, the words a fragile, dangerous thing, "if I told you it's not there where it should be… but in you?"
Lingxi froze.
The world narrowed to that single, impossible sentence.
In him?
What… could that possibly mean?