ON THE LAST DAY of Chu Wanning's seclusion, an uninvited guest arrived at Sisheng Peak.
While Mo Ran was helping Chu Wanning dress, bright and early, a quick rapping came on the doors of Red Lotus Pavilion. After ten days of cultivating in a deep trance, Chu Wanning was still muzzy and disoriented. He rather indifferently said, "Please come in."
Mo Ran snorted.
"What are you laughing at?"
"Shizun set barriers at the door. Other than myself, Xue Meng, and the others, who else could come in?"
Only then did Chu Wanning remember the spells and lift a hand to release them. A panicked messenger disciple hurtled in like a headless chicken, smelling strongly of wine. "Bad news, Yuheng Elder! A powerful demon's making a mess at Loyalty Hall!"
Mo Ran and Chu Wanning exchanged a quick look and rushed out without delay.
They were still some distance away when Mo Ran caught sight of a massive gourd spinning in circles in the courtyard. A crowd of elders and disciples watched in helpless exasperation.
"…A powerful demon?" Mo Ran asked. The fat gourd gurgled.
At the sight of Chu Wanning and Mo Ran, Xue Zhengyong's eyes
brightened. He slapped his thigh. "Ah! Yuheng! You woke up in the nick of time! Thank goodness, thank goodness!"
Chu Wanning was baffled, but his features were so accustomed to indifference that even bewilderment made him look wise. "Mn?"
"Another demon that escaped the Golden Drum Tower." Xue Zhengyong grimaced, both amused and disgruntled. "It won't leave—the Gourd of Debauchery!"
Chu Wanning looked up at the gargantuan gourd rampaging through the courtyard. It was as tall as two men and gleamed with a pearly glow; pink fog and gouts of wine spewed from its mouth. Indeed, this was the legendary Demon Gourd of Debauchery.
"It's harmless," Chu Wanning said. "But it forces you to drink!"
This was true. The gourd was presently chasing a group of disciples,
emitting a series of incomprehensible gurgles. Whenever it caught one, a hole would appear in its side, from which it sprayed wine into its victim's mouth.
Chu Wanning was speechless.
"Apparently it only concedes to people with a better tolerance than itself, " Xue Zhengyong added pitiably. "Yuheng, could you…"
Chu Wanning raised a hand to his temple as if his head ached already. Leaping down to the courtyard, he summoned Tianwen and held the willow vine out in front of the gourd.
"Stop," he said. "I'll drink with you."
The fat gourd wobbled in delight. An opening immediately appeared and shot a stream of wine at Chu Wanning's elegant face. Chu Wanning dodged it; a flare of golden light, and Tianwen had the fat gourd tightly bound.
"Why don't we try it another way? Do you have cups?"
Glug glug! It spat a small gourd ladle out of the opening, filled with clear wine.
Under the watchful eyes of the crowd, Chu Wanning sat down and started drinking with the Gourd of Debauchery.
Glug glug splat!
"Not bad. Give me another."
Splash!
"Do you have any pear-blossom white?"
Splish splash!
"Yuheng," Xue Zhengyong cried out in wonder. "Can you tell what it's saying?"
"Mn," Chu Wanning replied. "I understand something of the speech of this type of demon."
Splash! said the gourd.
Mo Ran smiled. "Shizun, what did it say?"
"It's just chatting—it said it hasn't seen the sun for a long time."
The gourd seemed ecstatic; and for whatever reason, it seemed to also understand Chu Wanning. It sidled over to pour him another brimming ladleful, all solicitousness.
"Is it pear-blossom white this time?"
Splash!
"I don't like nü'erhong."
Sploosh… The gourd dumped it out and poured another.
Everyone looked on in stunned silence. The human-demon duo drank until noon, the human sober and the demon in high spirits. As the day wore on, the crowd before Loyalty Hall swelled. Even Xue Meng and Shi Mei came to see.
As soon as Mo Ran saw Shi Mei, he recalled their earlier misunderstanding. Guilt weighed on him, and he immediately thought to apologize. But the second Shi Mei caught sight of him, he turned and left.
Xue Meng noticed too and elbowed Mo Ran. "I think he's still upset."
"Then what do I do?" Mo Ran said morosely.
"Go talk to him. You two are at odds, and I'm caught in the middle. I can't do anything," Xue Meng said. "Go on, it's not like you're helping here anyway."
Mo Ran glanced at Chu Wanning, still exchanging toasts with the wine gourd. Nothing serious was going to happen without him. "Then I'll go after Shi Mei. Stay here and watch over Shizun. If anything happens, you have to tell me right away."
It didn't take long for Mo Ran to catch up. Upon reaching the Dancing Sword Platform, Mo Ran called out: "Shi Mei!"
There was no response. "Shi Mei!"
Finally Shi Mei came to a stop and turned, looking at him consideringly. "A-Ran, what is it?"
"Nothing…" Mo Ran waved his hands, frowning. "I just wanted to say—what happened last time. It was all my fault."
"Which time are you referring to?"
Mo Ran froze, eyes widening. "What?"
Shi Mei's expression remained blandly gentle. As the wind picked up, he tucked a lock of hair behind his ear. "Do you mean the time you thought I was going to hurt Shizun at the Red Lotus Pavilion, or the time you two wouldn't sit with me during that dinner in Yuliang Village? Or even earlier, when Shizun first woke up and I met you in Wuchang Town to bring you wine, and you barely spoke to me the whole meal. Which one do you mean?"
Mo Ran hadn't expected him to dredge up events that had happened so long ago. For a moment, he was too dazed to reply. "You… You've been angry with me all this time?"
Shi Mei shook his head. "I wouldn't say angry, but yes, it's bothered me."
Mo Ran said nothing.
"A-Ran, you've been pushing me away since Shizun came back to life."
At this, Mo Ran didn't know what to say. He was pushing Shi Mei away. They'd once been so close even Chu Wanning could see it clear as day. But it had always felt like something was missing. The vague understanding they'd shared when they were young had never been explicitly addressed. Later, when Mo Ran recognized his true feelings, he didn't know how to handle his relationship with Shi Mei.
He'd contemplated telling Shi Mei outright but discarded the idea. He had never confessed to Shi Mei. Nor was he entirely sure of the nature of Shi Mei's feelings for him; if he rashly ran up and said he wanted to cut any romantic ties, would it not be too abrupt, too presumptuous? In the end, he had decided to let time fade whatever it was they'd shared.
Shi Mei watched him quietly for a while before continuing. "When you first came to Sisheng Peak, I told you that I, too, was an orphan who didn't have many friends, and that from then on we'd be family."
"…Mn."
"So why have you changed?"
Mo Ran was devastated. He suddenly felt lost; why had he alienated Shi Mei so? Had he and Shi Mei exchanged more than a hundred words since his return from the ghost realm? They'd once been inseparable, but now they were drifting apart. Perhaps he'd really overdone it.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"There's nothing to be sorry for." Shi Mei looked away. "Forget it, it's fine."
"Don't be angry. If you're angry, I'll… I'll feel awful too. You've always been good to me."
Shi Mei finally showed him a faint smile. "I'm good to you, but how does that compare to Shizun?"
"That's different."
Shi Mei gazed out toward the dusky mountains in the distance. "You once told me I was good to you, that I'd brought you a lot of warmth.
What about Shizun?"
"He gave me my life," Mo Ran said.
It was a long time before Shi Mei spoke. "I understand."
Mo Ran's heart ached terribly at the sight of him like this. "There's nothing to compare anyway. Everyone is different, you—"
Shi Mei didn't let him finish. He turned, the wind at his back, and patted Mo Ran's chest. "It's okay, you don't need to explain. I know what you mean. To be honest, I'm not that petty. But I really was hurt that you could think that of me."
"Mn…"
"Let's start afresh. It's water under the bridge."
Mo Ran's eyes were dark and gleaming. After a beat, he nodded and said gratefully, "Okay."
Leaning against the jade railings of the Dancing Sword Platform, Shi Mei looked especially tall and slender. He gazed out at the leaves fluttering below. The silence stretched until Mo Ran said—"Let's head back."
"What did you want to say back then?"
They spoke at the same time. Mo Ran was confused. "Back when?" "Before the Heavenly Rift," Shi Mei said.
Only then did Mo Ran recall the confession he'd left half-made at Butterfly Town.
"You never finished. I don't know what you wanted to say. May I ask you what it was now?"
As Mo Ran opened his mouth to answer, they heard a massive crash from the direction of Loyalty Hall. Both their faces paled. "Shizun's over there!" Mo Ran exclaimed.
Shi Mei had also lost his appetite for idle chatter. "Let's hurry back."
They turned and raced back toward the main compound, where they found yet another fat gourd in the wide courtyard of Loyalty Hall.
"What the hell is this?" Mo Ran blurted.
Xue Zhengyong covered his face. "Another Gourd of Debauchery." "How many are there?"
"Two—one for wine and one for lust. They grow in pairs from the
same stem." Xue Zhengyong looked like his head was about to explode. "The one testing Yuheng's tolerance is just the younger brother. Now the older one's here too."
Mo Ran's face was inscrutable as he worked through this new information. "If the wine gourd likes to drink, then the lust gourd…" He turned, face ashen, toward that spinning pink gourd.
"The lust gourd knows every trick of seduction on earth," Xue Zhengyong said in deep embarrassment. "It only obeys the orders of the purest people."
Mo Ran turned and shouted, "Xue Meng!"
"Why isn't Xue Meng here?" Shi Mei asked in confusion. "Where is he?"
Xue Zhengyong pointed at the lust gourd. "He's already inside
undergoing the trial. He said he wanted to help Yuheng."
Mo Ran breathed a sigh of relief. "That takes care of that then. If Xue Meng doesn't count as pure, no one on earth does."
He'd hardly spoken when there was a great boom. They watched as Xue Meng was unceremoniously ejected from the mouth of the lust gourd and landed sprawling in the crowd. Chu Wanning, still drinking with the wine gourd, glanced over at the commotion.
"What happened?" blurted Shi Mei.
"Don't tell me that even the young master…" someone else exclaimed.
Xue Meng stumbled to his feet, coughing up a storm with his face flushed red. His eyes showed furious embarrassment as he howled at the gourd. "You—you stupid demon, y-y-you're so freakin' shameless!"
Looking back and forth between them, Mo Ran realized Xue Meng was somehow in wedding robes of red and gold. He couldn't keep the amusement out of his voice as he asked, "What happened?"
Xue Zhengyong put a hand over his face, unable to utter a single word.
"I've heard of this," Shi Mei said. "The lust gourd isn't actually
lustful—it's a hopeless romantic. It wants to marry the person with the cleanest and most adoring heart in the world, someone who has no one else in their heart. Apparently, those sucked into the gourd find themselves in a wedding chamber."
"Then what?"
"The gourd's primordial spirit transforms into the image of a veiled bride or groom. Their victim needs to remove the veil with their own hands."
"Will they be blessed with the sight of the lust gourd's true face?" Mo Ran asked.
"Of course not. What they see depends on each individual. If there's someone they love, they see that person's face. If they don't, but are lustful, I heard they'll see…" Shi Mei cleared his throat. "A stunning man or woman without a stitch of clothing. Only the truly purehearted will see the lust gourd's original form."
Mo Ran glanced in some disbelief at Xue Meng, so angry smoke was practically rising from his ears. "Then what did Xue Meng see?"
There was no way Xue Meng was in love with someone, but Mo Ran refused to believe Xue Meng would've seen some nude man or woman either. Yet Xue Meng had indeed been thrown out by the lust gourd, and it was clear from the way the gourd was bouncing and rolling around that Xue Meng had been an object of immense entertainment.
Shi Mei couldn't bear to watch. In an attempt to spare Xue Meng some embarrassment, he began, "The lust gourd might've made a mistake—"
He never finished. Xue Meng had unsheathed Longcheng and pointed it at the gourd. "You fucking turned into me to seduce me!" he hollered. "You dressed an illusion of me in women's clothes! You—you garbage gourd! How dare you slander me?!"
The watching disciples of Sisheng Peak, Mo Ran included, all fell silent, trying to hold back their laughter. But it couldn't last; guffaws burst from the crowd.
The narcissistic Xue Ziming, the peacock in love with his own tail, had become the bride the lust gourd created—when Xue Meng lifted the veil, he had seen his own made-up face.
"Makes sense when you think about it." Mo Ran was trying his best not to laugh too loudly. He nodded. "I'm sure Xue Meng would be very pretty as a girl."
Before Mo Ran doubled over with laughter, he heard Xue Zhengyong shout once more, exasperated. "Yuheng, once you've dealt with the wine gourd, why don't you handle this one?"