Drag The Moon From Brine

drag the moon from brine
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/52558447.
Rating: Explicit
Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category: M/M
Fandom: 崩坏：星穹铁道 | Honkai: Star Rail (Video Game)
Relationships: Blade/Dan Feng | Previous Imbibitor Lunae (Honkai: Star Rail),
Yingxing/Dan Feng | Previous Imbibitor Lunae (Honkai: Star Rail),
Blade/Dan Heng (Honkai: Star Rail)
Characters: Blade (Honkai: Star Rail), Dan Feng | Previous Imbibitor Lunae (Honkai:
Star Rail), Jing Yuan (Honkai: Star Rail), Baiheng (Honkai: Star Rail),
Jingliu (Honkai: Star Rail), Teng Xiao (Honkai: Star Rail)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Prison, Blade is Called
Yingxing (Honkai: Star Rail), The Xianzhou Alliance Does Canon-
Typical Shady Things, Dan Feng | Previous Imbibitor Lunae Needs a
Hug (Honkai: Star Rail), Pining, Slow Burn, the inherent homoeroticism
of making chains for your beloved, the inherent homoeroticism of
tolerating pain for your beloved, Prison Sex, Dry Humping,
Miscommunication, Cunnilingus, Oral Sex, Tail stimulation, Object
Insertion, Intercrural Sex, Edging, Orgasm Denial, Light Dom/sub,
Lingerie, Bondage, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Rough Sex,
Unreliable Narrator, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Porn With Plot
Language: English
Series: Part 3 of author's renheng/xingyue works
Collections: Anonymous
Stats: Published: 2024-01-07 Completed: 2024-02-17 Words: 20,781 Chapters:
11/11
by Anonymous
Summary
Dan Feng has been a prisoner for incarnations, forced to create the cloudhymn and moonlight
that sustains the Xianzhou Luofu.
Yingxing is commissioned to create shackles and chains for him, but soon finds himself
falling for the ethereal prisoner instead.
“Everything demands a price to be paid; nothing greater than freedom, and hence no price
too great.”
AU: Instead of an alliance with the Vidyadhara, the Xianzhou Alliance captured the High
Elder and uses his energy to run the worldship. Inspired by La Vaguelette / Fontaine arc.
Notes
This is a darker remix of my original prison AU. That one is more humorous and has a happy
ending, if that’s more your cup of tea.
On the other hand, if you don’t mind dark themes and inevitable tragedy and almost 10k
words before we get to prison sex, then please, take a seat.
Title of the fic adapted from the saying 海底撈月, or to seek/scoop the moon from the
bottom of the ocean. (ETA: realised when building Qingque that HSR translates this phrase
as "scoop the moon" — it's her skill) There’s various versions of this phrase, including ones
that don’t specify it’s the bottom, or go for a more generic version of “water” rather than
ocean.
Heavy La Vaguelette references with inspiration from the Fontaine quest.
Inspired by [Restricted Work] by Anonymous

to crush golden feet into three-inch lotus
Chapter Summary
"May you live for ten thousand years, that I might have my vengeance upon you in this
incarnation or the next. Every drop of cloudhymn you take from me, you will repay in
Xianzhou blood."
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
The moon was always full on the Xianzhou Luofu.
With one hand, Yingxing sipped at his cup of baijiu, the light catching on the rim of the
porcelain. He examined the spear in his other hand under twin moons, one in the artificial sky
and its reflection in Scalegorge Waterscape. A few years after arriving on the Luofu from the
Zhuming, he’d observed how the weapons forged here reacted strangely to the moonlight,
some ghostly sense of static that warned him of any flaw or fragile point, and nowadays took
care to test and finish his creations at night.
“Perfect,” he murmured. Low in his belly, satisfaction pooled warmer than wine, as he ran
two fingers along the shaft of jade tempered to steel.
A shame that this one was not fated to be a weapon of legend, wielded by an immortal
warrior against the denizens of Abundance.
The rest of the commission, he’d finished several days ago. The specifications had been
exact, with no context, but Yingxing was intelligent enough to see that they were meant to
cage some creature. He took the spear and everything else he needed to the rendezvous point
on the shores of Scalegorge Waterscape. In these last hours of the night, the wind had picked
up enough to shatter the reflection of the moon into a thousand crystals on the surface of the
stormy sea, that it would be futile to weave a net to drag the moon from the brine of the
ocean.
And yet, arrogantly—Yingxing would admit he was every bit as arrogant as his reputation,
though he had earned the right to be—when he looked overlong at the lunarescent depths, he
seemed to hear the siren song to dive in, drown his sorrows, pay for the sins—
“Furnace Master,” came the smug, youthful voice of Jing Yuan behind him, cradling the title
with a bright-eyed smile that grated on Yingxing’s nerves as much as it charmed everyone
else on the Luofu. “Is that lovely spear for me?”
“You know that it’s not,” sighed Yingxing. Ever since Baiheng introduced him to Jingliu and
her disciple, Jing Yuan had pestered him on the matter and refused to stop.
Behind Jing Yuan was Jingliu, of course, engaged in murmured conversation with the
Arbiter-General Teng Xiao. Yingxing sketched a bow, which the two celestials acknowledged
with a nod without breaking their discussion. Three squads of Cloud Knights flanked them.
“I didn’t expect such exalted company for fixing an…engineering issue in the worldship,”
Yingxing said, as the General and Jingliu led the way up a lighthouse on the shore, though it
was not lit.
From the way Jing Yuan’s eyes crinkled, ever-smiling, he knew that Yingxing was fishing for
information. “An issue that will bring a new century of eclipse if it’s not fixed, from what I
understand,” he said, as they ascended winding stone steps cracked by age. “May Lan
preserve us.”
“It’s my hands and my creations that will preserve you,” Yingxing retorted. From what he’d
read about the century of eclipse, around once every five hundred years the vast reservoir of
Scalegorge Waterscape dwindled or even went dry in certain areas. For decades at a time, the
flowers and gingko trees alike withered, the immortals suffered greater attacks of mara, the
short-life escaped to other Xianzhou ships, and even the full moon itself waned into eclipse.
The further up the tower they climbed, the stronger an eerie sense of cold. Icy droplets of
water hammered down on their heads, hissing with the sharpness of blades honed in the
furnace but none of the heat. Yingxing drew a hand over the back of his neck and was
shocked when it came away with only water, not blood. It’s only water, he told himself.
The last traces of moonlight melted away as they reached a massive door of steel, reinforced
twice over with metal bars and arrays.
Yingxing watched as Teng Xiao manipulated the door mechanism at a side panel. Not a
particularly complicated mechanism. Clearly, meant more for keeping something in than
someone out.
“When we are inside,” Jingliu said to him coolly, “keep your nerve and listen only to the
General or me. Do not say your own name, or anyone else’s name; use only titles. Never
speak of what you see inside. Do you understand, Yingxing? The whole worldship depends
on it.”
What else would there be to listen to, and what could there be to speak of? “I don’t fail at
commissions,” Yingxing said instead of voicing his questions.
Jing Yuan gave him a wan smile, though he remained outside the door with half the Cloud
Knights. As Yingxing was ushered into the locked room—prison cell, his mind supplied—the
damp chill was harsh enough to leech away even hope from his bones.
In the centre of the cell was a device of interlocked jade, twisting its way around the lithe
figure suspended in mid-air with both chains and matrices. In any other situation, Yingxing’s
mind would be drawn to analysing the device, or its construction, or even the material of the
chains—but he had eyes only for that ethereal creature in silver and seafoam.
A veil of dark hair, a crown of azure horns, a tail of iridescent scales curling and uncurling.
The delicate bones of his feet crushed by gilded shoes into an arch of no more than three
inches, dangling above a cluster of lotus flowers, each petal no larger than the smallest of
Yingxing’s fingers. Jade-green eyes fixed in a seething, bewitching glare.
“A Vidyadhara,” Yingxing whispered disbelievingly. Creatures of legend, long since hunted

to extinction and revered only by the storytellers of teahouses.
“I give to you the ancient sinner, the sworn enemy of the Xianzhou, condemned to nourish
our seas and our moon,” Jingliu said for his benefit. “Yinyue-jun.”
“Sword Champion,” Yinyue-jun said in a voice, quiet yet clear, with the quality of being
spoken at a great distance through a vast hurricane. “Arbiter-General. May you live for ten
thousand years, that I might have my vengeance upon you in this incarnation or the next.
Every drop of cloudhymn you take from me, you will repay in Xianzhou blood.”
Yingxing swallowed at the wave of malice, and took another step towards the wrathful
creature. No one else seemed to pay any attention to Yinyue-jun and only worked around
him. Jingliu and Teng Xiao directed the Cloud Knights as they brought out what Yingxing
had created: chains, focusing arrays, a wide jade urn under his feet to collect moisture and
trap magic. One of them took a sickle and harvested the flowers already growing in the damp
flagstones. Yinyue-jun looked straight ahead, as though he was truly the moon, in distant
flight; but just as even the stillest waters could not reflect a perfect circle, a minute tremble
shivered through in his calves and in his dangling, delicate lotus feet.
Against the unending chill, Yingxing clenched his fists and tried to summon the memory of
the furnace, some memory of warmth. Instead there was only that ugly, cloying shroud, that
had dragged his heels ever since he crawled from a homeworld wrecked by borisins and
made a vow of vengeance—
“Careful,” Jingliu said, but made no move to stop him as Yingxing found himself lurching
forward, halfway into a trance.
Just a closer look, he thought, so I can make the commission better next time. The jade
bangles around Yinyue-jun’s wrists and tail were not of his creation. They pulsed a sickly
green, the characters etched on them like turtle-shell, ancient beyond any poetry Yingxing
had ever read. They must have shackled the Vidyadhara all his life. Faint trails of cloudhymn
seeped from his wrists, rivulets carving through the fate-lines of his palms.
“Can you confirm the alignment, Furnace Master?” one of the Cloud Knights asked him.
The chains and shackles of his design, of his hands, now draped over Yinyue-jun. Gold-
plated steel around slender yet strong limbs, a hundred minuscule jade talismans—that he’d
painstakingly remade, by hand, from the Divination Commission’s pathetic attempts—now
dangling along critical acupuncture points over collarbone and waist and hip. Yet the captive
Vidyadhara endured them with so much pride, as though he’d demanded to be laden in finery.
“It’s…it’s correct,” Yingxing said, when he had remained silent for far too long.
When the arrays were activated, the chains tightening around the silent, ever-silent prisoner,
almost nothing changed. Yinyue-jun’s back arched the slightest amount, the frowning line of
his mouth screwed tighter. But in the urn under his feet, silvery wisps sublimated into pure
water where lotus petals began—unwillingly, reluctantly—to unfurl.
Yingxing chanced another look at the Vidyadhara’s face. A statue so beautiful they sought to
destroy it, and yet when remade, only became ever more beautiful. Yingxing ached to capture
the moment in ivory and iron and jade, and lamented that his fingers could not carve seawater
and moonlight itself. If only he could drag the moon from brine—ah, how Yingxing was born
to love the impossible.
Then one of the Cloud Knights raised the spear that Yingxing had forged.
“Wait,” Yingxing tried to say, some instinct drawing his hand to where another man might
have worn a sword.
But words failed him. The tip of the spear gouged a deep line across Yinyue-jun’s iridescent
tail, releasing a shower of scales that glittered with something beyond colour and coalesced
into a wave.
Yinyue-jun’s lips never parted, never moved from a scowl. But the wave of scales roared
with unmistakeable wrath and carved a bloody gash into the Cloud Knight from shoulder to
groin. Armour clattered away like bamboo split by an axe.
The room erupted into shouts. Someone pushed Yingxing away, even as he tried to get to the
Vidyadhara, where he was supposed to be.
“Enough!” called Jingliu. In a swift move, she snatched the spear from the fallen Cloud
Knight, wielding her own sword in the other hand, and whirled on Yinyue-jun. She traced the
tip of the spear along the Vidyadhara’s willowy waist, the fabric of his robes tearing without
drawing blood. “That is enough. I will subdue you with greater force, but only if you make
me.”
Yinyue-jun didn’t do anything so vulgar as bare his teeth. But there was the suggestion of
something sharp in the way he narrowed his eyes.
“A fine crop,” Teng Xiao said, examining the urn three-quarters full with holy water and
blooming lotuses. “Our people are safe for another turn.”
“We who will never die salute you,” Yinyue-jun said, cold and rich with the liquor of
resentment. For all his pride, the set of his shoulders was still tense as he endured, betraying a
shiver instead of the scream that he must want to make.
I can understand that, Yingxing thought. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of screaming,
either. I would laugh and laugh and laugh, even as my lungs howled.
Chapter End Notes

Foot binding is the practice of breaking and binding young women's feet so they would
remain small and delicate as a mark of feminine beauty, a truly horrifying Chinese
custom that has more or less died out by now, thank goodness. The bones would literally
be crushed, and this mutilation could cause many complications, including infection,
immobility, and god-awful pain, presumably.
The ideal was to have feet as small as three inches, which was a size described as
"golden lotus" (三寸金蓮), hence the chapter title.
If it seems like I’m vilifying the Xianzhou Alliance, they literally do the exact same
thing to the heliobi to power their Creation Furnace. (They might have reasons, but it’s
still definitely mistreatment of a prisoner.)
P.S. Updating this once a week until my other fic is finished, after which updates will be
more frequent.
lament the source of springwater
Chapter Notes
chapter title from the saying, "飲水思源", literally to drink water and consider its
source.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Yingxing did not have much leisure time for festivals and performances, with the amount of
work he intended to accomplish in his lifetime. Even more work than usual, given what he’d
witnessed in the lighthouse. What had happened to Yinyue-jun, and what was still happening.
Baiheng did not take no for an answer.
“You are entirely too hard on yourself, Yingxing,” she nagged as she dragged him and Jing
Yuan to the water-dancing theatre. “And Jingliu is too hard on you, A-Yuan. You two young
ones need to go out, have fun, meet some hotties, or cuties, whatever floats your boat…”
Yingxing was thirty-one years old, the youngest Furnace Master ever on any Xianzhou ship,
but he couldn’t help the heat that rushed into his cheeks. He did not need Baiheng’s help with
that, he already had plenty of work. He couldn’t shake the haunting image of Yinyue-jun,
eyes alight with wrath, even as his body was held pridefully still. But what if he struggled, a
traitorous voice in his head said. What if he fought back.
“Thank you,” Jing Yuan said solemnly, with the glint in his eye that meant he was planning
something, “Auntie Baiheng.”
Baiheng screeched with mock outrage. “You ungrateful whelp! I’m too young and pretty to
be an auntie! Your jiejie is just trying to help you out of generosity, the goodness of my heart,
oh woe is me.”
At least the ensuing bickering, all the way to their seats in the theatre, helped get Yinyue-
jun’s fine eyes and dark hair out of Yingxing’s mind.
The stage of the theatre was a deep artificial pool, with a hundred fountains that spewed
water in all forms and sizes. Garish neon lights razed through the stage as the dancers,
suspended from the ceiling, flipped and twisted their way through the watery veils. Halfway
through the show, one of the performers, a lissome youth with dark hair, swung a mere arm’s
span above their heads. But his eyes were blue, not green, and something else too, something
he couldn’t quite place his finger on. Something too human about them.
Yingxing was grateful when Baiheng sent him and Jing Yuan off during intermission to bring
her snacks. As they jostled for overpriced rice noodle rolls and fried youtiao, he began, “So
about the—”
“You don’t understand the meaning of classified, do you,” Jing Yuan cut him off with a
chuckle.
“But you’re cleared to know,” Yingxing said, choosing to ignore the fact they were in a
massive crowd. Half the people were already drunk, anyways, or gossiping about some
dancer or other. “You were there with me.”
“Master Jingliu has always insisted I remain outside,” said Jing Yuan. “So I have never
received clearance.”
Yingxing groaned. Who else could he go to? He certainly wasn’t going to ask some no-name
Cloud Knight for help, who would only sneer at him for being an ignorant short-life mortal.
Jingliu wouldn’t sneer, but Yingxing knew better than to talk about feelings other than ‘love
of the sword’ with her.
“Hm, did you want to ask me what I know about the century of eclipse?” Jing Yuan smiled
knowingly at him, like a fox-spirit that deserved to be punched in the face.
“I hate it when you do that,” Yingxing grumbled.
“Well, I’ve never seen it, but the diviners think it’s not far off, at most fifty to a hundred years
away now,” Jing Yuan said, taking his reply correctly for assent. “Master Jingliu has
witnessed it, of course, and she doesn’t say but I can tell she’s worried. There’s only so much
we can do.”
“What is being done?”
“We’ve prepared stockpiles of rice, grain, medicinal herbs, everything will wither during the
drought. The strategic reserve of Scalegorge springwater—it’s separate from the main
waterscape, did you know?—it’s about halfway full.”
The eclipse, the drought, all of it must have to do with Yinyue-jun. But how, exactly, and
why? All of the preparations mattered very little compared to the root cause.
“Hypothetically,” Jing Yuan said, carefully as navigating a starchess game or a battlefield,

“would you wish that you had never gone in there?”
Yingxing cast a glance over his shoulder at all the water being wasted on mere entertainment,
and the crowds in wild ecstasy with no idea of the cost or who paid it. “That’s not what I
regret.”
The moon remained as full as ever, but the year would later become known as the Year of the
False Eclipse. The levels of Scalegorge Waterscape receded, the water lost its lustre, and the
reflection of the moon receded to a mere crescent. The lunar reeds, prized by the Alchemy
Commission, withered to pale grey horsetails along the shores of Scalegorge Waterscape.
Water and rice was rationed.
Yingxing received a message every week from the office of the Arbiter-General, demanding a
solution as the consultant on the cause. In turn he demanded all the information on Yinyue-
jun, and received a treatise entirely lacking in the information he needed. Instead they
detailed all the methods and implements that had ever been tried, in thousands of years, to
extract the cloudhymn power from Yinyue-jun. Blueprints for everything from nails drilled
into his back, flaying him open and piping the ichor directly to Scalegorge Waterscape,
dripping poison in his eyes or enclosing him in a cabinet of spikes.
The one thing without blueprints were the jade shackles on his wrists and tail. There were
observations from long-dead artisans, about the enchantments wrought into the stone to make
it indestructible and to restrict his cloudhymn powers. Missing records, perhaps, but the other
work these so-called craftsmen made lacks any creativity…if they made those shackles, I
would figure out to destroy them in a heartbeat. Yingxing would need to examine them
himself again.
Which meant seeking out Yinyue-jun again. Ever more recalcitrant, surely. What new
cruelties, what annihilation would those jade-green eyes threaten now? Fortunately, Yingxing
never backed down from a challenge, and he had never, ever failed to solve a problem. He
did not intend to start with Yinyue-jun.
He threw himself into feverish crafting, whittling down a massive piece of white jade,
stringing together silk and steel twine strong and thin enough to draw blood, filing down
sharp edges in ivory. As adept as he was in using his hammer, he used that sparingly,
preferring instead the deft precision of his hands even if his bones ached from the abuse. The
revelation came to him, after days without proper sleep as he passed the dwindling basin of
water in his workshop, and considered, lamented, the source of springwater as no one on the
Xianzhou had ever bothered to—
Yinyue-jun did not blink. Ever. It should haunt Yingxing, but instead it aroused his excitement
further.
When he called Jingliu, Yingxing was still grinning. “I remind you, you’re only talking to the
best craftsman the Xianzhou has ever known.”
Even through a flickering hologram, the swordswoman’s relief was palpable. “You have a
solution,” she said.
“I have one.” Yingxing ran his fingers over the set of sharpened ivory pieces, drummed his
fingers on the carved piece of white jade. “But you might not like it.”
“Then it’s better if I don’t know,” Jingliu said, as he’d hoped she would. “I’ll have Jing Yuan
escort you and stand guard outside. No witnesses.”
“Just like that? No four-hour-long meetings to interrogate this short-life mortal first, for
once?”
“You have no idea how much pressure the Charioteers are putting on—well, everyone,”
Jingliu said with a slight grimace. “If this becomes a true eclipse, thousands will die and the
Abundance will take advantage of our weakness to counterattack. The ends justifies the
means.”
“Has it always been that way?” Yingxing asked, careful not to let his voice reveal too much.
“We once treated him with the courtesy due a highborn captive, hundreds of years ago when
he was an adolescent. But when he broke his word of honour assisting the Cangcheng in the
Rahu incident…” When it came to the fate of her destroyed home, even Jingliu’s lofty voice
betrayed regret. “He slaughtered half a hundred civilians that day by his own hand. I had to
subdue him, and thereafter he had to be restrained and treated with greater force. It is what’s
necessary.”
Yingxing accepted this with silence, but couldn’t help thinking, and yet you refuse to let Jing
Yuan see what you’re complicit in. What I’m complicit in, now.
Weeks had passed between their two meetings, yet Yinyue-jun remained just as he was last
time. Staring, unblinking, suspended in the matrix of his cell. There were no lotus flowers
this time, only a few stray petals cast like broken pearls over a fossilised seabed of coral.
Yingxing bent to pick one up, lifted its torn edge up to eye level. But never did he take his
gaze off Yinyue-jun.
“You really don’t blink,” Yingxing marvelled, when he’d looked his fill of those stormy eyes.
Perhaps he’d surprised Yinyue-jun in some way—and wasn’t that a heady thought—because
the Vidyadhara explained, “My authority over water makes it unnecessary.”
Yingxing set a cushion on the ground beneath Yinyue-jun and adjusted the arrays to lower
him down. The diminutive shells of his bound lotus feet jerked as they touched the silk
cushion. “What are you doing,” Yinyue-jun snapped.
“Letting you sit down. And these chains—” my chains, lovely as my handiwork is on you— “I
will take them off.”
The moment the tips of his fingers grazed Yinyue-jun’s sleeve, something cold and so strong
struck him in the face. The opalescent tail moved faster than Yingxing could see, twining
around his neck in a deadly coil until he was gasping for breath. Oh, wasn’t Yinyue-jun
magnificent—
“You have a death wish,” the Vidyadhara hissed, his sharp features never losing that air of
regality. “I am descended from the unbroken line of an Aeon, and carry the unbroken curse of
that lineage, to observe the world's sorrows in eternity. You are nobody.”
With the last blood still pounding in his brain, Yingxing choked out, “Ying…xing…”
The pressure around his throat loosened, and Yinyue-jun slammed him into the ground with a
flick of that tail. “What did you say?”
“I’m not a nobody. I’m Yingxing, I wanted you to remember who I am.” Now that he could
breathe again, Yingxing remembered Jingliu’s warnings. “Uh, what are you going to do with
my name?”
A faintly annoyed expression, the most human thing that he had managed to pull from
Yinyue-jun so far. “You imbecile, you might have asked before you gave it to me. I see no
point in laying a curse on you, you’d probably get yourself killed anyways.”
"What, it's not because I'm too charming and clever to be cursed?"
"Even the highest of prodigies must be cursed, if their trespasses are too great to be forgiven,"
Yinyue-jun lamented, and it became clear to Yingxing now, that he bore a curse of his own
more than anyone should bear, alone to contemplate its weight for eternity.
Chapter End Notes
1. The water theatre performance is based on a real performance that used to be held in
Macau, but apparently it was discontinued a few years ago.
2. Don't call people "auntie" or "uncle" if they're of an age range to be "jiejie" or "gege"
instead XD It's always safer to guess lower~
3. youtiao is a fried dough. you could think of it like a Chinese version of churros, but it
is eaten more for breakfast with congee than dessert.
the lone wheel of the moon
Chapter Summary
“No one has ever asked my name,” Dan Feng found himself saying. Names had power;
and he no longer had any, for all that his strength nourished the worldship and all her
people.
Chapter Notes
Imprisoned all his life or not, Dan Feng was the successor to a thousand incarnations of
Yinyue-jun, stretching back to the time when Long still reigned. Yet in all his memories, he
had never met anyone like Yingxing.
The man had the gall not to fear him. Instead he loosened the chains on Dan Feng—but not
the shackles on his wrist and tail, never those. Offered him a cup of Scalegorge spring water,
as though Dan Feng hadn’t created it out of his own sacred flesh in the first place. Even
brandished a guzheng of pure white jade and began thrumming some peasant’s ditty on it
with sharp ivory nail-picks.
Most absurd of all, Yingxing presented the spear that had been used on Dan Feng, during the
first meeting, and placed it in his shackled hands. “I think…I was always meant to forge this
for you. To wield, not…”
“Sharp enough to pierce dragon-scales,” Dan Feng murmured. But not truly sharp enough,
against the endless cycles of Vidyadhara reincarnations.
“Be careful, lest you hurt yourself with it,” Yingxing says, voice rich with arrogance and
irony both. “I’ve made some modifications, to help channel your powers more easily. I would
have liked to engrave your name here too, if I knew it?”
An empty gesture to arm him, when the restraints on his power made it impossible for him to
take down the garrison and the Sword Champion that would be called down on him the
moment he stepped out of his cell. All Dan Feng might achieve was to slay one lunatic
craftsman, before the Arbiter-General decided it was worth an eclipse to put him down and
return him to the shell. But the intent of that gesture weighed heavy in the lunarescent air
between them.
Dan Feng lifted his chin, poised himself cross-legged on the cushion with great elegance, and
pretended to find it all ludicrous. Pretended that the weight of the jade did not inlay an
eternity of agonies on his carpal bones, a curse on every shimmering scale of his draconic
tail, sealing away the true power of the ancient sea. Pretended that he understood what the
man intended with these false kindnesses.
“Don’t delude yourself that these efforts will make me relent on refusing the Xianzhou my
cloudhymn energies,” Dan Feng said coolly. Lashes, restraints, nails—everything that
harmed his body awoke the instinct to draw out cloudhymn, but he could resist it if he bore
the cost. Even without cloudhymn powers, his Vidyadhara biology was sufficient to protect
him for a short while.
Every moment of his protest, another Xianzhou life might be wiped out, a snuffed candle
losing its stolen flicker from the moon. A tiny portion of the debt he was owed.
“That’s not what I’m asking of you.” Yingxing had the audacity to sound sincere when saying
it. “What I want is to know your name.” That request, again.
“I am Yinyue-jun,” Dan Feng said. “I have always been Yinyue-jun.”
“Always?”
Incarnation after incarnation, he was Yinyue-jun, and the Xianzhou Luofu stole the water of
life and the light of the moon from him. And all the vengeance he’d been able to claim, so
far, was the eclipses they suffered during his rebirths.
“No one has ever asked my name,” Dan Feng found himself saying. Names had power; and
he no longer had any, for all that his strength nourished the worldship and all her people.
An arrogant twist to the perpetual smirk on Yingxing’s mouth. “Ah, I see. I’m your first…”
Incarnations of being a prisoner had earned Dan Feng the occasional right to be less dignified
than his birthright demanded. So he kicked Yingxing in the groin, hiding a wince at the
reverberation it sent through the lotus-bones of his feet, crushed into fragility.
Even as he was groaning and panting on the floor like some animal, Yingxing managed to
look smug and satisfied. How freely, how unashamed of his weakness, this man expressed
himself.
“You’ve done nothing to deserve my name,” Dan Feng said, though he could not stop his
hands from lingering along the shaft of the spear. Jade tempered into steel, once made to
pierce dragon-scales, and now his to wield.
“I accept your challenge, Yinyue-jun.” A spark in Yingxing’s amethyst eyes, small yet fierce,
like the light from a star that would illuminate the sky and accompany the moon even
thousands of years after it died.
“Hmph,” Dan Feng said, and turned away. This troublesome pest was nothing more than a
blip in his long confinement, irrelevant to the course of his destiny. In that case, it would
make no difference…this dream will be buried in the end. “Do as you will.”
That was enough invitation for Yingxing to kneel at his guzheng for hours, until the sunlight
faded and the artificial moon claimed dominion, until the colours of the waterscape and the
sky were one and the same, until his rich voice turned hoarse under the weight of elegies and
ballads. If Dan Feng held fast to his refusal, would he play until his soul was nothing more
than a tear in the unending currents of the sea? His sturdy, deft hands, lost to the depths; the
waves of his black hair, tumbling free across his shoulders.
Dan Feng scowled. He had never paid this much attention to any of his jailers, and that was
all Yingxing was in the end. One of many jailers in the infinite lifetime of Yinyue-jun, and a
smirking, arrogant, insolent one at that.
“Your attempts would be of better value courting some insipid maiden,” Dan Feng finally
told him.
“I could charm an insipid maiden with some second-rate jewels and five minutes in my
workshop,” Yingxing said. “The poets take the light of the moon for granted, and yet I wait
for something else. I dare to say, I want more.”
How aggravating, that his whispers only enticed Dan Feng to want more as well. “You’ll
have nothing from me.”
“In the moment before the eclipse devours the moon, imagine that the last curve of light.”
Yingxing reached out with his hand, his thumb tracing a ghostly line a respectful distance
away from Dan Feng’s lips. “If the moon smiled then, she would resemble you. You leave the
same impression of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
Yinyue-jun held absolute authority over the ancient sea and the lunarescent depths, but Dan
Feng could not even control the flush in his cheeks or the fluttering of his lashes—
“Ah,” Yingxing said. “You blinked.”
“It’s not…it’s nothing special,” Dan Feng retorted. “I do it all the time. See.” He blinked
twice more, just to prove his point.
Yingxing burst out laughing then. “As long as I live, I’ll remember the time that you blinked
for me. Thrice.”
Dan Feng glared at him, wishing for the ground to open up and swallow him. The ground—
which was now a pool several inches deep with cool water, soaking both of their clothes. And
lotus flowers blooming with impunity, uncaring that each unfurling petal drove daggers
where jade shackled his wrists and tail. It hurt, enough that he dropped the spear that
Yingxing had made for him. It hurt as much as it always did, as he was always punished for
using that power, as much as he was punished for not using it—
“Are you all right?” Yingxing dared not to witness the miracle, to the cloudhymn swirling
silver around the thousand petals, and instead paid attention only to Dan Feng.
If he held out a hand then—his soul might be immortal, but his body was weak. Yingxing
took it with both of his hands, the warm calloused span of his palm and fingers large enough
to support even the impossibly heavy jade bangle.
“My name is Dan Feng,” he said, and refused to give any reaction to how the starlight danced
in those brazen, arrogant eyes. A speck of stardust might join the lone wheel of white jade in
the night sky, but even the brightest constellation could not drag the moon from brine.
Chapter End Notes
1. Chapter title is from these lines of poetry: “江天一色無纖塵，皎皎空中孤月輪”:

the river and the sky are one colour, without a speck of dust; in the bright sky, the lone
wheel of the moon.
2. A guzheng is a Chinese zither that resembles something of a horizontal harp.
3. “If the moon smiled then, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression of
something beautiful, but annihilating.” is a quote of Sylvia Plath's The Rival.
As I've now wrapped up my other fic, I'll have more time to focus on this one! I'll do my
best to update a second time every week in addition to the usual Friday chapter.
And thank you for all your support <3 I'm delighted that we all want to see DF in chains
(once again I point out that it is hoyo's fault for making THAT LIGHT CONE come on)
every kudos and comment and bookmark pulls the chains around his waist tighter
(◕ᴗ◕✿)
the moon-goddess flees the human realm
Chapter Summary
But were Yingxing’s fingers, this very moment, not entangled with the moon itself?
With his own hands, he would drag the moon from the brine of the ocean.
Chapter Notes
Ending the false eclipse cemented Yingxing’s role to ensure Dan Feng’s productivity.
Everyone else treated him as nothing more than a malfunctioning battery, and expected
Yingxing to approach it like a craftsman. It made him see red, but until he understood how to
undo the ancient shackles that restricted Dan Feng’s cloudhymn powers, there was little he
could do but play along.
In the meantime, he had plenty of work to keep himself busy. In addition to all his regular
work—because he still intended to become the first short-life mortal to run the Artisanship
Commission—he had to further improve the spear based on his study of Dan Feng’s
cloudhymn, as well as remake every inch of the chains he’d crafted. Dan Feng insisted that
Yingxing restrained him again before leaving his prison, and was far too proud to admit
feeling pain.
“But they’re not necessary,” Yingxing had tried arguing. “If anyone has an issue with it, they
can take it up with me. I’ve proven you can make cloudhymn without suffering.”
Dan Feng looked at him with that cruel emerald gaze, tranquil as the eye of a storm. “This is
not going to work if you do not obey me, Yingxing.”
“For a prisoner, you certainly make a lot of demands,” Yingxing had teased, even as he’d
reluctantly chained Dan Feng up again.
As far as Yingxing could tell, it wasn’t that Dan Feng wanted to suffer. But it proved his
superiority, proved his control over himself. Demanding to be chained, even when Yingxing
offered otherwise, was some small way of controlling the terms of his imprisonment.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dan Feng said when Yingxing offered this theory. “I have certainly
never asked for anyone else’s work on me.”
Yingxing valiantly restrained himself from saying something that would annoy Dan Feng
enough to kick him in the groin again, like knew I was special or they should have asked.
Instead he remade each and every link of the chains, crystallising soft gold into a delicate
matrix of his invention and paring it to round edges. By the time he was finished, even silk
would chafe skin coarser than the metal. He tweaked the jade talismans’ calibrations, just
enough that if an inferior craftsman examined his work, they would never notice the purpose
was now little more than jewellery. And he made it possible to Dan Feng to move, even when
he appeared chained.
Because as arrogant as he was, Yingxing was always aware of his mortal years—and now he
was painfully aware of it. And when the day came he was not there to use gentler methods, at
least the deception might buy Dan Feng a few precious moments of peace. Even as he
thought that, though, he hated himself for it, for how close it felt to giving up.
He banished that ire by mounting diamonds and jades, in alternating pattern, all along the
chain that would clasp around Dan Feng’s waist.
No one could deny how magnificent his handiwork looked on Yinyue-jun, even if—
especially if—the Vidyadhara sighed in exasperation at his modifications, the frown of his
lips softened and parted by the sound.
“Before you say that this isn’t necessary,” Yingxing said, securing the girdle of diamond and
jade around Dan Feng’s slender waist, “consider that I’m very stubborn.”
“You dare match your conviction to mine,” Dan Feng said, turning up his nose. But he only
shook his head a little reprovingly and held out a hand to fill the room with those precious
lotus flowers once again, betraying the slightest grimace at the effort.
At least he let Yingxing hold his hands and rub small reassuring touches where the jade
shackles met his skin. Yingxing waited until Dan Feng had relaxed once more and stopped
channeling his energy, before turning his attention to examine the stone. Perfectly seamless,
all the way around those slender wrists, burnished by time into a patina of deep, enigmatic
storm-green. And when Dan Feng exerted his cloudhymn, the jade glowed like they truly
held all the light of the moon.
“Whoever made this was no ordinary craftsman,” Yingxing said. “And it’ll certainly take a
genius of his time to break them. You’re lucky to have me around.”
That should have been sufficient for Dan Feng to chide him or, if Yingxing was very lucky,
even draw out a laugh. Instead Dan Feng said gravely, “It is not possible for you to break
them.”
But were Yingxing’s fingers, this very moment, not entangled with the moon itself? With his
own hands, he would drag the moon from the brine of the ocean. “It was not possible to
survive, when the borisin wiped out my entire world. It was not possible for a mortal to learn
the celestials’ craft, or to become Furnace Master. And I will find a way to free you.”
“You should not,” was the cold, even answer.
“I will,” Yingxing insisted, wishing that Dan Feng would believe in him. “So, what will you
do, when you’re free? Travel across the galaxies with me…or like the legend of the moon-
goddess, would you flee the human realm entirely and leave me behind most cruelly?”
He had meant it as a joke, hoping to tease Dan Feng back into a good humour. But instead
Dan Feng levelled him with a gaze holding incarnations of wrath, a hurricane on the cusp of
being unleashed. “I would make all of the Xianzhou pay for their sins. Their immortal lives,
sustained by what was stolen from me and the people I used to be, will be ended at my hands.
That is the inexorable path of fate.”
“Yinyue-jun, most people don’t know,” Yingxing said placatingly. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”
“Hmph. If you cannot withstand the storm, then stop inviting it to destroy you.” Dan Feng
pulled away from Yingxing’s touch and crossed his arms.
“You’d…seek vengeance on even me?” Yingxing’s throat had gone a little dry, imagining
Dan Feng atop of him, thrusting a spear through his chest. If he was very fortunate, perhaps
the very spear he’d made for Dan Feng.
It didn’t help that such a delicate, shocked flush coloured Dan Feng’s cheeks. “You cannot
escape it. Not even you.” He turned his eyes up to the ceiling, not as though Yingxing were
beneath his attention, but rather as if he could no longer bear to look at Yingxing. “Not that it
matters, because you won’t be able to unshackle me.”
Yingxing controlled the heave of his shoulders and tried not to sigh. “If only the Xianzhou
hadn’t done this to you in the first place…”
Dan Feng shot a glare at him. “You think those pathetic Xianzhou scum could shackle me,
when I bear a part of an Aeon’s power inside me?”
“Someone else did?” When Dan Feng pursed his lips in silence, Yingxing pressed him
further, “Dan Feng, what is it you know about the shackles?”
“I know that they are interminable suffering,” Dan Feng said, implacable as the oceans were
deep.
That left Yingxing with no choice but to plan yet more delights and pleasures for the mighty,
distant Yinyue-jun.
As though reading his mind, Dan Feng scowled at him. “Stop thinking that. I can smell your
repulsive mortal hope.”
There was something vulnerable in the stiffness of his frown and his shoulders, in how his
tail curled tightly away from Yingxing even if he offered his shackled wrists up for scrutiny.
As though he would beg Yingxing not to give him hope, as though that was more unbearable
than being in pain simply because of who he was, and who he had been.
“I am the storm incarnate, the last surviving Scion of Permanence. Hope is beneath me.”
“It’s only human,” Yingxing said. And for all of Dan Feng’s boasts, even his eyes betrayed
some shred of humanity, through the cracks of that mirror-like facade.
Dan Feng’s mouth twisted in something more horrific than a smile. “They haven’t treated me
like I’m human for so many lives, I’ve forgotten what that’s like anymore.”
Chapter End Notes
The chapter title is a reference to Chang'e, of course.
A bit more about the shackles is revealed...I'm taking guesses in the comments ;)
hairpin of jade falls into the water
Chapter Summary
Eventually Dan Feng found himself with his head in the warmth of Yingxing’s lap, and
Yingxing mumbled, “I’ve gotten Yinyue-jun drunk, haven’t I?”
“Quiet, you’re my pillow,” Dan Feng slurred, just before he fell asleep.
Chapter Notes
hello penacony! now back to our regularly scheduled xianzhou programming
TW consent issues: There is a moment at the end of this chapter which appears to be
dubiously consensual making out under the influence of alcohol/characters waking up in
a compromising position; they’re both into it, but they have not discussed it previously
and this is not immediately clear on reading the text. (There are hints but it will be
cleared up definitively in the next chapter.) If this would make you uncomfortable, stop
reading after the POV change.
Chapter title from <採蓮曲> (the verses of plucking a lotus) 白居易 "碧玉搔頭落水
中", a poem about a young lady who sees her crush and is shy, hence bowing her head
and causing the hairpin of jade on her head to tumble into the water.
When Yingxing came to him wearing red, Dan Feng simply couldn’t miss the opportunity to
say, “I don’t recall agreeing to marry you.”
Yingxing made a sound strangely close to a panicked squawk. “No, I’m not—I mean, I
would, I just—it’s for the new year celebrations!”
Another year. Insignificant in the permanent lifespan of Yinyue-jun, of course, even as the
laughter lines deepened on his mortal’s face. When Yingxing laughed, his entire body shook
with the mirth, vibrating through even the lightest touch on his forearms.
With one hand, Yingxing recalibrated the imprisonment matrix to let him down as usual,
keeping one arm free to catch him on the descent. Against his better instincts, Dan Feng
allowed it, yielded to Yingxing’s hand wrapped around his waist. He steadied his own arms
around the heat of Yingxing’s neck, fingers dancing close to the skin under the collar.
“There you go,” Yingxing said, inordinately pleased with himself as he settled Dan Feng on a
silk cushion on the floor and began to unpack takeout boxes. “Now, what would you like to
eat? Bai—uh, my friends let me take extras from dinner with them. Well, we ordered takeout,
none of us know how to cook…”
As though hiding his friends’ names would truly change the inevitable course of destruction.
“I do not have to eat,” Dan Feng said evenly. “I can subsist on moonlight alone.”
Yingxing rifled around the bottom of the container of chicken soup and picked up a pearly
piece of fish maw, extending his chopsticks towards Dan Feng. “It’s good for your health,” he
said.
“…Do not presume to make a habit of this,” Dan Feng said, and gingerly ate the bite off
Yingxing’s chopsticks. The plump, white piece of fish maw was silky and supple, sliding
down his throat with a slightly salty heat in a single smooth swallow. It left behind a trail of
chicken soup, damp on his lips. “There, you happy?”
Yingxing stared at him, eyes blown wide and mouth hanging open as though Dan Feng had
transformed into the azure dragon and parted the ancient sea in front of him. His hands were
fisted tight in the fabric of his pants.
“Yingxing?” Dan Feng said. Was Yingxing unwell? Surely his mortal constitution wasn’t that
fragile.
“Yes, I…um, here, try this too.” Yingxing shook himself out of his reverie and continued on
his quest to make Dan Feng sample everything he’d brought, from sweet sesame rice-
dumplings to a filling bowl of abalone rice still wrapped in steaming lotus-leaves to the
choicest pieces of soy sauce chicken.
“Don’t expect me to be impressed,” Dan Feng said, as Yingxing polished off the remaining
leftovers with mortal gluttony. “I once dined at the tables of Aeons and emperors. I could
criticise even the Arbiter-General’s own chef.”
“You’ve eaten with him?” Yingxing said, quizzical.
“The predecessor of the current Arbiter-General. When I was an adolescent.”
A pained expression came over Yingxing’s face. “Why do they stop treating you well?”
However angry Yingxing thought himself, it was a mere fraction to the wrath that Yinyue-jun
had harboured over incarnations. The jade shackles sent the briefest shiver of agony through
the bones of his wrists and tail. “They would say that I force their hand,” Dan Feng said.
At the start of every life, they showed the slightest hint of gratitude to him, relieved to finally
see the end of the long eclipse. They welcomed him back as the prodigal heir; and he himself,
young and naive, would lend his assistance to restoring the worldship to glory, despite the
suffering caused by casting cloudhymn energy. When they taught that he was a sinner in his
past lives and deserved to be shackled, he accepted that. So long as he produced cloudhymn
at their bidding, he was treated gently.
Until he remembered what they’d done to him in his past lives. Until he remembered the
Vidyadhara hunted to extinction and Scalegorge Waterscape stolen under the pretence of
preserving the ancient seas that they’d plundered. Until he remembered the true purpose of
the jade around his wrists and tail.
"And what do you say?" Yingxing asked, as if his opinion mattered in the world.
“I would say until I find my god,” Dan Feng said, voice laced with irony so bitter it was
venomous.
“I know that you’ve faced such hardships, with such strength, for so long,” Yingxing
murmured, “but sometimes…it wouldn’t hurt to let yourself be fragile. To let someone else
be at your side and take care of you.”
Yingxing was the only one who ever cared about that. Not even his own Aeon had considered
his wellbeing, when casting the curse inlaid into the marrow of his dragon-bones. Long had
answered the prayers of his predecessor and granted them the means of vengeance, and for
such a great deed a price was demanded. No one ever claimed being an Emanator, the will of
an Aeon, was easy.
If he wanted to keep Yingxing, if he wanted more of these illusions of being human, Dan
Feng had to give those Xianzhou thieves and scum the last vestiges of his people’s power.
With his reincarnation coming closer, the demands on him would only increase.
“Let me help you,” Yingxing said once again.
“I don’t require your help. I don’t require you at all,” Dan Feng lied.
“But do you want it?” Yingxing pressed him. “If you want me to leave, look me in the eyes
and tell me so, and I will.”
“What I want…” A mere mortal could never give it to him. Dan Feng dragged his nails
across the surface of his wrist shackles, even though the nails were likelier to snap before he
ever made a scratch. “Would you weave a net to drag the moon from the brine of the ocean?”
“The weaver has to wait for the bridge of magpies across the stars, just for a glimpse of the
beloved once a year.” Yingxing smiled at him, his ever constant starlight, tender as the
heavenly river without the fate of storms. “I’m not as patient as that, I’m afraid. I would
pursue you, and every day I did not see you, it would be the slowest, most agonising death.”
“You are mortal. All your deaths are fast in my eyes,” Dan Feng retorted, as if he did not
already feel that inevitable loss, that hopeless future, just like the other curse he must bear.
And yet it was this short-lifer who sought to pluck the lotus in blossom, who dared to make
him bow his head, until the hairpin of jade fell into the water. His starlight would tear apart
the very heart of the ocean.
“Then do me the honour of a toast in my memory,” Yingxing said, as though losing him was
some sort of joking matter. He poured them both cups of viscous fermented rice wine. “The
merchant told me that in ancient times, this was called yujiang, white jade turned to
ambrosial liquid. Have it on your lips, and you would ascend to immortality. Ganbei.”
“Ganbei,” Dan Feng echoed and hastily tipped back his own cup, before he could dwell too
long on Yingxing’s lips smeared white with ambrosial jade. Yingxing obligingly poured them
both another, then another, until their cheeks were flushed and their cups were changed.
Eventually Dan Feng found himself with his head in the warmth of Yingxing’s lap, and
Yingxing mumbled, “I’ve gotten Yinyue-jun drunk, haven’t I?”
“Quiet, you’re my pillow,” Dan Feng slurred, just before he fell asleep.
Yingxing woke up and realised three things. First, Dan Feng was curled and rocking in his
lap, iridescent tail wrapped a smidge too tightly around both of them and the jade shackle
pressing into his hip hard enough to bruise. Secondly, Dan Feng was asleep, eyelids closed
and long lashes fluttering against his cheekbones, and Yingxing had never seen anything
more enthralling. “Yingxing,” he sighed, and for a moment Yingxing worried he’d woken
Dan Feng, but instead the Vidyadhara ensconced himself back into sleep. Yingxing would
burn his own workshop to the ground to have Dan Feng sleeping in his arms until the end of
time.
Third, Yingxing’s cock was painfully hard. Which meant he had to extricate himself, and
quickly, before Dan Feng woke up and thought him some sort of pervert.
Unfortunately, the tail was quite the immovable object, especially since Yingxing had to be
gentle with it, had to not further injure the old scars etched into dragon-scales. The more he
tried to nudge it, the tighter the tail clenched around him, pulling him flush against the
sleeping Vidyadhara.
“Dan Feng,” he whispered, irrationally hoping that maybe the Vidyadhara would wake up
halfway and relax enough to let him escape with dignity intact. “Yinyue-jun…”
Then, shamefully, Yingxing found himself rutting against Dan Feng, and he wasn’t trying to
wake him anymore, just moaning into the smooth arch of his neck. “Feng-er,” he gasped, and
before he lost all his senses, wrenched himself to stillness.
Only to realise that Dan Feng, too, had stilled, minute trembling all through his shoulders and
his waist and his long, limber legs. His green eyes wide and dazed, even as his tail and hands
went slack.
“Sorry,” Yingxing choked out, releasing Dan Feng as gently as he could without giving in to
the desire to let his hands linger. Dan Feng let out a sharp exhale, just an octave higher than a
whimper. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to, just your tail…”
What was he doing, making excuses for his own depraved actions? This was entirely,
horribly inappropriate, when Dan Feng was a prisoner and no one on the Luofu had ever
protected him from being hurt. “Won’t happen again. Forgive me.”
Dan Feng made another indistinct noise and shook his head, but refused to look him in the
eyes, staring up at the ceiling. There wasn’t a single lotus bloom anywhere in the room, only
the unholy trinity of light emanating from his jade shackles that held back his power. If he’d
been free, Yingxing would doubtless be a splatter on the walls under a maelstrom of
cloudhymn.
“Aeons, I’m sorry,” Yingxing said again, his heart twisting at how he’d betrayed Dan Feng’s
trust in him, and fled like the coward he was.
Chapter End Notes
References and translations
wow. can't believe that this marks 100k words of this ship since, what, October? thank
you for all the support on this fic and others because it really does feed my motivation!!
if you're enjoying pls drop a kudos/comment nomnom (◕ᴗ◕✿)
Next chapter we earn that E rating.

the eternity of the moon
Chapter Summary
“I’ll be the one to prepare you,” he said, making his words rumble with promise until he
felt his beloved flutter and relax in his arms. “Yinyue-jun…let me worship you. Revere
you.”
In short: Yingxing neglects his own wellbeing, Dan Feng neglects his own wellbeing,
and the slow burn is finally over.
Chapter Notes
For the next week, Yingxing couldn’t so much as glance at a cup of water without a wave of
shame. He used barely enough to keep himself clean and to keep his forge running, but other
than that he sustained himself on imported liquor. He slept in his workshop through the night,
not even daring to venture out into the moonlight.
But he couldn’t hide forever. At the very least he had to face Yinyue-jun and apologise
properly for his transgressions, and make whatever amends he could. Yingxing should never
have made such advances on someone sleeping in his arms after entirely too much drink, let
alone a prisoner.
Everyone had always taken advantage of Yinyue-jun, and Yingxing was no better than any of
them.
Dan Feng was kneeling on the ground, turned away from Yingxing, dark hair spread over his
back and shoulders. He’d cultivated an entire lotus pool, delicate blossoms fluttering as the
ripples from Yingxing’s clumsy steps reached them. His opalescent tail thumped the ground,
once, clear and decisive.
“Last time…I shouldn’t have done that,” Yingxing began.
“You left me,” Dan Feng said sharply, turning his head just enough to glare at Yingxing. “I
thought you were going to—but then you left. I have spent all this time worrying that you
wouldn’t come back.”
Yingxing blinked and stuttered, “What, you didn’t…find it…find me unwelcome?”
“Idiot. Come here,” Dan Feng ordered, imperiously. “Next time, ask me instead of running
away.”
The relief that went through Yingxing was a dozen times more satisfying than even the
thought of actually bedding Dan Feng. “Well, I would want to treat you better than half-
drunken fumbling anyways.” Yingxing pressed soft, closed-mouth kisses to Dan Feng’s
wrists just along the jade shackles. “In fact, until you’re free of these shackles, I won’t—”
Dan Feng wrapped his tail around Yingxing’s neck, stopping the words in his throat. “Do not
say that. Don’t commit yourself to that folly.”
“I will do it,” Yingxing said, once the pressure on his throat weakened and he stopped
imagining Dan Feng’s arms or legs around his neck. “I will free you.”
“You do not know what that means.”
“Then tell me,” Yingxing pleaded with him. “Tell me who locked away your powers, and
why.”
The feverish glint in Dan Feng’s eyes would have sent a lesser man fleeing again. “My Aeon
made me this way. And you dare to claim you will undo it.”
“Why shouldn’t I? I may only be mortal, but I’m the one alive.” Yingxing wondered after the
words had left his mouth, whether that was sacrilege. “If your Aeon has an issue with it, they
should come back to life and I’ll fight them myself.”
“You impossibly arrogant man,” Dan Feng sighed. “When my people, our home, was wiped
out, the spirit of Long bequeathed the last of their power onto my incarnation line. To curse
the person I was, for being unable to protect that legacy; to bless the person I will become,
with the means to avenge that loss.”
Even through the haze of exhaustion and desire, that much explanation was sufficient for
Yingxing to put the pieces together. Divinely created or not, after all, the shackles were still a
work of craftsmanship, something he understood effortlessly. “They’re not only shackles to
restrict your cloudhymn—they’re storing your power, thousands of years worth.”
“The Xianzhou merely make use of my…condition. A fraction of what they have
accumulated by now, could sustain this ship until even the immortals faded from the stars,”
Dan Feng confirmed. “And on the day sufficient power has accumulated, these shackles will
unseal and I will finally receive every drop of Xianzhou blood that I am owed.”
Yingxing had a great deal of questions he wanted to ask, except his body chose that very
moment to topple over. He barely managed to twist aside to avoid knocking Dan Feng down
entirely.
Cool hands touched his forehead and the pulse at his wrist. “Yingxing, you fool. Sleep
deprivation, dehydration—what did you do to yourself?”
“Didn’t feel right,” Yingxing got out. “To use your water…when I’d upset you.”
“What new nonsense is this.” Dan Feng prodded Yingxing to lie supine, submerged in the
lotus pool, and raised a cupped hand in the air. A pearl of pure moonlight gathered at his
bidding, more concentrated than the flowers or springwater he created at the Xianzhou’s
bidding. The inevitable pain of drawing on his powers wrenched his mouth into a bitter, flat
line.
“Not if it hurts you,” Yingxing tried to say, reaching out to stop him.
“It does hurt,” Dan Feng said, so incensed he forgot not to admit weakness. He split the pearl
in half with a flash in his eyes, and yet it was not two halves of a sphere, but two perfectly
formed spheres of moonlight that remained. “So remember that the next time you feel
compelled to do something so gallant and idiotic. Take one now, grind the other into dust to
dissolve it in water and bathe in it tonight.”
Yingxing obediently swallowed the pearl that Dan Feng pressed to his lips. Those cool
fingers caressed him for a moment, traced down the line of his throat as he swallowed.
“Sit back up. Your clothes are soaked through; I’ll wick away the water before you catch
some mortal cold.”
“I could take them off,” Yingxing said, testing his luck, and was rewarded with a delightful
blush to Dan Feng’s high cheekbones. He wondered what he’d have to do, to coax a flush
into those pointed ears too. “Make sure my healer takes a proper look at my poor, wretched,
fragile, mortal body.”
Dan Feng settled in his open arms, but with the air of a deer trailing through maple leaves
alert to a predator, his body tense enough to betray his age-old suspicions. “You are mortal,”
he whispered, his breathing stuttering from the ancient calm rhythm of his race into an
abruptly heaving chest. “And I was made to carry the mandate of heaven and the legacy of an
Aeon, so what I would do to keep you with me, I will do it no matter the cost—I am well
accustomed to interminable suffering.”
“It’s not supposed to hurt,” Yingxing said, running a soothing hand down Dan Feng’s flank.
“We’ll take it slow.”
“Everything has always hurt,” Dan Feng confessed, crossing his shackled wrists between
them like some sort of offering. “My Aeon created me for this purpose. To endure suffering
and sacrifice, and to exact destruction.”
“If that’s the case,” and here Yingxing traced a hand around Dan Feng’s waist, enough to
entice without holding him firm, not yet, “if you were not made for pleasure, then what is that
warmth soaking from your sex into my pants?”
“You! How dare you be so vulgar,” growled Dan Feng, but pointedly straddled Yingxing’s
thighs more firmly.
“Whether your Aeon intended it or not,” Yingxing went on, pressing the lightest kiss to the
hair falling over Dan Feng’s collarbones, “I would defy them—any and all of them—to give
you nothing but pleasure, beloved.”
Dan Feng burying his head in Yingxing’s shoulder was entirely welcome, but the choked sob
that came out—just one, a tiny moment of weakness was all that his beloved dared to betray.
How long and arduous his captivity had been, between the curse of his shackles and the
demands of the Xianzhou.
“How long have you been held here, really,” Yingxing said softly, burying his words into fine
dark hair.
“Time…the concept of it, to a soul that will live forever.” The unbearable, resigned sorrow in
his words, worse even than the sob, as though immortality itself was the curse. “To me, time
is only before you and after you.”
He meant after knowing Yingxing. But Yingxing was a mortal, with a finite lifespan, and
after he left Dan Feng behind as he must…He clicked his tongue, always coming back to the
unending problem of how to unshackle Dan Feng. A weapon of destruction, its ultimate
purpose had sounded like, and wasn’t Yingxing the best weaponsmith in the Xianzhou?
“Don’t run away again,” Dan Feng said, before he could consider the problem further. “You
are utterly incomprehensible to me. You could have taken me last time. I was…I am
prepared.”
Prepared, apparently, meant bracing himself for pain, so stilted and fearful that Yingxing had
mistaken it for rejection. “I’ll be the one to prepare you,” he said, making his words rumble
with promise until he felt his beloved flutter and relax in his arms. “Yinyue-jun…let me
worship you. Revere you.”
“Yes,” the sigh escaped Dan Feng’s lips, more magical than any cloudhymn.
“With my tongue,” Yingxing clarified, and was promptly smacked with a tail while his
beloved huffed about how crude and base these mortals were. “Wait, so you don’t want—”
“Shut up and put your mouth to good use, Yingxing.”
Yingxing did not shut up.
“Back against the wall,” Yingxing said, with the smooth, supremely confident swagger as
though he was the one with immortal experience. “Up you go.”
Dan Feng began to shake his head, then before Yingxing got the wrong idea again, hurried to
clarify, “I wouldn’t mind. It’s just that I can’t stand well…”
He gestured to his feet, bones crushed and bound since he was a youth in this incarnation. In
ancient custom, they were a marker of nobility and grace, meant to attract and seduce a
husband of wealth and status. The barely-muted fury shouldn’t make Yingxing look more
handsome, but it did. Dan Feng traced the scattering of silver hairs on Yingxing’s head, no
doubt exacerbated by the neglect of his health.
“We will talk about that later,” Yingxing said, dark with promise, before scooping Dan Feng
up and pinning him against the wall. Dan Feng curled his knees over Yingxing’s shoulders,
desire shuddering through him as large hands wrapped around his waist and hips to lift him in
place, and Yingxing knelt and settled his head between obscenely spread thighs.
“Hold onto my hair,” Yingxing said, with an infuriating smile that Dan Feng needed to wipe
off his smug face.
With hands that had cultivated the moon, that could wither and ruin an entire realm, Dan
Feng grabbed the silver-speckled hair like a lifeline. Yingxing was moaning in bliss even
before his teeth teased open Dan Feng’s pants, tongue laving over the scales of his tail, then
finally at the wetness of his cunt.
“Oh, I am tasting the divine,” Yingxing gasped, between rolling his tongue into Dan Feng.
“What divinity.” Divine intervention was a curse that his predecessor was so foolish to call
upon themselves; far easier to belong to one mortal man than be used by an Aeon. Dan Feng
arched into the steady, rhythmic defilement delivered by that clever mouth. “You have made
me the lowliest beast there is, ah, Yingxing…”
“That’s it.” Yingxing took one hand off Dan Feng’s hip, somehow lifting him with just a left-
handed grasp on his waist. The slightest brush of gentle yet rough fingers, working alongside
his tongue at Dan Feng’s entrance. “Say my name.”
“Yingxing, you—” The rest of his rebuke collapsed into a wordless sigh, as Yingxing flicked
his tongue just so and brought his pleasure to a crest, trembling all through his legs like the
eternity of the moon. Dan Feng found himself clenching down, tight around the tips of
Yingxing’s thick fingers.
Dan Feng sank down into Yingxing’s arms, still panting from exertion as Yingxing pressed
kisses all along the length of his tail, laving the scales which had grown calloused from
friction against the ancient shackle. Ignoring the twinge of soreness, Dan Feng slicked his
hand with cloudhymn and slipped it into Yingxing’s pants, wrapped it around his cock and
stroked until Yingxing was groaning under him.
“You can take me,” Dan Feng offered again, forcing himself to breathe steadily, holding
himself ready for Yingxing to use as he pleased. He began to turn himself on his hands and
knees, terrified that he would betray some expression, some unwillingness, and scare
Yingxing off again.
Yingxing stopped him with nothing more than a touch on his neck. “No, not like…not this
time,” he said. “But may I bring you something, next time? Something for your pleasure?”
Judging from the look in Yingxing’s eyes—and the swell of his erection—Dan Feng had
definitely failed to stop the blush from creeping up into his ears.
Chapter End Notes

these two horny idiots finally did it, pls send them congratulations
seven steps into the hasty inferno
Chapter Summary
“How I feel about you…I don’t merely seek to drag the moon from the brine of the
ocean. What I wish is to see it rise, in all its glory and magnificence.”
Chapter Notes
Chapter title from <七步詩>, a poem that references burning the beanstalk to cook the
beans as a plea against fratricide.
“We’re deploying to war on Thalassa.”
Yingxing had laboured over the pair of scarlet-tasseled earrings and the delicate string of jade
beads, hoping the gifts would soften the sting of the news. Judging from his Yinyue-jun’s
bared teeth, the offering was far from enough.
“You cannot leave,” Dan Feng snarled, jade flaring at his wrists and his tail as he backed
Yingxing against a wall, bound feet gliding on a pedestal of cloudhymn. “Is this backwater
planet more important than me? Is it?”
“Don’t be like that.” Yingxing caught the Vidyadhara’s tail, before Dan Feng got the idea to
strangle him to win the argument, and gave the glowing scales a firm, reassuring stroke. The
tail immediately wound around his arm with all the force of a deranged octopus. “The people
of Thalassa need our help against the borisin invasion.”
“And I need you.” Dan Feng tossed his hair, every bit the dragon-lord of his lineage. “You’re
mine, and I refuse to let you go risk your life for some peasants in the name of the
Xianzhou.”
“I’m an engineer. I’ll be nowhere near the front lines. But I will have my vengeance against
the borisins.”
“Oh, if we’re talking of vengeance, then. Every day that you abandon me, I’ll see the
Xianzhou Luofu wither in another false eclipse!” As if to prove his point, Dan Feng swung
his arm and turned all the lotus blossoms that he’d been reclining amidst into dry, brown
husks.
“Dan Feng, for Aeons’ sake, I love you but you cannot cling to me like this. I’m not
disappearing on you right away. These immortals are so inefficient, the deployment will take
months.” Even while people died on Thalassa, and the borisins feasted their fill.
Dan Feng stared at him. “Say that again?” he said in a small voice.
“The deployment is estimated to take around three to six months?” Yingxing said,
deliberately putting on his most obnoxious smirk.
The tuft at the end of the tail smacked him on the shoulder. “Before that. You said you…how
you feel about me.”
Yingxing couldn’t help laughing at how adorably forlorn Dan Feng looked. “I’ll say it, if you
accept my gifts with good grace.”
“Hmph. Arrogant, impertinent mortal.” Dan Feng tilted his ear towards Yingxing, giving him
access to pin the red tassel on the smooth lobe of his pointed ear. “You will wear the other
one. And I want my reward.”
“As you wish, Yinyue-jun.” Yingxing leaned in close enough that Dan Feng dissipated his
pedestal of cloudhymn and rested his weight entirely in his arms. “How I feel about you…I
don’t merely seek to drag the moon from the brine of the ocean. What I wish is to see it rise,
in all its glory and magnificence.”
“You!” Dan Feng exclaimed, muffled where his cold lips pressed against Yingxing’s neck.
“You absurd man.”
“Shall I say it again? You still have another gift.” Yingxing pressed the jade beads into Dan
Feng’s hand. Each piece of green stone was the size of a large pearl, hollowed out inside,
attached together with copper beaten so soft and rounded it might as well be silk. At the very
end was a larger jade talisman, a circle with a hollow centre to anchor the entire piece.
Dan Feng held the jade accessory up to the light. “But where can I wear…oh.” His eyes
glazed over with lust, brighter than any jade. “…you want me to—in—inside—”
“If you want. This is for your pleasure.” Though Yingxing would be lying if he didn’t crave
that sight, he would be just as happy for Dan Feng to use it alone, warmed by merely the
knowledge of Dan Feng’s satisfaction. “Or if you prefer it on me, we could share this too.”
“Oh,” the sigh escaped his beloved’s lips again, proud draconic features softened to coyness.
“No, I want it. Go on,” he said imperiously.
Yingxing knelt so that Dan Feng could sit on his lap, facing away from him. The tail snaked
its way against Yingxing’s hardness and twined around one of his thighs with a distinctly
possessive streak. “Making yourself comfortable?”
Dan Feng twisted where he sat, the veil of his hair tumbling behind him as he turned enough
to look up at Yingxing. The display of his flexibility went straight to Yingxing’s cock, and
Dan Feng’s greedy, slender fingers tearing open his shirt did nothing to help. “Now I am,”
Dan Feng said primly, leaning against Yingxing’s bare chest.
Mouthing kisses through the dark hair flowing in front of him, Yingxing tugged down Dan
Feng’s pants and slid a finger over his slick opening. “Yinyue-jun,” Yingxing murmured,
reverent, as he dipped a second finger into the divine heat of his beloved. “Let this mortal
defile you once again.”
He didn’t expect a response, and didn’t get one other than a frenzy of breathy moans.
“Let’s make a bet, shall we?” Yingxing pried the jade accessory out of Dan Feng’s loosened
grip, and teased the jade just outside his cunt, enough contact to lubricate the beads and no
more. “If you can take seven of these beads without coming on my fingers, I’ll reward you.”
“You—you,” gasped Dan Feng, a bright flush creeping even through his bare thighs.
It took Yingxing a moment to realise that Dan Feng wasn’t trying to chide him for his
arrogance and insolence, as he so frequently did. “Yinyue-jun wants my cock inside him as a
reward?” He rolled his hips against Dan Feng, firm and deliberate and only once. “Then he’d
better earn it. One.”
He counted off each bead as he pushed them in, rough and steady, at a slow pace and only
progressing when Dan Feng relaxed for him. Put together, seven beads was barely the length
of Yingxing’s longest finger down to the last knuckle, and not much wider than a single
finger. The challenge was fair, if he said so himself. Dan Feng was practically rocking
himself onto the next one as they went. But Yingxing teased his clit with harsh strokes in
between, and just after the sixth bead, instead of counting six, Yingxing put his lips to Dan
Feng’s shoulder and sucked hard with the slightest impression of teeth.
As the orgasm hit him, Dan Feng made a keening noise, loose limbs flailing as Yingxing
relentlessly pushed the last bead into his trembling cunt. Yingxing couldn’t help grinding
himself against Dan Feng’s supple tail with a grunt, the coolness of the scales only stoking
his arousal.
“There we go. Seven. All done.” Yingxing sucked the salty-sweet wetness off his own fingers
before brushing a reassuring hand through Dan Feng’s hair. “Ah, except—I neglected to
mention my reward for winning the bet.” His hand trailed down through soft hair until he
cupped Dan Feng’s ass with an open palm. “Tell me, what is the punishment for striking the
divine?”
“Try it,” Dan Feng panted, coming down from his peak, “and find out.”
Yingxing slapped him right at the junction of his tail, decisively but not at all hard. It wasn’t
meant to hurt. Dan Feng squirmed against him with a wide-eyed whimper, even his tail
slackening its vice grip. “Yingxing—when you—in—inside—it vibrates,” he mumbled.
“This way, I can give you pleasure even when I’m not here,” Yingxing said. He didn’t bother
trying not to sound smug; all his self control was currently holding still his hips. “Not too
sensitive?”
“No. I can keep it in,” Dan Feng insisted, lifting his chin.
Yingxing wrapped his hands around Dan Feng’s waist and flipped him round so they faced
each other. Keeping an arm looped around his lover, Yingxing opened up his pants and took
out his own length.
Lashes lowered coquettishly, Dan Feng darted a hopeful glance down. “I thought you said…”
“You don’t get it inside you.” Yingxing punctuated the statement with a flick of his tongue
against an azure horn. “Eyes up here. Are you so cruel to deny my pleasure just because you
lost your bet, Yinyue-jun?”
“No,” Dan Feng said, the steady, unending seafoam of his eyes softened by the tides of
desire. “Show me your pleasure. Please, Yingxing.”
The plea, the name, his damn eyes. With a groan, Yingxing spread Dan Feng’s thighs wide
and hauled him against the underside of his own cock. Slick still dripped, obscenely, from the
last jade bead clenched at the entrance of Dan Feng’s cunt, making the slide smooth and
tantalising. Yingxing rocked his length along Dan Feng, without ever pushing inside that
tempting wet heat, making sure his beloved felt his size.
Each languid movement would cause the jade beads inside Dan Feng to vibrate and wring
more pleasure out of his sensitive body. How viciously the shivers wracked him, that he’d
thrown his arms around Yingxing’s neck and legs wound around his hips. Dan Feng moaned
more wantonly than ever, an endless litany of ah-ah-ah as though Yingxing had mounted
him, thrust inside him for real.
“Feng-er,” he grunted, the pleasure of stimulation almost breaking into the pain of denying
himself—denying both of them what they wanted. Your Aeon shackled you, the Xianzhou
imprisoned you, and yet I’m the one who has you, he tried to say, but he was too far gone for
words. “I need you,” he said instead, raw and vulgar like the mortal he was.
“Please,” his beloved said again, as though Yingxing’s pleasure was worth such a divine
creature begging to see. And that shoved Yingxing off the edge and made him spend right
against Dan Feng’s hot, slick cunt.
When Yingxing looked down, the white stripes of his seed marking those flushed thighs and
the swollen lips gaping open around his jade accessory kicked an involuntary jerk through his
cock, even as he tucked himself away. He could only hope, that every moment he could spare
from his finite lifetime, would be enough for the demanding creature who’d bewitched him
heart and soul.
One war with the borisins, his age-old nemesis, then he would return. Neither of them would
survive separation for long, in truth.
Chapter End Notes

Art inspiration: https://x.com/norio_0v0/status/1730505904100106693
next chapter will be less smutty but it's just xingyue being squishy around each other :)
dream of the last incarnation
Chapter Summary
“I, too, dream of being the last incarnation,” Dan Feng said, a delve of sorrow so distant
and deep, moonlight refracted into so many fragments that no net could drag them all
from the brine.
Chapter Notes
CW for mentions of past transactional sex.
“I hope you know what you’re doing with Yinyue-jun,” Jingliu said, accosting Yingxing in
his workshop and shooing away his apprentices.
Yingxing fervently hoped that she did not know what he’d done. Better that they suspect him
of implementing some punishment too dark for official witnesses, than sleeping with the so-
called sinner. “The Xianzhou Luofu prospers. My methods are working.”
Clearly unamused, Jingliu rapped his forehead, though at least she used her hand instead of
her sword. “Yinyue-jun has offered his assistance with the borisin attack on Thalassa. Is this
some trick of his?”
“No, but—what about the Luofu?”
“Our reservoirs are overflowing, he can be spared for a short time.” Jingliu scowled. “I would
be glad for the help, but he’s been known to betray his word of honour and turn on us.”
“Wonder why,” Yingxing muttered. The cycle of vengeance and resentment of bitterness,
from Yinyue-jun’s eternal imprisonment to whatever small retributions he could claim in his
reduced power. And was it really safe for him to expend his energy both sustaining the Luofu
and fighting in war?
“We’ll leave within the week. With him on our side, we don’t need to wait for the Cloud
Knights’ full deployment.” A rare sigh of regret, even as Jingliu turned away from him. “You
haven’t seen the destruction that Yinyue-jun can cause, for us or against us. In another time, I
might have dreamed of putting together a strike force, to act where the Xianzhou is too
slow…but perhaps it’s far too late for that.”
“It’s not too late for the people of Thalassa.” Obviously, Dan Feng’s intentions were anything
but selfless, but it wouldn’t hurt to remind everyone that he was still helping.
“Unless he has impure intentions, in which case we will all pay the price trying to subdue
him.”
Yingxing rather hoped that Dan Feng had impure intentions, and thought subduing him might
be enjoyable for both of them.
As if his thoughts were plain to see on his face, Jingliu said, “You should ask him what he did
to the last one who got too close.”
Dan Feng should have been confined in the brig until they reached Thalassa, but he
demanded the concession of staying in Yingxing’s makeshift workshop instead. Yingxing
made it clear he had work other than catering to Yinyue-jun’s every whim and spent hours
calibrating every weapon and equipment, until his beloved was curled up petulantly in the
corner, tail swishing for lack of attention. Then Yingxing said, “I’m told my predecessor met
an unfortunate end.”
“My last lover?” Dan Feng arched his eyebrows. “I was two hundred years old, when a dozen
Vidyadhara attempted an attack on Scalegorge Waterscape. Foolish, really.”
“There are other Vidyadhara?”
An elegant shrug. “They kept the secret of any others to their bitter ends.”
“At least one of them had the sweetness of your companionship,” Yingxing said, after a
moment of silence. Personally, he could think of no better way to go.
Dan Feng’s expression grew distant and cold. “It wasn’t any of the Vidyadhara. I slept with
the Arbiter-General of the time, to ensure my kin would be laid to rest beside Scalegorge
Waterscape, as close as possible without reincarnation into imprisonment. Then I laid a curse
on his name, and the ancient sea devoured him a few years later. That was perhaps a decade
before the incident on the Cangcheng.”
He recited it with no more emotion than critiquing a particularly dull tragic play at the
teahouse. Perhaps it was so very long ago, even by an immortal’s standards, and Dan Feng
had found his own way of defending himself. But Yingxing still laid the lightest of kisses on
Dan Feng’s fingertips to soothe the hurt as far he could. He didn’t trust himself to speak,
because then he wouldn’t be able to stop: is that why you’re sometimes so defiantly silent, so
tremulously still; was he your first in this life and did he treat you poorly; if I lose my mind
and pray to Yaoshi then I pray that he comes back to life and I can forge a sword just to hack
him to pieces. All Yingxing could do was be grateful he’d been so very slow and careful with
someone who had been a prisoner all his life, despite the air of untouchable pride.
“It was not a very great price to pay, to ensure they died free. Far easier than what I have
borne all these incarnations.” Dan Feng tapped the jade at his wrists. “Everything demands a
price to be paid; nothing greater than freedom, and hence no price too great.”
He said this about other Vidyadhara, yet was so resigned to his own fate. “Haven’t you paid
enough? Sacrificed enough?”
“I, too, dream of being the last incarnation,” Dan Feng said, a delve of sorrow so distant and
deep, moonlight refracted into so many fragments that no net could drag them all from the
brine.
“You’ll be the last incarnation to be shackled, and the first to be free. I’ll see it done,”
Yingxing promised, lowering another kiss to his beloved’s soft, cool palms.
Dan Feng was a miracle to behold on the battlefield. Bound feet dancing across lotus
pedestals, surges of cloudhymn that annihilated waves of enemies, Yingxing’s spear in his
hands. Yingxing thought he would have delighted in fighting at his side for the rest of his
mortal years, at least until Dan Feng outright fainted from the over-exertion, eyes open and
frighteningly empty, shackles gleaming brighter than he’d ever seen.
At least their mission was more or less accomplished by then. Most of the surviving locals
evacuated to the more defensible capital, the wounded and the children transported off-world
to be fostered on Xianzhou ships until the Cloud Knights arrived to reinforce them.
“This is normal,” Dan Feng said when he came to in the healing rooms and tried to get
Yingxing to stop taking care of him. “It’s a side effect of the shackles; I expend many times
the energy that is actually used, since most of it is stolen by these. Whenever I lent my aid to
the Xianzhou in my youth, or in any other incarnations, the same would happen. And I
managed fine.”
By which he meant, no one took care of him. And the Xianzhou wondered why he turned
against them. Yingxing sighed and held out a spoonful of the chicken soup that he’d made
with only a little help from Jing Yuan, taking care to spoon up more of the medicinal winter
fungus at the bottom. “Lie back down on the bed and have some soup,” he said.
“I deserve to be feted like a warrior-prince, not treated like a child,” Dan Feng said. “Where
is my reward for my valiant feats?”
Only his Yinyue-jun could act like being spoonfed was such a trial. “I’ll give Feng-er his
reward in due time,” he said, lifting the spoon again.
“I want that black dragon-leather you have on that shelf,” Dan Feng demanded immediately
after finishing the bowl.
Honestly, Yingxing had been expecting a demand for sex. It took him a moment to recall,
those scraps left over from remaking some woman’s family heirloom of armour into a
handbag. “Did you say dragon-leather,” he said, a sick dread in his stomach. “How…”
“It should be enough material to fashion a pair of bracers,” Dan Feng said, ignoring the
unspoken question. “Telepathic, so you can always find the other. In the ways of my
people…it would be a declaration of courtship.”
No more words were exchanged then, only a kiss that was either one, deep and languid, or a
dozen each melting into the next.
“Yinyue-jun,” he said, when Dan Feng’s mouth was swollen and sensitive, “let me brush
your hair?”
He coaxed Dan Feng to lie back on the bed, on his belly and propped up by cushions. Only
now did Yingxing realise just how short the nightgown was, baring almost all the moonlit
skin of Dan Feng’s legs, enough that he could see the end of the jade accessory dangling from
between his thighs. When did that incorrigible tease even find the chance to put it in without
his noticing?
“You were saying about my hair?” Dan Feng said, smug and sultry.
Yingxing mastered himself with a deep breath and began combing through Dan Feng’s long,
dark tresses. Even this about him was born of water, flowing through his hands as a river of
obsidian. He pressed light kisses against the ends as he brushed it out until it shone like the
night sky cradling the moon, admiring how it contrasted against pale, slender shoulders.
“Um,” Jing Yuan said uncertainly from the doorway, his eyes lingering far too on Dan Feng.
Yingxing was blocking his sight with his own body before he even realised what he was
doing. “I was just here to get bandages, and it’s not like I haven’t known for years,” he
protested as Yingxing dragged him out of the healing room and back into the hallway.
“Didn’t Jingliu just give you clearance this mission?” Yingxing demanded, an entirely
irrational suspicion heating up low in his gut.
“Technically, yes,” Jing Yuan said. “But you have been saying all sorts of incriminating
things while drinking, or while sleeping. There was also the time I saw you hiding a book of
Vidyadhara legends inside your crafting manual, and paying the storytellers at the teahouse
extra to keep telling Vidyadhara legends, and doodling in the margins of your blueprints…
need I go on?”
Yingxing glared at him. “Keep your thoughts off my—prisoner.”
“I could go on,” Jing Yuan said, eyes glinting with mischief like the brat he was. “I could also
be persuaded to stop, were I to be overcome with gratitude that our most genius, most
talented, most skilled craftsman Xing-gege would finally bestow me with a handmade
weapon—”
Flinging his hands up, Yingxing stalked back into the healing room, pointedly closing the
door on Jing Yuan’s wistful look. He was going to have to finish forging that glaive.
Chapter End Notes

1. "The last incarnation" would be specifically translated as 最後一代; if you know
what it implies, you know.
2. JY was supposed to have an actual character arc in this, where he specifically climbs
the ranks to become General so that he can try to help get DF out in a legal way.
Unfortunately xingyue took over my brain. I’m sorry husband, DF will look at you in
another AU someday…
Next chapter: lingerie ;P

caress the moon to my demise
Chapter Summary
“You think you will save me?” Dan Feng snapped, at the end of his patience. “Merely in
this incarnation, they tortured me for five hundred years before you ever came, and in all
the incarnations I can remember. What did you save me from?” When Yingxing
remained silent, too stunned to reply, he went on, “Do you think you can free me? When
you, yourself, have placed the worst chains on me, around my cursed heart, and yet you
are going to die and leave me alone, again—”
Chapter Notes
the summary makes it sound serious but honestly it's just smut because these two
wouldn't stop making out
Faithfully, constantly, Yingxing forged blades and tested them against the shackles, yet even
his finest work could never leave a scratch. They were the immaculate creation of an Aeon,
even one long-dead.
Despite it all, at least Dan Feng could enjoy Yingxing’s charming indignation that there were
some miracles his arrogance could not surpass.
“Everything the moonlight touches, anything that the ancient sea tastes.” Dan Feng brushed
Yingxing’s silvery bangs out of his eyes. “These weapons are cursed to fail and shatter
against a Vidyadhara. No Xianzhou weaponsmith could ever hope to craft the blade you
imagine.”
“That’s a curse?” Yingxing frowned. “I have noticed that certain flaws appear under the
moon, I correct for it—”
“You tried. Curses are an inexact art, and conviction can delay the inevitable, but not escape
it entirely.” The protections he had weaved thwarted his own imprisonment very little, but
they were all he could do. Most of the time, the weapons only cracked and broke some time
after spilling his blood.
Yingxing clicked his tongue, frustrated as he always was against the interminable wheel of
fate. “These shackles are a weapon used against you, so why won’t they break under the
curse?”
An engineer’s ruthless logical fallacy. “You expect my curse, even laid down throughout
incarnations, to undo an Aeon’s last will? The stone will not shatter.” Not until its true
purpose was fulfilled.
“Even stone is eroded under the inexorable drip of water,” Yingxing said after a while of
contemplation. “I will design something that uses moonlight and brine itself. Scalegorge
spring water…yes, I can work with that. The shackles are clearly a weapon.”
Truly, it was impossible to hide anything about weapons and crafting from Yingxing, even if
he did not yet know how right he was.
“Even if this was true, and we conjured an endless stream of water, it would take a very long
time before the stone eroded.” Yinyue-jun was immortal through permanent incarnations, but
Yingxing would age and die.
As usual, Yingxing shrugged his own mortality off, already fiddling with a blueprint on his
jade abacus. “At the very least, you should be able to tap into the cloudhymn that the stone
has been sapping away from you. You won’t need to expend more energy to sustain the
Luofu, and can rest more.”
That was not the nature of the shackles, Dan Feng knew from instinct and half-memories. It
had harnessed his cloudhymn power, created when his suffering was so unbearable that he
attempted to manifest a tsunami to drown himself and be dissolved away into the springs.
No, if the shackles were broken, instead the curse would begin to unspool, slow and
insidious, into Scalegorge Waterscape. A slow poison, vengeance fermented by long years of
resentment. The sentiments of one man could not hold back the deluge.
“You would take my vengeance from me,” was all Dan Feng said aloud. Before he had
Yingxing, vengeance was all Yinyue-jun had possessed in captivity.
“I’m saving you,” Yingxing insisted, arrogant as always.
“You think you will save me?” Dan Feng snapped, at the end of his patience. “Merely in this
incarnation, they tortured me for five hundred years before you ever came, and in all the
incarnations I can remember. What did you save me from?” When Yingxing remained silent,
too stunned to reply, he went on, “Do you think you can free me? When you, yourself, have
placed the worst chains on me, around my cursed heart, and yet you are going to die and
leave me alone, again—”
He could not say how it happened, that Yingxing’s warm arms were around him, his embrace
so massive that it became his entire world. It was so very cruel of his starlight, to lull him
into contentment, to trick him into accepting imprisonment because if the shackles were to
break, if he were to be free—
He would lose Yingxing anyways, lose even the view of the stars from the window of his
prison. The curse would be their undoing.
An eternity of suffering had been worth gaining him. Incarnation after incarnation of Yinyue-
jun, sacrificed to nurture the Xianzhou, so that eventually they delivered Yingxing to him.
Everything demanded a price to be paid, and for someone so dear to him as Yingxing, there
could be no higher price than this.
“Come what may, the stars will accompany the moon to the end,” Yingxing murmured in his
ear.
If only Dan Feng had the strength to discard him, instead of lie and lie in hopes of keeping
him. He had taken Yingxing’s craftsmanship and body and honour, and used him for a few
fleeting moments of delusional pleasure, only in the end to drag him down to the brine of the
sea.
While Dan Feng had developed the habit of condensing the required cloudhymn into lotuses
before their meetings—to make better use of their time, he claimed, though Yingxing
suspected it was because he preferred to keep any exhaustion or strain private—it was not
normal that the entire cell was overgrown with lotus blossoms, so much that it choked out
even the cloudhymn springwater. Dan Feng was crouched down amidst the pool, his black
hair spread like a shroud to hide all of his figure save for his proud azure horns.
“Are you all right?” Yingxing blurted, because Dan Feng had a habit of overusing his powers
until he fainted. “You shouldn’t push yourself—”
He trailed off as Dan Feng tossed his hair over a shoulder and straightened up to expose the
shocking expanse of his back, bare except for diamond-and-jade chains and scarlet ribbons
across his neck and hips. Then he turned to reveal the tiny scrap of maple-embroidered
scarlet silk, covering him from nipple to navel but baring the curves of his slender waist and
hips. The diaphanous fabric teased rather than concealed, glinting with delicate chains
winding around jade-white skin. A garnet clasp gripped his thigh just a little too tightly, as if
tempting fingers to wrap around that limb.
Sometimes sorrow and submission, other times imperious and assertive. That was what he
knew of Dan Feng, and in this moment he seemed to contain all those multitudes. And yet
something more, an air of too much perfection, on the wrong side of terrifying, sculpted in
Yinyue-jun’s divine body. What base filth of Yingxing’s hands had placed on him, and what
he desired to further profane him with—
“Did you,” Yingxing cleared his throat, willing some blood to stay in his brain, “where did
you get those?” He recognised the garnet clasp, he’d crafted it during one of his more
indulgent fantasies, but he hadn’t commissioned a seamstress for wedding clothes. Wedding
lingerie.
“In your workshop on the way back from the campaign?”
Yingxing flailed mentally whether it was Baiheng or Jing Yuan who had hacked into the
private shopping wishlist on his jade abacus, then decided that was not his priority for the
moment, and maybe for not a long while if he was very, very fortunate. “Tell me you mean
for me to touch you,” he implored.
“A great deal more than touch, I hope,” Dan Feng said archly.
That was all the invitation he needed. Yingxing was the most vulgar of beasts as he pounced
on Dan Feng, hands going straight for the dip of his waist. His thumbs slid under the scarlet
shift, the fingers of his two hands grazed each other.
“I desire not the long flight of the immortals,” Yingxing sighed, reverently, “but rather caress
the moon to my own demise.”
Dan Feng had gotten better at controlling his blushes, because he only narrowed his
unblinking jade-green eyes into draconic slits. “You are insufferable.”
“Very well then.” Yingxing curved his lips into a satisfied smirk. “What I mean to say is,
Yinyue-jun makes my cock so hard—”
“Stop being so crass!” Dan Feng chided him, as though he did not bite back an ardent moan
when Yingxing tightened the grip on his waist, thumbs pushing firm but reassuring circles
into the soft moonlit skin. “Shut up and move.”
Without waiting for Yingxing to string together a response in his very distracted mind, Dan
Feng hauled him by the collar into a large, gilt-edged lotus more substantial than the rest, like
the one he used to float around. The mother-of-pearl shade of the petals cradled his dark hair
and long limbs like the shell of a clam.
“Off,” said Dan Feng, yanking at Yingxing’s collar before winding slender yet strong arms
around his neck.
Reluctantly, Yingxing had to take one hand off Dan Feng to shrug off his coat, though he slid
his other arm around that lithe waist more tightly and pressed his clothed arousal between
them.
“Yingxing, no teasing tonight, I swear to Long,” Dan Feng said, breathless in a way that just
enticed Yingxing to kiss him even more so, sink into their embrace until their matching
earrings brushed each other’s cheeks.
“As Yinyue-jun commands,” Yingxing said, though he had every intention of opening up
Dan Feng with his fingers and tongue. “But first, I want to imbibe the moon—”
Dan Feng managed to stutter out half-hearted complaints to hurry up, Yingxing even as he
rode Yingxing’s face, though he dissolved into breathy sighs as his pleasure overtook him.
Yingxing made him come once like that, then scooped him into his own lap, careful to
support Dan Feng with his own body. The cloudhymn lotus they reclined on was dependent
on Dan Feng’s focus, after all, and although even shackled his magical reserves were
staggering, Yingxing didn’t want to be so caught up in seeking his own pleasure that he
dropped his lover on the ground.
As he adjusted his grip on Dan Feng, his fingers caught on the chains. But instead of tensing,
Dan Feng rocked his slick, bare sex against Yingxing’s clothed erection and made an
indistinct wordless moan that clearly meant, keep doing that.
Yingxing thumbed the jewels and metal links all over Dan Feng’s body, and teased his cunt
with two fingertips. Despite the orgasm, Dan Feng was still incredibly, tantalisingly tight, and
winced even as he fucked himself onto Yingxing’s broad fingers.
“Careful, Yinyue-jun,” Yingxing said, pressing his mouth to the corner of Dan Feng’s lips to
kiss the hurt away. “Prolonging your gratification can be interesting, too.”
“It’ll fit,” Dan Feng insisted, implacable even as he keened at the pressure of Yingxing
scissoring his fingers inside. “Yingxing, you make it fit, I swear…”
The shameless command made Yingxing even more painfully hard in his pants. Sheer
determination held him back as he kept working Dan Feng open, with three fingers then a
fourth, coaxing two more orgasms and reducing him to trembling pleas.
“So good for me,” Yingxing murmured as he licked the salty-sweet brine of slick off his
hand. “Ready for your reward now?”
Dan Feng’s storm-green pupils dilated dark as the watery abyss. Instead of reaching
straightaway into Yingxing’s pants, he drew his hand between his own thighs, and used his
wetness to slick Yingxing’s cock, long pale fingers gripping the length with more than a bit
of possessiveness. Yingxing threw his head back and groaned as Dan Feng sank down on
him, so warm and tight—
Too tight, he realised a split second before the momentum stuttered to a stop halfway down
and Dan Feng’s cunt spasmed around him. Headstrong as ever, Dan Feng kept trying to bear
down on him, eyes unblinking and wide with effort.
“Feng-er, stop,” Yingxing ordered, supporting his lover’s hips with a firm hand. “You did so
beautifully. This is more than enough.”
“I want it all,” Dan Feng said stubbornly, though he did stop trying. “I can take it all.”
Yingxing silently cursed the twitch of his traitorous cock. He was only mortal, and he no
longer had the will to resist Yinyue-jun’s demands. “Of course you can. But let me take my
time.”
He smothered Dan Feng’s shoulders with soft, open-mouthed kisses until the pale skin was
practically luminous, caressed the dip of his waist with the back of a hand, until the tension
seeped away a little. “Close your eyes and breathe for me, love.”
Dan Feng obeyed, lashes fluttering closed. Even in the throes of pleasure, his beauty still had
that unnerving quality of too much perfection, so very difficult to see past it for the
vulnerable edges of his soul. By some siren’s instinct, he entwined his legs around Yingxing’s
hips, seemingly unaware of the erotic spread of his thighs, the warm sensual drip of slick
between them, the obscene widening of his entrance around Yingxing’s cock, ever closer to
the base.
When he bottomed out, Yingxing tugged him closer by the waist and began to murmur,
“You’re so…” Only to cut himself off with a groan when Dan Feng began to ride him in
earnest, chains clinking as he coaxed Yingxing’s hips to buck up to get deeper.
“Please, Yingxing,” the sigh escaped Dan Feng’s mouth like a wisp of celestial moonlight as
he clenched down and speared himself on Yingxing’s cock, divinity and defilement all in one,
and Yingxing immediately committed himself to finding out all the ways he could hear it
again.
When Dan Feng’s strength flagged too much, trembling from his core to the bound arches of
his feet in unending deluge of pleasure, Yingxing squeezed his waist with the first hint of
reckless abandon. All Dan Feng could do was lean against the bulk of his chest.
“Don’t stop,” Dan Feng rasped. He didn’t recall screaming but he must have, since his voice
was hoarse.
“You’re incredible,” Yingxing groaned, and the worst thing was how sincerely he said it even
half-maddened with lust.
He lifted Dan Feng off his length with a steel-grip on the waist, then slammed him back
down, a marvellous full stroke on his cock. Two more after that, and he finally spilled inside
Dan Feng in a burst of heat. For that one blissful moment, he could almost delude himself
that he was nothing more than a vessel of pleasure made for Yingxing rather than a vessel for
vengeance, that he was a godless man whose body could be pledged freely to a mortal. That
the chains and shackles binding him were all of Yingxing’s design.
“Next time, may I bite you when I come?” Yingxing asked, vulgar as always, which at least
distracted Dan Feng from his private sorrows.
“As you like.”
“I couldn’t say actual words to actually ask, by the end,” Yingxing said, as he made to pull
out.
Dan Feng found a new well of strength to clamp his thighs around Yingxing’s hips and
entwine them both with his tail. “Don’t you go anywhere,” he said.
“Ah, but.” Yingxing glanced down at where they were joined and made a soft hissing noise
between his teeth. “You need to sleep, and I’ll get hard again.”
“If I’m sleeping,” Dan Feng said, very sweetly, “then you’ll wake me with your cock. As
roughly as you like.”
“You are trying to kill me,” Yingxing said in wonderment.
They were both asleep within moments. Twice more in the night, Yingxing woke him with
soft murmurs and harsh thrusts, not nearly as brutally as Dan Feng wanted but it would have
to do. Afterwards he said in a little choked voice, eyeing the bruises and seed he left on Dan
Feng’s thighs, “I didn’t…hurt you?”
Dan Feng did not have the heart to tell him, again, that he had been marked for suffering by
his own Aeon, that it was the reason he had been allowed to survive even when all his kin
had gone, and never again to rise from the sea. He defied his captors, even if he always gave
in at the end, just to keep from disappearing under these shackles. So it was for every
incarnation. Yingxing, of all people, could never hurt him.
Chapter End Notes
1. “I desire not the long flight of the immortals, but rather caress the moon to my own
demise.” references the line "挾飛仙以遨遊，抱明月而長終" by 蘇軾 in《前赤壁
賦》.
The original line literally means something like—I desire to travel with flying immortals
and hold the bright moon in my arms through eternity.
I don’t think YX particularly cares for immortality or eternity, so I have him reject the
first half of the line whereas the second line uses the phrase “長終” for eternity which
has a secondary meaning of “death”.
2. The quote in the summary is inspired by Mirri Maz Duur's monologue in A Game of
Thrones.
a throne of stars
Chapter Notes
Chapter title is a literal translation of the word for "constellation" in Chinese.
A few weeks after he designed the curios to harness the erosive power of water, Yingxing
examined the jade shackles under a lens of his own making. “It is being eroded,” he said with
no small amount of triumph. “And the energy is dissipating, without causing war or plague or
any sort of disaster on the Xianzhou Luofu. Another engineering miracle from yours truly.”
Dan Feng gave him a thin, humourless smile. “I’m sure they’ll write your name down as one
of the chief architects of my sedition,” he said. “You cannot change the inevitable.”
“I can,” Yingxing said. “I think I already have.” If all the effect his work had was to at least
give Dan Feng a moment of freedom and hope—if that was worthy of being called sedition
—then that was a feat of honour that none of the Xianzhou, in all their immortal lives, had
ever achieved.
“When you weaken the stone enough that there is nothing ahead but destruction, it may
choose to strike nonetheless,” Dan Feng said, as if it was alive.
A spike of heat lanced low in Yingxing’s gut—anger, yes, but more jealousy, that another had
owned Dan Feng’s mind and soul so completely. Fuck that Aeon, he thought, it’s my name
that Yinyue-jun begs and worships. Maybe he would agree to one of those shockingly brutal,
awfully tempting suggestions that Dan Feng kept making, just to show whatever Aeon lurked
in the afterlife who owned Dan Feng.
“Do you think you’ll know, when that moment is upon you?” he asked out loud.
“Of course I will,” Dan Feng said, clearly affronted at the idea he wouldn’t.
“Then when it’s close, we’ll make it clear to the Xianzhou that they will grant you your
freedom or be destroyed.” Yingxing massaged Dan Feng’s feet with a salve he used for his
own muscle aches when working too late at the forge. The damage that had been done by
binding them in his youth might never recover fully, but he’d won the argument that
something could still be done to help. “We could find a nice planet infested with
abominations of Abundance and rip them apart instead.”
An icy glare, frost gathering on the stormy sea. “What makes you think I don’t wish to see the
Xianzhou laid low?”
Yingxing had hoped, really, that Dan Feng might care for his opinion on that matter, and it
might be enough to quell his justifiable wrath—but in the end, what he wanted most of all
was Dan Feng to choose. “Once you have your freedom, you can decide whether to stay or
go. That’s what it means to be free.”
Perhaps it was futile to tell this to an eternal prisoner, who could not even hope to be freed by
death. Perhaps enmity was wrought so deep Yingxing could do nothing about it. If anything
could stop his ambition, humble his arrogance, it was Yinyue-jun.
“You’re very strange,” Dan Feng said. “I doubt the Arbiter-General would answer a threat in
any way other than return me to the shell, and get himself a newborn puppet.”
“Worth a try.” Yingxing frowned. “Is there pain in reincarnation?” Although he didn’t trust
Dan Feng to answer honestly, since he was far too proud to admit ever being hurt.
But there was nothing but sincerity in the way Dan Feng tipped his head back and whispered,
“In the brief moment between lives, all the pain goes away.” He shook himself a little and
said more seriously, “But what comes after, I cannot stand. In my youth, before remembering
the lives of my previous incarnations, I always fall for their lies. It’s the only thing holding
me back from throwing myself at the Sword Champion; but such is the cycle, this weak body
will fail.”
The other week Jing Yuan had mentioned, in passing—though that brat did nothing in
passing, so it was probably intentional—that they were hoarding every bit of water and rice,
that Yinyue-jun’s reincarnation was overdue. Yingxing had the horrible precognition of what
might happen if he hadn’t been able to shield Dan Feng from the worst of his torments.
“Enough questions.” Dan Feng crooked his finger in a clear summons for something other
than conversation.
When Yingxing’s visits abruptly stopped, Dan Feng didn’t notice at first. He had long since
tired of keeping track of days by the passage of sun and moon, and no other visitors disturbed
him now that he yielded to the Xianzhou all the cloudhymn they needed, the price for
Yingxing’s company.
But in the weakness of his spirit, he began to feel a quiet coldness, unravelling in an entirely
different sort of agony than the one he’d become used to enduring. Not even the warmth of
the bracer on his arm, or the weight of Cloud-Piercer in his hands, could quell it for long.
How could Yingxing just disappear without so much as a word, how dare he drag the moon
from the brine of the sea and in the next breath spurn the favour he’d been shown? Dan Feng
would never abandon Yingxing like this.
In a fit of temper, Dan Feng gathered the lotus flowers he’d cultivated and devoured them,
bitter with resentment. There was no point in being a willing prisoner if he wasn’t going to
get Yingxing in return.
When the door of his cell finally opened, the furious admonishment he’d prepared died on his
tongue. It wasn’t even Yingxing, but that young Cloud Knight with golden eyes and a shock
of tumbling white hair. “Yinyue-jun,” he said with a perfectly proper incline of his head,
though he shrunk behind his tall glaive when he noticed Cloud-Piercer. “Ah, please call me
A-Yuan.”
This was who the Xianzhou thought could replace Yingxing? Dan Feng instantly resolved to
give him nothing but grief. “Xiao-yuan,” he said in a saccharine voice that Yingxing would
have seen through in an instant, and beckoned the Cloud Knight to approach. “Closer, if you
please.”
With the distinct air of a small bird being dragged on a spider’s silk-string, Xiao-yuan drew
near him.“Yinyue-jun, I have been authorised to discuss a matter of some importance to
you.”
It must be about Yingxing. Some small part of Dan Feng was ready to surrender anything
they wanted just to have him back, but the ugly draconic wrath inside him stirred and made
him hiss, “Don’t lie to me. All you want is my servitude, unwilling or otherwise. Go ahead
and put my sacred flesh to torture. Have you ever seen even one eclipse, Xiao-yuan?”
“But I don’t mean you any harm—”
“Until you return what’s mine, the Xianzhou will have nothing from me but rot and brine,”
Dan Feng interrupted. “I will give you not even one petal.”
“Yingxing wouldn’t want this,” the brat had the audacity to say.
“I couldn’t care less. Bring him to me now.”
“But he’s hurt!” The Cloud Knight looked a little sheepish, no doubt at having blurted out the
very information he was supposed to trade. “He’s under the care of the best healers, I
promise.”
What nonsense. “I am the source of all healing, all water, all life, on this accursed ship of
yours,” Dan Feng snarled. “No one can heal him but me.”
“I’m sorry,” the brat said, faking actual tears welling up in his sunlit eyes.
Dan Feng summoned all of his cloudhymn, gritting his teeth through the searing pain under
his shackles, to throw the other man across the room with the concussive force of a waterfall.
It was entirely worth fainting for. In previous incarnations, when he aged and grew wrathful,
he might have held out long enough and caused enough damage until they returned him to the
shell.
Instead he regained consciousness, arms chained above his head to the ceiling and suspended
in place by a matrix of restraining arrays, just like it had been before Yingxing.
However long he spent there waiting, he concocted a dozen ways he could make the
Xianzhou suffer, and poured as much cloudhymn as he could spare into his shackles. Careful,
of course, not to let any spill over and blossom into lotuses beneath his bound, dangling feet.
After all, that was the original purpose of Long’s creation. When the Vidyadhara homeworld
fell, and their people slaughtered and hunted, the Yinyue-jun who had presided over that
failure prayed, and the shackles were the answer of that prayer. Over incarnations, enough
cloudhymn would be gathered and condensed, until they held enough power to level an entire
planet—or a worldship, as it were. Dan Feng, or any incarnation before him, had absolutely
no choice but to obey their Aeon.
Yinyue-jun was bound to carry that curse and nurture it like a child of his own body. The
Vidyadhara were infertile, but Yinyue-jun could birth calamity. So he would have his
vengeance, no matter the cost. And what about your freedom? a voice suspiciously like
Yingxing’s said.
Although Yingxing did not know it—and Dan Feng could not bear to tell him the whole truth
—he would have that too, in a way.
“I told them not to push you,” said an all-too-familiar arrogant voice, and there he was,
Yingxing was back. Limping on a crutch, hair touched too much with frost, but his eyes
blazed the same as always.
“Yingxing! No, don’t bother with that,” Dan Feng said, as Yingxing started to calibrate the
arrays to try and let him down. He didn’t want to expend energy creating a lotus pedestal to
rest on when that cloudhymn could be healing Yingxing, and Yingxing was in no condition to
support his weight for long. “Just come here.”
“I missed you too,” Yingxing said with a huff of laughter, pressing their foreheads together.
“Some Abundance forces attacked the Ambrosial Arbour, nicked my leg.”
“I can sense the head injury, you know,” Dan Feng admonished. He buried his face in
Yingxing’s warm neck to hide any grimace he made, as he gathered his cloudhymn powers
against the incessant leech of the jade shackles. The enchantment dampened Yingxing’s face
and hair with dew and brightened it with vitality. “That’s more like it. The Alchemy
Commission has fallen to ruins, obviously.”
Yingxing made a face. “I assure you I didn’t have this reaction at the Alchemy Commission,”
he said, indicating his tented pants.
Perhaps Dan Feng had overdone it a little. He was panting a little from doling out as much as
he could without blacking out again, and any moment now Yingxing would notice despite his
arousal and chastise him. “That was deliberate,” he lied. “You’ve kept me waiting far too
long, now get behind me.”
“What, in the chains and—” Yingxing yelped as he received a faceful of tail. “All right, all
right, I’m on it.”
Even with Dan Feng suspended a few inches above the ground, Yingxing loomed taller than
him, embraced him from behind and pressed a kiss with the slightest hint of teeth to his ear.
Dan Feng arched into the touch, a tortuous moan escaping at even the scant contact when
he’d been deprived for the brief separation that had felt longer than all his eternal lives.
“Please,” he gasped, as Yingxing lifted his hips and ass to grind against his very noticeable
erection. His arms flailed to try and push back into his beloved, but only succeeded in
straining and rattling the chains. “Yingxing, please.”
“I got you,” Yingxing drawled, sliding two thick fingers inside his already-slick entrance.
“You’ve been desperate without me.”
That arrogant brute didn’t even bother to phrase it as a question. Dan Feng couldn’t work up
the facade of being above it all, bucking wildly onto Yingxing’s calloused fingers that
worked into him with rough familiarity but still wasn’t enough.
“I need you,” he said, so horrifyingly, humanly plaintive, and didn’t allow himself to consider
what that meant, only spread his thighs as wide as he could despite the restraining arrays and
the chains. “I need you to go faster,” he added lamely.
“I know you do,” infuriating as always, but at least Yingxing was skilfully scissoring in a
third finger and a fourth, then rustling at the fabric of his pants with a sound suspiciously like
a tear. “Ready for me?”
“I’m always ready,” Dan Feng growled, and with the dizzying mental picture of Yingxing
fucking him tight and unprepared, let out a muffled wail as the hot line of Yingxing’s cock
speared into him. It would feel almost divine, but without a jot of the cruelty of Aeons. “Like
that, again, more…”
Yingxing’s hands clamped around his waist, fingers stroking down the line of his belly until
they met at his navel, strong enough to lift him in an obscene arch, ass raised and thighs
spread. Chained and restrained as he was, Dan Feng could do nothing but take every thrust
that Yingxing pounded into him. It was everything he wanted.
On a viciously deep thrust, Yingxing tightened his grip around Dan Feng’s waist, and desire
nearly crushed the breath out of him. “It’s all right,” Yingxing said, his hoarse voice
somehow steadying even though he was groaning and rolling his hips. “Ah, you’re so tight, I
can barely move…I’ll do that again, and this time you breathe out, let it all out, clear?”
Dan Feng barely finished moaning yes, please yes before Yingxing dug his fingers in, so deep
that for a moment Dan Feng could delude himself those clever hands could rip out his entrails
and his terrible draconic heart and his generational curse. He screamed through his climax,
twisting helplessly in his chains and Yingxing’s unrelenting arms.
Each spasm of his cunt, clenching down on Yingxing’s cock, was a precious victory, like
claiming a constellation, a throne of stars, for himself, especially when Yingxing shoved
himself somehow deeper, movements rough and choppy, and sank his teeth into his neck at
the highest arc of his momentum, a treacherous moment of silence before the storm, a quiet
prayer as the stars fell down—
a half-memory, how the promise was sealed in stone by an incarnation who failed to defend
their home, and had been given the prophecy of his own doom to pay for the hope of
retribution—
“Feng-er,” Yingxing said, a safe harbour back to reality, as he pinned Dan Feng down with
the erotic spill of mortal heat into a vessel once meant for divine retribution. He stayed inside
as he softened, obeying the moan of protest when he withdrew even a little. “You have no
idea how incredible you look like this…”
Worshipful hands, tracing down the chains that held him up, the maelstrom of his normally
sleek hair, the bite mark on his neck, all the way down to the bruises on his waist and the
warm rivulets of slick and seed trickling down his thighs. Dan Feng couldn’t see, but he felt
wonderfully ruined.
“Don’t leave me again,” Dan Feng said, the words coming out timid and strangled instead of
imperious and commanding.
“Not as long as I live,” Yingxing said. But even in his reassuring timbre, the words carved
out the inevitable loss of his flickering mortal life, yet another interminable suffering that
Dan Feng had to bear without hope of salvation, one last tear in the ocean’s heart.
Chapter End Notes
I'm afraid / terribly excited to say that this concludes the smut in this fic. The next and
final chapter will wrap up the plot, so gird your loins...
if you enjoyed the shameless prison sex, pls leave a kudos <3
Chapter Notes
was out of town so this is a day late. thank you for waiting <3
Yingxing hadn’t given much thought to increased encroachment of the Abundance’s forces
on the Luofu over the years. He focused on forging weapons and aurumatons, and made a
toast under the moonlight when each attack was repelled. It was always the same: they tried
to seize the Ambrosial Arbour, they failed and ran like cowards. Dan Feng nagged him to be
careful, and because he knew his beloved would hurt himself to heal him, Yingxing stayed
well behind the front lines.
Unfortunately war was a costly affair. While Dan Feng’s affection for Yingxing had allowed
for the Luofu’s reserves of power to run higher than any time in history, the Abundance’s
attacks were also unprecedented. Yingxing did not like asking Dan Feng to hurt himself, no
matter how badly the Luofu needed it—because they’d stupidly designed almost everything
on the worldship to depend on Yinyue-jun. No matter how much Dan Feng himself insisted
that the creation of cloudhymn was the purpose of Yinyue-jun’s existence.
Dan Feng was unbelievably proud and wilful, guarding his true feelings and troubles like
secrets of state. Try as he might, Yingxing’s efforts were no more than a drop of rainwater in
the endless brine, a solitary tear in the currents.
As he left Dan Feng’s cell one day, cradling an armful of lotuses, Yingxing lost his thoughts
in wishing instead he was carrying his beloved free of his prison. So lost, in fact, that he
didn’t realise at first glance that the usual half-squad of Cloud Knights who guarded the door
were dead on the ground.
“Open the door,” ordered the Sanctus Medicus cultist, brandishing one of the fallen knights’
glaives.
Yingxing drew his sword, grateful that Dan Feng had hassled him about wearing one as a
matter of course while the Luofu was under attack. No Abundance traitor would ever get
their hands on Dan Feng as long as he lived.
“Very well, if that’s your answer,” the cultist said, and leapt towards him.
Yingxing dropped most of the lotuses but clutched onto one, crushing the petals to release a
surge of cloudhymn. Where Dan Feng might easily have drowned an attacker—even if he
used too much power and fainted immediately afterwards—Yingxing could only benefit from
the increased vitality. It was enough, though, to let a middling swordsman like himself parry
the cultist’s blows, push him back against the wall—
A stab burned through his back, the tip of a blade erupting through his front ribs. A small part
of him absently noted that it was a rapier, the wound so narrow that he might survive to hear
Dan Feng lecture him about it. The rest of him was gurgling and screaming, like the
wretched, useless mortal he was.
“Open the door,” they pressed him again, and all he could do was shake his head, no, no,
never, you’ll never have him—
Through the bracer, Dan Feng could sense Yingxing growing weaker and colder. He had just
left, he must have been ambushed, he was so close and Dan Feng could do nothing, could
barely think. Instinct led him to grasp the spear that Yingxing had made for him and altered
from its original purpose to let him defend himself.
But it was futile when he was locked in. Dan Feng had never wanted to be out of this cell so
ferociously, so desperately, because Yingxing was dying on the other side of that door. He
banged on the door until his palms came away bloody, howled as though he still had the
unfettered power to call down a storm.
My breath brews storms and unleashes hurricanes, my bones bleed permanence, my agony
will set me free. With a thunderous roar, Dan Feng summoned every ounce of power that he
had inherited from an Aeon, focused only on the impossible, unbreakable jade shackles and
the one point where Yingxing had poured years’ worth of curses and brine to erode even
stone. His teeth ached where he clenched them hard, the pain lancing all the way down to his
bound, broken feet.
Dan Feng forced out every last bit of cloudhymn packed in his inhuman heart, far beyond the
limits where he should have fainted away. It didn’t matter. He would not let up until it killed
him, or he reached Yingxing again. He would not let up even though this would spell the
beginning of the end.
And against all odds, the jade began to fracture, a crack of a single inch over the flow of his
radial artery. The rush of the ancient sea back into Yinyue-jun, when it had been locked away
for so many incarnations. He had moments, at most an hour, before the shackles broke
themselves and fulfilled their original purpose, but it was enough. The full authority of
Yinyue-jun could save Yingxing.
With a flick of his fingers and a surge of power, the cell doors were flung open. Six soldiers
—not Cloud Knights, and with the distinctive stench of the Abundance—held Yingxing at
swordpoint, even as he bled from wounds to his chest, sword falling from his hand.
“Give him back to me,” Dan Feng snarled with a dragon’s wrath.
“We’re here to rescue you,” one of them protested, and Dan Feng hurled Cloud-Piercer,
forward and down, to kill that one first.
He tore through four more of them, until one of the last two survivors held a knife to
Yingxing’s neck and shouted, “Stop or he dies! We just want to talk!”
Dan Feng reined back the murderous rage scorching inside him. “I’m listening,” he hissed,
not bothering to make the voice human in the least. Yingxing was wounded badly, but not
lethally, and there was still time before the curse of his shackles took effect. Not very much
time, the price must be paid— “Speak quickly.”
They were soldiers from Sanctus Medicus, spies for the Abundance who wanted him to part
Scalegorge Waterscape and expose the Ambrosial Arbour. So long as they let him heal
Yingxing, Dan Feng could not care less, barely even noticed Yingxing shaking his head and
gasping no, don’t.
You promised me freedom, Dan Feng might have replied. You promised me I could choose,
and all I want is you. All I ever choose, in the last hour before calamity strikes, is you.
Dan Feng let the two cultists drag them to Scalegorge Waterscape. By now the jade shackles
on his wrists and tail had fractured so deep, that parting the sea was as easy as raising his
hand and commanding a cloudhymn tide. Surreptitiously, he sent a surge of power to
Yingxing as well, to start to heal his wounds. Live a little longer, my starlight, then come to
me.
“The Ambrosial Arbour,” one of the soldiers gasped in awe as they reached the sickly white
roots. “Finally, it’s the time…”
“So it is,” Dan Feng said, as the shackles shattered in a sound as crisp and clear as the quiet
voice of an Aeon speaking through the storm and the earthquake and the fire. In his last
conscious moment, he knocked Yingxing as far away as possible.
As though from a distance, Yinyue-jun saw the Azure Dragon transform from his own
human-like shell of a body. Thunder roared and tsunamis raged. Soldiers for the Hunt or the
Abundance alike died by the thousands. The stars pulsated and sang bloody hymns, and the
universe descended into an abyss of flesh and desires. The desire for vengeance—for
freedom—for the stars themselves—
The dragon heart beat to its limit, raising its fangs, breath, and fury. Even if it wanted to, it
could not defy the will of Long, to avenge the extinction of his scions—the Permanence
remembered.
But Yinyue-jun had long years of imprisonment to weave his own curse. He could never
subvert the Aeon’s design, but merely one or two incarnations could already have destroyed
the Xianzhou Luofu into a speck of dust, and Scalegorge Waterscape alongside it. And
afterwards, what then? Captivity in another Xianzhou ship’s jail, with an even more hopeless
future? Yingxing had thought he could set Yinyue-jun free, but from the very start he had
been far too late. For incarnations, the cloudhymn gathered in the jade shackles was no
bringer of vengeance.
He had transmuted it into a weapon designed to kill Yinyue-jun. To annihilate his divine
heart, the source of his cloudhymn, the cause of his suffering and imprisonment. And to
return the sacred power back to the ancient sea.
As a starskiff came hurtling towards him like an arrow shaft, Yinyue-jun did not try to avoid
the blow. The starskiff ran him through, the Foxian pilot lifting a sun of absolute darkness,
and as her starskiff and her hand and her face disappeared, she brought down the Azure
Dragon.
All according to plan.
“Now the price will be paid.” His life and his soul, for the final end to his suffering. An
executioner’s blade of pure cloudhymn rose out of the sea and hovered over his neck.
Returned to his human form, every scrap of his power spent, Dan Feng knelt ready to meet
his freedom. In his hand he held Cloud-Piercer, and Yingxing’s chains still trailed around his
body, as though he was in his beloved’s arms and none other.
The arms—which tightened around him, which warmed him even as the blade came
screaming down and Dan Feng realised too late that it was Yingxing, pushing him away from
his death sentence.
He turned just in time to see a mortal crushed by a power meant to destroy an Aeon’s divine
heart.
“Yingxing, no,” Dan Feng screamed, horrifically alive because Yingxing had paid the price
for him. Moments ago he had millennia worth of cloudhymn at his fingertips, enough to heal
any mortal wound, and he had spent it all before it was truly needed. “Yingxing, please, you
didn’t, it was supposed to be me…”
There was no answering star light in Yingxing’s eyes. All strength, all warmth, sapped out of
him in a split second. This was all his fault.
Dan Feng had not feared death, an entirely foreign alien to a Vidyadhara of infinite
reincarnations, because he knew he would find the morning star once again in that city of
woe. The dragon-heart was supposed to be destroyed. But now Yingxing was already dead,
and he was alive, never to reach that promised paradise. Time ran short; if he delayed now,
the Xianzhou forces would soon recover and seize back the heart, the source of his
cloudhymn.
So in one stroke, he could deny them and get Yingxing back…
“Would you ever forgive me,” Dan Feng whispered to the mortal man who had saved the
moon from the brine of the sea, yet drowned himself in the attempt. “Return to the water’s
embrace once more, Yingxing.”
In one hand he held aloft his own dragon-heart. That thing had powered the Xianzhou Luofu
and cursed half a dozen incarnations of Yinyue-jun. Colder than the tempestuous tides raised
by an unfeeling moon, as though it had never been warmed by the indomitable light of a star.
How perfect it looked, the divine creation of an Aeon, even as it wept tears and rivulets of
blood for who it had loved and lost.
“COME BACK,” Yinyue-jun roared, and a crimson star answered.

The Xianzhou Luofu fell into eclipse for an unprecedented seven hundred years, and never
recovered from the destruction caused by the Azure Dragon. No matter what they tried,
neither Yinyue-jun nor the next incarnation was capable of creating the required staggering
levels of cloudhymn, and the new Arbiter-General decreed no further attempts were
permitted.
“Be free, Dan Heng,” Jing Yuan murmured as he watched the young man leave for exile.
“Yingxing, your work is done.”
Chapter End Notes
I kind of have an idea for a jrh sequel for when the AE crew arrive on the dystopian
luofu but I also got distracted by other ideas so...welp.
thank you for coming along on this journey and hope you enjoyed it! if you did, please
don't forget to leave a kudos!
Please drop by the Archive and comment to let the creator know if you enjoyed their work!

Drag The Moon From Brine

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drag the moon from brine

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/52558447.

Heavy La Vaguelette references with inspiration from the Fontaine quest.

Inspired by [Restricted Work] by Anonymous

The moon was always full on the Xianzhou Luofu.

“A Vidyadhara,” Yingxing whispered disbelievingly. Creatures of legend, long since hunted

Chapter End Notes

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Baiheng did not take no for an answer.

“I hate it when you do that,” Yingxing grumbled.

“What is being done?”

“Hypothetically,” Jing Yuan said, carefully as navigating a starchess game or a battlefield,

Chapter End Notes

“I am Yinyue-jun,” Dan Feng said. “I have always been Yinyue-jun.”

“Ah,” Yingxing said. “You blinked.”

Chapter End Notes

1. Chapter title is from these lines of poetry: “江天一色無纖塵，皎皎空中孤月輪”:

2. A guzheng is a Chinese zither that resembles something of a horizontal harp.

“You should not,” was the cold, even answer.

The chapter title is a reference to Chang'e, of course.

hello penacony! now back to our regularly scheduled xianzhou programming

See the end of the chapter for more notes

“You’ve eaten with him?” Yingxing said, quizzical.

“The predecessor of the current Arbiter-General. When I was an adolescent.”

“Let me help you,” Yingxing said once again.

Chapter End Notes

References and translations

Next chapter we earn that E rating.

“Last time…I shouldn’t have done that,” Yingxing began.

Yingxing blinked and stuttered, “What, you didn’t…find it…find me unwelcome?”

“You do not know what that means.”

“Shut up and put your mouth to good use, Yingxing.”

Yingxing did not shut up.

Chapter End Notes

See the end of the chapter for more notes

“We’re deploying to war on Thalassa.”

Chapter End Notes

CW for mentions of past transactional sex.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

“No, but—what about the Luofu?”

“There are other Vidyadhara?”

Yingxing glared at him. “Keep your thoughts off my—prisoner.”

Chapter End Notes

Next chapter: lingerie ;P

See the end of the chapter for more notes

“I’m saving you,” Yingxing insisted, arrogant as always.

“In your workshop on the way back from the campaign?”

“As you like.”

“You are trying to kill me,” Yingxing said in wonderment.

Chapter End Notes

Chapter title is a literal translation of the word for "constellation" in Chinese.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

“But I don’t mean you any harm—”

“I couldn’t care less. Bring him to me now.”

Chapter End Notes

See the end of the chapter for more notes

All according to plan.

So in one stroke, he could deny them and get Yingxing back…