38 Sunlight and Poison
Xiao Ying, body half out of the floor, his arms and palms flat on the floor to support him up.
His shoulders strained as he struggled to push the rest of his body upwards through the floor while maintaining the focus to ensure that all parts of his body at the level of the wood, and below the wood, were able to pass through the floor to sit on the ground level of Concubine Jing's palace.
Once his waist was visible, Xiao Ying finally relaxed his arms, letting himself fall into sitting down, easily pulling his legs up by leaning backwards onto his back.
He panted and swallowed dryly, lifting one arm up to wipe away the sweat that had gathered on his forehead and face, before deciding to instead just to scrub everything on his face away, resolving to find himself a pond, or some other body of water, to get rid of the tears and snot that was also there.
...
Was this body capable of eating?
Was this body capable of drinking water?
Were the effects of this body seen like the shifting of papers when he stood near to them, their flat and brittle bodies lifting up and away at the slightest gust of wind?
Was that how Concubine Jing saw him?
Was that how Concubine Jing knew where he was?
Or maybe, was it in fact that she had some sort of access to spiritual powers to see ghosts, or she had managed to gather the support of some Daoist priest to give her talismans or seals to let her guard her palace further?
It was honestly more likely that she had heard about the powers of those men and had decided to train herself, the overachieving, suspicious, busybody that she was, but it was also quite likely that she had asked for such resources and cultivation manuals to help her, but...
Such a thing had never been included in the original novel that Xiao Ying wrote.
The ghost of Ming Cheng's mother was the only supernatural detail that he had included, and that was only because he had no idea, at the time, how to write the story of somebody rising through the ranks of the palace to become Emperor on their own.
That's why Ming Cheng had been the long lost son of the current Emperor, missing and seemingly thought dead because of it.
It was the entire reason for the ghost existing, because he had no other idea how plot convenient exposition was supposed to be given.
He had watched Yugioh, and there had always been somebody on the side to explain things, because otherwise, the entirety of the duels were then completely indecipherable because they were all bullshit.
Destroying the moon and all!
What the fuck else was he supposed to do!?
He didn't know what the fuck that he was supposed to be doing.
The ghost wasn't even supposed to be a big part of anything big, but now...
Xiao Ying gulped and forced himself to take deep breaths to calm himself down to try and put himself in a state more level headed than the one that he currently found himself in.
He needed to calm about this.
He needed to be logical.
He needed to play it safe, and he needed to be proactive and plan around this incident.
If Concubine Jing could sense ghosts, or at least had some sort of mechanism for alerting her of their presence, then Xiao Ying needed to find it within himself to not approach her and to keep out of her way until he knew exactly what the situation was, and whether she really did have skill and control with the spiritual arts.
He turned to face the sun, his body still too weak and shaky to really attempt standing up, let alone walking.
It definitely wasn't a good idea for him to make his way back to the palace and Ming Cheng in his current state.
He swallowed again, watching the sky be dyed yellow as a small, red sun began sinking down below the horizon, the glow of the poisonous flowers lighting up the room that he was sat in far more than the big ball of plasma that the planet was currently orbiting around.
Xiao Ying closed his eyes, the hollow gaps of the skulls and their broken bones immediately conjured up by his imagination, his instincts forcing his eyes to look back into the light less than a split second later.
He didn't want to think about the pit of death that was currently underneath him.
He didn't want to think about what Concubine Jing had done, turning his face to look at the winking flowers, the harsh sunlight burning his eyes, forcing them to water.
There were bodies.
There were so many bodies.
Concubine Jing wasn't meant to be written as a monster.
She was just a lady wildly loyal to her Emperor, to the point of taking up arms if she needed to.
She wasn't supposed to be some sort of mass murdering psychopath who kept the bones of her fallen enemies in a pit under her palace.
They should have been given proper burials, at the very least, not...
whatever this was.
It was impractical of her to keep the evidence of the deaths that she had caused.
What was this?
This didn't make any sense.
What...
Why...
Xiao Ying curled into himself as he struggled to wonder what had happened and the reason for it.
Had his world expanded to include him and this entire story line?
Why was this happening?
Was it all his fault?
Was it his interference that had created some sort of butterfly effect?
Or maybe, it was his very existence, considering that to have rotted into skeletons, the bodies must have been slain before Ming Cheng's very arrival into the palace?
Too uncertain and too restless to keep sitting there while the greatest threat to his existence was only a few floors above him, Xiao Ying picked himself up on his shaking and wobbling legs, and began making his way back to Ming Cheng and the slightly smaller world where things all made sense.
