Thread by @undeadbiscuit

for christmas eve, i give you more #sangyao angst, feat modern cultivators

meng yao is a killer for an underground syndicate, taken in as a child as a "favor" to his mother (she doesn't know what he actually does for the group and he's not about to tell her).

his boss hands him

a folder containing his next target, a conservationist with a local museum who basically told the syndicate to go fuck itself over some extremely old and extremely valuable (both in the monetary and magical senses) paintings and sculptures.

when meng yao looks at the picture of

the man he's supposed to kill, he gets an inexplicable splitting headache; so painful he nearly throws up.

he manages to pull himself together enough to wave off the suspicion of the boss, but the pain still plagues him as he leaves to start preparing for the job.

and then the nightmares start.

there's nothing *distinct* about them, just a voice sobbing words he can't hear properly, washes of shadow and color, and then *blood*.

"uh oh, someone looks haunted," his mother's friend sisi greets him when he arrives at the apartment she

and his mother share for a visit. "you better see a spiritualist before that gets worse."

he doesn't verbally tell her how stupid that sounds, but she can tell he's thinking it and gives him a poke that makes his brain throb.

"brat. you know i'm right."

he refuses to think so,

but the pain and nightmares are only getting *worse* as he starts the necessary spy work to catch his target at a vulnerable point.

he finally gives in and contacts a spiritualist who sometimes assists the syndicate with their more esoteric problems and knows to be discreet.

the assessment is... unnerving, to say the least.

this target is someone he's already killed before, in a past life, and the guilt and self-hatred afterwards had been so strong that it had followed him into death and is still affecting him now.

if he tries to continue carrying out the hit, he may end up killing himself from an overload of negative energy before he can succeed.

the spiritualist gives him a bag of assorted crushed herbs and tea, telling him it will give his dreams the clarity to find out exactly what had

happened between him and this nie huaisang that had ended in the latter's death. only by knowing the details can he either move past it and finish what he's been ordered to do, or... well, the spiritualist doesn't say it outright, but he gets the hint.

staring at the deceptively

harmless-looking bag on his kitchen counter, he takes a deep breath to steel his nerves, then fills the electric kettle and fetches a cup from one of the overhead cabinets.

the dream/memory mush is decidedly NOT happy because we're looking at one of these timeline variations where jin guangshan ordered him to kill huaisang in order to distract nie mingjue away from the whole xue yang business.

and sweet, trusting, so very much in love that it's

a little smothering huaisang is so easy to lead into a trap, pleas for help and the look of wounded betrayal as he's abandoned to die alone the last jin guangyao ever sees of him.

his past self mourns appropriately and later marries someone else.

and eventually becomes

convinced that he is being haunted, his own life ending by accident while trying to escape "the ghost".

but looking into those memories, meng yao can see that there was never really a haunting, just guilt hallucinations.

he wakes up with a brain full of conflicting emotions and swear words and dried tear tracks down his face.

he's not going to be able to carry out the hit.

much as he wishes he could, he can't just take steel wool to his brain and scrub out All of That, and without being able

to do so, the guilt will kill him.

again, apparently.

so now he has to figure out something *else*.

and that's going to mean having to get closer to nie huaisang, the thought of which makes his chest tighten up in panic.

mentally damning his past self, he rolls out of bed.