ARCHIVE OF DIXING | English 镇魂 Guardian Fanworks Directory

Zhao Yunlan remained silent for a while, reflecting, as the smell of chocolate began to fill the apartment.
"Does your family know about us?"
“My family besides Xiao Hua who watched our drama in the rain live?”
"Yeah, the others who weren't eating popcorn during our drunken romantic cliché."

...

“It has been a long time since someone other than Xiuxiu or Xiazi has stayed in this house with me. Sometimes I think it’s a bit too big.” Xiao Hua stared at the fire ahead, the fireplace warming the room that usually turned cold when Shen Wei wasn't hiding his true nature.

Zhao Yunlan spends his first day alone with their newborn daughter.

Wu Xie wanted for Shen Wei to try - just try - to be seductive.

“Interesting … and in non-professional settings?”
“What?” As soon as Zhao Yunlan thought he had Wu Xie figured out, the other continued in a direction he hadn’t expected. Sure, Wu Xie had given control of their dance over to Yunlan, but there was no doubt that Wu Xie was still very much in control of their conversation.
“If I wanted to see you again, would you mind?” he reworded his question.
---
Zhao Yunlan is finally unable to avoid going to a fancy dinner, but it's pleasantly surprised by a stranger he spots across the room. What started as a mundane and boring night ends up being one that Zhao Yunlan will never forget

Zhao Yunlan had missed the Ghost Slayer for four years. And so, he had been intrigued for months by the strange relationship that seemed to exist between him and Wu Xie.
Maybe he wasn't prepared for the consequences of a little piece of the complex truth.
Shen Wei wished he could protest. But it was too late.

"That... everything? Get that blanket out of here, your mouth was much better than that,” he whimpered.
"Oh my, Xiao Wei,” Wu Xie chuckled, “I know you're weak to alcohol, but remind me not to let you even look at the bottle next time."

When facing Shen Wei, Xiaoge felt the weight of duty in the blade that struck his own. And each time they trained together, that weight dropped a little more.
Little by little, Shen Wei's blade was becoming lighter, in the understanding that there was no opponent there. There was no master or apprentice between them. Xiaoge didn't remember his masters. Shen Wei had only had two, but only one was warrior-forged and had led him in the practice of dao.
In the absence of the upper hierarchy, with just the two of them in their silent mutual decision of equality, they had become what neither of them had before: martial brothers.

Zhao Yunlan is not the only one who didn’t feel the inherent terror of the Ghost Slayer's presence. Pangzi looked up briefly, observing Liu Sang and Xiaoge, who were as calm as him. Respectful, as the occasion required, but calm nonetheless. Covered in black, bringing cold and mystery or whatever, it didn't change anything for them. This was the Shen Wei they knew in everyday life, talking passionately with Wu Xie, cooking with Pangzi, sword training with Xiaoge, learning how to better use a cell phone with Liu Sang. If they were supposed to inevitably feel the same way everyone felt about what Shen Wei was, then perhaps the effect of that would have been broken by them knowing who he was. Shen Wei was their friend.
...
On an autumn night, the Ghost Slayer visits SID headquarters.

What returned to Shen Wei was not just the pendant with Kunlun's soulfire. What was being recovered was much more than what he knew he had lost.
He was unwilling to lose it all.

Shen Wei had to admit that Wu Xie was correct. If he were to attempt to recover his pendant himself, it would be easier for him to be killed or imprisoned again and the contents of the pendant discovered by Hell's Court than for him to succeed. But what would become of Zhao Yunlan now if Shen Wei still couldn't even get close to him without causing him harm, if he lost Wu Xie so soon?
Once, under a sky as starry as tonight, Shen San had told Shen Wei that he could make wishes if he saw shooting stars.

Wu Xie, lying on the rug with the book, the blanket not quite wrapped up but tangled in him, stopped his attempt at reading again. That shy contentment that Shen Wei occasionally showed about something, casually about his own thoughts, was always - always - charming.

"Never again turn your back on me. Don't run away from me. Kill me first, but don't try to abandon me.”
That was when the Ghost King understood, despite everything he still couldn't be clear about, he was perfectly capable of understanding that. Because the Fire God had spoken his language. And because the very land where they lay and forcibly intertwined was now what was left of what had once been Zhurong's great friend. The realization hit the Ghost King harder than the fear he had felt before: Zhurong was, in a peculiar way, like him - completely alone.

The boyfriend from his past that Wu Xie found inside the tomb was now everyone else's problem.
While everyone in the team had doubts and theories, Shen Wei was embarrassed.

After being rescued from his imprisonment, Shen Wei admired the starry sky that he had not seen for a long time. And the loved one he never believed he would see again.

...
[This work takes place right after the first part of "Of fallen gods and forgotten sacrifices" (the first work in this series), so if you're new here, you can read this one after the first one and before all the others]

"You didn't have to come down the mountain just for that." The being pointed to the umbrella.
“Oh?” Kunlun couldn't believe the audacity of that ordinary thing to dismiss him and not even thank him for his concern. “What kind of thing are you that you don't even have a bit of courtesy?”
...

Zhao Yunlan thought that there was something very wrong with him for being so allured by Wu Xie and his partner, by the relationship they had... and he didn't even know Shen Wei in person. He thought he had done a lot of ridiculous things in his life, but falling in love with a couple is the worst of them.

Working at the SID, Wu Xie faces the memories in silence. Memories of the one who forgot him and everything he once meant.

Shen Wei often found himself marveling at the thought: he had a real life. He was delighted with every thing about that house, about his new life. Some of his paintings, less personal than what only Wu Xie knew, now also began to appear on the walls of the house - landscapes, flowers, birds. It took a lot of encouragement from Wu Xie for Shen Wei to be confident about decorating the place with the art he made himself. He was still shy about it, but he was satisfied somehow.

After settling in Longcheng, the cold weather that sets in reminds Shen Wei and Wu Xie of how they once breathed together. And maybe it promises them that they will still be there when time passes, appreciating what they never wish they had let go.

In the bleak industrial wastelands of Dixing, a mother poisons herself and her twin sons in an attempt to escape the collective abject misery and poverty that envelopes their existence.

A decade later, an undergraduate senior proceeds with a sensitive research topic for his honors thesis.

Son of Haixing housing mafia's boss, seeking redemption from a painful past, with his estrangement from his family spawning feelings of self-loathing, finds himself irrevocably, devastatingly drawn towards the person that threatens to topple his life as he has always known it.