Chapter 8 Yiran
Yiran
It was past dinnertime when Yiran got home. The mansion was quiet, and the lights had been dimmed for the night. There was
a generous bowl of double-boiled herbal chicken soup waiting in the kitchen and a reminder that there was cut fruit in the
fridge. Yiran didn’t have any appetite, but he knew Auntie Kimmie had labored over the soup, so he placed the bowl in the
microwave and stared absently as it went round and round.
In hindsight, he wished he’d asked for Matthias’s number. Their conversation had spurred more questions than ever, and Yiran
was even tempted to talk to Ash about it. But his half brother was hardly home these days, and Matthias had shared something
in confidence that he hadn’t even told his own family.
A sliver of light down the corridor caught Yiran’s eye on his way to his bedroom. The study door was ajar. Just the barest
of cracks. He’d been avoiding his grandfather as much as possible, and he didn’t know what possessed him to creep toward the
door now. Hiding in the shadows, he peered in.
His grandfather was sitting in his reading chair. The light from the table lamp cast shadows across his face, deepening the
lines on his forehead, revealing the gradual weakness of his jaw. Had his grandfather always looked this old and weary? Had
so much of his once-raven hair turned white in the last month? There was something uncomfortably vulnerable about him. Something
too mortal.
A lump grew in Yiran’s throat. He snapped around and marched to his room, refusing to acknowledge the emotion bubbling inside
him. Emptying his pockets, he tossed his phone onto the bed. His other phone vibrated almost immediately like an omen.
The caller ID was blocked, but he knew exactly who it was.
His old phone had gotten busted that day at Outram, and he’d asked Theo for help when he bought a new one.
Theo was the kind of guy who knew a guy.
He’d set up the connection, and for a weekly fee, one of his guys would regularly scramble Yiran’s cell phone signal and make it untraceable.
Yiran had taken it another step further when
a Hybrid showed up that snowy evening at Theo’s penthouse lounge, asking the most dangerous question of all.
Do you want your magic back?
Yuki had disappeared after that brief meeting, but not before writing a phone number on the sleeve of Yiran’s T-shirt. Barely
a friend and all enemy, he belonged to the group of Hybrid Revenants who wanted to take over the city, while Yiran’s family
and ancestors had sworn to protect it. The only reason lines had blurred was because Yuki had offered something Yiran wanted
badly.
As far as Yiran knew, no normie could practice magic, because their spirit cores were too weak to handle the turbulent flux
of spiritual energy. So how did he manage to cast magic after absorbing Rui’s? Maybe the Hybrid knew something he didn’t.
Do you want your magic back?
It was the worst kind of temptation, the meeting of fear and longing. It took two days for Yiran to succumb, and another to
call Yuki with a burner phone.
He wasn’t proud of his weakness; he’d tried to rationalize it. Here was a good opportunity to arm the Guild with information
about the Hybrids and their plans. Yiran was only being dutiful, he was thinking about the big picture. Maybe he could return
to the fold armed with precious information for the Guild. He could play spy now, and Yuki would be dealt with later.
But in the end, Yiran never did tell anyone about their secret meetings.
Telling would mean relinquishing control and putting his own goals at risk.
His grandfather had made it clear that he’d rather Yiran remain a normie.
Considering the extreme measures Song Wei had taken to try to elicit magic from his grandson as a child, Yiran couldn’t fathom why he’d abandoned that goal now.
Something remained missing inside Yiran. He felt it every living moment. He wanted to fill it with magic. If it meant he had to be selfish, so be it. Nobody else gave a damn
about him anyway.
He would be a spy, loyal only to himself.
In exchange for information, Yiran had to keep Yuki company, but it slowly turned into more than he’d bargained for.
“I’m not going to spill everything right away,” Yuki had said when Yiran pressed him for answers the first time they’d met
up. “You wouldn’t go to third base on a first date, would you? Work for it—hang out with me for the day, and I’ll tell you
something useful.”
Naively, Yiran had agreed to the arrangement on the assumption that it would be a singular event. They’d watched an arthouse
movie at the independent theater, strolled for miles down to the helix bridge by the Quay, where they soaked in the city lights
while sharing a cheesy pizza. Food tasted like nothing to Yuki, but he relished every bite, as if clinging to some memory
in his past before he’d transformed into the creature he was today. Was Yiran’s presence a connection to that life?
It was that look on Yuki’s face when he was eating the damned pizza that got to Yiran, and he agreed to another meeting. By
their sixth outing, though, Yiran started to suspect that Yuki was only stringing him along.
Everything Yuki had chosen to share was observable or something the Exorcists could deduce for themselves. Hybrids couldn’t
tolerate the sun because it drained their energy, so they were most active at night or when it was overcast. Hybrids retained
their sentience and emotions, but the recently turned were less in control of their hunger and more prone to violence. Hybrids
healed quickly and aged slowly, almost as if the cells in their body were stuck in a cryo or regenerative mode.
The spiritual energy in a Hybrid Revenant was messed up because the Blight disrupted the natural balance of vitalizing yangqi, replacing it with damaging yinqi and causing a qi deviation.
It was a miracle for any human to survive the infection and subsequent transformation.
But those who did had cracked the code—their bodies and spirit cores had found a way to evolve somehow.
And they even learned to use yinqi for combat, similar to how the Exorcists cultivated and honed their yangqi to do magic.
Except the Hybrids didn’t need a conduit the way Exorcists needed their blades, because yinqi manifested directly from their spines to form vicious weapons.
All this was information the Guild had to know already. Yuki was careful, never leaving any clues about where the Hybrid hideouts
were, for example. He was stealthy and hard to tail; Yiran had tried. Yuki never spoke about the Hybrids’ plans either, or
if they were still determined to take over the city and how they might do it. And he never revealed how a normie like Yiran
could obtain magic and wield it again.
Yiran had run out of patience.
His burner phone stopped buzzing, the missed-call notification adding to a string of previous ones. He turned the phone off
and stuffed it under his pillow.
The hot shower didn’t improve his terrible mood. Steam misted over the mirror, and his reflection stared back at him, distorted
and uncanny.
For a second, it felt as if Liming was here with me . . .
But it wasn’t Liming that Yiran saw reflected in the mirror. It was Matthias.
Why had the man looked so familiar? He’d said his spirit core was different, and he implied that the Simulator program responded
to that. Was that what happened to Yiran on his first day at the Academy? Was there something different about Yiran’s spirit core?
He uncapped the tube of toothpaste. Screw being polite. He should’ve asked more questions of Matthias while he had a chance.
But Matthias wasn’t a ghost or anything; there had to be a way to find him. One of Theo’s guys could do that with the information Yiran had. Matthias had been a Xingshan cadet, then a doctor at one of the city’s hospitals.
He had a child. A daughter, to be precise. That was enough information to track—
Toothpaste squirted out of the tube and all over the sink.
Yiran had seen Matthias before.
There’d been a man sleeping in the hospital’s visitor lounge the night Yiran snuck in to see Rui. Yiran had paid scant attention
then, but he was certain now that the man was Matthias. That was why he’d looked so familiar—Yiran could see traces of Rui in him. And he recalled that the news had said her father was
a former medical researcher.
Song Liming and Matthias Lin had met at the Academy. Liming had saved Matthias’s life during a Simulation prank gone wrong.
Rui had saved Yiran’s spirit core from burning out that day when the program glitched. If the past were a game, it was repeating
itself with the players reversed.
Yiran brushed aside the unsettling parallel as he wiped down the sink. It didn’t matter. Coincidence or not, he was never
going to see Rui again.