A little bit of Meiyuan for @amasamay , who's also my tgcf wifeyy
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Mei Nianqing had been working with Zhi Ming on bringing Shen Yuan back, and the whole thing was giving him a headache that no amount of spiritual energy was going to fix.
That little idiot had gone and done self-destruction without any warning whatsoever, like he hadn’t stopped for even a second to think about what that would do to the people left standing there watching it happen. Like he hadn’t considered that some of them might actually care.
“That little shit,” Mei Nianqing grumbled under his breath, carefully carving out the eyes of the puppet while Zhi Ming watched from the side with his tiny arms crossed. The problem with Zhi Ming being a small statue was that there were certain places on the puppet he simply couldn’t reach no matter how determined he was, and determination alone did not give you longer arms. So Mei Nianqing had volunteered himself to fill the gap, and here they were.
Working together, the two of them had constructed a puppet. It wasn’t perfect by any measure. The proportions were a little off in places, the carving on the hands was slightly uneven, and there was one section along the jaw that Mei Nianqing had redone three times and still wasn’t entirely happy with. But if you stood back and looked at it without being too harsh about the details, you could tell who it was supposed to be. The resemblance was there. Anyone who had met Shen Yuan would recognize it within the first few seconds, provided they had the decency to overlook some of the rougher spots.
They had been working on this puppet for nearly a year. A whole year, while the heavenly realm slowly pieced itself back together around them, brick by brick and prayer by prayer. And Jun Wu? Still exactly where they had left him, pinned to the ground deep inside the cave, Fangxin buried in his stomach, motionless and silent. They worked in the ten thousand god statues cave, surrounded by all those stone faces looking down at them from every direction, which was a strange kind of company but the only kind available.
“Zhi Ming, I think it’s enough.” Mei Nianqing stepped back and looked at the finished puppet, then looked at the little statue perched on the large rock nearby, waiting. He tilted his head slightly, assessed the work one more time, and decided that spending another month refining the carving would not actually improve their odds of success. Enough was enough.
Zhi Ming nodded and immediately reached for a piece of paper, scribbling something down. His handwriting was genuinely terrible, the kind of handwriting that made you feel a little sorry for whoever had to read it, but Mei Nianqing kept that opinion to himself. Given that Zhi Ming was working with hands the size of a child’s thumb and had been a small stone figurine for longer than either of them probably wanted to think about, complaining about penmanship felt like it was missing the point.
The note said: 'Let’s draw the array now.'
Mei Nianqing nodded. He lifted the puppet carefully and carried it out of the cave, moving through the dark passage and out into the open air, where there was enough room to work. Then, with Zhi Ming directing from his shoulder and pointing his tiny arm here and there with surprising authority, Mei Nianqing drew the array out on the ground, checking the lines twice before settling the puppet into the center of it.
After that, they sat down together and began the summoning.
Calling a soul back was not a fast process. It required patience, and stillness, and the kind of quiet focus that made time feel like it was moving through something thick. They stayed in the same position for what felt like a very long time, the only sounds around them the wind and the distant settling of stone. The puppet didn’t move. Didn’t so much as tremble. Mei Nianqing found himself going through the array step by step in his head, checking for anything he might have drawn wrong, any character out of place, any line that curved when it should have been straight.
He was still working through the fourth section in his head when something small and urgent tugged at his sleeve.
He looked down. Zhi Ming was pointing at the puppet with one tiny arm, the other hand gripping Mei Nianqing’s sleeve tightly, like he was trying to make absolutely sure he was paying attention.
The puppet’s finger had moved.
Just one finger. Just a small, almost imperceptible twitch. But it was movement. Real movement, not a trick of the light or a settling of the wood.
Something in Mei Nianqing’s chest unknotted itself all at once, a relief so immediate and physical that he had to take a slow breath to steady himself. He still wasn’t certain yet. A soul had entered the puppet, yes, but that didn’t automatically mean it was the right soul. Summoning was not an exact process, and the last thing he wanted was to declare success only to discover they had pulled in the wrong spirit entirely.
So he waited. And the puppet continued to move, slowly, like someone waking up in stages from a very deep and disorienting sleep. Fingers first, then hands, then the slow lift of the head.
Eventually, the puppet stood up.
Mei Nianqing got to his feet and approached carefully, Zhi Ming climbing up to his shoulder and gripping the fabric of his collar with both tiny hands, leaning forward to look. He stopped when there was a reasonable distance between them and looked at the puppet directly.
“Who are you?” he asked, keeping his voice level.
The puppet blinked. Then it looked down at itself, slowly, like it was taking inventory. Both hands came up and it touched its own face, its arms, its chest, turning its palms over and looking at them from both sides, the expression on the carved face doing something complicated and wondering, like someone who had been told they were going to wake up somewhere unfamiliar and was still surprised to actually find themselves there.
It couldn’t speak, of course. The puppet had no voice to offer. But Mei Nianqing had already thought of that, and he held out a piece of paper and a brush.
The puppet took them without hesitation, steadied the paper against its knee, and wrote. Then it turned the paper around to show him.
Mei Nianqing looked at it. Then looked at the puppet. He appreciated the directness but one name was not sufficient evidence, so he kept his expression neutral and waited.
The puppet seemed to understand that, because it immediately started writing again, filling the rest of the paper with more, writing about the fusion, about things that would only be known to someone who had actually lived through those events, and then pointing at Zhi Ming on Mei Nianqing’s shoulder with clear recognition in its carved eyes.
Zhi Ming gave a small, solemn nod in return.
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Mei Nianqing read the paper through to the end. Then he let out a long breath and said, “Okay. You’re really him.”
Zhi Ming, from his shoulder, looked insufferably satisfied about all of this.
Some months passed since the day Shen Yuan had come back, living now inside the puppet that Mei Nianqing and Zhi Ming had spent a year putting together.
It was fine. Everything was fine. The work was done, the result was good, and life in and around the cave had settled into something with a rhythm to it. Mei Nianqing told himself regularly that everything was completely fine, and he almost always believed himself.
Except for the thing with his heart.
He had started noticing it somewhere around the time Shen Yuan had helped him with the cards. That particular afternoon, Shen Yuan had leaned in close without any warning, close enough that Mei Nianqing could have reached out and touched him, pointing at the hand of cards and explaining in his fast, casual way which one to choose and why. And Mei Nianqing had just… stopped. Gone completely still, his mind wiped clean of every thought he had been in the middle of, because his heart had done something loud and sudden in his chest that he had absolutely no framework for.
He was not a person who was unfamiliar with his own body. He had been alive for a very long time. He had felt pain, and grief, and satisfaction, and the quiet exhaustion that came from carrying too much for too long. He knew what those things felt like.
He did not know what this was.
And it kept happening. That was the part he found most difficult to deal with. It wasn’t a one-time thing. Every time Shen Yuan looked at him, just looked, just turned his head in his direction and met his eyes, even for a moment, Mei Nianqing’s heart did that thing again. Loud and insistent and completely unhelpful. He would catch Shen Yuan mid-thought, that little private snicker on his face that appeared when he was turning something funny over in his head, or watch the way he moved when he was talking about something he actually cared about, and his chest would react before he had any chance to tell it not to.
It was deeply inconvenient.
And Zhi Ming knew. That little shit was becoming impossible to ignore. The small statue had started producing little drawings, quick rough sketches on scraps of paper that he would wave in Mei Nianqing’s direction at whatever moment he calculated would be most effective. Every single one of them was of Shen Yuan. Shen Yuan sitting. Shen Yuan laughing. Shen Yuan doing absolutely nothing remarkable except existing, which Zhi Ming had apparently decided was portrait-worthy.
He was so annoying. He was also the only one who seemed to understand what was going on, which made him simultaneously the most irritating and most useful person in Mei Nianqing’s immediate vicinity.
Mei Nianqing was not going to ask him about it. He had some dignity.
Zhi Ming had also started engineering situations. Little ones, subtle enough that if you weren’t paying attention you might have missed the pattern. He would grip Shen Yuan’s clothes with his tiny hands and lead him somewhere with whatever excuse he had decided was plausible that day, which usually earned him a sideways, suspicious look from Shen Yuan but not actually enough resistance to stop him. And somehow, almost every time, wherever Zhi Ming had decided to lead Shen Yuan happened to be wherever Mei Nianqing was.
The drawings kept appearing. The leading kept happening. Mei Nianqing kept pretending not to notice the pattern, which was getting harder to do convincingly with every passing week.
Then came the afternoon when the pattern produced a result that none of them had quite planned for.
Mei Nianqing was sitting on the ground, a scroll across his lap, working through it in the quiet way he did when he was actually concentrating and didn’t want to be interrupted. He heard Zhi Ming arrive first, the familiar tiny footsteps, and then the slightly more reluctant footsteps of Shen Yuan behind him, and he didn’t look up, because if he looked up it would only encourage Zhi Ming.
He didn’t hear exactly what happened next. There was a sound, sort of a surprised intake of breath, and then something happened in the space between one moment and the next, and Shen Yuan was in his lap.
Mei Nianqing had never, in the full length of his life, had occasion to compare the heat of his own face to volcanic activity. He was now reconsidering that gap in his experience, because what was happening to his face in this moment suggested that the comparison was not as hyperbolic as it might have sounded. He was certain his face was producing visible warmth. He was at least ninety percent sure he was going to combust.
Shen Yuan had gone completely rigid. His face was red, deeply and thoroughly red, and his eyes had taken on the quality of someone whose soul had departed their body to seek calmer accommodations elsewhere. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t speaking. He wasn’t even appearing to breathe. He was just… there, sitting in Mei Nianqing’s lap, absent from the physical world.
Zhi Ming, from somewhere to the left, looked like he had just witnessed the single greatest achievement of his entire existence.
Mei Nianqing shot him a look that communicated quite clearly that he could keep his feelings to himself. Zhi Ming shrugged one tiny shoulder with the energy of someone who had absolutely nothing to apologize for, and then walked off in the direction of the deeper part of the cave, which was an impressively casual exit.
Mei Nianqing cleared his throat. Nothing happened. Shen Yuan was still somewhere else entirely, floating in whatever internal space he had retreated to.
“Shen Yuan.” He reached out and shook the puppet’s shoulder, once, gently.
Shen Yuan snapped back into himself with a start, blinking rapidly, and then processed the situation he was in and immediately began trying to get up. He was apologizing or atleast trying to apologise, scrambling to move, but the scrambling somehow produced exactly the wrong result, and instead of creating distance it closed it.
It was barely anything. A brush, a fraction of a second, the softest and most accidental contact. And then Shen Yuan went backward off his lap with a startled, landing on the ground, one hand flying up to cover his mouth, eyes wide enough that they seemed to take up most of his face.
He scrambled to his knees, then his feet, and then he was gone, moving out of the cave at a speed that could only be described as fleeing, the sound of his footsteps disappearing quickly into open air.
Mei Nianqing sat very still on the ground where he had been sitting before any of this happened. His scroll was still in his hands. He hadn’t moved it. He looked down at it for a moment without reading a single character.
Then, slowly, almost without deciding to, he raised one hand and touched his own lips.
The warmth that had been in his face was still there, settled in deep now, not fading the way it should. And under his hand, where his ribs enclosed his heart, that same loud, insistent, entirely-impossible-to-ignore thumping was going again.
He lowered his hand. He looked at the empty cave entrance where Shen Yuan had disappeared.
He thought, ‘What am I going to do now?’, as he placed his hand on his chest and had absolutely no answer for himself. Just the warmth, and the quiet, and his heart doing whatever it wanted without his permission.
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Inspired by @particle90272 That Time I Got Transmigrated as a God 💞🙌🏻
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