It was evening as they headed back to the Death Hall mountain. The innkeeper, Youzhou, had been kind enough to keep the room for Shu Zhijing despite him not staying that night. As they left, the Diyu Lord himself promised that the ghosts, corpses, and monsters would leave them all alone if they were coming from the mountain. The Diyu Lord gave no explanation about any of it, and promptly left, leaving Shu Zhijing to quickly chase after him.
As they walked up the trail leading to the mountain, it was quiet. Shu Zhijing spent it soaking in the proximity from his nephew, who leaned against him and held on like he never wanted to let go. Shu Zhijing fully returned the sentiment. A-Lin had been his sweet nephew who he doted on as soon as he saw him. One couldn't see the precious baby that Xiaolin had been and not wanted to do everything to care and love for him. Growing older had done nothing to dissuade Shu Zhijing from those same feelings despite eight years having passed, four of which had been without his nephew.
As they approached the mountains, there were more people inside, dressed in funeral clothes -- they were ghosts.
"That's the man that came here," one of the old woman ghosts whispered to the Diyu Lord. The Diyu Lord hummed in response. "He's the one that put Wu Mi to rest." The Diyu Lord paused, but quickly moved on with only another hum. The man was not callous, he had seen the way he peered at both his charge, the girl Mu Wen, and his nephew, Shu Xiaolin. The Diyu Lord did care about them, but he was still the Diyu Lord: a demon.
They walked the familiar halls, the same path that Wu Mi had taken him through before they came across the room with the meandering skeletons milling about. None of the skeletons bothered them again, their bones rattling together as they bowed when the Diyu Lord passed. They moved on and where there was previously just stone, there were two new doors.
"Should I stay and guard him, shifu?" Mu Wen asked, whispering to the Diyu Lord, eyeying Shu Zhijing from over the man's shoulder.
"No, I trust his words. He loves A-Lin," the Diyu Lord said. "You get some rest. I'm going to teach you how to use talismans in the morning. It will help you with quick spells should you need them."
Mu Wen bowed lowly to the Diyu Lord, who just patted her shoulder before the girl went towards him. She kissed Shu Xiaolin's thin cheek and nodded at Shu Zhijing before she took the bed mat and blanket from the Diyu Lord, pulled from his ring, and headed into her room. The Diyu Lord turned to him and walked into the room closer towards the Diyu Lord's chamber, the one that previously housed Wu Mi's tethering totem. The Diyu Lord laid the mat down on the raised stone platform to make it more suitable for sleep.
"I'm just in the other room," the Diyu Lord said. "If either of you need anything you can come and get me. I won't be sleeping, I promise." The Diyu Lord smiled at Shu Zhijing and nodded, but he stopped to kiss the top of Xiaolin's head much like one would to their own child, and Shu Zhijing wished that he had been there for that, and he wished that it wasn't the infamous Diyu Lord offering his nephew that comfort but someone else… someone like his lover, Qiaodan. They would make excellent parents, even if it would be considered unacceptable to everyone in the sect for them to do so.
"Thank you, Diyu Lord," he said, setting Xiaolin on the bed just to bow properly to the man. The Diyu Lord continued to smile at him.
"You can call me Liu Liangzhe, if you'd prefer. I don't try to announce the Diyu Lord-thing, but it's good that you're aware of who and what I am," Liu Liangzhe said, his voice getting tighter and much darker as he muttered his last words -- a subtle threat to keep his behaviour proper.
As Shu Xiaolin climbed into his mat, he pulled the blanket to the side for Shu Zhijing to join him. The man pulled off his boots and rested his outer robes to the side as the Diyu Lord, Liu Liangzhe, left them without another word, drifting out of the room like a dark ghost. He crawled onto the platform and rested on his side beside his nephew, who wrapped his arms around his waist and snuggled his little face against his chest. He stroked the back of his nephew's head as he slept and caught himself humming multiple times before he just gave into that urge to make some sort of comforting noise. When Xiaolin was surely asleep, Shu Zhijing held his nephew as close as possible without waking him up and truly cried. He cried in a way he couldn't cry in the public space with so many people around him at the inn, yet he cried quietly so his nephew didn't wake up.
By the time he had cried himself dry, he extracted himself from his nephew's stubby arms and tucked him in while he went in search for some water to try and make the pounding in his head stop. As he left the room, he saw only the hallway leading to the other rooms and then the one that led to the room of skeletons. There was no water in the room of skeletons, and he didn't trust himself to navigate his way out of the mountain labyrinth the first time he was there, even less now that his eyes were swollen and distorted by a layer of mucus.
"I thought he had nobody," Liu Liangzhe said from behind him, shocking Shu Zhijing so much that he jumped before he spun around, keeping his head down so that he didn't let the man see just how horrible he had felt. "How old were you when you lost him? You're still very young, Shu Zhijing. You're barely a man."
"I was eighteen when he went missing," he said. "The elders told us it was a kidnapping. I searched for two years, but then my father got sick. My brother demanded I return home… my brother…" he grit his teeth as he thought about how Shu Ganmao had held him when he cried, how his brother told him that it was okay to be upset, and that bad things happened sometimes, but it would get better. "That bastard…" he said, his entire body shaking with how much rage coursed through him. He couldn't properly articulate how livid he was. Liu Liangzhe rested a hand on his shoulder, cold but heavy like the earth beneath them.
"I have some ideas on what to do," the Diyu Lord said. "I feel it's only right that you be involved. I may want revenge for what I saw, but I took it already. You have more of a claim to be angry, rightfully so, than I do."
"Xiaolin was just a baby, he was only four," Shu Zhijing continued. "How could he do that to him? He's still a baby. What did Ganmao even want from me? Why did he send me out to look for Shu Xiaolin if he caused all of his suffering? What good did he think would come from it? What was the purpose of this scheme?"
Instead of responding right away, because Shu Zhijing was sure there was no proper response for something like that, Liu Liangzhe handed him a wooden cup of water.
"You've been crying. Drink some water, and come with me. We'll figure it out," Liu Liangzhe said before he started to walk away. Shu Zhijing took a sip of water and chased after the man who went into one of the three rooms that he had seen when he visited with Wu Mi, but hadn't entered. He wondered if it would live up to the skeleton room outside the hall, or if it would be more like the man Shu Zhijing had been interacting with, not the fearsome Diyu Lord but the caring and relatively docile Liu Liangzhe.