Xue Lian stood in the doorway with her back to him.
The grey morning light fell across the landing behind her. Her dark hair hung still. One hand rested at her side, the other held the edge of the door, and she did not turn around when she spoke.
"You are not meant to stay here."
Zhao Wei stared at her from across the apartment. "What does that mean?"
"Even if you don't like it," she said, "you'll soon find out."
She looked back at him over her shoulder, one last look, calm and final. "It appears your heart is not willing to leave. So we'll leave you for now." A pause. "But we'll soon meet again."
"Let's go, Bai Feng."
The companion creature scrambled after her. "M-Miss!"
Zhao Wei crossed the room in three steps. "Wait, wait for me! Miss!" He reached the landing. The stairwell was empty. The sound of their footsteps had already dissolved into the ordinary morning sounds of the building pipes, television, and a door closing two floors down.
He stood at the top of the stairs and looked at nothing.
"Doesn't make any sense," he said quietly.
High above Tongzhou, Xue Lian and Bai Feng moved through the night sky over Beijing's rooftops, the city spread below them in its winter lights. Bai Feng kept pace just behind her, his expression tight with worry that he had been trying and failing to conceal for the past hour.
"Miss," he said, "will this really be alright? Turning a human into an undead is forbidden as it is, but to just leave him there like that..."
"All responsibility lies with me," Xue Lian said, without slowing. "It's fine."
Bai Feng exhaled. "For now, Semani is our priority. This is the region that reacted four days ago, right?"
"Yes." Xue Lian's eyes moved across the city below, steady and searching.
Semani was a magic stone that reacted only to demon power. That was the reason it had been tracking Xue Lian's movements across Beijing for the past four days, drawn to the signature of her energy the way iron is drawn to a magnet. It was also the reason—
"AH!" Bai Feng stopped mid-air.
"That must mean that the boy who received Miss's power also—!!"
Xue Lian did not stop moving. "Will be a target," she said simply.
Bai Feng stared at the back of her head. Below them, Beijing glittered in the cold, indifferent to everything moving above it.
"It will show itself soon," Xue Lian said. "No need to be nervous."
Three days passed.
And nothing changed.
Zhao Wei sat in his classroom in the morning light with his textbook open in front of him and the words swimming on the page, and thought, not for the first time since waking up in his apartment that morning three days ago, that the whole thing had the quality of a fever dream. The park. The monster. The girl. The way his arm had healed in seconds from a cut that should have bled.
It's almost like that entire incident never even happened.
Except that he was not breathing. He had checked, again, in the bathroom mirror that morning, standing very still, watching his chest. Not moving. He had gotten through three days of school and two shifts at the restaurant without breathing once, and nobody had noticed, and that was either a miracle or a sign that people paid much less attention than they thought they did.
"Seat 14, please read the text." teacher,
Zhao Wei looked up. "Ok."
He read three sentences. His voice came out normal. He sat back down.
Then he felt fingers close around his wrist, cold, precise, and the textbook in front of him was suddenly not the thing he was looking at.
Xue Lian sat beside him.
She had not been there a moment ago. She was there now, looking at him with the same level, dark eyes, as if materialising in occupied classroom seats was simply something she did.
Zhao Wei stared at her. His classmates continued reading. No one looked over.
"The people of Beyond Realm," she said quietly, "must not remain in the human world." She held his wrist without releasing it. "That is the Law of Beyond Realm."
"Beyond Realm?" he said, keeping his voice low.
"Beyond Realm is a world that exists alongside Earth." She spoke plainly, as if reading from a reference she had long since memorised. "Things that people believe exist only in imagination dwell there. Simply speaking, devils, dwarfmen, dragons."
"And, like you," she added, "living corpses. Undead lives."
"*SHUT UP.*" Zhao Wei pulled his arm back. His voice had come out louder than intended. Two students glanced toward him. He waited for them to look away. "I'm human," he said, lower this time, with his jaw tight. "I'm a human being, and I don't know what you're trying to.."
The pain hit without warning.
Not a gradual ache, something sudden and absolute, like a hand closing around his heart and squeezing. He doubled over, hands pressing against his chest, the desk lurching under him as he grabbed it for balance. His vision whitened at the edges.
"GE.."
The sound that came out of him was not a word.
He hit the floor on one knee. The classroom noise continued around him, indifferent. His hands were shaking. The pain pulsed in his chest with a rhythm that was not a heartbeat but something else mechanical, deliberate, external.
Xue Lian crouched in front of him. Her expression had not changed.
"I am the one manipulating your heart," she said.
He looked up at her. His breath, the breath he did not actually have, came in ragged, reflexive gasps.
"It looks like you still don't understand," she continued. "But even if you want to be in denial, it's too late." She straightened. "You cannot go back to being human."
The pain eased, slowly, like a hand relaxing its grip. Zhao Wei stayed on one knee and breathed the breaths that meant nothing and tried to make his vision clear.
"One who becomes an undead through the power of a demon necromancer," Xue Lian said, above him, "cannot continue living without receiving their master's blood." She looked down at him with something that was not cruelty and was not sympathy. "Without me, you'll go back to being a corpse."
Zhao Wei raised his head.
She was looking back at him steadily. Behind her, the classroom carried on with students reading aloud, pencils moving, the ordinary traffic of a Tuesday morning at school, entirely unaware of the conversation happening in its centre.
"I am," she said.
"The Demon Necromancer, Xue Lian." A pause.
"Your Master."
The word landed the way her earlier ones had, flat, definitive, without apology or softening.
Zhao Wei stared at her. Something built in his chest that had nowhere to go, not pain this time, but fury, hot and sudden. I thought she was sorry. I thought that apology meant
"EK?"
"I resurrected you," Xue Lian said, with the same composure she brought to every other statement. "So of course, you're my slave."
Zhao Wei's mouth opened.
Closed.
He sat on the floor of his classroom and looked up at the girl who had killed him, resurrected him, manipulated his heart from the inside, declared herself his master, and was now waiting for a response with the patience of someone who had already decided how this conversation was going to end.
The bell rang.