Gyuvin took the corpse girl’s hand and they walked together, through the deserted streets, until they reached the outskirts of the town, where the graveyard was marked out by a wooden fence, the dirt and grass dotted with rows of memorial tablets. Seo Jung found her own coffin without much difficulty, the only grave plot in the graveyard that had been disturbed.
“Can I ask for one more thing?” she asked, still holding on to Gyuvin’s hand, looking up at him though she couldn’t see. “Sorry for troubling you.”
“Don’t apologize. What is it?”
“Can you bury me with some wisteria? I know I can’t go home, but I want to at least remember what home smells like…”
“Okay. I’ll go and get some wisteria for you, but in return, can you lie down and close your eyes for a while?” Gyuvin asked, guiding her over to her coffin. He swiped the dirt and soil away with a wind enchantment before patting the empty coffin for her to lie down. “I’ll be back, okay? Can you stay here until I return?”
“Okay.” The corpse girl closed her eyes and was silent, and Gyuvin headed back through the streets to pluck some wisteria clusters. No wonder Seo Jung had found her way home even while she was blind, he thought. The scent of wisteria was so strong he was sure even if he closed his eyes he could find his way back. She might have had difficulty finding her way if she’d lived at any other house but this one.
By the time he returned to the graveyard, Seo Jung’s spirit had left. The only thing keeping her spirit in the human realm was her confusion making her think she was still alive, but now that she knew she was dead, her spirit had no reason to linger. She’d left even before Gyuvin had come back with the wisteria, because she trusted him to fulfill her last request.
Gyuvin knelt down on the dirt, arranging the wisteria flowers around her coffin, placing the final stalk between her clasped hands. The process of sealing a body was simple, something he’d practiced a billion times back home, and as he drew the final talisman on the coffin, it glowed iridescent gold for just a moment before sinking back into the ground, the dirt flooding in to fill the hole until it looked just like every other grave plot in the yard. Evening was starting to fall now, and the descending sun turned the shadows of headstones into long fingers.
“You’ve done this before,” Ricky said quietly. A statement, not a question.
Gyuvin nodded. “There’s people like her everywhere. Someone needs to be the one to put them to rest.”
Cultivators, especially those from bigger sects, generally knew all the basics with regards to handling common issues related to spirits and ghosts and demonic activity, but certain sects like Meteor Court clearly contributed more in the way of solving the commonfolk’s problems as compared to sects like Moonrise Palace. They were located so far away from the nearest city or town that calls for help hardly came to them. It wasn’t at all surprising that Ricky had never encountered something like this. Gyuvin, on the other hand, had seen this through a thousand times before.
They returned to the House of Wisteria to report that Seo Jung had been safely returned to her grave and her spirit sent off, news the family were greatly relieved to hear, before heading back up to the Sky-Ascending Peak. It was the middle of the dinner hour as they stepped off the elevators, but Gyuvin and Ricky turned the other way at the corridor, heading for the seniors’ quarters.
“Oh, you’re back,” Han Seungho said, looking mildly surprised to see them knocking at the doors of his living quarters.
“The issue has been solved,” Gyuvin reported back to the senior who’d given him the assignment, Han Seungho. “It was a simple case of a corpse rising due to an improper burial. It looks to be a one off incident, so there shouldn’t be any major problems in the near future.”
“That was it?”
“Yes, sunbae.”
They were dismissed soon after, to catch the tail end of the dinner hour before the food ran out. The dining hall was mostly empty, only a couple of stragglers left behind. Gyuvin headed for his usual table, though his friends had finished eating and left long ago, but this time, Ricky followed.
“Can I sit here?”
Gyuvin looked up from setting down his tray of food. “Yeah, of course, sit down.”
He observed the selection of food on Ricky’s tray silently, in between bites of his own. Clear soup, steamed rice, blanched vegetables and fish, and little jewel-like fruit jellies he’d picked with only strawberries in them.
“You don’t eat spicy food?” he asked casually. It was just unusual for people living up in the mountains to dislike spicy food, considering it was one of the ways they combated the sheer cold.
Ricky shook his head. “I don’t like the taste. You’re probably wondering how I survive at Moonrise Palace like this, aren’t you?”
“Took the words right out of my mouth.”
“The cold doesn’t really get to me. It never has, so I didn’t see a need to build up my spice tolerance.”
Gyuvin figured that line of reasoning checked out, though he recalled Ricky mentioning that he’d been born with a weak constitution and was a little surprised to hear he wasn’t much affected by the harsh weather.
“Hey, Ricky.”
“Hm?”
“Why don’t you ever come eat with the rest of us?”
Over the past couple of weeks, as their group of four had started expanding into their group of nine, even Zhanghao and Yujin sometimes broke off from their own group to come join them for meals, but Ricky never did.
Ricky took a neat bite of cabbage. “Noisy.”
Gyuvin stared blankly at him for a second, rendered speechless.
“And I don’t like being around so many people all day.”
“You’re around your own sect’s disciples all day.”
“They’re different. I grew up with them.”
“Hanbin-hyung grew up with me, and I’m sure even he gets sick of me sometimes,” Gyuvin interjected.
Ricky thought about it a little. “I don’t think he does. I don’t know him well, but he’s around Hao-hyung a lot. I think he’s nice.”
“He is nice,” Gyuvin answered despairingly. “You should have seen him sparring with me when I was twelve and he was fifteen. He gave me twenty moves’ head start whenever we sparred even when he knew he could defeat me in seconds.”
“Yeah? You don’t give me any head starts when we train,” Ricky shot back.
“Forget about head starts. I’d lose as soon as I gave you just an extra second.”
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