INARTICULATION (MLM/MxM/M4M ORIGINAL)

17: Guilt

Many emotions never crossed paths with a killer like him. He had taken more lives than he could count on more occasions than he could remember. Guilt, however, he remembered very clearly to have been reaped along with his pure mortality.

MEMENTO MORI

Xun Jie was quick to begin brainstorming a few plans. Plans for how a rift could be opened after the demon lord was slain. In the original series, that was precisely why Xun Jie had been pronounced dead in the written work. He had fallen into a rift created by Heng'e, where he was supposed to be unable to leave that plane of nothingness if she had died before he could reach the other side.

Now, it seemed like it would take much more than a simple slash at her glass eye to kill her. Getting the job done would be tough, and Xun Jie would have to stick around to make sure he did it right the second time, unable to even visit Earth afterward, hence why he was so adamant about the idea of killing her.

He often found himself asking Wen Jingyi for any ideas or information he may have kept to himself in the drafting stage of her character. However, he always avoided or only half answered his questions before falling back to sleep in his arms or on the bed.

It was all he could do during his recovery period. There was nothing he could do to speed up the healing process, and to ensure that no scars were left behind, Xun Jie did what he could with his supply of spiritual energy and shared his flow with him. It did help to speed up the healing process a great deal, but it wasn't as effective as it would have been on a person like Fu Qianqiu. He had formed a spiritual core, and Wen Jingyi hadn't. If the same healing process were done on someone who had a core, they would be able to more properly regulate that flow and use it to heal themselves.

Not to mention that Xun Jie had never used this technique for regeneration before. On another person, much less.

In the past, he only ever used his acquired ability of Blood Lock on himself to slow the flow of blood leaving his body. That required demonic qi, which he had a bountiful amount of.

However, that wouldn't be of any use to Wen Jingyi. No matter how this ability of his was used, it always brought great pain. The last time he used it on Wen Jingyi, he only meant to slow his heart palpitations and blood flow to ease his mind. On Wen Jingyi's part, it felt more like his heart had stopped beating and he was unable to breathe as his lungs were being held stiff.

Xun Jie did not want that to happen again.

So, he left Wen Jingyi in Fu Qianqiu's care while he left with Hai Ruan to uncover Memento Mori 's drafts.

Yes, they jumped back to Earth.

Xun Jie seated himself at Wen Jingyi's desk. He knew the man had used the device sitting atop to draft and write his stories since they had shared the experience of plotting a new work together. He was never allowed to handle said device but easily understood its controls when watching Wen Jingyi while he was operating it.

So he sat down at that desk and pressed the power button. Much to his surprise, it turned on. The white screen was blinding, but he only cared that he was doing something right.

Hai Ruan stood by his side as he was presented with a blue screen demanding a password.

"Password?" Hai Ruan asked themself.

"Jingyi told me that expensive and complex devices like these have passwords to ensure privacy. Come to think of it, many things in our world have passwords or variations of the sort to hide things from the public."

"Yes, just as there are personal passwords per spiritual array user."

Xun Jie sat silently in that chair and didn't bat an eye in Hai Ruan's direction.