We Share One Heart Demon and One Bed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gate Breaks
Jinghan tries to seal the demon under the Weeping Gate beside his oldest rival, the seal shatters, and the demon splits between their two hearts.
The seal had held for four hundred years, and it broke on Fang Jinghan's chant.
He stood at the Weeping Gate on the night of the dark moon, his sword planted in the stone before him.
He tried not to look at the man across the black pool.
Luo Yanchen, master of the Scarlet Lotus Sect, stood on the far side with his own sword planted.
The righteous sects called him the Ember Demon.
Jinghan had fought him nineteen times in ten years, and he knew the man's footwork better than his own sect's songs.
"You're late, Sword Immortal Fang," Luo said across the water.
"My master is ill," Jinghan said. "He sent me."
"He's always ill when the work is dull."
"I thought your elders would send someone with manners."
"They sent me."
Jinghan almost smiled, and he hated that he almost did.
Then the old gate warden struck her bell, and the two men began the chant.
It was the oldest sealing song in the world, sung by two voices in turn.
One voice was meant to be righteous and one demonic, so that the thing under the Gate would hear both and sleep.
Jinghan's voice was cool and Luo's was low, and for twelve lines they ran together.
On the thirteenth line the black pool began to boil.
"Fang Jinghan," Luo said, very calmly. "Something is wrong with your half."
"There's nothing wrong with my half."
"Then it's mine."
The stones of the Gate cracked from the top down.
Red light shot up out of the pool, wet and furious.
It did not go for the sky.
It went for the two men.
Something hit Jinghan in the chest, and he heard his own sword fall.
He was on his knees in the rubble, unable to breathe, and he could feel a second heart beating inside his ribs.
It was too fast to be his.
Hands closed on his wrist.
Luo had crossed the broken pool in two strides and dropped to one knee in front of him, braid swinging, face gone gray.
"Hold still," Luo said.
He pressed his palm flat against Jinghan's chest.
The hand was huge and hot, and it covered the whole of Jinghan's breastbone through the white silk.
Red light poured back and forth between them, up Luo's arm and into Jinghan's chest.
The wild beat in Jinghan's ribs slowed until it matched the beat under Luo's hand.
Both hearts were pounding the same count now.
"Do you feel that?" Luo asked.
"Yes."
"Is it yours or mine?"
"I don't know," Jinghan said, and his voice cracked on it.
Luo's eyes were brown and very close.
There was a scar on his chin that Jinghan had put there in the seventh duel.
Jinghan had never been near enough to see it so well.
Luo's hand did not move, and Jinghan did not want it to.
Nobody had touched him like this in years.
At Cloudpeak the disciples bowed and kept their sleeves to themselves, and Jinghan had told himself for a long time that he didn't mind.
He did not tell himself that now.
The old gate warden hobbled over the broken stones with her bell in her fist.
She looked at the two men.
"Two hearts," she said. "It didn't want one. It wanted a pair."
"What is it?" Luo asked.
"What it's always been. A heart demon. It's in both of you now."
"Then get it out."
"Can't. It's sewn in."
She tapped her bell against Luo's wrist, then against Jinghan's.
"It sleeps when your hearts are joined. The old record says so."
"Joined how?" Jinghan asked.
"Skin to skin, qi to qi, from dusk until the first cock crows."
Jinghan went stiff.
"You mean cultivate together."
"I mean dual cultivation," the warden said. "Every night."
Jinghan kept his face still.
Cloudpeak taught that dual cultivation was a path for the weak, taken in the dark by people who couldn't sit alone with their own qi.
Cloudpeak had also never told its sword immortal what to do with his hands or his mouth.
Jinghan had spent years pretending he never wondered.
"No," Jinghan said.
"Then it wakes at moonrise," the warden said. "And you're both dead by dawn."
The moon had not risen yet.
A short while later, a thin white edge rose over Redcliff, and the thing in Jinghan's chest woke with a roar.
It was not a demon's voice.
It was only pain, wide and hot and thirsty, as if every vein in his body were being wrung out.
Luo made a sound beside him and bent double.
A red lotus burned through Luo's robe over his heart.
Jinghan looked down and saw the same lotus glowing through his own white silk, the same petals, the same light.
"Sword Immortal Fang," Luo said through his teeth, "I would rather you didn't die."
He was shaking.
He had his hand over Jinghan's on Jinghan's own chest, and he was not letting go.
Jinghan thought of nineteen duels, and of how he had never once asked why Luo always smiled when he won.
"Then get your robe off," he said.
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