#danmei #BL #TGCF #HeavenOfficialsBlessing #Hualian #MDZS #MoDaoZuShi #Wangxian #HuaCheng #LanWangji #LanZhan #crossover #fanfic #angst #romance #drama #psychological #AU #atmospheric #addictionmentions #adaptedtext #englishadaptation

(This chapter is an adapted English version of the original Russian text.)

Snow pressed against the window frames in heavy, wet clumps—like unsaid words weighing down the air. It melted and slid down the glass, turning the lamplight into a blurred, golden melancholy. The room breathed with heat—thick, feverish, filled with the scents of sweat and bitter herbs.

Lan Wangji was burning. The fever devoured him from within, making his skin seem fragile and translucent, like ice beneath the sun. Chills racked his body, brittle as branches breaking under winter snow. His immaculate robes had been replaced by a simple white shirt, plastered to his fever-hot skin with every tortured breath. His hair, tangled and damp, fanned over the pillow like scattered shadows. He looked like a spirit worn thin between two worlds—too fragile for life, too alive for oblivion.

Wei Ying paced beside the bed. His usual bright energy now beat helplessly against the stillness, like a moth against glass.

“Lan Zhan, seriously? How did this even happen?” His voice cracked, trying for cheerfulness and failing. “A plain cold? You—Hanguang-jun—caught this? Ridiculous… right?”

Lan Wangji’s lips were cracked—fine lines like cuts on porcelain, stained with a memory of blood. He moved them slightly.

“Got wet,” he breathed, the word dry as ash.

He wasn’t talking about rain. He meant soaked through—to the bone, to the very last note he never played.

Wei Ying froze, the bowl in his hand shaking.

“Wet?” he echoed, all humor gone.

Steam from the medicinal brew curled between them—sharp, peppery, smelling like a life not his, a life someone tried to force back into his body. The scent of wine, laughter, freedom—everything Lan Zhan never chose and never wanted.

Outside, snow thickened. Lan Wangji turned his head, his fever-hazed gaze finding Wei Ying.

“I understand,” he began, each syllable carved out with effort. “You are like desert wind. You need space. You drink to drown out the past. You wander because life is never enough for you.” He paused, eyelids lowering. “But what about me? I can’t keep up. And in chasing you… I lose myself.”

Genuine confusion crossed Wei Ying’s face—so vivid, yet so distant in that moment.

“Lan Zhan,” he said, and there was no mischief now, only bewilderment. “I’m here. I love you. Our closeness—doesn’t that mean anything? But you… you’re always with your scrolls, your clan, your duties. You rarely share the rest of your world with me. I get lonely there alone.”

He lifted the bowl to Lan Wangji’s lips. The hot rim burned the cracked skin. Lan Zhan didn’t flinch—just closed his eyes. In that small gesture lay surrender, silence, and something else—wounded clarity: he had loved not Wei Ying, but the possibility of loving him. And when that possibility faded, only emptiness remained—emptiness even fever couldn’t fill.

The rest of the world slipped from him. Fever pulled him under—into a wild, delirious dance of images.

Heat first pressed like wet snow stuffed beneath his collar. Then it became light—red, crimson, like the umbrella that once opened above him and kept him alive. He saw it vividly: the scarlet dome over a white world, the silver butterflies trembling on silk, the single warm eye, glowing like a coal cupped in a palm.

His fingers reached toward nothingness. Trembling, they scraped the air as if searching for the umbrella’s edge—for the warmth that once touched his wrist and never let go.

He clutched Wei Ying’s sleeve.

“Don’t go…” he whispered, staring through him. “Stay… this time… stay…”

“I’m here,” Wei Ying tried to reassure him.

Lan Wangji recoiled, trembling.

“Go… please… it’s so loud. So cold… so cold…”

Wei Ying stepped back and rose slowly.

“All right… I’ll go. I’ll be nearby.”

The door closed.

Snow blurred the world into white haze. That haze seeped through cracks, eyelids, skin—falling inward, falling, falling, until everything went white, soundless, airless. And there, inside the collapsing whiteness, he exhaled:

“Hua…”

The name escaped him like the last drop of blood from an opened vein. A floorboard creaked somewhere beyond the room. But Lan Zhan heard nothing. Only red silk behind his eyes, and warmth that wasn’t here.

Night sank outside—thick as ink—with only snowflakes revealing the shapes of eaves and branches. The air in the room was heavy, smelling of herbs and human fragility. Lan Wangji writhed in fever, his disciplined body now a shattered vessel leaking pain.

Hua Cheng appeared soundlessly. He simply was, standing at the bedside. Tall, draped in red, he looked as though the night itself had taken form around him. Coolness radiated from him—fresh, clean—so achingly welcome that Lan Zhan, eyes still closed, reached toward it like a wounded man reaching for a healer’s hand.

Hua Cheng stood still, gazing at Lan Wangji. At this cultivator in white, now looking like a broken reed. And he could not understand why he was here.

Every fiber of eight hundred years of devotion screamed betrayal. So why had his feet carried him to this place, answering this call? That call he once begged for—“Call me for real.”

He slowly extended his hand—pale in the dark, long-fingered, cold as spring water from a deep well—and laid his palm on Lan Wangji’s feverish brow.

Lan Wangji stilled instantly. As if a mountain stream crashing on stones had suddenly frozen under winter’s touch—trapping every cry, every “stay,” every “go.”

His eyelids fluttered; still delirious, he lifted his burning hand to cover Hua Cheng’s cold one. He pressed it to his cheek like someone holding the last shard of ice—knowing it will melt, but clinging because it’s the only thing that doesn’t burn.

Hua Cheng froze. His fingers lay caught in that trembling, fever-bound grasp, and something inside him twitched—an old scar he believed long forgotten. He tried to pull back, regain control, but his hand no longer obeyed. His thumb traced Lan Wangji’s lower lip—rough, scorching—like the rim of a cracked bowl that once held blood instead of wine. He dipped his fingertips into the bitter medicine at the bedside and touched the dry lips again, moistening the wounds.

Lan Wangji gasped—soft, guttural—and parted his lips in a voiceless whimper. Not from pain. He craved not moisture, but the touch itself—like the dying crave not water, but the hand that brings it.

And then Hua Cheng, guided not by reason but by something ancient, ruthless, and unbearably gentle, leaned in.

The kiss at first was only a brush—cold, tentative lips against burning, broken ones. A moment suspended on the edge, like a drop of blood trembling on a blade.

Then… Lan Wangji answered. His lips, dry and fever-hot, moved under Hua Cheng’s with such trusting, delirious tenderness that it stole the breath Hua Cheng no longer possessed.

He recoiled as if burned by his own heart. Blankness roared in his mind. He stared at the sleeping man whose face had softened, freed for an instant from pain by that kiss—and felt the wall inside him crack. The wall he had built for eight centuries from bone, blood, and devotion to a single name.

This man… The thought crept slowly, thickly, like blood along steel. He loves the way I once loved. Just as fiercely. Just as foolishly. And just as alone.

Hua Cheng didn’t want him to walk the same path. The path where devotion becomes poison, and waiting becomes eternity in a personal hell where even death offers no rest.

He straightened. Red sleeve glinting in the dark like the last drop of blood falling onto snow. He lingered one moment longer, gaze sharp, confused, burdened with something he didn’t dare name.

Then he set a dark-red peony—closed, heavy with dew and unspoken sorrow—on the bedside table and vanished.

Snow whispered outside. And in the room remained only silence—silence in which someone, for the first time in years, allowed himself to be weak.

Dawn found Lan Wangji suspended between sleep and waking. The fever had retreated, leaving his body shattered but his mind disturbingly clear. He turned his head.

On the bedside table, beside the untouched bowl of medicine, lay a flower. A single peony bud.* Deep burgundy—almost black in the morning light—its petals velvet-smooth, damp like lips after a kiss that ought not be remembered. The flower looked alien in the strict simplicity of the room—like a forbidden color intruding on a monochrome world.

Its scent hung in the air—thick, sweet, intimate, like breath after a long kiss. It filled the room, seeped into his lungs, his veins, his heart—making it pound as if it wanted to escape and hide inside that fragrance forever.

Lan Wangji raised a trembling hand. He picked up the peony—carefully, as if holding a living heart that could stop with a single wrong movement. He pressed it to his cracked lips.

The petals were cold. Silky.

And his body remembered—sharply: the icy hand on his fevered brow… the vague silhouette swallowing the night’s light… the sudden relief cleaving through the fire…

And the lips. Cold lips. On his own.

He jerked the flower away from his mouth, as though it had scorched his already fragile skin. His heart hammered—fast, guilty. What was he doing? He had just… touched something brought by a man who wasn’t his husband—with a tenderness born in the soul’s deepest corners, the kind that cannot bear daylight. A tenderness he had never felt for anyone but one person.

Clutching the flower until the velvet petals bent and the coolness melted in the heat of his palm, he hid it in the secret pocket near his heart—quickly, furtively, like someone hiding a crime not yet committed but already inevitable.

To hide it. So no one would see. So even he could pretend it wasn’t there.

Lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, he still felt the taste on his lips—sweet and bitter at once. And shame. But the shame was alive. More alive than anything he had felt in months. More alive than the silence he had mistaken for love.

Note: *In Chinese culture, the peony is the “king of flowers,” symbolizing nobility, prosperity, and passionate—often shy or forbidden—love. A secret peony gift could serve as an unspoken confession.