Capturing My Demon King Costar

MY COSTAR INSPIRES ME

Fan Wujiu leads Yao Shen through parts of Youdu he has never seen before; out of the sinuous, dizzying streets with all their improbable skyscrapers and into what looks like an underground system. The city's guts.

Layers upon layers of construction that lay beneath the ground and have been built upon. All of Youdu's past buried underneath its present.

The underground tunnels are like sunken streets, still bearing the marks of all the feet that have walked them.

To Yao Shen they seem labyrinthine and dizzying, but Fan Wujiu knows his way around, switching from tunnel to tunnel and lowering his head in anticipation of the stretches where the ground above them sinks down.

Eventually, they come to a stop in front of a doorway half submerged in soil.

Fan Wujiu stretches out his fingers and a black seal flies towards the the door, slamming it open with a bang.

Yao Shen peeks from behind Fan Wujiu's shoulder, but no sound comes from the darkened doorway..

Fan Wujiu leads the way and Yao Shen follows him inside the derelict building. The air inside is stagnant and foul smelling, but it smells of staleness, not of decay.

They turn a corner and come upon a larger chamber where five people lay suspended in the air. Their long hair trails almost to the ground in their horizontal positions, but their hands are folded almost ceremoniously over their chests.

Fan Wujiu takes a deep breath and draws another seal in this air, this time his movements are wider, more ample. When he shoots it towards the unconscious people, it flashes between black and grey for a moment before disappearing in a flash of light and dropping everyone to the ground.

A young looking girl, with the top-half of her hair done up in two buns at the side of her head, jumps to her feet immediately.

"Fan Wujiu I won't let you get away with this!" she shouts. She pulls out a horse-tail whisk from behind her back and brandishes it towards Fan Wujiu.

Slowly, the other ghost kings start getting to their feet too.

"I'm afraid I already have, Yi Wang," Fan Wujiu says, with a sigh of contrition.

A chorus of indignation raises up. All the other ghost kings advance towards Fan Wujiu.

Yao Shen steps in front of Fan Wujiu with his arms spread out. "Listen, we don't have time for that. Just let us explain."

The man leading the charge stops in his tracks, his dark eyebrows knitting in confusion. "Shi Wang? Is that you?"

The young girl walks up right to Yao Shen and gives him a long, appraising look. "It is you! I almost didn't recognise you with the short hair." She frowns. "Did they make you a ghost king again? Your spot was still empty..."

Yao Shen shakes his head. "No, I'm still a mortal human." Well, he does have some ghost king abilities back, but that's just Si Wang's workaround, he doesn't know if it counts.

Yi Wang frowns. "Then, how?"

All the other ghosts behind her have equally complicated looks on their faces, so Yao Shen figures it's best if he explains himself. "It's a long story but I'll try to make it short..."

---

"I never trusted that Si Wang...always too solicitous."

"I can't believe we've been unconscious for two years! How hasn't Youdu collapsed under the influx of new ghosts?"

Yao Shen thinks it's a big indictment to all ghost kings in general that it hasn't. It just goes to show that things haven't been running properly for a long, long time.