On a hard and cold floor in a drafty, dirty shack, to be precise - not that any of these things catch his attention immediately. He wakes with a strangely distorted shock, his body jumping to life and them slumping bonelessly again. His arms bleed sluggishly, melding in with the blood smeared across the floor in a demonic array (https://i.imgur.com/3fzMW5n.png). The candles and papers arranged in a circle around him have all been blown out and pushed to the side, as if something had landed within the circle itself with great force.

Suddenly, there's far too much light and noise as a boy he doesn't recognize comes crashing into the locked shack with several others. He squints, wanting to shut out all of it - can barely even hear the insults hurled his way. He's kicked and his body flops and rolls like a ragdoll. He feels like he's about to vomit. One of his first thoughts is a simple, disgruntled: That's quite a lot of courage you have, kicking the Patriarch! His body feels heavy and it takes great effort to sit up - especially when his shirt is grabbed and he's shaken by the first boy, who's yelling something about him pretending to be dead.

"I'm not pretending to be dead at all, since I've been dead for quite a while," he thinks.

Around him, the others are turning the room upside down - but it's sparse, and there isn't much to destroy. After throwing pots on the ground and shredding papers, they leave, locking the door behind them on the order to not let him out anytime this month. He grabs his head, which is pounding even worse in the now-deafening silence. At his knees is a shredded manuscript which he only notices belatedly.

"Hm...? This looks sort of familiar? It seems like something I made... Oh. I see, it's Xianshe." An array where the caster uses their corporeal body as a lure to summon an extremely sinister ghoul of carnage to grant their wish... A forbidden art opposite of stealing bodies - it offers a body, instead, casting the summoner's soul out and back to the earth. He huffs in disbelief. "Since when was I categorized as an extremely sinister ghoul? Wasn't it just that I had a terrible reputation and died a horrifying death? Really, how absurd."

The sensations in this body are starting to return, slowly but surely. His arms pound in pain, reminding him of the cuts still there - and the curse he's going to have to deal with now, if he's not careful. Ugh.

"Now I'll have to grant this Mo Xuanyu brat's wish, or else my own soul will be annihilated by the curse if it has any backlash. --But wait. What was Mo Xuanyu's wish, anyway...?" Flipping through the papers reveals a big fat nothing! BOY. Not a single thing is written down! He clicks his tongue, giving the papers in his hands a shake that makes his entire arm hurt.

"Where did that brat get this incomplete copy?! He missed the step of reading his wish...! Really, how absurd! How outrageously absurd...!"

But Mo Xuanyu's soul had already been banished and would never come back to answer his questions, so. Hm.

"...Although I don't know what the exact wish is, judging by the state of things here, it's probably something like 'wipe out the entire clan'. After all, he called for me - the legendary 'immoral, ungrateful villain who's out of his mind and doesn't care about family or friends'. Is there anyone more 'sinister' than me?"

His tone is heavy with sarcasm and - more than that - a sort of bone-deep exhaustion. Wordlessly, he tosses the papers to the side and lays back on a dirty straw mat with a sigh, tucking his arms beneath his head.

"But you've got the wrong person..."