A huge, huge, HUGE thank you to my husband and RL friends who listened to me rant, to Cata for betaing this for me and to Ryan for test reading. I would never have gotten this monster completed without you guys.

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This thing was supposed to be a silly, fluffy little ghost story involving Chanyeol being completely oblivious to the fact that he was living in a haunted mansion, and somehow turned into what is probably the darkest and goriest thing I have ever written. This is what happens when you let your stories write themselves, I guess.

I didn’t decide how I was going to end this story until around the time I finished Chapter 7. Other candidates for how the story could have ended include:
The Dark Ending: Chanyeol fails, dies, and becomes a part of the manor.
The Bittersweet Ending: Chanyeol succeeds, but Kris willingly goes into the light after saying his goodbyes. Chanyeol moves on with his life, knowing that Kris is finally at rest.
The Really Dark But Kind Of Romantic Ending: Chanyeol fails, but doesn’t immediately die. Knowing that he is doomed, he kills himself in such a way that he can have his last moments be with Kris, replayed periodically for eternity.
The Surprise Reincarnation Ending: Chanyeol succeeds and Kris moves on, but a few months later, someone who is clearly Kris’s reincarnation comes into Chanyeol’s life.
The Super Cracky Self-Indulgent Ending: Not only does Chanyeol succeed and Kris remain in the land of the living, but ALL of the ghosts are returned to life, and they all live happily ever after in that big mansion.

I also heavily considered writing multiple endings and letting each reader choose which one you wanted to consider canon, but as I got closer to the end of the story I realized there was really only one ending that felt right, so I’ll save the multiple-endings idea for another time.

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At the request of several readers, I sketched out Dragon Manor and marked where the ghosts appeared. Some ghosts are marked in more than one place, but it should be pretty obvious why that is. You can view the first floor here, and the upper floors here.

Dragon Manor was based on this house design, though I removed the entire basement level and changed or simplified a few things.

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A few notes:
Kris’s father and grandfather originally began to collect their fortunes as tradesman selling all sorts of Chinese goods to the British. At some point during Kris’s father’s time, he switched his focus to two trades only: the export of Chinese tea to the British, and the import of British opium to the Chinese. These two products were in such high demand, Lord Wu began making huge amounts of money, very quickly.

The first Opium War began only two years after Kris’s death, meaning that the trading empire Lord Jung had wangled his way into suddenly dropped in value by quite a bit. Still, he already had enough money that it barely mattered.

It is extremely unlikely - though not impossible - that a Chinese son would have studied in Britain at the time Kris supposedly did, and even less likely that a Korean daughter would have. Asian people definitely visited Britain, but it was rare that they stuck around for any length of time; the first Chinese-born person to become a naturalized British citizen was only about a decade before Kris’s supposed time studying. So this one requires a little suspension of disbelief.

Dragon Manor is not accurate to any time period or culture. It’s a completely anachronistic amalgamation of styles.

The west wing of the manor was always guest suites. The east wing of the manor was originally stables on the first floor and servant’s quarters on the second; it was converted into a garage and more guest suites in between Baekhyun’s death and Jongdae’s, in the 1930’s.

The gun safe is just outside the first floor west wing entrance, hidden at the back of a small storage closet; it was put in when the wing was renovated in the 1930’s. It was within easy reach when the tiger was chasing Chanyeol during Lu Han’s scene, but Chanyeol didn’t know it was there.

All of the historical residents of the house knew that the west tower was there, and many of them figured out how to get into it, but they never really felt the need to explore it for some mysterious reason that totally didn’t have anything to do with Kris’s spirit wanting that space to himself. The only people who ever went up into the tower more than once were Junmyeon, Baekhyun, and Minseok, and whenever someone would mess up Kris’s stuff, he would put it right back again, keeping the rooms exactly as they were when he died.

The reason that the house couldn’t do much to affect the new addition off of the kitchen (the family room, sun room, and breakfast room) was simply because Kris hadn’t been made manifest since the addition was built. If Chanyeol hadn’t broken the cycle, eventually those rooms would have been pulled under the house’s influence as well.

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If you have more questions, you can find me over at my curiouscat or askfm, or on my twitter or tumblr.

Thank you for reading, my lovely darlings, I will see you next time!