Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Wei Wuxian spent the first half of his first life alternating between being the head disciple of one of the major sects, and being an outcast orphan with no true place. His childhood was steeped in tension – the quivering tension of the lakes of Lotus Pier, droplets of clear rain as they roll down the heavy leaves; the snapping tension of Madam Yu and Uncle Jiang’s catastrophe of a marriage, and with it the impossible task of balancing excelling but not so much that Jiang Cheng would start looking explosive yet not so little that Jiang Yanli would start looking worried; the simmering tension of being at once both the adopted son of one of the big five cultivation clans and also the son of a servant and rogue. Wei Wuxian is about eighty percent certain childhoods aren’t meant to be so utterly exhausting. Not on the child, at least. He may have missed years five to fifteen of his own son, but otherwise he’d like to think A-Yuan could at least eat dinner without having to navigate a political and personal minefield on three fronts. (Jiang Yanli, along with being gentle and kind and compassionate and generous, was an angel from the heavens because she was the only one of her incredibly dysfunctional family to have anything resembling emotional intelligence. Nobody knew how. Uncle Jiang was caring but oblivious when it mattered and unnaturally passive for a sect leader, Madam Yu was protective but abrasive at best and abusive at worst, and Jiang Cheng’s entire range of feelings could be summarised as angry).

(Then again, their entire generation was a mess of spectacular proportions. They may have been raised as a generation of war, but that’s no true excuse. The two Lans were so emotionally repressed Wei Wuxian is still vaguely tempted to try and find Qingheng-jun’s spirit and maybe give him a stern, fatherly talking to; the two Nies were polar opposites and ultimately both drove themselves off their respective cliffs; the one recognised Jin was an arrogant, narcissistic, spoilt brat – the other Jins turned out as either suicidally desperate or maliciously manipulative, and the two Wens were sadistically bloodthirsty and sadistically useless, in that order.

As far as Wei Wuxian remembers, the only proper parental figure for anyone in his generation had been…Lan Qiren. And really, that summed it all up perfectly.)

Then shit really went down.

Cloud Recesses burning, the Xuanwu of Slaughter (the cries of a thousand dead, in pain, in pain, in pain), Lotus Pier also burning, Uncle Jiang and Madam Yu dead (protect him!), the Jiang Sect in absolute tatters, the damned Core-Melting Hand, the core transplant (it hurts it hurts please stop please don’t stop no, no, no), Wen fucking Chao, the burial mounds, the burial moundstheburialmoundstheburialmounds (fall, fall, fall)—the Stygian Tiger Seal, the Sunshot Campaign, the Wen remnants, the Ghost General, the burial mounds again (buy radishes this time! not potatoes!), Qiongqi Path (the box warps, bends, breaks. the bell will never ring again), the Nightless City, Jiang Yanli (A-Xian…), the burial mounds again, the siege.

His death.

Thirteen years.

Then his life, once more.

Wei Wuxian makes a good show of it. He makes a good show of anything: he spent years pretending he was simply too arrogant or too powerful to need Suibian when really the gaping hole where his brilliant core used to sit and the leaking wound where his bond to his sword used to thrum would tear at his very soul every damned second.

He’s a born actor. Wei Wuxian reincarnates—more or less, he’s still maintaining he’s not the sort of vengeful spirit that could be attracted into a body sacrifice rite, okay—into Mo Xuanyu’s body, and promptly goes and creates chaos, gets kidnapped by Hanguang-jun, accidentally solves one of the darkest mysteries of the generation, very nearly starts up another inter-sect war, teaches some children, gets married and celebrates it very much. Celebrates every day even. But it’s not as easy as he makes it look. Mo Xuanyu has a slighter frame, weaker bones and muscles from malnutrition, shorter height and with aching joints that will never go away thanks to past mistreatment. Everything is a different length, a different width. The proportions are changed. Every time he does something out of reflex he dissociates from the body since his mental response far outpaces his physical one. His golden core is dismal, more of a flicker than a glow, but this, at least, is better than the stark void Wei Wuxian’s original body had.

Wei Wuxian is the only case of died-then-came-back-in-another-body-with-all-memories-and-spiritual-cognition-intact so he can’t draw comparisons to see how he matches up, but he thinks he’s been doing pretty well. It’s nauseating and harrowing, in truth. It hurts. It feels viscerally, deeply wrong. It’s not his body, but it is his mind and his soul. It’s not his fingers that tap shakily against a shoddy bamboo flute, but it is his will that controls them. It’s not his face that smiles to hide tears, but it is his heart that breaks behind it. It’s not his core and his power and his golden, shining pathway – but it is his spirit that now has one foot on both roads.

Sometimes, Wei Wuxian thinks it will tear him apart, cultivating both conventional energy and resentful energy. Sometimes, he does not think he would mind if it does.

(But Lan Zhan looks at him and says Wei Ying, and his eyes do not hold fear or revulsion, only naked hope and desperation. But Lan Zhan takes hold of his wrist and removes a curse mark from his thigh and bandages his abdomen and never, never flinches away. But Lan Zhan tells him that he is loved not because of his voice or his eyes or his body, but because of his soul.)

So, yes, his life. Once more. (The fight goes on.)

Which is no less difficult even without a literal war going on. Two broken brothers (Which? Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng? Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen? Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang? Jin Guangyao and Mo Xuanyu? All?) and a thousand broken words and broken bodies between them. Wei Wuxian doesn’t look back very often since his story isn’t exactly sunshine and flowers and the last thing he needs is more reason to snap and just lose it, but when he does, he wonders how many people would laugh if he told them that he, Yiling Patriarch, Grandmaster of demonic cultivation, the one who walks and talks with death, that he knows now, with a clear memory and vivid experience that clutches at his marrow in quieter moments—that dying had been the most comforting part of everything?

Lan Zhan wouldn’t laugh. Might cry. So Wei Wuxian never says it, even though the only, only time he is truly relaxed is at night, as his husband (witnessed by heaven and earth and nobody, nobody else) extinguishes the candles and their blankets are drawn up to their shoulders. Even though sleep is still just sleep, sometimes remembered, sometimes good and sometimes bad – going to sleep is now something else entirely. The act of closing his eyes and feeling his body shut down becomes something addictive.

That’s not to say Wei Wuxian is about to lie down and sleep forever. (Even if he wants to, some days.) No. In the end, at the core of it all, the Yiling Patriarch had never been driven by madness or by greed or by evil. He may have been tainted by it, may have felt his own hubris clambering up his legs and laughed in its face, but no. Wei Wuxian, from the time he was last set down by his mother and father and never picked up by them again, to now, decades later and perhaps no less hurt by the world, has always been driven by love. He will not sleep until Lan Zhan and Lan Yuan and Jin Ling and Jiang Cheng and—everyone else, all the juniors who flock to his words like ducklings, all the cultivators who have learnt to look past the rumours and the night-time tales, all the common people who care not for how he deals with the monsters just that he does—until they are all happy. (An impossible task. Attempt the impossible—but can he, after having been struck out from the register? Having been hunted and cursed and whipped by the new sect leader, who glares at him with lightning-fury in his eyes and a warm, warm core turning in his chest?)

Wei Wuxian’s love once shot the sun then razed the ground beneath it. Perhaps Wei Wuxian’s ultimate crime is not the blood of the thousands that runs down his hands, nor the blood of his family that seeps into his skin. Perhaps it is, instead, that Wei Wuxian knows more intimately than anyone else what his love can do, and still he lets it rise like the tide under a full moon, lets it blanket those around him like the snow of a silent winter.

Just perhaps, his crime is that he knows what his love can do—has done—and still offers it so freely.

Chapter Text

The stories of the Yiling Patriarch are so dark, so terrifying. They are the sort of tales that people only dare to murmur under the midday sun, because in the dark, it feels like just thinking of his deeds may bring the shadows to life. They are a child’s horror story, of a man who was thrown into hell on earth but walked out with red eyes and a ghostly flute. They are a grown adult’s horror story too, of a man who won them a war by standing on battlefields of thousands of corpses, who would then turn on his own people. They are a cultivator’s horror story of course, of a promising young master who stepped from the broad, golden path onto the unpaved, dark, narrow strip of the heretic ways.

His deeds are blown out of proportion (three thousand cultivators slain in one night by a laughing madman) and his actions misunderstood (he turned on his own clan because they refused to give him the sect!) and his very person twisted into an abomination of human nature (Wei Wuxian, the depraved demonic cultivator, who revels in death and greets madness like an old friend).

It is no surprise, then, that everybody forgets the most important thing. That the entire world, excluding his very own family, is blind to the true danger. (Lan Zhan and Lan Yuan, Lan to the core in their studious and diligent nature, have turned their formidable observation powers onto him. They refuse to lose him again. Jiang Cheng had spent half his life anchored to his brother, and no chasm of communication could wipe that away.) Wei Wuxian had been the fourth ranked young master of his generation. He had been unsurpassed in Jiang sect archery and swordplay. When he had put his mind to it, he excelled across all six arts.

But that is not all.

And it is not his principal talent.

Wei Wuxian had always been, and likely would always be, unparalleled in his ability to think, to imagine, then to apply, to make. To create. Even at the height of his notoriety, the cultivation world had been willing to overlook his apparent cursed nature to use his own inventions. Demon-luring flags, evil compasses, spirit-trapping pouches. Empathy, barrier arrays, energy nets. His arguably most impressive feat, the Ghost General himself, was for all intents and purposes a genuinely successful revival of a dead man. Wen Ning may not have blood pumping through his veins or warm flesh that would flush at pressure – but he had a heart, and he had his mind and his memories and his will (unless controlled, and Chenqing plays lullabies as easily as it does screams, and sometimes even the undead need rest), and he had his soul. Honestly, when he was fifteen and free and wild (I promise you still are, Senior Wei, please stop scaring the juniors—) he broke through Cloud Recesses’ wards. Granted, they weren’t at full alert, but still. He had been a disciple then!

The Yiling Patriarch is intimidating in his power. In the armies upon armies of undead that answer his whims – in the resentful energy that curls up to him like a purring cat and yet rots through flesh and bone like poison, twining around his pale fingers like decorative, destructive ribbons.

Wei Wuxian is intimidating in his inventive talent. In the talismans and spells and enchantments he churns out with nothing but paper and ink – in his moonlit eyes that see everything and his blade-sharp, arrow-fast intellect that misses nothing.

“Lan Zhan, ah, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian drawls, rolling around on the floor uselessly as his husband finishes up a stack of reports. Lan Wangji does not respond visibly or audibly, but Wei Wuxian knows he is listening anyway. He always is. He continues, “What do you regret most?”

That makes the paintbrush pause as it dips into the inkwell. Lan Wangji looks up, golden eyes calm. “Wei Ying knows,” he says, even.

Wei Wuxian winces, sitting up, and apologises, “Sorry, sorry! Yeah, I know what you mean, but—if it is what I think it is, then, well, it traces back to one source, doesn’t it?”

Lan Wangji continues his impassive stare. Wei Wuxian reads the silent question in the minute shifting of his eyes.

He sighs. “Lan-er-gege did you know? Ah, I’m sure you know, I think I told you before, I don’t remember, but my perfect A-Zhan never forgets anything! Wen Ning, our cute little dumpling Wen Ning, our adorably shy Wen Ning, who could crush a boulder with a fist and instead once dressed up as a walking, talking bush so he could scare off cultivators without having to make eye contact with them – it’s his birthday in a month!” During his rambling, Lan Wangji has returned to his pile of papers. His attention is still easily split between the mind-numbing reports—Wei Wuxian would know, he once tried to help out and fell asleep halfway through the first one—and his carefree husband.

He nods.

Wei Wuxian hums, but doesn’t grin and go off on a spiel about presents and suitable gifts for fierce corpses. (A fierce corpse pet? He can raise a cat for him, probably?) Instead, he taps his fingers against the wooden flooring of the jingshi. “Nearly fourteen years, Lan Zhan, and Wen Ning has not aged.”

“He is a fierce corpse,” Lan Wangji replies blandly. Where anyone else would only read a statement of truth, Wei Wuxian laughs at the hidden incredulity. (Do not look at the face. Listen to the heart.)

“Yes, yes, but—his soul has not aged either. I checked and no, don’t leap over to your ineptly named guqin and start playing Cleansing, or I’ll sleep in the mountains tonight. The rabbits must be so very lonely at night, hmm? Honestly, this is a peanuts sort of use of resentful energy compared to what I can do.” Wei Wuxian, after seeing Lan Wangji slowly retract his hand from where it had been reaching for Wangji, groans and flops back onto the floor again. “I feel like I’m getting rusty! Are the juniors still impressed by me? Maybe I can’t even play Chenqing anymore!”

“Good,” Lan Wangji says.

“Not good! Just because it means you can protect me while I hide away like a swooning maiden. I’ll bring one of the rabbits along so you can satisfy your need to protect something on our night hunts, honestly. No, wait. The little ducklings are about the same level of cute and the same level of useful, aren’t they? Let’s just use them—Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian protests, laughing as he spots the twitch at the corner of Lan Wangji’s lips.

“Do not call them ducklings,” Lan Wangji reprimands, but does not look up nor change his tone. This amounts to the same as free permission, from him.

Wei Wuxian smiles, then murmurs, “He truly is the same as a decade and a half ago.”

Lan Wangji finishes off the last of the papers, and sets about tidying up his workspace without breaking his perfect sitting posture.

Wei Wuxian frowns at the ceiling. “It’s like I’ve stopped time for him.”

A paintbrush rolls off the side of the low desk.

And it’s not easy, when it comes down to it, because it’s one thing to manipulate an energy that exists—crimson and corrosive it still exists nonetheless—and another one entirely to attempt the same with an energy that likely doesn’t.

Of course it’s not easy. Turning back time.

But it’s not impossible. Nothing is, to the man who has died twice and lived thrice, to the one who turned the shadows of his own soul into a weapon to be wielded, to him, who looked at the roiling corruption of a world drunk on its own power and stood tall and refused to be stained.

Wei Ying saw a lonely boy made of jade that everybody flinched away from and pulled his cold hand into the living sunlight with easy smiles and ringing laughter.

Wei Wuxian saw a lost brother with dead eyes and a dead chest, and pulled his warm, spinning heart out of himself to give it away.

The Yiling Patriarch saw a small family tortured for crimes they did not commit, and threw himself against an entire world to save them.

Wei Ying, Wei Wuxian, the Yiling Patriarch, the Grandmaster of demonic cultivation, sees that his husband loves him, but bears thirty-three whip marks that ache in the morning and burn in the rain; sees that his son loves him, but is left biting his tongue and lowering his furious gaze when his friends and teachers and elders say that it is wrong; sees the empty void where many, many figures should stand, should sit, should survive – and so he breathes, and thinks, and creates.

He is thirty-five years old in a twenty-four-year-old body.

(He is thirty-five years old, in a twelve-year-old body.)

Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng watches as he brother stumbles into the hall for breakfast and promptly stops dead. One hand is still raised to rub his eyes, which are now widening until they look like they may pop out of his head.

“S-Shijie?” his idiot brother whispers.

A-Jie looks up from where she is rearranging the plates on the table. She smiles, warm and fond. “A-Cheng, A-Xian! Come—,”

Wei Ying launches himself at her, over the table, with a wail. Jiang Cheng watches with mounting horror as he wraps himself around A-Jie like an octopus while A-Die looks on in amusement and A-Niang nearly breaks the table in half in rage.

Half the Yunmeng Jiang sect stares as their head disciple leaps and slashes and bounds around like a hyperactive, overgrown dragonfly – and yet unerringly takes down every target in the training ground.

“SUIBIAAAAAAAAAAAN,” Wei Wuxian suddenly screeches, startling a flock of birds into taking offended flight. More than one disciple jumps and turns to look at him in alarm. “I’VE MISSED YOU!” he continues hollering. He curls into a ball around his sheathed sword. In front of him, the straw dummy is more dust than straw.

“The fuck have you missed?!” Jiang Cheng snarls, after gaping for a moment at the destruction of their hardy training dummies, striding over to whack the back of his head. “You’ve always had your sword! Get up, you embarrassment!”

Big mistake.

Slowly, Wei Wuxian turns to his shidi, sniffing dramatically. Then he drops Suibian unceremoniously into the dirt and clutches onto Jiang Cheng’s knees. “MY BROTHER!” he screams, “I’VE MISSED YOU TOO!”

Jiang Cheng’s soul nearly leaves his body.

(From then on, Jiang Cheng would answer any half-wary, half-awed inquiries into his brother’s sudden changes as, “He’s possessed, just ignore the dumbass like usual.”)

Madam Yu sneers, unravels Zidian and—

Wei Wuxian draws Suibian, still grinning, still dripping water in their front hall, still with laughing eyes and wayward hair.

She almost pauses. “You dare to challenge me?” she hisses.

Suibian glows a strange bloody crimson, too dark, too heavy to be just a normal cultivator’s red energy. Cangse Sanren, Yu Ziyuan remembers half in disgust and half in resignation, had had spiritual energy the colour of a blooming fuchsia.

Wei Wuxian’s voice is light and cheery as he replies, “Sure! Let’s have a duel!”

Zidian crackles.

(She loses. She loses. She loses.

She is the Violet Spider, Mistress of Lotus Pier, the spear and the shield of Yunmeng Jiang. And she watches as Meishan Yu’s heirloom crackles uselessly in the waters of her lakes and her sword clatters to the wooden boards as the head disciple rests his sword against her throat.

Wei Wuxian reaches down and ignores her nails digging into his palm as he forcefully drags her back up.)

“Uncle, uncle!” Wei Wuxian calls out, slipping into his office through the window. The first time, Jiang Fengmian had nearly drawn his sword to cut down the intruder, but it’s almost ritual now. Never mind that nobody has figured out how the energetic boy is doing it, given that the window overlooks the deepest parts of the lake and there is never a boat around. One disciple had suggested flying in on his sword, which would have been the obvious answer if not for how Wei Wuxian forgets his spiritual sword in the strangest places like it’s a cheap toy.

Jiang Fengmian would scold him – spiritual tools are to be offered respect, and doubly so their swords, which will tie themselves to the wielder’s core over time – but every time a harried servant brings the poor weapon back to Wei Wuxian, he bursts into relieved tears. Why the melodramatic response if he’s the one at fault in the first place? Jiang Fengmian may have a reputation for being kind and compassionate, but he’s never been good with tears. He’ll leave the matter alone.

“Yes, A-Xian?” he asks, setting down his brush. One time he had tried to continue working while his eldest son crashed into his rooms. He had not made the same mistake again.

“Guess what Jiang Cheng did!” Wei Ying crows. A cursory glance at his hip shows that indeed, once again, his spiritual sword has been lost somewhere obscure.

“What?” Jiang Fengmian humours, smiling.

“He took down the corpses around Huzhou! It was great! Just bam, and then wham! And he did it so easily too!”

Jiang Fengmian recovers from his horror admirably. “H-Huzhou, was it? Very good.” Huzhou had been suffering from a crop of fierce corpse attacks since almost three full moons ago, and the Jiang sect had been waiting for their most senior disciples to return from their various night hunts to tackle it all at once. Jiang Fengmian is ninety percent certain his eldest son did the bulk of the work, but for his youngest to have participated at all is an accomplishment nonetheless.

Wei Ying rolls his eyes. “Of course it was very good! Go tell Jiang Cheng that!”

Jiang Fengmian blinks. “Ah…yes, of course.” And he stands and goes to find his youngest son because last time he had replied I will, A-Xian, but I am very busy right now—he had blacked out and woken up later on a horse. In the water. Yu Ziyuan had seen him and in turn he had seen the poorly-masked laughter in her eyes as she scorned him about strange hobbies not befitting a sect leader. The rumour that the Yunmeng Jiang sect leader ritually rides terrified horses into deep water and then sits on them to meditate is still circling. It only happened once!

Besides, it’s not a chore to find his youngest son and give him some praise. Jiang Fengmian does like seeing him light up like so.

Jiang Yanli, who might be at best a mediocre cultivator and generally considered rather plain compared to the rest of her family, is also very, very observant. It’s part and parcel of being the argument diffuser in a family with two people that had tempers like already-lit matches and two others that were often infuriating without trying to be.

She knows that something has happened to A-Xian the very morning he had nearly broken her spine with an over-enthusiastic hug. A-Xian is prone to mood swings and is very easily affected by his own dreams, but that embrace had been sincere, deep-rooted relief and fear. She does not know what he fears, but his shaking fingers and hitched breaths could not be faked.

Still, it is not as if she can go out on the peculiar solo night hunts he keeps disappearing onto nowadays. She cannot even offer him much more than some protection talismans she had made herself—which he had received with thanks like she had given him the world, her cute little brother—and his favourite foods to comfort him when he gets strangely quiet.

He is too frenzied some days, and too subdued others. The junior disciples under his purview are pushed harder and harder, changed training regimens and elongated hours, but they also improve in leaps and bounds. A-Cheng worries and then tags along for a night hunt and comes back hauling an injured A-Xian behind him on his sword and promptly forgets all his worry for anger. Ah, A-Cheng. Jiang Yanli despairs for him, sometimes. A-Niang and A-Die have no idea what to make of this new, changed A-Xian. He is powerful, nearly impossibly so for someone who appears to have just woken up one day and skipped multiple levels of training, but he is also bizarrely unbalanced.

Jiang Yanli sees the way he puts down Suibian and then forgets to pick it up again, only to cry in true joy when he is reunited with it later. She sees how pain and regret and determination, such a strange collection of emotions, flashes through his eyes whenever he gulps down her lotus root and pork rib soup. She sees the way he stops flinching at A-Niang’s harsher words and stops dropping his gaze at A-Die’s fonder looks, how he pushes A-Cheng forward instead as he regales everyone with the tales his brother’s courage, almost always brushing over his own role in their latest hare-brained scheme entirely. How he can now shrug at comments and insults that would have left him smiling plastic and fake just weeks before.

Something has changed, Jiang Yanli knows.

But perhaps it is not for the worse – even if she picks up his whimpers in the night and the listless way he sometimes looks through them. He has more days of lively joy, makes ever more friends, is closer to A-Niang and A-Die and A-Cheng than before, is surer of himself and bolder in his laughter.

If he is happy, then Jiang Yanli will leave well enough alone.

Yu Ziyuan gives up and takes her husband’s passive stance on something for once: sure, perhaps once she could instil fear and restraint into the errant child, but now? Now, anytime she snaps Zidian, he excitedly draws Suibian and challenges her to a duel. Which he keeps winning. Oddly enough, it works out – the ever-present headache that once followed her anytime she saw Wei Wuxian lessens now that she knows he has results to show. The Violet Spider has never dealt in flimsy concepts such as love or affection; but she sees the rising spiritual power and the concrete steps he takes to protect his brother and sister, and that is enough for her. Wei Wuxian dares to call her shimu once, and it’s only because Zidian needs to recharge that she does not whip him for it. Then he continues doing so, and Yu Ziyuan is not the sort to bother herself with petty matters, that is all.

Jiang Fengmian keeps finding the hidden gifts he has been buying for his wife stolen out of his quarters, only to show up a few days later in hers. Yu Ziyuan spits something about buying her attention with useless trinkets, but he also sees her wearing the lotus hairpin he had bought on his last trip. Then one night, water seeps into Yu Ziyuan’s rooms—and her entire wing, in fact—rendering them useless, and the two of them sleep on separate beds but under the same roof for the first time in years. The water disappears equally rapidly and equally suspiciously the next morning, but his wife does not move out. He has his suspicions. There are very few individuals capable of overriding the water-repellent talismans that are a staple of Lotus Pier, intricate and as old as the history of the lake-based town itself, and fewer still that would dare. Still, it is only for the better, and sometimes it truly is just easier to go along with his more free-spirited child’s ploys than not.

Jiang Cheng is resentful for a solid few months, and then gradually drops that for exasperated fondness and a serious fear because the same idiot who sleeps in until noon is the same idiot who pledges his undying support to Jiang Cheng one late night is the same idiot who runs face-first into a tainted divine river beast, shouting gleefully about testing out his latest invention. The only thing that matches his brother’s insane cultivation abilities is his unsurpassed talent for attracting trouble, getting himself hurt, and then doing it all over again. It’s hard to begrudge someone when they’re bleeding out for the third time in a row. Wei Wuxian is infuriating and aggravating in how easily he outclasses everyone else, but he also makes it very, very easy to love him nonetheless.

Jiang Yanli has always loved her younger brother, blood ties or not be damned, and it is no different now. Sure, he interrupts her lessons with wild tales of hunting divine beasts (which was actually a factual recount, and now she doesn’t ignore his tales anymore), and whines at her until she does his hair for him, and seems to ask meaningless and random questions about peacocks – but he also picks her flowers from mountains that are deemed inaccessible, brings back little jewels and hair combs that are imbued in positive energy, and always, always lights up in her presence like she is a gift unto herself.

Yunmeng Jiang gets used to it, after a year.

The rumours spread, because if there’s one thing all cultivation clans share as a specialty it’s gossip—and soon enough, the lands know of the hyperactive, shameless, crazy and crazy powerful head disciple of the Yunmeng Jiang sect.

Wei Wuxian becomes known as a hurricane in human form—in battle, nigh impossible to beat, and out of it, nigh impossible to deny. He swirls through their streets with a beaming grin, nuzzling up to old grandmothers and stealing their homemade cookies. Dances along with the children of the gutters at night time, teaching them how to draw simple wards that can send up spluttering flares. Sleeps through lessons and yet gives all the right answers. Runs circles around all his fellow disciples, but stays behind each time to help them out.

When the time comes for two of their disciples to lead a group that will head to Cloud Recesses in Gusu Lan to study, there is barely any thought or doubt put into the choice to shoo their local human disaster away for a year. (Which is good, because Wei Ying would have just hopped onto Suibian and followed along anyways if he hadn’t been invited.) Jiang Fengmian, as he signs the names of his two sons, suppresses a shudder. Yu Ziyuan, as she instructs the servants to pack their bags, scowls even as she piles in extra clothes and extra money.

“Welcome to the Cloud Recesses,” Lan Qiren intones, strong but collected, eyes severe as he casts his gaze over the assembled puzzle pieces of sects. These are the best the generation has to offer, or second-best if the craftier sect leaders wanted to keep their real geniuses hidden, and Cloud Recesses trains them both as a show of their own strength and goodwill, but more importantly to keep an eye on the future leaders of the cultivation world. To make connections.

Except purple is conspicuously missing.

He narrows his gaze. “Has there been word on the tardiness of the Yunmeng Jiang sect?”

An assistant disciple from the Lan sect shakes his head. “None, teacher. The rumours, however—,”

“Rumours taint the facts as they spread,” Lan Qiren reprimands, but internally twitches. He has heard about a certain person from that sect, no doubt everyone has, but he is also certain it is all exaggeration. A teen barely over fifteen capable of defeating the infamous Violet Spider? Preposterous.

“Well, we shall welcome them separately as they come. Let us begin with a—!”

A blur of black and red lands next to him, fast enough the dust stirs up and the trees sway. Disciples cry out, shocked, and Lan Qiren steps back to draw his sword as the cloud clears.

“Hi Teacher Lan! Sorry we’re late! I wanted to take a detour to visit the waterfall over at Mountain Wuyishan! It really is as pretty as they say, you know…”

Lan Qiren filters out the babble of words, white noise already starting to compound into a migraine as he sets eyes on the latest walking legend.

Wei Wuxian, unruly hair held up by a crimson ribbon, robes dirtied with soil and water, with a facepalming heir to the sect followed by multiple pairs of out-of-breath Jiang sect disciples wobbling down to the ground behind him, grins back at him.

He takes a breath.

Lan Qiren has a feeling he is going to regret the moment the boy before him speared through their boundaries.

Chapter Text

He regrets it.

Wei Wuxian is the opposite of everything the Gusu Lan embodies.

Calm? Gone, even from the white and blue-clad disciples that trail after the intolerable boy like ducklings. They take to him like moths to a light – something exciting and fresh and unique, and while Lan Qiren will admit, under extreme duress such as imminent death, that his combat and cultivation prowess is nothing to shake a hand at, everything else is absolutely unacceptable as a role model.

Rule abiding? Four times. Four times Lan Wangji has caught the boy sneaking alcohol into their premises—heavens knows how many more times he has done so without being caught—besides, he is far too young to drink! Cloud Recesses doesn’t even sell alcohol nearby! He confiscated his outrageously named sword so he couldn’t fly to the town and yet the boy still managed to make it Caiyi and back within half the shichen, and with three full jars! How! What!

Quiet? Shattered, just like everything else. He runs everywhere with ringing laughter and happy shouts, popping into the library to drag one disciple or another out for something or the other, interrupting structured swordplay lessons with obscure techniques, using self-invented papermen-possession techniques to play pranks in class, blowing all their knowledge of cultivation out of the water as he skips through each day.

And perhaps that is what keeps Lan Qiren from booting the boy out on his behind. Beyond the fact that he would just climb back in like some roach, and likely be helped by his enamoured fanclub, it’s that underneath the rule-breaking, indolent, improper and unrepentantly chaotic face of a boy who is the source for their latest rabbit infestation is a genuine genius.

He sketches up ground-breaking wards like they’re simple doodles. Draws impossible yet functional talismans onto the dinner desks using tea and chopsticks. Slips around anyone’s sword like it is a wet noodle, snickering all along as he kicks dirt into eyes and jabs at crotches and yet never loses. Can harness his energy to the point that it forms visible nets of spiritual light, humming with power and as solid as anything else. His sword, ridiculously named as it is, is controlled as perfectly as any true soul weapon and a beauty to watch in real action.

So instead, Lan Qiren just throws the boy out of his classroom a few times a day – he knows the material regardless, irritatingly enough – and takes to carrying around a ruler just to smack some sense into the boy. (Although it is made of light wood, and thinner than any other of their punishment weapons, but nobody needs to know that. Heavens forbid someone think he’s fond of the dreadful brat.) Cloud Recesses gets very used to seeing their stoic teacher chasing after their local clown with a stick in one hand at the fastest pace possible without actually running. The first time, Jin Zixuan sees it out of the corner of his eye and trips face-first into a pond. The second time, Nie Huaisang sees Wei Wuxian coming straight for him, assumes it’s something fun and lifts his fans to wave, then spots Lan Qiren behind approaching like a stormfront of apoplectic rage and faints on the spot. The third time, Lan Xichen catches his uncle by the arm with panicked eyes and checks for qi deviation. (And then doesn’t know what to do when it’s not qi deviation, because…that means his uncle…just does this normally??) The Lan elders, meanwhile, have decided to just pretend they’re all collectively blind.

Lan Qiren walks around the bend towards the Library Pavilion, a new serenity twining through his bloodstream from his daily meditation routine.

And stops.

He opens his mouth—and closes it—and opens it—and closes it, and swallows, and tastes iron—and opens it, and very certainly does not roar, “WEI WUXIAN!”

He turns on his heel and stalks off to the visiting disciple dormitories.

Behind him, the elegant stones and polished wood of the peerless Library Pavilion of Cloud Recesses is covered, roof to floor, wall to wall in sloppy chicken-scratch, the thick red paint running and dripping onto the once-pristine grass.

They are the characters of the three-thousand and twenty-four Gusu Lan sect rules.

+

“But teacher,” Wei Wuxian says, blinking innocently, “you told me to copy the rules at the library!”

Lan Qiren spits blood.

Lan Qiren casts narrowed eyes across the disciples eating silently in the dining hall. The ones who meet his gaze cower back down, which, well, Lan Qiren is not here to instil fear, but it’s worlds better than a certain menace who doesn’t look up at all from where he is methodically emptying entire containers of something viciously red into his own meal.

He has a very strange feeling…

Lan Qiren, with the honed senses of a veteran cultivator, eyes his own proper and white congee, but doesn’t see anything wrong with it. A small probe with his spiritual energy also shows nothing out of the normal. He’ll trust it, he supposes – not even that rapscallion would dare do anything so direct, surely? Lan Qiren takes a spoonful of his congee, holding his sleeve as is proper as he takes his first mouthful—

His tongue burns, his mouth burns, his throat burns. His beard burns—His entire head burns.

“WEI WUXIAN!”

If Cloud Recesses, pristine heart of his sect, beautiful home and hearth and all, is no longer safe from the wretched grasp of the devil-spawn, then Lan Qiren, being an intelligent man of formidable experience, will take himself out of it.

The last time he had stepped out of Cloud Recesses had been as part of an emergency response for a particularly difficult night hunt in the eastern mountains, and so Lan Qiren does not…dawdle, but does take his time in Caiyi. He comes back up the hundreds of steps into Cloud Recesses after having a respectable meal in a quiet restaurant. Lan Qiren has walked these steps enough he remembers when the thick trunks of the pines lining the stairway were still small and weak.

Then he misses a step.

It is only his cultivation and reflexes that allows him to twist halfway through the fall to catch himself on his arms and not his face and—

“WEI WUXIAN!”

There is a talisman paper, inscribed with sigils for illusion and confusion, that is disintegrating into the air even as he tries to catch it with fingers shaking in fury. No evidence, one might say. Not Lan Qiren. Lan Qiren knows.

“WEI WUXIAN!” comes the bellow.

Jiang Cheng looks heavenward for patience and sanity. He finds neither.

“The fuck did you do now?” he asks his brother, even as he sidles away to slip out of their shared dormitory room. He smartly refuses to be here when Teacher Lan descends like an offended bat out of hell with a moustache.

Wei Wuxian has the audacity to wink. “Ever heard of disappearing ink?”

“WEI! WU! XIAN!”

Still, the largest mystery after three weeks suffering through the day to day with a human disaster is the way Wei Wuxian never complains once when he is sent to copy lines with Lan Wangji. He complains about everything else, like his lungs are bottomless and his throat never gets sore, but this? Instead, he hops up with a beaming smile, thanks Lan Qiren, and prances away to settle down and copy lines with the younger of the Two Jades.

Lan Qiren would worry – anything the son of only-slightly-less-insane Cangse Sanren (and isn’t that something, Lan Qiren never thought Cangse Sanren would be the saner one) would thank you for is something to be worried about – but then he’d worry himself into an early grave. He can already feel the ulcers. Sometimes when he is meditating, he will think he hears a whisper of that deranged boy’s cheery voice, and will promptly leap up in a flurry to check and re-check his rooms with his sword drawn. Once he swears he sees a chilli plant growing between his floorboards and rips them all up, only to find nothing. Of course he would find nothing. Chilli plants are heat-based, and the mountains of Gusu are the last damn place where one could possibly sprout the useless things. The carpenters who come in to rebuild his room are judgemental, but at least Lan Qiren has enough standing for them to not fret about his sanity to his face.

He still sleeps with an extra ward, just in case the human disturbance decides to try and copy his mother and shave off his beard.

And there’s another Lan, just as affected, if in entirely different ways.

Lan Wangji is gone from the beginning.

He tries to resist, at first, because Gusu Lan is a sect of regulation, of propriety, of righteousness and honour. Then again, their sect founder had been a musician monk who fell in love, and the romance runs through his veins undeniably.

Wei Wuxian is a blazing light amidst the monochrome of Cloud Recesses. He talks too much, speaks with his hands and ever-moving body when Lan Wangji seals his mouth. He outpaces everybody else, Lan Wangji included, in classes when called upon, but otherwise stays out of the way and cheerily helps those struggling on the sides. He breaks their rules, but suffers their punishments too. He teases Lan Wangji, and yet reads his minute responses effortlessly.

And perhaps most of all, he always looks at Lan Wangji with such warmth in his eyes.

Lan Wangji knows that he is too cold, too quiet, too strict. Even the other Lans of his age will straighten their spines and look away when he enters a room. The Lan elders expect nothing but the best from him, a gleaming example for the rest of his generation. With every technique he masters, with every book he finishes, with every night hunt he completes, the pressure piles on higher. Lan Wangji is not allowed to curve his shoulders underneath it, not allowed to loosen his headband even as it seems to ache against his forehead. Xiongzhang had always been his only respite.

But Wei Wuxian does not seem to even see the towering walls Lan Wangji has built around himself.

He breezes in, enrapturing and enriching, and he pokes his cheek and ruffles his robes and kicks at his ankles. He grabs his hand and pulls him into the sun where his other friends—Jiang Wanyin and Nie Huaisang are two staples, even with a rotating roster of other disciples—eye Lan Wangji distrustfully and yet shuffle over for him to sit on the grass. He mumbles and mutters as he copies the rules, sometimes sitting so close their sleeves will brush, and then never ends up actually copying them as he draws breath-taking portraits and landscapes.

Lan Wangji hoards everything.

The drawing of himself, with a flower tucked into his hair. The drawing of the two rabbits Wei Wuxian had presented him with one day, which now have little ribbons on their floppy ears so that Lan Wangji may differentiate them from the tens of other rabbits that now hop over Cloud Recesses’ back hills. (Nobody knows where they have come from, although everybody knows how or rather who, and uncle had been speechless with rage, as per the norm, when Wei Wuxian had skilfully woven a narrative of wild animals being allowed to live in their natural habitats and their function in teaching responsibility to juniors.) Flowers, carefully pressed between books, that Wei Wuxian had picked from odd places. All the various papermen he keeps sending in class, or at least the ones Lan Wangji can slip into his sleeve before his uncle spots one and explodes.

The intangible things too.

The easy touches Wei Wuxian gives out. Lan Wangji is jealous at first, when he notices that Wei Wuxian will grab anyone’s hand, will playfully punch anyone’s shoulder, but then he realises that Wei Wuxian only ever keeps his hand interlaced with Lan Wangji’s own, only lets his hand linger on Lan Wangji’s shoulder. That he might slump over bodily and melodramatically declare the death of his brain as he buries a flailing Nie Huaisang under his weight, but only ever genuinely relaxes his muscles and trusts Lan Wangji to hold him up.

The teasing whispers and low-lidded glances, the soft breaths as he naps, the way his curling locks of hair never seem to lie flat. The soothing hand against his back when Lan Wangji pauses in front of the gentian house one day. The strong arm that knocks Bichen out of his grasp. The laughter, the pouts, the joking frowns, the glimmering eyes, the slow head tilts.

Lan Wangji loves, and loves, and loves.

(Wei Wuxian would die for them all. But he already has. He already did. And he knows that it is easy to die – knows intimately how much harder it is to live. So, he will live for them all. Once more.)

Wei Ying misses his husband. He misses the familiarity, borne of years spent exploring each other’s pains and hurts, spent mapping raised scars against shivering skin, spent learning what hides beneath a blank face or an everlasting smirk. He misses the dewy mornings, him grumbling as he latches onto Lan Zhan’s waist and tries in vain to drag His Excellency back into their sleep-warmed sheets, his failed attempts always marked pleasantly by a deep kiss followed by a gentler press of lips against his forehead. He misses the misty nights, Lan Zhan with his arms folded over his chest in typical Lan sleeping posture, Wei Ying sniggering as he downs Emperor’s Smile by the jar and rearranges his husband’s belongings so Lan Zhan will have to spend an extra few minutes the next morning in their rooms.

Wei Ying misses his son, Lan Yuan, Lan Sizhui, with his proper demeanour and easy-going smiles, his cloud-patterned headband and immaculate Gusu Lan robes, marred only at the inner collar and inner wrist cuffs by clumsily stitched flaming spider lilies. He misses how his ears would flush just like his father’s whenever Wei Ying teased him about calling him mother, and yet he would accept each time with exasperated fondness. He misses feeding their little rabbits in the afternoons, the quiet of the hills interwoven with the low song of an obsidian dizi in duet with an azure guqin.

He misses many things. Of course he does. He is the only remnant of a world that will never be. Two decades is time enough for many things to change. (Once more, my child, once more. Wake up, open your eyes, breathe in. Once more.)

Cloud Recesses wavers before his eyes, a double-layered mirage, because the post-war Cloud Recesses he had come to know had been rebuilt in the image of its older twin, but not exactly. The food in Caiyi is delicious, but no store carries the levels of spice they do in the future, long after the owners had gotten used to chilli-loving Wei-gongzi who would drop by their stores at all sorts of times. The rabbits don’t know him yet, do not come bounding up like furry balls of cuteness as their descendants would in twenty years. The trees lining the walls and entrance steps are towering, old behemoths, so very different to their younger counterparts that would be transplanted in later, after they are burnt in the war. The people are kinder, with looser lips and clearer eyes, because they have not suffered the lingering stench of death. His fellow disciples are faces he has dreamt lying on the blood-soaked grounds of Nightless City. Sometimes he says something and expects the response to be the whispers of a ghost, only to startle when a strong, human voice answers instead. Sometimes he looks at someone and cannot see their face, only hear their screams and pleas echoing on repeat in swirls of dark energy. Sometimes he wakes and wants to sleep, still.

It is strange. It does hurt.

But not like before. (Never like before. There is no before.)

Not like it did when he was him, too, but him in another child’s body. Not like when he fell, and fell, and fell, and the burial mounds claimed his soul and branded his heart and took his very world and set it spinning in the wrong direction. Not like when he was younger, and livelier, and more naïve, screaming as the water itself was set alight under a glaring sun.

Wei Ying misses many things, but he does not miss even more.

It is not his husband; but Lan Zhan here also blushes through his ears, looks at him with open adoration that is not weighed down by thirteen years of grieving loss or longer still of painful misunderstanding, still anchors him down with steady hands and calm words. (He loves and he is loved in return.) It is not his once-brother; but Jiang Cheng looks at him with proper respect and pride, will knock shoulders with him playfully, rolls his eyes yet calls him shixiong just to watch people pale. (He loves and he is loved in return.) It is not his dead sister; but Jiang Yanli is alive and breathing and thriving, sends them lotus seeds packed with her letters, tells them stories of Uncle Jiang and Madam Yu with laughter underlining her elegant script. (He loves and he is loved in return.) Jin Zixuan, whose chest does not have a pale arm through it. Lan Xichen, whose smile is not strained nor false. Nie Huaisang, whose eyes are not shadowed with the deeds he has done. (The ducklings, who will learn without being ashamed and listen without being afraid, who will not be haunted by the tales of a war that never truly ended, who will grow up with mothers and fathers abundant.)

Yes, Wei Ying misses things – but he doesn’t, too, because they are all here, with beating hearts in their chests and churning blood in their veins. And this time, they will stay that way.

Chapter Text

Time trundles on. Wei Wuxian makes a name for himself, half good in his ingenuity and half bad in the way he breaks every single one of the three-thousand rules on the walls of Cloud Recesses. He thinks they should erect a statue for that achievement. The elders all think he’s a monster that they really shouldn’t like, but still do.

Yunmeng Jiang and Gusu Lan grow closer, tied impossibly by a single boy who bounces between the two places like they are both homes. The leaders start sharing their woes with each other, mostly because the vast majority of those woes begin with Wei Wuxian, that moron—. It becomes usual, after a while, to see blue and white mingled with shades of purple. Wei Wuxian shoulders his way into hunts decades out of his experience, yet somehow always ends up successful one way or the other. Both sects are pulled along in his wake.

Because yes, he does drink far too much Emperor’s Smile before Gusu Lan issues a decree to every shop under their purview to ban his patronage, and sure he barges in on meetings like they’re discussing weather and not the fate of thousands of people, and runs away screaming from dogs like they’re demons incarnate even though he fights actual demons incarnate with a laugh, and is carelessly remorseless about everything he does, and maybe he gets called shameless and thick-faced everywhere he goes – but Wei Wuxian, at his core, is the brightest child any of them have seen. (And perhaps he is no child, and perhaps he is a man, and perhaps he has lived far longer than he should have or could have or would have. Yet the joy in his eyes and the thrill in his words are not false. He was denied a childhood once. He will not be denied again.)

He is brilliant – in his studies too, when he applies himself. He takes all their understandings of cultivation and flips them around. His offhand comments on resentful energy are starting to provoke serious discussions of spiritual balance, of the essence of yin and yang, of the inherent give and take of nature itself. Why push away abysses when you cannot control them, instead of luring them like little fish and pulling them into pre-set traps? Barriers don’t have to stay in place – they can move, too!

He is kind and loving, welcoming young disciples and correcting their stumbling words and feet, laughing with the older disciples and freely giving away his time, his efforts. He smiles for everyone, eyes bright and fingers light as he shares touches and pats like they are all family.

Wei Wuxian tears the century-old boundaries of sect division and bloodline discrimination into ribbons, and Yunmeng Jiang and Gusu Lan watch on with fond exasperation. This is what it looks like, from the outside.

“Lan Zhan, ah, Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian chants, playful.

“Mn.”

He cheekily trails light fingers down one pale cheek. His hand is caught in a strong but gentle grip.

Wei Wuxian smiles. Blows out a breath. “Lan Zhan, do not forget. Books burn very, very easily, my love, and your wards are not as strong as the elders believe.”

Lan Wangji pauses, nods.

“Do not forget,” Wei Wuxian repeats, in a whisper, leaning in to hook his chin over one firm shoulder, “for there is nothing new under the sun.”

“Auntie Yu!” Wei Wuxian hollers.

Yu Ziyuan resist pinching her brow. “What?” she snaps out.

“Can I borrow some disciples? I have an idea for a new barrier!” He bounces in place, grinning and carefree, but there is a shadow in his eyes.

She narrows her own gaze. “You moron,” she says, disdainful, “as head disciple, they are under your instruction.”

“Thanks, Auntie Yu!” he replies, even as turns to bound back outside. Then he freezes, and spins back around. Just watching him drains Yu Ziyuan’s energy, sometimes. “Oh wait, before I forget! I think some people would love to check out the place that forged Zidian, you know?”

Yu Ziyuan’s eyebrow twitches. “An entire sect does not leave its grounds to go traipsing into another’s lands, you dimwit.”

“Of course, of course,” he nods easily, “but hey, a visit to Meishan isn’t impossible, is it? Say—hmm, maybe after the discussion conference?”

She frowns. “Get to the point.”

He shrugs. “No point, no point,” he singsongs, “just that sometimes, a change in scenery is good.” He flounces back outside.

Her scowl does not recede. “Who told him of the discussion conference?”

Jinzhu and Yinzhu trade a glance. “We are unsure,” they reply.

“Wow, you’re great at this!”

Wen Ning nearly faints.

This is Wei Wuxian, one of the top five young masters of their generation. Who is beaming at him. Who is grinning approvingly at the cluster of his arrows stuck into the boulder.

“Th-Th-Thank you, Wei-gongzi,” he stutters out. Oh god. If he offends Wei Wuxian, he’s probably going to be murdered. It’s common knowledge how protective his brother, the sect heir of Yunmeng Jiang is of him, and also there are rumours the second young master of Gusu Lan is equally so.

“Oh, you know me?” Wei Wuxian laughs, airy. “I’m afraid I’m doing you a disservice then, since I don’t know you yet! What is this master archer called?”

Wen Ning squeaks.

“W-Wen Ning, Wen Q-Qionglin, gongzi—,”

“Aiya, do away with the gongzi business! Just call me Xian-gege!”

Wen Ning makes a sound like a kettle boiling over.

“Ah, or Wei-xiong, if that makes things easier for you?”

“I-I’m n-not sure, ah, s-sorry! I’m sorry!”

“There had better be a good reason for this!” Jiang Cheng snaps.

Wei Wuxian snorts. “Getting to see my perfect future husband is reason enough,” he claims.

If they weren’t flying at full-speed towards Gusu Lan right now, Jiang Cheng would tackle his moron of a brother off his damn sword. Plus there is a pack of their more senior disciples trailing behind them, so, role modelling and all.

“If Gusu Lan counts this as an invasion of their boundaries, you’re fucking getting it,” Jiang Cheng warns. Indeed, they do not have official reason nor permission to be sneaking towards Cloud Recesses right now. Still, Wei Wuxian had almost left entirely on his own, and Jiang Cheng is not about to let his idiotic brother get struck by some stuck-up Lan disciple’s stray arrow.

The answering smile is unsettling. “Oh, I doubt ours is the invasion to be worried about.”

Lan Qiren bows to Jiang Fengmian. “Gusu Lan is deeply thankful to Yunmeng Jiang for their assistance.”

Jiang Fengmian bows back, but his frown does not disappear. He had not sent his disciples out, nor had he even been aware of them leaving just yesterday. “Of course. We have set aside our visiting wing for your sect, but there is limited room. If necessary, Lotus Cove is of course willing to house those of the Gusu Lan.”

In another room, Yu Ziyuan smacks both her sons over the back of their heads. “And what possessed you both to risk our sect to save the remnants of another?! Without notifying me or Jiang Fengmian?!” she demands.

Jiang Cheng cowers a little, but Wei Wuxian merely sits back on his heels and shrugs. “No time, Auntie Yu,” he answers. “Also, do you know the best way to make some fake swords?”

“What are you on about now?!”

Wei Wuxian grins, but it’s the same smile he had given Jiang Cheng before diving in straight from the clouds and beheading Wen Xu in one fell sweep.

Lan Xichen bows, deep. “I am told from Wangji that it was you who gave pre-emptive warning regarding our libraries.”

Wei Wuxian laughs, scratching his cheek in apparent embarrassment. “Ah, Lan Zhan, you’re too good! No, no, Zewu-jun, I’m sure he just read too far into another shameless comment of mine!”

Lan Xichen blinks. “All the same, Wei-gongzi, Gusu Lan thanks you. The vast majority of our texts and scrolls had been moved into another secure location just weeks prior to the Wen sect attack.”

“Oh? Good to hear!”

Of course, some things are inevitable. Of course, fate will not let its dolls go. Of course, it begins.

Indoctrination, the Qishan Wen say.

You have trapped a turtle in a mountain and in its belly is a sword that I once used to end you all, Wei Wuxian does not say.

“How do you have your swords?!” one disciple asks, incredulous.

Wei Wuxian shrugs. “Eh, I wasn’t about to give up my precious baby to their grubby hands. Who knows where their dirty fingers have been. What if they don’t know how to wash properly?”

Jiang Cheng mutters, “You’re the dumbass that literally forgot his sword in a bush the other day.”

Then Jin Zixuan, of all people, also takes his real sword out.

Another Jin disciple gapes. “J-Jin-gongzi?! Why did you also…?”

Jin Zixuan coughs. “It was just suspicious,” he explains, without actually explaining at all.

(It’s because Wei Wuxian had sent him a letter about it, and in that letter had been some vaguely terrifying knowledge of things that he could not know, and less vague threats pertaining to the matter with Jiang Yanli, and well—Jin Zixuan maybe, kind of, sort of, possibly regrets how things have ended up with his once-betrothed? And everybody knows step one to getting back into the good graces of ‘best sister’ Jiang Yanli is to humour her brothers.)

“So, let’s kill a turtle!” Wei Wuxian chirps.

“…What?!”

Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin and Lan Wangji return to Lotus Pier with the death of a corrupted, ancient beast under their names, and with their real swords on their hips. Sect Leader Jiang does not leave for Qishan Wen to retrieve the swords of his sons, as he may have, once upon a time, once upon a life. The Violet Spider does not allow a simpering woman into her halls, as she may have once upon a time, once upon a life.

Lotus Pier burns.

But Yunmeng Jiang does not fall.

“What about the innocents?” Wei Wuxian asks.

The war table pauses. “Innocents?” one sect leader asks.

Wei Wuxian nods, smiling. “Of course! It’s not as if Qishan Wen is made up of thousands of evil cultivators who want to kill everyone! What about the farmers? The healers? The children and the elderly?”

Nie Mingjue snorts. “Anybody on a battlefield is asking for death,” he proclaims.

But Lan Qiren is frowning.

Jiang Fengmian says, calmly, “Yunmeng Jiang will not sanction a genocide.”

“Is it really a genocide if they’re all after us—,”

“The whole point is that not all of them are!”

“As if, just look at what they tried to do to—!”

“—you can’t use that to represent everyone—!”

“Who even cares about—!”

The Sunshot Campaign starts. (Once more. Just once more.)

From the inside, it goes like this.

Wei Wuxian knows what he is capable of. The softest hearts always wield the sharpest blades, when pushed far enough. He remembers, because it seems like yesterday to him, his many past lives and all in between. The Yiling Patriarch is far from dead, but Wei Wuxian lets him sleep. There is no need for a mass murdering, all-powerful Grandmaster of demonic cultivation here. Not yet, at least. When the time comes, Wei Wuxian knows what he can do. He can feel them even now, strands of resentful energy, pools of dark fury that he can whistle to in the late nights, feel them caress him back in a familiar dance that once felled half a world. He has three-slash-four lifetimes of experience under his belt – and he has his original body with its original core. In a broken body with no core, he had ended a war. In a weak body with a weak core, he had taken down a conspiracy of epic proportions. This time, with muscles that stretch and contract as easily as he breathes, with a heart that pumps blood strong and steady, with a pulsing core that turns and burns and shines, he is unstoppable.

Wei Ying shares his affections, because they were burnt to ashes last time. He hugs and pats and jostles because they were corpses last time. He gives and gives and gives – because when the time comes, and it will, Wei Wuxian will take.

The Yiling Patriarch is the old tale mothers tell their children to keep them in bed at night. It is the whisper of small fires in the dark, talismans spluttering in futile attempts, broken swords and gaping jaws. Do not misbehave, little one, or the Yiling Patriarch will come for you! It is a made-up story seeped in truth, and one that terrorises grown cultivators and little chubby children all the same.

Wei Ying is Wei Wuxian is the Yiling Patriarch. Those that he loves, that love him in return, see the former two.

Those that he does not will scream and flee and fall, before the latter.

(The world has killed him once, with crows circling ahead and too-long too-dark too-inhuman hands reaching up from below. The world has killed him twice, with the soul-shattering snap of a seal breaking as he is torn apart by undead mouths. The world has killed him thrice, with the drip of blood and a sprawling seal on the ground and all his power disintegrating his very being.

But Wei Wuxian lives, and that, beyond all else, is the beginning and the story and the end all at once.)