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Jiang Cheng was an omega.

Jiang Yanli, despite being a Beta, was set to be YunmengJiang’s next leader for this reason; due to the birthing problems related to the birth of an omega like Jiang Cheng, Yu Ziyuan was no longer able to bear children. A curse upon the Jiang name, Yunmeng’s leader refused to even look at his son most days. The boy’s mother was not much better, resolving to leave him with her devoted servants, who were to whip him into the shape of an omega who others would at least not look down on with too much distaste.

The first were the Spiders. Jiang Cheng thinks he barely remembers it now, but the flashes still come in his sleep. Rather than training him to be a respectable omega, the Spiders had doted on him, taught him MeishanYu’s famous dances, loved him when no one in his family did, and then, a few years later, ravished his omegan body day after day right behind his mother’s back.

The Spiders were clever; they never left marks on the boy, and even as they knotted in him time after time, afterwards they would always feed Jiang Cheng various herbs and medicines that flushed through his body and made him bleed throughout the night. Cleaned and fresh for them again for the very next day.

Perhaps Jiang Cheng could have told someone. Tugged on his mother’s sleeve and told her her Spiders had been touching him strangely. Perhaps he did. Perhaps she never listened.

As the two Alphas took him for their own pleasure, Jiang Cheng’s immature body changed, growing faster than it should have— tiny pert breasts emerged from his chest, painful as they came. His waist began to slope with a sharp curve into his hips, the silhouette of it eye-catching and alluring to all with every cautious swaying step. There formed a sultry look in the child’s eyes that unnerved most adult Alphas and made others’ gazes stray. And his scent, his scent, that was something unforgettable. Especially to one particular boy in the Cloud Recesses.

Like lotuses and peonies. A sweet and distinct scent that seeped into the back of your nose, clearing your airways in an addictive breath of florals and fruits, fresh and ripe and bursting to be picked and urgently eaten between gnashing white teeth.

Jiang Cheng was too young to have been experiencing heats — his study at Cloud Recesses was meant to be of no certain worry. Perhaps if his parents had looked at him more closely. If they had noticed the whispers, the stares. Perhaps they would have kept Jiang Cheng home, with the Spiders, where, at that time, he had belonged.

Instead, he came to Cloud Recesses, a blushing, clueless youth. Aching to be included amongst the many Alphas and Betas, begging to be seen as something, anything, other than a lowly burden unworthy of even a second look.

And indeed, the Alphas looked.

Prepubescent snarls, the sour scent of not yet fully formed Alphas filling the air like a locker room. Lan Qiren had quietly warned Jiang Cheng to take his suppressants, and Jiang Cheng, who had never heard of suppressants, had only nodded and left for his chambers, an unease sinking deep inside his chest all the while.

He was being followed.

The Lans had strange traditions. Three thousand of them, in fact, carved into the great stone at the Cloud Recesses’ gate.

One such tradition was very old, rarely practised at that day and age. But one Lan child always followed every rule, every decree upon the stone, including that one:

An unmated omega in heat is free for the taking.

Lan Wangji threw Jiang Cheng into the brambles of a bush with a speed and strength one could only attribute to a Jade Alpha. Even as Jiang Cheng cried out and protested, Lan Wangji’s strength easily overpowered him, a rage in the Alpha’s eyes petrifying the omega with fear.

“Whore,” Lan Wangji had said into Jiang Cheng’s ear as he thrusted inside. “To parade your body around in such a way. This must have been what you wanted.”

Jiang Cheng screeched and fought, begged for the Alpha to see that there was nothing of this he could have wanted, nothing of this he had ever even known of let alone could have stopped or prevented.

“Quiet. Obey.”

Even as he wanted to fight, Jiang Cheng’s body had already adjusted to Lan Wangji’s overwhelming scent and accepted the Alpha’s voice as word of law. He quietened. He stilled. When Lan Wangji’s knot expanded in him, Jiang Cheng could only shake his head wordlessly, tears running lines down his soft teenager’s cheeks.

“Do not cry,” Lan Wangji said, and Jiang Cheng was no longer even able to cry. “You wanted to be filled with pups,” rasped Lan Wangji. “So I will fill you with pups.”

Jiang Cheng closed his eyes, but Lan Wangji ordered them open. “Whore,” he said, and repeated. “Whore, whore, whore.”

There was so little Jiang Cheng knew about his own body then. But he knew at least what it meant to have an Alpha knot inside you—the beasts that would grow in his belly if he let them.

Jiang Cheng sobbed and wailed soundlessly the moment Lan Wangji fixed his robes and left. He knew the consequences would be dire if he were to get pregnant. The Spiders never let him get pregnant.

Sneaking into the medicinal storages after dark, Jiang Cheng made his own concoction using the faint memory of the Spiders’ recipe. He made a pot of it large enough to feed five men. He drank it all in one night.

And in the morning, his organs fell out of him.

Horror as he was rushed back to Lotus Pier, expecting his last hours of life to go out like a candle blown too soon. Yu Ziyuan’s anger pulsed like a sun about to explode.

“You are to blame for this.” She held his martial brother’s collar in her fists. “You failed to protect him. You will pay for this. You will pay.”

Two days after Jiang Fengmian found out about the organ replacement that left his favourite disciple dead, Yu Ziyuan and her Spiders disappeared overnight.

All of Lotus Pier watched Jiang Cheng’s recovery as if awaiting a comet to land into the earth beside them.

If Jiang Cheng’s body were to accept the dead Alpha’s organs, his life would be turned completely around. An heir, a leader, an Alpha.

If his body didn’t…

If it rejected those parts which never belonged to him in the first place. He may never stand again. Never walk, never dance like the Spiders had taught him. The more favourable option was for him to die.

Jiang Fengmian paid close attention to his son for the first time in his life then. Noticed the face of his mother, with little of the scowl; the bite. If he could be an Alpha, thought Jiang Fengmian. Then I could perhaps allow him his life.

If not, then he must pay for it.

In the six months of recovery, the status of the Alpha organs ambiguous throughout, Jiang Fengmian had much time to ponder how exactly his son would pay for his favourite disciple’s life.

In those months, Jiang Fengmian had had time to observe more than his beautiful son’s face. He saw how the doctor removed the boy’s clothes to reveal a rapidly maturing body, filled out parts round and tender for the plucking.

The day the Jiang doctor informed him that the organ replacement was a failure, and his son was to live bed-bound for life, Jiang Fengmian climbed into that bed and raped his son repeatedly.

It was the least his useless son could do. To pay for his martial brother’s life. To pay for the burden of his. To pay for how his mother had refused to be touched even years after his problematic birth.

His son’s body was good for that, at least. Jiang Fengmian enjoyed how his son cried, ordered him to be louder, to test the silencing talismans on the door with the back of his throat. Jiang Fengmian enjoyed how his son bled, blood of his martial brother, returned to Jiang Fengmian.

It was only a pity his son could no longer be bred. No matter how many knots he put into his son, his womb was ruined, and no litter would take. A useless son after all.

In the year his father took him, Jiang Cheng reflected on what it meant to be an omega. He had thought, as a child, that it was simply about bearing pups for the family. His rudimentary education taught him that he was to be reared into a favourable bitch, used for breeding by his spouse. It was all about the breeding. Hence why the Spiders had been so eager to teach him.

Meeting the Lan boy had taught him something new. Yes, being an omega was about bearing pups. But it was also about subjugation. It was about not having a choice over who would fill you with their seed, who would hold you down whenever it was desired. Even strangers had greater rights over Jiang Cheng’s body than he. Being an omega, then, was about accepting the subjugation, taking on the acts of others, and stomaching the effects. To accept, and to bear. That was what an omega was for.

It was difficult to define what an omega’s place was after its ability to bear pups was destroyed. But Jiang Cheng’s father taught him well enough over the months under the man’s subjugation.

It didn’t always matter whether the omega could bear pups. Sometimes the knots were just knots, and not seeds. Sometimes the things to bear were not litters, but punishments. To be an omega, Jiang Cheng thought. Was to live a life of punishment for your existence.

Lan Xichen tends to Jiang Cheng’s deteriorating body like a love letter. Lotus Pier had long burned down by the hands of the Wens. The Wens had long burned down by the hands of the resistance. Jiang Cheng is the sole survivor of a desecrated Sect. The heir, one might say.

Lan Xichen is the leader of GusuLan, and the brother of the Lan boy who had ruined Jiang Cheng’s life— though Jiang Cheng cannot argue that it wasn’t ruined from birth. Lan Xichen was sorry, he’d said. And said again and again, for years and years.

His brother was dead, but what had happened to Jiang Cheng had been revealed. A debt transferred. Lan Xichen took Jiang Cheng on like a burden. A useless omega with nothing to give.

Yet Lan Xichen seemed to have nothing he wanted to take.

Lan Xichen tended to Jiang Cheng’s body like a love letter, though Jiang Cheng’s was one that had never been inscribed with a single pleasant word. Lan Xichen wrote psalms upon his shoulders with an innocent hand, only touching Jiang Cheng to clean him, to heal him, to ease the tension in his bones.

How humiliating it must have been, for Lan Xichen to have had to marry him, a broken omega who could not bear pups, who was no longer worth even subjugating, who carried with him the marks of punishments completely unrelated to the man.

“Jiang Cheng,” Lan Xichen would say. “Don’t say that, my dear.”

He strokes Jiang Cheng’s face and whispers, a little secret:

“An omega’s duty, is only to be loved.”