Reading Time: 124 Minutes

Title: Dark Promises Amid Rising Screams
Author: MeyariMcFarland
Fandom: The Untamed
Genre: Angst, Action Adventure, Historical, Horror, Humor, Paranormal/Supernatural, Time Travel
Relationship(s): Su She/Meng Yao (platonic)
Content Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Major Character Death, Violence-Graphic, Violence-Domestic (discussed), time travel fix-it, unreliable narrator, discussion of genocide, PTSD, depression, chronic anxiety, panic attacks, warning: Jin Guangshan, warning: Wen Ruohan, canon typical violence, politics, serious self-esteem issues, self-sacrifice
Author Note: The Major Character Death is on-screen, at the beginning, and undone by the time travel.
Beta: Batspit
Word Count: 88,700
Summary: The problem with being insecure about your decision making was that you ended up second-guessing yourself into some really… horrible… situations. Su She hadn’t ever really thought that he was worth much. His training among the Lan had ensured that. But he didn’t doubt at all that Jin Guangyao was leading him straight to death. Maybe it was time to make a choice and stand on his own two feet, no matter what the consequences were.
Artist: Mizu Sage

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1. In Which Our Protagonist Dies and Then Has Cause to Regret His Life’s Choices

Su She saw the fist coming.

Hard not to, what with Nie Mingjue’s fierce corpse being as big as a house and bellowing like an enraged ox. Really didn’t matter what sort of screaming, yelping or other noise the others made when that fist was headed right at him.

That was the hard part: he’d seen all of this coming and still, here he was staring death in the face. The angry, dead, terrifying face. So many choices that he’d made, second-guessed, and went back on. So many points where he could have chosen differently and then just… didn’t.

Off to the side, Wei Wuxian yelled something at Su She with a worried expression on his face. That was so very him. Su She had threatened his life, threatened the kids and hurt people, killed people, and Wei Wuxian was still so fucking kind-hearted that he cared that Su She was about to die.

They were opposites, the two of them. Su She, broken by his life and bitter as fuck and Wei Wuxian, hunted, killed, resurrected to wreak revenge and yet he traipsed along taking care of people and being kind to everyone around him like the lunatic he was.

Trusting them. Trusting everyone! That…

Su She started moving to put himself between Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangshan, even though he knew to his bones that it would be his death. It was stupid as fuck and yet Su She couldn’t do anything else at this point. He’d made the choice to back Jin Guangshan. He wasn’t going to change it now.

Because why would he trust his own judgement? Who was Su She to believe in himself when there were so many others so much wiser than he was and so much better than anything he could ever become?

Story of his misbegotten life. If he’d only stood firm on the right things at the right time, none of this would’ve happened. The Guanyin Temple itself loomed silent and afraid around their insane little group, an appropriately operatic backdrop for Su She’s waste of a life.

And it was a waste, too. Such a waste. He’d failed as a Lan. Failed as a rouge cultivator. Failed to set up his own sect. Failed to protect Jin Guangyao who was just about the only damn one who ever saw him, personally.

The only one who seemed, seemed, to see that Su She had some worth. That’d been a lie just like everything else with Jin Guangyao and he’d known it for ages but hadn’t been willing to actually do anything about it.

And now this.

Fuck his life, seriously.

Su She still dove in front of Nie Mingjue. Still protected Jin Guangyao even though he knew Jin Guangyao wouldn’t do anything like that for him. Obviously. Still took it like he’d taken everything else so far in his life: resentfully but willingly because what else could he do?

Nie Mingjue’s punch straight through Su She’s chest hurt like nothing else ever had, not even the backlash from the Hundred Holes Curse. His legs crumbled down under him as his arms went slack. Su She dangled from Nie Mingjue’s arm for a moment before his about-to-be-a corpse fell off Nie Mingjue’s massive, corded arm.

For one moment, Su She had a glimpse of Jin Guangyao’s eyes. They were cold. Reptilian. Calculating.

Ah. Yeah. He’d kind of thought it was that way.

Jin Guangyao who was his only and dearest friend, who he’d spent his life and his sect and everything he had supporting through this insanity, didn’t actually give a good god-damn about him. He wasn’t a friend at all. Su She was nothing more than a pathetically easy to manipulate tool that Jin Guangyao picked up and honed to a razor’s edge.

Right. Fine. Whatever.

Darkness began closing in around the edges of Su She’s vision as his body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut on the floor of the temple. There was shouting and screaming, the sound of blood splattering and stones creaking as if they were about to shatter, but none of that mattered.

Just like the fist, Su She had seen this coming a long while back. And he’d prepared for it because even if he fucked his entire life up, maybe he could get things right in death.

As his soul slipped out of his broken body, the array he’d painted on his right thigh activated. Should’ve gone on his back, honestly, or his stomach, but with everything going on Su She hadn’t been sure that it would be undamaged there. On his thigh, covered with a bandage, the array had stayed pristine enough through the fights and the running and now his death.

Time travel wasn’t what he wanted to do. Flinging his soul back into his younger body was a nightmare just to think about. So many horrible, horrible things to be dealt with. But hey, at least he could do things differently.

Maybe.

Su She wasn’t the best demonic cultivator in the world. He wasn’t the most creative cultivator of any kind. He wasn’t even especially good at demonic cultivation, compared to Wei Wuxian and Xue Yang or about half the other idiots that Jin Guangshan had gotten into it. He couldn’t come up with wild new ideas and entirely new branches of cultivation like some people.

What he could do, what he did do as his soul slid sideways out of the current moment and then backwards through time towards his younger body, was improve in slow, steady increments on what other people had created.

Give him an array. He’d improve it. Give him a Lan battle song. He’d find a way to make it stronger, better, more effective. Toss two completely different techniques at him and he’d find a way to gracefully combine them to give the desired effect.

Give him a time travel array and, well.

The array he’d studied from Wei Wuxian’s notes had been designed to fling your soul willy-nilly back into your younger body. You could sort of choose when, but it was impossible to say the time of day or location where your soul would land in your younger body. And it was a pretty violent thing, kind of like slamming your soul down into your body from a thousand feet.

So Su She had fixed that when he put the array on his thigh. Fixed the knowledge transfer to be first. Then the weight of his adult core would settle slowly into his body because there was no need to be cruel to himself. And then, at the very end, the demonic cultivation would settle, which should give him time to say his goodbyes and get the hell out of the Cloud Recesses because that was the first and most important mistake he’d made.

He’d stayed way, way, way too long in the Cloud Recesses after he realized that he could never fit in there.

Instead of slamming into his young self, it was a slow settling of his older soul into his younger body in the middle of the night when no one else would be awake to notice his soul’s arrival.

His younger-self jerked awake in the middle of the night as his older-self had chosen to settle in a full month before the guest lectures where Wei Wuxian would meet Lan Wangji for the first time. Seriously, there was no reason to endure that disaster a second time. Su She was getting out before the two of them started flirting like idiots at each other in completely different love languages.

His chest hurt. Su She rubbed his chest, breathing hard as he remembered how Nie Mingjue’s fist had punched straight through him. It was… very real. And very painful, as his memories of the present and the future that wasn’t mingled.

He’d been such a fool. Made so many mistakes. Doubted himself so badly that he never even tried to find his own way until far too late. He’d been cruel, sarcastic, short-tempered and downright mean. There were so many points where he’d made enemies with his attitude when he could have had allies just by being a tiny bit kinder.

Yeah, not again.

The senior dorms were quiet, filled with deep breathing and the occasional snore out of Cho Yizhe who’d gotten an elbow to the nose during training and who never had figured out how to properly use his core to ease injuries, right up until the day that the Wen came and burned down the Cloud Recesses.

Su She looked around. All of these men, boys really, were going to die. Every single one of them. Including Su She, as everything stood.

He was twenty years old, not quite twenty-one. In less than two years, the Cloud Recesses would be gone. Lotus Pier would be empty of Jiang. The Jianghu would be at war.

Yeah.

No.

Both the younger part of his soul and the older refused that future. As they fused into one person, not two fitfully sharing a body during the wee hours of the night, Su She thought about what he had to do.

Where to go. Who to kill, who to help, how he could keep the Sunshot Campaign from happening. Hell, politics had never been his strong suit, but he’d figure it out. So many people’s motivations made more sense as his old and young selves merged to became his new self.

There was time. He could make decisions once he fully settled into his new body.

His core slowly expanded over the next ten days, growing to match what he’d been as an adult. The skills with sword and guqin and dizi and, well, everything else, came over that time, too. Which was good. Jin Guangyao had beaten some political sense into his brain, some logic when it came to spying and understanding people’s motives, just by being who Jin Guangyao was.

He’d learned how to make a good-sized qiankun pouch off in the future that wasn’t, so making a handful of secret ones that he hid on his person was easy enough. Jin Guangyao always said that understanding the people around you was vital, their history and philosophy and the things they expected as normal, so Su She spent the time gathering knowledge, gossip, and secretly gathering information from the Lan library that would be helpful.

No techniques, of course. He wasn’t going to be accused of being a knock-off Lan again, not this time. No, he grabbed other stuff.

Copies of treaties between the various sects and mortal governments. Records of food, fabric, weapons, furniture and the like purchased over the last couple decades. Account books and history books and a thousand or so different books of poetry and literature that he’d regretted not having when he started Moling Su.

Most of the literature were things he copied himself using the Lan copying talismans that were so useful. The poetry and the rest of the literature were things that disciples had made copies of for calligraphy practice or punishment. No one had looked at them since they were tossed into the library, so Su She really didn’t feel a shred of guilt taking them. A good chunk of them were ones he’d done personally during calligraphy practice or punishments, so yeah, he’d take them along instead of abandoning all the hard work that went into making them.

On the tenth day, as the resentful energy from his demonic cultivation loomed in the back of his mind before it began to settle into his younger body, Su She gathered up his few belongings into a separate qiankun pouch that everyone knew about.

Just as he remembered, no one had noticed anything different about Su She. The teachers hadn’t praised him for being stronger or more accurate in his fighting and music. One of them had actually sniffed and commented that Su She had apparently been studying finally because he was finally showing some minimal level of skill.

Not equal to Lan Wangji’s of course. Never that.

Asshole.

The new Cloud Recesses, rebuilt after the Sunshot Campaign, had never had the same feel that the old one did. Su She made a point of walking through the grounds, breathing in the cold, clear air and studying the beautiful old buildings. It was gorgeous and austere and perfect.

“I’m going to claw my way out of my own skin if I stay here much longer,” Su She murmured as he stared into the waters of the Cold Spring where one of the pieces of the Yin Iron lurked angrily.

It felt angry. Frustrated. Exhausted in that bone-deep way that Su She remembered from the darkest parts of the Sunshot Campaign.

Made sense. The Yin Iron, all the various pieces of it, had been struggling and fighting for much, much longer than Su She could imagine. They had to ache to die at this point.

“Call me if you need to leave,” Su She murmured. “I’ll come get you, help you die. Until then, stop trying to talk to your other parts, will you? It just makes Wen Ruohan even crazier, and he doesn’t need the help.”

There was a surprised little pulse of resentful energy which was Su She’s cue to turn on his heel and march off to Lan Qiren’s office. If the Yin Iron was responding to him, his demonic cultivation was settling faster than Su She had noticed. Better to get his ass out of the Cloud Recesses before he climbed into the Cold Springs right then to save the Yin Iron from it’s depressing captivity.

Besides, he did still need to talk to Lan Qiren about leaving. The Elders never had given Lan Qiren the support he needed.

Su She had assumed, before he left the Lan, that the Sect Leader was logically the one who handled all correspondence, who took messages and audited records. The Sect Leader was the leader, right? He did it all, knew it all.

That little misconception had died when Ran Quanyu, his First Disciple in the Moling Su sect, had sat him down and set his head on straight.

“I don’t know what the hell you think a Sect Leader is,” Ran Quanyu had snapped at him, “but he’s not an errand boy. You do not go and meet people at the gate yourself. You do not answer every single bit of mail. That’s madness. Even the smallest sect has staff that supports the Sect Leader. You have me as your First so fucking use me!”

“That’s…” Su She had snapped his mouth shut before he could spew some anxious nonsense about how Lan Qiren and Jiang Wanyin did it all themselves.

“I don’t fucking care,” Ran Quanyu had declared. “I’ve served in six separate sects so far and, outright, you’re killing yourself with trying to do everything on your own. You’re getting clerks and an accountant for the books and a fucking assistant who will screen your fucking mail, got it?”

Ran Quanyu had been right. Su She had been wrong. It’d eaten him up for ages until he realized that Jin Guangyao had six times the staff that Su She had and got epic amounts more done because he could properly delegate things to his people.

Hadn’t saved them in the end but whatever.

Whatever!

Lan Qiren had one clerk who was whichever elder on the Council had time to help him with his duties. They chose which duties they wanted to help with, not Lan Qiren. Talk about fucking bullshit, there. In any other sect, Su She would’ve been reporting to an assistant, not the Sect Leader. It was outright bullshittery that he had to report to Lan Qiren to leave the Lan.

“Sect Leader Lan,” Su She said as he tapped on the doorframe to Lan Qiren’s very nice, very neat, very heavy on account books and papers and texts office. “May I speak with you?”

“Su She,” Lan Qiren said, blinking up at him.

“You know who I am?” Su She asked, astonished despite himself.

He’d learned a lot from Teacher Qiren over the years, you know, when he wasn’t too busy being Acting Sect Leader Lan Qiren, but he’d always assumed that Su She was just a faceless body in the crowd of other students, one of the bunch with nothing to distinguish himself in Lan Qiren’s mind.

“Of course,” Lan Qiren said, gesturing for Su She to sit opposite his desk. “A talented young outer disciple. I expect that you’ll be quite solid for us.”

Solid.

The wild doubt that had stormed through him when Lan Qiren actually recognized him died a sudden death. Solid. Ugh. Yeah, no, this was absolutely the right thing.

“Thank you, Sect Leader,” Su She said as he untied his plain white ribbon and properly folded it. “I appreciate that, but I’m afraid that’s why I’m here.”

He set the ribbon on top of a stack of account books, breathing deeply for the first time in what felt like decades. All the decades he remembered instead of just the two his body currently had.

Wow, he had been a nervous wreck the first time he removed his ribbon and left the Lan. This time it felt good. Right. Like dropping a basket weighing a thousand tons off his shoulders. Su She smiled and rubbed his forehead, enjoying the feeling of bare skin.

“Ah,” Lan Qiren said faintly as he carefully picked up the ribbon and cradled it in his hand. “You’re quite sure about this? There is no coming back from it.”

“I know,” Su She agreed. “Honestly, I’ve never felt like I fit in here. The Rules are a lovely structure for some, but I constantly second-guess myself. I get anxiety about everything as I worry if I’m doing it right or wrong. It’s just a terrible fit, overall. I truly do appreciate all the Lan have taught me, but I’m not right for the Lan and I don’t think the Lan are the better for me being here. Better to leave and find my own way.”

“I see,” Lan Qiren said with such a tragic look in his eyes that Su She huffed at him.

“Stop that,” Su She said, wagging a finger at Lan Qiren. “This isn’t a tragedy of some kind. It’s a good thing. Which is better: a soul that’s broken by trying to fit where it can never belong or one free to find its proper home? You did everything right. You taught me. You helped me learn about myself. And if that learning takes me away from the Lan, well, that happens sometimes.”

Lan Qiren granted him a small, crooked smile. “Did I? If I had done everything right, you wouldn’t want to run away from the Lan.”

“I’m not running,” Su She said firmly enough that Lan Qiren actually met his eyes fully instead of glancing away in guilt. “I’m making a choice. One of the best, earliest rules we learned was Know Yourself. And I do. I know myself. I know the Rules. I’m making the choice that’s right for me. And for the Lan. I’d rather not spend the rest of my life wracked with jealousy of those who fit in here.”

“That would be bad,” Lan Qiren said softly, regretfully but without the blooming guilt that Su She had never realized was there before. In the future that wasn’t. Whatever.

“Worse than bad,” Su She scoffed. “I’d have been miserable if I stayed, and I would have outright made it everyone else’s problem. I’d rather not become the Lan version of Jin Zixun.”

It was only after he’d said it that he panicked about whether or not he’d actually met Jin Zixun at this point in time. Thankfully, it didn’t matter.

Lan Qiren laughed softly, looking a little relieved as he stood and gestured for Su She to follow him. The last time, Su She had stormed in and flung his ribbon at Lan Xichen who’d smiled and wished him well in a tone that implied that he hoped that Su She died in a ditch somewhere. Things hadn’t been good for a long time at that point so Su She hadn’t been surprised by it.

Angered? Oh, yeah. But not surprised. He’d stomped on out of the Cloud Recesses without even waiting for Lan Xichen to remove his name from the rolls.

This time, Su She followed Lan Qiren to the archivist who kept the list of names of all the Lan sect members, inner, outer, living, dead. She was like a million years old, old enough that even with her powerful cultivation, she’d gone white-haired and stoop-backed. Lan Wenjing looked at him and then hummed as she took his hand, patting it gently.

“I wondered if you’d stay,” Lan Wenjing commented. “You were such a fretful little boy when your family brought you here. But you said you wanted to be a Lan, so I wrote your name in the Book. What do you want now, Su She?”

Another person who knew him. Su She shuddered and bit his lip at her kindness, which he totally hadn’t expected. He didn’t even remember meeting her when he joined the Lan, but that whole month was a blur in his memory mixing his mother’s death, his father’s grief and all the new things here in the Cloud Recesses that he’d never experienced before.

“I can’t say that I remember that,” Su She finally managed to say, voice thick with unshed tears. “Too soon after my mother died. But yeah, at the time I was determined. I just… don’t fit. I’ve been thinking about it for years and finally made up my mind. I’m leaving. There’s a place for me but it’s not here. I’m going to find it.”

Lan Wenjing smiled at him, patting his hand again with her cool, dry, ink-stained hands. “I’m glad for you. Knowing what’s right for you is as important as knowing the Rules. Let’s see here. Where were you?”

She searched through the Book, finding his listing. It was short, just his name, the date he entered the Lan sect and the various instruments he’d learned to use. Guqin, sword, erhu though he’d never properly mastered the erhu. Lan Wenjing marked another date down and noted “departed the Lan” next to it.

“Now,” Lan Wenjing said as she looked through a different book. “You went on, let’s see, one-hundred- and seventeen-night hunts. Made six guqin, three erhu, all of acceptable quality. No major discipline incidents. No great triumphs, either, but it’s a rare Lan who manages that at your age, let me say. You’re entitled to, hmm, yes, new robes of course. Oh, and we’ll want to discuss that sword of yours. Take off for that, add on for returning the ribbon, of course. Those are expensive, dear boy, quite expensive, indeed. Yes. There we are. Do you agree, Sect Leader Qiren?”

Lan Qiren looked over her sums and then added a little notation at the bottom. “Add another twenty for wisdom transfer.”

“Ah, well done, Su She,” Lan Wenjing said, beaming up at him. “You taught our Qiren a lesson. Good on you, dear boy, good on you.”

“But…” Su She tried to protest but he couldn’t in the face of Lan Qiren’s wry smile and Lan Wenjing counting out coins.

Not a mountain of coins. Not even enough to live a full year on, actually, but far more than he’d had when he left last time. Was this… normal? Wow, he’d totally fucked himself over as Ran Quanyu would’ve said.

“There we go,” Lan Wenjing said once she was done counting out the coins. “You get one qiankun pouch, and two sets of robes in whatever colors you want. If we have them in stock, of course.”

“Um, black, red, grey, I guess,” Su She said with a shrug because he was far more focused on staring at the little pouch of coins in his hands. “I mean, they don’t take stains much and they’re easy to replace.”

“True, true,” Lan Wenjing agreed as she flapped a hand at Lan Qiren who’d looked disturbed by his color choices. “Don’t be silly, Qiren. He’s going to have to wash his own laundry from now on. Let the boy hide the stains until he figures out how to do it properly.”

Su She went beet red, but so did Lan Qiren so he didn’t feel too bad about it. In short order, Su She had his new linen robes which were, as he’d intended, very much like what Wei Wuxian had worn as the Yiling Patriarch.

Come to think of it, Su She would bet anything that Wei Wuxian had worn those colors specifically because they were easy to get, easy to wash and hard wearing enough not to show stains. Ha! It wasn’t really aesthetic at all, was it?

Lan Qiren made sure that Su She got a quick meal in the kitchen as he packed some rations for Su She to take. Then Lan Qiren walked him right down to the gate. The guards on the gate, both really young juniors who stared at Su She in stunned confusion, didn’t say a word as Lan Qiren nodded towards Su She’s sword.

“I would suggest commissioning a new sheathe for your sword,” Lan Qiren said as he pulled a plain black sheathe out of his sleeve, “but we had this one lying around. Lan Wenjing insisted on your having it.”

“…Thank you, Sect Leader Lan,” Su She said as he swapped his old pale blue sheathe with the new black one. It fit perfectly, of course. “I’m grateful that you made this as easy as it was. I honestly expected a great deal more… arguing.”

And threats, attempts to hold him there. Maybe throwing him into one of the cells where he would have to meditate on his choice to leave. Just accepting it and letting him go so gently was…

…bizarre. Wonderful but bizarre. When had his life ever gone this well? Never, that’s when.

Lan Qiren sighed. “I must admit that I want to argue with you, but you’ve clearly made up your mind. I would never keep someone here who did not wish to stay. Even if you are no longer a Lan, you are still one of my students. If you have need of advice, please do not hesitate to contact me. I will be glad to help in whatever small ways I can.”

“Thank you, Teacher Qiren,” Su She said.

He carefully removed the Lan entry talisman, passing it over to Lan Qiren who cradled in both hands while looking like he wanted to cry. Su She bowed properly and formally because if he didn’t, he was going to start crying, too.

The formality got both of them past the teary stage, thank fuck. Su She took a deep breath, nodded to the Lan Juniors, and then walked up the road towards Caiyi Town. Behind him, he could hear Lan Qiren murmuring to the Juniors who sounded a little panicked about Su She’s departure.

He didn’t turn around.

He didn’t look back, either, because this was the right decision. Su She had fought it for a lot longer last time. Staying in the Lan had made him go all bitter and sharp-edged in his jealousy and hatred of what he’d become. Not this time.

His chest ached from Nie Mingjue’s blow. There were drifting shadows off in the pines around the road that rippled when Su She looked their way. Come what may, this was the right choice.

The lofty pines rustled around Su She in the afternoon breeze. He hadn’t said goodbye to anyone, not that he had anyone that he would have called a real friend among the Lan. Today wasn’t a special day. There were no festivals or anniversaries or anything to call it out as a perfect day for making a massive change in one’s life.

It was just the day that Su She’s demonic cultivation would return so it was time to go and be who he had to be.

The world was going to war in just a couple of years. One man had saved it last time before Jin Guangyao twisted the whole world against him. That one man had done so much, been twisted so badly by everything that he’d done, everything he’d seen, everything that had been done to him.

The Yiling Patriarch had been the key to saving the world.

Well, this time around, Wei Wuxian wouldn’t be the Yiling Patriarch. He wouldn’t invent the Ghostly Path. He would, hopefully, not lose his core and get thrown into the wild, deadly Burial Mounds for three months.

Because Su She would be there already. He had the lessons he’d learned from the Lan. He’d learned from the Jin and from Xue Yang and from Wei Wuxian himself.

Su She wasn’t inventive. He wasn’t wildly creative. But he could take what other people had created and turn it into something much better, much more powerful, and much more effective.

Wen Ruohan wouldn’t know what was going to hit him.

2. In Which Our Protagonist Attempts to be Very Cool and Distant to Everyone and Fails

Anyone who thought that the Burial Mounds were sealed was an idiot.

Su She slowly strolled up the grubby main road of Yiling, studying the marks of resentful energy staining the buildings, plants, and the earth itself. The Wen and the Nie and the Jiang might’ve convinced themselves that they’d pushed all the resentful dead back and away from the people in town, but they were wrong.

The battle that’d happened here must have been so far-ranging. It wasn’t confined to the Burial Mounds at all. Su She could feel so many aching spots of resentment where warriors fighting to the bitter end died cursing their enemies. The river was full of knots of drowning men’s terror. The fields around town grew haunted mushrooms along with the peasants’ grain and vegetables.

The Yin Iron had been here for a long, long time. A really long time. Xue Chonghai must have used it to sculpt the landscape around his palace. The hills around Yiling were so very not natural. They echoed with ghosts, rang with the impact of the Yin Iron like a big brass temple gong struck long enough ago that the sound had died even though the bell still shivered from the impact.

“Hey, hey! Cultivator! Try my turnips! Hey! Best in the market!”

“Beautiful pottery out of Lotus Pier, cultivator. Best quality you’ll find anywhere!”

“Sturdy basket, cultivator. Good and strong. You can carry whatever you need in it.”

Most of the people trying to sell their wares in the stunted, dispirited version of a market Yiling boasted were trying way too hard to convince him to stop and peruse their cheap wares. The basket maker stared up at Su She with dead, exhausted eyes.

“Show me,” Su She said. “I do need a backpack.”

Not really, but hey, it made a good excuse to stop and crouch down so that he could properly study the poor bastard. He looked like he was half-dead, a lot like Wei Wuxian had looked during the Sunshot Campaign when he was killing himself by inches trying to create demonic cultivation at the same time he was hiding his injuries and fighting a war.

Dry hair that looked like it would break off if Su She brushed his hand over the man’s head. A patchy beard that was too sparse to hide the desperate pallor of his face. And dark bags under his eyes that looked like he’d been punched in the face repeatedly.

“Here,” the man said. His fingers shook as Su She took the basket the man offered to him.

Su She made a point to let their fingers touch and yeah, the poor bastard was seriously infected with resentful energy. Felt like it was coming from something he ate or drank because it radiated outwards from his intestines rather than creeping inwards from his fingers or feet.

“Good and solid,” Su She allowed as he tested the basket. “Too small by half. You got a bigger one? I’ll pay actual Gusu coin if you do.”

The basket maker blinked and straightened up a little from his hunch over his obviously aching belly. “Gusu coin?”

“Mm,” Su She agreed. “Just left the Lan. I have a little money to spare, not a lot. They don’t exactly let you go with much besides the clothes on your back. But yeah, I need a basket, and these are nice and solid. Good bamboo, nice weaving. I just need bigger.”

“I have a couple back home,” the basket maker offered with the desperate sort of hope that the truly miserable and destitute had when they got a glimpse of something better.

“You gonna stick around here?” Su She asked, waving at the other people reluctantly looking at the wares on the half dozen or so blankets people had laid out. “It’s getting close to midday. I’d’ve thought that you’d be packing up soon anyway.”

The basket maker huffed a laugh as he nodded. “Yeah. We heard that there were going to be cultivators coming through so…”

“Ah,” Su She said, shaking his head. “Didn’t see anyone on my way into town, honestly. There was a troupe of Nie out on the main road, but they went on past the turnoff without stopping.”

“Figures,” the basket maker grumbled as he loaded all his little baskets into the bigger ones, then tied the bigger ones together until he could stuff his blanket into their tops and then lash it all to his back. “Knew I should’ve kept on making stuff at home instead of wasting my time.”

Him getting up seemed to set off an exodus. All the other vendors started gathering up their wares, casually trading amongst themselves or squirreling their goods away as if they were more precious than gold. Su She followed the basket maker out of Yiling and off towards the Burial Mounds.

“You live close, then,” Su She commented.

“Furthest out from town, closest to the Burial Mounds,” the basket maker agreed. “The farm isn’t much, but it’s been in our family for generations. Used to be worse back when my uncle Cho Dalong ran the place for his mother. My mother Lianmin runs everything now but she’s sick. We’re all sick. Can’t figure out why, either.”

“Huh,” Su She grunted. “What’s your name?”

He was Cho Muye, second son of the Cho family. Despite looking like he was thirty or forty, he was only sixteen. His mother Lianmin was a fierce woman old before her time. She had to have been a beauty when she was young but decades of working the farm and birthing children who didn’t make it to adulthood for a husband who spent most of his time anywhere but in Yiling had turned her bitter and angry.

She had resentful energy eating her from the inside out, too. So did her first son, Cho Shuxin, and his wife, Pan Jinwen who was pregnant with a baby who wasn’t going to survive if the resentful energy issue wasn’t addressed.

As Cho Muye sorted through the half-finished baskets to find one that would make a good, big backpack, Su She wandered around their farm, poking things like a fucking idiot who couldn’t mind his own business.

Logic said that he should be on his way and not interact with anyone. Su She didn’t. He couldn’t. Cho Muye was so young, so sick, that Su She couldn’t walk away without making at least an attempt to save his life.

The resentful energy had to come from somewhere. It wasn’t the fields. They had old, old markers that were easily charged up to keep resentful energy out, which Su She quietly did not do, though he was fascinated by the things. They were like nothing he’d ever seen before so the temptation to poke was tough to resist.

It wasn’t the house or barn which was surprisingly clean of resentful energy inside due to equally odd old arrays that kept the residents safe. That left the well.

Which was ancient, just a hole in the ground with a circle of heavy rocks around it. The well was full of black slime that throbbed with resentful energy. Not a yao or anything like that, though give it a few years more and it might gain enough power to become one.

“Why are you staring into our well?” Cho Muye asked with a confused frown. He had two big baskets in his hands.

“It’s a mess, that’s why,” Su She said. “It’s why you’re all sick. Needs some serious purification or you’re all just going to get sicker and sicker.”

Cho Muye flinched and cast a worried look back towards the house where his mother Lianmin was scolding Cho Shuxin in a low, unhappy voice for some failing or another. “We can’t afford that. We’re barely eating as it is.”

“I’ll trade the backpack for purifying the well,” Su She offered. “I’m not the greatest cultivator in the world, not by a long ways, but I can do this. It’s easy enough, really.”

“You would?” Cho Muye breathed, dark, exhausted eyes going wide. “Seriously?”

“Yeah,” Su She said with a casual shrug that was probably way too stiff given how nervous the repeated questioning was making him.

He probably shouldn’t do it, honestly. Su She had intended to keep a really low profile. The only reason he’d even stopped to talk to Cho Muye was how miserably sick he looked. Even the offer to purify the well was more for Pan Jinwen’s baby than it was for the right reasons.

Be just and fight evil didn’t really apply here, though. There was just being compassionate and helping where he could when he could. Su She couldn’t be just anymore, not as a demonic cultivator, but the most compassionate, kind man Su She had ever met was Wei Wuxian, the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. Not the worst inspiration for living his life, overall.

“Please!” Cho Muye begged. “Which one do you want? Both?”

“Nah, just one,” Su She said, pointing to the more complete of the two since they were about the same size. “That’ll work. Give it some padded straps or something and I’ll count it as equal.”

Cho Muye laughed as if Su She was insane, but he still hurried back to his ramshackle little work shed to finish the backpack. Soon as he hurried off, Su She crouched down and set his left hand on the rocks around the top of the well.

They extended all the way down the inside of the well. Once upon a time, someone had done a lot of serious work to make this well as good as possible. Nice tightly fitted stones, cut, and then placed without mortar that would’ve decayed over time, it was the sort of well that lasted for generations.

Anywhere else.

There were old purification arrays cut into the stones all the way down. Su She nodded as he quietly whistled to draw the resentful energy out of the well. It seeped upwards, creeping around his ankles to form a puddle that hopefully none of the Cho’s would see. He took a moment to check the well’s depths with all his senses, both spiritual and demonic, to see if anything had died or fallen in or what have you.

Nope. Just slime mold out of the Burial Mounds finding a congenial new home once the purification arrays failed.

Good.

Once the resentful energy was all out of the well, Su She breathed out and carefully sucked the resentful energy up into his left hand. His veins bulged, turning back as night as it seeped up to ring his bicep where it would be hidden by his sleeves, but the resentful energy soon settled down as he soothed it.

There would be work for it soon, good solid work that would make up for everything that the energy had been born from. He couldn’t quite tell why the energy was here but, hell, it could be a dozen different things from the old war against Xue Chonghai, Chonghai’s own work, or just the resentments of living on a marginal farm at the edge of the worst town in the Jianghu. Where it came from didn’t matter; only giving it a purpose which he’d do soon enough.

After he got the energy settled, Su She called on his golden core to charge the purification arrays in the well.

Got the shock of his life when the whole damned well suddenly blazed with light when he’d expected, at best, a dim, barely visible glimmer along the stone lining. Su She toppled backwards, landing on his ass as he stared up at the blaze of light stabbing up into the sky.

“What the hell are these purification arrays?” Su She squawked to Cho Muye as he came running from his work shed. “The fuck?”

“That’s what I was going to say!” Cho Muye yelped. “It’s never done that before. The cultivators always say that it takes a while for the arrays to have an effect.”

Su She turned to stare up at Cho Muye’s exhausted face. “Those fuckers cheated you. You charge an array; it goes into effect immediately. That’s what charging it fucking means.”

Yeah.

Any hope Su She had of flying under the townsfolk’s notice died when he charged the well’s arrays. Not only did Lianmin come running out with a rusty old halberd in her hands, half the town came running to see just what’d happened at the Cho farm.

The next few shichen, right into the night, was spent explaining over and over again that no, it did not take time for an array to come to full effect. Charged was charged. If it didn’t glow, it wasn’t charged, and they were getting cheated. He managed to wave off from charging up anyone else’s arrays, pleading exhaustion, hunger and, finally, bone-deep terror that the next one was going to take his head off if he wasn’t properly careful and prepared.

The blast had been really damned impressive, after all, so even Lianmin bought it. Muye did, too. Su She spent the night at their farm, sharing some beans from his stored food and then waving away Lianmin’s insistence that they had to pay him more.

“Let me study the arrays on your compound walls and on the well and I’ll count us more than even,” Su She said. “They’re really different from anything I’ve ever studied before. Super-old, too, which is interesting. Most arrays just don’t last that long and all of them are still at least a little active. You know, other than the well.”

One night turned into several, which somehow turned into Su She settling in at the Cho farm during the nights and spending his days wandering around Yiling charging people’s arrays up while studying them intently. They were very different from purification and protection arrays that he’d seen other places and other times, though there was a thread to them that reminded him strongly of Wei Wuxian’s work.

Very possibly, these were what Wei Wuxian had based his most wild, off-the-wall inventions on.

Su She was pretty sure that they were created by Xue Chonghai back before he went mad.

By the time he’d been there a month, everyone called him Laozu Su instead of Su She which was just weird, but hey, he’d been aiming at being Laozu anyway so he’d take it. At the very least, it helped with everyone letting him poke around their homes, farms, businesses and what have you.

There was a lot to poke at.

Ancient arrays that still flickered with life were everywhere. On random rocks around the rice paddies, built into houses as foundation stones, carved into the smoke-blackened beams of most every house.

“Seriously, you just always carve those symbols into the beams?” Su She asked Yiling’s one wood carver who made chairs and tables and also the beams for everyone’s roofs. And their doors which had their own special symbols that were just… assumed… to be perfectly normal.

“Of course,” Du Xilin said. He frowned at Su She as if he was more than half-mad to be questioning it. “Laozu, you can’t have a house without the proper symbols. It’s just not done. You act like you’ve never seen them before.”

“I haven’t,” Su She said. “These are completely new. I’ve never seen them anywhere else. Never even found reference to anything like this in the various libraries I’ve been to, and I would’ve because this is the sort of thing I always find fascinating.”

All true which was good. He was stunned enough by the things that he wasn’t going to be any good at lying, not that he was ever very good at it. Lan didn’t lie. People who left the Lan were pretty darn crappy at it, too.

Du Xilin stared at him though, mouth dropped open to display his lack of teeth on the left side, legacy according to Cho Muye of an epic fist fight Du Xilin had been in when he was Cho Muye’s age.

That was a good thirty years ago so he’d been chewing on one side ever since. The gums on the toothless side were blackened like the band on Su She’s arm, but with much less intent on Du Xilin’s part, of course. He was going to have to come up with a way to properly cleanse the resentful energy out of everyone’s bodies sometime soon.

For Pan Jinwen’s baby’s sake if for nothing else.

“Huh,” Du Xilin grunted. “I suppose you’ll want to see all the symbols I use, then?”

“Absolutely yes,” Su She said, grinning at the way Du Xilin rolled his eyes.

Du Xilin had about eighty symbols, primitive arrays, that he carved into everything he made. Cho Dahong, the potter in town, had a hundred and thirty that he painted onto the pottery made in town. There were another ninety or so that he used but only in carved situations. Lianmin, who turned out to have been a very good weaver before she got so sick, had close to four hundred that she worked into her fabric, almost all of them in the weave pattern as opposed to in color work.

“They’re very traditional,” Lianmin said as she smoothed her hands over the texture of baby blanket she’d painstakingly created for Pan Jinwen’s baby despite how much pain bending over to throw the shuttle gave her. “Grandmother Entai used to say that there was a whole language hidden in the symbols that no one outside of Yiling ever learned.”

“She wasn’t wrong,” Su She said as he carefully felt out and then sketched the woven blessings and protective arrays Lianmin had created for the blanket. “It literally is. I just wish I knew what all the symbols mean because it’s amazing.”

As spring edged into the hammer-blow dry heat of early summer, Su She recorded everything he could find. Every symbol. Every usage. Every array in and around Yiling. He still hadn’t forged into the Burial Mounds proper yet, but that was fine. There was time. Wen Ruohan wouldn’t start trying to conquer the world for a good nine months to a year and a half yet.

Everywhere he went, Su She charged up people’s protective arrays. Houses, compound walls, fields, wells, on their pottery, whatever he could find, Su She charged.

The first few came alive just like the well in a blaze of terrifying power. More than once, Su She dove to the side and then had to check his pants to see if he’d lost bladder control. After he’d gotten a dozen or so recharged, the displays grew less and less violent. The amount of power he had to put in was lower, too, as if the arrays were subtly influencing each other. Once he got everything in town charged, including Lianmin’s fabric and any random bits of crockery Cho Dahong had painted pretty symbols on, Su She ventured out into the surrounding hills.

There were hundreds, thousands, more of the arrays with their strange symbols out there. Su She recorded every one of them, then charged them all.

In the back of his mind, he could hear Lan Qiren querulously asking him just what he thought he was doing, mucking about in ancient dark knowledge that led to the evils of demonic cultivation. All of it had to come from Xue Chonghai, after all.

But then he’d look at Muye, who no longer hunched around his aching gut, or Lianmin who sometimes smiled now. He’d go walk in Yiling and see that the pockets of resentful energy he’d noted when he first arrived were fading away. The river no longer looked like a slime-ridden sludge pit. It didn’t stink like death and taste like some of the things Su She had eaten during the Sunshot Campaign’s darkest days.

Yiling looked… normal. Felt normal. Better than that, actually, because every single person in Yiling started glowing with health right about the time he finished cataloging all the arrays outside of town.

“You did something, didn’t you?” Muye asked once Su She arrived back at the farm with a raft of new notes to carefully transcribe into his precious notebooks, bought outright from his hoarded store of money instead of traded for just so that he could keep everything organized properly.

“While out wandering around in the hills?” Su She asked, looking up from the stacks upon stacks of carefully sketched, copied or rubbed symbols. “Yeah. I activated everything I came across. Why?”

“Jinwen swears that her belly glowed while you were gone,” Muye said. “My stomach stopped hurting entirely. Mom’s smiled six times and she’s warping up her loom again, the big one that’s sat idle for most of my life because it hurt too much to work on it. Too much bending and twisting throwing the shuttle.”

He crouched down and offered Su She a wrist. Su She frowned, but he still checked Muye out.

There’d been nothing but the vaguest hints of a core when he first arrived in town. When he brushed his fingers over Muye’s fingertips in the marketplace, his fledgling core had been swamped by the resentful energy gnawing away at his guts.

Now he had a nice little core, nothing spectacular but quite respectable for a sixteen-year-old man.

“When did that happen?” Su She asked, checking again and then a third time only to get the same results.

“While you were off in the hills,” Muye said. “Everyone agrees. It was like there was a fog across Yiling and it started lifting a shichen or so after dawn today. By the middle of the afternoon, it was gone. All of us, everyone in town, feels way better. And we all could suddenly feel our cores.”

“Wait, you all had cores but couldn’t feel them?” Su She said.

He squawked when Muye nodded as if that was the weirdest question ever.

“What?” Muye protested as Su She bolted to his feet. “That’s normal. I mean, seriously, everyone gets a core by the time they’re a year or two old. We’ve just had a terrible time feeling them for the last couple of generations.”

“What,” Su She whispered with every bit of the emotion in his heart, “the fuck are you talking about? No one, ever, gets a core by the time they’re one. Most people don’t develop their cores until they’re teenagers!”

“What?” Muye asked with just as much confused horror as Su She.

So, yeah, that turned into another month’s worth of research that kept Su She from investigating the Burial Mounds, but hey, Yiling was even more unusual than he’d thought in the beginning. Every single person in town had a core. Most of them did fuck-all to improve their cores once they’d appeared, but whatever the weirdness of Yiling really was, it somehow helped every single person develop a core.

Without trying.

Su She wasn’t sure if he was angrier about it or more fascinated. Either way, towards the tail end of summer where the apples started getting ripe and they began harvesting the grain, Su She went to stand at the edge of the Burial Mounds proper, just on the Yiling side of the ramshackle line of sealing arrays put down by the great sects.

The stone closest to him was Nie. It was nearly dead, only a flicker of power left in it. Off to the right, a few paces away, was an ancient Lan stone that was so covered with moss and lichen that the only way it was identifiable was its overall shape. The Wen stones were in a little better shape, physically, but they had no charge whatsoever.

“Tell me you’re not going in there,” Muye complained.

“Can’t do that because I absolutely am,” Su She replied without looking over his shoulder.

“You’ll be killed!” Muye shouted.

He grabbed Su She’s shoulder, hauling him around so that Su She had no choice but to meet Muye’s very worried, very young eyes. Seriously, he looked so much better. He looked his age instead of like an old-before-his-time about-to-keel-over wreck.

“No, I won’t,” Su She promised.

“You don’t know what they’re like,” Muye snarled. “They’ll eat you. They’ll tear your throat out and eat you.”

“No, they really won’t,” Su She said, amused. “Not only because I have my sword and my cultivation. Not only because I have the training and have gone on a bunch of night hunts. And not only because I’ve fought literal armies of resentful dead.”

“Yeah, right,” Muye complained. “So what else do you have going for you?”

Su She smiled sadly as he called on the resentful energy soaked into his bicep and into the ground around them. “I’m a demonic cultivator, too. They won’t kill me because I control them. Well, I can control them. I’ve not claimed any of them yet because seriously, no need to.”

“No…” Muye breathed, backing several stumbling steps away from Su She. “No! You’re not a monster.”

“No, I’m not,” Su She agreed. “The ghostly path isn’t evil. I’m not a monster of any kind. I just have a task that I have to do, and I can’t until I understand just what Xue Chonghai did here. He was building something beautiful, Muye. Yiling could’ve been the best place in the Jianghu, but something went wrong, and I need to find out what.”

Muye looked back towards the Cho farm, where the plants were growing better, and the sun seemed to shine more brightly than it had before. His brother Shuxin was out hoeing out weeds in the vegetable garden. When Shuxin saw them, he casually waved a hand their way.

Su She waved back. Muye didn’t. Shuxin went back to work with a smile visible despite the distance.

“You’ve made everything better,” Muye muttered. “We’re alive. We’re healthy. How can you be a demonic cultivator?”

“Everything that you know about demonic cultivation is wrong?” Su She suggested.

He couldn’t help but smile wryly when Muye rolled his head around to glare flatly at him. Probably not the best way to say it, but by this point Su She was fairly certain he had the broad outlines correct. What everyone in the Jianghu called “demonic cultivation” wasn’t demonic at all. Xue Chonghai had been creating something very different based on a much, much older style of cultivation that no one really remembered anymore.

Something had clearly gone very, very wrong, yeah, but the bones of his work still lived on in and around Yiling.

And it was beautiful.

“Promise me you’re not going to raise an army of the dead to kill us all,” Muye demanded like the kid he was.

“I promise that I’ll never raise an army of the dead against anyone in Yiling,” Su She promptly said. He held up a hand when Muye opened his mouth to protest. “Wen Ruohan is taking over little sects left and right, Muye. He’s threatening the Great Sects, cowing the emperors of the states that surround the Jianghu. He’s got a piece of Yin Iron and he’s prepared to use it. He’s going to come through here eventually and frankly, there’s no one else who could protect the town. I can. I know I can. I’ve done it before. I will swear on my very life that I will never attack the people of Yiling, but I don’t trust the sects or Wen Ruohan. There will be war. I will be ready for it. And I promise that I’ll do everything in my power to protect everyone here. But that’s all you’re getting on the promise front.”

Muye was nearly as pale as he’d been on that first day by the time Su She was done. He nodded slowly, biting his lip. Then he nodded again, firmly.

“Fine, I’ll take it,” Muye said. “You’re our Laozu, the Yiling Laozu. As long as you won’t turn on us, it’s fine. Just make sure you don’t get eaten or go crazy or something. And try to be back by dinner, if you can. Mom said that she was pulling noodles for dinner tonight.”

Su She looked at the Burial Mounds and then back at the Cho house, briefly tempted to put it off for another day.

“Damn it, way to make me keep the trip in there short, Muye,” Su She complained.

He rolled his eyes as Muye snickered at him, but whatever. Whatever!

This time Muye didn’t stop Su She as he passed the boundary lines and began the hike up into the heart of the Burial Mounds. It wasn’t a whole heck of a lot different than it’d been in the future that wasn’t. Still dry, parched earth with dead trees. Scrubby grass gone parched brown dotted the rising hills that led inwards.

Now, after studying so much around Yiling, Su She could see how the viciously spiked rock spires at the center of the Burial Mounds had been crafted. They weren’t natural at all. Xue Chonghai had worked with the stone, sculpting it to be this way.

And after hundreds of years, it was still this way. He carefully ran his fingers over the base of one spire and nodded. The dryness in here was deliberate. The spires had arrays built into them to encourage rain to move around, the ground to be parched and dead, and the air to be as dry as the deserts to the north.

It wasn’t until he got past the spires that the air had some hint of moisture. Significant, that. Su She wasn’t sure what Xue Chonghai had been trying to preserve in here, but looking at the place now, he definitely had something hidden away.

Somewhere.

The resentful dead, both ghostly and corpse, watched Su She as he made his way towards Wei Wuxian’s Demon Subdue Palace. His cave. Xue Chonghai’s cave, really. They didn’t attack him or interfere or even come shambling towards him, though Su She saw quite a few skeletal soldiers in battered, decaying armor off among the trees.

They felt…

Hm. Curious wasn’t the right word. Like they were waiting, watching, anticipating something that would happen soon. It felt kind of like how the Yin Iron hiding in the Cold Pond had been before he left Gusu.

Something new was happening. They didn’t know what to make of it. They were waiting to see, even as their old bones ached to let go and move on into the cycle of reincarnation. They were stuck and unable to change.

Like Muye. Like Yiling.

Like Su She himself, though he had his promise to himself and to Muye to guide him. The world was going to descend into war in the very near future. Su She couldn’t do a lot, not yet, but he could be ready to fight Wen Ruohan. He could protect the people of Yiling, maybe steal some of Wen Ruohan’s victims out from under his nose.

And he would keep Meng Yao from becoming Jin Guangyao, if he could.

Deserved or not, Su She had given Jin Guangyao his loyalty. He’d promised to protect him and help him however he could. Keeping Meng Yao from ever serving Wen Ruohan was probably the best and most significant way he could help the man who’d held Su She’s heart all uncaringly in his hand before tossing it aside for his so-expensive and failed vengeance.

After he figured out the Burial Mounds, of course.

3. In Which Our Protagonist Discovers Old Secrets Hidden Away Long Ago and Realizes That He Has Much to Learn

Ghosts wailed among the trees. They didn’t have much left to them, honestly. The ghosts he’d used in the future that wasn’t had been distinct personalities with specific reasons to resent the living and to want revenge. These ghosts were faceless masses of resentment, not individual people anymore.

In much the same way, any buildings that used to exist at the heart of the Burial Mounds had slowly decayed until they were piles of sticks punctuated by shattered roofing tiles. The walls of Xue Chonghai’s palace, which Su She could identify only by finding the lingering glimmers of power in the array-decorated foundation stones, had apparently been knocked down so thoroughly that even the piles of bricks were long gone.

“They really destroyed everything in here,” Su She commented to no one.

The crows heard him, maybe. The ghosts certainly weren’t going to reply to him. Those walking dead soldiers had stayed well outside of the central area near the cave, so he wasn’t going to talk to them.

And yet, it still felt like someone heard him because the Burial Mounds itself seemed to grumble over the destruction. Old and tired, the presence felt like the crankiest of the Lan Elders who walked hunched over their canes while mumbling about weather shifts and young children who should be more respectful.

“I’ve been studying what he created,” Su She commented as he slowly strolled towards the cave. “I’ve recharged all the arrays I could find out in Yiling. The town at the base of the mountain. No idea what it would’ve been called in Xue Chonghai’s day. Everyone’s much healthier now. It’s kind of strange. There’s so much resentful energy but they all just… shrug it off and go on with their lives when the arrays are charged.”

The Burial Mounds rumbled under his feet, shifting in a minor earthquake that was as much in the energies as it was in the ground.

“Yeah, it makes me happy, too,” Su She admitted, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I mean, I didn’t want to get all wrapped up in their lives, but I went and did it. I promised Muye, Cho Muye, second son of the family that lives closest to the barriers the Great Sects put up, that I’d never raise an army against them.”

Su She grinned at how exceedingly disgruntled the Burial Mounds was by that promise. He laughed and kicked a little pebble towards the cave entrance, tilting his head back to look at the formless dark shapes of the ghosts circling in the looming clouds overhead.

“Oh, don’t be so grumpy at me,” Su She said. “I’m still going to do my best to kill the Wen. Well, Wen Ruohan in particular is a problem. He’s got a piece of the Yin Iron that I need to take away or something. And I do intend to do something about the other pieces. They’re so damned tired. They want to rest, and all the spiritual cultivators can think to do is seal them away to suffer even longer.”

That made the Burial Mounds perk up nicely. There was a pulse of energy from the cave, repeated when Su She crouched down to poke at a bit of tiled floor that hadn’t gone completely back to the elements. There was a nice bit of one of the symbols on it.

“Protect, I think,” Su She said, waving at the cave. “I’m getting there. I’m still learning to read all this. It’s completely different from the characters I’m used to. And I think I’ve only noted down like a quarter of the symbols, honestly. I’ve got so damned much to learn.”

This time the pulse from the cave was insistent enough that Su She rolled his eyes as he stood and headed that way.

“Pushy,” Su She drawled. “I’ve been here before. Well, not before exactly. I lived this life once before, died messily, and sent my soul back to try again. I have a pretty good idea what’s in here and there’s nothing that I remember in there that’ll be helpful.”

Pure pissy outrage rolled over Su She. If the Burial Mounds had a voice, it would’ve been scolding him like Lianmin did Shuxin every morning when he groaned and whined about getting out of bed. Lazy, ignorant, uneducated, and uncouth were all good descriptors for the scolding coming from the cave.

Su She grinned. “Snippy. No one’s seen this since he died, you know. How could I be educated on it? At least I’m making an effort to learn it now that I know it’s here.”

Inside, the cave was pretty much what he remembered. The opening was small enough that a sturdy door could’ve covered it. A couple of paces inside, the cave opened up into a looming dark audience hall of a space with the ceiling hidden in darkness four or five times higher than Su She was tall.

There were lights where none had ever been in the future that wasn’t.

Dozens of symbols gleamed in the darkness overhead. More of them shimmered around the doorway, there when he looked from the corner of his eyes and gone when he turned to look straight-on. There were even some carved into the floor, laid out a lot like a giant xiangqi board, complete with lines connecting the symbols.

“Oh, now that is interesting,” Su She said, studying the layout. “The attacking army is going to lose so badly. You know, if this was actually xiangqi.”

His knees nearly gave way as a wave of shocked delight swept through the cave. It was way more intense inside the cave than it’d been outside. Focused, actually. Much more focused than Su She would have thought given his previous experiences in the future that wasn’t.

But then…

…Wei Wuxian hadn’t ever gone out into Yiling to activate the arrays. Even when he brought the Dafan Wen here, Wei Wuxian hadn’t done a single thing that Su She could remember with the bits and pieces left over by Xue Chonghai.

Sure, there were some odd little fillips in his arrays that looked a lot like what Su She had found so far, but that could’ve just as easily come from his time as a homeless street kid in Yiling as it could’ve from here.

“This is a defensive array,” Su She whispered. “And you’re an… entity? The remnants of Xue Chonghai himself? The combined consciousness of everyone who died here? What?”

He got a strong yes on it being a defensive array, but the rest of the questions just got him an impatient wobble of energy summoning him further into the cave. No answers from the Burial Mounds then. Su She would just have to investigate for himself.

Which he did.

The inner cave with its toppled statue was a lot like he remembered. Dusty, dry other than the pool which wasn’t bloody, thank goodness. The statue was still immense and creepy as fuck with its gaping mouth and blank eyes.

“Not many arrays,” Su She commented as he stalked around the room. “This wasn’t an important room, was it? Not like that outer room. But there’s so little here. There has to be more.”

He spent a while checking every spur cave and passage, finding a few arrays here and there, but nothing like the xiangqi defensive array. Eventually, as night was falling outside proving that he was not going to get any of Lianmin’s excellent noodles, Su She found himself back in the cave with the statue and the pool, glaring at its blank eyes.

“Right, so this has been a waste of time,” Su She complained. “Give me a hint here, will you? I need more information. More symbols. Hell, something like an actual text would be wonderful. There’s got to be more here, but I can’t find it.”

The Burial Mounds hummed at him, considering him. It felt uncomfortably like having a god stare him down. Or a tiger yao consider whether or not to eat him.

Then a gleam of light reflected off the back of the statue’s head.

Su She blinked and then resigned himself to clambering over the toppled demon statue like an ant crawling up a human’s leg. Which was pretty much what he did, honestly. Despite the pool, and the trickle of water coming down the cave wall to feed it, the back of the statue was dry. No moss. No slime mold. No lichen. Only a bunch of dust.

There was a little gap between the statue’s head and the cave wall, just wide enough for Su She to settle into it if he didn’t breathe too deeply. It wasn’t until he was standing there, being careful not to breathe hard, that he realized that wait…

Wait.

Why wasn’t his breath being reflected back at him? He should feel the moisture and heat of his breath bouncing off the cave wall. He didn’t.

“Huh,” Su She grunted, eyebrows going up. “Right. This must be one hell of an illusion.”

He carefully raised his hands, patting the cave wall in front of him as he brought his arms up and towards the center. Wall, wall, normal old wall, then just barely wider than his shoulders, open air that looked just like cave wall.

“Well, fuck.” Su She bit his lip, anxiety making him dizzy as every single horrible thing that could happen rampaged through his mind.

Bugs, snakes, yao of all kinds. There could be a drop that he couldn’t see. It could be pitch black all the way, nothing that he could see. The space could be warded against everyone and everything, meaning he’d drop dead and Muye would wonder just what happened to him for the rest of his life.

The Burial Mounds nudged him impatiently.

“Stop it,” Su She rasped as he fought with his breathing. “Anxiety attack. Let me ride it out, damn you.”

Thankfully, the Burial Mounds did just that. Not especially happily. It kept grumbling and rumbling, making the ground feel like it was shifting under his feet which was not helpful in the slightest when he was having a panic attack. But it waited for him to get himself in hand.

“Right, so I hope you’re not aiming to kill me in sneaky ways here,” Su She said once the flood of worries subsided, and his heart slowed down to something approximating normal. “Here goes.”

Hands up so that he wouldn’t run nose-first into something, tapping his toes as he shuffled forward, Su She advanced through the hidden passage. The first pace or two was dead black and completely silent.

Then he emerged into a library.

Scrolls filled the shelf niches carved into the cave walls. They were dusty, obviously old as fuck, but they were still there. Su She breathed out a whispered curse full of awe and then promptly looked for any arrays that looked like preservation and cleanliness. Or felt like them. Or, you know, gave him the vague impression that they might help keep all the scrolls intact.

It wasn’t a library like the Lan Library with several rooms covered with shelves. This library had four walls. One had the doorway. The wall opposite the door had a complicated mural covered with symbols. The other two walls had the shelves which held maybe a hundred scrolls wrapped in delicate silk, each with a dangling label ribbon that had the name or maybe the author written on it in symbols that he couldn’t read.

Yet.

Amazingly enough, the ceiling overhead glowed. There was a light array up there. Su She spared one second to wonder whether it’d been active all this time or if he’d activated it when he came in. Or maybe the Burial Mound had brought it back to life?

Didn’t matter. Because each shelf had their own individual preservation and cleaning arrays that Su She activated one by one. He ducked out of the way of the billowing dust after getting a face full the first time. Twelve shelves so it was pretty quick. Then he delicately and carefully took one scroll off the shelf.

“Wow, the silk’s in better shape than I would have expected,” Su She murmured as he extracted the scroll. “Hmm. Bamboo strips sewn together, inked symbols covered with… yeah, beeswax. Fuck, I need so much paper to transcribe these. So much paper and ink. I can’t take these out of here, not even to study them.”

It was a full language. Visibly, obviously, a full language with punctuation marks and directionality and grammar and everything. Lianmin’s weaving was really close to the same “grammar” though she was using a subset of the characters in the scroll. Fuck, he wanted to sit down right here and study it until he had it all worked out in his head.

The mural kept flashing at him.

“Fine,” Su She grumbled. “I’ll put the scroll away, you pushy bastard. Damn it, you don’t understand just how fascinating this is. The greatest academic find in a thousand years, and you want me to go stare at a pretty painting instead.”

He made a point of wrapping the silk cover around the scroll exactly as it had been before, taking his time with each and every fold of the fabric even though he could feel the Burial Mound’s impatience in his bones. Made his molars ache, honestly, which was kind of weird. But then skeletons wouldn’t have much to feel anything with besides their teeth, now would they?

Eventually, he finished that and had to go stare at the mural.

Which wasn’t a mural.

It was a map.

“You mad fucking genius,” Su She whispered as he stared at the map. “You ridiculous idiot. What the hell were you thinking?”

Yiling and the Burial Mounds didn’t have arrays built into them. They were an array. The biggest array that Su She had ever even heard of. Sure, the Cloud Recesses had defenses wrapped around it and the Nie’s Unclean Realm built wards right into their mountain, but it wasn’t like this.

Xue Chonghai had sculpted the land around his palace, around this cave where he presumably kept the most secret of his knowledge, into one enormous array. The shape of the mountains formed the border lines. The road and the river were part of it. Every place he’d cataloged so far was marked on the map, as well as places further around the Burial Mounds that he hadn’t gotten to.

“Health, safety, protection,” Su She picked out, fingers ghosting just above the mural because he was desperately afraid to even touch it for fear of damaging the ancient paint. “Power. Wow, power’s written all over this thing. Longevity, I think. Gah, I need a dictionary! A lexicon. Hell, I’d take a grammar. Some letters asking Mom to send socks. Anything to give me a sense of how this damned language works.”

Since he didn’t have it, Su She pulled out his notebook and set to work sketching the entirety of the mural. It took far too many pages that he would have to cut out and paste together later, but that was all right. He’d come back. He’d bring better paper, ink and brushes, so that he could copy everything.

At least the Lan copying talisman worked well on bamboo scrolls. All he would have to do was unwrap them, set the new paper scroll next to the old bamboo scroll, and the talisman would copy over everything including the lines of the thread stitching the bamboo strips together.

“This is so amazing,” Su She whispered as he finished the last little bit of his mural copy. “So amazing. I just. I want to ask Teacher Qiren about this, and I can’t. That would be so stupid. But he would love the mystery of it, if he didn’t know where it came from. Damn it all.”

It was one of the few things that had always made him like Teacher Qiren. Lan Qiren. Acting Sect Leader Lan. He loved old books and old knowledge as much as Su She did. One of his fondest early memories of the early days in the Cloud Recesses had been listening with awe as Lan Qiren lectured in that dry, precise tone of his about…

…the ancient pictographs that had formed the initial basis of Chinese characters.

“Oh, fuck,” Su She whispered as he stared at the mural again. “Those aren’t symbols. They’re pictographs! Not Chinese, I don’t think, but something like it. Okay, yeah, I will need to talk to him. He’s sure to be able to at least point me at the right country that this all came from.”

Su She did his best not to run straight out of the hidden library and then all the way back to Gusu. Wasn’t easy. Really wasn’t easy since he knew that Lan Qiren would be all over this and just as delighted as Su She was.

“All right,” Su She said as he breathed through the rush of nerves, the rampaging ideas of what kind of acclaim he could get, and the corresponding bitter certainty that everyone would take this discovery and Su She himself for granted.

“All right,” he repeated, “what do I need? I need at least the same number of scrolls. I need ink sticks, a lot of them. I need a work table I can set up easily, all by myself. That means a nice big qiankun pouch built into my new backpack. I need to, to, to contact Lan Qiren… Oh! I should bring him fragmentary bits of this. Yeah.”

Assorted fragments of the writing from around town and then maybe one bit copied out of one of the scrolls. That would work. And it was really damned believable for a former student of Lan Qiren’s to come back to ask him questions if he had found a puzzle like this one.

There’d be questions about why his aura was tainted by resentful energy, why he was so different.

“Yiling,” Su She muttered as he scanned the various scrolls. “Fuck. Which one would be harmless? If I pick the wrong one and Teacher Qiren can read it, I might end up dead on the spot.”

The Burial Mounds rumbled as they shoved him away from the shelf he’d been looking at and over to the shelves on the far side of the room. One of the scrolls, a slender little one about the size of two of his fingers held together, glowed with a soft green light.

“That one, huh?” Su She said as he pulled it off the shelf.

The silk wrapping it was embroidered with leaves and the outlines of various sorts of vegetables. Su She hummed and carefully unwrapped it. Inside, there were drawings of various plants in different stages of growth with arrays next to them. Each array had a bit of text explaining something.

“How to better grow your veggies, I’d bet,” Su She murmured. “Good choice. No one would object to that.”

He sat down on the floor of the library so that he could copy several of the illustrations, their arrays and descriptions into his notebook. Not many pages left in it. Man, he needed so many notebooks to work on all of this. Once done, Su She wrapped it back up, quickly but carefully, and then put it back on the shelf.

It kept glowing.

“No, I am absolutely not taking it out of here,” Su She huffed. “The preservation spells are keeping it safe. They won’t exist outside. And frankly, I want to convince Teacher Qiren that I found fragments, not a full scroll. Stop being so damned pushy, will you?”

The Burial Mounds huffed at him, but they let him leave the library without the scroll. He did make a point of sketching out the xiangqi defensive array on his way out, plus a quick sketch of the cave itself, but that was it.

Dawn gleamed over the spiky spires surrounding Xue Chonghai’s secret library.

“Ah, man, I missed the noodles,” Su She grumbled as he set off down the mountain once more.

When he pushed open the door to the Cho house, Muye looked up from his breakfast of congee with bits of fruit floating in it.

“You’re late,” Muye declared, completely ignoring the way Lianmin swatted his shoulder and Pan Jinwen giggled at them both.

“Yeah, yeah, shut it,” Su She grumbled at him. “Amazing discoveries don’t wait for noodles. Sadly. I’m kind of annoyed about that.”

Lianmin cackled as she served him a bowl of congee that Pan Jinwen dropped fruit into along with some little bits of tofu. Shuxin, as normal for any time before midday, slowly plodded his way through eating his breakfast with an expression that suggested he was a fierce corpse instead of a human being.

“So what did you find?” Muye asked.

“The dead are… waiting for something,” Su She said, frowning into his congee. “Not sure what, but it has to have something to do with all the arrays I charged up. There’s some big… something… at the center of the Burial Mounds. Nothing at all left of Xue Chonghai’s palace. I mean, there’s a cave but all there is inside of it is a toppled statue. Head is as tall as I am. It was massive. Must’ve taken a small army to topple the thing over.”

Muye listened with fascination while Lianmin’s frown intensified the more Su She talked. She’d yet to treat him like one of her sons but Pan Jinwen had quietly informed Su She a few days ago that Lianmin already thought of him as her wayward by-blow by someone else’s loins. He was just waiting for the motherly lecture about not being an idiot and bringing shame to the family to come out.

“What will you do?” Pan Jinwen asked, glancing at Lianmin.

“Well,” Su She replied as he pulled out his notes and showed them just how few pages he had left in his only remaining notebook, “I did find some neat stuff that looks like descriptions of arrays for how to grow various vegetables better. Faster? Bigger, probably. I think I’m going to take a trip back to Gusu, talk to my old teacher. He’s like me about old languages and arrays. Loves them.”

“So he’ll skip eating and sleeping just to study the things?” Lianmin asked in that motherly disapproval tone that made both Muye and Shuxin wince.

“Yes,” Su She said, grinning at her. “Yes, he will. And has. And does on a regular basis. Teacher Qiren’s just like that. Frankly, his encouragement of my… fascinations with this stuff is the reason I stayed in the Lan as long as I did.”

Muye had to turn to the side to avoid Lianmin’s scowl of disapproval.

Su She didn’t bother.

The rest of the meal was all scolding, which Su She just grinned over. It’d been such a long time since he’d had a mother that getting motherly attention was a pure delight instead of a dismay, even with how disapproving Lianmin was.

He’d planned on setting out for Caiyi Town right after breakfast. Lianmin stomped on that idea. She made him get cleaned up, complete with washing all his robes. Then she made him neaten all his notes up into something approximating a logical, legible order. Which, fair. He would inevitably show Teacher Qiren all of them so better to have them look something like coherent than the mad jumble they had been.

By that point it was evening, so he spent the night and got a good night’s sleep in his little loft space up in the rafters of the Cho house. Sometime in late spring, it’d stopped feeling weird to sleep in and among his notes which were stacked between pickle barrels and boxes full of old broken tools.

The loft was warm, and it was dry. He could hear the wind humming in the thatch. At this point in the summer, it was too warm, of course. Su She was a cultivator, so it didn’t much matter to him. He just adjusted his temperature and then dropped right to sleep.

The next day everyone in town had messages and packages that they wanted him to carry to the next big town. The Jiang and the Lan had junior cultivators who were assigned to fly mail for a nominal fee. It was good training on flying for the younger ones who struggled with controlling their swords and the sects never promised that your packages would get there perfectly pristine.

Mostly intact, sure, but not, you know, perfect. Most mail usually ended up with mud stains or water marks or whatever from when the kids lost control and plummeted into the ground. No junior that Su She had ever known did it more than a couple of times, but they all did it.

He had when he’d had the duty at twelve.

So yeah, charging straight into Lan Qiren’s office had to wait for loading up packages and taking orders for various supplies that no one could get in Yiling. Everyone had money, not a lot but enough to cover their requests. Everyone was excited to send him on their way.

“I swear,” Su She grumbled to Muye once he’d crafted his big qiankun pouch into the canvas lining of his new basket backpack, “I need a pack mule for all of this.”

“You’re the one who volunteered,” Muye said, grinning at him as he adjusted the straps to fit Su She’s shoulders properly.

“I don’t remember volunteering for anything,” Su She protested. “Your mother just told me I was doing it. This was not my idea at all.”

“Uh-huh,” Muye drawled, nodding that he was done. “Whatever you say, Laozu Su. Whatever you say.”

He laughed as he ducked away from Su She’s swat, then waved with everyone else as Su She mounted up on his sword to set out. The kids in town all yelled in excitement like they’d never seen anything of the sort. That was a lie. He’d done it a half dozen times since he came to town, mostly because the kids had begged and begged until he gave in to the whiny little brats.

Su She waved back to everyone, then flew along a bit above treetop level. Not fast. He could’ve got much higher, much faster, but he wanted to see if he could feel the edges of the giant array from the air.

It was noticeable, to him anyway, from the ground, but that didn’t mean that it was perceptible from the air. Sometimes you could feel arrays even when you were so high up that people looked like ants. Sometimes you could hover a finger’s width above an active array and feel nothing.

The giant array built into Yiling was one of the feel-nothing ones.

Su She knew where the edge was. He’d charged every bit of it on this side of the Burial Mounds. Even with that, he couldn’t feel a single thing from the air.

Good. If he couldn’t feel it even when he knew it was there, then none of the Great Sects would suddenly notice that something was going on while he was gone. He’d made a promise to keep Yiling safe. It’d be so damn frustrating if he broke it because he had to leave to go get more paper.

Once past the edge, Su She went higher and faster. The summer-golden landscape zipped by below his sword. This high up, the air was cool and crisp with only a hint of the dust of summer. He’d missed flying while staying in Yiling.

But as he flew ever closer to Gusu, all Su She wanted was to turn around and head back to the place that had somehow become home.

4. In Which Our Protagonist Encounters His Rival Who Barely Remembers Who He Is, Which Just Figures

Not a single thing had changed in Caiyi Town.

Su She wasn’t sure why he’d expected everything to be different. Probably because he remembered what it looked like after the Wen burned the Cloud Recesses down and plunked a Supervisory Office in the heart of Caiyi, but yeah, he’d been kind of shocked that nothing had changed in the months he’d been gone.

He’d learned so much. How could the rest of the world have trundled along without noticing?

Thank fuck the rest of the world hadn’t noticed. Seriously. But yeah, it was weird.

He’d sent a message up to Teacher Qiren to say that he was back in town and had some questions about some weird old pictograms he’d found, but there hadn’t been a reply yet. Su She couldn’t really expect Lan Qiren to jump up and run down to look at them, but he’d sort of expected Teacher Qiren to jump up and run down to look at them.

You know. Because ancient pictograms of unknown origin that needed to be deciphered. That was just what one did.

While he was waiting, Su She had sent his many packages, bought an extra set of inner robes in nice warm red cotton for winter because they were cheap even though it was much too early, and ordered an absolute fuckton, technical term, of paper, blank scrolls, and ink. Plus about twenty new brushes, too.

It’d take a couple of days for them to be ready, so he shrugged and headed towards his favorite cheap restaurant on the edge of Caiyi Lake. Food was always a good way to pass the time, especially when he didn’t have to dig it up, clean it or cook it himself.

Lianmin had firm opinions about everyone in a household contributing to the meals. What with her husband, who Su She still hadn’t met, dodging in and out of Yiling and never contributing anything besides demands, laundry to be done, and complaining, Su She could hardly blame her for it.

It just meant that he was looking forward to a nicely greasy restaurant meal with fried tofu and all the breaded vegetables he could get. With at least four bowls of rice.

So of course he didn’t make it to the restaurant before trouble found him. It found him. Not the other way around, damn it.

“Su She!”

He started and whirled, staring as Lan Xichen hurried over with a look of delighted surprise on his perfect face. Lan Wangji stalked behind him, a look of blankly scowling disapproval on his face. There were a dozen or so other guest disciples behind them, plus some Lan junior disciples, too.

Oh, shit.

This was the Waterborne Abyss day, wasn’t it? Su She blinked at Lan Xichen several times and then bowed properly even though his black, grey, and red robes were tied loosely enough that his chest showed, and his hair was up in a loose, messy ponytail just to keep it off his back in this heat.

“Sect Heir Xichen,” Su She said. “What are you doing in town? I mean, sorry, no, um, can I help you?”

Lan Xichen breathed a little laugh, bowing back properly. His smile even looked actually happy instead of the slightly forced one he usually pointed in Su She’s direction later on. Actually, today was the day where things had started really going wrong for Su She. The Waterborne Abyss had shown everyone that he just wasn’t Lan caliber and he’d been blindingly jealous of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji both.

Oh, great. Wei Wuxian peered around Lan Wangji’s side; eyes bright with curiosity as he studied Su She like Su She was somehow incredibly impressive instead of a messy slob.

“I’m so glad that you’ve returned,” Lan Xichen said, beaming. “We’ll get you reinstated—”

“Whoa, wait,” Su She interrupted, heart rate quadrupling immediately. “I’m not here to rejoin the Lan. I’m just here to get some supplies. And, well, get some lunch. My favorite restaurant is on the lake, and I really wanted some of their fried tofu and breaded vegetables. I’ve missed that greasy food.”

“You’re…?” Lan Xichen blinked at him as if he couldn’t quite parse what Su She had said. Worse, Lan Wangji glowered at Su She as if he was a horrible person for daring to disappoint his brother. “But I thought…”

“No,” Su She said, laughing a little that he had to explain it again. “Sect Heir Xichen, not everyone is suited to be a Lan. I thought it would be good for me, you know, after my mother died. But it wasn’t. The Rules, while a great structure for many people, are horrible for me. I had constant anxiety, panic attacks about breaking the rules. I was worried about it all the time to the point that I could barely eat or sleep. I was so intensely jealous of you and your brother that I could barely breathe. You take to the Rules like its easy and it was always agony for me. So yeah, I left. I’m much, much happier now.”

Lan Xichen stared; mouth open slightly. A few of the Lans, none that Su She had ever been close-ish to, stared, too, but no one said anything. Until Lan Wangji tilted his head to the side.

“Jealous?” Lan Wangji asked, putting his normal epic amounts of emotion into the single word.

The flicker of his brows tighter together was disapproval of Su She’s having allowed himself feel jealousy. The pursing of his lips was all about how uncomfortable Lan Wangji was with anyone having compared themselves to him. And the way his shoulders went twice as stiff as before was all about how Lan Wangji always compared himself to the original Lans and found himself wanting.

Su She hadn’t spent his entire time in the Lan comparing himself to Lan Wangji without learning how to read the man.

“Desperately,” Su She said, grimacing. “If I’d stayed, as I told Sect Leader Lan, I would’ve fallen straight into obsessive jealousy and been miserable. And you know I would’ve made it everyone else’s problem.”

That made a sliver of amusement flare in Lan Wangji’s eyes as the other Lan disciples snickered. Lan Xichen laughed softly, nodding that Su She had a point.

“Wait, so you’re a former Lan?” Wei Wuxian asked way later than Su She had expected him to interrupt. “I didn’t think anyone would leave the Lan.”

“Eh, it happens,” Su She said. “Maybe a handful every generation decide they just don’t fit in. One or two every couple decades get thrown out for one failing or another. It’s not a big deal, really. People just don’t talk about it.”

“Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Wanyin hissed at him, grabbing his sleeve to drag him back. “Don’t go poking at people’s sore spots.”

Su She burst out laughing, waving off Jiang Wanyin’s worries. “Oh, no. Seriously, I’m fine. I’m so much happier than I was. I haven’t had more than a handful of panic attacks since I left. I used to have so many of them that the doctors had me taught special breath control techniques because they were worried I was going to get addicted to the calming teas.”

“I didn’t realize it was that bad,” Lan Xichen said, horrified.

“Mm, yeah,” Su She said. “I was a mess. Now I’m not. It’s better. By the way, is Teacher Qiren available? I sent him a message, but he hasn’t replied.”

Su She went ahead and asked even though he knew from the future that wasn’t that Lan Qiren was off at a discussion conference. It allowed him to open up the discussion on the Yiling arrays, which he kind of wanted to do with Wei Wuxian around.

Who knew what Wei Wuxian had seen but never talked about in the future that wasn’t?

“Ah, my apologies,” Lan Xichen said in that slightly formal way where he wasn’t really apologizing but he did feel a little bit bad about not being able to help you. “I’m afraid that our uncle is off at a discussion conference. He won’t be back until seven days from now.”

“Damn,” Su She grumbled. “Right. I’ll send him a proper letter with the pictograms I found. I really wanted to ask him if he’d seen anything like them before.”

Predictably, Wei Wuxian perked right up, bouncing out from under Jiang Wanyin’s hand. Lan Xichen also straightened a little bit, eyes brightening with curiosity. What surprised him was that Wen Qing and Wen Qionglin, who’d been lurking at the very back of the crowd of guest disciples, stepped forward to stare at him intently.

“Where did you find them?” Wei Wuxian asked, bouncing on his toes. “Do they do anything?”

“Yiling,” Su She said, grinning at him. “They sure as hell do. I went to charge up the purification arrays on an old well and the flush of power from their activation almost took my head off. Had to do a pants check afterwards because it was so terrifying.”

“You’ve been to Yiling?” Wei Wuxian gasped. “I grew up there! I mean, I spent a few years living there. There are the weirdest pictograms on everything.”

“I know!” Su She exclaimed, waving his hands at Wei Wuxian exactly as he never would have if he’d still been a Lan. “It is so bizarre. I swear, I’ve looked at every single house, turned over every piece of pottery, crawled around in every attic and I still keep finding more of the things. It’s so fascinating. Not a one of them is the sort of pictograms that were the basis for our characters. It’s driving me crazy trying to figure them out.”

Man, it felt so good to find someone else to splutter to about these things. Wei Wuxian beamed like it was the best thing he’d ever heard, nodding and pointing at Su She in obvious agreement before rolling his eyes about the going crazy part.

So yeah, some of the crazy-weird stuff Wei Wuxian had invented as the Yiling Laozu must have come from what he’d seen as a street kid in Yiling. Huh. Nice. He’d been right.

“They’re not?” Lan Xichen interrupted with enough shock that Lan Wangji stared sidelong at him.

“No, not at all,” Su She said. He pulled out his notebook with the fragments that he’d been planning on showing to Lan Qiren. “See, this is what they look like. They’re clearly a sort of language. The people in Yiling use them on everything. Lianmin, the woman who owns the farm I’ve been staying at, weaves them into fabric.”

“You’re staying with Auntie Lianmin,” Wei Wuxian breathed, eyes far too wide. “Wow, you’re brave.”

“Eh, not really?” Su She said. His cheeks had the impertinence to blush on him as Wei Wuxian stared at him. “See, I only stopped in town because I was curious, but they were having a market and her youngest son, Cho Muye, was there selling the baskets he makes.”

“Really very good woven bamboo baskets,” Wei Wuxian explained in an aside to Jiang Wanyin who looked kind of like he wanted to shove both Wei Wuxian and Su She into the lake at this point.

“Very good,” Su She agreed, turning so that they could see his basket. “Made this one, actually. Anyway, he was all hunched over and so damned sick. I almost thought he was a fierce corpse; you know the kind that barely have enough resentment to even keep moving? Yeah. He looked like that. It was awful.”

“What happened?” Wei Wuxian asked with enough horror that it reminded Su She that Wei Wuxian actually knew everyone in Yiling. He might not have been treated well, like the other street kids there, but he knew them, and they certainly knew him.

“Slime mold out of the Burial Mounds infested their well,” Su She said. He nodded when Wei Wuxian stared at him aghast. “Yeah, they were all being poisoned with resentful energy every time they drank. Lianmin’s daughter-in-law, Cho Shuxin’s wife Pan Jinwen, was pregnant so I mean, I could hardly just walk away.”

“I can’t believe someone actually married Shuxin,” Wei Wuxian said with one hand over his mouth to keep himself from laughing out loud. “Wow. That’s amazing.”

“Personally, I can’t believe it either,” Su She agreed. “But Pan Jinwen’s in it for the babies and to learn weaving from Lianmin. I don’t think she cares all that much about her husband other than that.”

Laughter won. Su She joined in on the snickering guffaws despite the disapproving gleam in Lan Wangji’s eyes. Gossip, you know. Strictly forbidden. But hey, catching people up on the people they’d known a while ago wasn’t exactly gossip.

Sort of.

“So their well was the one that almost took your head off?” Jiang Wanyin asked as Wei Wuxian chortled.

“Yep,” Su She agreed. “Lianmin came charging out with her rusty old halberd. Pretty much the whole town came running. It was like… like a spear of light shooting up straight towards the heavens. First four times I charged someone’s well around town it was like that, but then those four wells were all on the outskirts of town and heavy with resentful energy. The ones in town with less resentful energy were a lot less dramatic.”

“I wonder why that happened,” Wei Wuxian mused as he wiped his eyes. “I mean, whenever cultivators came through, the people in town would pay them to charge their protective arrays. It was never like that, not even a gleam of light.”

“And every time the cultivators cheated them blind,” Su She said grimly enough that every single Lan stiffened, especially Lan Wangji. “I suspect, though I can’t prove it, that they saw the very nonstandard protection and purification arrays and just assumed that they didn’t do anything. So instead of pushing a little bit of energy into them, they pretended and then pocketed people’s hard-earned money. Cheated them blind.”

To Su She’s surprise, every single one of the cultivators clustered around him and Wei Wuxian reacted with a variant of fury, outrage, or outright dismay. Even Wen Qing and Wen Ning looked like they wanted to protest that it had happened.

Wei Wuxian, because he was Wei Wuxian and would have been the Yiling Laozu if Su She hadn’t gotten there first, went so blackly furious that Su She was surprised that clouds of resentful energy didn’t immediately billow up around him.

“What?” Wei Wuxian howled. “But they spent their life savings on that!”

“Yep,” Su She agreed. He huffed. “Which is why I spent the last few months charging every single fucking array they had without charging for it. I mean, I did ask to get to study all the arrays and stuff, but I didn’t ask for money or anything else.”

“You are very good man,” Wei Wuxian declared.

“Don’t say things like that!” Su She glared at him. “How dare you? Do you want to set off a depressive spiral of anxiety and panic attacks here? No, I’m not. Don’t you dare say it again, either.”

From the way Lan Xichen turned away, one sleeve over his mouth, he wasn’t the only person who wanted to join into Wei Wuxian’s spluttering laughter. Assholes, all of them. He wasn’t a good man. Not at all. And in a few months, a year or so at most, they were all going to turn their backs on him and hunt him to the ends of the earth.

Because he was the Yiling Laozu, and they would learn in time just what that meant.

Not today, though.

There was a Waterborne Abyss to deal with. And Su She still wanted to get to his favorite restaurant eventually.

“Whatever,” Su She grumbled. “What are you guys doing in town, anyway?”

“Ah, there are water ghouls in the lake,” Lan Xichen replied, eyes still squinted up with hidden amusement. “These ones have volunteered to help deal with them.”

“No way,” Su She said, staring out over the lake where he could, actually, feel the Waterborne Abyss this time. “Too big and solid for ghouls. It’s not anchored to the lake bed, but that thing is way too powerful for ghouls.”

“Huh,” Wei Wuxian said, staring over the lake just like Su She was. “Now that you mention it, it is very dark. Heavy even.”

“Exactly,” Su She agreed. He rolled his eyes as Lan Wangji frowned at the two of them. “Stop that. Sensing resentful energy is a survival trait. Anyone with a core in Yiling learns to do it. I’m not convinced that the peasants can’t feel it, too. There’s so many knots of resentful energy and haunted mushrooms that you’ll die in minutes if you don’t pick the skill up.”

“Oh,” Wei Wuxian said with a shudder. “I forgot the mushrooms. Those things are horrifying.”

“So bad,” Su She agreed.

Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen exchanged disbelieving frowns, but Wen Qing stepped forward with her hand out for Su She’s wrist. He shrugged and let her check. The ring of resentful energy he’d had around his bicep had dispersed when he showed off to Muye, so there were only the standard knots and taints distributed though his body now.

“Oh,” Wen Qing breathed, eyes wide. “That’s… not good.”

Su She shrugged. “I know. I’m working on an idea to…”

He paused and looked out over the lake just dramatically enough to make Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji straighten up. Next to him, Wei Wuxian bounced excitedly as if he was about to start tugging on Su She’s ponytail to get him to say what the idea was.

“I’m working on an idea about how to purge resentful energy,” Su She said slowly with his eyes locked on the center of the lake where the Waterborne Abyss lurked. “Using the purification arrays that I’ve found in the wells in Yiling. And the river. It might… work here, too.”

To the very moment he died in the future that wasn’t, Su She had ached to have the Lan acknowledge his ability to combine bits and pieces of various cultivation techniques into something useful. It’d driven him half-mad on multiple occasions. The whole reason he’d cursed Jin Zixun with the Hundred-Holes Curse had been that he’d not only insulted Moling Su, he’d also implied that Su She’s new musical cultivation pieces were purely copies instead of things that he’d created out of bits and pieces from six different sources.

So to find himself settled down in his favorite restaurant with the Twin Jades of the Lan, the Two Prides of Yunmeng, both Wen Qing and Wen Ning watching with awe as he metaphorically tore apart a standard purification array, overlaid the parts on the three Yiling purification arrays he had, and then finessed them into a wholly new array that might, if he was lucky, work on the lake like the Cho well array had?

That was the best feeling he’d ever had.

“Right,” Su She said once he had two different versions. “I think these might work. This one is more likely to work. The other is… iffy. I’m really not sure about the boundary and the limits on it. These characters have like ten different interpretations according to the people in Yiling. Have to test them, of course.”

“How?” Wei Wuxian asked while wiggling like an excited puppy and studying every single note Su She had made.

“Eh, easy enough,” Su She said.

He picked up the one that was probably going to be effective on the lake with little to no modification. A tiny push of power into it made it gleam. Then he smacked it against his chest.

Once, when he was fourteen, he’d made the mistake of walking behind a grumpy mule who had kicked him in the chest for it.

The purification array kicked Su She in the chest so hard that for a second he thought he was back in the future that wasn’t with Nie Mingjue’s fist through his torso. He wheezed and toppled over, curling up in a ball as the entire damned restaurant started shouting and flailing and carrying on.

Took him far too long to be able to roll over and wheeze a protest at Wen Ning and Wen Qing who were bodily holding off Wei Wuxian and Lan Xichen.

“I’m fine,” Su She complained. His voice came out way too thready. “Well, not fine. Kicks like a mule. Ow. How much resentful energy is left?”

“You…!” Wen Qing spluttered at him in outrage, fury bringing color to her cheeks and a light to her eyes that might be beautiful to another man. “What is wrong with you?”

“Oh, it’s all gone,” Wen Ning commented because he’d actually taken Su She’s wrist and checked. “I mean, your lungs and heart are bruised, and you shouldn’t sit up anytime soon, but it looks like it purged every bit of resentful energy out of your system.”

“Perfect,” Su She said, reaching towards the second talisman.

“No!” Jiang Wanyin shouted as he grabbed it and stood up with it held over his head. “You are not doing that again. Don’t be an idiot.”

“Fine,” Su She grumbled at him. “I was just going to see what directionality I put on the thing. It should’ve encased me in purification instead of punching it straight through me. I mean, if you make a dozen or so of them, put them on the gunwales of the boats, and then encircle the Waterborne Abyss, it should work. Just might punch holes in the boats when you activate it.”

Both Jiang Wanyin and Wei Wuxian looked much more carefully at the two talismans after that. The one that Su She had tested was decreed to most likely be the more effective one for their purpose. Su She was flatly forbidden, by everyone, from participating in attacking the Waterborne Abyss.

Which was fine.

The last thing he wanted was to go out there and nearly get consumed again. No, thank you. Once was enough.

Especially when every single breath made him flash back to watching Nie Mingjue’s fist flying straight at him. It wasn’t…

Well, that was a lie. It was horrible and he could barely think straight for the panic that kept thrumming along his nerves. He felt kind of like the time lightning had struck far too close during a night hunt, like every single hair was standing on edge and the very air in his abused lungs was crackling with wrongness.

Thing was, it wasn’t unfamiliar.

The vast majority of Su She’s life in this and the future that wasn’t had been spent with his body vibrating itself to pieces from anxiety and panic and bitter grudging determination to keep going.

Not able to breath? Fuck no, his lungs were fine. He was just having another panic attack. Practice his breathing exercises and don’t bother the healers who’ll just look at him with those disappointed faces as if he was somehow magically supposed to stop being a nervous wreck. After being a nervous wreck literally from his first memory.

He’d always hated that look, so he deliberately didn’t meet Wen Qing’s eyes. Safer to look at Wen Ning who had only sympathy on his round, gentle face. Stunningly, Jiang Wanyin looked kind of like he knew exactly what Su She was going through. He kept interrupting anyone who tried to ask Su She questions.

Lan Xichen paid for a room for Su She to rest in at the neighboring inn.

“It is not that we wish to claim credit for your work,” Lan Xichen said in his earnestly patronizing way.

“Sect Heir Xichen, I can’t sit up without passing out,” Su She drawled at him. “Of course I’m not going out on the lake. Be serious, will you?”

The earnest expression turned into startled laughter for a moment and then into worry and then back into his smiling mask that hid all his emotions. Other than the tremor in his fingers that said he was still seriously upset about the whole thing.

“I’ll be fine,” Su She said. “Got a nurse and the best doctor in our generation just said that I’m an idiot but a durable one.”

“You are an idiot,” Wen Qing agreed. “I’d beat you about the head and shoulders for doing that if it wouldn’t knock you out.”

“Yeah, yeah, I still needed to test it anyway,” Su She mock-grumbled at her. “I mean, the whole point, besides the mess in the lake, is figuring out how to protect pregnant women in Yiling from getting polluted by the resentful energy. Can’t use that one, obviously. I mean, it really did feel like getting kicked in the chest by a mule.”

“Do not kick pregnant women in the chest with your crazy talisman ideas,” Wen Qing snapped as if she hadn’t listened to a single word he’d said.

Except that it was said with a wry smile and an amazed shake of her head. Wei Wuxian grinned for it, as did Jiang Wanyin. Amazingly, Lan Wangji graced him with one bare sketch of an approving nod which was almost as much as someone else singing his praises to the heavens.

Su She ignored it in favor of hauling himself to his feet with Wen Ning’s help. Wen Ning went with him to the room in the inn. Wen Qing followed the others as they went to take care of the Abyss. Worked well, in his opinion, though another sturdy man to help him up the stairs would’ve been helpful. His chest really did hurt, and breathing was a challenge.

“I’m not a doctor like Jiejie,” Wen Ning said apologetically as he propped Su She up on pillows on the bed so that he wouldn’t be lying flat on his back. “I can’t really heal you, but I can monitor and make sure that your lungs don’t fill with fluid.”

“Good enough,” Su She said.

Out the window, Su She could see the others rowing into the center of the lake. In a few minutes, it would be over one way or the other. Whether anyone else knew it or not, this was what he considered to be the beginning of the Sunshot Campaign.

Wen Ruohan had attacked the Lan by sending the Abyss downstream. He’d tested their responses, their awareness, and found them lacking. The next attack would be a lot more deadly. Su She’s throat tightened as the scent of the smoke in the future that wasn’t. He’d had nightmares about the Cloud Recesses burning back then. Hadn’t helped his temperament at all.

But that didn’t have to happen this time. Su She damn well wasn’t going to let it happen, more for Lan Wenjing’s sake than anyone else’s. And Wen Ning was a vital part of making sure that none of that happened.

“Your uncle is testing them, isn’t he?” Su She murmured after a little bit. “Poke them and see how they respond. He’ll smack them down soon.”

“I… I don’t know anything about that,” Wen Ning whispered. His shamed expression made the lie obvious.

“Kid, I’m not a Lan anymore,” Su She said. “This isn’t my place to defend, and I was never very happy here anyway. I’m reading it right, though, aren’t I?”

Wen Ning sighed as he nodded, nearly in tears he was so dejected.

“The fuck does he have on you and your sister to keep you at his side?” Su She muttered as if he was talking to himself.

To his relief, Wen Ning took the bait.

“We’re hostages against our family’s safety,” Wen Ning whispered as if afraid that someone in the crappy inn was a spy who would report back to Wen Ruohan immediately. Actually, there probably were spies following both of the Dafan Wen around, weren’t there?

“And they’re hostages against your behavior,” Su She completed for him. “Well, fuck that. Yiling isn’t much but I’m building a safe place there with the new arrays I’ve found. If you want, I can go find your family and bring them back to Yiling. Hide them away. That way you won’t have the threat hanging over your heads and you can do what you want.”

“You’d do that for us?” Wen Ning whispered, eyes so very wide and shocked and young.

“Not just for you,” Su She said, “but yeah. I would. I will. If you want me to. I’m not a Lan anymore. I’m not anything anymore. So I can’t be just, and I can’t really fight evil like I used to, not that I think we were actually fighting evil when I was a Lan. Either way, I can be kind and I can help people and that’s enough for me.”

Wen Ning didn’t answer him. That was fine. He had no reason to trust Su She. They’d only just met.

Not much after that, the entire damned lake lit up with the power of the arrays that Su She had created, so neither one of them was much interested in continuing the conversation.

“Fuck, no one is going to miss that,” Su She grumbled as he shielded his eyes with one shaking hand.

“I didn’t… expect it to be so h-huge,” Wen Ning admitted.

He’d shielded his eyes, too, with both hands, but he still flinched away from the light until it faded away, leaving the entirety of Caiyi Town in an uproar that lasted until well after dark.

Su She stayed out of it. Firmly, determinedly out of it. He was tired. He’d been ordered to rest by a doctor. He was under Official Medical Care. Nope, not going out there and answering questions.

Eventually, once night fell fully and the foofaraw outside started simmering down to a dull roar of people asking questions instead of shouting in panic while running around like chickens with their heads cut off, Wen Ning started talking again.

“Could… you answer a question?” Wen Ning asked hopefully.

“Depends on the question, but sure,” Su She said.

“Why did Teacher Qiren spend so much time on the Rules?” Wen Ning asked with enough desperation that it must have been driving him crazy for ages.

Su She cackled, wagging a finger at Wen Ning who blushed and then looked desperately uncomfortable. “I asked him the same thing when it was my turn to attend!”

“You did?” Wen Ning perked right up for that. “What did he say?”

“You have to understand that Teacher Qiren is also Acting Sect Leader Lan,” Su She explained, still grinning. “He’s got an epic amount of work that he has to do, all the time, and he has no staff. Seriously, no one. Not a clerk, not a disciple, not an accountant. The Lan elders are… not helpful. So he’s very busy all the time and always thinking about six things at the same time. So, his intent doesn’t always come through in every session.”

“Why doesn’t he have staff?” Wen Ning asked. He pressed a hand to his chest as if he couldn’t breathe from sheer horror.

“The Lan Elders say he doesn’t need it because he’s only the acting Sect Leader,” Su She said. “I think they’re punishing him because they can’t punish anyone else. It’s ridiculous, honestly. Anyway, I’d guess that he’s overwhelmed right now because he usually gets to the end of the recitation of the rules and then asks someone from the Jiang or the Jin or the Nie to explain what their rules are. What’s the basis of their sect’s behavior and beliefs?”

There were footsteps on the stairs, but Wen Ning didn’t seem to notice. Su She did. He raised his voice enough so that the people coming would hear what he said.

“Generally, after discussion between the various disciples that Teacher Qiren mostly just stands back and allows to happen, what sorts out is that all the sects have more or less the same general ideas of how to behave,” Su She explained. “The details will be different, of course, but the broad outlines are similar enough that the sects fit together well. We’re all more alike than we are different. That’s the point of the whole thing. We fight the same things. We follow the same general principles, use much the same sort of cultivation. I mean, no one is out there using resentful energy to create “dark” cores or something.”

The door slid open. Wei Wuxian stared at Su She with his mouth dropped open in shock. Su She snickered at him, waving for him to come in and sit down. Lan Xichen was behind him, as was Wen Qing who pushed past them all to come check on Su She’s condition. Behind them both, Jiang Wanyin lurked, scowling and uncertain of his welcome.

“That’s what it’s about?” Wei Wuxian spluttered.

“Yeah,” Su She said, nodding since Wen Qing had his arm in a death grip. “Those different details are very important, but overall we’re more alike than we’re different.”

Unless you were from Yiling. Which Su She absolutely wasn’t going to say, not even to Wei Wuxian. Once Wen Qing nodded that he was all right, Lan Xichen and Jiang Cheng came to bow very formally to Su She.

“Thank you for your assistance,” Lan Xichen said in his most formal Sect Heir Lan tones. “The Lan, Jiang and Wen Sects would like to buy copies of your purification array.”

Su She stared at him. “…What do you mean buy copies?”

5. In Which Our Protagonist Meddles in Things Which Are None of His Concern, With Abandon and then Dismay

Once upon a time in the future that wasn’t, Ran Quanyu had cursed Su She down one side, up the other and then beat him through the training room floor three times for casually giving away one of his squirrely array ideas that he’d cobbled together in his spare time. It had been a mixture of Lan, of course, plus some bits of Jin blended together by pure determination and a massive amount of experimentation.

“That is worth money that could feed us, you idiot!” Ran Quanyu had bellowed at Su She once Su She couldn’t get up anymore. “Do not ever do that again!”

He hadn’t. Not in the future that wasn’t. Not now, either.

After his moment of dead shock that anyone wanted to use the half-completed and ridiculously overpowered array again, Su She had thought of how much food and clothing he was going to need to relocate the Dafan Wen.

Then he’d bargained for a price that made even Lan Xichen wince while insisting that the talismans were proprietary, not to be used casually and that they weren’t allowed to alter them in any way.

“As if anyone could,” Wen Qing had grumbled as she nodded her agreement.

“He could,” Su She had said, pointing at Wei Wuxian who held up both hands while urgently shaking his head no. “You could. You might not want to, but if the situation were bad enough, you absolutely would and could.”

All of them had promised to talk to their leaders and then bring back the price that Su She demanded. He got his used talismans back, all of them water damaged and illegible because yes, they had kicked holes in the boats. And, while he was waiting for his paper and clothing and food orders to be compiled, he made the final versions of the Heavenly Pillar of Purification array that he’d let them use.

The trick of making it impossible to copy was one that he’d learned from one of the Lan librarians. You needed two sheets of paper, glue and a fancy looking nonfunctional array on the front. Paint the proper array on the back side of the paper with your cinnabar and what-have-you. Then put the pretty bit of nonsense on the other side in normal ink. Maybe sparkly ink if you were being a total asshole, which Su She totally was. Take the second sheet of paper and paint it’s back pure black, nice thick layers of ink so that nothing could be seen through them. Then glue the two together.

Made the talisman much more sturdy and pretty much impossible to copy because the working bits were safely hidden away.

Before Wen Ning left the room, he had looked at Su She while biting his lip.

“Yes?” Su She had asked.

Wen Ning looked at his sister’s back, then out over the lake which was still gleaming slightly. “He’ll use it to…”

“Torture people, test things on them and then wipe it all away so he can do it again and again and again,” Su She had agreed quietly enough that his voice shouldn’t carry down the hallway.

“I…” Wen Ning had shut his eyes. When they opened, Su She could see the Ghost General instead of the sweet, shy boy who’d been there all afternoon. “Yes. Send me a message.”

“Will do,” Su She had said. He had waved a hand when Wen Qing frowned over her shoulder at Wen Ning. “Eh, just an idea about a smaller-scale version that could be used for pregnant women. Wen Ning had some suggestions for safer testing than what I had planned.”

“Good,” Wen Qing had said, glowering at Su She. “Come on, A-Ning. We need to get going.”

“Mm,” Wen Ning had said and that was that.

The next day, Su She had bought all the used clothes he could find in every size possible, telling people that it was for his friends back in Yiling. No one thought anything of it. Quite a few had praised him for his charity.

He had added on bolts and bolts of fabric. Tools and seeds and about ten nice big tents. He’d also bought sturdy fabric to make hefty qiankun pouches for everything he was buying. The stronger the fabric, the more you space you could build in, which meant that his tons of supplies for the Dafan Wen and Yiling ended up in pouches small enough to tie to his belt instead of his needing to buy an ox and a cart.

Three days later, he had all his paper, ink and brushes. He also had the payment from the Jiang, the Lan and the Wen for his Heavenly Pillar. Su She had not gotten any of the messengers, who were not Jiang Wanyin, Lan Xichen, or Wen Qing, to snicker over the dick joke.

Rude.

It was the perfect dick joke. None of them had a proper sense of humor. Su She would’ve said he was appalled by them, but hey, he really fucking wanted out of Caiyi Town before Wen Ruohan came and made him disappear into the Fire Palace. Or someone saw through his façade of control to the rising anxiety drumming through his veins.

So, the instant they walked off, Su She headed for the edge of town. He was back on his sword as soon as he reached the rice paddies outside town, and he didn’t slow down or stop until he was halfway to Dafan Mountain.

He hadn’t planned on stopping, honestly, but panic attacks waited for no man. Flying while hyperventilating and shaking so hard that his sword wobbled under his feet was a damn stupid idea. Su She managed to land, mostly without crashing. His sword didn’t cut him or end up broken or get wedged into anything. And a bloody nose was really nothing.

It was the way his chest ached that upset him the most.

Every aching breath pulled into his lungs seemed to flow around a fist through his chest. Every huff out felt like it was gushing through the hole instead of out his mouth and nose. It was one hell of a flashback and Su She would’ve really preferred if his fucked up memory hadn’t latched onto this particular memory from the future that wasn’t.

Su She wheezed his way through the old breathing exercises while counting decaying leaves under his knees and haphazardly cataloging the bird calls he heard. He wasn’t exactly sure how long he struggled with the panic attack, but the sun hadn’t moved too far across the sky when it finally eased, and his lungs sucked in a full breath.

Finally.

He coughed. Then set his back against a tree until his hands stopped shaking. A full shichen had definitely gone by after he ate a snack, meditated for a while, and then pulled himself back to his feet. His knees shook pretty bad, but he didn’t fall over so it was good enough.

Not ideal but hey, he’d been pushing the damned panic attack off ever since the Waterborne Abyss, so it wasn’t all that bad, really.

Dafan Mountain was a pretty area. Big trees, good fields, little bitty towns hidden away in the forest, most of which he couldn’t care less about. The only village he cared about was the Dafan Wen’s which was uncomfortably close to the Dancing Goddess in her cave.

“Right,” Su She mused as he landed closer to the cave than to the village and considered the Yin Iron hidden inside. “I suppose I might need to help you. Goddess won’t like it, though.”

The Yin Iron wasn’t there.

It didn’t pulse at all. Su She frowned, checked again, and then sighed.

Okay, so that explained where Wen Ruohan’s piece had come from. Jin Guangyao had been so convinced that the Wen had their own piece and the Dancing Goddess piece had been there until Wei Wuxian was reborn, but obviously that wasn’t true.

That meant that he didn’t have to worry about the Dancing Goddess yet. She could wait. Or, you know, be someone else’s problem.

The Wen’s village was about like Yiling, with less odd pictograms, more smiling kids, and fields absolutely filled with medicinal herbs waiting to be harvested. He strolled up the street towards the center of town, nodding when various people glanced his way in concern.

“Can I help you?” an old woman with white hair and a doctor’s tabard asked. “Something wrong with your chest, maybe?”

“Panic attack,” Su She said, shrugging. “I’m still a bit wheezy from it. No, yeah, Wen Ning sent me.”

Every single person in the town square turned to stare at him with hungry, worried eyes. That was borderline terrifying enough that Su She pressed a hand to his chest and worked to control his breathing.

What was this thing with people abruptly seeing him? No one ever had in the future that wasn’t. This was so not right.

“Come sit down,” the old woman said.

She latched onto his free wrist and dragged him right off to a bench in the shade of one of the houses. Between her and a pregnant woman who eyed Su She like he was a deadly threat until she heard him wheezing, they got him sitting, took his backpack off, stacked his qiankun pouches full of supplies next to his feet, and shoved tea into his hands.

Calming tea.

“Not sure I should have this,” Su She said as the pregnant woman pinched his wrist.

“Ah, no, definitely not,” she said, plucking the tea right back out of his hand. “Because only part of that wheezing is the panic attack. Did you get kicked in the chest by a mule or something?”

Su She grinned at her. “No, but the sensation was very similar. Remarkably similar actually. See, I was Caiyi Town and encountered some Lan I knew. I was a Lan until just before the guest disciples arrived for the lectures. Left. Never quite fit in.”

He rambled through the rest of the story, watching as both the old woman who told him to call her Popo and the young woman who said to call her Wen Pianzi relaxed into the tale. He got twin glares of utter outrage that were nearly identical to Wen Qing’s when he told them about testing the talisman on himself. And they were deeply amused by his description of Wen Qing’s outrage.

“You earned that,” Popo declared. “A-Qing’s an excellent doctor, especially for her age.”

“She’s my cousin,” Wen Pianzi agreed with a firm nod as she worked to help drain the fluid that was building in his lungs. “A-Qing prefers surgery to general doctor work, but yes, she’s very good and you absolutely deserved a severe talking to. Why in the world did you fly here? You should have rested for longer, let your lungs recover more. Not to mention the remnants of bruising on your heart.”

Su She grimaced. “But they were perceiving me. It was horrible. I was getting all kinds of panic building up and the anxiety was starting to roll higher and higher. I had to get out of there before I went into full melt-down again. I haven’t had a melt-down since I left the Lan, and I don’t want to have one again.”

Popo frowned and looked at the discarded tea. “You… shouldn’t have the tea because you’ve been exposed to it too much.”

“Exactly,” Su She agreed. “The Lan doctors taught me breathing and qi exercises to cope with the anxiety and panic attacks. They work well enough. Getting the hell out of the stressful environment works way better.”

That led to a rambling discussion with Popo about why he’d been so anxious. She drew in three other members of the village, descendants of hers who were all doctors of various sorts too. They asked more questions to try and diagnose everything while Su She kind of laughed and shook his head at all of them.

Because seriously, he was fine. Yeah, the panic attacks still happened from time to time. That was to be expected. Nie Mingjue had punched through his chest, killed him and triggered the array that sent him back in time. Flashbacks, panic attacks and all were to be expected, you know, completely aside from all the crap that’d gone on in the Sunshot Campaign.

Not that he told them that.

By dinner, Su She had met pretty much everyone include Wen Pianzi’s little girl A-Jian who was only about three years old. A-Jian looked so much like Lan Sizhui that Su She figured that he’d found both where Lan Sizhui came from and the family that he’d lost before Lan Wangji adopted him.

Must be a hell of a tale there. A really horrible, vicious one full of death, destruction and the worst that both the Wen and the Jin could level on people.

Once the kids were off to bed and it was just him and Popo sitting at her hearth together, Popo looked at Su She with all the weight of an elder who knew you were hiding things. He straightened up automatically and then huffed when it made his chest ache. So, yeah, maybe testing the talisman on his own body had been stupid, but it had sped up the testing process dramatically.

Even if the side effects left something to be desired.

“Wen Ning sent you to us,” Popo observed.

“The Heavenly Pillar of Purification is… a problem,” Su She said. He grinned at Popo’s snicker. “Thank you! Finally. I’ve been waiting for someone to laugh at the dick joke.”

“Young men,” Popo sighed but she grinned at him, so it was fine. “Explain it to me.”

He did. In grim, sickening detail. Both what the talisman had done to him and how it could be used to purify whatever residue Wen Ruohan’s experiments left in people so that he could try again. And again. And again.

“The best way to test talismans and arrays,” Su She said with the certainty that came from his experimentation alongside Xue Yang in the future that wasn’t, “is the sort that you can have someone report directly on. Like me with the Heavenly Pillar. I could tell them outright that it would kick a hole in their boats. I could tell them how it would work as a highly focused beam that would spread only at a distance, as well as show them exactly what the impact was on any living beings. That let us know how many we needed and how to space them for best effect.”

Popo closed her eyes as she went pale. “And Wen Ruohan will do it.”

“He absolutely will,” Su She agreed. “Wen Ning agreed as well. I mean, I know you’ve got no reason to trust me. I’m no one to you. But… I left the Lan because I couldn’t stay and live a good life. I settled in Yiling because it’s fascinating. I love the place, sad as that is. The people are amazing. And…”

He paused and extended his senses so that he could make sure that they weren’t being overheard. There were people awake, yeah, but they were in their houses. A couple of places had arrays for listening and monitoring, but they weren’t the active sort. They’d only activate when people were right next to them. Right now, no one was so they were inactive. And, worryingly, a couple of people off on the edge of town who’d been kept mostly away from Su She felt like they carried massive loads of resentful energy.

Those two were obviously spies. Obviously. Popo had done a lot to keep them away from Su She all day. Now he knew why.

That needed to change.

“Yeah,” Su She said as he opened his eyes. “It’s not safe here. I have a place that I’m making safe. It’s kind of crazy but it should be good when I’m done. I offered to remove you to safety so that Wen Ning and Wen Qing would be free to escape. If they stay, they’ll help keep Wen Ruohan alive. They’ll be forced to be part of his sick experiments. Neither of them deserve that.”

“Yiling then,” Popo said with a sigh. “Well, it would be better than constantly worrying about A-Qing and A-Ning. You know that Wen Ruohan won’t let us go easily.”

“Eh, I can handle that,” Su She said, waving her worry off.

He grinned when she eyed him narrowly. It was so much like one of Wen Qing’s glares. Looking at Popo glaring, he could see what Wen Qing would look like if she got the chance to grow old.

That was another thing he needed to fix. Not so much for himself, or for any of his debts, but because seriously, what the Dafan Wen had gone through in the future that wasn’t had been horrific.

Jin Guangyao had mentioned on one occasion in one of his idly cruel tones where he’d apparently forgotten that Su She was ever a Lan, that he’d experimented on the Wen in the camp at Qiongqi Pass. Having just worked with Xue Yang on several of his sick little experiments, Su She had side-eyed Jin Guangyao before opening his mouth.

“What sorts of tests?” Su She had asked in as casual a tone as he could manage when he’d felt like his spine was crumbling to dust and his heart had broken into a million glassy shards inside his chest.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Jin Guangyao had replied while smiling his coldest, most reptilian smile. The one that made Su She wonder just what exactly Wen Ruohan had done to Jin Guangyao before the end. “The tests weren’t effective anyway. Our new experiments are showing much more promise.”

“Good,” Su She had replied and then left the whole thing alone.

You know, until the middle of the night when he woke up with screaming nightmares and sweat-soaked sheets, convinced that Jin Guangyao was going to let Xue Yang experiment on him next. Instead, he’d worked harder at mastering demonic cultivation, dedicated himself even more fully to Jin Guangyao’s insanity, and let Moling Su fall back into Ran Quanyu’s much more capable hands.

For all the good that did.

Oh well, that was done and over with. It sure as hell wouldn’t happen now.

“I’m not explaining it, but I can do it,” Su She said to Popo as he pushed all the memories back into the future that wasn’t so that they’d stop haunting him. “And honestly, no one but the two spies even know I’m here. We knock them out, do something to make this place go up in a fire or explosion, there’s no guarantee that Wen Ruohan will start looking right away. Make it confusing enough and he’ll lose time investigating.”

Popo snorted a laugh. “Fine. Keep your secrets. We’ll discuss it tomorrow amongst ourselves. I think we’ll all agree to go. Saving the children, especially, from Wen Ruohan is important. Freeing A-Qing and A-Ning is even more important.”

“Good,” Su She said.

He got to sleep by the hearth which was fine. This time of the summer, there was little need for a blanket. Su She used one of his robes rolled up as a pillow and dropped to sleep almost as soon as he laid down.

The next day, Wen Pianzi refused to let him do a single thing. Part of it was that he actually had pushed himself way too hard when he flew here. The other part was that the village wanted to discuss the idea without him listening in. Su She spent the time making more qiankun pouches out of his sturdy fabric, crafting twenty over the course of that day that Popo distributed to those coming along.

Right underneath the spies noses, no less.

As Su She lounged about, casually making the pouches, the spies went about their daily lives. At first, they kept an eye on Su She like they thought he was a major problem, but as the day went on and Wen Pianzi kept plying him with healing teas and working on the mess he’d made of his lungs, they went back to their normal routine.

Night fell. Everyone went to bed, including Su She though he settled down by the hearth in Popo’s place again.

As the moon rose over Dafan Mountain, Popo nudged Su She to wake him up.

“I’m awake,” Su She said, sitting up. “You all decided?”

“Yes,” Popo said. “Can you do something that will make it seem like the entire village was destroyed in a fire or explosion?”

“Absolutely yes,” Su She said. “Your spies?”

“They’ve been dealt with already,” Popo said without a speck of guilt or uneasiness. “We’re all packed. The men are harvesting what they can from the fields while the women are gathering all the seed we can get into the bags.”

“Should be fine,” Su She said as he pulled his outer robe on and then settled all his pouches around his waist and his backpack onto his back. “I made them big.”

Popo leveled a scornfully disbelieving look on him but when they gathered everyone up at the edge of the valley and no one had had to leave anything behind, she nodded an apology to Su She. It was fine. No one really studied making qiankun pouches so that they would hold massive amounts. Most people just assumed that it was tied to the power of the person and that there were limits.

Ridiculous, that. You just had to use the proper techniques and materials to increase the capacity. If Su She had spent a few months with test qiankun pouches exploding in his face to learn that, well, that was fine. He’d been sixteen. That was just the kind of thing sixteen-year-old boys did.

“All right,” Su She said as he drew out one of Jin Guangyao’s large-group teleportation talismans on the ground, “I need everyone touching. This will send us to just outside of Yiling on the Burial Mounds side of things. I’m gonna be flattened by it, but that’s all right. We’ll land right next to the Cho family farm. They’re good people. They’ll help when they see that it’s me.”

The timing on this was going to be tricky, but Su She knew that he could do it. He’d done this before. Not a whole village, no, but he’d done it before.

“Stay here,” Su She ordered. “I’ll be right back. Gotta set up the other half of this.”

His nerves were thrumming like a too-tight guqin string by the time he’d put the ring of very standard fireball arrays around the edges of the village. All of them were pointed inwards towards where the Dafan Wen waited. If he did this just right, it should wipe out any traces of the teleportation array, too.

Better still, a talisman outside of the Dancing Goddess’ cave meant that she’d be disturbed and possibly go on a rampage through the burning chaos, too.

It took three attempts at triggering the talisman outside the Dancing Goddess’ cave before she woke and pulled free from the rock wall. Su She grinned as she cracked and rumbled her way out of the cave, making sure that she saw him clearly before he bolted back towards the village.

Along the way, he triggered the fireball talismans with wild bursts of his qi. This had better work, or the aftermath was going to be horrific.

Nah, it would work. It would. He’d make sure of it.

Su She dashed straight at the Dafan Wen who were pale-faced and trembling as they watched the Dancing Goddess slowly stomp her way into town. “Right. Everything is set up. Arrays charged, Goddess woken; we’re good. They’re on timers. Everyone, I mean it when I say touching. Grips of steel would be better.”

Little A-Jian was tied to Wen Pianzi’s chest with a sling so there were no worries there. So were the other kids with their parents. Su She still did a quick headcount, shoving Popo into the center of the crowd where everyone could hang onto her.

Then, as the moments ticked by in his head and the Dancing Goddess slowly strode into the center of town, Su She charged up the mass teleportation array. He thrust a hand out to the Dafan Wen and got grabbed by about eight pairs of hands just as the fireballs went off.

Instantly, the rosy light of dawn creeping over the mountaintop disappeared into a roaring inferno. Su She watched the fire billow towards them. The fire enveloped the Dancing Goddess who roared in outrage as she smashed her many fists into the burning houses around her. Only once the fire blasted at them did he trigger the teleportation array.

It went off just before the fire reached them.

Scorching heat twisted away into cool, damp mustiness. The Dafan Wen screamed as they all landed in a heap. Su She groaned.

And dropped straight down on his face in the dirt.

“What were you thinking?” Popo yelled at him.

“Laozu Su!” Muye bellowed. “What the hell was that?”

“Fuck my life,” Su She mumbled as he struggled to push himself up to at least sit.

Didn’t manage it, of course. Teleporting a couple hundred people across the Jianghu out of a fireball that he’d set himself took it out of you.

So he didn’t manage to explain a single thing to Muye who spluttered questions at Popo until she threatened to silence him with her needles. By that point, Lianmin was there which meant that the discussion went into full scolding mode. Su She rolled his eyes and nearly passed out from the effort.

Yeah, no. He just didn’t have the energy to fight anyone.

“A-Jian,” Su She said since Wen Pianzi had put her in Su She’s lap to keep him from going anywhere. “Can you scream for me?”

“Mm!” A-Jian said, dimples in full evidence.

She screamed so loud that Muye fell over and Lianmin started back a few steps. Su She patted her head and grinned, which just made A-Jian giggle and squirm proudly.

“Right,” Su She said into the silence. “I’ve got ten big tents for them. Plus food, tools, spare clothing and a bunch of other stuff. They’ve got their stuff from their village. I brought them here because Wen Ruohan will use them as experimental subjects in using resentful energy and the Yin Iron to turn people into living puppets.”

“Ah,” Lianmin breathed, eyes as grim as her normal expression. “Well, we certainly can’t have that. At least this wasn’t as dramatic as the well purification. Where were you planning on taking them from here?”

Su She jerked his chin towards the Burial Mounds. “In there. I’ve got some more work to do, but I should be able to create a safe place inside the Burial Mounds that no one can get at, not even Wen Ruohan. You know, once I’ve eaten and slept, not in that order.”

“In the meantime,” Popo said, “we have our… own tents.”

She paused because Su She got A-Jian to help him untie all the qiankun pouches from his waist. His things were all in his basket. Their things, the stuff he’d bought for the Dafan Wen or for Yiling, were in the pouches. He knew better than to get everything all mixed up.

“This is for the Cho family,” Su She said, passing Muye one pouch. “That’s for the Du family, then this is for the Pan’s. The rest are to be shared among the Wen. Who’ll need a different name.”

“I believe we’ll go back to our original name before Wen Ruojin married my sister,” Popo said with a grimly satisfied smile. “We were Wei long ago. Wen Ruohan insisted on our taking the Wen name when his brother married in. I thought it was terribly rude then, but I was just a girl. I’m the elder now, and we’re Wei once more.”

Wen Pianzi’s smile slowly bloomed as Popo talked. “That’s wonderful. I never liked being saddled with the name Wen.”

The other Dafan Wei nodded and murmured their agreement. Su She sat there in the dirt with A-Jian in his lap, wondering if Wei Wuxian had ever known that he’d actually rescued his own relatives in the future that wasn’t.

Probably not. If he had, there was no way he wouldn’t have used it against Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao.

“Good,” Su She said through a jaw-cracking yawn. “Let me have about two or three shichen of sleep and I can get you all safe inside the Burial Mounds.”

Muye shook his head at Su She. “You’re such a liar, Laozu Su. You’re going to sleep through the entire day and the night, too. But fine, we’ll get them settled into the forest. No one goes up there, not even travelers. We can hide them pretty easy until you get what you have planned done.”

And that was that, surprisingly.

Lianmin headed into town to tell everyone else about the Dafan Wei. Muye helped Su She back to the Cho farm, all but shoving him up the ladder to his attic. As Su She collapsed into his bed face-first, he heard the Dafan Wei asking thousands of questions about how Su She had come here, what he was up to and what was up with all these odd pictograms?

He smiled as he fell asleep. Maybe Popo would figure out where they’d come from by the time he woke up. Maybe not. Either way, he would get the rest of the arrays around the Burial Mounds charged up, set up an inner barrio that would keep strangers out of the sanctum in the center of the Mounds, and he would start deciphering Xue Chonghai’s hidden library.

You know, after a long nap.

6. In Which Our Protagonist Reluctantly Takes Others Into His Confidence and is Surprised by the Results

Yeah. Nap. More like he slept for a day and a half, then ate half his body weight in rice and veggies before falling face-first into his soup.

Muye was never, ever, going to lose the smug look. Asshole kid. Never mind that he was only a few years younger than Su She, officially. Another whole life’s worth of experience didn’t count as far as everyone around Su She was concerned. And, frankly, it wasn’t like Su She learned a ton from that life, other than all kinds of mistakes that he didn’t want to make again.

Either way, three days after he stole the Dafan Wei from the Wen, Su She was finally vertical enough that he had to deal with both Muye and Popo Wei deciding that he couldn’t be allowed to wander around alone.

“Look, I just have to get everything set up before you guys can go in,” Su She protested.

Muye stared at him so flatly that he didn’t need to say a word.

“Child, none of us believe you’ve the capacity to stand up for more than a quarter shichen,” Popo Wei said, patting Muye’s elbow. “Your lungs are still clogged. Your heart has a murmur. You need to recuperate, not go marching off to battle fierce corpses.”

“There’s no battle to be had,” Su She complained. “Seriously, they’re not going to attack.”

“Then there shouldn’t be any problems with the two of us accompanying you,” Muye said for the sixth time since breakfast.

When Su She had idly thought about how the Dafan Wei and the residents of Yiling would interact, he’d thought more about Lianmin’s strictness rubbing up against Wei Pianzi’s smiling version of a stone-cold bitch. He’d considered Uncle Fourth, the endlessly cheerful wine maker, bouncing around cheerfully with Cho Dahong who painted designs on his pottery based on what looked happiest instead of what made sense.

He had never imagined Popo Wei and Muye teaming up on him. Never. If he had, Su She would’ve run screaming for the hills rather than follow through on the whole thing.

“I hate this,” Su She sing-songed to the sky because no one on the damn earth was listening to him. “I hate this so very much. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”

Thankfully, A-Jian wasn’t there to decide that it was the best song ever. If she had been, she would’ve sung it for the next month non-stop, driving everyone crazy. As it was, Muye rolled his eyes and Popo Wei shook her head at him.

“We’re coming,” Muye said. “Stop arguing and start marching, Laozu Su.”

“Calls me a Laozu and doesn’t listen to a word I say,” Su She grumbled as he pulled his still-full bamboo backpack on.

Muye had his own backpack full of bamboo working tools, water bottles crafted out of bamboo, and the lunch that Popo Wei had made for the three of them. Between Muye and Su She, they had the components needed for Su She’s worktable. It wouldn’t be much, but it was enough to get started on the copying project.

“I do wonder how anyone survives in this town,” Popo Wei said as she poked the now-dead Nie boundary markers.

“Easy,” Su She said. “They’re all stupidly stubborn and hard to kill. That’s how.”

Muye grinned. “And just generally too bitterly determined not to leave home to let anything out of the Burial Mounds stop us. This is home, you know? Why should we leave? We’ve been here for generations. We’ll be here for generations more.”

“I do understand that,” Popo Wei said as they passed the line of inert Great Sect boundary markers and trudged up the mountain towards Xue Chonghai’s long-destroyed palace. “It’s why we stayed at Dafan for so long despite Wen Ruohan. But I was speaking more of the wandering dead that haunt the Burial Mounds.”

“You mean them?” Su She said, gesturing towards the line of skeletal soldiers standing at attention off by a stand of black bamboo.

They looked grotesque, of course. All rotting flesh and exposed bone under the battered, torn armor. But the aura coming off them was one of respectful obedience. Su She nodded to them as he set down the legs of his workbench, leaning them against his hip because seriously, he just wasn’t back to normal yet.

“General,” Su She said, listening with all his senses. “Ah… General Kwan, leader of the armies of Xue Chonghai.”

The corpse with the fanciest helmet straightened up, bony chin lifting just the right way for his exposed jaw and broken teeth to suggest a dashing grin. The image of the man he had been in life flashed through Su She’s mind. He’d been young to be a general, maybe thirty-four, thirty-five, but he’d been fighting since he was fifteen, so he was deadly and experienced and as loyal to Xue Chonghai as Su She had been to Jin Guangyao.

“Thank you for staying to protect your master’s works, General Kwan,” Su She said. “We’re reviving the defenses. I’ll be reworking the boundary stones the Great Sects put in to contain you. They’re all inert now. Take your men and get them all standing up right. If you can, knock any of the moss and debris off them. If not, don’t worry about it. We’ll be at war soon enough. Providing a truly safe place for the civilians is key.”

General Kwan tottered into a formal bow that his undead troop copied to the best of their ability. They marched off towards the edge of the Burial Mounds which was probably going to scare the hell out of everyone in Yiling.

Oh, well. Couldn’t be helped. Having them occupied with righting the boundary stones should let Su She do what he needed in the remnants of Xue Chonghai’s palace. And who knew? Might burn off enough of their lingering resentment that they left to their next reincarnation.

“That…” Muye choked and coughed before turning to Popo Wei who wasn’t half as pale as he was. “What the fuck was that?”

“That was demonic cultivation,” Popo Wei said, hands loose over the top of her walking stick.

“Eh, barely qualifies as it,” Su She said. He picked up his table legs again. “Come on. We still have a ways to go and a lot to do.”

Silence held all the way past the black bamboo groves, through the dead-looking forest and on past the tooth-like spires. It held right on until they reached the line of foundation stones for Xue Chonghai’s palace.

“I thought there was a palace in here,” Muye said, starting at the sound of his own voice as if he hadn’t intended to speak out loud.

“Right here,” Su She said, lightly kicking one of the foundation stones. “I think that most of Yiling was built with the stone and bricks that had been part of the palace. There’s just the foundation and the cave left.”

“A very good foundation,” Popo Wei observed as she peered at the pictogram arrays on the foundation stones. “With very odd protections.”

“Very,” Su She agreed. “So, I was thinking that this would be the area where everyone would set up their tents. There’s a water supply in the cave, plus there’s a spring just up the hill that we can do the purification array on. If we do some work to rehabilitate the soil, set up some basic aqueducts, you could grow whatever you need here.”

Popo Yu blinked at him before sighing. “Here. Amidst the clouds of resentful energy and the wandering dead.”

Su She shrugged. “Yeah. It’s temporary, but it should work. Take a look around. I’ve got a thing I need to do in the cave but you two should be able to figure out if I’m insane to even think of this. I never was a farmer, never did lead anyone. If I’m out of my mind to even suggest this, say so.”

“Oh, you’re definitely out of your mind,” Muye said before Su She could even pick up his table legs again, “but you’re not wrong that it could be a very livable little village. In about a decade or two with some concerted work on the soil. It needs at least five years of heavy mulching, a few tons of manure spread over it, and yeah, all the water possible, but it could work. Just not yet.”

“Agreed,” Popo Wei said, poking the dirt under her feet with her walking stick. “I would be very concerned about anything grown here being toxic, though. The sheer amount of work needed to remove the contaminated soil and replace it with viable soil is an issue.”

Su She sighed.

Right. Well, that was an issue he’d have to deal with. Soon. Ugh.

“Fine,” Su She grumbled at them both, especially as they grinned at him for his muttering and glowers in their direction. “It’s not the best idea but I still think this is the safest place in Yiling, once I get the defenses working properly.”

Popo Wei promptly followed Su She into the cave. “What… defenses? Oh, my.”

“Has this been here all along?” Muye whispered as he stared at the glowing arrays decorating the roof of the cave and the xiangqi board on the floor.

“Yep,” Su She said.

He spent his time focusing on the board, nodding that a great many more arrays are now visible, if not obviously active. The work the others had done while he was asleep to charge up the arrays around the other sides of the Burial Mounds clearly had an effect. There was more available, more points and defenses and attacks on the board.

If it’s a xiangqi board. Su She still isn’t sure. If he could just read the damned pictograms, he’d know for sure.

“What is all this?” Muye asked in a hushed, awed voice.

“I don’t know,” Popo Wei said in a troubled voice.

“If I could read the damned pictograms, I’d tell you,” Su She complained and then grinned at the flat looks he got from both of them. “What? I was a Lan. This sort of thing drives me crazy. Knowledge I can’t understand. So rude.”

The Burial Mounds laughed at him, dark energy thrumming through the cave even though there’s a heavy sense of approval in the laughter. Muye dropped to his knees, hiding his head while Popo Wei lifted her chin and stared around the cave defiantly.

“Don’t scare them off,” Su She scolded the Burial Mounds. “They’re here to keep me alive, you know. Apparently I have no sense of self-preservation and need minders.”

“You definitely need minders.” Popo Wei sniffed. “Who is that? Or what?”

“I think it’s the Burial Mounds,” Su She said, staring up at the ceiling’s constellations of pictograms gently gleaming down at them. “I don’t know how it came to be aware. Might be partially something Xue Chonghai did. Might be partially Xue Chonghai himself, for all I know. I just know that the Mounds are aware, sentient to a degree. And they get more sane and coherent the more of the arrays are active. This is why I said you’d be safe in here. This place, this cave and this… entity… was created specifically by Xue Chonghai to protect. I don’t know much, but I do know that.”

There was no other explanation for it. If it was just a ravening monster created out of the piles of resentful energy here in the Burial Mounds, he’d have been dead ages ago. So would Yiling, because those barriers were a joke. They didn’t do a damn thing to keep the townsfolk safe.

Popo Wei frowned over it all, but she still followed Su She into the statue room willingly enough. If there was an ocean’s worth of judgement in her eyes as she peered into the dark corners and silently judged the fallen statue, well, she was entitled to it at her age.

“We’re not going to be eaten, are we?” Muye asked from the doorway. He barely peeked, then slowly eased into the room while staring wildly at everything. “What is that? Why is that here? Who is that supposed to be?”

“If I could read the damned pictograms—” Su She started to say.

“You’d tell us,” both Muye and Popo Wei said with a roll of the eyes and a heartfelt sigh respectively.

“Exactly,” Su She said. “All right. I don’t think you—”

“We’re going with you,” Popo Wei interrupted while Muye nodded reluctantly.

“Can climb over the statue’s head to get to the secret room behind it,” Su She continued while glaring at them both for interrupting. “I mean, we can try and heft you up and over, but I’m pretty sure you’d rather we didn’t, Popo Wei.”

“Over the… Oh.” Muye stared at the statue and then sigh. “Yeah, that makes sense. Good way to hide the secret room.”

He set to work helping Su She heft the worktable’s pieces overtop the statue’s head, both of them grumbling about the tight quarters and the dust and making idle plans of how to shift the head out of the way enough that they wouldn’t have to struggle this way.

“It is rather tight,” Popo Wei said. “Not too bad. I’m not sure what the problem was.”

Su She stared at her. Somehow, she’d gotten around the statue and was standing right in front of the hidden doorway to the Xue Chonghai’s library. Popo Wei smirked at him, nodding towards the illusion of the wall.

“Here, yes?” Popo Wei asked.

“How?” Su She huffed at her.

“I walked around the head and then just side-stepped over to here,” Popo Wei explained with a shit-eating grin that was more suited to Wei Wuxian than it was to a little old granny leaning on her cane.

It was so painfully obvious that Wei Wuxian was related somehow to Popo Wei. Seriously. He could be her literal great-grandson; the smiles were that identical.

“I hate you and everything about you,” Su She announced, much to Popo Wei’s amusement. “Yeah, right there. It’s about three paces in and then you’ll be able to see again.”

“How?” Muye grumbled next to Su She. “It’s just not fair.”

“With age comes wisdom,” Su She replied in his own grumble. “And the ability to make everyone younger than you look like blithering idiots.”

That made Muye snicker and nod, which, you know, was fair.

Either way, they worked together to ferry the worktable and baskets full of scrolls and ink sticks and loose paper into the secret library. Popo Wei stood off to the side, studying the map on the wall rather than poking at any of the scrolls.

From her expression, she found the whole thing distinctly disturbing, but she didn’t say anything, so he didn’t have to worry about it. Yet.

“Wow, this is a lot more than I was expecting,” Muye whispered to Popo Wei once Su She had his table set up and was working on duplicating the vegetable garden scroll.

“Much more,” Popo Wei agreed.

They both froze when Su She activated the Lan copying talisman. In a matter of moments, he had an exact copy of the scroll, complete with the nodes and any damage or stain marks. Su She checked between the original bamboo strip scroll and the actual paper scroll, nodding his approval.

“How did you do that?” Muye asked so warily that Su She raised an eyebrow at him. “I mean, that’s gotta be demonic cultivation there.”

“…That’s the Lan copying talisman,” Su She said, glaring at them both. “What are you going on about? It’s a simple copy, you idiot.”

“Hm,” Popo Wei hummed, perking up. “I have about twenty old healing texts I want to use that on, then.”

“No problem,” Su She said. “I’ve got spare paper. We can do it when we get back to Yiling. The scrolls are all for these. If I have to, I’ll go get more scrolls, though.”

He got to work on copying more of the scrolls, working his way methodically through the shelf the agricultural one had been on. After a bit, both Popo Wei and Muye helped. Muye ground ink. Popo Wei unwrapped and unrolled and then rerolled and rewrapped scrolls for him. She had a good gentle hand for it which was good. Between the three of them, they had half the scrolls blindly copied over in a shichen, at which point Popo Wei called for a break.

“We can get the rest after you eat,” Popo Wei declared. “Come on. Leave it all here and we’ll go outside, get some fresh air.”

“Fine,” Su She said even though he kind of wanted to bull his way through until everything was copied. “I suppose I could do with some food.”

“I could definitely eat,” Muye said cheerfully, like the sixteen-year-old kid that he was.

Popo Wei led them the easy way around the statue’s head, gracefully ignoring Su She’s grumbles and Muye’s snickers. While she and Muye set up a little picnic right outside the cave, Su She went to the spring and used the Heavenly Pillar to purify the water.

It kind of blasted the entire area around him clear of all resentful energy, right down into the soil for close to fifteen paces in every direction, but the water was nice and clear once it stopped blazing, so Su She wasn’t going to complain about the spots in his eyes.

“Well, the water’s clean,” Su She said once he’d stumbled back to Popo Wei and Muye. “We can refill the water bottles now.”

Popo Wei sighed and put his bao into his hand because the spots in his eyes were so obnoxious that he couldn’t actually see her hand. Or the bao. Or Muye’s face, for that matter.

It was fine. He ate and carefully circulated his qi through his eyes, and by the time he was on his third bao, he could see just fine. Granted, most of what he was seeing was Muye’s judgmental look and Popo Wei’s pursed lips every time she glanced his way.

What sucked was that the Burial Mounds grumbled about him hurting himself, too. That was way harder to ignore.

“Come on,” Su She groaned finally. “It was just spots in my eyes. You guys need to stop glowering at me over it.”

“You take far too many risks with your body,” Popo Wei replied sadly enough that Su She flinched. “I don’t know who convinced you that your life and your health are expendable, but I’d rather like to give them a stern talking to.”

The thought of Popo Wei meeting Jin Guangyao as he was at the end made a cold sweat break out on Su She’s back. Or the thought of her meeting the bitter Lan Qiren and Lan Xichen from the future that wasn’t. That would be just as bad, in a different, less bloody, way.

“There’s no one you could talk to,” Su She said, glaring at the rocks between his feet so that he wouldn’t have to meet their eyes. “That’s all in the past. Besides, I’m not that bad. I know, knew, people who were much worse. And what’s so bad about giving someone your loyalty, anyway? If the person’s worthy of it, it’s a pretty good thing.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think whoever you did give your loyalty to was worthy,” Muye said. “The way you act makes me think they knifed you in the back or something.”

“Chest strike,” Popo Wei countered. “A vicious one. I’ve seen how you react to anyone trying to touch your chest, Su She.”

“Stop perceiving me, both of you,” Su She complained.

Rather than argue with them about it all and maybe admit something that he shouldn’t, Su She stomped back into the hidden library to keep working on transcribing the rest of the scrolls. Muye and Popo Wei didn’t join him right away. They must have had one of those little whispered conversations before they came back, because both of them left the subject of Su She’s supposed lack of care for his own survival alone.

They’d gotten the process for copying the scrolls down to a fine art, so it didn’t take another shichen to finish the job of getting the rest of them. Su She sighed once the last one went back on its carefully protected shelf.

“There we go,” Su She said, patting the cave wall. “Now I just gotta learn to read these things. You got anything else we need to know about before we head back out to Yiling?”

The Burial Mounds hummed under their feet for a moment. Then the map flashed with several warnings around the edges of Yiling. Su She wasn’t sure what the warnings were, but he dutifully copied them down.

“That one’s on the main road, just where everyone turns to come to Yiling,” Muye said.

“And this one is where the Wei have settled,” Popo Yu agreed, tapping her cane against the higher up spot. “Not sure what this one is.”

“That’s where I did the Heavenly Pillar on the spring,” Su She said. “I’d best go check that before we leave, just in case the Pillar did something weird.”

The Burial Mounds seemed to calm down once they’d acknowledged the three warnings. It stayed quiet as they left the library, then the cave. The xiangqi board had shifted a bit, not much, but enough to be noticeable.

“Ah, must be people from outside nosing around town,” Su She said as he studied the board. “If this is the cave, that has to be the town. That means these have to be people coming in.”

“Xiangqi as a defense system,” Popo Wei mused as she studied the board and nodded slowly. “We need more defenses here. Walls and shields to keep the Wei from being noticed.”

Su She pursed his lips and then shrugged as he summoned a little bit of resentful energy. When he carefully dragged his fingers over to the proper position to shield and protect the Wei’s tents, a new pictogram bloomed there.

It felt like a wall, like a screen. Maybe like a temporary fortress or something.

Su She hummed and then pushed a tiny bit more energy into it. The pictogram flashed once then brightened and stabilized enough that it gave him the impression of thick stone walls guarded by ranks of soldiers.

“I think that might have helped,” Su She said. “We’ll have to go check. I really want to keep Wen Ruohan from getting his hands on your people, Popo Wei. We can’t let him keep Wen Qing, no matter what.”

Popo Wei nodded about that, walking slowly at his side as they made their way down towards the spires. She paused and then snorted a little laugh as Su She checked on the arrays carved into the base of the spires. Muye followed Su She, muttering under his breath about what they meant and why they were there, which Su She could only give guesses on.

“I do have a question for you,” Popo Wei said once they rejoined her.

“Sure,” Su She said. “What is it?”

“Why did you travel back in time?” Popo Wei asked so seriously that Su She’s heart just about stopped dead in his chest.

“Wait, what?” Muye squawked. He stared at Popo Wei and then at Su She. “Is that why he’s so weird? It’s been driving me crazy how he knows us all and what’s going to happen.”

“I do not know what’s going to happen,” Su She protested automatically. “I mean, I can make logical guesses but…”

Both of them stared at him so flatly that he trailed off and groaned while rubbing his face with both hands. Great. Wonderful. And here he’d thought that he was doing a good job hiding his time travel from everyone.

They were all dead if Wen Ruohan realized that he’d time traveled. It wouldn’t be much better if the other Great Sects figured it out, either.

“So?” Popo Wei asked once he met her eyes again.

Su She sighed and let them see how tired he was. How twitchy the Sunshot Campaign and Jin Guangyao had made him. He rubbed his chest, which ached as if Nie Mingjue had just then punched through it.

“The future that I came from sucked,” Su She said finally. “Between the war that’s coming against the Wen and the aftermath, every single Wen but one baby died. Miserably. About half the Lan died before the war, another third of the remaining during the war. The Jiang? Killed entirely other than the three heirs. Which, don’t let me forget, you need to meet Wei Wuxian. I think he’s like a grandson or something. The Nie were decimated. Most of the small sects were outright annihilated. The entire Jianghu was on track to fall apart within a generation or so.”

Popo Wei went white as he talked while Muye’s eyes went wide as saucers. She pressed one hand to her lips, tears rising in her eyes. There wasn’t much he could say to fix it, so he kept stomping right over her heart.

“Personally?” Su She continued. “I suffered in the Lan until I was half-mad. Then I defected. Bitter, disconsolate asshole was a good description of me. Tried to start my own sect and no one took me seriously. I was just a cheap Lan copy, not anything new.”

“With the way you take bits and pieces and turn them into new talismans?” Muye huffed with supreme outrage.

“Yep,” Su She agreed. “The person I dedicated my life to went through so much shit that he was a murderous, traitorous bastard who used me like a tool and then, at the end when everything fell apart, tossed my life aside as worthless. I mean, I saw it coming so I had a time travel array on tap. Good thing too, because it’s hard to survive when a fierce corpse punches straight through your heart.”

They both flinched.

“I dropped back into my younger body and, well, decided to do things different,” Su She finished. “The Wen will be coming. Wen Ruohan is probably already a puppet of the Yin Iron. Jin Guangshan will do everything in his power to run every single sect into extinction so that he can be the new Chief Cultivator once Wen Ruohan’s dead. And every single sect is going to play into their vicious little opera.”

“Or they would have until you started doing things,” Popo Wei said. She nodded once. “Good. We shouldn’t discuss this with the others. I don’t believe they’d keep it quiet. But it was important to know. I can cover your back and your disciple here needed to understand just what he was getting into.”

“Wait, what?” Su She squawked at Muye who blushed brilliantly but still put on his defiant grin. “Oh, fuck my life. You can’t be serious.”

“As if I wasn’t already trying to figure out all the stuff you do,” Muye said. “Mom’s already said that if she had her way, she’d be your disciple, too. Jinwen’s not far behind. Shuxin thinks we’re all crazy but he’s lazy so that’s no surprise. Half the town would start wearing black, grey and red if you gave the least sign of being interested in starting a new sect.”

“Many among the Dafan Wei feel the same,” Popo Wei agreed. She grinned at his dropped jaw and desperate whine. “Oh, shut your mouth and come along, young man. I’d like to have a proper dinner and you have a lot of studying to do.”

Su She sighed as he trailed along behind the two of them.

This was not what he’d planned. It wasn’t what he’d expected, either. What ever happened to his grand plan of being no one and nothing, drawing no attention at all until it was time to go attack Wen Ruohan?

Silly question.

He knew exactly what’d happened. He’d seen a sick young man, met a desperately ill family, and let his foolish, too-soft heart get the better of him yet again.

Fuck.

He sighed as he listened to the two of them banter back and forth about what the new sect should be called.

“It’s the Yiling Su sect,” Su She announced as the passed the line of barrier stones which were all standing up properly and mostly cleaned off now. General Kwan had done a good job. “Not that we’re going to announce anything anytime soon, mind you, but that’s what it would be called.”

“Yiling Su,” Muye mused. He nodded firmly. “I like it.”

“Fitting,” Popo Wei agreed. “I suppose Muye would be your First Disciple.”

“Oh, hell to the no,” Su She said instantly. He rolled his eyes when Muye looked hurt at his instinctive response. “Lianmin would be First Disciple. The First Disciple needs to be someone who can knock me down a notch, tell everyone else what to do with themselves, and who can manage the sect if I’m gone somewhere.”

“Oh,” Muye said, blinking. “If that’s the criteria, then logically yes. It would be Mom. I’ll let her know tonight.”

“No,” Su She said.

Both Popo Wei and Muye ignored his protest. They marched right off towards the Cho farm as if there was no question that the Yiling Su sect was going to be starting up today. Tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.

He threw up his hands and followed them, wondering what it was about him that attracted terrifyingly competent people who flatly didn’t listen to him when he said things. If it had just happened in the future that wasn’t, that would be one thing. Jin Guangyao, you know.

But now it was happening in the past, too, which meant that it wasn’t chance or Jin Guangyao’s plotting. It was something about Su She and that was a kick and a half when he really didn’t need it.

“No, no, no!” Su She snapped as the two of them started plotting a town meeting about the still hypothetical Yiling Su sect. “No! We have to make sure everyone is safe and create the secret hide-out first. No sect anything until that’s done, damn it!”

He ran after them, determined to keep things under control if at all possible. Deep inside, where he absolutely wasn’t going to let it be seen, his heart sang with joy that he wasn’t going to be alone in all of this. Maybe he couldn’t tell everyone about his time travel. Maybe he couldn’t share all the stuff he’d learned and created in the future that wasn’t. But he wasn’t alone now and that mattered a lot for a kid who’d grown up in the Cloud Recesses. This wasn’t the sect or clan he’d thought he’d belong to, but it wasn’t too bad all things considered.

As long as he could keep Wen Ruohan and Jin Guangshan from killing everyone.

 

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