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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7. In Which Unwelcome Guests Interrupt Ongoing Projects, Much to Our Protagonist’s Annoyance

Su She watched the Jiang senior disciples saunter up Yiling’s main street and very carefully didn’t turn to look towards the hills where the Dafan Wei were hiding.

The “wall” that he’d created on the Burial Mounds’ xiangqi board defense system had turned out to be an actual, physical wall of solid stone that had thrust up out of the ground, much to everyone’s startlement at the time. There were a whole series of pictogram arrays on it that made the wall hard to notice and everything behind it even less likely to be seen, heard, smelled or anything.

Popo Wei had approved.

She’d shooed both Su She and Muye off back to the Cho farm, which was fine. Lianmin had taken the news that she was slated to be the Yiling Su sect’s First Disciple with a confident nod, as if that was the most logical choice. The others had all nodded, too, which amused Su She. Even Shuxin had taken it as a given that his mother was the perfect candidate.

“You’ll want to make a point of being in town tomorrow,” Lianmin had said while serving out dinner. She’d managed to get some meat from somewhere, but she didn’t serve any of it to Su She, of course.

He nodded his thanks for that before raising an eyebrow about town. “Why? I mean, I have all the scrolls to work on now.”

“Do it in town,” Lianmin repeated with a stern enough look that Su She just nodded that he would. “The Jiang sent some disciples. They expect to see you. They were… a bit disturbed that you hadn’t come back to Yiling yet when they arrived yesterday.”

“Fuck,” Su She sighed. “Fucking politics. Never could stand that nonsense.”

“Deal with it anyway,” Lianmin ordered.

So, here he was, sitting on the steps of Yiling’s one teahouse, watching the Jiang disciples in their fine purple silks saunter up the street of Yiling towards him as if they owned the place. It bugged him. A lot more than it should, given that he wasn’t actually a sect leader, Yiling was supposed to be the armpit of the Jianghu, and he didn’t want them to notice anything.

Him and his stupid pride. Now was not the time to get all wrapped around the ox cart’s axel about respect, honor and dignity. He was a rogue cultivator who’d left the Lan. There was nothing for him to be all huffy about.

Yet.

“Su She?” the lead disciple asked once they reached the steps.

“That’s me,” Su She said. “I didn’t think that Sect Leader Jiang would be looking for me this soon.”

“The talisman you created was very interesting,” the lead disciple said as if he was kind of surprised that someone like Su She could do anything significant.

“Yeah, yeah, so who are you?” Su She said, waving off the backhanded praise. “Jiang, I know. But you gotta have a name, right?”

The casual disrespect completely threw the kid off. He wasn’t any different in age than Su She was, really. About twenty-two, not as much as twenty-five, but he seemed so very young to Su She. All full of pride and honor with no idea of the horrors that were coming to the Jianghu.

The kid sucked in a breath as he pasted on a too-stiff smile. “I am Jiang Heiwei, Second Disciple of the Jiang.”

“Pleased to actually meet you, then,” Su She said with a casual bob of his head that was nowhere near the bow that it should be. “Su She, formerly of the Lan, now a rogue cultivator who’s desperately confused why Sect Leader Jiang wants you to come talk to me. I mean, I thought I made it clear that I wasn’t joining another sect.”

Jiang Heiwei’s mouth hung open for a moment as a dozen replies tripped along behind his eyes. He cleared his throat and straightened up; hands firmly clenched behind his back. The kid might think that he was hiding his tension by putting his hands behind his back, but his shoulders went rock hard and his jaw kept working as he sorted through what to say next.

“Sect Leader Jiang thought you might not be aware that Wen Ruohan is… very interested… in what you did with the Heavenly Pillar of Purification,” Jiang Heiwei said with careful, neutral precision for every single word. “He is, in fact, somewhat worried that the Wen may… cause trouble in Yiling.”

“Mm,” Su She said as he leaned his elbows on his knees.

The contrast between their perfect lilac silk robes and expensive silver guan against his scruffy black linen robes and messy ponytail held up by an old red ribbon he’d snagged from Jinwen’s repair basket was painfully stark. He looked like no one. Like street trash that was probably only at the teahouse to get some wine before he went to go get drunk.

Showed what appearances really meant, didn’t it? Because Su She had all the power in this little confrontation and they had none, whether they realized it or not.

“Like that’s news,” Su She said. “That was obvious back before I even left the Lan. Wen Ruohan is determined to rule the entire Jianghu as Emperor. Chief Cultivator isn’t enough for him. He’s going to roll right over the top of everyone, Lan, Jiang, Nie, Jin and all the minor sects, too. If your Sect Leader isn’t preparing for war, he’s going to get the entire Jiang Sect killed.”

Jiang Heiwei’s cheeks flushed. “You dare–!”

“Kid, I’m not the one who’s going to bring the Wen down on your heads,” Su She interrupted before he could get stupid and try to challenge Su She or something. “That’ll be Jiang Wanyin or Wei Wuxian. They’re the ones in danger. Jiang Yanli probably won’t bring Wen Ruohan’s attention to her. I mean, from what I’ve heard, she’s just this sweet, kind girl. But your heir and your First Disciple? Yeah. Wen Ruohan will find a reason to go after them. He’s already got a reason to go after the Lan.”

“You,” Jiang Heiwei whispered.

“Me and the Heavenly Pillar,” Su She agreed. “There’s no doubt he’ll come here. But probably not right away, you know? Because Yiling is nothing and there’s no one important here besides me. Unless you’re here. And then, oh then.”

He laughed softly while shaking his head.

Du Xilin strolled over, passing Su She to head up into the teahouse. He came back a moment later with a sturdy mug full of tea for Su She, the other one held in his free hand. When Du Xilin raised his eyebrow at Jiang Heiwei, it made Jiang Heiwei go very pale.

“It’s collusion, right?” Du Xilin said. “If they’re here when the Wen show up.”

“Yep,” Su She agreed. “The Jiang are conspiring against the Wen, don’t you know? Seeking out the mad Yiling Laozu who creates horrific talismans that devastate entire lakes.”

“But that’s not what it does,” Jiang Heiwei protested. “It just purifies resentful energy. Dramatically.”

Su She snickered, pointing at Jiang Heiwei before sipping his tea. “It’s the dramatics that matter. Truth’s not important to the Wen. Or the Jin. They only care about their profit. The Lan might weakly protest that one of “theirs” would never do something like that, but I’m not one of theirs anymore, am I?”

“And the Nie don’t even know who you are,” Jiang Heiwei whispered. He licked his lips and shuffled his feet as if he was resisting the urge to turn around and fly straight out of town.

“Exactly,” Su She agreed. “The truth doesn’t matter when you have someone determined to start a fight. All that matters is protecting your family, your sect, your clan. Or your friends, as the case may be. So. With all seriousness and full respect to the Jiang Sect and your sect leader. If you’re not preparing for war, you’re all going to die. How are you going to keep soldiers out of Lotus Pier? How will your people escape when, not if, the Wen attack? What’s more important: keeping your sect alive or having shiny new talismans that really aren’t all that useful unless you happen to live in the middle of a place riddled to the core with resentful energy?”

Jiang Heiwei shut his eyes and sighed. “Like Yiling.”

“Like Yiling,” Su She agreed. “So. Yeah. Go home. Tell Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan that war is coming very, very soon. The Waterborne Abyss didn’t grow in Caiyi Lake. It had to have been driven downstream by the Wen to see how the Lan responded. The war has already started. The first battle was already fought. Oh, and I’d bet you anything that the first casualties have already died. Has anyone checked in on the little sects between Qishan and here lately? Or have they been unusually quiet and everyone just… ignored it?”

All three Jiang disciples sucked in a sharp breath. So did Du Xilin, but he also shook his head and grimaced as if dismayed. The Jiang just looked too young to be out on their own.

And horrified.

“Thank you, Yiling Laozu,” Jiang Heiwei said, bowing with full, formal posture. “We will carry your message back to our sect leader.”

“Good,” Su She said, rubbing the back of his neck which felt way too hot. Damn face blushing on him again. “Make sure he passes it on to the Lan and Jin and Nie, too. I mean, Jin Guangshan won’t do a damned thing about it, but I’ve heard Yu Ziyuan is friends with Madame Jin. She should at least give her friend a head’s up. Maybe with, you know, her favorite instant-death poison or something.”

Du Xilin snickered. “Rude.”

“I don’t know,” Su She drawled as he grinned and wagged his eyebrows. “Might be better for the Jin if there was a tragic accident in Jin Guangshan’s future. He’s such a lech. I mean, it can’t go any worse for them if he was gone. Put a Yu woman in as regent and even Wen Ruohan might hesitate to act against them.”

Jiang Heiwei cleared his throat, coughing a laugh into his hand. “I will pass your words along, Laozu. Thank you.”

The three of them turned on their heels and marched off towards the edge of town. Su She couldn’t help but be reluctantly impressed that they hadn’t taken to the sky the instant they turned. Whatever.

Whatever!

Jiang Fengmian would take the warning, or he wouldn’t. Su She had done what he could on that front. He had more important things to work on now.

“Now what?” Du Xilin asked.

“Now you get to making wall and roof beams,” Su She said. “Enough to house all of Yiling and all the Dafan. I’ll get to work making the sanctuary safe enough for people to actually live in there.”

Du Xilin nodded slowly. “I’ll pass the word that we need more bricks. More roof tiles. Ovens?”

“Good idea,” Su She said. “Little portable stoves would be better than ovens, though. We can make a big shared oven for everyone to use.”

After that, there was a lot of running around talking to people that felt far too familiar to Su She. It’d been a while since he’d been a proper Sect Leader. Even in the future that wasn’t, Ran Quanyu had handled the majority of the day-to-day stuff. Especially after Su She lost his damned mind and dedicated himself to serving Jin Guangyao.

But he remembered the early days of setting up Moling Su and this was stunningly similar to that. Less recruiting, but more trying to figure out how to make sure everyone was safe. Less politics, so far, but a lot more sorting out defenses for the upcoming war.

If Ran Quanyu wasn’t too busy being a teenaged asshole with a completely different name and gender right now, Su She would’ve gone to find him and bring him back. The experience that’d made Ran Quanyu into Ran Quanyu hadn’t happened yet. Might not happen at all, if Su She managed to derail the Sunshot Campaign properly.

Ran Quanyu would have to find his own way to his new name and gender, as much as it bugged Su She not to have Ran Quanyu there to yell at him all the time.

Either way, by nightfall, Du Xilin had worked up a whole series of beams and support struts with the barest shaping. He’d gotten the pictograms carved in, of course. Couldn’t have a house beam or support strut without them. That was fine. Whatever Du Xilin felt was needed was good enough, as long as they had something to frame houses out with.

Amazingly, he’d gotten enough of them finished that Su She strapped four huge stacks of them together and slapped a featherweight talisman on each one. The strongest featherlight talismans that made things hover about knee-height worked pretty good, especially once Su She chained the stacks together with ropes like a train of mules.

He and Muye managed to get them up to the sanctuary without any issues, though Du Xilin insisted on coming along so that he could see what they were dealing with.

General Kwan had appeared when they entered the Burial Mounds, but he’d stayed off to the side by the black bamboo instead of marching over for more orders. Amusingly, there were about six more layers of boundary stones than he’d even known where there. General Kwan’s people must’ve dug them up out of the ashy soil and set them up like ranks of shattered teeth.

There was another layer of even older boundary stones around the spires, ones covered with pictograms that Su She ached to inspect. No time for it now, but he’d get there. Eventually.

“This is your sanctuary?” Du Xilin said, lip curling at the bright green grass growing all around the cave’s entrance.

“Where did all this grass come from?” Muye asked, arms flailing and eyes wide. “Those trees have leaves. Why do they have leaves? They didn’t have leaves this morning!”

The change really was pretty significant. The greenest grass and most-alive trees were near the spring that Su She had purified last night, but the whole area around the cave was a lot less “Burial Mounds” and a lot more “potentially livable space” than it had been.

“Now I really want to go see how the fish and seaweed reacted in Caiyi Lake,” Su Sue said. He put his hands on his hips. “This is amazing. I had no idea it might do this.”

Muye stared at Su She with his jaw dropped open.

“Okay, so something is different,” Du Xilin observed cautiously. “That’s nice. Where are we putting houses? Do we have any foundation stones to start from or are we just hammering beams into the ground?”

“Stones we got,” Su She said because hey, mysteries were nice but houses to live in were better. “Over here. Let’s see what we can salvage from the palace foundations.”

Mysteries could wait. For a day or so, anyway. Maybe as much as two or three days. Possibly. If his curiosity didn’t make him crawl right out of his own skin first.

Whatever.

Between the three of them and Su She’s featherlight talismans, they set up the foundation stones for sixteen different little huts spread all around the clearing in front of the cave. They wouldn’t be much, inevitably, but they would be better than everyone piling into the cave.

Granted, the cave could hold a thousand people or so without too much crowding, but Su She kind of didn’t want them tromping around on the xiangqi defensive array or poking into the hidden library.

“I had no idea you could reverse a featherlight to make something massively heavy,” Du Xilin observed as Su She did just that to set the foundation stones in their new locations.

“Mm, most couldn’t,” Su She admitted. “Flipping a talisman seems like a simple task but you get weird effects sometimes when you do it. Took me a few dozen tries when I started messing with this one. Had some really strange effects, too. Boulders really shouldn’t fly like hot air balloons.”

Muye shook his head. “I have so much stuff to learn.”

“You definitely do,” Du Xilin agreed with a snort of laughter. “I think I’ll wait until everything’s properly written down and codified. I don’t want to get caught up in the chaos of testing new ideas.”

Su She glowered at him. “Asshole, it’s never going to be fully codified. That’s not how things work. There’s always something new being tested and always changes being made. Even the Lan, who are the most hide-bound, traditional stick-in-the-mud’s of the Jianghu, have revisions going on all the time.”

“But I thought the rules were the rules,” Muye said.

“Nah, they added like twenty rules and revised about a dozen during my time in the Lan,” Su She said. “Seriously, there’s always changes. Just pick a thing and work on that until you’re good at it, then move on to the next thing.”

Du Xilin grunted. “Right. Teach me how to do these talismans then. I need to apply them to the beams and get the framework of the houses set up.”

A task that should’ve taken a couple of days, teaching Du Xilin and Muye how to create, charge up and apply featherlight talismans, took just about as long as it took for Su She to explain it once. He watched the two of them working together to put up posts, attach cross-beams, and then slot in roof trusses. Both of them acted like it was nothing at all, no big deal, just the simplest thing in the world.

Su She shook his head before heading into the cave. “I don’t know how you do this to them, but every single person born or raised in this town is a fucking genius.”

The Burial Mounds laughed at him.

It also flashed several things on the xiangqi board, pointing out places that Su She needed to fix stuff, charge stuff up, what-have-you, but it still laughed. He didn’t quite start snapping at the Burial Mounds, because that was ridiculous even for his innate insecurities and anxieties, but he did grumble a bit as he took notes on what needed to be done.

Before night fell, Du Xilin and Muye had three houses framed up. Su She helped them get the beams and trusses set up for the next day’s work, then he led them back down to Yiling with the Burial Mounds humming happily in the back of his mind.

Yeah. They were totally doing something right here, even if Su She couldn’t read the pictograms.

Yet.

The next day, Du Xilin took half the Dafan Wei men into the Burial Mounds to get the rest of the houses set up. At the same time, Muye and Shuxin went over to Cho Dahong’s pottery shed to make about sixty-million roof tiles that Su She whacked together a “Fire the Clay Instantly” talisman for.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life!” Cho Dahong breathed as he watched a stack of a hundred bamboo-shaped roof tiles firing red-hot while standing out in the open. “This is amazing. I love it!”

“You’re just lazy like Shuxin,” Muye said, poking Dahong’s shoulder.

“I will absolutely admit to that when it gets me talismans like this,” Dahong said, grinning so widely that Muye groaned and stomped off to shape more roof tiles instead of trying to tease him.

By midday, Dahong had enough roof tiles for all sixteen huts in the burial mounds. It took a bit of work to get them all stacked up and tied to bamboo poles, but Dahong apparently had infinite creativity when it came to avoiding carrying heavy tiles a couple miles up a mountain. He drafted people in town, including Muye, and disappeared into the Burial Mounds with all the tiles.

Just before the Wen sauntered into town.

Or towards town, anyway. The Burial Mounds had nudged Su She to warn him who was coming, so Su She made sure he was sitting in the dirt, hunched over as he carefully took a rubbing of a pictogram he’d already taken a rubbing of.

It was a nice one, complicated and confusing enough that Su She thought it might, possibly, be a decoy, so the Wen disciples frowned at him instead of barking orders.

“Do you know where these are from?” Su She asked instead of introducing himself or demanding that they do it first. “I mean, do you recognize what sort of pictograms they are?”

“N-no,” the lead Wen disciple who looked to be a hardened soldier about thirty-five years old or so. There was a tightness about his eyes that reminded Su She of himself right after the Sunshot Campaign but before he cursed Jin Zixun with the Hundred Holes Curse.

“Damn it,” Su She grumbled. “I really gotta send another letter to Teacher Qiren. This is driving me crazy.”

“Uh…”

Su She looked up him, deliberately blinking several times as if he’d only just realized that they weren’t natives of Yiling. “Oh. Wen. Right. Sorry, I get kind of involved when I’m researching these things. Who are you?”

The lead disciple huffed a little laugh. “Wen Yonggang. Sect Leader Wen sent us to ah, encourage you to come talk to him.”

“Recruit or kidnap?” Su She asked so calmly that Wen Yonggang’s eyes went wide as his whole troop of soldiers-not-disciples fidgeted nervously. “Because recruitment isn’t going to work. And kidnapping is going to get people hurt. You. Not me. Sorry about that, but not really sorry.”

Wen Yonggang’s hand clenched on his sword hilt, but he didn’t immediately pull it. “You’re not intimidated by us.”

“No,” Su She said, snorting at the sheer idea. “Look, I know. Wen Ruohan is the Chief Cultivator. He’s important. He’s powerful. You’re used to everyone bowing and scraping. Have you ever, even once, heard of Lan Qiren bowing and scraping to him?”

“…No.” Wen Yonggang stared at Su She as if he was growing another head right there in front of them. “You’re not Lan Qiren.”

“No, I’m certainly not,” Su She agreed. “But if Lan Qiren were here, he’d be down in the dirt with me, trying to catalog each of these damned pictographs, too. Probably with extensive libraries pulled out of his sleeves and rafts of letters that he was working on to send off to all of his favorite scholarly buddies.”

Wen Yonggang groaned and ran a hand over his face. “You’re a scholar. Damn it.”

“Very much so,” Su She said with his brightest, most aggressive smile that Jin Guangyao used to praise as being actually effective for intimidating people. “And you’re not getting me out of here unless you’re pulling my cold, dead corpse out. My non-resentful corpse, because I guarantee you if I came back as a resentful corpse, I’d still be fascinated by these things.”

Wen Yonggang thew up his hands and turned to walk away a few paces, muttering under his breath the whole way. Things like “why me” mingled in with “I hate this” and one very pointed sigh that had to be Wen Yonggang’s version of cursing Wen Ruohan out without actually cursing him out.

Because justified paranoia about Wen Ruohan monitoring them even when they were far away from Qishan was justified.

Su She snorted and shifted around so that he could very carefully check the sides and back of the stone.

Then he started cursing under his breath because there were pictograms etched in a delicate hand on the back of the damn thing that he hadn’t caught the first time he’d looked at the stone. Which meant that, someday when there weren’t Wen soldiers-not-disciples in town, he was going to have to go back over every single stone to see if they had things on the back, too. Damn it all.

“Wen Ruohan would help you with this research,” Wen Yonggang announced as Su She was carefully copying down the back pictograms.

“Wen Ruohan doesn’t give a damn about anything that won’t bring him more power,” Su She countered. “Nice try, but no. I know better than that. Besides, the Heavenly Pillar—”

One of the soldiers-not-disciples in the back of the crowd sniggered.

“Thank you!” Su She exclaimed. “Do you have any idea how few people are actually laughing at the dick joke? I’m so disappointed in the whole world. Put an enormous dick joke out there and no one laughs at it. Just sad. So sad.”

The kid the back snickered even harder, despite Wen Yonggang glowering at him. The other soldiers-not-disciples did their best to be as blank-faced as a Guanyin statue. That only lasted as long as Wen Yonggang was looking their way. As soon as he turned away, the sniggers spread.

“Why?” Wen Yonggang asked. “Just why?”

“Big blazing pillar of light stabbing up towards the heavens,” Su She said, shrugging. “What else do you call it?”

“…Why am I even having this conversation?” Wen Yonggang muttered. “Wen Ruohan requires your presence. You will be coming with us whether you like it or not.”

“No,” Su She said as he tucked his new notes away into his sleeve and stood, brushing his robes off casually. “I won’t, actually.”

They all put their hands on their swords, not that they drew them. Su She rolled his eyes and pulled his stack of experimental talismans out of his other sleeve, muttering as he sorted through them. Better Heavenly Pillar that didn’t kick you in the chest. Better spirit attraction flag that he hadn’t quite finished. Better featherlight talisman, about eight of those. The flipped feather-lights that made things stupidly heavy.

Su She nodded, charging enough of those up.

A quick gesture flung them at the Wen soldiers-not-disciples. Wen Yonggang started to shout orders to cut Su She down.

Started to. The Stupidly Heavy talismans hit his entire crew, dropping them to the ground where they groaned and slowly sank into the dirt. Su She nodded and then smiled at Wen Yonggang.

“Present for you,” Su She said as he headed back into Yiling. “Brand new talisman: The Stupidly Heavy Object talisman. Opposite of a featherlight. Enjoy. You’ll want to get them off their chest before they’re buried in the dirt. Might die if they go too deep. Collapsing soil around them, you know.”

“What?” Wen Yonggang shouted.

He started at Su She, then turned around as his men shouted for help in wheezy desperate tones. Su She kept on sauntering back into Yiling, leaving the Wen to sort out their own problems. He wasn’t at all surprised to find Muye on the road, staring back towards Wen Yonggang who was cursing up a storm as he tried to rescue his men.

“Wow,” Muye said. “I had no idea those would do that.”

“You smack a Stupidly Heavy Object on anything and it’s going to be stupidly heavy,” Su She replied.

Muye curled a lip in his direction. “You are so bad at naming things. I swear, you should never be allowed to name anything at all. I’m telling Pan Jinwen that you’ll name her baby something stupid.”

Su She stared at him. “Why would I be naming Jinwen’s baby? Shouldn’t she do that? Or at least Lianmin?”

Muye cackled, which drew even louder curses out of Wen Yonggang. “I love how you don’t even consider that Shuxin could name his own son.”

“He’d name the kid “first boy” or “first girl” and leave it at that,” Su She scoffed. “Like Lianmin would let her precious first grandchild be named that way.”

They headed back into Yiling to the sound of Wen Yonggang’s increasingly frantic cursing. Took him a good long time before he thought of putting a simple featherlight on each of them to cancel out the Stupidly Heavy Object talisman.

Which. Yeah, he should totally come up with a better name for that one. He just didn’t care all that much about fancy names for most of the things he invented. If he was going to sell it to other people for any real amount of money, sure, he’d put the effort in.

Those things? Eh, probably not. They might be helpful in war if he could figure out how to trigger them remotely, but that was more work than he was willing to do right now. More important things to take care of.

“So now what happens?” Muye asked as the echoes of the Wen soldiers-not-disciples relief echoed up the road to them.

“We head into town, make like nothing is going on, and then see what happens,” Su She said. “I doubt that Wen Ruohan actually told them to bring me in dead or alive. I’m not useful dead and I’m not a big enough threat to him. Yet. What’ll be interesting is just how persistent Wen Yonggang will be in the whole recruit him or drag him back thing.”

Muye side-eyed Su She. “You’re not going to let them recruit you, right?”

“Pfft, no,” Su She said. “I did the join a sect thing already. I hated it. And no, I’m not going to let them drag me off, either. I’ve got about a thousand different ways to discourage them from grabbing me, completely aside from all that.”

Su She waved towards the Burial Mounds which he didn’t want to expose to the Wen yet. There were still mysteries that he had to solve, a language that he needed to learn to read. And the entity at the heart of the Burial Mounds, whatever it might be, was not something that Su She was ready to turn into a weapon.

There were other options. A lot of other options. Hell, he had everything that Wei Wuxian came up with, a good half of what Xue Yang whacked together while he was torturing and killing people, the things Jin Guangyao had him do, and all his own creations and that was just on the demonic cultivation side.

Su She knew he could hold the line for a really long time.

What he didn’t know was how the Jianghu at large and how Wen Ruohan in particular would react to a two-bit nobody from Yiling defying them all.

For one panic-driven moment, Su She wildly wished that he could have his Jin Guangyao back. There was no political problem, outside of how to keep Lan Xichen from hating him, that Jin Guangyao couldn’t solve.

Hopeless, there.

Because Jin Guangyao was still Meng Yao. He was still serving with the Nie and dealing with that asshole of a captain who stole his ideas and treated him like crap. Meng Yao was out of Su She’s reach as irrevocably as if he’d been on the other side of the world.

Because Meng Yao served under Nie Mingjue.

Su She was not going to be in the same room with Nie Mingjue. Not now. Not ever, if he could manage it. The panic attacks wouldn’t, couldn’t, be worth it.

8. In Which Our Protagonist Deals With Politics and Wishes That Daytime Drinking to Excess Was Less Looked-Down Upon

So, the pictograms in the Grow Healthier Radishes and Beans scroll turned out to be among the very common ones that Lianmin used, which was very helpful in parsing out potential meanings. Better still, that scroll had a lot of really basic pictograms that were combined into other, more complicated pictograms like the one he’d found on the back of the stone marker at the edge of the valley.

One of the scrolls that had some very interesting diagrams showing what looked like construction layouts, at least according to Du Xilin, used both the very simple pictograms and the compound ones. Better still, that scroll had a lot of the things Su She had found on the xiangqi defense board, which, honestly, was blinking warning lights constantly lately.

Su She frowned at the thing from his spot sitting at the opening of the cave with a second worktable, the two scrolls and a small mountain of notes he’d created trying to decipher Xue Chonghai’s language.

“Yeah, I know. There’s outsiders.” Su She tried to turn back to his work, but the Burial Mounds grumbled at him. “Come on! I know they’re there. You know they’re there. I can’t fucking send them away. We’re not ready to keep everyone safe yet.”

The Burial Mounds all but shoved him towards Yiling.

Outside of the cave, Du Xilin and the vast majority of the Dafan Wei were working on building houses, making outdoor kitchens and harvesting the ridiculously fast-growing veggies that’d volunteered themselves out of the soil. Popo Wei was talking with Lianmin about what plants would be good for dyes or making fabric, but she was one of the few not working on making a proper village garden happen between the new buildings Du Xilin was happily constructing.

Turnips with red flesh and black skins were pretty damn good, actually. The turnip greens were much tangier than normal ones, so Su She really loved those things. Purple carrots and deep black beets that made a red dye so powerful that Lianmin had all but skipped away after testing some of it.

Bamboo that was black but still edible. Also incredibly fast-growing. Sixteen different sorts of greens that were more on the black side of things than the emerald. No potatoes, the soil wasn’t good for that, but just about everything else that he could think of.

The extensive and indecipherable wards Xue Chonghai had built into the Burial Mounds had, once they were primed by his Heavenly Pillar of Purification, turned the heart of the Burial Mounds from a graveyard into a paradise of freely available food, sparkling clean water and the kind of security that made the Cloud Recesses feel exposed.

Su She wasn’t sure if he wanted to think about just how heart-broken and furious Xue Chonghai had to have been to turn his perfect paradise into a graveyard full of resentful rage.

They were fixing it. Bit by bit, not really understanding what they were doing, but they were fixing it all. Another couple of days and the entirety of Yiling would be able to retreat if they needed to. That’s all he needed, another couple of days.

The Burial Mounds shoved Su She towards Yiling again.

“Fine!” Su She huffed, throwing his hands up. “I’m fucking going, you nagging bastard. Someday. Someday I’m figuring this fucking language out and no one anywhere is going to stop me, especially not you.”

He swept all his notes away into one sleeve. The two scrolls went into the other sleeve. Then he stomped off towards Yiling, grumbling the whole way.

It was interesting how different things were outside of the spires. While there was a fruitful garden blooming inside the spires, the space defined by the spires themselves was dry and lifeless, even worse than it had been. Every blade of grass had died. Even the lichen on the rocks was slowly flaking away because it’d died as well.

Once he passed the spires, clouds of resentful energy billowed. General Kwan and his men staggered around like ravening fierce corpses, for all the world looking like they would rip his throat out the instant he lowered his guard.

Except that General Kwan always gave Su She a proper salute when he passed.

He and his men slipped away into the clouds of resentful energy whenever Muye or one of the other Yiling villagers came through. None of the Dafan were outside anymore. Popo Wei had agreed that it just wasn’t safe after Wen Yonggang and his soldiers-not-disciples refused to leave without Su She.

Shuxin rolled his eyes as Su She stomped past the Cho farm. “The Jiang are back. They’re having one of those very polite arguments in the teahouse. Muye’s going to be glad you’re back from your cataloging.”

Which was what they’d decided to call the efforts to hide everyone inside the safe zone. Made sense. Su She actually was doing a hell of a lot of cataloging between dealing with the thousand and one fires that refused to be put out.

Fuck but he hated politics. Also kind of hated the whole thing where Lan were trained from a stupid-young age not to drink. Su She had never been one to break the rules wildly, but he had gotten drunk a time or two after he left the Lan in the future that wasn’t. Hangover headaches were bad, sure, but the release of being pleasantly, not sloppy, drunk was nice.

Even now, on his second life, Su She just couldn’t bring himself to drink alcohol during the day, even when faced with epic levels of stupidity from pretty much everyone and everything. Damn the Burial Mounds, anyway. Getting plastered would be so nice right about now, but no, too much Lan-induced guilt and too much Wen- and Jiang-created stupidity anyway.

He stomped on into town, stomped to the teahouse, and then stomped up the stairs with a scowl on his face that should’ve made people dive out the windows to escape. Didn’t.

Because Wen Yonggang was too busy smiling pointedly at Jiang Heiwei who had on the sort of smile that usually meant throats were about to be cut. Off in the corner, Muye sat with his own pot of tea, a little bowl full of salty snacks, and a fascinated look like he was looking forward to watching Yonggang and Heiwei tear each other into bloody shreds.

“What are you two up to now?” Su She growled.

Neither Yonggang nor Heiwei started. They stiffened, just a little bit, but they didn’t start or turn Su She’s way. Or explain anything either.

“What are they up to?” Su She asked Muye.

Muye grinned. “They’re trying to stare each other down after both of them claimed that their sect leader would give you better houses and wives and all kinds of stuff.”

“The fuck would I want a wife for?” Su She spluttered. “Did either of you idiots even think of asking if I even want a woman?”

Wen Yonggang jerked and turned to stare at Su She. “Ah…”

“Well, I’m sure that Sect Leader Jiang—” Heiwei started to say far too brightly only to snap his mouth shut when Su She pointed a finger at him.

“And did either of you think to ask if I want sex with anyone at all?” Su She demanded. “A house? What the hell would I want with a house? You have a house, and you have to have staff and there’s maintenance and taxes and all kinds of nonsense. The only use I’d have for a house is a place to keep my notes and qiankun pouches are a thousand times more secure. And no!”

He glowered as both Heiwei and Yonggang immediately opened their mouths, much to Muye’s amusement.

“I do not need anyone to make me qiankun pouches,” Su She continued, rolling right over top of Muye’s snickers. “I learned from Teacher Qiren. I’m perfectly capable of making my own, and they’re bigger, sturdier and more secure than anything you two could offer.”

“The Jiang still have far more to offer than the Wen,” Heiwei spluttered, flailing a hand in Yonggang’s direction even though the other Jiang disciples behind him had settled in with snacks, tea, and similar expressions to Muye’s.

“If one is interested solely in making money and getting into flashy fights,” Yonggang started to say in his most scornful tone.

He didn’t get any further because Su She silenced the both of them, much to their shock. Su She glared at them both, hands on his hips, as they made muffled noises of protest and confusion, respectively.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Muye observed, sipping his tea. “Is that one of yours or a Lan thing?”

“Completely a Lan thing,” Su She said, shaking his head. “And every single senior among the Lan knows how to do it. We were generally not allowed to do it without permission or something huge going on, but I think this idiocy counts.”

“They’re not going to stop, you know,” Muye observed so mildly that all the Jiang and all the Wen glared at him. “What? You’re clearly both so wrapped up in your dick measuring contest that nothing is going to stop you.”

Even Su She spluttered into laughter for that. The Jiang disciples just about fell off their chairs, they laughed so hard. The Wen wheezed and coughed into their hands, trying desperately to pretend that they weren’t dying from not laughing their guts out.

Yonggang bellowed something despite the silencing spell. Didn’t manage to rip his lips open again, but he made a good effort.

Heiwei hid his face in his hands while shuddering as if he’d be cursing up a storm if his mouth was free.

“Can’t say that you’re wrong about that,” Su She finally said. After laughing for a good bit, which was certainly better than the rage, frustration and rising panic attack he’d been holding off by the skin of his teeth for days. “Just not sure how to get them to stop.”

Muye shrugged. “Start your own sect? Disappear into the Burial Mounds and become a ragged hermit who comes out to creep everyone out every so often? Oh, how about cultivate to immortality and them smack them all through the floor.”

“Not in the teahouse, though,” Su She said, craning his neck to make sure that the teahouse proprietor wasn’t listening.

Because Ho Junchen, who was taller than Su She, broader in the shoulders than Su She, and possibly the most dangerous person in the entire Jianghu if you could get him out of his kitchen, was no one that Su She wanted to tangle with. The man had agoraphobia worse than anyone Su She had ever met, but he was an amazing cook, a truly talented tea master, and had a past more mysterious than even Su She’s.

Muye peered, too, breathing a sigh of relief. “Right. Definitely not in here. Either way, they’re not going to stop. They’re too invested in this nonsense.”

Heiwei managed to break the silence spell with a combination of determination and a blast of qi through his teeth. “He couldn’t start his own sect. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Yonggang gestured towards Heiwei and then at Su She as if to shout “yeah, that!”

“Great,” Su She groaned. “Now I have to do it, don’t I?”

“Mom’s still your First Disciple,” Muye said as happily as a duck wading into the newly flooded rice paddies.

“I hate my life,” Su She whined. “Hate it. Hate it! Everyone and everything is conspiring to keep me from deciphering those damned pictograms. Fine. Fine! The Yiling Su sect is now taking in a very limited number of disciples. Let’s see. We’ll have Lianmin, and you, Muye. Du Xilin can join and oh, we definitely need Cho Dahong’s particular version of whimsy.”

“He is fun,” Muye agreed. “And he knows tons of pictograms.”

“Wait, this is serious,” Heiwei said as his face went pale. “You’re actually going to do this.”

“I don’t seem to have a choice about it, do I?” Su She huffed. “If you people would just leave me alone and let me putter away on these pictograms, I’d never even think about it. But here we are. So. As the new sect leader of the Yiling Su sect, get the fuck out of Yiling. Go tell your fucking sect leaders what you accomplished.”

Yonggang swallowed. Inaudibly because of the spell. Su She lifted it, which was only proper when the person had calmed down. Or was looking like they might just throw up. Aspirating vomit into your lungs was always horrifying. Su She wasn’t entirely certain that Yonggang’s cultivation would be strong enough to keep the acid from burning his lungs to the point he choked and died.

“You are serious,” Yonggang whispered, as green as the grass outside.

“Yep.” Su She said. “Get out. You, in particular, Wen Yonggang. And you, in particular, Jiang Heiwei, get out. Out of my town. Out of my sight. Out of my fucking hair. Seriously, go fuck each other or something, will you?”

It took another shichen to get both the Wen and the Jiang out of Yiling. There was entirely too much complaining, begging, worrying about what the various sect leaders would think. Despite the Jiang’s steady efforts at making friends with everyone in Yiling, no one in Yiling asked if they could stay.

Heiwei looked so very distraught when Muye shrugged at him instead of asking Su She to let them stay.

“I mean, you’re nice enough,” Muye said, “but you’re all kind of overwhelming. We’re more the quiet and retiring types in Yiling. And all the smiling and cheerfulness is kind of creepy.”

“Creepy?” Heiwei asked in such a broken tone that Su She suspected the Muye had just shattered his sense of self into a thousand tiny pieces.

“This is Yiling,” Su She said. “Think about it.”

Heiwei didn’t think about it. He flew off wobbling on his sword with his people. Yonggang did think about it as he watched the Jiang go. In fact, Su She kind of thought that Yonggang was going to keep right on thinking about “Jiang Smiles Are Creepy” for the rest of his life.

Possibly while throwing back a silent toast for the most devastating blow anyone had ever leveled.

Su She sighed once they were gone. If only they would stay gone. They wouldn’t. Of course they wouldn’t. There was too much at stake for them to stay away.

“I didn’t want to say anything while they were here,” Muye said as he pulled a stack of letters in Lan pale blue paper out of his robes. “But you have mail. The writing on them is getting more urgent so you might want to read them pretty quickly.”

“These are from Teacher Qiren!” Su She exclaimed.

He slowly went pale as he realized that there was a letter for every single day going back to two days after he stole the Dafan Wei. Su She turned and stared at Muye who shrugged and waved one hand towards the departed Wen and Jiang nuisance makers.

“Mom was really clear that they didn’t need to know about those letters,” Muye said. “She’s got some more letters, by the way. From various people, not just from the Lan.”

Su She bolted towards the Cho farm, running full-tilt because he had to know just what was going on in the wider world while he was watching those assholes be distracting, annoying little jerks.

There were so many letters.

So many.

Wei Wuxian had written and sent something like eighty letters, though once sorted and put in a kind of order, it amounted to the content of about five letters with a bunch of drawings, unconnected notes and, oddly, recipes for various sorts of fried vegetables that Su She copied over and gave to Pan Jinwen.

“Oh, I like these,” Pan Jinwen murmured as she set off to start trying them all out. “Thank you, Laozu.”

The letters from Jiang Wanyin were stiffly formal for four letters, then went to admiring for six, then went to grumpy about being ignored for the remaining three. Not much in them, just Jiang Wanyin angling to further their brief acquaintance. And, you know, asking if he’d come up with any more amazing talismans with inappropriate names.

He had letters from all the sect leaders, from Wen Ruohan on down to Sect Leader Yao, the old windbag. Most of them were the formal nonsense that went along with sect leaders trying to get one-up on their neighbors.

There was one very stiff and very formal letter that had come in just that day from Wen Ruohan asking if Su She had a way to track missing people.

Wen Ning had sent exactly one note. It said, “thank you” and nothing else.

“Bad news?” Lianmin asked, peering over his shoulder at Wen Ning’s note.

“Not for me,” Su She replied. “I hope. For other people, probably. Maybe? No, yeah, I think it’s bad news for some other people.”

Lianmin raised one eyebrow, staring down at Su She and his stack of ridiculous mail that he should’ve been getting all along with an expression that Su She had seen on mothers everywhere who were so very done with their children’s nonsense. He went beet red because he hadn’t had anyone look at him that way since he was a literal child.

“Not telling you.”

“I’d say that you clearly shouldn’t,” Lianmin agreed. “I need a bit of kindling. How about that?”

He snorted a laugh and passed the letter from Wen Ning over to Lianmin, watching as she used it to start a fire in the stove. Once that was burned to ashes, Su She sorted the letters into stacks based on “Write Back Politely”, “Write Back With Obvious Confusion”, and “Write Back Rudely to These Idiots”.

Lan Qiren’s many, many letters went in their own stack, of course.

He ended up creating a form letter for the other stacks, which he passed over to Shuxin who was perfectly happy to sit and copy the same letters over and over with the proper people’s names on them. Amazingly, Shuxin had a very good writing hand, so the letters came out looking respectable instead of starting out perfect and degenerating into a scrawl as his letters usually did.

That left Su She free to go over Lan Qiren’s letters in detail which was lovely because they were utterly fascinating. In the time since his first two letters about the pictograms, Lan Qiren had done a massive amount of research, contacted something like forty scholars that he knew in various places, and figured out that the pictograms were far, far older than Su She had thought.

Xue Chonghai might have used them to do things never before seen in Yiling, but he wasn’t the one who created them. They were ancient. Truly ancient. Possibly thousands of years old.

“Huh,” Su She grunted as he studied the copied scroll that Lan Qiren had sent to him. “The pictograms might be out of Tubo. Though Teacher Qiren thinks that they’re older than that. There are similar pictograms coming from the far reaches of Siberia and Mongolia.”

“Seriously?” Shuxin asked, brush poised off the page so that he wouldn’t mess up his latest letter. “Wow. I mean, there’s been stories about the founders of Yiling coming from out past Mongolia for forever, but I never put any credence in them.”

Su She stared at him; mouth open until he managed to splutter some actual words. “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that? For fuck’s sake, that’s important!”

“None of us believe it,” Shuxin said with a shrug. He went back to copying letters, as happy as he could be not to be out hoeing the weeds or doing labor on the farm.

Ridiculous.

Su She huffed and went back to Lan Qiren’s letters. By the time he’d read them all over several times in the process of formulating a reply that wasn’t filled with profanity, the deep betrayals of the entire population of Yiling knowing stories that they didn’t bother to tell him, and an overly-detailed analysis of the Turnip scroll, night had fallen and Lianmin was scowling at both him and Shuxin for cluttering up their dining table with their nonsense.

“I did get all your letters done,” Shuxin said as he passed the stacks over to Su She. “All you need to do is sign them and we’ll send them off. What do you want to do with the rest, burn them?”

“No, sadly, we have to keep them,” Su She grumbled as he nodded his thanks to Shuxin. “Since I was viciously maneuvered and cruelly tricked into declaring the Yiling Su sect, they’re official records of our correspondence and need to be kept. No idea where, yet, but I’ll figure that out eventually.”

Shuxin grinned. “You mean Mom will figure it out and you’ll just nod and agree that she’s right.”

“Same thing,” Su She said entirely casually even though Lianmin glared hot death at them both and Muye snickered into his sleeve along with Jinwen.

They settled in to dinner, all the letters off to the side for the moment. It was still strange to eat with a family this way. The Lan weren’t like that. They had their cafeterias, and some people did actually do the family meal thing, but it was for special occasions and usually very rare. In his Moling Su sect, he’d gone with the same thing, mostly because there weren’t any families yet. He’d had a bunch of young cultivators who were looking to become a proper sect, but time had run out.

No, honestly, he’d gotten so wrapped up in Jin Guangyao’s plotting and nonsense that he’d stopped even trying to make the Moling Su sect work properly. He really didn’t want that to happen again now that he’d been maneuvered into starting another sect.

“Question for you all,” Su She asked as they cleared the table off together and made sure all the dishes got properly washed.

“Yes, we all want to be part of the sect,” Lianmin said, rolling her eyes at him.

“I figured,” Su She said. “Nah, the question is what you guys want out of the sect. I mean, each sect is different. They’ve all got their own little things that they work on that makes them unique. We already know that it’s Yiling and its pictograms and the Burial Mounds themselves that will make the Yiling Su sect unique. I just… Well, given a chance, I’d make it into a near copy of the Lan and that seems ridiculous given how different Yiling is from Gusu. So. What do you guys want from a sect? What do you want to be giving to it? What’s the point of the sect to all of you?”

They were questions that Jin Guangyao had asked, only in private and only with the Jin he trusted. Su She had never asked his people and he still regretted it. Not knowing what Ran Quanyu would have said was going to haunt him for the rest of this life, just like it had in the future that wasn’t.

From the stunned look on Muye’s face and the deeply confused one on Shuxin’s, they weren’t questions that either of them had ever considered. Fair. Most people didn’t think about stuff like that. You took what you got, and you were happy about it.

“Doctors,” Jinwen said firmly, one hand on her ever-growing belly as if to protect the baby inside. “I mean, we have the Wei and all, but it needs to be something that the sect pays for. Doctor care is vital. At all stages of life.”

“Absolutely yes,” Su She agreed. “I mean, that’s normal for sects, but yeah, I’ll definitely talk with Popo Wei about making it official. She’ll probably give me that look, you know the one, like I’m the slowest child she’s ever seen.”

Jinwen giggled. “I do know that look! I hope I can do it when I get older.”

“You will,” Lianmin reassured her, which made Shuxin gulp and go very nervous indeed.

As if Jinwen wasn’t already studying to be Lianmin of the next generation. Shuxin married her. He would just have to deal with it.

“No wall of rules,” Lianmin said with her sternest look. “Yiling isn’t made for rules, not like that. We can’t be admitting people willy-nilly, either. There needs to be a very strict selection process. We have ancient secrets hidden in plain sight. They’ll be stolen in an instant if we take the wrong people in.”

Su She nodded his agreement, pulling out a scrap of paper to start taking notes. “Totally agree with that one. Both of those, actually. The Rules always made me stupidly anxious. Not recreating that here.”

Night was starting to fall, so Su She summoned a little ball of light in the palm of his hand to set over the table so that he could see what he was writing. Muye frowned at the light and then tilted his head sideways as if there was something wrong with it.

“You know, I never asked why you made light that way,” Muye said.

“Lan thing, I thought,” Shuxin said, blinking at Muye.

“…No, that’s how everyone in the Jianghu does it,” Su She said and sighed. “Another thing in plain sight that I missed?”

“Maybe,” Muye said. “This is how we do it.”

He used his finger to sketch one of the simplest pictograms, a circle with a dot in the middle. They very faintly glowed, hovering in the air in front of Muye’s face. He set his finger on the dot and concentrated. The pictogram brightened until it blazed, then faded back to the same intensity as Su She’s.

And then Muye grinned and started changing it to all the colors of the rainbow as if that was a perfectly normal, straightforward thing to do.

“Fuck my life!” Su She groaned. “All right, fine. Teach me how to do that.”

Of course.

Of course it took well into the small hours of the morning for him and Muye to teach each other their very different methods. Of course the Yiling method was fiercely powerful, oddly configured and relied on their strangely effortless cores.

And, from Muye’s side, Su She’s method was far too much work for far too little effect. At least until he realized that doing it Su She’s way made his core stronger and doing it the Yiling way didn’t. At all.

“Why are our things so different?” Muye spluttered once he and Su She decided that they were too tired to keep working on it.

“Now you know how I feel,” Su She said with a little smirk and a very large jaw-cracking yawn. “And it’s not just this. It’s everything. Every single thing from the smallest, most ordinary stuff on up to the biggest stuff is radically different in Yiling.”

Muye frowned. Then turned to stare at Su She’s notes.

“The explanation is in the pictograms,” Muye asked even though he didn’t make it a proper question.

“I think so,” Su She said. “Can’t guarantee it’s all spelled out in neat, orderly lines in the “How and Why We Did It” Scroll, but I also can’t guarantee that there isn’t a “How We Did It” scroll. Yet.”

“Make sure you write your Teacher Qiren,” Muye grumbled while rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand like a little boy. “We really gotta work this out.”

Su She snorted a tired laugh and shooed Muye off to bed like the over-confident junior disciple that he was. Kids. Never willing to admit that they were exhausted even with it was painfully obvious.

Of course, Su She was equally exhausted and equally done with the whole mystery, so he sat up a little longer to write the final version of the letter to Lan Qiren. He included the complaining about people holding his mail because “strangers” were in town, didn’t include all the cursing, and outright begged Lan Qiren to tell him that he knew anything at all about the writing systems of outer Mongolia and Siberia.

All while yawning his head off, head bobbing and barely able to keep the brush working properly.

But it was done and tomorrow it would be sent off.

And tomorrow he would have to sit down with every single person in Yiling to find out what obvious things hidden in plain sight he’d missed because that was probably what would point him in the right direction when it came to translating the damned pictograms.

If that didn’t work, he was going to go interrogate the Burial Mounds themselves because he had to figure this out and quickly.

Wen Ruohan was not going to take the refusal lying down.

That much Su She knew for sure.

9. In Which Our Protagonist Figures Out Several Important Things and Regrets Many Life Choices

“Let’s see…” Su She muttered as he compared six different scrolls against a diagram he’d made with Lianmin’s help, noting which pictograms matched with the meanings he’d gotten from Du Xilin and Cho Dahong.

Every single time he started making progress on the potential dictionary of pictogram meanings, something interrupted him.

Someone. Something. Somehow.

So he’d waited until the middle of the night to start working with the smallest amount of light possible in his attic. He’d even hung a blanket so that no one could see the light in the window. If no one knew he was awake, no one could interrupt him.

And if the Burial Mounds tried, well, fuck them. He was going to fucking figure this out if it killed him.

Lan Qiren might just kill him if he didn’t figure it out. Their letter exchange had continued since his official declaration of the Yiling Su sect, though Lan Qiren professed himself to be unsurprised that Su She had started his own sect.

The sarcasm had all but dripped off the page. Not that Su She could blame him. He hadn’t ever intended to go this path. The world seemed determined to shove him into the Sect Leader position, no matter how utterly unsuited he was for it. At least he’d managed to land on amazingly competent seconds each time. First with Ran Quanyu and now with Lianmin. He’d be doomed if he was on his own, but Lianmin was doing just as good a job as Ran Quanyu had. Maybe even better.

Which wasn’t the point, damn it.

Su She rubbed his eyes and swirled his qi to banish the exhaustion making his mind wander. A few pictograms later, he found himself fretting over how much rice they had on hand. Another swirl and he got six pictograms before he damn near went face first into his notes as sleep tried to overwhelm him.

“Wait,” Su She said, staring at the notes and the pictograms and the way his hands were shaking despite all his efforts at control. “This isn’t accidental. This is on purpose. Something is blocking anyone from learning it!”

Well, that put a completely different color on the apple. Su She swept all his notes and scrolls and diagrams up into a qiankun pouch. No change in his desire to flop down and sleep. He gathered his ink and brushes and inkstone. Still no change.

Slipping out of the house was easy enough, as was striding silently through the night towards the heart of the Burial Mounds. General Kwan watched him pass, dead eyes unusually intent, but none of the dead made an effort to stop Su She. The Wei were of course asleep when he got there. The sun wouldn’t rise for another two shichen.

Still no change in the need to go do anything else.

So, Su She slipped into the secret library and then set about putting up every privacy, silence and keep out talisman and array that he knew. After the third Keep Out and the second privacy but the first silence, the resistance abruptly faded.

A brand-new pictogram glowed on the floor in front of the entrance to the secret library.

“Oh, now that’s interesting,” Su She murmured as he knelt and studied it.

It combined aspects of the pictograms that Lianmin worked into baby blankets to encourage quiet around babies so that sounds wouldn’t disturbing their sleep with the one that Du Xilin worked into ceiling beams to ensure that noise from inside the house didn’t go outside and outside noise didn’t come in.

“Let’s see what you do,” Su She said.

He pushed a little power into the thing.

The opening in the cave wall disappeared utterly. Solid stone. No sign that there had ever been an opening there. Su She sucked a sharp breath between his teeth before triggering the pictogram again. The opening appeared and he blew out a breath in relief.

Good. Getting trapped in a cave like this was not high on his agenda in life, thank you very much.

Once he had the cave entrance sealed once again, Su She turned towards his worktable that was set in front of the map of the Burial Mound’s defenses.

There was a new alcove holding exactly one scroll wrapped in golden cloth directly underneath the map.

“Are you fucking with me?” Su She demanded. “Seriously? All I had to do was close the fucking door and I could’ve had the key to everything?”

The Burial Mounds distinctly laughed at him. Because of course they did. Both the Burial Mounds and Xue Chonghai were assholes. Su She was convinced of it.

Either way, he grumbled through unwrapping the new scroll, copying it onto a fresh scroll, and then rewrapping it safely. Which was probably a good thing since the fucking thing was a literal dictionary of the pictograms, with a set of grammars of how they were used in general writing, how they were used in arrays and how they could be combined to create new words as needed.

“I hate you,” Su She sang as he rolled his eyes towards the dark ceiling of the library cave. “I hate you. I hate you so very much. All that fucking work and I just had to close the fucking door.”

So much work that had turned out to be a total waste of time that frankly Su She felt he was owed some complaining. So much nonsense and the very thing he’d been looking for was right there waiting for him. Just to prove the point, to himself if not to anyone else, Su She marched over and opened up the wall.

The dictionary scroll, the copy he’d made, looked like someone had spilled ink and tea all over it. Everything that he’d copied over was hidden once more. So yeah, locked door and he could study. Open door and he couldn’t.

“That asshole better have recorded the why of this,” Su She grumbled as he set to work memorizing the meanings of the pictograms.

Lan Qiren had taught him about a dozen different methods for quickly memorizing information. It didn’t take much to get the central hundred and fifty of the pictograms into his memory. Su She paused before going on to the next couple hundred, tapping his fingers on the worktable.

“I better check,” Su She muttered.

He undid the seal and returned to one of the randomly copied scrolls.

“Oh, thank fuck, I can memorize things,” Su She sighed as he sagged so much with relief that his knees all but went out from under him. “That would’ve killed me. Not to mention being stupid. How would you fix things if you couldn’t memorize what everything meant?”

The next couple of shichen until dawn were nonstop memorization. By the time Su She had the basic vocabulary and grammar memorized, his stomach was rumbling, and his eyes were burning, but that was fine. He could puzzle his way through the majority of the scrolls he’d copied. That was good enough for one night.

Hopefully, not that his fucking luck ever went that way, he’d manage to get time to come up here and memorize the rest of it so that he could find the scroll that explained just who created this place and why.

“Where did you go?” Lianmin snapped at him the instant he walked into her farmhouse.

“Who the hell is that?”

Su She stared at the broad-shouldered, scowling man in the middle of the kitchen. He wasn’t too bad looking, really, but there was a furtive sort of a look around his eyes as he kept glancing towards the door as if he wanted to be out it as soon as possible. And he was clearly jealous as hell of Su She on first sight.

“Huh,” Su She grunted, obnoxiously eyeing the man up and down. “No, not impressed. He must have come with a hell of a dowry for you to stay married to him, Lianmin.”

“Don’t change the subject!” both Lianmin and her husband snapped.

“Had some studying to do,” Su She said to her while waving her husband off. “Took longer than I expected but I think I finally might have a handle on some of the meanings for the pictogram combinations.”

“Really?” Lianmin said, still stern and wary but less disappointed in his everything due to actual progress having been made. “You’ll have to show me later.”

“Mm,” Su She said. He yawned, jaw cracking, and shook his head. “I will. Still working on it so it’s not certain yet, but I’m finally getting somewhere on it.”

“Who the hell is this?” Lianmin’s husband demanded.

“Su She, sect leader of the brand-new Yiling Su cultivation sect,” Su She said. “Lianmin is my First Disciple because no one else is willing to challenge her for the spot.”

Lianmin’s husband opened his mouth to scoff and then snapped it shut again without saying a word when Lianmin glowered at him. She jerked her chin towards the door which made him wince and shuffle his feet. To Su She’s surprise, Lianmin just glared him down wordlessly.

“You can’t just throw me out. I’m your husband,” he protested though it was a really weak protest given the increasing intensity of Lianmin’s glare.

“You haven’t been back for two years,” Lianmin snapped at him. “You’re the one who abandoned the farm and our marriage years ago. Stop coming back. You’re not welcome and I will have the boys beat you bloody if you try to flounce your worthless ass back into the house again.”

“I don’t flounce,” her husband muttered as he edged towards the door.

He didn’t. He scurried as he grabbed a bamboo backpack that Muye had clearly made a long, long time ago and all but scrambled out of the door. There were several heartbeats of silence where the only thing to be heard was the sound of his feet pounding against the ground outside, and then Muye whooped with delight, dancing around with Shuxin as if they’d been waiting forever for that to happen.

“I’m glad you finally gave him the boot,” Jinwen said, one hand cupping her belly as if it needed extra support. Given how big her belly was, it probably did.

“Should have done that years ago,” Lianmin grumbled as she flipped her greying braid over her shoulder and sniffed derisively. “I never did like him. Only married him because it was what everyone expected of me.”

“At least you got us out of it,” Muye said with a big grin that Su She wouldn’t have dared to show to a woman who’d just thrown out her husband, but then Muye was still young enough not to know when he should duck and keep his mouth shut.

“Both of you should get back to work,” Lianmin snapped at her sons. “And you,” she glowered at Su She, “are an idiot for staying up all night on your silly little pictogram project.”

“Ah, but if I do have it all worked out, I’ll be able to activate the full defenses around Yiling,” Su She countered with a grin that was just apologetic enough not to get something thrown at his head. “You know we’re going to need it. Wen Ruohan won’t take being turned down.”

Lianmin sighed and rolled her eyes. “I wish Popo Entai was still alive. She almost cut off his heavenly pillar when Wen Ruohan was a young man. She’d have set him straight in a quarter shichen.”

Su She’s mouth dropped open but nothing coherent came out. The sheer thought of anyone, much less a commoner woman, attempting to castrate Wen Ruohan was so… impossible… that he couldn’t quite make the idea settle in his brain.

A moment or two later, Su She snickered despite himself because wow, that explained so much about Lianmin. And her still-nameless former husband. No wonder he’d run for the borders of town the instant Lianmin rejected him.

“You take after her, don’t you?” Su She asked with his biggest grin.

“Far more than you’ll ever know,” Lianmin replied.

Her smile sent a shiver up Su She’s spine, so he threw his hands up and went to sleep for a shichen or so.

Turned out to be about a full day when he woke back up, but hey, he had been studying and working far too hard with far too little rest. According to Jinwen, they’d woken him up just enough to shove a bao into his mouth and then let him go back to sleep. Su She didn’t remember that. The entire time was a black pit of nothingness so obviously, he’d needed to sleep far worse than he thought he had.

It didn’t stop him from shoving more bao in his mouth and then stomping right back into the Burial Mounds to seal up the secret library. Three days of that, both the studying and the deep, black sleep afterwards, got him to the point that he could read…

…everything.

Not just the stuff that he’d consciously memorized. After the second day of study and deep blackout sleep, he came back and realized that he could read combinations that he hadn’t actually studied.

That was weird. A little uncomfortable. Su She knew he should probably feel deeply disturbed about it, but all he could think was that Lan Qiren would be bitterly jealous of his finding a way to learn something by falling asleep. It was kind of a dream come true for any scholar.

Either way, day four dawned with Su She blinking his way out of the black pit of magical study with an understanding of exactly how the wards and defenses around the Burial Mounds, and by extension Yiling, were supposed to work.

“You’ve got a weird look in your eye,” Lianmin commented as she passed him a bowl of rice covered with stir-fried vegetables and a bowl of soup with little chunks of tofu floating alongside greens and thinly cut bites of radish.

“Finally figured out the missing piece of the defenses,” Su She said. “Give me one day and I might, possibly, be able to defend us all against Wen Ruohan.”

“That’s nice,” Lianmin said as if he was a little boy who’d brought in a snake and asked if he could keep it as a pet.

She took a bite of her rice and vegetables, then paused while chewing it because Muye, Jinwen and Shuxin were all staring at Su She with their jaws dropped and their eyes wide. Muye even had a bite of radish dangling from his chopsticks halfway to his mouth.

“Wait,” Lianmin said, blinking several times. She frowned at Su She. “Did you actually say that you could defeat Wen Ruohan’s armies?”

“Well, maybe,” Su She said between shoveling bites of rice and veggies into his mouth. “Not sure yet. Things could be broken. But yeah, I think I could. Just have to check and fix a few things.”

Breakfast got finished really fucking fast. Lianmin and Muye followed Su She around as he found the things that weren’t right and fixed them. They very clearly didn’t understand why they weren’t right. Every time he tried to explain it, their eyes got distant, and they lost track of his words.

It wasn’t until he fixed the final set of boundary markers that’d been turned backwards that Lianmin understood the explanation all the way through.

“What just changed?” Lianmin demanded.

“Mm, well, the boundary markers were set to hide and confuse what was going on in here,” Su She explained. Again. For the eleventh time. “Some asshole moved these around so Yiling itself became forgetful instead of being forgotten. It’s been messing with everyone’s ability to learn about the pictograms and about the defenses.”

“Wow,” Muye whispered, eyes far too wide. “That’s not good. I mean, the Festival of the Turns will have to be cancelled.”

“The Festival of the what now?” Su She squawked.

Turned out, the people of Yiling had a whole series of little festivals that they performed every three months or so on specific dates dictated by celestial alignments. One of them involved, fuck his life in every single way, turning the boundary stones around to apparently make everyone forget the stuff they shouldn’t know.

Su She spent a long damned time cursing over that one.

All the way back into town. All the way through recording what every single one of those damned festivals and traditions were. All the way back to the hidden library with Lianmin and Muye on his heels.

They were appropriately impressed by the way the entrance disappeared into a solid stone wall.

Lianmin was less impressed that it’d taken him three days to learn all the pictograms, but then Lianmin was never, ever impressed by anything if she could help it. Su She kind of thought that she’d made a secret oath as a young woman to never give anyone an ounce of respect that they hadn’t earned a few million times over.

Thankfully, Muye was more than impressed enough for her, so Su She didn’t end up feeling like a complete idiot and total incompetent.

“This is amazing,” Muye breathed as he studied the scrolls and notes that Su She had taken on them. “I can actually read these now! Sort of. I don’t understand all of it, but it mostly makes sense.”

“Get the basic grammar down first,” Su She instructed. “Then start adding vocabulary. You two have a leg up over me. I had to start from nothing. You’ve been around these things all your lives. It should be pretty damn natural for you.”

It was.

By the end of a shichen, both Muye and Lianmin could pick their way through any given scroll on the right-hand side. The left side with its more esoteric knowledge and detailed history scrolls was too hard for them, but they could do the cooking and farming and weaving and setting up advanced sewage system ones without issue.

Watching someone else fall into a black pit of sleep-borne nothingness for a full day was a very different thing from experiencing it. Jinwen started out kindly reassuring, went sort of strained around the time lunch came around and Su She had checked on Lianmin and Muye approximately every thirty heartbeats or so. By dinner, she threw him out of the house and told him to go pester Popo Wei.

Who was all Popo Wei at him.

“Mm, it certainly is difficult to watch others exhaust themselves so severely,” Popo Wei said with an arched eyebrow and pursed lips like the actual grandmother that she was.

Su She’s head slumped down to his chest. “They called you in to check on me, didn’t they?”

“Oh, only about a thousand times the first time,” Popo Wei said. She chuckled. “The second time it was only a dozen or so. The third, I came to check myself as no one else bothered.”

“Gah.” Su She grimaced and rubbed his hands over his face. “I’ve never been any good at managing anxiety, you know. This sets off all of my worst traits. I got them into it. I thought it was a good idea. And now they’re all…”

He didn’t say dead. They weren’t dead. Both Lianmin and Muye looked like they were dead, but they weren’t dead, damn it. It was just his anxiety making everything into a catastrophe.

If his chest would just stop feeling like Nie Mingjue had punched straight through him, it would help, but no. That wasn’t going to happen. Every single anxiety attack had hit him with a punch to the chest since he came back.

There just hadn’t been an anxiety attack quite this bad in a while.

Damn it all.

“Breathe, child,” Popo Wei ordered in that firmly gentle tone that healers always got when he was having a panic attack.

“It’s not a panic attack,” Su She told her as he did the breathing exercises. “Anxiety, yes. Panic, no.”

“Breathe anyway.” Popo Wei chuckled when he stuck his tongue out at her. “They’ll be fine. They’ll wake up with new knowledge and you’ll have help in all the things you’re doing for us.”

“I know,” Su She said, well aware that he sounded like a petulant child. “I know. It’s just so hard. I hate the way my body and mind work. It’s such crap.”

Popo Wei shrugged, eyes gentle even though her face was distant, philosophical about all the ways their bodies and minds failed them. Given that she’d never been a cultivator and thus was feeling every single one of her years, she sure as hell had the right to be philosophical about it.

Even if body and mind failures were crap. You know, in Su She’s opinion.

Which mattered for nothing at the moment.

Instead of bothering her or looking in on Lianmin and Muye yet again, Su She spent the rest of the day helping out in the hidden Wei village. There were a lot of things that needed a strong back and willing hands. Plenty of posts to be hammered into place, bundles of tiles to be hefted up onto roofs and holes to be dug.

Not a bad way to spend a day full of anxiety. At least when he was dripping sweat and fall-down exhausted the anxiety didn’t eat away at him. He was puffing too hard by the end to be able to tell if it was his tiredness or the anxiety that made his chest hurt.

“You know, I was kind of worried about the whole sect thing,” Jinwen commented as she served dinner to Su She and Shuxin. “It all seems so very formal and important.”

“Eh, not most of the time?” Su She said, grimacing. “Only for, like, negotiations and discussion conferences. Most of the time it’s just living life and helping each other.”

Jinwen dimpled at him even though she didn’t let herself grin at him. “I can see that now. But what really worried me was that Sect Leaders always seem to be so powerful and important and grim. Bigger than life.”

Shuxin choked on a bite of rice as he started snickering. The laughter dancing in Jinwen’s eyes went a long, long ways towards knocking Su She’s anxiety right back down. It wasn’t the same sort of take-down as what Ran Quanyu would’ve done, but the effect was the same.

Because if she was calming down about Sect Leaders that meant that he’d demonstrated by example that he wasn’t powerful and wasn’t important and certainly wasn’t an always-in-control, knows-everything sort of Sect Leader.

He was just a giant mess doing his best as life kept on trying to knock him off his feet.

“Oh, fuck you.” Su She pouted into his spicy vegetable soup.

Not, like, for real, but enough that Jinwen laughed openly at him and Shuxin went into a coughing fit because he’d swallowed wrong around a too-big bite of rice and a too-hearty laugh.

Not the worst way to spend an evening full of waiting. This whole Yiling Sect thing might just work out if they all treated Su She like a normal person instead of the way Ran Quanyu had told the Moling Su sect to act around him.

Formal occasions were fine. Su She could play the role if he had to. But the rest of the time? He didn’t want to make the same mistake he had last time. No more distancing himself from his people. No more pretending to be something he wasn’t.

Yiling was full of human disaster areas, and Su She fit right in with them. There was no reason not to just be himself.

And, you know, Lianmin might just smack him in the face with her oldest, smallest wok if did try to be Big Important Sect Leader all the time. He wasn’t important enough to risk denting her best wok, of course. Or even the one with uneven thickness that Lianmin always complained about but reliably used when it was time to fry tofu.

The next morning, Su She smiled as Lianmin and Muye joined them for breakfast. They looked like they’d barely moved all night, creases on their cheeks and hair mussed, but both of them had clear eyes and the energies moving around them were much clearer than they had been before they learned the pictograms.

Interestingly so, in fact.

“You’re both stronger,” Su She said, pinching Muye’s wrist and nodding that his unearned and never-changing core had, in fact, grown. Dramatically.

“I feel different,” Muye agreed, rubbing his belly with his free hand. “It’s weird. Kind of nice? Maybe? Not used to my core being this… loud, I guess.”

“This is what you meant about growing cores,” Lianmin said, rubbing her stomach with a grimace as if she’d eaten something that disagreed with her. “I’m not sure I like it.”

“Should be able to start a fire now without tinder,” Su She offered.

Lianmin considered that for a moment and then nodded that it was worth it. To Su She’s amusement, Shuxin promptly looked like he wanted to do it, too, but it was Jinwen who spoke up about it first.

“Once my baby is born, I’m learning,” Jinwen declared.

“I would recommend waiting until then,” Su She agreed, “but sure. I’d kind of like everyone to learn it. The more of us who know, the less chance there is of stupid mistakes and the knowledge getting lost again. I don’t want to rely on just me to keep everyone safe. It’s gotta be everyone that we can get into it, as quickly as we can teach them.”

Turned out that Shuxin and Du Xilin were the next to learn the pictograms and do the dead-to-the-world thing. Su She still almost lost his mind over them, even though he knew that they would be fine. The next ten days was filled with nearly losing his mind because most of the Wei learned in shifts and about half the Yiling people did, too.

“You are so very bad at this,” Jinwen said, patting Su She’s shoulder as he watched over the last set of Wei to succumb to the black pit of sleep.

“I know,” Su She complained as he did his breathing exercises. “I know. Trust me. I do know. I just can’t help it.”

Jinwen sat down on the rough-hewn bench outside of Popo Wei’s little home, smiling as Popo Wei’s youngest granddaughter clambered up between them to lean against Su She’s side. She was a sweet little girl, but ferocious when it came to protecting the people in her family. Weirdly, she patted his knee as if he was one of her uncles instead of a functional stranger.

“Do you know that I’ve never had hope before?” Jinwen commented in a distantly wondering tone that had Su She’s head snapping around to stare at her. She smiled wryly at him. “I never did. Life in Yiling never promised anything other than grime, misery and dying far too young. I knew from the time I was A-Lian’s age that I would marry young, have babies young, die too young to see my own grandchildren born.”

“You do realize that you’re breaking my heart here, right?” Su She asked.

Jinwen grinned at him, bright as the sun breaking over the mountains. “Silly. It’s better now. Everything is better for all of us. You’ve given us clean water and food. Secure homes. Knowledge of our heritage. Power to protect ourselves and make our lives better. All of it happened because of you, Su She. If you hadn’t come here, nothing would have changed just as nothing ever had. I know you feel like every single one of us to learns the pictograms is taking a horrible risk.”

“You are!” Su She huffed. “Just because it’s worked for everyone else doesn’t mean it won’t hurt someone next time.”

Jinwen patted his shoulder while A-Lian patted his knee even though at three she was far too young to understand anything more than that he was upset over something.

“We all know that.” Jinwen’s smile went wry. “That’s what I meant. We’ve never had hope. No hope of change, no hope of improvement, no hope of safety or a long life. And now we do. How can you be surprised that we’d do most anything to improve our odds of keeping all the lovely things that you’ve given us?”

There wasn’t a single damned thing that Su She could say to that. He tried, of course. Opened his mouth and then shut it again while sighing and rolling his eyes towards the heavens. Jinwen just giggled at him, especially as A-Lian climbed into his lap for hugs since pats weren’t working to cheer him up.

It was a good point, though.

Su She had come back to the past on nothing more than the blind, desperate hope that he could make a difference. That he could change things for the better.

He hadn’t stopped the Sunshot Campaign. Yet.

He hadn’t kept Wei Wuxian from sacrificing his core for Jiang Wanyin. Yet.

He hadn’t even properly warned a single sect of Wen Ruohan’s grand plans to enslave the entire Jianghu through overwhelming Wen military might and the Yin Iron. Yet.

That ‘yet’ was important.

What he had done was unravel a mystery that promised to make solving the problems much easier. Very different from everything that had happened in the future that wasn’t, but hey, that was the entire point of coming back to the past.

All he really had to do was get the defenses fully up and running, get as many people as possible into reading the pictograms properly, and then deal with whatever bullshit Wen Ruohan and Jiang Fengmian flung his way. Oh, and all the other sect leaders once they learned what he was up to. They were certain to cause problems, too.

Just a few more days, that’s all he needed.

“I’m going to work on the defenses,” Su She decided as nerves about what Wen Ruohan would do started crawling under his skin like ants.

“Good idea,” Jinwen said, taking A-Lian from him. “I’ll send Shuxin and Muye your way so that they can help.”

Su She stared at her for a long moment. “That was almost Lianmin-like in confidence.”

“Oh, good,” Jinwen said, grinning at him. “She did send me to get you to stop brooding and start working again. She was starting to get that twitchy look that precedes a stern lecture.”

“Ugh, fine,” Su She groaned as he stomped off to do as his First Disciple ordered. “I’m going. I’m going!”

It really was a good thing that he tended to draw in the stern, taskmaster type of First Disciples. He so needed someone to keep him on track.

Preferably someone who actually gave a damn about him, unlike Jin Guangyao.

Yeah. No.

No thinking about that or he’d spiral back down into another anxiety attack instead of making sure everyone was as safe as he could possibly make them. Productive work was much better than fretting, for sure.

10. In Which Our Protagonist Receives a Rude Letter, Decides to Answer in Kind, and Gets Less Done Than He Wished

“You got another letter,” Du Xilin called.

The warning, casual and accompanied by rolled eyes, came as Su She trudged into town, feet dragging from all the hiking up and around the Burial Mounds he’d done while getting the full defenses up and running. He really only had a few things left to fix. Three stones in town, two at the far end of the road through town and one array that he’d missed in Du Xilin’s workshop that needed to be charged up.

Under it, actually, which was why Su She sighed and met Du Xilin’s eyes instead of promptly crawling under his workshop with the spiders and mice and who knew what that had settled in under his floorboards.

“Another letter,” Su She said, rubbing his filthy face with both hands. “From who?”

“That Wen guy,” Du Xilin said, snorting. “Sent the same messenger to bring it, though he did manage to find his way alone this time.”

The sheer disrespect of the phrasing was matched by the derision in Du Xilin’s voice. Which had to mean that Wen Yonggang was listening in to the whole conversation. Appropriate. Wen Ruohan never did care about anyone else’s privacy, independence, or desires.

“What the fuck did he say to you?” Su She drawled, amused despite himself at Du Xilin’s attitude.

Du Xilin glared towards the center of town where the teahouse sat even though both of them knew that Wen Yonggang wasn’t there.

“He implied that the style of houses we have in Yiling are inferior,” Du Xilin said stiffly enough that Wen Yonggang was really lucky that the whole town knew about the politics swirling around them all. Without them, Wen Yonggang would’ve had his skull caved in as Du Xilin beat him bloody with a wall beam while lecturing him about proper house construction methods.

Su She’s lips twitched as he shook his head, purely for Wen Yonggang’s benefit. “I’m surprised he’s still alive. You weren’t tempted to club him with a beam or something?”

“Oh, I was tempted,” Du Xilin growled, glaring towards the teahouse in the center of town. “I was tempted. But I’m not going to beat him to death with his own limbs until after he delivers that stupid letter of his.”

Su She snickered the whole time he was under Du Xilin’s house charging up the array. He made a point of getting the last three stones, which involved getting muddy and grass-stained as well as covered in cobwebs and shed snake skins that’d made Du Xilin practically levitate through his own roof.

By the time he plopped his butt down on the stairs of the teahouse to make a half-hearted effort at brushing himself off, Wen Yonggang must’ve heard from pretty much everyone in town that he’d messed up badly.

“Sect Leader Su,” Wen Yonggang said with such prim disapproval that Su She grinned at him despite his exhaustion. “Sect Leader Wen Ruohan directed me to deliver this letter to you.”

It was pristine, perfectly white with exquisite handwriting and a blood-red sun seal on the scroll.

“I’m not touching it until I wash my hands,” Su She replied. “Gimme a minute. And, you know, maybe apologize to Du Xilin before his cousins drag you over there by your ears.”

Wen Yonggang whipped around to stare at the two middle-aged women with ferocious glares. “Ah. His cousins?”

“Mhm.” Su She hummed. “I mean, totally up to you, but they’re damned deadly with their long knives and have cores about equal to yours. You might escape if you flew but I wouldn’t guarantee it. Du Menglong is deadly at throwing knives and Du Mengying is an archer. Killed a sparrow in mid-flight at a hundred paces in the spring, just to shut one of the asshole Jiang up about their mighty archery skills.”

Wen Yonggang sucked a hissing breath through his teeth. “I’ll be back shortly.”

“Good plan,” Su She agreed firmly. “Gives me a chance to look like something other than a mud pit.”

Surprisingly given how tense Wen Yonggang was, he chuckled before he marched off towards Du Xilin’s workshop. Followed by pretty much every single one of Du Xilin’s relatives, all the way down to his baby grand-niece on his mother’s side who was all of four years old.

And scowling at Wen Yonggang just like all her relatives.

“Brought you clean clothes,” Muye said from inside the teahouse. “Since Mother figured you’d be a disaster area.”

“She should be sect leader,” Su She huffed. “She’s better at it than I am.”

Muye grinned at the now-standard response to Lianmin being Lianmin. So did everyone else in the teahouse. They didn’t even need to say it because Su She already knew what Lianmin’s answer would be.

He was the only one stupid enough to be a sect leader in a town like Yiling, so he was stuck with the job.

Joy.

He had plenty of time to get cleaned up on the back steps into the teahouse’s kitchen. Muye hadn’t brought his really good clothes. Those were reserved for special occasions like weddings, funerals, and actual discussion conferences. Justified given Su She’s tendency to get covered in ink, mud, and whatever else might be around.

They robes were his second-best set, no fraying at the hems or obvious stains and mended spots. Su She gladly settled down for a pot of thick black tea and a hearty bowl of vegetable soup with thick chunks of tofu just about the time Wen Yonggang came back looking a bit dazed but unbruised.

“Just lectured you about traditional housing styles in flood-prone areas, huh?” Su She asked as Wen Yonggang thumped down opposite him.

“He’s… well educated, isn’t he?” Wen Yonggang asked, nodding absent thanks to Muye when he delivered a bowl of soup and some tea to the table.

“That’s one way to put it,” Su She agreed. “So, letter? I assume it’s rude as fuck. The town wouldn’t be about to glare you to death if it weren’t.”

Wen Yonggang opened his mouth, frowning as if he couldn’t figure out how Su She leaped to that conclusion, then looked around the teahouse. Every single person other than Su She and Muye were glaring at him. He sighed as he picked up his spoon.

“I don’t presume to tell my sect leader if he’s being rude or not,” Wen Yonggang said dryly enough that his soup should’ve evaporated into a puff of steam drifting up through the rafters. “He gives orders. I follow them.”

Su She grimaced. “That’s a lovely way to end up committing atrocities, you know. First it’s all “I’m loyal” and then it’s “well, he’s the sect leader” and pretty soon you’re running around butchering other sects that never did a thing to you without even thinking about it.”

The spoonful of soup that Wen Yonggang was about to put in his mouth slopped back into the bowl as his fingers spasmed. He stared at Su She.

“I’m a scholar,” Su She said, wagging his spoon at Wen Yonggang. “There’s something like forty or fifty examples of exactly that on small and large scale in the Lan records. Teacher Qiren spends weeks analyzing them and making sure that we all understand, understood in my case, that one can’t rely on other people to do one’s thinking. You have to consider and take a moral stand on your own.”

“You left the Lan,” Wen Yonggang protested but he looked deeply uncomfortable, not accusatory at all. Kept poking his spoon into the soup and not trying to take a mouthful.

“I most certainly did,” Su She agreed, sipping his soup, “specifically because I could not continue with them. The Rules were oppressive. For me. The structure of their lives was stifling. For me. I do agree with the food, just not some of the limits on how much rice and fried food you can eat.”

“He’d eat his body weight in fried vegetables if he could,” Muye murmured to Wen Yonggang.

“Not quite that many,” Su She said over Muye’s snickering and Wen Yonggang’s faint wheezy laugh. “But close. I left the Lan specifically because I took the Rules seriously. Know Yourself is one of the foundational rules. So is Be Just. I couldn’t follow the foundation if I followed the rest of the Rules, and I couldn’t live with the endless contradictions. So I left. I’m much happier now than I ever was.”

Wen Yonggang had just scooped up more soup when Su She declared himself to be happy. His fingers twitched again, dumping the soup back into the bowl in a splash that stained his white sleeve. Instead of trying again, Wen Yonggang pushed the bowl away so that he could stare at Su She entirely too seriously.

“Sect Leader Wen has commanded that I bring this letter to you,” Wen Yonggang said in all the formality and severity that came with being on Wen Ruohan’s orders.

“You know I’m going to say no,” Su She said as he finished off his soup by picking up the bowl and drinking the broth.

He shoved the remaining tofu and vegetables into his mouth while watching Wen Yonggang do his best not to grimace and nod. Didn’t quite manage it, but that was fine. They both knew that this was a wasted effort. Probably the only one who thought that the letter had a single slim hope of success was Wen Ruohan himself.

And he was insane enough to think he could conquer the world, so yeah, not much going on between his ears at this point in time.

There’d be less in the next few years. Su She already knew that. Jin Guangshan had quietly told Su She that Wen Ruohan had been utterly mad well before the Sunshot Campaign began. From what Jin Guangshan had found in the records left over by Wen Qing, Wen Ruohan had been raving mad and barely able to control his own qi since Wen Qing was nine or ten years old.

Hid it well, obviously, but the Yin Iron had eaten his soul bit by bit until “Wen Ruohan” was a puppet being controlled by the Yin Iron instead of a person using the Yin Iron as a tool.

Didn’t much matter. Su She knew how to handle that. He’d known that before he came back in time and with the stuff he’d learned from the Burial Mounds, it shouldn’t be hard at all to seal the Yin Iron. Or destroy it. It might not save Wen Ruohan’s life, but then again it might.

“The Wen do not accept refusals to offers such as this,” Wen Yonggang warned.

“The Wen, meaning Wen Ruohan and not everyone else, are assholes that way, yeah,” Su She agreed as he took the scroll and flipped off the wrapping. “Yeah, about what I expected.”

“What’s it say?” Muye asked, craning his neck to peer at the scroll.

“Join the Wen or else be utterly destroyed, basically,” Su She said as he casually rolled the scroll back up. “There’s a lot more flowery language about the so-called benefits of being one of Wen Ruohan’s people, but that’s the heart of it.”

Muye frowned, showing just how young he was in his utter puzzlement. “But why would Wen Ruohan tell you to join his sect when you’ve just started your own sect?”

Wen Yonggang rolled his eyes towards the heavens, snorting when Su She waved a hand at him to keep him from answering the very earnest and painfully naïve question. Even some of the others in the teahouse looked at Muye with that kindly pitying expression that teenagers always got when they showed just how little they understood of the real world.

“Kiddo,” Su She said while passing the scroll back to Wen Yonggang, “not one single sect is going to take us seriously. We’re nobodies from Yiling doing who knows what. If anything, they’re going to claim that I’m stealing all the Lan secret techniques and thus obviously we’re not really a real sect.”

“Only until your Teach Qiren gets at them,” Muye countered, much to Wen Yonggang’s amusement.

“True,” Su She said. “But it’s still a fact. No one will take us seriously until we prove that we’re a real sect doing real work with real techniques of our own invention. Which won’t honestly take much given all the stuff I’ve figured out, but hey, it’s still to be expected.”

“Figured out?” Wen Yonggang asked while trying to pass the scroll back to Su She.

“I’ve finally got a basic translation for a good chunk of the pictograms,” Su She said. He didn’t take the scroll. “They’re really amazing. I’m having so much fun when I’m not mucking around under buildings in the middle of winter snake nests. At least the snakes were gone. I really don’t like having snakes slithering through my robes.”

Both Muye and Wen Yonggang stared at him in horror. While it was probably general fear of snakes for Wen Yonggang, Muye went white as paper and clutched the table. He shuddered hard enough to nearly spill Wen Yonggang’s untouched tea all over the table.

“You didn’t see any living ones, right?” Muye asked desperately.

“Nah, not a one,” Su She said. “Lots of shed skins, some as big around as my forearm, but no living snakes. Du Xilin is tearing up floorboards and filling the gaps that let the snakes in. Also plans on filling the nest with concrete if he can get enough.”

“…Why?” Wen Yonggang asked, eyes flicking between the two of them.

“The snakes around Yiling are venomous,” Muye explained, wheezing a little as he put his head in his hands. “Very venomous. They’re… they’re a kind of yao, I think? Maybe? They have four eyes and two sets of fangs, and they can get big enough to eat a ten-year-old child.”

Wen Yonggang stared at him before turning to Su She. “And this place makes you happy?”

“Still better than the damned deer yao around Gusu,” Su She said. “Those things are terrifying. The blood antlers and the way they eat everything including rocks always made me run screaming in terror.”

Both Wen Yonggang and Muye gaped. Huh. Had he forgotten to tell Muye about the different kinds of yao that developed in different areas? He must have. Have to get on that later, you know, once he’d thrown Wen Yonggang out.

“I’ll explain later,” Su She promised Muye. “Anyway. Answer’s no. It was no before. It’s still no. It’s always going to be no. Tell him that if he wants to argue with me about it then he should set up a discussion conference. I’ll come to it and let him lecture at me for a while before I tell him no to his face.”

Wen Yonggang shook his head. He thrust the scroll back at Su She, glowering when Su She refused to take it. Seriously, they all knew how this was going to go. Wen Ruohan must’ve really pitched a fit for Wen Yonggang to be this determined to make Su She accept it.

“Sect Leader Wen does not allow refusals,” Wen Yonggang declared.

“Don’t care,” Su She replied. He leaned on the table, studying the rising color in Wen Yonggang’s face. “Don’t give a single fuck what Wen Ruohan wants. Don’t care what you think, either. I do care what Lianmin thinks but that’s because she’s terrifying and you’re not.”

“The Wen are the most powerful sect in the world!” Wen Yonggang shouted as he stood. “The sun stands over everyone!”

Su She smiled, the not-nice smile he’d used when threatening Jiang Wanyin and Lan Wangji at the Guanyin Temple in the future that wasn’t. It drained all the color right out of Wen Yonggang’s face and made Muye start.

“Only until the sun sets,” Su She drawled, low and threatening. “Every day ends. The night always comes. Qishan might be the home of the sun, but Yiling is the night itself. Get the fuck out of my town. Do not come back unless you have three times the army you think you need, backed by enough grave diggers for all of them.”

“You can’t…”

Wen Yonggang started to say more only to freeze, eyes wide, as Su She drew a pictogram in the air between them. It was blood red, of course, throbbing with all the power of the Burial Mounds. Resentful energy billowed around Su She in great ashy clouds that made Wen Yonggang hiss in shock while Muye just frowned and cocked his head to the side as if confused as to why the Burial Mounds had allowed Su She to do it.

Since the Burial Mounds were, finally, fully active, and fully repaired.

He’d taken care of that before he sat down with Wen Yonggang because Su She might be stupidly loyal and idiotic about adopting causes that he really shouldn’t, but he wasn’t a fucking moron.

Every advantage that you could arrange in advance was one that you could use to keep your people and yourself alive while making your opponents dead. It’d always worked well in the future that wasn’t. No doubt that it’d work well now, too.

The pictogram was the one used to forbid someone to stay in Yiling. Properly charged and targeted, it produced the same effect as Lianmin had had on her former husband. Just, you know, permanently with cultivation instead of sheer terror.

The pictogram flashed over to Wen Yonggang who shouted as he created a shield which did precisely nothing to stop the pictogram. It sank into his chest, dropping Wen Yonggang to his knees where he wheezed and trembled.

“Leave Yiling,” Su She said, tossing the scroll back to Wen Yonggang. “Do not come back. Actually, you physically won’t be able to come back, just so you know. There’s a boundary line that you won’t even be able to get close to. About five leagues out from it should be the limit for you.”

Wen Yonggang tried to wheeze something threatening, but the words came out as an incoherent whine. He struggled to his feet and then stumbled down the stairs. A moment later he was on his sword, flying away far too quickly for someone so shaky, but hey, he was gone.

That was good.

“Wow, that was even more effective than what Mom did with Dad,” Muye commented while blinking rapidly. “Nice! So now what?”

“Now we prepare for war,” Su She said.

Or try to, anyway.

Nobody in Yiling had any idea what a war was like. Popo Wei had some clues, having been a field medic when she was young and a doctor the rest of her life until her joints got too bad. No one else had lived through a war.

But then, nobody in the Jianghu had lived through the Sunshot Campaign either. They had always trained to fight fierce corpses and yao, not other cultivators. Su She knew for a fact that the vast majority of the cultivators in all the sects other than the Wen had never so much as fought another human in a real battle before.

The Wen had. Of course they had. But most of those battles were little skirmishes and the sects being attacked were wiped out quickly or the submitted after a token fight.

Even the Wen weren’t truly prepared for all-out warfare between the sects.

“Wen Ruohan hadn’t realized that his people were unprepared to kill other humans,” Jin Guangshan had mused one night in the future that wasn’t just before everything fell apart on them.

He’d swirled the tea in his delicately gilded and exquisitely expensive cup, smiling at the play of the lights over the tea’s surface. That sort of thing had always pleased Jin Guangshan. Expensive items, delicate and tasteful, were among his greatest joys.

They reminded him of his mother.

“I don’t think anyone was,” Su She had replied as he cradled his teacup in both of his hands. “It was… hard.”

In a piece of gentle sarcastic kindness, Jin Guangshan had given him a roughly shaped and thick-walled teacup, the sort of thing that the Lan admired as being “honest” and “pure” instead of admitting that the teacup was thick-walled to keep the heat in the tea for as long as possible, and roughly shaped because no one among the Lan would dare to spend money for something delicate when they could make a point about how ascetic they were.

Su She just liked the damned things because they kept his hands warm along with the tea, not that Jin Guangshan ever accepted that excuse.

“Mm, killing humans is hard for most,” Jin Guangshan had agreed. He had gazed out the window at the lights of Lanling and hummed. “I must admit I never had that issue. Neither did Wen Ruohan even before he went mad, apparently. Humans have a very hard time killing other humans for the first time. Afterwards, though…”

“Yeah,” Su She had sighed. “Yeah.”

Once you did it once, it was always much easier the next time. And the time after that was easier still. After five or six killings, well, you pretty much didn’t think about it until well after the fact. Or until something made you realize all of a sudden that you were slitting the throat of a young boy who was probably just as terrified as you were.

Then you killed them and spent a while sobbing while puking your guts out.

And then you got up and did it again because that was what a war was. Endless killing. Endless misery. Endless terror and struggle and yearning for it all to end.

Not in Yiling. Not if Su She could help it.

And he could.

Muye trailed along on Su She’s heels, eyes going wider and wider as Su She activated all the defenses that the Burial Mounds and Yiling had. The wards would keep people, cultivators, from flying overhead which would handily keep Wen Chao from tossing anyone in like the asshole had been prone to in the future that wasn’t. There were about fifty layers to the wards, which started at the spires with lethal level arrays that would atomize anyone who got that far and went outwards to General Kwan and his resentful dead troops, and onwards all the way to about five leagues past the border of Yiling.

The outer wards directed people away. Made them forget that Yiling was there, that they wanted something in Yiling. Nightmares, loose bowels, all kinds of distractions from the mental to the physical. If you, or more accurately the Wen, pushed past those wards, they’d start having heart palpitations and hallucinations and all kinds of crap.

Xue Chonghai had been very, very serious about keeping his sanctum safe.

“This is going to mess them up so bad,” Muye fretted once Su She activated everything and turned Yiling into a black hole that no one was going to get into without true misery.

Su She looked at Muye who really was just a kid. He’d never doing anything significant in his life. All he knew was Yiling.

“Muye,” Su She said as he gently put his hand on Muye’s shoulder and squeezed, “all of this is what will keep you and the Wei and Jinwen alive. None of you can fight. None of you are trained for battle. We’ve got farmers and doctors and craftspeople.”

“And you,” Muye whispered.

His face was so damned pale that Su She sighed and opened his arms so that Muye could latch on for a desperate, shaking hug. Seriously, he was forever and always a fool for the people he decided to care about. Lianmin might be the one who was best as his First Disciple, but Muye was the person that Su She had chosen in this life.

“Yeah, and me, kid,” Su She agreed, hugging him firmly. “It’s fine. I’ve got a whole mess of tricks that I can use, and the Burial Mounds are all-in on making sure that no one gets hurt. We’ll get an army coming our way, but they won’t get in. At most two or three Wen will make it through.”

Muye pulled back to frown at Su She. “Really?”

“Yup,” Su She confirmed with a confident little nod as he ruffled Muye’s spiky mess of a ponytail. “They’ll be the strongest, the most determined and the stupidest of the Wen. Because only the strong and determined could get through, but only the stupidest would actually keep going.”

That got Muye snicker-snorting which was better.

Either way, together they warned everyone what’d happened. Su She told everyone about the wards and how they’d work about a dozen times before Lianmin took over, told them once, and then glared down any further questions. Popo Wei got everyone calmed and then Jinwen set to work making sure that everyone had food enough to endure a siege.

Everyone did. Between the food they’d all been stockpiling all summer and the way the sanctuary at the heart of the Burial Mounds pumped out food, there was enough to make sure all of them could eat well for months upon months. Add in the purified water in everyone’s wells and they were set.

Su She retreated into the hidden library rather than stay and gossip with the others once dinner was done. He’d never done well interacting with other people before a battle, especially one where he had to sit and wait until the enemy showed up. Usually in their own good time.

Ran him crazy every single time, in the future that wasn’t and now, too.

The Burial Mounds nudged him towards the wall full of history and tactics, highlighting a particular scroll. One that he hadn’t had a chance to read over yet. Su She raised an eyebrow and then shrugged.

“Hope this is properly distracting,” Su She muttered as he unwrapped it.

It wasn’t How and Why I Did It, the scroll. It wasn’t even A Hundred and One Things The Burial Mounds Can Do.

It was a miserably dramatic and heart-wrenching love story between two zhiji who found themselves on opposite sides of a Jianghu war.

“Oh, you utter bastard,” Su She complained at the Burial Mounds when the shorter, more delicate of the two betrayed the taller, more muscular one in a desperate bid for his father’s approval. “I can’t believe you pointed me at this.”

He kept reading.

Of course.

Because it was too damned familiar. And it was a history, not a drama. Not an opera or an epic poem or anything. It was real and they, the two men at the heart of the scroll’s tale, had been just as real as Su She and Jin Guangyao.

They killed each other in the end.

Because of course they did. Su She sat for a long time with his head in his hands, heart hurting for these ancient men from far-off Siberia. And for himself. And Jin Guangyao who was still Meng Yao.

“I’m going to have to see him, aren’t I?” Su She whispered.

The Burial Mounds hummed and rubbed a metaphorical hand over Su She’s back in an awkward attempt at comfort.

“Fuck my life.” Su She sighed. “If I want to warn Meng Yao, that means I have to face down Nie Mingjue. I still… I still feel his fist punching through my chest. I just. Fuck my life.”

There really wasn’t anything else that could be said about it. Su She knew he needed to warn Meng Yao. Maybe save him from that asshole Nie commander who’d been stealing his ideas and treating him like crap.

That mean that he had to see Nie Mingjue.

Talk to him without going into a full-blown panic attack.

“Great.” Su She stood and stretched, back cracking and knees aching.

Chest echoing with the impact of Nie Mingjue’s punch.

“I have no idea how I’ll explain that,” Su She admitted. “I guess I have time to figure it out. The Wen have to be dealt with first. I’m going to bed. Here’s hoping the Wen come back quickly. I really hate waiting.”

Even as he said it, he knew that it wouldn’t happen. Wen Ruohan was Wen Ruohan. He’d let them stew, get fearful and twitchy. Then he’d send in an overwhelming force that Su She already knew was going to be wasted.

Really, the question would be who would make it through the defenses to Yiling. Su She could speculate who had the right combination of stubborn determination, blind stupidity in the face of overwhelming power, and ruthless honor, but he’d have to wait to find out what happened in reality.

Because this would never be the future that wasn’t. He didn’t know what would happen. Not anymore.

“Fuck, I hate waiting,” Su She complained as he left the hidden library and headed back to the Cho farm for some inevitably restless sleep.

The clouds of resentful energy parted for Su She as he made his way through the star-light night. General Kwan saluted as Su She passed, silent and waiting for the battle to come. His men were behind him, swaying on their slowly rotting legs.

Su She smiled wryly and saluted back. “We’re just waiting for the siege, General Kwan. Nothing urgent yet.”

It was amazing how bony skulls and rotting flesh could manage to look exasperated. General Kwan in particular looked outright pissed that there weren’t enemies to fight that minute. Su She nodded his agreement and headed onwards towards home.

Home.

Huh.

That was… new.

He hadn’t realized that this had become home. Actually, Su She wasn’t sure exactly when he’d decided that Yiling and the Cho farm was his home for real instead of just a place he was staying while he worked at preventing the Sunshot Campaign from happening.

The Cloud Recesses hadn’t ever felt like home. Moling Su had tried to be a home in the future that wasn’t. For a while, before Su She realized that Jin Guangyao was too damaged by his experiences to ever return Su She’s faithful loyalty, he’d thought that maybe Jin Guangyao could be his home.

Odd that he’d found a home, adopted it and been adopted by it, before ever realizing that was what he’d done.

Lianmin appeared on the porch of the farm, staring across the dark fields right at Su She. “Get to bed, you idiot.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Su She laughed as he headed inside where everyone else was asleep. Lianmin was in her nightclothes, a warm padded jacket wrapped around her. “Sorry for waking you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lianmin ordered as she pushed him towards the ladder up to his attic. “Sleep. Trouble will come in its own time. Better to be rested for it than not.”

“So true,” Su She agreed.

So he went up to his bed and collapsed into it face-first. Surprisingly, sleep caught him immediately and dragged him under into sleep that didn’t include nightmares about anything, not even Nie Mingjue’s fist going straight through his chest.

11. In Which Our Protagonist is Very Done With Pride and Duty as Motivating Emotions

A month and a half. Wen Ruohan made them all wait for a fucking month and a half. Even for him, that was an asshole move.

Su She had been ready to give up on the tense waiting about two days after he exiled Wen Yonggang. He still had questions about what Lan Qiren had found, so he was more than ready to head into the next town to set up a mail drop since no one was getting into Yiling to deliver the mail.

Lianmin said no. Popo Wei said no. Even Muye stared at Su She like he was absolutely insane, so he’d been stuck waiting a full month and a half before he got to head off into Jiang territory with his letter to Lan Qiren because they had the closest town to Yiling.

The snow had already blanketed the Cloud Recesses at this point. Down in the lowlands, it was all rain that occasionally froze. He picked a clear day when it wasn’t too cold to make the trip to set up the mail drop. No one liked flying through freezing rain, even if they were from Gusu.

The Jiang, like most of the major sects other than the Jin who were greedy assholes, provided little offices scattered around their territory where you could bring in mail to be delivered elsewhere in their territory for free. You wanted it sent to a different area? Yeah, there was a charge for that. Sometimes a steep one.

But in-territory? That was free. Not fast, but it was free. You wanted fast, you had to pay extra for a cultivator to be called to deliver your mail personally.

Not many people did that, obviously.

The little Jiang senior disciple who’d been assigned to the next tiny town down the river stared at Su She like he was a monster come to rip her throat out when he sauntered in. She was maybe seventeen and short enough that she looked more like twelve. Except for the bust that was big enough to belong to a Nie woman. Her purple robes curled around her body in ways that probably tempted every single teenage boy in town, not that Su She was interested at all.

“Oh, come on,” Su She complained as her breath hissed between her teeth and she went far too pale. “Wen Yonggang totally started it. It’s not my fault.”

She squeaked like he’d almost started her into a laugh, pressing her lips together as she stared up at him. “Um. That’s… interesting?”

“Who’s talking about the dread Yiling Patriarch raising armies of the dead?” Su She asked, wagging a finger at her when she gasped. “Come on, you know it’s propaganda. Have they started in on the stealing babies bit yet? Someone always pulls out stealing babies and sacrificing them for power.”

One eye went squinty as the little Jiang cultivator tilted her head to the side. “Uh. Where are you getting that?”

“History,” Su She replied. “Hey, everyone knows I was a Lan. Teacher Qiren has this whole lecture cycle on the evils of gossip and how it can be used to sculpt people’s attitudes to the point that they’ll charge off and attack people who are just peacefully living their lives. He’s got eighteen different examples of it, all from fairly recent history.”

“No,” she breathed as her hands pressed against the counter between them. Until her knuckles went white, so he hadn’t managed to calm her down at all. “Really?”

“Yep,” Su She confirmed. He pulled out the letter to Lan Qiren. “There’s a reason for every Lan rule and Teacher Qiren, who this letter is for, knows every single one of them. In detail. The man’s mind is amazing. I’d prefer that this was delivered kind of quickly. I mean, I know, I know. It’s almost winter and it’s gotta go to the Jiang sect so that they can snoop at it, but it is Teacher Qiren. He’ll be irate if it doesn’t get to him pretty quick-like.”

“…You are not what I was expecting,” the little Jiang cultivator said finally.

By the time they calculated out how quickly he wanted to have the letter delivered versus how much that would cost to deliver it through Gusu’s bitterly snowy weather, especially with every single sect in the Jianghu already up in arms about Yiling turning into a black pit of resentful energy out of the so-called blue, Su She had become “Laozu Su” to Jiang Xiandao, who was actually as giggly and gossipy as you’d expect of a girl her age.

“Yeah, the Jin have been yammering about how dangerous you are every time they come through,” Jiang Xiandao said while counting his payment out. “The Nie have no opinion either way yet. I think they plan on waiting and seeing. The Lan are quite firmly convinced that this is all a misunderstanding and Sect Leader Fengmian has been saying that you’re a powerful young inventor so this must just be a new array that went sideways on you.”

“Pfft, it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to,” Su She said. He rolled his eyes when Jiang Xiandao stared at him with her jaw dropped open. “No, really. Wen Ruohan sent Wen Yonggang to force me to join the Wen. No options, no offers that were anything I’d ever want. And Wen Yonggang made it clear that the people of Yiling would pay for it if I didn’t. Of course I defended them.”

“Huh.” Jiang Xiandao shook her head. “Well, I’ll pass that along when I see Sect Leader Fengmian and Yu Furen. I don’t know that they’ll believe it.”

“Don’t care if they do or not,” Su She said, “but if they’re not preparing for a war, they’re gonna get all of you killed. Wen Ruohan has to be out of his ever-loving mind to pull a stunt like this.”

Jiang Xiandao didn’t believe it. Obviously. But that was fine. She’d mention it again to Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan. That was good enough.

Either way, his letter to Lan Qiren would eventually get there, letting Lan Qiren know that things had gone seriously pear-shaped on him so direct conversation by mail was going to be difficult. He sauntered out of the little office and then was outright astonished that there wasn’t a horde of cultivators waiting to ambush him.

Huh. Maybe the gossip and whisper campaign hadn’t drummed up people to the point that he was considered truly dangerous yet. That was nice, if very temporary.

Su She meandered towards the edge of town, picking up some toys for some of the kids, bits of candy for everyone, and a nice new set of brushes and ink sticks for himself. He was going through so much ink and so many brushes. It was kind of his biggest expense right now.

At the edge of town, a shrub rustled as Wen Ning peeked through the branches at him.

“Oh, hey, you survived,” Su She said with a delighted smile.

A quick curl of resentful energy hid both Su She and Wen Ning from anyone who might be watching. From the feel of the proto-array, because Su She didn’t bother making it a full array when just a quick sketch would work, no one was actually looking at or for Su She at that moment.

All the better to slip into the bushes where Wen Ning bit his lip and then waved for Su She to follow him.

They ended up halfway up the hills outside of town in a thicket of bamboo that was so tightly packed that it made a nearly solid wall. The graceful arch of the leaves overhead formed a lovely roof because the center of the thicket had been hollowed out, leaving just enough space for a small tent and a tiny clay cookstove.

That Wen Qing was carefully feeding twigs to so that she could boil water for tea. Or maybe soup.

“Did you get—?” Wen Qing’s mouth snapped shut when she saw Su She. “A-Ning! You weren’t supposed to contact anyone who knew us!”

“He’s the person we’ve been looking for, Jiejie,” Wen Ning said soothingly, not that it did any good for Wen Qing’s temper.

“He’s an idiot,” Wen Qing replied so scathingly that Su She huffed at her. “A self-sacrificing one, at that.”

“I’m definitely a self-sacrificing idiot,” Su She agreed even though he pouted about having to admit it out loud in front of actual people who could perceive him accurately, “but I’m also the person who saved the Dafan Wen and hid them away where Wen Ruohan could never get at them.”

Wen Qing went white as she collapsed back onto the little folding stool she’d been sitting on.

“I told you, Jiejie,” Wen Ning said as he patted her shoulder hesitantly before turning to Su She. “I couldn’t figure out how to get us to Yiling without our being seen. I’m so glad that I spotted you going into town today.”

“Well, it’ll be easy to get you two to safety now,” Su She said. “If you’ve got swords you can fly on, we can go straight there.”

Wen Ning nodded, immediately starting to pack their things up. That was about what Su She expected from him. It’d always seemed to him that Wen Ning was an innately trusting person, back before he’d been killed and resurrected. Hell, he’d been innately trusting after he was a resentful corpse. He just didn’t trust quite so many people.

The slowly growing glare from Wen Qing showed just how innately distrusting she was, which was exactly what he’d expected from her.

“Why?” Wen Qing demanded in a low voice that wouldn’t go past the bamboo but was definitely not low enough to keep Wen Ning from hearing her.

Su She shrugged. “I’m an idiot. I trusted the wrong person a long time ago and it cost me… everything. I got a second chance, so I decided to do better. Instead of fretting and worrying about every fucking thing, I decided that I’d pick my things to defend and care about carefully and then I’d stand my ground against the heavens, the hells and everyone in between.”

“And that leads to saving the Dafan Wen how?” Wen Qing demanded.

“Oh, fuck, that’s a tale, there.” Su She laughed and shook his head. “I was going to be a wandering rogue cultivator like in the stories everyone tells, but I saw a sixteen-year-old boy in Yiling who was dying because he was being poisoned by the resentful energy in his family’s well. So I traded a basket for purifying the well and somehow ended up with the biggest mystery in the Jianghu landing in my hands.”

Wen Qing’s flat glare didn’t shift at all, but her toes started tapping impatiently.

“Now, the whole reason I was in Yiling was because I wanted to study the Burial Mounds,” Su She explained with a wide grin that only made Wen Qing glare at him harder. “You see, I knew that Wen Ruohan was working on conquering the Jianghu and the world. The Lan elders all know about it. They just think they’re safe enough to be immune, assholes that they are.”

Wen Qing pressed her lips together as her chest heaved against a laugh that she clearly wasn’t going to let past her teeth.

“Now, the Lan have a piece of Yin Iron,” Su She said, nodding when Wen Qing went pale. “Yeah, yeah. I know. You went to try and find it, then got derailed by my Heavenly Pillar.”

“That is the worst name,” Wen Qing complained. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to explain what you did to my uncle with that name on the array?”

“Yes,” Su She declared, grinning in triumph. “Yes, I do. And it was totally deliberate, too. Someday I’m going to get Wen Ruohan or Jin Guangshan praising my Heavenly Pillar and it’ll all be worth it.”

In the tent, Wen Ning started giggle-snorting. It was adorable as fuck, especially with Wen Qing shaking her head and sighing as she gestured for him to continue his tale.

“Anyway, I talked to Wen Ning while you guys were out purifying the lake,” Su She said. “He confirmed that Wen Ruohan was actually working on taking control of the world. And I confirmed that yeah, the Heavenly Pillar will absolutely purify all the resentful energy out of a person so that you can experiment on them again and again and again. Offered to go free your family specifically to deprive Wen Ruohan of the two of you, obviously.”

Wen Qing pressed the tips of her fingers against her lips as she went green. Justified. The thought of what Wen Ruohan was undoubtably doing to people as the Yin Iron ate him from the inside out was horrifying. But she didn’t stay green for long.

After a moment, she blew out a breath and nodded once.

“We do have our swords,” Wen Qing said as she stood and folded up the stool. “We don’t have enough qiankun pouches to carry everything.”

“Eh, give me a minute,” Su She said as he pulled out sturdy fabric and his sewing kit. “Should be able to pack the whole camp with one of my big ones.”

Both of them stared at him for that, but he’d done it before. Popo Wei had been especially pleased with his biggest qiankun pouches that made packing up an entire barn full of hay the work of a moment.

It still sent a thrill up his spine when Wen Qing’s eyes went wide after he pulled their entire camp into the pouch he’d made for them. Not even the bits and pieces of scattered bamboo were left behind. Su She breathed through the needy desperateness for praise, then through the panic that went along with realizing that he was never, ever going to get over the shit he’d gone through in the future that wasn’t.

By the time he’d breathed and recited enough quick mantras that he wasn’t going to have an anxiety attack about how to make sure that Wen Qing kept on being impressed by him, Wen Qing had that flat look that doctors always got when they saw straight through him.

“Yeah, I know I’m a mess,” Su She grumbled at her. “Just pull your damned swords already. Popo Wei misses you two something awful. Oh, wait. Let me mark you so that you can get through the wards.”

It wasn’t something he’d prepared before coming here. How could it be when he’d assumed that Wen Ning had hauled his sister off somewhere in the wilds of Meishan instead of coming to Yiling? But it was something that he’d gotten figured out as he learned the pictograms and rebuilt the Burial Mound’s wards.

Su She used a bit of charcoal to sketch a quick rendition of the pictogram for “Open” over the one for “Welcome” on two bits of bamboo from the grove’s floor. A hint of resentful energy activated the rough talismans and burned the pictograms into the wood.

“These will do for the moment,” Su She said as he passed them to Wen Ning and Wen Qing. “I’ve got better stuff back home that I’ll give you. It’s just temporary. Once you’re welcomed into Yiling properly, you’ll be fine.”

Wen Qing frowned at the little bamboo talisman. “One hopes that it doesn’t require blood sacrifices.”

“Nope,” Su She confirmed. “Just need to give up your name and let Popo Wei claim you back into her family.”

Both their heads snapped up. While Wen Qing’s frown went straight into a thunderous scowl, Wen Ning beamed at Su She.

“They reclaimed the Wei name?” Wen Ning asked. He clutched the talisman to his chest. “I’m so glad! Popo always complained about that when the spies weren’t around.”

“What happened to the spies?” Wen Qing asked. She tucked the talisman into her sleeve reluctantly, corners of her mouth turned down.

“No idea,” Su She said in his most creepily cheerful tone of voice that’d set off both Muye and Wen Yonggang when he did it at them during the whole posturing against the Jiang thing. “Popo Wei told me not to fuss my empty little head about it, so I didn’t. I was busy making sure that the Dancing Goddess destroyed the town and left little to no evidence of what happened to everyone.”

“That was you?” Wen Qing squeaked in an octave that she would probably swear to her dying day was nothing like a squeak. Even though it absolutely was.

“Yep.” Su She shrugged off the stares from both of them. “Ready to go?”

They were ready to go. Not necessarily happy about it, on Wen Qing’s part, or calm, on Wen Ning’s part, but they were ready.

The flight back went smoothly enough that Su Sue started twitching long before they got to the outer boundaries of the Burial Mound’s wards. He stopped them three times to add Look Over There arrays, What Was That Behind Me talismans, and then Oh No You Won’t shields to both of the Wen siblings.

“And I thought I was paranoid,” Wen Qing said with a little smirk as they finally took off again.

“You’re paranoid,” Su She confirmed grimly. “I have chronic anxiety and panic attacks along with trauma responses that knock me to my knees if I don’t manage my responses to things. Totally different.”

Even if the end results tended to be much the same.

Either way, they made it back to Yiling and flew right into the Burial Mounds because Wen Qing was literally just as twitchy as Su She was. Wen Ning, though tired from the flight, was more excited to see his family again after thinking that they’d all disappeared and maybe died.

Wen Ning had his own trauma issues after living with Wen Ruohan which was totally fair, honestly.

“Huh,” Muye grunted when they landed at the edge of the little village at the heart of the Burial Mounds. “Didn’t expect that. I had no idea you could fly in here.”

He’d been hoeing up the endless weeds that tended to choke the kitchen gardens that the Wei had set up. Su She was pretty sure he could come up with a talisman or array or something that would reduce the weeds while not affecting the plants that people wanted to grow, but he hadn’t had a chance to tweak it yet.

“Only if you know how and have me managing the wards,” Su She said. “Set it up that way. Where’s Popo Wei?”

“Jinwen’s baby is kind of threatening to come early,” Muye said, nodding towards Popo Wei’s slightly bigger and nicer house on the far side of the village. “Mom brought her up to have Popo Wei check out what’s going on.”

“And he doesn’t ask who we are before telling you that?” Wen Qing muttered to Su She.

“He’s sixteen,” Su She said, flapping a hand at her. “And I brought you in here exactly in the way that no one is supposed to be able to get in here.”

Muye nodded cheerfully. “I was told it was impossible, but Laozu Su keeps doing the impossible like he was raised in the Jiang, not the Lan.”

Even Wen Qing smirked at Su She when he groaned over that. Muye snickered and waved them onwards. They made it about five paces into the hidden village of the Wei before someone spotted Wen Qing.

Everyone stampeded at her other than Popo Wei who only emerged onto her front step when Su She came over to knock on her door. Wen Ning was crying his eyes out while hugging everyone he could get his arms around. Wen Qing was busy checking everyone’s health and asking questions about how they’d been treated faster than anyone could answer.

Popo Wei’s breath caught in her chest as she gripped Su She’s shoulder. “You found them.”

“Actually, they found me,” Su She said. “Wen Ning spotted me on my way into town and then he caught me on the way out. Want me to leave them to you for a bit? I should go check on things.”

Popo Wei nodded, eyes misty as she stared at Wen Qing and Wen Ning. “That would be good. Jinwen’s all right. The baby’s further along than she thought. It just sat high and tight, so she didn’t realize that she’d been pregnant that long.”

“How soon?” Su She asked, instantly worried for her.

“Another week or two,” Popo Wei said, smiling up at him. “Help her back home. Better for her to be where she belongs than in my little house.”

Su She nodded, plotting how to get Jinwen back to the Cho farm without having her walk the entire way. If she was that close to having her baby then yeah, no wonder she’d been waddling around. Her complaints before he left this morning made way more sense.

He was just helping Jinwen to settle into the chair that Muye had rigged up with featherlight talismans when Shuxin came running in at top speed.

“She’s fine,” Su She called to Shuxin.

“The Wen are at the border of town!” Shuxin yelled at him, at Muye, at everyone.

He was so wide-eyed and frightened that he didn’t even seem to see Su She until Su She caught his shoulders and made him stop for a moment. Then Shuxin sagged as he gripped Su She’s elbows. The stark relief on his face ratcheted Su She’s anxiety up instantly.

“Thank goodness you’re back,” Shuxin wheezed. “Mom’s pulled everyone out of town even though there’s only two Wen who made it through the wards. They’re all on their way here. I saw General Kwan and his people heading through town. They were marching, actually marching! I’ve never seen them act like real soldiers before.”

Su She breathed a little laugh. “Hey, this is what they’ve been waiting for ever since Xue Chonghai died. They’ll hold whoever it was for a little bit. You get to take care of Jinwen. She’s due in like a week or two at most.”

The color that had come back to Shuxin’s face drained away. “What?”

Nope, not handling that one. Su She shoved him over to Jinwen who leveled a Lianmin-style glare at him over Shuxin’s head as he patted her belly and babbled nonsense about not being ready to be a father yet. Su She ignored both the glare and the babbling. More important things to take care of, like running down to the edge of the spires to meet Lianmin and the rest of the Yiling residents, none of whom looked half as rattled as Shuxin.

“It’s Wen Xu and Wen Zhuoliu,” Lianmin announced as soon as she saw Su She. “They look like they’re about to fall over. Well. Wen Xu looks like he’s about to fall over. I couldn’t tell that Wen Zhuoliu was affected at all.”

“Yeah, no, he wouldn’t show any signs until he dropped dead,” Su She agreed. He counted everyone and then blew out a deeply relieved breath that everyone was there. “Go on in. I’ll go deal with the two of them. General Kwan can only keep them occupied for so long.”

Lianmin nodded but she frowned at him the same way she did at Muye when he was about to go hunting for better bamboo out in the forests around Yiling or when Shuxin decided to go drinking in town.

“I’ll be careful,” Su She promised before she could scold him. “I know what I’m up against and I’ve got tools that they don’t.”

“You’ll explain that when you get back,” Lianmin said firmly enough that Su She just nodded.

Popo Wei and Muye knew about his time travel, though only because Popo Wei was scarily smart and Muye was stupidly lucky. It probably wasn’t fair to keep it from Lianmin for much longer. Especially not now that Wen Ruohan had decided to attack.

Yiling without its residents was creepy again. Not the same sort of creepiness as it had when he first arrived back so many months ago. But still creepy. Despite the lack of people, there was a sense that the houses were watching Su She as he walked down the main street towards the sounds of swords clashing and terrified cursing.

Had to be the Burial Mounds keeping track of everything going on.

That was probably a very good idea. Su She stared as he reached the edge of town because wow, that was… something. Definitely something. He wasn’t sure what it was but… yeah.

Wen Xu grunted and shouted as he swung at General Kwan repeatedly. Every single one of his swings went wild, not hitting anything vital. In fact, he kept hammering on General Kwan’s breastplate instead of his skeletal neck or his rotting legs or arms or anything. General Kwan stood there and took it, occasionally shifting slightly left or right to make sure that Wen Xu hit his breastplate properly.

In the background, Wen Zhuoliu knelt on the ground, panting as he clutched one wrist. One severed wrist. His hand lay on the ground in front of him where it had been cleanly sliced off.

Odd thing was that the only person with a sword sharp enough to cut through arm bones like that was Wen Xu. General Kwan and his men all had rust-eaten, fragile swords that would break if they ever actually tried to cut through anything.

Should probably do something about that, actually. Maybe. Eh, he’d ask Popo Wei and Lianmin about it after this.

“Die! Die! Die!” Wen Xu shouted but his eyes were so wide that he couldn’t possibly see what he actually faced.

Su She walked a wide circle around him to crouch down next to Wen Zhuoliu. “That loyalty thing isn’t working out so good for you, is it?”

Wen Zhuoliu actually glared at him.

“Just saying, this isn’t the best death in the world,” Su She continued. “Not that I’m offering you a better place or a chance to live. I wouldn’t trust you no matter what claims you made of changing. We both know you’d never abandon your loyalty to Wen Ruohan.”

“You are not one to speak of loyalty,” Wen Zhuoliu said in a low, angry growl.

“That’s where you’re wrong.” Su She hummed and shrugged. “We’re cut of the same cloth. I tried to be loyal to the Lan, but it was killing me. Yiling? I’m loyal to death and beyond to Yiling and the people here. They’re mine and I’m not ever going to leave them or let them get hurt. I did tell Wen Yonggang to inform Wen Ruohan of that. Eh, probably didn’t even understand what Wen Yonggang was saying what with the way the Yin Iron is eating his soul from the inside out.”

Wen Zhuoliu’s fury drained into ice-cold horror. Instead of explaining further, Su She stood up and sighed as he watched Wen Xu exhausting himself against General Kwan’s breastplate. It was getting a bit battered, not enough to break but still, no reason to let it be completely destroyed.

When Su She whistled, resentful energy bloomed around him. He gestured and pushed the resentful energy at Wen Xu, surrounding him in it so abruptly that Wen Xu felt down on the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

“You will not fight,” Wen Zhuoliu sneered.

Su She rolled his eyes. “I’m no idiot. The war is coming. I know that. This isn’t even the first battle of that war. And you two, hey, you’re not even a footnote in this war.”

He put a Stupidly Heavy talisman on Wen Xu, directly on his neck so that it would break when it engaged. Then Su She charged it up as much as he could.

Wen Xu sank down into the earth so quickly that it looked like the ground had gone liquid underneath him.

Nothing but bedrock would stop Wen Xu’s body from falling. Even that might get damaged a bit from the impact. In a thousand years or so, maybe, someone might dig up his corpse and wonder just how it got there but no one else was going to find Wen Xu.

“How deep?” Wen Zhuoliu asked in a voice that actually was a little bit faint. Huge display of emotion for him.

“Bedrock,” Su She said with another shrug. “That’s what Stupidly Heavy talismans do if you charge them all the way up. Head on or off before you go down, too?”

Wen Zhuoliu shut his eyes for a second. His expression didn’t change at all. What did change was the grip on his severed wrist.

Blood poured as Wen Zhuoliu let go with his fingers and his cultivation, letting his life’s blood flood out of him in a rush that Su She winced at but allowed to continue. Far be it for him to deny the man his chosen death.

Su She had chosen his death for loyalty and honor’s sake. Let Wen Zhuoliu do the same.

It didn’t hurt anything.

Once Wen Zhuoliu lay on the ground, still and lifeless in the puddle of his blood, Su She charged up another Stupidly Heavy talisman. He put it on Wen Zhuoliu’s severed hand and then tossed the hand on top of Wen Zhuoliu’s body. They sank together into the ground just as quickly as Wen Xu had.

General Kwan moaned at him.

“Oh, no, I’m fine,” Su She said. He smiled and deliberately didn’t pat General Kwan’s shoulder the way he would have Muye’s. “I’ve killed so many people. It’s not a problem anymore. I don’t really even feel anything. After the first few you just… do it and don’t really feel anything.”

General Kwan nodded at that, bowing as properly as he could with his rotting body.

Then he and his men stagger-marched back to their places in the dead zone outside of the spires, leaving Su She alone in Yiling with only a puddle of blood and the Burial Mounds to keep him company.

“The part of this that sucks,” Su She commented to the Burial Mounds as he ambled back towards Popo Wei’s hidden village, “is that I know who’s coming next. Wen Chao is going to show up and be a total brat at us. Really not looking forward to dealing with him and his ridiculous fireballs.”

The Burial Mounds hummed and nudged Su She to hurry up. There was an impression of three scrolls and then a hint of laughter, truly derisive laughter.

“Well, that’s good,” Su She said, hurrying now that he had the prospect of something new to learn. “You really have something that’ll let me stop his stupid fireballs?”

The way the Burial Mounds laughed made Su She grin. That was wonderful. Three good things in a day: He’d gotten the letter out to Lan Qiren. He’d saved Wen Qing and Wen Ning. And now he had new things to learn.

Not bad at all, even if it did mean that he was going to have to put up with Wen Chao’s temper tantrums in the very near future.

12. In Which Our Protagonist Feels Ridiculously Old Despite Being the Youngest One in the Room

Wen Chao was as green as seaweed when he managed to stagger his way into Yiling. It was kind of amazing that he’d made it that far, honestly. There was dirt dug into his robes at the knees and his hands were skinned from falling over too many times. Su She would bet that some of the stains on his clothes were vomit; he looked that sick as he stood there panting and swaying.

“Well, I knew you’d be coming,” Su She commented from the steps up into Cho Dahong’s pottery shop. “You couldn’t have taken another few hours? I’ve barely gotten started on this scroll.”

Cho Dahong’s place was closest to the main road out of Yiling and thus the first place anyone saw when they were on their way into Yiling. He also had a nice wide porch that he usually had samples set out on so that people could see his wares and wander in to buy stuff.

Not that it worked, mind you, but Cho Dahong was always far more interested in making the pottery than he was in selling it. Much to his family’s dismay.

“Where is my brother?” Wen Chao demanded.

Su She stared at him. “Seriously. You know he’s dead. Why are you even asking?”

“You wouldn’t, wouldn’t dare,” Wen Chao said, wheezing and swallowing abruptly as sweat broke out over his face. “No one would dare to kill my brother. He’s the heir. Heir to the Wen. Wen empire. You, you…”

Had to admire the kid’s guts. He managed to get most of his little rant out before he toppled to the ground vomiting up what little was left in his stomach. Wasn’t much. A little acid and a lot of heaving.

Su She sighed and watched him, waiting until Wen Chao managed to wrestle his body back under control despite the influence of the Burial Mounds on him.

The three scrolls that the Burial Mounds had ever-so-graciously pointed out to him had been pretty interesting. One was all about adjustments that could be made to the wards to make people’s bodies fight them. Thus the vomiting and general can’t stand up that Wen Chao was struggling against.

Second one was a way to make sure that the whole conversation echoed back out to the other Wen soldiers who hadn’t made it this far. There was no way that Wen Chao was getting out of Yiling, alive or dead. Given Wen Ruohan’s usage of the Yin Iron, or its usage of him as the case may be, Su She couldn’t let the little idiot go. He was too useful as a pawn of the Yin Iron.

Third one was a fascinating treatise on the nature of time and how the flow of time might actually be a construct of the way the human mind worked. It was breaking Su She’s brain just reading the thing over. He needed something like forty years of concerted study to actually work out the math and the arrays and the theories that went with it. As a person who’d already traveled in time, he’d thought he had a good grasp on the subject.

Yeah. No. Not even close if the third scroll was even vaguely accurate. Made his grumpiness at Wen Chao all the more real, which was probably deliberate on the Burial Mounds’ part. Damn them anyway.

Wen Chao sucked a breath through his clenched teeth as he raised his head to glare with bloodshot eyes at Su She.

“Yes, actually,” Su She said firmly, answering his little rant even though he didn’t much see the point other than knowing the other Wen soldiers would hear it, “I would dare to kill your brother. Or your father, for that matter. I mean, I’d rather not. Rather sit here and study this scroll and the pictograms and whatnot. If you assholes would leave me alone, none of this none of this would be happening.”

“The Wen are the sun,” Wen Chao hissed at him, struggling to stand up and failing.

“Yeah, yeah, ruling over everything.” Su She groaned as he rolled his eyes. “And as I told Wen Yonggang, the sun fucking sets, you moron. No power is eternal. Nothing is forever. The Wen rose. The Wen will fall. It’s as inevitable as the fucking tides. Get over it. Frankly, the harder you work to keep the Wen ascendent, the sooner they’re going to fall. Mostly because you’ll piss everyone in the Jianghu off so badly that they go after you.”

Not a word of it got through to Wen Chao. His snarl didn’t shift. His eyes didn’t widen. He didn’t even hiss at the sheer implication that what he was doing right then was going to make his beloved Wen sect fall.

Because, hello? Heir to the Wen collapsed right there in front of Su She with no defenses, no one to keep him safe, not even his sword out in case Su She decided to cut his throat.

He’d always thought that Wen Chao was an arrogant bastard, even back when he actually was this age in the future that wasn’t.

Now?

Fuck if Wen Chao wasn’t the most spoiled, most arrogant, most ridiculous idiot he’d ever had the misfortune to deal with. He was going to get himself killed and spend the entire time blaming everyone else instead of ever catching a clue that it was his own damned fault.

“They wouldn’t dare,” Wen Chao hissed.

“Of course they will,” Su She said. He shook his head when Wen Chao just huffed. “Kid, seriously. Wen Xu, the heir, is dead. Wen Zhuoliu, his scary protector, is dead. Now here you are, back in the exact same place that they died. Without a single person to guard your back.”

Wen Chao’s eyes widened finally. “You wouldn’t dare!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Su She groaned as he rolled his eyes towards the ash-filled sky overhead. “Are you fucking serious? Of course I’d dare. You’re helpless and a bother and I have much better things to do than sit here debating whether or not the Wen are all-powerful or not. Which, hey, news for you! They’re fucking not.”

“You wouldn’t dare!” Wen Chao bellowed as he hauled himself back upright on his shaking legs. “My father would—”

“Your father is being eaten alive by the Yin Iron, kid,” Su She said. “He doesn’t care if you live or die because he’s not in control of his fucking body anymore.”

Wen Chao staggered back several steps, going so white that Su She kind of expected him to pass out. Frankly, the entire conversation was a waste of time. There was no getting through to Wen Chao. The kid was so set in his ways and so spoiled that he simply couldn’t comprehend that he might, possibly, maybe, be wrong about anything.

The only reason Su She kept trying to get through to him was that the wards were relaying the entire conversation back to the rest of the Wen.

Who knew how the whole thing would be reported back to Wen Ruohan? It’d probably get twisted around and tied in knots to make everything Su She’s fault, but he was planting seeds of doubt and that was more important than accurately conveying information back to Wen Ruohan who wouldn’t care one way or the other anyway.

If he wanted to accurately convey what was going on, he’d write another letter to Lan Qiren. The Lan, and especially Lan Qiren, were famously good at being scrupulously honest. Also massively petty but few people realized just how petty Lan Qiren could be when he was offended by someone.

“No,” Wen Chao finally whispered, shaking his head. And knees. And hands. “No! You’re lying.”

“Why the hell would I lie about that?” Su She asked with honest curiosity. “I mean, come on. I have wards here that even the Yin Iron would hesitate to go through. The people I care about are safe and snug where no one is going to get them. I got nothing to gain by lying about that.”

“You’ve killed them all!” Wen Chao screamed. “Yiling is empty because you killed them to raise an army of the dead!”

“…Wow, he’s already doing that?” Su She asked, blinking at Wen Chao. “Huh. I mean, I knew that some smaller sects had disappeared, but I thought that they’d been sucked into the Wen, not killed outright.”

“Not my father, you!” Wen Chao protested.

“Kid, I hate to break it to you, but not everyone reacts the way your dad does to things,” Su She said. He waved the scroll at Wen Chao. “I mean, it’s an understandable confusion. You expect the stuff you see growing up to be universal. It’s really not, though. I mean, if it were, everyone would be as excited about the pictograms and scrolls I found as I am. And as Lan Qiren is. But hey, not everyone is a scholar. Not everyone is a war-mongering soul-eating chunk of iron inhabiting a sect leader.”

The fireball shouldn’t have been surprising.

Su She had been letting his mouth run on, all the old sarcasm and bitterness coming out. There was just something about Wen Chao’s green-tinged pout that made him feel all the years of his life in the future that wasn’t.

So yeah, Wen Chao bellowing as he summoned a fireball and then flung it at Su She shouldn’t have been a surprise at all.

Still was. Su She cursed and flung up a shield, then cursed harder as the Burial Mounds clamped a much stronger shield overtop of Wen Chao who promptly…

… flung another fireball at the shield and was consumed in the backlash of flame.

“Well. That was… stupid,” Su She commented to the roiling mass of fire contained inside of the Burial Mound’s shield. “Like I wouldn’t plan for fireballs. It’s like that idiot’s only weapon.”

He sighed and stood up, using resentful energy to push the Burial Mound’s shield down into the ground like snuffing a candle. Took a moment for the fire to flicker out, but once it did there was only ash and melted bits of metal left. Just about a sword’s worth of metal lay puddled in the center of the fused earth where Wen Chao had died.

“What a moron,” Su She said, mostly for the listening soldiers’ benefit.

“We heard screaming,” Muye called from up the street towards the edge of town.

“Your mother is going to twist your ear half off, Muye,” Su She scolded him.

“No, I most certainly am not,” Lianmin said as she strode past Muye to stare at the scorched spot. “So who was the idiot who decided to pick a fight with you?”

“Wen Chao, second son of Wen Ruohan, and now-dead heir to the Wen Sect,” Su She said. He shrugged. “Also a complete idiot who was so convinced of the Wen’s rightful place at the head of the Jianghu that he couldn’t bear to hear anything that contradicted it. Killed himself by throwing a fireball at the shield holding him in.”

Lianmin snorted and rolled her eyes.

“Wow, that’s really sad,” Muye said in a tone that was the exact opposite of sad. His giggles certainly carried to the soldiers listening in. “I mean, he killed himself.”

“That he did,” Su She agreed as he stood and gave Lianmin the scroll. “I’m going to go check the border, make sure no one else gets in. Take that back, will you?’

“Of course,” Lianmin agreed she studied the wrap. “Time travel? You found a scroll on time travel?”

“Nah, on the nature of time itself,” Su She said. “Not traveling through it, just understanding time. Really interesting. I’ve gotta take so many notes. And I need to do a bunch of math. I might have a basic understanding of it in, oh, maybe a decade or so.”

Lianmin rolled her eyes again. “You are such a scholar.”

As if she wasn’t just as bad in her own areas of interest. Not that Lianmin would admit it, especially not when people could hear her. Su She waved them back towards the Burial Mounds before heading off to make sure that the Wen army waiting for him to emerge never had the chance to get at him.

It didn’t take a lot to twist the wards just right to make anyone getting close travel in the wrong direction. Crossing a maze array with the wards was a tiny little tweak, one easy to do on the fly.

Well.

It was easy for Su She.

Popo Wei was always on him to admit that what was easy for him was usually darn near impossible for other people. The way he put things together was nearly unique. You know, other than Wei Wuxian who had his own style of impossible smashing things together until they worked.

The Wen army was already starting to shift position as the maze effect pushed against them. Su She studied them, peering through the leaves of a bamboo thicket that was just tight enough to make him hard to spot. It wasn’t a perfect camouflage, but it was good enough for the situation. None of the Wen soldiers looked all that interested in peering towards Yiling. All they looked like they wanted to do was run away as quickly as possible.

The Wen had made camp out on the road about half a day’s walk from the Burial Mounds. It was a bit farther than he’d expected based on how he’d set up the wards, but the Burial Mounds had been pretty darn pushy about making sure no one got close. Travel by sword was fast enough that he’d gotten there in minutes instead of the march that Wen Chao likely had gone through.

Su She could fly in easily. He was pretty sure that the holes he’d spotted just before he got to the bamboo thicket had been formed when Wen Chao crashed into the abandoned rice paddies head first. It looked like he might have made multiple attempts at flying in before giving up and marching in with soldiers peeling off behind him the whole way.

All the Wen soldiers who’d tried and failed to follow him were already back at the Wen camp. At least Su She assumed the ones with mud on their clothes and frantic expressions as they packed everything they owned as quickly as they could were the ones who’d tried to get into Yiling. The other Wen didn’t seem as spooked.

No one had put up tents, not one single tent anywhere. There were no camp fires. Hell, it looked like the Wen army had just stood their fidgeting while Wen Chao stomped his vomiting way into Yiling.

It wasn’t much of an army, either. More like a strike force. Su She saw about two hundred cultivators, no more than two-fifty. All of them looked fairly young, actually. They might be Wen Chao’s personal little army within the Wen army which made more sense of the way they all stood around fidgeting instead of doing something constructive. You know, like sending a message back to Wen Ruohan or making lunch or even sending someone after Wen Chao before he got too far away and got his fool ass killed.

A little listening array let Su She overhear what the apparent commanders of the strike force were whispering to each other.

“It can’t be real!” the shorter, younger one insisted even though his face was sweaty-pale, and his hands shook.

“You know it is,” the taller, older one hissed. “The array that Wen Ruohan gave us confirmed that Wen Chao is dead. That means that the whole thing was real.”

“But why would it echo that way?” the shorter one insisted. “It’s, it’s, it’s just a trick to make us believe that Wen Chao is lost. Then the Yiling Patriarch will torture him and turn him into a puppet.”

The older on glowered about that, staring not towards Yiling or the other soldiers but back towards Qishan.

Interesting, that. Wen Ruohan really was conducting the puppet experiments, wasn’t he? Well, that wasn’t good. Su She was going to have to do something about that soon.

The Lan piece of the Yin Iron had been happy with the idea of dying. He had to wonder if the Wen piece would be equally ready to die when it was being fed so wonderfully right now. The various pieces might have evolved into different individuals.

Or they might not. No way to tell without doing more testing and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. You know, because there was a small army of Wen soldiers looking to capture him and take him back to Wen Ruohan.

Also because Lianmin would tie his testicles in a knot if he tried anything like that without support.

“Right,” Su She sighed. “How to get rid of these idiots?”

There were a dozen really nasty thing he could do to them. They weren’t within the Burial Mound’s defenses, but that hardly mattered when Su She was right there. Between what he’d learned from the Burial Mounds, what he’d learned during the Sunshot Campaign in the future that wasn’t, and his training with the Lan, there were enough choices that it was hard to narrow anything down.

Of course, most of that was pretty darn destructive and Su She didn’t actually want to slaughter them all. If he was pulling a Yiling Patriarch like Wei Wuxian’s Yiling Patriarch, well, there were plenty of dead around the area he could summon. Or he could kill them and puppet them the way the Yin Iron would.

“Nah,” Su She murmured as he crafted a Jin messenger butterfly and then gave it several little twists to multiply it’s power so that it created not one butterfly but a swarm.

He also changed it from a butterfly into a glowing blue crow because he wanted to. Butterflies were a Jin thing and frankly? Su She had had enough of those damned butterflies in the future that wasn’t. Sticking with crows was better.

As he pushed a huge chunk of resentful energy into his altered messenger spell, Su She gave the growing murder of crows one simple message.

They took off in a thunderous clap of wings that made every single Wen soldier flinch and whirl. The cloud of messenger crows exploded up out of the woods around Su She, filling the sky with smokey-blue crows that were ever so faintly see-through. They almost looked like real crows except for the way their wings trailed ash and their forms wobbled with every beat of their wings.

“What the fuck is that?” the younger of the two Wen commanders squawked.

“Run,” the older one said, pulling at his sleeve. “Run! Everyone run!”

He turned and ran for his life. Maybe a third of the Wen followed him. The rest stood there with their mouths open and their eyes wide as the murder of ashy crows swooped at them.

“Go away!” the murder of crows bellowed.

Su She flinched and covered his ears, much too late. Knees went out from under him, too, because he’d never in his life ever heard a sound that loud before. It was a punch to the chest just like Nie Mingjue’s punch, except with sound instead of a fist.

Hurt just as much.

Especially his poor ears, dammit.

“Oh, ow,” Su She wheezed as he hauled himself back to his feet with the help of a toppled piece of bamboo from the entirely flattened grove he’d been hiding in. “Overpowered that one. Oops.”

The ashy crows’ bellow knocked the remaining Wen over like they’d been flicked by a giant. A moment later, the Wen scrambled to their feet and ran after their fleeing comrades. Not one of the turned around to watch the murder of ashy crows dissipate into a billowing cloud of resentful energy that rained ash down over the road.

None of them mounted their swords until they were nearly out of sight. Morons. Su She shook his head and rubbed his ears. Popo Wei was going to scold him so hard for overdoing the volume. Oh well, it was a mostly successful test, though he would need to work on the volume issue before he did it again.

It wasn’t until he was on his own sword heading back to the Burial Mounds that he realized that hey, he hadn’t heard any screaming. There was no wind rushing past his ears. Except, of course, there was.

He just couldn’t hear it.

“Really overpowered that one,” Su She sighed and pushed himself to get to Popo Wei that much faster.

You could really fuck up your hearing if you didn’t get to a good healer fast enough. Cultivation would fix all the damage, sure, but if you had something misaligned inside your ears you could lose the ability to hear certain ranges of sound. And yeah, he was actually bleeding from his ears so, you know.

Oops.

Which was what he said as he set down in front of Popo Wei’s hut while everyone yelled soundlessly at him.

The sheer quantity of swearing coming from Lianmin was matched perfectly by Wen Qing, now named Wei Qing. Popo Wei shut the swearing down with one stern look, at the same time that she waved for Su She to sit his butt down and let himself be treated.

Where “be treated” equaled “be knocked out by needles and wake up two days later”.

“Well, I hope that your headache isn’t too bad,” Popo Wei said as she gave Su She a cup of water to sip. “We managed to repair your eardrums. The inner ear was rather terribly damaged, but A-Qing and I figured out a way to repair that, too. You will, of course, be explaining what you did, yes?”

“Yes, Popo Wei,” Su She said once his mouth felt less like leather and more like normal. “And seriously, thank you. I just wanted to scare the remaining Wen soldiers off, so I altered a Jin messenger butterfly to be a crow and fed it some resentful energy so that it’d be something other than a fucking butterfly. And, well…”

“You overpowered it,” Popo Wei said with a sigh that seemed to deflate her entirely. “Su She, you are… ridiculous. The damage done to your ears, and certainly to the Wen soldiers’ ears, is severe enough that you should have gone deaf. Many of them may go deaf. I know that you feel it’s your duty to protect us. I understand that you feel responsible for us all, especially with the changes you’ve made. But you must be more careful with yourself.”

Su She cringed.

He couldn’t even try to call it anything else.

The one truth of his life, both now and in the future that wasn’t, was that he always did stuff and then got scolded for it after the fact. Usually by very formidable women. But also by Ran Quanyu who wasn’t a woman at all.

“Please don’t do that,” Su She said after he fought his way through the waves of shame, revulsion at himself, and then guilt for having worried them.

“I have to,” Popo Wei said very gently. She took his hand and squeezed it gently. “There is no one else in your life who can be a grandmother to you, Su She. There’s no one to be a mother or an aunt or even a sister who scolds you with love for doing something that scares the wits out of them. That falls to me. My sons are gone, long dead in Wen Ruohan’s army, but you gave me back my name, saved my family, found and rescued my grandchildren, and have created a paradise for us. I couldn’t be prouder to know you if you were actually my child.”

“Fuck,” Su She whined.

He let Popo Wei hug him until he stopped leaking tears. Stupid emotions, always getting riled up at the wrong time over stupid things like getting praise and love that he literally would’ve die for in the future that wasn’t.

By the time he managed to stop being an emotional disaster, Wei Ning appeared with food for him to eat, another very gentle, shy scolding, and three letters from Lan Qiren that he’d snuck out to get even though everyone told him not to.

Su She stared at Wei Ning who blushed brightly. “I hope you got the “don’t worry me that way” lecture, too.”

“I did!” Wei Ning giggled into his sleeve. “Jiejie was really upset at me. So was Popo Wei and Lianmin. But I know that talking to Lan Qiren is important and no one else could go. Besides, no one notices me.”

“Other than all the Wen soldiers out there who just had their ears blasted by the dread Yiling Patriarch,” Su She said. He arched an eyebrow as Wei Ning ducked his head to hide his completely unrepentant expression. “Next time take someone with you. Muye’s good at sneaking and at being calmly matter-of-fact as he does stupid shit. No going alone.”

Wei Ning grinned and bobbed a bow at Su She. “I will! Eat your food. Lianmin will be here soon to scold you, too.”

Su She ate his food. While he read the letters from Lan Qiren, but he ate his damned food. No way was he getting a Lianmin scolding without a full belly, especially after being asleep for two days.

The letters were… well.

First letter was all right. It was about eighty percent Lan Qiren being an excited scholar at him and twenty percent politics heating up that Lan Qiren commented on by sniffily Not Commenting on all the nonsense the other sects were doing.

The second one was a bit of a worry since it was about sixty percent politics, thirty percent excited scholar and ten percent Lan Qiren warning him that the Wen were Very Upset About His Nonsense.

The third one…

“What does it say?” Lianmin asked as she sat down next to his bed.

Smirking at the way he’d started, because of course he’d been so deeply focused on reading the letters and studying every single implication in them that he hadn’t noticed her arrival.

“The Jianghu is having a discussion conference in the Unclean Realm to discuss how they’re going to hunt down and destroy the Yiling Patriarch,” Su She said.

Lianmin snatched the letter out of his hand so that she could scowl at it. “What is wrong with those people? We haven’t done anything to them and what right do they have to be upset about you making a sect here? Not one of them ever did anything real to help us here.”

“It’s politics,” Su She sighed. “And probably the Yin Iron egged on by Jin Guangshan. At least it’ll be held in Qinghe instead of Qishan. Nie Mingjue is. Well, brutally fair. He won’t go to war without real proof.”

Lianmin frowned at him as he paused over Nie Mingjue. She carefully folded the letter back up and then set it on her lap with her hands resting overtop it. The sternly worried look in her eyes was almost worse than the lecture he’d expected to get.

“Tell me,” Lianmin ordered.

For one wild moment, Su She thought about lying through his teeth. Granted, it wouldn’t work since he’d already told Popo Wei and Muye, but the temptation was a wild, vicious animal inside of him until he subdued it back into the normal panic that he always had when thinking about his death in the future that wasn’t.

“Nie Mingjue killed me in the future that I came from,” Su She said because it was the logical place to start. “He was a furious corpse, really furious since he’d been betrayed about every way possible and, you know, Nie. Their resentful corpses are always bad. He punched a hole straight through my chest which triggered the time travel array I’d figured out. Came back to myself back in the Cloud Recesses and decided that no, I wasn’t going to do anything the same.”

“That’s how you did it,” Lianmin breathed.

“All this?” Su She asked, waving a hand at the Burial Mounds outside the walls of Popo Wei’s hut.

“No, that’s obviously a surprise to you as much as it is to us.” Lianmin sniffed derisively. “No, the way you dealt with the Wen and the Jiang. The warnings you gave them all. I’d thought you were having visions of the future, remarkably reliable ones.”

“Fuck no.” Su She huffed. “That would be a nightmare. I’m not sure how that would even work, actually. It’d be so ridiculously painful. Nah, I just know what happened before. Won’t happen this time. I’ve changed too much already. But it lets me have a… better understanding of people’s motivation.”

Lianmin nodded. “It would. Very well. I’ll talk with A-Qing and Popo Wei about medicine that will allow you to attend the discussion conference without having massive panic attacks every time Nie Mingjue twitches.”

She passed the third letter back to Su She and then marched right out of the hut even as Su She spluttered at her back.

Great. Lovely! Just what he wanted.

A discussion conference all about him and Lianmin was going to chuck him straight into the middle of the thing.

Fine.

Su She pushed back the blankets and then got properly dressed in his black, grey, and red robes. If he was going to have to go to the stupid conference, then he’d better get ready for it. There were scrolls he needed to take excerpts of, arrays he needed to design and test, and a discussion that he was going to have to plan out.

Because not only was he going to have to see Nie Mingjue, he was going to have to face down Meng Yao, his zhiji before he’d become the man who was Su She’s zhiji.

No matter what else he did during this fiasco of a discussion conference, he had to make sure to tell Meng Yao never to work with Wen Ruohan. And to never, ever try to get Jin Guangshan’s approval.

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