Reading Time: 115 Minutes

Title: Lord of the Yiling Peak
Author: MeyariMcFarland
Fandom: MDZS/The Untamed
Genre: Crossover, Drama, Fantasy, Hurt/Comfort, Paranormal/Supernatural, Romance, Suspense
Relationship(s): Lan Zhan / Wei Ying
Content Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Rape/Non-con/Dub-con, Torture, Violence-Graphic, child sexual abuse (discussion of), canon war and aftermath, human sacrifice, murder
Author Note: While this story is a crossover between MDZS and SVSS, the body of the story is focused on MDZS. Four key characters show up in end notes on each chapter, sort of like the chorus in Greek plays. I changed Wei Wuxian / Wei Ying quite a bit too, which will become clear in the story as he comes into his heritage. Other than that, most of the really horrible things happen off-screen and in the past, though some truly terrible things are discussed. Mind the warnings, please, and take care of yourself.
Word Count: 103,065
Summary: It could have started as the rain poured down on them all, washing away blood and stirring up mud as Lan Zhan stood their sad and noble in the darkness of the night. It didn’t. It started when Wei Ying was a kid on the streets of Yiling. It started when Madame Yu beat him with Zidian and left him bleeding through his torn clothes. It started when Wen Chao threw him off his sword and down into the swirling wails of torment that was the Burial Mounds. Qiongqi Path was just the point where Wei Ying finally followed the path he’d been offered years before.
Artist: Spennig Aisling

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1. Hidden Peak

Wei Ying didn’t allow himself to look back at Lan Zhan. He couldn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to keep going and the Wen remnants absolutely needed him to keep going. There was so much to do and no time to do it in, but at least Wei Ying knew exactly where to take everyone.

If only…

No, there was no point to “if only”. Though at this point it honestly seemed like someone was working just as hard as they possibly could to isolate Wei Ying and keep him away from his family, that couldn’t be true. It was just the way things were, not a grand plot of some kind aimed at him, of all people.

Rain poured down his cheeks, dripped down his throat and soaked his ratty robes. Shijie had been right. He really should have worn the new robes that she’d gotten for him. He’d been so concerned about wearing the deep purple underrobe that he’d pretended that he’d not seen them, even though it made Shijie go all sad-eyed and purse-lipped at him. Jiang Cheng’s ever-simmering anger was easier to handle, especially when Wei Ying was drunk.

It was so easy to get drunk anymore. Wasn’t even fun.

“They’ll follow us,” Wen Qing said a quarter shichen later as the rain lightened from dramatic downpour into annoyingly misty rain that soaked them all through far faster than the downpour would have. “They’ll catch us.”

“No, they won’t,” Wei Ying said. “Can you, do you have enough spiritual energy to dry some talisman paper? I have a… a place we can go to but to get in we need a talisman.”

She stared at Wei Ying like he was insane. Then with the sort of furiously disapproving glower that healers always got around Wei Ying, ever since he went to Lotus Pier with Uncle Fengmian. Which! Totally not his fault this time. He hadn’t even done anything yet.

“None of us have the energy to power a teleportation talisman,” Wen Qing said in the painfully precise tone that meant she was angrier than even Madame Yu in a full-blow rage. Or Jiang Cheng’s bellow number three where he was horrified and couldn’t express it other than by yelling.

“Not teleportation,” Wei Ying said, squinting into the clouds and nodding. “We’re close enough to the southern edge of the ward wall. I just need a talisman to open it. Practically no power needed, I promise.”

The way that Wen Qing glared the whole way through drying one single sheet of talisman paper and then drawing three stalks of bamboo in the center of a simple “open the door” talisman was a bit over the top, but Popo was very nice about holding the board that Wei Ying used to write on and Uncle Fourth smiled as he held his shirt as a tarp over their heads to keep the misty rain off.

Well, maybe the blood he used to make the talisman was the problem, but really, what else did Wei Ying have for it?

Besides, blood had worked the first time. It should work now, too.

And it did.

The clouds looming overhead abruptly thinned, letting a beam of light stab down to Wei Ying’s feet. Where before there had been rocks and shrubs, some looming pine trees gone scrubby with the effects of war and a fire that had raged through in the last couple of years, now there was a gleaming path laid with pristine grey slate stones.

It led away from Wei Ying and upwards into a mountain that hadn’t been there a moment before, one covered with thickets of bamboo that gently swayed in a wind that none of them could feel. Birds sang quietly. Several small brown rabbits hopped across the path, dislodging the scattering of dropped bamboo leaves on the slate.

“What is this?” Wen Qing whispered, eyes wide as she clutched Wei Ying’s arm hard enough to leave bruises. “What did you do?”

“I… found it,” Wei Ying said, laughing a little because oh, he’d never quite dared to tell anyone this story before.

Not Jiang Cheng who was jealous and angry and so very desperate for respect. Not Shijie who Wei Ying loved with all his heart but who just smiled sadly and told Wei Ying to keep his head down after Madame Yu beat him bloody. Certainly not Uncle Fengmian who looked at Wei Ying and saw someone else’s face.

He’d never been sure if it was his mother or his father that Uncle Fengmian saw. He’d never been brave enough to ask for fear of breaking the spell that had given him a home, however tenuous it had always been.

Not even Lan Zhan knew about this, his zhiji, the one who knew the song of his soul and accepted it no matter how discordant it was.

If only that had meant that Lan Zhan supported him through everything instead of trying to scold Wei Ying into being something that he… well, just never could quite be.

No. No if only’s.

“Explain.” Wen Qing’s glare could’ve stripped flesh from bone.

She still waved the Wen remnants through the gate and onto the path upwards towards the peak hiding behind the bamboo. Kept her grip on Wei Ying’s arm, of course, but then she didn’t know.

“My parents died when I was five,” Wei Ying said as they started up the long, long climb to the peak.

Behind them, the gate closed. There wasn’t a path between where they’d been and where they were. Their footprints just started up in the middle of nowhere. When the Jin followed their trail, because Jin Guangshan and that stupid jerk Jin Zixun absolutely would, they would find a trail of footprints, horse tracks and then… nothing. The trail would cut off in nothingness.

“And?” Wen Qing prompted.

“We were in Yiling,” Wei Ying said. He nodded at the way she grimaced, and Popo looked at him with sorrow filling her eyes. “Yeah. It was bad. I was five, not yet six. I tried to survive on the streets, but winter was coming up. The wild dogs were… very bad that year. They attacked me. I managed to chase them away, but I knew they’d follow my blood trail and there was no one who would help me.”

“Not in Yiling,” Wen Qing agreed with a sigh. She finally let his arm go, patting his wrist in apology for the bruises already forming up.

“Yeah,” Wei Ying agreed. He nodded up the trail, taking the lead since none of the Wen looked willing to go first. “So I was bleeding badly and hiding around the corner of the Burial Mounds. There were stands of black bamboo just inside of the boundary markers. I’d collapsed next to one of the really old ones that no one knows a thing about. It’s so old that all you can see is a swirling thing around the edges and what looked to me like three stalks of bamboo in the middle.”

He held up the talisman, letting them see just how much it looked like what he’d described.

“And, because I was dying and I knew I was dying,” Wei Ying said in the horrible-cheerful voice that always made people look at him like he’d just stabbed them in the guts, “I drew the design with my blood.”

Wen Qing sucked a sharp breath between her teeth. “And a door opened up to somewhere else.”

“Somewhere safe,” Wei Ying corrected. “I crawled through. It closed. There was water next to the path and a little hut that I stayed in for a couple of days. I had just enough of a core to keep myself from bleeding out, just enough to keep from getting an infection. Once I was strong enough, I started exploring. There’s… so much more, Wen Qing.”

“A place where we can be safe?” Wen Qing asked, all sharp sarcasm and sneers.

“A place with more than enough buildings for a hundred times this many people,” Wei Ying said. “Several hundred times this many. A place with libraries filled with knowledge I’d just barely begun to understand when I got lonely. I left to talk to people again and then Uncle Fengmian found me. But. There’s a surgical theater, Wen Qing, better than any that I’ve ever seen.”

They both turned to the cart carrying Wen Ning and his army of stasis arrays. The broken-off shaft of the spear through his chest was ugly, but the not quite clotted blood, held forever at that in-between state by Wei Ying’s hasty status talisman and a wash of resentful energy had kept Wen Ning’s soul from fleeing.

His face was so pale compared to the threads of resentful energy wrapped around his body and soul to keep them together.

“He’s not dead yet,” Wei Ying murmured. “After Wen Chao threw me into the Burial Mounds, I went back again. Crawled, really. It’s hard to climb a mountain with broken arms, legs, ribs, hip. Spine. I was a mess. But I survived because of this place. Everything I’ve done with resentful energy; I learned there while I was healing up. It’s… There’s so much. So much there just waiting. Gardens gone wild, but still full of plants. Animals so tame that they walk right up to you. Not one but at least three libraries full of books the likes of which I’ve never seen before.”

The Wen watched Wen Qing stare at her brother. Even Popo held her breath. None of them would fight it if Wen Qing said no. She’d been protecting her family, sacrificing everything that she was for so long, so they would listen if she decided that this was too dangerous.

“What’s the price?” Wen Qing asked because of course she did.

“This place wants a lord,” Wei Ying said.

He shook with the knowledge of all he could never have again. Shijie’s soup. Jiang Cheng yelling and then slinging his arm around Wei Ying’s shoulders as they laughed and made up. The shidis and shimeis cheering as he made an impossible shot over the river, taking down a kite flown too far and too high.

Drifting on the river amidst lotus blooms while lying on his back on the bottom of a boat. Running through the streets of Lotus Cove while laughing, Jiang Cheng and Shijie laughing as they ran at his heels.

Lan Zhan.

Lan Zhan…

“It wants a lord,” Wei Ying repeated, letting his crooked smile, the real one, out. “It picked me when I was five. If I bring people here, if I give them a home, I have to be the lord of the peak. And I have to keep both my people and the peak safe, no matter who throws themselves at our defenses.”

Wen Qing nodded slowly.

There was a weight to her gaze as she studied him. She knew what it meant to have to lead. She’d been doing it for far too long, and with way less support than she should have had.

“All right,” Wen Qing said. She nodded sharply, just once. “All right. Lead the way. Let’s get everyone up there, settled in, and then we’ll plan out how to save Wen Ning’s life.”

And that was that.

“Good plan,” Wei Ying said in his horrible-cheerful voice as he clapped his hands. “Let’s go everyone. It’s a long hike up but there’s plenty of places to stop and rest. Benches, places to get water. Even some groves full of fruit. I’ve never seen them without fruit of some kind so we can get something to eat along the way. Oh, Popo! There’s stores, too, full of fabric. I didn’t dare go through them when I was little, but I found all kinds of robes up there. Fancy ones, too. That’s where I got my black robes before I returned to the world.”

“Good,” Popo said as she cheerfully stumped along next to Wei Ying despite her bent spine and the exhaustion and hunger grinding her down. “We could do with some warmer clothes, especially if we’ll be living on top of a mountain.”

She set off a wave of quiet conversations as the Wen speculated about what they’d find at the end of the trail. Wei Ying let them talk. They had no idea. None at all.

Despite having spent three years as a kid and then three very painful months before the war, there was so much that he’d never seen.

Because there wasn’t one peak for them to claim.

There were twelve.

Twelve peaks full of buildings, libraries, gardens, weapons; everything that you might need to start a sect.

Or start over again after the world turned on you.

All of the hidden from the world with wards that would tell Wei Ying instantly if there was a threat in the borderlands between them and the rest of the world. Here, he could keep everyone safe until he figured out what to do next.

Hopefully.

#

Deep in the Demon Realm:

Shen Qingqiu, staring into a mirror that shows his former peak and the motley band that WWX is bringing in, tapping his closed fan against his bottom lip: ….

Shang Qinghua, rushing in with Mobei-Jun on his heels: I just got an alert from…! Oh. You’re already aware. Did the wards fall? Do we need to summon the others back out of Heaven?

SQQ: …

SQH: Oh! Hey, it’s our boy. He’s looking, um, somewhat better? Not bleeding out this time. That’s good.

SQQ: >.>

MBJ: e_e

SQH: What? We had to fling his scrawny butt into a stasis array, shift him through a time distortion and keep him unconscious for months to heal him up. Mu-Shidi was all but chewing iron and spitting nails over the damage done to him. This is way better.

SQQ: …True. Not ideal, but definitely true. He at least brought doctors with him this time.

MBJ: …still not properly practicing demonic cultivation though…

SQH: *pats MBJ’s arm reassuringly* It’s probably better for him not to, my King. He’s only got a tiny little bit of demon blood from his mom. I mean, if he’d gotten more from her, it’d be different.

All three pause to think about just what WWX would be capable of if his Heavenly Demon blood was active like his great-grandfather’s was.

SQQ: I’ll keep watch. We should verify whether there’s a real threat to him in the Jianghu.

SQH: Yeah, absolutely. No worries, we’ve got it.

*scurries back out with MBJ on his heels as always*

2. Lost Trail

“Where the fuck did he go?”

Lan Zhan glared down his nose at Jin Zixun. His fingers ached from his grip on Bichen. It was an active effort not to draw and lop the man’s head off. It wasn’t as though Jin Zixun would even notice Lan Zhan drawing.

He was too focused on the trail that Wei Ying and the Wen had left after they fled from Qiongqi Path.

The camp of nightmares in Qiongqi Path itself lay far behind. Wei Ying must have led the Wen quickly, too quickly for people who had been beaten, starved and tortured. So much abuse and why?

There was no reason for the Wen to have been imprisoned this way. No reason for torturing them. No reason for the humiliation. Lan Zhan didn’t understand why it had happened. More importantly, he didn’t understand how Lan Sect disciples had been part of guarding the camps and had just… not reported what they’d seen. Surely one of them would have sought out someone in power and questioned it?

All along the way, Lan Zhan had seen signs of people who had stumbled, who had fallen only to be helped up by several others. The ragged footprints of woven-straw sandals and bare, bleeding feet had been easy enough to follow along the Path, through forests and then into this bare, rocky valley between mountainous peaks.

As this valley was close to Yiling and the Burial Mounds, it lurked instead of existing. Trees which should have stood tall and shaded the ground instead grew up and then twisted. Their bark was dark, not as black as the trees directly around the Burial Mounds, but close enough to it that Lan Zhan wondered wildly if the Burial Mounds were actually contained at all.

This valley felt far too much like Yiling, a place living under a shadow that it could never escape. A place where sunshine never reached, and rain failed to wash the world clean.

Also a place where Wei Ying’s trail disappeared entirely.

What trail there had been must have been washed away in the rain that had poured down overnight. It was the only explanation that made sense. Wei Ying couldn’t have teleported all the Wen remnants in one fell swoop.

Surely not.

Thus, it must be that the rain had washed Wei Ying’s path away, leaving them all to search and struggle and thankfully fail to find him.

On one side of the rocky, burnt-over valley, there were rain-swollen hoofprints and footprints with the deep ruts of a cart. On the far side where Jin Zixun knelt amidst his troupe of sycophantic Jin disciples, there was nothing.

Not one rut. Not a single footprint. Not even a bit of fur scratched off the ox drawing the cart that held Wen Ning’s corpse.

It was, admittedly, odd.

Lan Zhan didn’t care. None of them should be chasing Wei Ying and the Wen anyway.

He stood off to the side, glaring, because if he stopped gritting his teeth and spoke, he would kill Jin Zixun and start another war when they’d just barely found an end to the last one.

Though it seemed to him that the Jin didn’t believe the war was over yet.

After all, Jin Guangshan was not the undisputed ruler of the entire Jianghu as he so clearly believed he deserved.

“Seriously, where the fuck did they go?” Jin Zixun spluttered with more confusion than misplaced rage. “There’s no sign of them. It’s like they just climbed on swords and flew off, ox cart and all.”

“Impossible,” Lan Zhan snipped, curling his lip when Jin Zixun sneered at him.

“Obviously,” Jin Zixun drawled. “None of them even had a sword.”

Or golden cores. A thing that Jin Zixun and the other Jin were quite ardently determined to keep anyone from noticing. Thus, the Jin insisting on leading the chase for Wei Ying.

They had not, logically, been pleased when Lan Zhan insisted on joining them. Nor had they been pleased when Lan Zhan remanded every single Lan disciple who had been at Qiongqi Path back to his brother with orders for them to report on what exactly they had been thinking in participating in such depravity.

The Lan who stood with Lan Zhan were different, summoned from home and chosen solely from the Lan disciples that Lan Zhan had personally trained and patrolled with. Every single man and woman were someone that Lan Zhan trusted at his back in a fight to the death. Every single one of them stared at the Jin with appropriately disapproving flat expressions.

They were also, not coincidentally, all cousins from branch lines distant enough not to compete directly against Lan Zhan and Lan Xichen.

It worked quite nicely to make Jin Zixun twitch every time he glanced their way.

“What have you assholes done?” Jiang Wanyin snapped as he swooped in like a purple cloud of fury.

“Nothing!” Jin Zixun snarled up at him. “They fucking disappeared.”

Jiang Wanyin, being the vicious and unforgiving person that he was, turned to Lan Zhan to confirm that, his scowl making it clear that he didn’t believe a word that fell from Jin Zixun’s lips.

“The trail stopped halfway through the valley,” Lan Zhan reported as formally as if he’d been talking to Shufu. “The footsteps and wagon tracks stop entirely. It appears that we lost the trail in the middle of a rocky patch.”

“I just said that,” Jin Zixun huffed. “He’s used his evil tricks to escape. I told you that he was a problem. They’re all problems!”

Lan Zhan joined Jiang Wanyin in staring scornfully at Jin Zixun before both of them turned back to each other without acknowledging his words.

It was something that they’d perfected during the last hunt for Wei Ying. It was… pleasant… to see that they hadn’t lost the trick of synchronized scorn. Jin Zixun was satisfyingly infuriated by it and only became more so as they ignored his outrage entirely.

Overhead, forty Nie disciples which was twice the number that the Jin had brought and four times what Lan Zhan had escorting him, all hardened warriors, flew in with Nie Mingjue who descended towards the ground like a god come to smite them all. During the war, lines had broken when Nie Mingjue descended with that sort of formation.

Jin Zixun barely even seemed to notice it.

Idiot.

Nie Mingjue hovered on Baxia just above Lan Zhan’s head, staring around the valley as if he was tracking movements that they had missed.

Which might be true. There were few people in the world as talented at tracking as Nie Mingjue.

And yet he landed with a puzzled frown instead of his disappointed-in-your-lack-of-training scowl.

“There’s no trail,” Nie Mingjue said.

“See?” Jin Zixun exclaimed, throwing both hands out at Nie Mingjue as if that excused him from all culpability.

“Agreed,” Lan Zhan said. “There are also far fewer people than the Jin claimed.”

“Same number as you claimed,” Nie Mingjue agreed.

His mustache twitched in a minute smile that few would have recognized without extensive time spent listening to Lan Xichen going into raptures about Nie Mingjue’s every expression. Lan Zhan ignored Jin Zixun’s spluttering curses. He also ignored the fury, the spitting rage, the shouts at all of them that they were out to get him, Jin Zixun, in particular, but also the Jin who were so vital to the war effort.

Who had sacrificed themselves to make the world safe from the threat of the Wen.

Lan Zhan snorted as he studied the place where Wei Ying’s trail ended.

“It’s distinct,” Nie Mingjue said as he crouched down to run his fingers over the ending of one of the wagon tracks. “See here? There’s a hoof print, oxen. I can see the heel, but the leading edges of the toes aren’t there. Ground’s soft enough that we’ve got distinct prints all the way up to here, despite the rain. This ox has poorly trimmed toes. Left is shorter than the right, maybe so short that it cut into the quick. It’s favoring that foot. Right here,” he tapped the ground where the tracks ended, “should be the step where the other forefoot dug in more deeply to compensate for the ox’s limp.”

“…Instead, there is nothing.” Lan Zhan hummed, confused.

“Instead, we have half a print, literally half,” Nie Mingjue corrected. “It’s like the ox stepped half on a ceramic tile, half off, but there’s no sign of anything being laid down here.”

Lan Zhan frowned.

And then sucked a breath between his teeth as Jiang Wanyin started cursing under his breath.

They’d seen it before. During their search for Wei Ying, they’d found signs of him scattered at fairly wide distances around the Burial Mounds. It was part of why they’d taken so long on the search. Half a footprint here, a quarter of a handprint there; Wei Ying had left traces of himself as if he was at right angles to the world and only occasionally stepping back into it.

“This is, what?” Lan Zhan looked at Jiang Wanyin. “Less than two shichen walk from the Burial Mounds?”

“Yeah, about that,” Jiang Wanyin said. His jaw worked as he glared across the barren valley towards the looming, blighted hills that surrounded Yiling. “Bit less than that, actually. There are some small passes that lead into town from this direction. Nothing you could take an army through, but a handful of people? It’d be perfect.”

“Yeah,” Jin Zixun said so sarcastically that Lan Zhan, Nie Mingjue, Jiang Wanyin and all of the Lan glowered at him in unison. “Except that he didn’t go that way. The trail ends right here.”

“No,” Lan Zhan said. “The three months that Wei Ying was missing. This happened then, too. It’s… he never spoke of it.”

“Ever,” Jiang Wanyin agreed grim and angry and covertly desperate as his clenched fist shook and Zidian sparked on his finger. “But yeah. Dad used to say that he had someone posted in Yiling and all the towns around Yunmeng looking for Wei Wuxian. And yet he never found him until three years after Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze died. Never could figure out how they hadn’t found him.”

Nie Mingjue stood like a mountain rising from the ocean. Even Jin Zixun stilled, his muttered complaints about no one respecting or listening to him dying in the face of Nie Mingjue’s thunderous stare.

“We’re going back to Koi Tower,” Nie Mingjue declared. “We’re going to find out exactly what happened in that camp. We’re going to see just why one of the heroes of the Sunshot Campaign found it necessary to run away and hide with his mortal enemies.”

“They weren’t,” Lan Zhan said before Jin Zixun could do more than go pale as a ghost and open his mouth to protest. “The Wen that Wei Ying rescued were peasants. Farmers, doctors, old people and children. I was there. None of them were Wei Ying’s enemies. None of them were any of our enemies, no matter what the Jin might claim.”

When Jin Zixun howled with outrage, Nie Mingjue slashed a hand at him. And Lan Zhan silenced him, too.

“Back to Koi Tower,” Nie Mingjue ordered. “Now!”

He glared, fingers clenched around Baxia’s hilt, until the Jin mounted up on their swords. Jiang Wanyin took flight with them. As he’d not brought a single Jiang disciple with him, as if he was merely an ordinary disciple instead of a sect leader, he flew unconcerned next to the Jin.

When they got back to Koi Tower, Lan Zhan would have a private word with his brother. He would strongly recommend that Lan Xichen go to Jiang Yanli so that the two of them together could kindly and implacably remind him that he was a Sect Leader now.

One who could be very easily murdered if he proved to be an obstacle to certain people’s ambitions. One who should never, ever travel by himself.

If it came from them, perhaps Jiang Wanyin would listen.

Probably not, but it did need to be attempted. Because Jin Guangshan clearly was determined to destroy anything and anyone who might get in the way of his rise to power. The Wen remnants were the first. The Jiang had already been undercut and subtly side-lined. The Lan owed the Jin ridiculous amounts of money that Lan Zhan deeply resented. And Jin Guangshan had already made comments about Nie Mingjue’s “inevitable” qi deviation as if it would happen any day now.

Wei Ying… may have found a safe place for the Wen and himself. Lan Zhan desperately hoped so. The rest of them still needed to make the Jianghu safe, if that was even possible at all.

#

SQH lurking around Koi Tower in common cultivator robes with MBJ under a heavy glamor that kept anyone from noticing that he was a demon, not a human:

SQH: Well, now we know why our boy took a runner. They’re getting ready to blame him for everything.

MBJ: Already.

SQH: *grimaces* Yeah, already. Seriously, what is it about his bloodline? They’re all brilliant as fuck and they’ve got the worst luck possible.

MBJ: …

SQH: What? Why are you looking at me that way?

MBJ: *sighs*

SQH: Oh, fine. Blame it all on me. Not my fault that my parents cut me off and I had to support myself by writing porn daily. Conflict makes stories better! Conflict and smut.

MBJ: *even more long-suffering sigh* I know. Do we strike?

SQH: *studies the Jin disciples peacocking their way by* Yeah, no. Not yet. Let’s head back and see what my son and Cucumber have found out. I think there’s something more going on here.

They duck into a dark alley and disappear, leaving behind a patch of ice crystals that melt before anyone but a stray cat could notice.

3. Bamboo Grove

At the top of the mountain, the trail led them out of a thick bamboo grove and into… paradise.

That was, of course, after six separate stops for people to rest, four to drink from the sparkling, beautiful brooks that bounded down the mountainside, and one stop purely for Wei Ying to do his best not to hyperventilate about being responsible for all of them when he was so bad at taking care of anything and anyone.

Including himself. How could he be a sect leader? All he ever did was mess things up!

Wei Ying got himself under control before Wen Qing could do more than finger her needles while giving him that narrow-eyed glare that promised a health check if he so much as twitched wrong. Actually, he was probably going to get the world’s most thorough health check whether he twitched or not.

Which wasn’t fair, but wasn’t something to worry about at the moment, not when Wen Qing’s eyes were like saucers and the other Wen clustered around Wen Ning’s ox cart as if they were afraid to touch the buildings for fear of them dissolving into mist.

Home.

His true home. The home he’d found as a small child, the home that he’d kept tucked away safely in his heart where no one could see it or steal it. His whole life, Wei Ying had known that he couldn’t tell anyone about this place or…

Or else. Something deep inside of him had always screamed that he didn’t dare let anyone know. No one. Not his friends, not his sect, not Jiang Cheng or Shijie and definitely not Madame Yu.

It was so hard to let go of all the… imposed helplessness and worthlessness that he’d picked up from Madame Yu. She’d hated him so very much that he’d never dared to be properly the Jiang First Disciple when she was around. It was plain safer to act like a laughing goof-off with not a single thought in his head.

And if it that meant that he had to stay up half the night to get his First Disciple duties done, well, half the other people he’d worked with had done the same thing. Madame Yu had never stayed up late without a night hunt in her life. The peace and quiet while she and her maids slept were very helpful for getting all the things that kept the sect running done.

“All right,” Wei Wuxian said once he had his rampaging emotions back under control. “I spent a good bit of time on this mountain when I was little. It’s really pretty and they have a huge library that I could barely get into. Just a few sections even though it looked like it was practically infinite inside. Like a library built inside of a qiankun pouch.”

Wen Qing’s mouth opened and then slowly shut again as she nodded for him to continue.

“The mountain I landed on last time was that peak over there,” Wei Ying pointed at the next closest peak. “That’s the one with the surgical theater. It’s got a library, too, but it all looked like medical texts, and I just didn’t, still don’t, know enough about medical cultivation to make sense of them. That’s where we should go to save Wen Ning. It is, actually, where I got the stasis talisman that’s keeping him from dying.”

All the Wen other than Uncle Fourth and Cousin Nine perked up at the idea of a medical library, so that was good. For Uncle Fourth and Cousin Nine who’d already made a thousand or so comments on the way up about amazing plants that they’d seen on the climb, he pointed to a third mountain, a bit farther off.

“That mountain there has what I think is a sect or maybe a just a college devoted to agriculture and rearing animals,” Wei Ying said. “I only poked around it briefly when I was really little, but the animals that live there are just… so tame. So ridiculously tame. And there’s some amazing potatoes. You have no idea, Wen Qing. There’re so many varieties! I miss those potatoes.”

“Wait, how many of these peaks have sect buildings on them?” Wen Qing asked while shaking like she was about to fall down.

He cupped her elbow and gently encouraged her to sit on one of the nearby benches. Which encouraged the other Wen to start poking around because the bench stayed a nice solid bench when Wen Qing thumped down onto it like a puppet with the strings cut.

“Twelve,” Wei Ying said. He flinched as every single Wen, even Uncle Forth, whipped around to stare at him. “What? What’d I say?”

“Twelve peaks,” Wen Qing whispered. She’d gone white as a ghost and when she swallowed it sounded like her throat was lined with gravel. “Twelve peaks hidden away from the world with everything intact, just waiting for the right person to unlock the path.”

Wen Ying stared at her, then at Popo who was crying and praying in breathy little whispers as she rocked A-Yuan in her arms even though A-Yuan was out cold and drooling on her shoulder. He turned back to Wen Qing who snorted at him.

She shook her head. “You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” Wei Ying asked.

“Generations ago, after Xue Chonghai was destroyed, the greatest sect that ever existed died,” Wen Qing said in the same tones you’d use for telling a bedtime story to a child. “They had twelve peaks, for they were twelve separate sects that banded together as friends and allies. Each peak had a specialty that they excelled at over everyone else in the world. They chose their members based on merit, not by blood or by clan or by looks or by faith. Every four years, they would hold trials and the poorest peasant or reformed criminal, even a slave escaped from their masters, could come and compete in the trials.”

Wei Ying’s stomach churned because he had heard this story. Not often. Madame Yu didn’t like it. She thought it was disrespectful of the rules of the Jianghu and especially inappropriate in that it might give a certain upstart boy she hated ideas above his deservedly low station.

But Shijie had told the story to Wei Ying and Jiang Cheng once when Madame Yu was off on a night hunt and Uncle Fengmian was busy negotiating with the potter across the river for a large purchase of replacement teacups.

“Cang Qiong Mountain Sect…” Wei Ying whispered. “You think…?”

“I’m pretty sure,” Wen Qing said. She smiled wryly at him, as sharp as a knife and as awkward as a newly hatched bird. “It’s safe, though.”

“Well, yeah,” Wei Ying said. He waved a hand back down the mountain. “No one else has the array to get in. Just me. I mean, and now you.”

“I don’t think I could reproduce it, not without study,” Wen Qing replied. She clapped her hands on her thighs before standing. “All of which can wait. We need to save Wen Ning’s life first. And gather food. Getting to that peak will take a while.”

“Oh, no, that’s easy,” Wei Wing said. “There’s this really beautiful bridge made of rainbows that forms if you stand at a certain spot. I’ll show you. All you have to do is stand in the spot and think about which peak you want to go to and the bridge forms. It moves you like you’re flying on your sword, too. Very fast, very smooth. It’s amazing.”

None of them believed him. Or maybe they didn’t understand it.

Not that it mattered when all he had to do was lead them to the pair of stone pillars that defined the bamboo peak’s landing place. Wei Ying thought about the medical peak as he stood between the pillars.

The rainbow bridge shimmered into existence.

Wen Qing cursed like a fishwife while Uncle Fourth tested the bridge by tapping it with his toe, then stomping on it, and then by jumping up and down as energetically as he could. He nodded and pronounced it “quite sturdy and actually not that see-through”.

Then they went to save Wen Ning.

The hospital peak was almost entirely a hospital. All the buildings were medical buildings of one sort or another. There were dorms but they were specifically dormitories with narrow little beds that looked like no one could sleep for more than four hours in them. The dorm rooms were tiny, too, more cells than actual living spaces.

Last time, just before he’d left, he’d found some buildings lower down on the mountain that were probably actual living spaces, but they weren’t preserved in the same way. Or maybe they’d been destroyed in a huge fight and then only partially rebuilt before the sect was abandoned.

There were a couple of peaks like that, not that Wei Ying told the Wen that.

“This is exactly what we need,” Wen Qing breathed as she stared at the overgrown garden full of flowering plants, spiky herbs and fruit trees of sorts that Wei Ying had never seen anywhere else.

“This is Soul’s Ease,” Popo hissed as she stared at a particularly thick patch of chest-high weeds with delicate little blue flowers. “I thought this was extinct.”

“What do we need to heal Wen Ning?” Wei Ying asked before the Wen doctors, especially Wen Qing, could go into a research frenzy on all the plants.

“Right,” Wen Qing said through her heavy breathing and shaking hands. “Right. A-Ning. We’ll, we’ll help Wen Ning and then, and then we can, can…”

“Yeah,” Wei Ying agreed. “What should I harvest? Any special techniques to harvest it?”

Over the course of the next two shichen, they harvested medicinal plants, explored and ruthlessly cleaned the best operating theater, and ate the mountain of food that Uncle Fourth and Cousin Nine had prepared for them all.

Popo made them all tea from Soul’s Ease and glared until Wei Ying drank his entire cup of it.

He sagged in his seat as warmth spread through his body. His racing mind slowed to a gentle meander instead of the normal galloping race of thoughts careening about in his head. Even his heart, which had been beating violently inside his chest ever since the core removal, slowed to something more like normal.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Wei Ying said as he huffed and shook his head. “That’s… very nice. I suppose I shouldn’t have a second cup?”

Popo patted his hand and smiled as she poured him half a cup. “You can have a bit more. Most everyone else other than A-Qing should avoid more.”

The second cup was like magic, settling Wei Ying into his own skin with such firmness that he was aware of his filthy skin, his dirty clothes, his lank hair and aching body for the first time in ages and ages. It wasn’t as though he’d forgotten that he was a mess. It was more like his body had been somewhere far away, unimportant and only a thing to notice when the pain got too severe.

Wei Ying was very, very good at ignoring pain.

“Do you want to do the surgery tonight?” Wei Ying asked Wen Qing who looked like she was pleasantly drunk after her two cups of Soul’s Ease.

“No, we all need to bathe and sleep,” Wen Qing said. She ran her finger around the rim of her cup and then licked it as if seeking every last drop of the tea. “Here?”

“No, the best baths are on the first peak,” Wei Ying said. He pushed himself to his feet and was distantly, pleasantly, surprised that his legs didn’t wobble at all. “Best beds, too. I like that one the most, honestly. It’s very quiet and peaceful. Let’s head back there for tonight.”

One of the cousins volunteered to stay with Wen Ning, not that Wen Ning was going to do anything. It was more a matter of that she’d found a stack of medical cultivation books and clearly wasn’t going to sleep, anyway.

“I’m no surgeon,” Wen Lingli said with a wry smile as she held up her severed left hand and wiggled the three remaining fingers on her right hand. “I can do research, and I will be fine. I grabbed a nap while you were all harvesting so much.”

Wen Lingli shooed them all out and across the rainbow bridge, back to the bamboo peak that Wen Qing labeled Qing Jing from the old stories.

“The one we just came from is Qian Cao Peak,” Wen Qing said with so much certainty that Wei Ying decided that there was no point in arguing.

“Which is which, then?” Wei Ying asked.

“Which is the peak that has the most weapons, not with forges but for people to train with?” Wen Qing asked.

She smiled and nodded when Wei Ying confidently pointed to the battered peak covered in practice yards, obstacle courses and huge logs and boulders that looked like people hauled them around randomly.

“Bai Zhan,” Wen Qing said.

The warehouse one was An Ding. The one with tall walls and graceful gardens that made Wei Ying’s hair stand on end even as a little boy was deemed Xian Shu, the women-only peak. Qiong Ding was the tallest peak with the grandest buildings and more conference rooms than anywhere else. The one with the forges and racks upon racks of swords that he’d never dared to touch was Wan Jian.

Then there was one with stunningly good feng shui that Wen Qing labeled as Zhi Ji, the one with all the friendly critters which became Ling You, the one with barrels upon barrels of wine sealed away in stasis that Uncle Fourth almost ran straight at which she decided was Zui Xian. The last two were Ku Xing which had zillions of talismans on almost every available surface, and Chuang Zhao which had so many amazing gadgets that Wei Ying had almost, almost, stayed on when he was little.

“That’s lovely, A-Qing,” Popo said as she planted both hands in the small of Wen Qing’s back. “The baths are this way. They’re better than the Nightless City. You will go bathe. You will change into the clothes I laid out. You will go. To. Sleep!”

Wen Qing started out outraged, spluttering as Popo implacably pushed her towards the baths. By the time Popo finished, though, she was pale and only nodded docilely that yes, of course, that was exactly what would happen.

“I’m going!” Wei Ying exclaimed the instant that Popo turned her gimlet glare on him.

He was not going up against someone who could make Wen Qing act like that. Besides, a bath would be really nice. And sleep. He never had slept as well anywhere else.

“That one’s mine,” Wei Ying called to Popo as he pointed at the little bamboo cottage set off to the side from everything else. “I always sleep in that one.”

“All right, A-Ying,” Popo said, shooing him off. “I’ll make sure it’s all ready for you. Go on now!”

Wei Ying went. Tomorrow was soon enough to figure out the next steps after they, hopefully, saved Wen Ning’s life.

#

In the Demon Realm:

Luo Binghe stares at the mirror, arms crossed over his chest and face impassive as he watches Wei Ying laugh and bathe and coax the little boy, Wen Yuan apparently, into letting his hair be washed and combed out properly.

SQQ: You’re still here?

LBH: He’s so much like her. The same personality, the same ridiculous self-sacrifice.

SQQ sighs and wraps his arms around LBH’s waist, putting his chin on LBH’s shoulder: Just like me, you mean. Your gifts breed true, but apparently certain personality traits breed true, too. Lingling looked like you and acted like me. Her daughter, Yixiao—

LBH: He only knows her title, Shizun. He’s never heard his mother’s actual name before.

SQQ: …I know. But that just makes my point stronger, Binghe. He would never have survived all the things that have happened to him without your blood and my personality. It’s a problem. But I’m more curious about Wen Qing and Wen Ning.

LBH: *frowns over his shoulder at SQQ* Really?

SQQ: They operated on A-Ying. They were exposed to his blood, Binghe. Wen Ning should not have survived long enough for the stasis array to be placed. The resentful energy supporting him should have degraded his body. It hasn’t. Wen Qing is…

LBH: *stiffens and switches the mirror to the women’s bath even though both of them blush over it* I can see it. She had blood worms, too. The child may as well. He’s claimed them. Huh. Huh!

SQQ: *huffs and pokes LBH* Don’t make assumptions. Yixiao laid claim but not like you or your father did. The Heavenly Demon blood might breed true, but the more distant a person is the less it impacts their personality.

LBH: *shrugs even as he smiled brightly at Wei Ying’s little family* We’ll keep watching? If we have to, we can bring them to the demon realm. Somehow.

SQQ: No, we should let them live there. The human realm is healthier for them. You know that. But maybe, eventually, we can visit. I’d… like to hug my great-grandchild. And his child, too.

LBH: Then that’s what we’ll do. When it’s safe enough.

Neither of them comment on the fact that they couldn’t even save their own granddaughter and her husband from destruction.

They don’t have to.

4. Dark Lies

Koi Tower’s audience chamber made Mingjue’s teeth itch. He gritted his teeth so that he wouldn’t snap at the various Jin servants offering drinks, tiny little plates with finger food so small that it would dissolve on the tongue without a trace and, occasionally, themselves.

It wasn’t their fault.

All of this lay squarely at Jin Guangshan’s feet.

Which was probably why he lounged on his gilded throne in his gilded audience chamber with the gilded wall hangings showing peonies over the gilded floor tiles under the gilded boots of far too many Jin wearing cloth of gold.

It wasn’t just Jin Guangshan, sadly. There were elders, younger generation like Jin Zixun. A great-uncle, Jin Ruotian, watched Jin Guangshan as if he was gauging exactly how much he could get away with before Jin Guangshan decided to one-up him by being even more horrible. Made the party absolutely horrible, being surrounded by so many Jin determined to be so awful.

Plus Lan and Jiang and Nie, of course. And many of the smaller sects, though the majority of them seemed more interested in eating and drinking as much of Jin Guangshan’s money as they possibly could. Sect Leader Yao had obviously been at the wine for a while now given the way he lectured at Madame Jin in the most pompous voice possible.

If she stabbed him, Mingjue would laugh. And nod approvingly. Most annoying man in the entire Jianghu, including the late and not lamented Wen Ruohan.

Though there was one other person doing a fine job of trying for the position of Most Annoying Cultivator To Ever Live.

Mingjue scowled as he watched Jin Zixun strut around the gaudy gold-covered audience hall in Koi Tower while bragging about how he’d tracked the Wen and “wicked” Wei Wuxian halfway across the Jianghu. Unsurprising, there. If Jin Zixun could take credit for something, he would. The boy had no sense of honor and such a large sense of entitlement that Mingjue wouldn’t be surprised if he felt that he was owed a position as emperor of the world.

What was surprising was how many people listened to him. During the Sunshot Campaign, all of Jin Zixun’s bragging did nothing other than get him rolled eyes and sardonic comments. Now people, other than the Jin who were required by sect alliance to pretend to believe him, seemed to take him seriously.

Even as he spouted baseless nonsense about how dangerous Wei Wuxian was.

“Da-ge, you’re scowling,” Huaisang said, expression mostly hidden behind his latest frippery of a fan.

One of the actual fripperies of a fan instead of the ones that Mingjue had made him with hidden knives and steel spines. Interesting choice given the way the Jin were busy riling everyone up to a new war.

“I am tired of war,” Mingjue grumbled. “The Jin apparently aren’t, but I am. They’re strutting around acting like they’re ready to go into battle but there’s no one to even fight.”

Huaisang snorted behind his fan which was abruptly one of the dangerous ones, though the paper looked identical down to the delicate shading on the sparrow flying amid bamboo stands. He didn’t even need to say it for Mingjue to snort a laugh and then hide his sudden grin behind a hand raised as if he was smoothing his mustache.

If there were an actual physical enemy to fight, the Jin would have disappeared like mist on a sunny summer morning.

“I know,” Huaisang mused quietly, eyes bright and brainless above the fluttering edge of his fan despite the grim twist of his lips hiding behind it. “It’s rather interesting, isn’t it? What would you call a war when there’s no one to fight?”

It was one of the questions that Second Mother used to ask, back before she died attempting to birth their little sister who’d not lived long enough to draw a single breath. Second Mother had always been the politically minded one. First Mother had been a warrior like Father, like Nie Mingjue. Second Mother was the one who thought about plots, who gossiped in a bright cheerful tone, who fooled people with her fripperies and her silks so that they wouldn’t notice her mind.

None of the Nie had missed that Huaisang had chosen to style himself exactly like Mingjue’s mother. And Mingjue had taken after First Mother in both personality and build.

He’d never seen the point of correcting people’s mistakes about who bore whom. It didn’t matter, not now that all three of their parents were dead. Mingjue snorted instead of answering, mostly because Xichen smiled at them across the room.

And then Xichen gracefully extracted himself from whatever lecture Sect Leader Yao had intended to deliver to him so that he could make his way to their side with all that Lan inevitable grace and dignity. The Jin parted like water. None of them seemed to be aware of doing it. They just got out of his way as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Sect Leader Nie,” Xichen said rather more formally than Mingjue expected. “A-Sang. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

Mingjue shrugged and jerked his chin towards Jin Guangshan lounging on his over-decorated throne. “Couldn’t miss it. It’s one of those sect leader duties.”

Since he’d let all his disgruntlement come out in the words, Huaisang and Xichen both abruptly had to fight not to let their grins show. Huaisang hid behind his fan. Xichen hummed and nodded his agreement even though his eyes squinched up dramatically in a not-grin.

“I had expected that the Nie would be retrieving the other Wen from the camps,” Xichen said once he had control over his laughter. It didn’t take very long at all.

The moment after he noticed how quickly Lan Xichen’s amusement faded, the words he’d said registered.

“Camps?” Mingjue asked a bit louder than he’d intended. “Plural?”

“So I’m given to understand,” Xichen said.

His nod was a thing of graciousness, all calm and dignified despite the tension in his shoulders and the little lines that appeared on either side of his mouth. There was just a hint of rage in the way Xichen raised his chin, in the thinness of his lips as he stared calmly across the people filling the audience hall.

No one seemed to notice it.

Seemed.

Most everyone other than Mingjue and Huaisang edged away from the three of them. Not obviously or with looks over their shoulders. They just… found reasons to be further away. In a matter of moments, the three of them stood in a pocket of empty space, a bubble of privacy in the center of the stupidity that was the Jin Sect’s party.

“How many?” Mingjue asked quietly.

“I’ve no idea,” Xichen replied, still with that thin hint of anger. Also with a bit of frustration in the way he rocked up onto his toes and then back down onto his heels. Fear flirted with a tremble of his fingertips, quickly stilled. “I haven’t gotten a straight answer from anyone.”

Mingjue nodded slowly, staring across the room towards Jin Zixun who was being rude and obnoxious at Jiang Wanyin. Not a good idea there. Jiang Wanyin looked even closer to strangling the idiot than normal.

“Right,” Mingjue said. “Leave that to us. Huaisang, get the gossip. You have a quarter shichen or until Jiang Wanyin decides to kill someone.”

Huaisang snort-laughed, snapping his fan shut to show off his suddenly vicious smile. This time everyone around them did double-takes before backing off sharply.

“Well, I can hardly turn down a dare like that, now can I?” Huaisang declared just loud enough for it to carry though a random quiet moment. “Don’t try to stop me, Da-Ge. I’m off.”

He turned on his heel and marched off, leaving Mingjue to theatrically groan and rub his forehead. Next to him, Xichen laughed into his sleeve though there wasn’t much amusement in his eyes. Probably more of an effort to hide his disgust at the entire situation, but eh, it worked well enough.

A quarter shichen later, after Xichen and Mingjue had chatted, separated, and gone in different directions, Mingjue allowed himself to hear one of Jin Zixun’s too-loud comments about the remnants of the Wen. Conveniently, it was one prompted by Huaisang fluttering about how there were so few left and he was so grateful to Wei Wuxian for eliminating the threat of the Wen by making them disappear into thin air.

“What do you mean there are more Wen?” Mingjue shouted.

A proper shout, not one of his hear-it-across-a-battlefield bellows. Jin Zixun still started and stumbled backwards like he was shocked that anyone could be that loud. As if Mingjue hadn’t bellowed at him, personally, on multiple occasions during the Sunshot Campaign.

“We were given the job of containing them,” Jin Zixun huffed into the sudden and complete silence. “None of you are even aware of what a big job that was, are you?”

Across the room, Meng Yao, no, Jin Guangyao was his name now. Jin Guangyao stiffened and stared at them as if he was tempted to come running over to slap both his hands over Jin Zixun’s mouth. Given the way Jin Guangshan snapped to attention on his gaudy throne, Jin Zixun was as big of an idiot as Mingjue had always thought.

Better, though, Jin Zixun was a complete and utter idiot because he kept talking despite the way every single Jin of any level of authority turned to make shut up gestures at him.

“Excuse me?” Mingjue said with his very best attempt at being forcefully polite. It came out more like “I’m about to cut your head off” but that was fine. “Did you just say that I, Sect Leader Nie, don’t understand how much a threat the Wen were? Did you actually just say that to my face?”

Huaisang, of course, started tugging at Mingjue’s sleeve as if he was trying to pull Mingjue away. Wasn’t actually believable because he only used three fingers, and he kept his fan firmly in front of his face so that no one could see the shit-eating grin. Xichen appeared out of the crowd to grip Mingjue’s other arm. Lightly. Delicately. With a grip so firm that a sickly new-born baby could’ve thrown it off with ease.

“Well, you don’t!” Jin Zixun shouted. “None of you know what they’re like. Always running away and striking from the shadows. They try and claim that they’re not actually Wen, but we know the truth.”

“Not actually Wen,” Mingjue said into the rising murmurs. “Who’s saying that they’re not actually Wen?”

“Zixun!” Jin Guangyao said, perpetual smile fracturing around the edges as he hurried over. “Father wants to talk to you. Now.”

“In a minute,” Jin Zixun said while glaring at Mingjue. “This is more important.”

Exactly like a man who had a death wish given the fury on Jin Guangshan’s face and the brittleness that swept over Jin Guangyao.

“Who?” Mingjue asked.

He curled a lip up to sneer at Jin Zixun. If there was one thing he’d learned about Jin Zixun during the war, it was that the boy could not stand to have anyone look down on him. He wouldn’t work hard to improve his cultivation. He wouldn’t study policy or strategy or even attempt common sense. But he still expected everyone to bow down to him simply because of his family name and his sect. It was like that cinnabar dot on his forehead had stolen what little intelligence he’d been born with.

“All of them!” Jin Zixun shouted. “All the rabble skulking about in Qishan. The liars and cheats trying to steal our territory, ours! We earned it. We fought in the war, and we deserve that land, that money, those slaves!”

“Zixun!” Jin Guangshan bellowed, cutting off Jin Zixun’s all-too-revealing posturing.

“…Slaves,” Mingjue said.

He turned to Jin Guangshan who showed no signs of drunkenness anymore. If anything, Jin Guangshan looked completely and utterly sober. Maybe Father had been right when he said that Jin Guangshan’s golden core was specifically optimized to ensure that he could resist every poison, every assassination attempt, every single thing that might ever kill him.

Alcohol was, after all, a poison in large enough quantities.

Jin Guangshan said nothing. He just raised his chin.

“Where did these slaves come from, Sect Leader Jin?” Mingjue asked. Xichen and Huaisang’s hands both fell away from his sleeves. “What gives you the right to take anyone other than the two hundred and thirty-one surviving Wen? I know the names of every Wen survivor. I have sketches of every single one. I know their ages, their professions, the state of their cultivation and only two of them were cultivators. Where is your nephew getting these slaves the Jin apparently earned with their two-hundred and fifty-three warriors during the Sunshot Campaign?”

Jin Guangshan sat down on his throne. His mouth stayed shut. Around Mingjue, the other sect leaders gathered. Even the minor sect leaders like Yao and Ouyang placed themselves behind Mingjue.

Logically. No one in their right mind got between Mingjue and someone he’d chosen to target. No one was stupid enough.

“Uncle?” Jin Zixun said in the echoing silence of the now-dead party.

“Shut up, Zixun,” Jin Guangshan said. He jerked his chin at Jin Guangyao. “Get him out of here. I’ll deal with my nephew later.”

Jin Zixun went so white that Mingjue was tempted to grab him and haul him off to Qinghe to their dungeons. The terror in Jin Zixun’s eyes was so stark. He didn’t, though. Jin Guangyao gripped Jin Zixun’s shoulder and shoved him out of the audience chamber, leaving Mingjue to glower at Jin Guangshan.

Time to find out just what sort of bullshit the Jin thought they could get away with.

#

In the Northern Demon Palace:

Shang Qinghua, dashing around his office as he gathers notes, supplies, weapons and random junk that he shoves into his qiankun sleeves: Right, so, we go back. We find the other camps. We make sure that everyone is save.

Mobei-Jun: *sighs and just stands there*

SQH: My King! We have to help them!

MBJ: *Stares in silence with mingled cold-faced appreciation and blank-faced frustration*

SQH: But they’re gonna get killed…

MBJ: *staring softens just a little bit*

SQH: Ugh! Fine. I won’t go save them all. But there’s gotta be something we can do. Can we take out the guards? At least make them super-sick or something?

MBJ: *thoughtful silence followed by an up-quirked eyebrow*

SQH: Well, of course I have ideas of how to do it. Who do you think I am? I’ve got ideas about everything. Some of them even useful.

MBJ: *tiny twitch of his lips followed by the faintest of nods*

SQH: Thank you, my King! Man, this is gonna be great. We’ll leave a skeleton crew of the guards left. They’ll be too nervous to actually hurt anyone. Then we’re gonna go make Cucumber and Binghe actually help.

SQH: *rushes out of the office, chattering about the thousand and one truly painful and humiliating things he intends to do to the Jin camp guards.*

MBH: *smiles, actually smiles, and follows his husband into creating chaos yet again*

 

5. Healing Hands

Wei Ying woke to someone petting his hair.

His back felt like someone had stabbed him in the spine about eighty times. His neck was a flaming knot of agony. His arms had gone numb where his head had rested on them, and his right foot was so numb that it felt like his leg ended at the knee since he’d tucked his right foot under his left sometime during his sleep.

He’d dreamed of someone murmuring that he was loved. That he needed to stay safe. That it was dangerous.

And… someone in green? Well, someone in green and someone in black with red trim just like Wei Ying. Obviously pulled right out of what’d happened.

But it was so nice having that hand on his hair and the knowledge that someone cared.

“Young Master,” Wen Ning murmured, quiet and thready and oh so alive. “You’re going to get a stiff neck. You should go to bed.”

“Wen Ning!” Wei Ying sat bolt upright and then fell right off the stool he’d been perched on for who knew how many shichen.

It was dark in the little treatment room that Wen Qing had chosen. What light there was came from the gently glowing night pearls that had waited for a patient in a delicately woven rush basket for… decades? Centuries? The preservation spells on the peaks were so good that there was no way to tell how long everything had sat waiting.

This particular treatment room had a nice comfy patient bed, a lovely little desk for the doctor to record notes at, and the world’s most uncomfortable stool.

Probably to encourage doctors not to do exactly what Wei Ying had done.

“Ow,” Wei Ying groaned as he hauled himself up onto his knees so that he could peer over the edge of the bed. “Oops. Hi, Wen Ning. How do you feel?”

Wen Ning wasn’t quite giggling. Not quite. His lips trembled as if he would be if he had the strength for it, but he looked wan and pale and highly amused.

“I’m fine, Young Master,” Wen Ning said. “Really. You should go to bed.”

“Nope,” Wei Ying declared as he set the stool upright and then plopped himself on it. “My whole leg is asleep. And my arms. And my butt. I’m going nowhere until I can stand up without breaking my own neck. Your sister would kill me a dozen times if I gave her another patient to deal with.”

Wen Ning absolutely laughed over that, little breathless giggles of delight that Wei Ying grinned at. “Young Master…”

“At least call me Wei Wuxian,” Wei Ying said, waggling a mostly numb finger at Wen Ning. “I mean, I’d rather you called me Wei Ying or A-Ying or even Hey You Idiot like your sister does, but I’ll take Wei Wuxian.”

If Wen Ning had been capable of blushing, he probably would’ve been blazingly red. As it was, Wen Ning bit his lip and wiggled his fingers as if he wanted to ward Wei Ying off, but there was a sort of startled gratitude about his eyes that encouraged Wei Ying instead of warning him off.

Years of practice telling the difference between Jiang Cheng saying “fuck off” because he was embarrassed and really wanted a hug versus Jiang Cheng saying it because he was about to lose his temper so disastrously that someone would get stabbed had taught Wei Ying the difference.

It showed a bit differently on Wen Ning, but Wei Ying could still see it. And honestly, he could just sort of… tell… that Wen Ning was pleased instead of horrified or embarrassed.

“I mean it,” Wei Ying said, shaking his hands to get the blood flowing again. “You saved me. You saved Jiang Cheng and Shijie. You found Uncle Fengmian and Madame Yu’s bodies for us. If anyone in the world has earned to right to use my name, it’s you and your sister. Except she’s scary so I’m not saying it to her.”

Wen Ning’s fingers shook in time with Wei Ying’s hands, probably unconscious mirroring. Still cute, even if he didn’t realize he was doing it.

He also grinned, nose wrinkling up, as he nodded. “Jiejie can be very scary. You really should tell her that I woke up.”

“Yes,” Wen Qing said from the doorway in the flattest, most threatening tone of voice that Wei Ying had ever heard, “you really should have.”

“My hands were numb, and my foot was asleep!” Wei Ying protested. “They’re only just waking up now.”

At least the pain in his back and ribcage were better. Not gone, but better. Wei Ying helped turn Wen Ning over and put him back again, helped change the dressing on his wound which looked so much better than he would have expected so soon after a surgery.

“Is that a surprising amount of healing?” Wei Ying asked once Wen Ning was bandaged, tucked back in and asleep. “Because it seems like a lot more healed than I thought was possible.”

Wen Qing nodded. She scrubbed her hands over her face and sighed before shoving Wei Ying right out of Wen Ning’s recovery room despite his noises of protest. Then she shoved him out of the hospital and to the stone pillars that marked the end of the rainbow bridge connecting the peaks together.

“It is surprising,” Wen Qing said. “Quite surprising, actually. The herbs we found made a huge difference. Which doesn’t matter at the moment. How many people can these peaks support?”

Wei Ying frowned before looking across the mountain range.

At this time of the night, a good three shichen before dawn, it was cold and dark. The bulk of the various peaks were dark marks against the bright star-filled sky. Here and there he could see glimpses of phosphorescence, as if there were night pearls or maybe plants or critters that glowed, but for the most part, it was dark and silent and cool.

“I don’t know,” Wei Ying said slowly. “I think that most of the peaks could hold a good thousand or so people. Probably more. There are buildings lower down along paths you didn’t see. Those look like they could hold, oh, another five thousand or so? Maybe? They looked like servants quarters or maybe junior disciple quarters. I’m not sure. And different peaks have different arrangements. But, well, easily five or six thousand. A good-sized town with plenty of room for growth.”

Wen Qing nodded slowly. When she stared out across the peaks, she seemed to see things that Wei Ying couldn’t. What, he had no idea.

Eventually, after what seemed like forever, she hugged herself and turned back to Wei Ying. The dim light of the night pearl lanterns set at the base of the pillars gave her eyes a shimmering reflective cast for a moment, though that was probably just reflections.

“Can the rainbow bridges go other places besides other peaks?” Wen Qing asked with so much painfully suppressed hope that Wei Ying reached out to cup her elbow. “Can it?”

“I have no idea,” Wei Ying said, frowning at the way she trembled. “Why?”

“The other camps,” Wen Qing said.

And then said nothing else.

It took a moment for Wei Ying to follow the trail of her thoughts. He’d thought that when Wen Qing said that she’d searched every camp to find Wen Ning that she meant that the few surviving Wen had been moved from place to place to keep anyone from seeing what was done to them. Presumably someone would have stopped it if only they’d seen.

Right?

Except not right.

Because… camps. Plural.

“Let’s find out,” Wei Ying said once his boiling fury subsided enough that the resentful energy stopped billowing around him like clouds. There was a red cast to Wen Qing’s face that he knew came from the red glow of his own eyes.

Logically, he should wait until at least dawn to do the test. It was the middle of the night. It was dark. There was no reason to go rescue other Wen survivors.

Except it was the middle of the night and the other camps, wherever they were, should be quiet. The guards would want their sleep. They wouldn’t spend all night torturing their prisoners.

Only part of it.

“All right,” Wei Ying said as he triggered the spell for the rainbow bridge. “Where would one of the camps be?”

The bridge didn’t leap out to any of the other peaks. It just glowed around Wei Ying’s feet as he stood there and looked at Wen Qing. After a moment, she bit her lip and stepped to his side.

The magic of the bridge seemed to shiver.

For a moment, it felt as though the bridge itself looked somewhere impossibly far away. As if it was asking permission or something. Which, you know, could very well be possible if the previous residents here had become immortals and joined the Heavenly Courts.

The next moment, though, the bridge lanced out across the night. Not bright and blazing the way it did during the day. This time, the bridge was thin and blood red, glowing under their feet as if it were the Northern Lights. Wei Ying’s breath caught as the bridge landed somewhere far, far outside of the mountain range.

“It works,” Wei Ying whispered. “But we can’t step off the bridge. I mean, I can’t. We need to anchor the bridge. We’ll need more people. Someone to go in and get the others free, help them move. Maybe to fight. I think I could call fierce corpses while on the bridge? Maybe?”

“We have to try,” Wen Qing said. “Let me go wake a few of the others. There… there are so few left. And the Jin are so vindictive. We have to try.”

Wei Ying nodded as he followed Wen Qing away from the rainbow bridge. The eerie red glow was still there when he looked over his shoulder, faint enough to make him doubt his eyes, but it was there.

They could do this. They could save the other Wen and hopefully keep anyone else from dying at the Jin’s hands. That was… absolutely worth it.

His only worry was being able to do it fast enough to save everyone else from the Jin. Having stolen these Wen, the Jin would absolutely be moving to kill all the other Wen they’d taken hostage.

By the time he reached the hospital, Wen Qing had all the healthiest Wen up and hurrying back to the rainbow bridge. She had baskets full of bandages and fruit because that was what they’d been able to gather so far.

“I’ve set Popo to making food,” Wen Qing said. “If we can get them onto the bridge, I think we can save them.”

“Only if we can keep the Jin off the bridge,” Uncle Fourth said, frowning at the faint green glow of the bridge.

“Leave that part to me,” Wei Ying said as he twirled Chenqing and smiled the Yiling Laozu smile from the end of the Sunshot Campaign. “I won’t be able to leave the bridge but that won’t matter. Any… any dead they’ve left around will answer my call. We’ll get the others to safety, I promise.”

To his awe-struck surprise, Uncle Fourth beamed at Wei Ying as if he’d just been given the best present ever. Wen Qing huffed a bit with that “you’re getting checked the instant this is done” scowl of hers. The other Wen smiled, shoulders relaxing and eyes brightening.

It was, well, weird.

Good! But so very weird.

Not that it mattered at the moment.

“Let’s go!” Wei Ying exclaimed as he strode back to the waiting Rainbow Bridge. “This is the perfect time of night for raids on the camps. Come on Wen Qing. You know where they are, and I can get the bridge there. By dawn, if we’re fast and careful and lucky, we should have everyone out of danger.”

“Don’t jinx us,” Wen Qing snapped at him even though she came as eagerly as Uncle Fourth and the others.

Wei Ying stood between the pillars and let himself pray, just a little. Let it work. Let them save whoever was left to save. Let the killing and misery and suffering finally end. He hadn’t ever wanted to lead a sect, but if that was what it took to save these people he’d chosen as his own, he’d do it.

Come what may.

#

In the Demon Realm:

SQQ, rubbing his forehead and groaning: What is it about our children? That’s flatly impossible! The Rainbow Bridge does not go anywhere else! It only goes between the twelve peaks.

LBH: I don’t think that is the bridge, Shizun. The color is all wrong.

SQQ, going very, very still: …Not Xin Mo. It’s destroyed! You were purged of its influence, Binghe.

LBH, staring very intently at the mirror as WWX and WQ liberate their third camp with virtually no casualties at all: No, I don’t think… well, it’s the wrong color for Xin Mo. It’s just… Shizun, that’s demonic magic. He’s doing something very like what Mobei-Jun does. Not exactly, but close to it. The woman is helping but only in the focus.

SQQ: Another sign of blood worms. He has more of you than I expected.

LBH: True. At least we know he’ll survive.

SQQ, clinging to LBH and burying his face in LBH’s broad shoulder: …At what cost, Binghe? How much torment will he have to go through before he finds his happy ending?

They stand together, silently watching WWX saving everyone he possibly can.

 

6. Echoing Silence

“This is fucking bullshit,” Jiang Cheng complained as he flew at Nie Mingjue’s side. “Who the hell do the Jin think they are?”

None of them had slept. Who could sleep after finding out that Jin Guangshan had decided to enslave entire villages simply because the people lived in Qishan? Some of them hadn’t ever been Wen. They’d just been people who moved into open territory, with the Great Sect’s approval, to farm the land.

Hell, most of them hadn’t been Wen.

It wasn’t like Wen Ruohan had properly brought the disciples he’d conscripted into the Wen Sect. No, they’d been kept hostage against their family’s lives while their families were told they had to farm and forge weapons and do shit for the Wen or their sons, fathers and nephews would be executed for treason.

The entire situation had been fucked up. Start to finish, a fucked-up disaster.

That Jin Guangshan could make it worse was kind of stunning. If Jiang Cheng had had his way, both Jin Guangshan and Jin Zixun would’ve been beheaded right there in the middle of the party, but no.

Sect Leader Yao had started yelping like he always did, demanding evidence and proof and running his mouth about how the Jin were the most honorable and powerful sect and thus they couldn’t possibly have overstepped their authority. He’d had that great-uncle, Ruotian, behind him making vaguely approving noises, but still.

Sounded pretty much word for word how he’d responded to Wen Ruohan. Sect Leader Yao: the man most likely to kiss the boot of the person about to kick him in the teeth. Idiot.

Jiang Cheng had responded exactly as Mother always wanted to. His knuckles still hurt, just a bit, but the shattered mess he’d made of Sect Leader Yao’s nose more than made up for the minor pain. At the very least, no one picked up Sect Leader Yao’s refrain of praise for Jin Guangshan, not even Sect Leader Ouyang.

“They think they’re rulers of the Jianghu,” Nie Mingjue grumbled. “Jin Guangshan thinks he’s the new Chief Cultivator.”

“If you’d just taken it the way everyone recommended,” Jiang Cheng said because of course he said it out loud instead of just thinking it, “then none of this would’ve happened.”

Nie Mingjue glowered at him. He looked just as incandescently furious as Jiang Cheng, unlike Lan Xichen who flew on his other side with his block-of-ice brother Lan Wangji flying just to the rear and the right of him. The only of the four of them who had anything like a reasonable expression was Lan Xichen.

Jiang Cheng was pretty sure that he was every bit as angry. He just wouldn’t let his perfect little smile fade. At least Lan Wangji had a proper scowl. Nothing else, but he did have a good scowl, and this situation demanded all the scowls.

Plus a few swords thrust through Jin disciple chests. The kidnapping, raping, torturing assholes.

The camp in Qiongqi Path had been a rough-edged bloodbath full of corpses, death and misery. Not even Wei Wuxian at his worst could’ve drawn up that much resentful energy. The Nightless City at the very end of the war, just after they killed Wen Ruohan, didn’t have as thick a layer of resentful energy as the Path did.

As they flew over the pass to the second camp, Jiang Cheng expected the same aura of torturous misery.

Moans, screams, begging. Cruel laughter. Jiang Cheng knew what to expect. He’d seen in in Yunmeng, in Yiling, all across the Jianghu as they liberated towns from Wen control. They’d all seen it, over and over and over again.

Since the Jin had decided to be just like Wen Ruohan, down to copying his horrible experiments and trying to best them, logically all the camps that they’d shoved people into would be hell-pits of misery, death and torture.

The bare rock-filled quarry that Jin Guangyao had, after ferocious interrogation, admitted was the second largest camp, stank of blood. Sewage not properly treated. Bodies left to rot instead of being laid to rest properly.

No resentful corpses, at least. The four shacks sat silent as they landed. Jiang Cheng nearly broke a tooth from the way his jaw clenched when he saw the corral that was probably where the captives were kept during the day. They must’ve been packed into one of the shacks for the night.

“Hey!” Jiang Cheng bellowed, annoyed that the guards hadn’t come out to splutter and protest and pretend that they had the right to do this shit.

Silence echoed.

Complete silence. Eerie silence.

Worrying silence.

“Hey,” Jiang Cheng said as he pulled Sandu. “Where is everyone?”

Nie Mingjue frowned as he pulled Baxia. She hummed in his hand, a threatening vibration that made Jiang Cheng’s hair stand up on his arms. Before Nie Mingjue could stride forwards, Lan Xichen put a hand on his shoulder.

“I sense no one living,” Lan Xichen murmured. “Not even guards. There’s no one left here. No one at all.”

Jiang Cheng shivered as a chill ran right up his spine. That… He hadn’t noticed that but yeah. To a cultivator’s senses, people always put off some level of qi. Non-cultivators only radiated a little bit, but he’d instinctively noticed it when night hunting since he was like twelve. During the war, he’d gotten especially good at sensing all kinds of intent coming at him, from lying to murder to the intent to run like hell.

There was nothing.

When Nie Mingjue moved forwards, Jiang Cheng flanked him to the left. Lan Wangji took the right with his guqin at the ready. Lan Xichen paced slowly behind them, xiao in his hands but not lifted to his lips.

The shacks were not actually empty. No prisoners at all, but one shack held one dead Jin guard who’d had his throat cut. The other shack had three Jin guards who were under stasis arrays that kept them solidly unconscious and unable to free themselves. The other two shacks had nothing but some furniture for the guards in one and rotted hay that looked like it’d been piled up as bedding for the captives in the other.

There was no one living anywhere inside of or near the camp.

Same thing happened at the second, third and fourth camps. Fifth camp had twice as many guards in it but most of them were Lan instead of Jin which made Lan Xichen go as pale as his robes. The sixth camp had no one at all, dead, alive, stasis, whatever. Just wind blowing leaves through and no signs of people at all.

“What the fuck happened?” Jiang Cheng asked after the Nie disciples reported back on their lack of findings, the Jiang confirmed that all the people found so far had been taken back to Koi Tower, and the Lan disciples with Lan Xichen had vapors about their fellow disciples being part of this crap.

All of them with the same “I have no idea what’s going on but it’s very fucking creepy” faces. You know, in the Nie scowl version, the Jiang wide-eyes version and the Lan blank face but shaking fingers version.

Couldn’t blame any of them. Jiang Cheng was just as creeped out as anyone else. He wouldn’t admit it, not when his fellow sect leaders were keeping quiet about their quietly creeped-out-ness, but it was just about the freakiest thing he’d seen since he and Lan Wangji came on Wei Wuxian torturing Wen Chao and Wen Zhuoliu.

Jiang Cheng knew that it was all Wei Wuxian’s fault.

The asshole excelled at shit like this. He probably went out of his way to make sure that this was extra, super-extremely creepy instead of just normal creepy. It’d be just like him. There weren’t any artistically displayed entrails so obviously Wei Wuxian had been short on time as he saved the captives, but he might as well have hung up signs saying “Wei Wuxian was here!”

Still, Jiang Cheng was fiercely curious what happened to the Jin disciples.

The Wen, eh, they were fine in his opinion, no matter what Jin Guangshan wanted Jiang Cheng to say. They were mostly civilians, mostly non-cultivators, and honestly, he did owe life debts to both Wen Qing and Wen Ning. It would be easy enough to argue that Wei Wuxian was fulfilling the life debts that the Jiang owed, which he absolutely was going to do since he had Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen on his side.

There should have been a good ten, fifteen Jin guards at each camp. Should have. They were flat gone and that was not something that Wei Wuxian would’ve done. Kill them? Hell yes. Torture them for their abuse? Sure and Jiang Cheng would’ve helped.

Quietly disappeared entirely with no signs that they’d ever existed at all? That was so far outside of Wei Wuxian’s habits that it was making the hair stand up on the back of Jiang Cheng’s neck.

“Seriously, what the fuck happened here?” Jiang Cheng repeated since not one person opened their mouths with an opinion.

Neither Nie Mingjue nor Lan Xichen answered Jiang Cheng.

“What? Neither of you have a guess?” Jiang Cheng asked. He put his hands on his hips and just stared at the two of them.

Nie Mingjue cleared his throat while pointedly staring anywhere but at Jiang Cheng. Lan Xichen took the opposite tactic and smiled blandly at Jiang Cheng as if direct eye contact plus a smile made it less obvious that he had no clue.

“Just fucking say it,” Jiang Cheng said, rolling his eyes. “I mean, obviously Wei Wuxian did something. Stole the Wen right out from under the Jin’s noses. Driving me crazy trying to figure out what happened to the Jin, though.”

Both of them stared at Jiang Cheng.

“You don’t believe that Wei Wuxian killed them,” Lan Xichen said.

And then winced as Lan Wangji scowled at him as if Lan Xichen had just pissed on his robes.

“If Wei Wuxian killed them,” Jiang Cheng drawled as he waved a hand at the complete and total lack of resentful energy, fierce corpses, and body parts strewn about, “it’d be obvious. Really, really obvious. When my asshole of a brother decides to go all-in on the murder thing, there’s collateral damage for miles. No fierce corpses, no blood and viscera draped over the buildings. Not one single4 thing is on fire. Obviously, no way did Wei Wuxian make the Jin disappear. The rest of it, sure, that’s got his grubby little handprints all over it, but not that.”

“Agreed,” Lan Wangji said so firmly that Lan Xichen’s permanent smile fractured into a startled look.

“All right,” Nie Mingjue said as he started actually looking for signs of the Jin disciples around the camp. “Let’s see what we can find.”

Jiang Cheng had always known that the Nie were excellent hunters and trackers. That was just a fact, one of the foundational truths of life that went along with Father never seeing Jiang Cheng for who he was, A-Jie being the very best person alive, and fire was hot.

He hadn’t expected that all the Nie could literally read a leaf in a wagon wheel rut like Lan Qiren reading one of his ridiculous rules.

“Same thing here,” Nie Mingjue said as he crouched down to study the way the mud squished out around a rock. “One of the captives stepped half on this rock, half off it. The rock hit right in the middle of their foot, at the arch. They jerked to the side. That’s where this distortion came from. And then they took the next step into nothingness.”

“This is so odd,” Nie Zonghui murmured a little further off. “I can see the edges of however they escaped. It’s left a print in the mud.”

Turned out that Wei Wuxian had somehow created a discrete gate of some sort that was five paces wide and thin as a single hair. The captives had stepped through that gate and away from the camp. Possible out of the world entirely for all that the Nie could find.

Jiang Cheng sighed once they all came back to the center of the camp to compare notes. “Okay, so my idiot genius of a brother came up with another entirely new technique never before seen by anyone anywhere. He rescued the so-called Wen captives in the middle of the night. If he had anyone helping him, they were wearing the same straw sandals that the captives were, so we can’t tell their footprints apart. Either way, a few Jin were killed. A handful of potentially less awful or more prosecutable Jin were put in stasis. The rest disappeared like mist, who knows where. That cover it?”

“You do good debriefs,” Nie Mingjue said, mustache twitching as he fought against a grin.

“I’ve been briefing people on my brother’s nonsense for a literal decade now,” Jiang Cheng drawled. “Of course I’m good at it. What’d I miss?”

“There is no sign of where Wei Ying and the Wen went,” Lan Wangji said.

And yeah, that was the key, wasn’t it? Jiang Cheng nodded.

“Right,” Jiang Cheng said, studying his fellow sect leaders and absently noting that the Lan following Lan Xichen still had that twitchy finger thing going. Really nervous.

“Back to Koi Tower,” Nie Mingjue decided. “I need to ask Jin Guangshan and M—Jin Guangyao more questions.”

“Good plan,” Jiang Cheng agreed. “Let’s do it.”

#

Off on the far side of the Silk Road near Kazakhstan at an oasis, Shang Qinghua nods for Mobei-Jun to drop the last of the Jin cultivators they’d kidnapped.

SQH: That’s that. Sunrise in a shichen. They’ll be fine here.

MBJ: …

SQH: Yeah, yeah, I know that leaving them alive is a potential threat, but these are the decent ones out of the lot. They were just following orders.

MBJ: *Scowls at the unconscious Jin cultivators*

SQH: No, it doesn’t excuse anything. *starts going through their clothes and taking everything of value, including their swords and any money or gems they have on their persons* Here. Take these. The kids will probably need them eventually and we can do something about the swords later.

MBJ: *calmly puts all the stolen goods away into a qiankun pouch* …

SQH: Heh! Yeah, we’ve dropped them off on the far side of the desert where people speak a totally different language and use a totally different writing system. No money. No weapons. Nothing but their skills to help them survive. They’ll either get themselves killed by showing their true colors or they’ll survive and start a new life.

MBJ: *considers and then nods approval*

SQH: Back home!

They disappear in a swirl of ice crystals, leaving the Jin behind to their fates.

 

7. Humble Homes

Wei Ying flopped onto the bench closest to the …whatever it was that A-Yuan was building out of broken bits of bamboo and random rocks. Also some piles of leaves that A-Yuan periodically showered down on his little creation.

“Why is A-Yuan covered in dirt?” Wen Qing asked in that “someone is getting stabbed with needles” voice.

Right behind Wei Ying.

He yelped and started to jump to his feet only for his legs to go to water after all the running around he’d done for the last two and a half days. Wei Ying flopped to the ground next to A-Yuan who frowned at him and gravely patted Wei Ying’s arm as if testing his qi.

“Xian-gege fell down?” A-Yuan asked.

“Ah, yeah.” Wei Ying laughed awkwardly as he scooped A-Yuan up into his lap. “Your Auntie Qing surprised me so much my legs went all shwoop! And I fell down.”

Wen Qing sighed as she put her needles away. “You fell down because you’re exhausted, you idiot. I know you haven’t slept since we got here.”

“I slept,” Wei Ying protested. While watching over Wen Ning, he did not say because then he really would be on the receiving end of Wen Qing’s needles. “I was just startled. That’s all.”

Very clearly, A-Yuan would be the most brilliant cultivator the world had ever seen because he promptly started giggling from his spot in Wei Ying’s lap. Wen Qing just rolled her eyes at him before hauling both Wei Ying and A-Yuan up. Mostly because A-Yuan clung like a little monkey instead of standing on his own feet.

“Food, bath, bed,” Wen Qing ordered as she pushed Wei Ying away from the bamboo grove, away from A-Yuan’s abandoned project which had made such a lovely excuse to avoid all the worshipful eyes watching his every move, and back into the thick of things.

“Fine,” Wei Ying groaned, all overly dramatic because otherwise he’d get skittish and that would upset his new sect members.

All three hundred and six of them. According to Wen Qing, there should have been about a thousand, but the Jin had been remarkably effective in killing people in horrible ways so there just weren’t that many left.

The stories the Wen told were. Hm. Nightmare fuel? Not that Wei Ying needed help having nightmares, but still. So many Jin had come out to the camps, looked around and actively decided to make things worse. Not just Jin Zixun who was always as horrible as he could possibly be. Others. Elders and juniors and a few servants who apparently decided to take the abuse they experienced out on someone else.

Which meant yeah, very few people had been left in the camps.

Three hundred was manageable. Not great, but manageable. Most everyone was more than happy to be there, if desperately afraid that the sects would come find them and kill them all. They had one new cultivator, a young girl who wasn’t yet twelve who’d been part of the Yao sect before the Wen rolled over them.

Yao Lixin had been all of about nine when the Wen came. She’d run, hid, gotten captured and then adopted by a Wen soldier who sent her back to the Nightless City to be a bride for his son. The son had been… not as bad as he could’ve been, but creepy. As the war went on, the son had been called to fight and then killed along with the soldier. Yao Lixin and her adopted mother had run for their lives only to get caught by the Jin when they cautiously crept out of their hiding place after the war was over.

She and her adopted mother were deeply devoted to each other, so it was fine. At least there was a fourth cultivator to charge things and open locked doors and so forth.

Well, third. Wei Ying didn’t quite qualify as a cultivator anymore. He was… something… but he wasn’t a cultivator.

“Xian-gege!” Yao Lixin huffed with her fists on her hips and a disapproving frown on her face like she was sixty instead of all of eleven. “He was clean! I made sure.”

Around them, smiles bloomed. Yao Lixin’s adoptive mother rolled her eyes to the sky, but she was laughing under her breath as she shook out wet laundry and hung it to dry on bamboo that Uncle Fourth had cut and pieced together for the purpose.

None of the captives were quite comfortable with the laundry building down the mountain yet. It was lovely and had still-working arrays to clean all stains. There was an amazing series of hoops that would remove stain after stain after stain from your garment as you passed it through, and there was a spot to hang washed clothes such that they dried in moments.

Wei Ying loved the place. No one else did. Yet. Uncle Fourth had muttered something about an eerie chill to the building which was why the former captives had decided to do their laundry up at the peak. Chill or not, the laundry building was amazing, and Wei Ying was going to get them to use it sooner or later.

“It’s fine,” Wei Ying said. He couldn’t help but grin at her cute disapproval. “A-Yuan was building. Building is a very messy thing. Right, A-Yuan?”

“Mm!” A-Yuan agreed, nodding emphatically as he clung to Wei Ying’s robes. “A-Yuan made Xian-gege a new house just like our new houses.”

Wei Ying crooned as he hugged A-Yuan. “You are such a good boy! But I’ve got a house. The one in the bamboo grove is mine.”

“But A-Yuan doesn’t live there,” A-Yuan said, all sad with big eyes and a pouted out bottom lip while plucking at Wei Ying’s robes. “A-Yuan wants to stay with Xian-gege.”

“With me?” Wei Ying said as his mouth dropped open and his stomach climbed right up his throat. “But? You’ve got Popo. And Auntie Qing and Uncle Ning.”

“Want Xian-gege,” A-Yuan mumbled against Wei Ying’s chest. “Safe with Xiang-gege.”

Yao Lixin patted A-Yuan’s back as if she completely understood that. And, well, most of the other new sect members looked like they would be right there with A-Yuan if they could. Even Wen Qing looked sympathetic to A-Yuan and violently unsympathetic to Wei Ying’s sudden rush of nerves.

“There is a second bedroom,” Wei Ying said as he patted A-Yuan’s back and stared at Wen Qing desperately. “I can’t really take care of him full time. Maybe Popo could come stay in the bamboo cottage with me and A-Yuan?”

Wen Qing considered it and nodded. “Could work. I’ll ask her about it. You still need to eat and bathe. Get to it.”

Their food was still very simple, potatoes, radishes, fruit and nuts. None of the new sect members who were farmers were ready to say that this oddly domesticated animal on Ling You Peak was edible and that one was not. The critters behaved too weirdly for that. Yesterday, Wei Ying had spent half his time there with a Twisted-Fang Bi-Viper following him around like he was its best friend.

Given that the Bi-Viper was old enough and, since Bi-Vipers never stopped growing, big enough to eat a horse whole, it hadn’t been the most comfortable of experiences for everyone else. Snake-gege had been Wei Ying’s sole companion when he was little, so he hadn’t been bothered at all. Thankfully, the Bi-Viper had wandered back off to do its own thing once the rainbow bridge back to Qing Jing lit up.

There was something going on with the wards on Ling You. The animals there were just way too tame. Wei Ying didn’t know what it was yet, but he was going to figure it out. Eventually.

“Okay, we have had food,” Wei Ying declared as he scooped A-Yuan up into his arms despite the sticky fingers and messy face. “Now it is time for bath.”

“Nooooo, Xian-gege,” A-Yuan whined through his giggles. “A-Yuan doesn’t need another bath. A-Yuan had a bath this morning!”

“Nope,” Wei Ying said as he marched off to the baths with pretty much every other kid under the age of twelve following along behind him, including Yao Lixin. “Bath-time, bath-time, lovely sudsy bath-time~!”

All the kids, all five of them, started singing along with his silly little song. It was one he vaguely remember Baba singing when he was tiny, so it sort of squeezed his heart to hear kids singing along with him.

Until they all were wet and soap suds were everywhere and A-Yuan turned into a greased eel as he laughed and tried to escape every stage of getting clean.

Wei Ying did not regret giving his golden core to Jiang Cheng.

He didn’t. It was necessary. It was right. It was what Jiang Cheng needed to survive.

Boy, did he regret not having a golden core as he struggled to get A-Yuan washed up and then dried and then back into his second set of clothes which were, actually, clean. They were the pale green and white robes that went along with Qing Jing Peak. All the kids put versions on while Wei Ying put his black and red robes back on.

“No pretty green?” A-Yuan asked with a frown as he held his arms up for Wei Ying to carry him.

“I like black and red,” Wei Ying declared as he hauled A-Yuan up and then groaned because somehow over the last half shichen A-Yuan gotten times heavier than he had been. “Maybe for formal occasions I’ll wear the green and white, but the sets I’ve seen in my bamboo cottage are all gauze and frilly and too many layers. Like ten whole layers! Too many.”

A-Yuan’s eyes went wide as he held all his fingers out and checked with Yao Lixin to make sure that he’d counted right. “That’s so many!”

“That is a lot,” Yao Lixin said much more skeptically.

“Four layers of gauze in graduated shades of soft green,” Wei Ying said as he led the kids back to their parents. “Under that are three layers of deep green, icy green and white robes. There’s a vest held in place by a belt, heavily embroidered. Then there’s an outer robe on top of that and there’s the pants and underthings, too.”

Yao Lixin gaped. “That’s more layers that Sect Leader Yao wore! That’s more than Sect Leader Wen, too.”

“Exactly,” Wei Ying said with a sage nod and a grateful smile as the various parents came to reclaim their clean, tired-out kids. “That’s why I’m resisting and staying with black and red for now. Popo and I can talk about something more reasonable than ten layers of gauzy robes because that’s just too, too, too much.”

By the time Wei Ying marched off to the bamboo cottage with A-Yuan, his arms felt like they were made of lead, and his legs were made of chunks of wood. Popo took pity on him and carried A-Yuan off to bed, though Wei Ying did have to make an appearance to kiss A-Yuan’s forehead and tuck him into bed like he used to with Jiang Cheng when they were still little enough to pretend that they had a real father who loved them.

Wei Ying, at least, had once had a father who loved him.

Jiang Cheng could never claim that.

Fuck, he missed Jiang Cheng and Shijie so bad that it was like an animal trying to claw its way out of his chest. Not all the time. Just sometimes, like when little moments reminded him of what he used to have. Like now.

“Come,” Popo murmured once A-Yuan sprawled on his little bed, sound asleep.

She tugged Wei Ying out of the second bedroom by his sleeve, smiling at the way Wei Ying tiptoed. And then laughed when he smacked right into the wall because he couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder at A-Yuan.

“Let’s have some tea, A-Ying,” Popo said.

“Heart’s Ease?” Wei Ying asked as he settled at the table in the outer room that had two desks, multiple empty bookshelves and a lovely low table with the comfiest, fluffiest floor pillows that Wei Ying had ever had the joy of sitting on.

“Of course,” Popo said.

Her eyes twinkled with quiet happiness as Wei Ying guzzled his first cup and then slowly sipped his second one. It was kind of surprising just how soothing the Heart’s Ease tea was. Despite having it every night and a couple times during the day after they rescued everyone, it never tasted the same twice. There was a sweetness to it, an earthy flavor that was almost like mushrooms, but he could never pin it down.

“Good,” Popo said once he was done. “Now, I’ve talked with A-Qing and A-Ning. They agree. So does Uncle Fourth and Cousin Third. We’re all the family that A-Yuan has left. There’s no one who’s blood to him anymore.”

“Um.” Wei Ying shut his mouth instead of protesting that he would never, ever dream of taking A-Yuan away from his few remaining family members.

“He sees you as a father, A-Ying,” Popo said. Her hand reached out to rest on top of Wei Ying’s fist clenched around his empty teacup. “We all do. A-Qing sees you as a beloved, if sometimes stupidly suicidal, little brother. A-Ning sees you as a big brother. Uncle Fourth said outright that you’re just like his nephew. And I see you as a grandson. We’d all like to give up the Wen name and become Wei. We want to be your family in truth.”

“Um?”

Popo’s face blurred as tears welled up and spilled over. Wei Ying tried to find words to say that they didn’t have to, that he would be delighted to be Wen like them instead of Wei, but all that came out were broken sobs as Popo gathered him up in her arms and held him through the storm of tears.

Uncle Fengmian had taken Wei Ying in.

He’d never made Wei Ying part of the Jiang family line.

For all that Shijie and Jiang Cheng called Wei Ying their brother, they’d never done it either. All these years, he’d been alone. He’d smiled through all the snide comments, quipped at the people who sneered, and ached deep inside for a home and family that was all his own.

“Please,” Wei Ying finally managed to say.

Popo hugged him harder as she hummed a lullaby, sending Wei Ying off to sleep amid his falling tears.

#

In the Demon Realm:

Shen Qingqiu, cuddling Luo Binghe as he shakes and sobs into his lap: ….

LBH: He just, just, just abandoned us! Chose an entirely different family before we could even, *shudders on another huge sob* even meet him!

SQQ: *sigh* Binghe, there’s another way you could look at this.

LBH: No, there’s not! Our great-grandson is lost to us for all time!

SQQ: Or… he could be gathering up a group of people to add to our family. Including a son of his own. You know, that cute little boy who already has his blood worms?

LBH: *goes very still and very, very silent* What?

SQQ: *looks at the mirror that shows Uncle Forth and Cousin Third helping Popo tuck Wei Ying into bed, all of them looking down at him with not just thanks but also rueful affection for the disaster that Wei Ying is* Look.

LBH: … They’re… They…!

SQQ: Mhm.

LBH: *sits bolt upright, instantly delighted despite the tears still dampening his cheeks and soaking SQQ’s lap* They’ll become Wei! Fully! Oh!

SQQ: *rolls his eyes and waves an absent-minded drying charm at his lap as LBH rushes off to tell everyone that he’s getting a whole new family* My Binghe. At least I know where Wei Ying gets the dramatics from.

There is, it should be noted, not one slight hint of awareness of SQQ’s own dramatic tendencies to be found.

 

8. Lost Path

The main street of Yiling was still dry, dusty, and depressing. Lan Zhan slowly walked towards the Burial Mounds, scanning for anyone who looked like the Wen captives. Or like they had redyed Wen robes. Or even hair pins that had Wen suns on them.

No one did. No one was.

No one wore red and black either, not that Lan Zhan would admit openly that the real reason he was here was to find any trace of Wei Ying. The Wen captives could take care of themselves. What mattered was making sure that Wei Ying was okay.

He’d been so… ill… since he disappeared before the Sunshot Campaign. Thinner, angrier, eyes red with either demonic cultivation or, more likely, exhaustion. Lan Zhan knew that Wei Ying wasn’t sleeping enough. He knew that Wei Ying had constant nightmares, that he barely ate at all and drank far too much.

If only he’d been able to actually say that he was worried about Wei Ying’s heath, not angry about the demonic cultivation, perhaps none of this would have happened.

And then all the Wen captives would have been tortured to death instead of most of them. The Jin were utterly unapologetic about it. When Lan Zhan had tried to ask about it back at Koi Tower, Jin Ruotian had sighed and patted Lan Zhan’s arm.

“Unfortunately,” Jin Ruotian had said in a tone that sounded as if he meant the words, despite the glittering hardness of his unsympathetic eyes, “we must follow where our sect leader takes us. I’m sure you understand. Filial duty is the primary virtue.”

“No,” Lan Zhan had said, glaring. “Justice is.”

Jin Ruotian had sighed and shook his head as if Lan Zhan was being unrealistic. No, there was no changing the past. What was, was. Lan Zhan would simply have to find Wei Ying and make sure that he was okay.

If only he could find some hint of the path Wei Ying had taken.

So far, Lan Zhan had followed Wei Ying’s path to where the trail ended. He’d traveled entirely around the Burial Mounds and found absolutely nothing. He’d checked in every single mundane and cultivator town for any word of Wei Ying or of the Wen captives.

There had been no success. At all. Not one person had seen Wei Ying or even heard a rumor of him. The Wen remnants might as well have turned into mist and burned away in the heat of the noon sun.

Which was why he had come to Yiling.

Wei Ying had lived in Yiling as a child. During the search for Wei Ying before the Sunshot Campaign, Jiang Wanyin had told stories of how many times Jiang Fengmian had searched both Yunmeng and Yiling itself for Wei Ying.

During the three months that Wei Ying was missing, Lan Zhan and Jiang Cheng had done the exact same thing: searched and found only fleeting hints of Wei Ying that led nowhere.

The hints were always centered around Yiling. Not in the city. Outside of it. Along the outskirts of the Burial Mounds which loomed over Yiling like a curse about to descend. Lan Zhan didn’t know how the residents ignored the weight of the Burial Mounds, but perhaps it was something that they were simply accustomed to, having grown up here.

Lan Zhan had traveled widely across the Jianghu, not just for the Sunshot Campaign but also for night hunts before and after. He’d seen the glittering false beauty of the Jin, the rugged mountains of the Nie. The wry down-to-earth people who lived under Sect Leader Yao, somehow well cared for despite Sect Leader Yao being Sect Leader Yao.

So many places, humble and grand. Rich and poor. Common and cultivator.

Yiling felt… off.

There was an underlying layer of qi that felt warped. No matter where Lan Zhan went in Yiling, that sense of something just out of true with the rest of the world was there. If anything, it was worse at the edges of Yiling furthest from the Burial Mounds. There the warped qi filled his subtle senses, keeping him from noticing the haunted mushrooms and tainted stands of too-dark bamboo.

In the middle of Yiling’s dusty, desultory marketplace, that sensation of warped qi was far less.

“And what do you think you’re doing?” an elder woman bent in half by her aged spine asked as she leaned on her heavy staff and peered up at him.

“I’m looking,” Lan Zhan answered.

“Hm.” She frowned at him. “Tea. Come on. Now.”

She hobbled off without waiting for Lan Zhan to decline. Or accept, for that matter. With no progress and no other ideas, he followed her to the teahouse that sat at the center of Yiling. It was a rather worn building with open seating below and closed rooms on the floor above that one could apparently rent.

The Elder chose a table in the corner closest to the kitchen, tapping on the door twice.

As Lan Zhan slowly knelt opposite her, the kitchen door opened and someone, the cook? Someone slid out a tray with tea, two small bowls of rice and two large bowls of noodles in a thick fermented bean paste based sauce.

“All right then,” the Elder said as she portioned their unexpected meal between the two of them. “Tell me what Hanguang-jun is looking for in Yiling.”

“…You know me,” Lan Zhan said, blinking at her.

“The entire Jianghu knows you, boy,” the Elder said. “I’m Entai. This is my town. It’s been mine since I was younger than you and that impertinent ass Wen Ruohan tried to flirt with me. Nearly cut his heavenly pillar off for him. Did manage to get his neck, though not deep enough to kill him, more’s the pity. Answer my questions before you eat.”

Lan Zhan stared at her as his thoughts swirled between shock, awed amusement, and the realization that Shufu would absolutely loathe Elder Entai. Or he would love her dearly. There would be nothing between the two responses, not for Lan Qiren.

“I…” Lan Zhan fidgeted with his steaming up of deeply brown tea. Black, brewed hot and long. A lovely hint of citrus to it, though. “I am looking for my zhiji. Wei Wuxian. He disappeared. When he was a child, he lived on the streets in Yiling for a time.”

“Birth name?” Elder Entai asked, one eyebrow going up in doubt.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan said. “His parents were Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze. They died fighting something out of the Burial Mounds.”

“Hm,” Elder Entai said.

She sipped at her tea and stared across the tearoom with a stare that sent the other guests up and out with enough urgency that Lan Zhan frowned. Not a one of the other guests glanced his way. They just left quickly, bobbing nods to Elder Entai who ignored them entirely.

“People have said that Wei Ying lived here. He didn’t. We saw the boy briefly, for about three months, but he disappeared. Reappeared three years later. I’ve no idea where he went between. His parents did die here, that’s quite true. But to say that the boy lived on the streets here is a lie.”

She drank her tea in three long, slow sips, eyes distant and very pointedly not meeting Lan Zhan’s. Rather than argue or confront what surely must be a lie, Lan Zhan drank his own tea. Which was lovely. Better than most tea he’d gotten in the finest establishments in Gusu or Yunmeng, frankly.

They ate their soup and rice in silence. Only once they were both done, and the tray had been pushed back into the silent kitchen did Lan Zhan frown at Elder Entai.

“Wei Ying said that he lived in Yiling as a boy,” Lan Zhan observed.

“What exactly did he say?” Elder Entai asked.

“That…” Lan Zhan paused to go over everything that he could remember. “That… he’d lived here “for a time” as a boy. That was all he ever said.”

Elder Entai nodded. “That would be accurate. He was here for a time. A brief time. Then he disappeared somewhere else for three years. And reappeared in completely new robes of a very old style indeed only to get snapped up by Sect Leader Jiang.”

“Old,” Lan Zhan observed, something distant chiming in the back of his mind that the description was important.

“Mhm,” Elder Entai agreed. “The last anyone saw him, it was dusk. There were feral dog packs that autumn. He’d run from them, heading around the side of the Burial Mound. A couple of the Cho claimed that he’d been bitten but we never found a blood trail or body. The blood went so far and then stopped entirely. We assumed that the dogs got him until he came back.”

Lan Zhan straightened. “Do the Cho remember where that was? Can I talk to them?”

Both of Elder Entai’s eyebrows went up. After a moment, she nodded and levered herself back to her feet. The Cho farm was the very last farm in Yiling before you reached the barriers that the Great Sects had erected to keep the Burial Mounds contained. The Cho farm was small, with scrubby fields that clearly never produced enough food for the family. The walls of their compound, despite their poverty, were tall and quite solid.

Impressively so. All Lan Zhan had to do was glance to his right to realize why. The barrier stones for the Burial Mound wards were only ten or twenty paces from their fields. He was somewhat appalled that they even attempted to live in such an inauspicious place.

Elder Entai marched right up and banged on the door. When the owner, Cho Lianmin who was apparently the oldest daughter of the family and whose husband had run away not long after her second son was conceived, looked Lan Zhan over and then gave him a scornful curl of her lip.

“He’s looking for the spot where Wei Ying disappeared as a child,” Elder Entai explained.

“Really.” Cho Lianmin stared at Lan Zhan even more flatly. Then she called her youngest son, Cho Muye who was all of eighteen but looked more like he was thirty, to take Lan Zhan there.

Cho Muye was much more effusive, chatting about the fact that none of them knew where Wei Ying had gone, that he’d been a nice kid, always smiling. He had, shortly before Wei Ying disappeared, shared a meal and a game of football with Wei Ying.

“I tried to convince Mother that we should take him in,” Cho Muye said as they strolled along the southern edge of the Burial Mounds, staying a firm ten paces from any boundary marker that Cho Muye saw. “We’d had a really bad year so it wasn’t like we had any food, but Mother had actually bent enough that we could let him stay with us for a few days. I knew she’d cave once he was there. He’s really personable, you know.”

“I know,” Lan Zhan agreed.

“All right,” Cho Muye said. “That’s the spot there.”

He pointed towards a standing stone that was smaller than every other one they’d passed. It’s shape was odd, round like a wheel instead of a finely carved slab shaped like a proper talisman or prayer tablet. It barely came up to Lan Zhan’s knee. Time and weather had ground away the engraving on the stone.

“What does it say?” Lan Zhan asked as he knelt down to run his fingers over the face of marker. He could just feel the engraving but couldn’t make out what characters might once have been there.

“No idea,” Cho Muye said with an entirely casual shrug. “They’re too old. I used to think it had the character for river,” he drew three lines in the air with his finger, “but my older brother thinks that it’s just a carving of bamboo. There’s always been bamboo around here, so who knows?”

Lan Zhan frowned.

“The trail led here and then he turned inwards?” Lan Zhan asked.

“Yeah, no,” Cho Muye said as he gestured to show where the trail of blood had been and then were it stopped, exactly next to the round marker. “We had a clear blood trail all the way up to this stone. Then there was a splash of blood on the stone itself. The trail stopped, like someone had laid down a carpet and he’d been bundled up in it right here,” Cho Muye traced a line in the ashy soil directly next to the stone marker. “No blood anywhere else. No signs of the dogs. No nothing. I mean, we all searched but there was nothing to find.”

Lan Zhan nodded as he stood. “Survival came first.”

“Exactly,” Cho Muye agreed. “So, um, what will you do now?”

When Lan Zhan hummed while staring into the Burial Mounds, Cho Muye fidgeted. That was the direction that Wei Ying must have gone, so that was the direction that Lan Zhan needed to go. After doing a bit more searching around the edges of the Burial Mounds.

“I will look for more of these markers,” Lan Zhan told Cho Muye. “Thank you for your assistance.”

“Oh,” Cho Muye said. “Um, yeah, there’s a bunch off that direction. They’re way outside of the ones the Great Sects put up but they’re so old that everyone agrees that they don’t do anything anymore. Don’t stay out after dark. Or at least don’t stay on the ground if you do. The resentful corpses sometimes swarm the line and attack anyone who gets too close.”

“I will be careful,” Lan Zhan lied.

“Okay, good luck?” Cho Muye offered before licking his lips and hurrying back the way he came.

Which left Lan Zhan to check for a few more of the round markers before returning to this spot and heading inwards to see if he could find where Wei Ying had gone all those years ago. He certainly couldn’t have gone to the same place, but perhaps Lan Zhan could find some clue of how he’d disappeared.

Anything that might give him a chance of finding Wei Ying again was worth investigating, no matter what the danger might be.

#

In the Demon Realm:

Luo Binghe, staring into the mirror with a thunderous scowl: He better not hurt our boy.

SQQ: …

LBH: Shizun, what are you seeing that I’m not?

SQQ: …

LBH: Shizun?

SQQ: It’s rather striking, isn’t it? The color schemes. White and pale blue. Not as good as pale green of course but not bad. Possibly acceptable.

LBH: …Shizun? What, what?

LBH stares at the mirror for a long while before standing very, very straight with very wide eyes

LBH: Shizun! He’s just like you! Scholar, musician, incredible warrior.

SQQ: White and blue versus black and red. Also completely incapable of using his words, especially if he has something emotionally important to say.

LBH: *splutters into a laugh* Oh, Shizun. All of our kids follow our pattern, don’t they? Each generation finds their opposite and then latches on.

SQQ: Exactly. Though you’re quite right about one thing. He’d better not hurt Wei Ying, or he’ll regret it.

LBH laughs as he hugs SQQ, both of them watching Lan Zhan set his jaw and forge into the Burial Mounds with his sword drawn, each carefully not commenting on just how little they can do to help their potential great-grandson-in-law to survive the dangers of the barrier around their old home.

 

9. Quiet Inventory

“What are you doing?”

Wen Qing, no Wei Qing’s snappish question made Wei Ying frown. He stared at the stacks of robes he’d been sorting through, then stared at her for a long moment. The scent of sandalwood filled his nose, even after so long.

Her annoyance was a bit… odd.

Given that he’d been doing exactly what needed to be done.

“Making sure we have enough robes for everyone,” Wei Ying said. “Why?”

She huffed and flung a hand out towards the rest of their people who were doing more or less exactly what they should be, from Uncle Fourth and Cousin Nine making lists of food they needed versus food they’d found growing on three peaks surveyed so far to Popo who was mending and A-Yuan who was busy running around like the little kid he was.

“There are things that need to be done,” Wei Qing exclaimed. “Important things. And this is what you choose to work on?”

Wei Ying tilted his head to the side, mouth slowly opening as he considered her rising stress. Popo’s Heart’s Ease tea helped a lot. So much. He could still feel the stuff in him, soothing all the rough edges and helping him be calm, focused, unstressed.

Only two people got more than one measured cup of Heart’s Ease: Wei Ying and Wei Qing.

It’d been obvious the first moment he met her that Wei Qing carried entirely too much stress around. Like, all the time. She all but vibrated with the stress of her position among the Wen. What had always surprised him, before the world fell apart, was that she wasn’t a bigger mess.

He’d commented once to Nie Huaisang that Wen Qing was one of those people who thrived the more stress they had to deal with.

“Like you?” Nie Huaisang had countered, sending Wei Ying into an explosion of protests and wailing that turned into a joke.

But it was stress driving Wei Qing now, wasn’t it? Not anger at him or worry about how he was doing things. She was like a new member of the sect who hadn’t figured out the patterns of life in her new home yet.

Which, frankly, was exactly accurate. This was a brand-new sect, and Wei Qing had never been involved in running one before.

“This is what I should be doing,” Wei Ying said. “No, seriously. A-Qing,” he went as red saying it as Wei Qing went hearing it. “I was First Disciple of the Jiang. You don’t honestly think that Uncle Fengmian or Madame Yu kept the inventory up to date, do you? The only things I didn’t do were bookkeeping, since that was Shijie’s job, negotiating new trade deals, which was Jiang Cheng’s, and setting up the night hunt schedule.”

Which had always been Madame Yu’s territory that she fiercely defended against anyone and everyone to the point that Wei Ying had barely even known what was coming up before he was chased out the door by purple lightning and shouting. Most everyone was the same, even Jiang Cheng.

You did not question the night hunt schedule, lest you find yourself on the wrong end of Zidian’s bite.

“Wait,” Wei Qing said slowly, “you did… all of the sect leader and furen duties?”

“Pretty much, though never by myself before,” Wei Ying confirmed as he finished his count and settled the robes back in place on their shelf. “The three of us handled it all. Shijie was the one who handled most of the actual social obligations. You know, smile, tea, polite conversation, but I met everyone who came in, made sure that they were there legitimately, did the first and last contact thing.”

Wei Qing stared at him sidelong, grumbling under her breath as if that made no sense. Fair. In any other sect it wouldn’t make sense, but the Jiang had been a mess, so it was what it was.

“Seriously,” Wei Ying said. “The old First Disciple retired because his granddaughter had triplets.”

“Oh, no,” Wei Qing said, shuddering. “That poor woman.”

“I know,” Wei Ying agreed. He laughed. “Those little girls were so lively, though. All healthy, mostly because their great-grandfather gave her spiritual energy every day from the moment they all realized that it was triplets. So, he retired. I took over. He’d been doing almost all the ruling for a long while. Treaties and daily management and working with the people in town. Madame Yu had some… odd… ideas of what a Sect Leader should and should not do.”

“Thought it all should come to her?” Wei Qing asked. She’d relaxed a little bit, not much, but enough to lean against the wall as Wei Ying kept working on inventorying the robes.

He snorted. “No. He was supposed to be regal and commanding and deal with other sect leaders and do not much else. Uncle Fengmian certainly didn’t mind. He hated the day-to-day work, so it settled down to the First Disciple. Once I took over, most of the time people didn’t even bother going to Uncle Fengmian for decisions. They’d come to me, Shijie or Jiang Cheng and we’d present it as a done deal in the evening.”

And hadn’t Nie Huaisang goggled at them during the lectures when they admitted it one night while drunk.

None of the other sects worked that way. Not one. Every other sect leader kept a firm, inescapable rein on what happened in their sect. The sect leader might not make every tiny decision, but Nie Mingjue knew what was going on with clothing supplies, food merchants, trade deals, visitors in and out. All that work was a big part of what Nie Huaisang loathed and tried to avoid, you know, along with saber training.

It was one of the things that Wei Ying intended to do here, mostly because they might be hidden at the moment but eventually someone was going to come hunting for them and figure out how to get in. If a tiny little kid could do it accidentally, a full-grown adult with enough stubbornness, or maybe enough rage, would figure it out, too.

“So, yeah, I’m doing my actual job as sect leader right now,” Wei Ying said as he moved from the stacks of finished robes to the bundles of fabric neatly stacked and wrapped in remarkably well-preserved oil-cloth. Yards and yards and yards of it, almost all of it green and white.

“Really.” Wei Qing frowned.

“Mhm,” Wei Ying confirmed, though he did frown at her a bit as he worked. “Shelter, which we’ve got in the buildings. I’ve set Cousin Nine to going through the new people to see who knows how to build and repair houses. Food, which is Uncle Fourth. He’s having a great time surveying all the peaks with Wei Ning now that he can walk around a bit. So many lovely potatoes.”

He sighed happily and then grinned at the way Wei Qing rolled her eyes.

“You’re handling making sure everyone’s healthy,” Wei Ying continued, setting aside a length of really lovely black silk with a subtle bamboo pattern woven into it so that Popo could make him more robes. “One of the new guys is working with his brother on water supply, making sure that it’s pure and going to stay that way. I do still need to find someone who can do accounting, but if need be, I can train someone in that. And I’ll need to check the wards later. Defenses. Weapons. Set up a training program for the kids. You know. Regular sect stuff.”

Wei Qing blew out a breath before scrubbing her hands over her face. “You’re a better sect leader than Wen Ruohan.”

“Like that’s even hard,” Wei Ying laughed.

The spark of amused annoyance finally lit in her eyes as her lips twisted in an attempt not to smile. He pulled out a bolt of red silk with a lovely flame pattern woven into it which would be amazing for under-robes. And then one that was grey silk, thick and luscious with an all-over hex pattern woven into it.

Jiang Cheng would lose his mind over the fabric here. So beautifully woven, such amazingly even dyes in vivid colors. They could make so much money just selling small squares of the silk as scarves.

If being seen wouldn’t get them all killed.

“Xian-gege!” A-Yuan shouted. “There’s a flashy thing flashing!”

Wei Ying blinked, staring towards where A-Yuan pointed. Earlier that day, after a breakfast that had made some of the new people cry in relief and others twitch for fear of it not being enough, Wei Ying had taken A-Yuan and the rest of the kids.

They’d marched around Qing Jing, and he’d shown them all exactly where the warning beacons were. They didn’t look like much. Just stone pillars a little taller than Wei Ying was with a big hunk of roughly shaped quartz crystal on top.

“See, this is what it looks like if there’s someone coming at us,” Wei Ying had said as he triggered the testing array that he’d found when he was a little kid. “If it’s not bright, then we’re safe. No one is coming. But if any of the beacons ever light up, you need to yell and tell me so that I can go thump whoever’s coming in.”

The testing array was just a flame-shaped mark carved into the side of the pillar, but when Wei Ying had touched it as a child and now as an adult, the quartz crystal had blazed with light.

Just like it blazed now.

“Someone’s trying to get in,” Wei Ying said, shock and confusion making his voice go all thready. “Wait. Someone’s trying to get in!”

Wei Ying tossed the clipboard at Wei Qing who was as white as the uniforms and shaking just like Popo and Uncle Fourth and Yao Lixin and most everyone including A-Yuan.

“Get everyone to Bai Zhan, Wei Qing!” Wei Ying yelled as he ran for the rainbow bridge. “Someone’s at the border! I’ll take care of it, but the weapons are at Bai Zhan!”

“Go!” Wei Qing shouted back as everyone bolted after him.

They waited for Wei Ying to lance the bridge down towards Yiling in a bright red swathe of power that looked a thousand times stronger than it had when he saved the others. The moment he stepped off, the rainbow bridge went rainbows again, swirling back up into the sky and to the distant Bai Zhan peak where everyone could arm themselves and be safe.

“All right,” Wei Ying said as he twirled Chenqing. “Let’s see who it is.”

If it was Jin Zixun, Wei Ying was totally letting the fierce corpses that defended the border zone eat him. He was. He’d just stand there and…

Yeah, no. He couldn’t do that.

If only he’d had Subian, and a core of course, Wei Ying could’ve flown. Without Subian, all Wei Ying could do was run through the ashy dead forests towards the sounds of battle. There were no screams of terror or howls of anguish, just the lightning-fast whistle of a blade and the sound of fierce corpses growling.

He paused at the edge of the narrow cleft in the rocks where whoever it was had foolishly retreated.

And then he saw Bichen.

“Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying yelled.

No answer, just more frantic slashing and louder growls.

Wei Ying lifted Chenqing and played hard at the fierce corpses. They’d always been horrible to dissuade. When he was little and encountered one during his explorations, he’d always run like the wind back to the safety of his peak or one of the safe paths. After he healed up and headed back out of the Burial Mounds, he’d skirted around them and used the tricks he’d learned while healing.

Let him go right now! Wei Ying played at them with all his determination and ferocity.

The growling stopped.

The corpses shuffled back out of the cleft in the rocks.

Wei Ying sent the corpses shambling back towards Yiling where they could watch for Jin golds and Nie sabers. Much better job for them to be doing than attacking Lan Zhan.

Then he dashed into the cleft in the rock towards Lan Zhan.

Blood everywhere. Lan Zhan’s white robes were soaked with his blood. He had one arm wrapped around his belly. In the time it took to send the corpses away, Lan Zhan had collapsed to the blood-soaked earth.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no!” Wei Ying said as he scrambled for the qiankun pouch full of bandages and bits of fabric that he’d stuffed into one sleeve while over on Qian Cao. “Hold on, Lan Zhan. Let me get this wrapped up and I’ll get you out of here.”

“Wei Ying…” Lan Zhan whispered, tears in his eyes as Bichen dropped out of his nerveless hand. “Go. They will… come back.”

“No, they absolutely will not,” Wei Ying said. “Hold your strength, Lan Zhan. Trust me. It’s okay.”

So many bites. Cuts along his legs from lopping off corpse limbs. His stomach had been torn open. There were bites on Lan Zhan’s neck that were far too close to his jugular. Just… so much blood, all of it spilling away.

Wei Ying scooped up Bichen, cutting his fingers on it accidentally as he sheathed it. Another couple of wads of fabric against Lan Zhan’s poor belly, mingling his blood with Lan Zhan’s blood in a horrible, awful mess, then Wei Ying shuddered.

“Okay, there’s a safe place, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying said. “I have to carry you to get there. Just hold on and you’ll be all right.”

“Mm.”

Lan Zhan’s little nod was so very distant, so blurry-eyed and pale-faced, that Wei Ying threw caution to the winds and picked him up immediately despite the blood and Lan Zhan’s pale face and the way Lan Zhan gasped and then went totally limp in his arms.

Oh, damn but he wished he still had his core! Just a little bit of qi to feed Lan Zhan, something to help the bleeding stop, to keep his precious heart beating…

Oh, please, just something…

No. It didn’t matter. He had to get Lan Zhan to safety so that was what he was going to do, no matter what.

Wei Ying took a deep breath and then hurried back towards the safe zone and the nearest path. There had to be a way to contact Wei Qing. He just… had to create it.

Fast.

#

In the Demon Realm:

Luo Binghe, flinging bandages and supplies towards Shen Qingqiu: We’ll need those. And the blood replenishers. And water, need some water. Shizun! We have to hurry.

SQQ, staring at the mirror, lips thin and face pale: We can’t.

LBH: …Shizun!

SQQ: You know we can’t, Binghe. We can’t go back. We’ll break the world.

LBH, shaking as tears well up: …Shizun, he’s going to lose the love of his life. We have to help somehow.

SQQ: The only tie we have is the blood worms, Binghe. He’s got your blood. Your demonic cultivation. That’s… it’s all that’s left.

LBH, blowing out a breath and then coming to kneel at SQQ’s feet: Right. I, yes, you’re right. Let me, let me focus. Maybe I can nudge them? No, not maybe. I can. I will. Our great-grandson is not going to lose his love just when they’ve been reunited.

As LBH bows his head and leans into SQQ’s lap, SQQ watches the mirror and waits, tension all through his fingers gently combing through LBH’s hair.

 

10. Healing Poultice

Wei Qing pressed her lips together as she made sure that all the kids were securely hidden away on Ling You Peak. The cuddlier animals had promptly descended to snuggle with the kids so that they wouldn’t cry. The more dangerous ones had started patrolling the mountain as if they actually understood what was happening.

Like they were people, not animals. Or maybe the sort of people who weren’t actually humans? No, that was insane. Demons weren’t people. They were warped monsters created by resentful energy. Everything Uncle Ruohan had done with resentful energy showed that the old stories of a world full of “demons” existing alongside the normal world just couldn’t be true.

Even if it seemed like with the ancient Twisted-Fang Bi-Viper lay coiled at the edge of the rainbow bridge, its four unblinking eyes focused far away.

Towards where Wei Wuxian had gone to confront whoever it was.

“A-Jie,” A-Ning said softly, appearing from the other side of the Bi-Viper with a distant expression and a determined look despite still being so weak that she had to catch his elbows to keep him from falling down after he took four steps. “A-Jie, we need to help him.”

“We don’t know who’s come after us, A-Ning,” Wei Qing said as she made him sit down on the bench nearest the rainbow bridge. She immediately straightened so that she could go back to the bridge and fret.

“No, A-Jie,” A-Ning said, catching her wrist. “Listen. Can’t you hear it? He’s calling for help. Screaming for it. He needs our help. Right now.”

Any other time, any other place, Wei Qing would have said that it was another of A-Ning’s flights of fancy. He’d always been remarkably sensitive, aware to the slightest shifts of qi and of temperament, but instead of making him into the perfect warrior as Uncle Ruohan had wanted, it had left A-Ning open to… so much damage.

Particularly from Uncle Ruohan.

But standing on Ling You Peak with a perfectly tamed Bi-Viper as big as a house while surrounded by spiritual boars, spiritual eagles, and a particularly intent black and white cat who might or might not be a spiritual beast, Wei Qing had to admit that…

“…Bleeding,” Wei Qing whispered. “He can’t stop the bleeding.”

The smell of blood lingered in the back of Wei Qing’s throat. It shouldn’t. There was no blood, none at all. And yet she could smell it, feel it coating her hands, hear the terrible sound of drops of blood impacting against flagstones.

A-Ning nodded. “He needs help, A-Jie. Right now.”

Wei Qing, hands shaking and lips pressed into a thin line with how very much she hated this illogical feeling building inside of her, nodded. She checked her qiankun pouches full of medical supplies. Then looked up at the Bi-Viper.

“Will you carry me to him?” Wei Qing asked. “I have to get him back to Qian Cao as fast as possible and none of us have swords we can fly on.”

The enormous Bi-Viper stared at her with its four unblinking eyes before gravely nodding once. Wei Qing sucked in a sharp breath as it lowered its head so that she could climb on. She’d never been afraid of snakes, but her whole body shuddered as she climbed on top of the Bi-Viper’s massive head.

“Tell the others,” Wei Qing ordered. “Get me a support team for massive blood loss and… traumatic fierce corpse bites. Also disembowelment.”

She shouldn’t know what the injuries were. She shouldn’t. Wei Qing didn’t even know that there were injuries to be dealt with.

But she still knew.

And that was a thing that would have to be dealt with later, after the crisis was over. All her disbelief, her worry and fear, got shoved down deep inside her where she put her emotions whenever she had to go into surgery. Later. She would deal with all the weirdness later.

Much later, if she had her way.

“We will,” A-Ning promised as the cat stood and swished its tail while flicking its whiskers at Wei Qing as if ordering her to get going. “Hurry.”

The rainbow bridge went blood red when they moved between the pillars. It shouldn’t do that. None of the old legends said that the rainbow bridge would go anywhere but to the other peaks, but Wei Wuxian had been Wei Wuxian at it, and now it did more than it had before.

Including arching across the sky and slamming down beyond Qing Jing where Wei Wuxian had disappeared.

Riding the Bi-Viper was nothing like riding a horse. Or a sword. Its body undulated under Wei Qing but the cobra-like flaps on the side of its head kept her from falling off even as they flowed onto the bridge so fast that she greyed out for a moment.

“Come on, come one. Just a little farther, Lan Zhan. We can do this. I know we can. Don’t give up on me. We’ll make it. I know we will.”

She heard Wei Wuxian before she saw him. If she hadn’t been worried before, she definitely was now. That was the same voice he’d used when he convinced her to cut out his golden core and transplant it into Jiang Wanyin.

Seeing him was worse.

Covered in blood from his chin down to his toes, staggering, eyes wild as he struggled towards Qing Jing with…

Oh. Of course. Lan Wangji in his arms.

“How do you get into these situations every single time?” Wei Qing snapped at Wei Wuxian as she flung herself off the Bi-Viper’s head straight at Wei Wuxian and the horrifying amount of blood dripping off Lan Wangji.

“W-Wei Qing?” Wei Wuxian asked.

For a long, blank moment, he just stared like he couldn’t believe that she was actually there. Then he gasped and staggered towards her instead of dropping to the ground so that she could properly bandage all of Lan Wangji’s many, many wounds.

“Set him down, you idiot!” Wei Qing snapped at him. “I swear, I’m going to put you through the most detailed emergency medical treatment class the world has ever seen just so you stop doing this!”

Wei Wuxian sobbed a laugh, but he stopped, dropped to his knees and then helped Wei Qing wrap more bandages on top of the ones already soaked through. It took her a moment to realize that some of the blood on the bandages was coming from Wei Wuxian, not from Lan Wangji.

“Give me your hand,” Wei Qing snarled as she grabbed his wrist and then shoved a bandage against the nasty sword wound he’d somehow gotten. “Stop confusing things with your blood. Use your damned flute and put him in stasis like you did with A-Ning.”

Amazingly, Wei Wuxian opened his mouth to protest. A moment later, he shut it and did as she ordered. This time, she could see how the resentful energy he called up sealed all the wounds. It stabilized the horrible gash across Lan Wangji’s belly. And then as black lines moved up Lan Wangji’s throat and wrists, it pushed Lan Wangji into that death-like stasis that had saved A-Ning’s life.

“Good,” Wei Qing said once Wei Wuxian lowered his blood-stained flute. “All right. That’s better. We can get him there now. Do you need the talismans, too? I didn’t bring any talisman paper.”

“No,” Wei Wuxian said, shivering in visible shock. “No, he’s… he’s not as bad off as A-Ning was. Just… it’s bad. Very bad. But his soul hasn’t started to leave. It’s still firmly in his body.”

“Excellent,” Wei Qing said. “We’ll keep it that way. Once we’re done with surgery I’m going to scold you for going off on your own without a single damned weapon or any way to call for help. Stupid thing for you do to. What would you have done if I hadn’t come to help?”

Wei Wuxian nodded, laughing through his tears. They very carefully got Lan Wangji up onto the Bi-Viper’s massive head, which was still horribly unnatural and utterly terrifying, not that Wei Wuxian seemed to notice it.

Too focused on Lan Wangji. As always.

Then they rode the Bi-Viper all the way up to Qian Cao.

It was, surprisingly, nearly as fast as it would’ve been if they could have ridden on swords. The Bi-Viper was massive enough that it had to take the strangely well-tended paths, but those paths were remarkably direct on Qian Cao, unlike the gracefully meandering paths on Qing Jing.

“Can we, can we save him?” Wei Wuxian asked as they carefully lowered Lan Wangji into the waiting trauma team’s arms.

“We can,” Wei Qing said. She frowned at the way Wei Wuxian bit his lip. “Don’t. I mean it. We’ve got resources here that no one else in the world can come close to. I’m one of the best surgeons alive and his injuries are stabilized. We can stitch him up without worrying about blood loss or shock.”

“And we have Heart’s Ease,” Popo said, hurrying in with an enormous armful of the stuff. “There’s an old poultice that I remember that should make a very big difference for him. Just need to get three more herbs and I’ll be right back.”

Popo dashed off again, her bun bobbing as she ran like she never did unless she was chasing A-Yuan. Good. Whatever the poultice might be, it would almost certainly not hurt. Popo had forgotten more medicine in her life than Wei Qing had managed to learn.

Wei Qing bullied Wei Wuxian into washing the blood off. She bound his hand with a little of the Heart’s Ease crushed onto the bandage. Then she and her team set to work stitching Lan Wangji back together.

Wei Wuxian hovered around the edges of the surgical theatre, fretting the whole time. He kept rubbing at the cut on his hand, not hard enough to rip open the stitches that one of the trauma team had given him but enough to make Wei Qing want to shout at him.

Eventually and so soon that it felt like no time had passed despite Wei Qing’s blooming exhaustion, everything was done.

“All right,” Wei Qing said as she washed her hands for the final time. “We’ve repaired all the damage. We’ve stitched everything that needs stitching. All the wounds were cleaned, and all the work has been triple-checked. We’re ready to gently remove the stasis and remove the resentful energy.”

“You’re sure?” Wei Wuxian asked like the fretful idiot that he was.

“I wouldn’t say it if I weren’t sure,” Wei Qing snapped at him.

“But what about the poultice?” Wei Wuxian asked.

“That’s after we’re sure there’s no more need for surgery,” Popo replied from the doorway where she had a small bowl holding a poultice that quite literally glimmered with qi. “It’s supposed to be placed over the patient’s heart and wrapped with bandages to hold it in place.”

Wei Qing sighed. “As long as we’re not exposing open wounds to it.”

Popo snorted a laugh and shook her head. Then she laughed in earnest when Wei Wuxian hesitantly poked a finger into the poultice.

“It stings!” Wei Wuxian squawked.

“Your core is gone,” Popo said, shooing him towards Lan Wangji’s side. “Of course it stings. It’s designed to fortify a wounded cultivator’s core and help them heal faster. Think of it as the Heart’s Ease tea specifically for the core.”

Wei Wuxian’s eyebrows went up at that, but he finally did as Wei Qing had ordered.

Chenqing sang sweet and desperately hopefully as Wei Wuxian ever so delicately pulled the resentful energy out of Lan Wangji’s body. Every meridian and channel emptied with a trill that ached with suppressed love. Wei Qing nodded for each one. By the time Wei Wuxian finished with the resentful energy, Lan Wangji’s qi circulated in a pure blue gleam that danced on his skin despite the stasis array holding his life in abeyance.

When she nodded, Wei Wuxian slowly removed the stasis array, too. Not as slowly. There was such a thing as too slow when it came to restarting a person’s heart, lungs and brain. But slow enough that Lan Wangji subsided into a deep slumber instead of starting awake and flailing against Wei Qing’s restraining hand.

“Good,” Wei Qing said as she watched Lan Wangji’s blood floor, his qi circulate and his heart beat in a slow, steady rhythm. “Excellent. No bleeding. His body is already responding perfectly. The bites and surgical sites are scabbing over already.”

Surprisingly quickly, actually. Wei Qing had expected a bit more bleeding, especially in the gut wound, but even that seemed to seal right up as if his flesh itself wanted to make the wounds go away.

“The qi here is very powerful,” Wei Qing murmured.

“This will help, too,” Popo said. “Get the bandages ready, A-Qing.”

Popo’s poultice didn’t spread when she scooped it out onto Lan Wangji’s chest. She had to smooth it down, patting the edges to get an even layer that shimmered and then began to pulse in time with Lan Wangji’s heartbeat.

“It’ll help?” Wei Wuxian asked, hugging his flute like a scared child would hug their doll in a thunderstorm.

“It already is,” Wei Qing said as they carefully shifted Lan Wangji so that they could bandage the poultice in place. “His color’s improving. This is… Popo, this is practically like an army of people supplying him qi.”

“I know,” Popo said with her proudest, smuggest smile. “The old stories claimed that it could help a cultivator heal from even the most dangerous of wounds. There’s one story that claimed that it had healed a severed spinal cord, though the story was very clear that it was applied almost immediately after the injury.”

“Write all of that down,” Wei Qing ordered as she double-checked Lan Wangji. “Definitely write it all down, Popo. He’ll probably wake up in the morning and be able to walk a few steps.”

Wei Wuxian collapsed to his knees, tears flowing down his cheeks. Wei Qing let the others, especially Popo, comfort him. She focused on cleaning Lan Wangji up, on getting into one of the recovery rooms, on making sure that her whole team ate and drank something.

Wei Qing took a bit of time to scrub the blood off her body, to switch into clean clothes that didn’t smell of antiseptic and blood while Popo gently bullied Wei Wuxian into cleaning up.

Then she went back to Qing Jing to sit on the porch of Wei Wuxian’s home because the thought of going back to her own bed made her want to shriek.

A shichen or so later, after darkness fell and the stars came out overhead in a river of brilliance that seemed even grander than she’d ever seen, Wei Wuxian plopped down next to her on the bench.

“Thank you,” Wei Wuxian whispered.

“Of course,” Wei Qing murmured.

She took his hand and held it until Wei Wuxian slowly tipped sideways and laid his head in her lap to cry silently. Wei Qing brushed her fingers through his hair and just breathed in the crisp, cool air.

#

In the Demon Realm:

Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe lay in a tangle together, both utterly exhausted.

Mobei-Jun peeks in without Shang Qinghua on his heels. He sighs and shakes his head at the two of them before carefully easing them fully onto their bed and covering them with a blanket.

He looks through the mirror at Lan Wangji who to his expert eye to be healing with the rapidity that comes from fully energized Blood Worms. MBJ nods approvingly.

When he switches the mirror to WWX, he almost snorts audibly to find WWX sleeping in a horribly awkward position as his adopted sister watches over him. The glance over his shoulder at LBH speaks volumes about how un-surprising that is.

Then he hesitates before shifting the mirror to Ling You Peak where the disguised Zhuzhi-Lang lays curled around A-Yuan and the other kids.

He’d had some doubts about Zhuzhi-Lang’s plan to stay in the human realm in his demon snake form, but apparently it had worked out well enough for him.

Mobei-Jun nods and leaves the room silently.

The mirror shifts back to WWX sleeping with WQ on the porch of SQQ’s former home, just as LBH used to do with SQQ in the days before everything fell apart for them.

 

11. Green Robes

Lan Zhan didn’t wake up at mao shi. That was probably a good thing given that Wei Ying didn’t manage to get to bed until the middle of yin shi, though he had, according to Wei Qing, fallen asleep on her lap like an idiot for a full shichen and a half.

His neck hurt enough when he stumbled to his bed for him to believe it.

When Wei Ying woke up properly at wu shi, mostly because A-Yuan climbed into bed with him and started bouncing on his full bladder to get up and eat and play, Lan Zhan hadn’t woken. He’d stirred, shifting a hand and sighing before falling back asleep.

At shen shi, in the middle of the afternoon when A-Yuan was carried off for a nap by Popo, Lan Zhan woke up enough to drink a little broth and stare blearily at Wei Ying. He didn’t say anything. If anything, Wei Ying would’ve said that he was still mostly asleep.

The smell of Popo’s poultice still filled the recovery room as it pulsed underneath the bandages around Lan Zhan’s chest. It was such an odd smell, like the scent of wet earth after a rainstorm in spring, like crisp, ripe apples, like mint and cinnamon and candied oranges sliced so thin you could see through them.

Its glow shouldn’t be comforting. Not really. Wei Ying sat next to Lan Zhan on one of the horrible stools with tears dripping down his cheeks. Lan Zhan was alive. Alive despite his injuries, alive and safe and right there with Wei Ying, even if he was asleep.

Wei Qing and Snake-gege, the ancient bi-viper that was so, so smart and so, so helpful, and the poultice all had saved Lan Zhan. Maybe Wei Ying had helped a little bit, too. Maybe, though Wei Ying thought he’d mostly just bled all over Lan Zhan when he should’ve been keeping Lan Zhan from bleeding.

All that mattered was that Lan Zhan lay there breathing and healing while Wei Ying watched over him. Wei Qing chased him out so that he wouldn’t wake Lan Zhan up again.

They managed to get Lan Zhan to stir enough to drink more broth just before you shi. The sleep that Lan Zhan fell into after that was so very normal that even Wei Qing teared up a little bit. Just for a moment, but the tear was there on her eyelashes. Wei Ying saw it.

He didn’t get to stay at Lan Zhan’s bedside. A-Yuan found him and dragged him off for a bath, dinner, another bath because a good half of A-Yuan’s food went on him instead of into him, and then A-Yuan wheedled Wei Ying into telling him a long, looping story for bedtime.

Wei Ying ended up falling asleep with A-Yuan.

No one woke him up or made him go back to his own bed so when Wei Qing came dashing in with the news that Lan Zhan had truly and properly woken up at, oh ugh, mao shi on the second day, she couldn’t find him.

“Wei Wuxian!” Wei Qing roared loudly enough to scare both Wei Ying and A-Yuan right out of A-Yuan’s surprisingly comfy little bed.

“Here!” Wei Ying yelped as he tossed a robe over A-Yuan’s head in an effort to make it seem like he’d been helping get A-Yuan up instead of sleeping where he really shouldn’t have.

The robe was upside down and inside out so yeah, Wei Qing glared at him, nostrils flaring, instead of giving him a scrap of praise.

“He’s awake,” Wei Qing said.

“L-Lan Zhan…?” Wei Ying asked, giving up on A-Yuan’s robe.

“He’s awake and asking for you,” Wei Qing repeated. “There’s robes for him to wear in the other room. Take them to him. I’ll… help A-Yuan get dressed. What in the world is wrong with that robe?”

She muttered the last bit which set A-Yuan into a giggle fit, not that Wei Ying stayed to explain. Wei Ying grabbed the robes and ran for the bridge which flared rainbow bright and beautiful under his running feet. Popo smiled at Wei Ying as he ran past, pointing him to the treatment room Lan Zhan had been placed in.

The complex, ever-changing smell of the Heart’s Ease poultice was gone, replaced with the scent of tea and really plain congee with no spice at all.

“Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying asked as he skidded to a stop, impacting the door frame with a thump that Wei Ying barely noticed in his desperation to see Lan Zhan.

Who was sitting up in bed, bandages still wrapped around his belly, arms, legs and neck, but alive. Oh, so alive. Lan Zhan’s guan was gone, set to the side, and his ribbon was there, too, folded neatly.

All of his white and blue clothes lay in hacked bloody chunks in a bucket across the room, waiting for Lan Zhan to decide what he wanted done with their remnants.

A tray with, yes, tea and plain congee sat over Lan Zhan’s bandaged legs. The tea was half gone. The congee mostly. Lan Zhan had eaten. He’d woken up and eaten…!

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan said, frowning at him. “Where…?”

Wei Ying grinned instead of bursting into tears like an idiot as he came in and offered the stack of ridiculous white and green gauzy clothes he’d refused to wear. “The safe place I told you about. I don’t know if you remember it or not, but this is the place I found when I was a kid. And the place that I healed up in after Wen Chao threw me into the Burial Mounds before the war. It’s safe. And, well, I know the clothes aren’t blue, but they are mostly white with plenty of layers. I think it’ll fit you fairly well.”

Lan Zhan blinked three times before he took the robes. His breath caught as he ran a hand over the top robe.

“They’re too fine,” Lan Zhan said, frowning.

“No one else is wearing them and honestly, I really do think they’re the right size for you,” Wei Ying said. “Whoever they were made for was quite tall, if a bit more slender at the shoulder than you. It should work for the moment.”

Lan Zhan huffed, fingers tracing the delicate bamboo embroidery on the topmost pale green robe. “Wei Ying. What happened?”

“Well, you tried to get through the barrier,” Wei Ying said, scooping the tray off and putting it outside for someone to take away and wash. “There’s so much here, Lan Zhan. Wear the robes, at least for now. It’ll be easier to explain if I can show you.”

He probably deserved that long, hard look. Whatever Lan Zhan saw in Wei Ying’s face, he eventually nodded and allowed Wei Ying to help him into the clothes. It wasn’t the full ten layers, thank goodness. Lan Zhan would’ve fallen asleep halfway through if it’d been all of that.

Just pristine white underthings plus a deliciously soft white underrobe that got covered by three layers of green robes, all pale and delicate and beautiful. Lan Zhan frowned at them, but he didn’t seem displeased by them.

“These are sect leader robes,” Lan Zhan commented once Wei Ying delicately tied the belt around his poor abused stomach.

“Probably,” Wei Ying agreed with a little nod. “I certainly wasn’t going to wear them, though, so you might as well. They’re almost Lan in their fineness. You should be grateful that I didn’t get the embroidered white gauze layers for you. Those are ridiculous.”

“Wei Ying.” Lan Zhan’s look was fondly scolding until he realized that Wei Ying wasn’t joking.

“You’ll see,” Wei Ying promised. “Come on. Lean on me. We’ll take it in easy stages.”

“I feel… surprisingly good,” Lan Zhan admitted as he actually allowed Wei Ying to help him to his feet.

“Wei Qing is a genius of a surgeon and Popo had this amazing poultice that apparently did you a world of good,” Wei Ying said only to wince when Lan Zhan speared him with a sharp look at the “Wei” before A-Qing’s name.

Lan Zhan didn’t ask. Wei Ying didn’t explain. Instead they slowly shuffled out of the recovery room into the hallway which made Lan Zhan’s breath catch. The recovery room hadn’t been anything special, just a white-walled room that smelled of antiseptic with a comfortable bed for Lan Zhan to sleep on.

The hallway was different, though. The closest to it was the Lan infirmary and that was much more austere than Qian Cao. There was no carpet, of course, but the walls were painted with a lovely warm gold paint that seemed exactly the shade of rice just as it got ripe. Every other wall between the recovery room doors was a soothing mural done in such a fine hand that the Emperor himself would’ve been jealous.

“Just wait until we’re outside,” Wei Ying said when Lan Zhan looked sidelong at him. “I mean it. It’s much more believable when you see it.”

Outside, thankfully, the sun had come up. All twelve peaks gleamed in the early morning light. Lan Zhan’s legs went wobbly but there was a bench right there so Wei Ying eased him down onto it and let him stare for as long as he wanted.

“…Wei Ying?” Lan Zhan whispered eventually; eyes shockingly wide for how little his face normally changed.

“Okay,” Wei Ying said, humming thoughtfully. “So, I don’t know that I agree with Wei Qing, but she’s convinced that this is Cang Qiong. There are twelve peaks. Each of the peaks have distinct buildings and functions. And it is, actually, sealed off from the world, but I mean, how reasonable is it that I managed to somehow magically find the way into the lost location of the mightiest sect? I mean, me? That’s just not, well, I suppose I do have a talent for impossible things happening…”

Wei Ying paused and then groaned as he let his head thump back against the wall behind them. The awed look faded into Lan Zhan’s tiny smile wrinkle at the corner of his eyes that he always got when he was deeply amused by something Wei Ying did.

“Fine,” Wei Ying complained with a little huff of annoyance. “I just convinced myself. This is Cang Qiong. We’re on the medical peak Qian Cao. Most of us are living on Qing Jing because it’s very peaceful and it’s my favorite of all the peaks. Plus there’s the Great Library which I still haven’t had a chance to delve into yet. So unfair. All those books and I keep getting distracted by food and hugging A-Yuan and sleep. Just not right.”

Lan Zhan huffed a little laugh, hand on his belly against what had to be a stab of pain. Stomach injuries were no joke on the pain. Wei Ying knew that far too well.

“How…?”

“Well, I was chased by dogs,” Wei Ying started, explaining the whole thing for what felt like the millionth time. The kids kept asking for the whole story, so he’d gotten a lot of practice with the story. “I would’ve stayed except I was so… so lonely, Lan Zhan. I planned to slip out, talk to people maybe get some treats, but Uncle Fengmian found me almost instantly, so I never got back here. You know, until Wen Chao threw me in.”

The Bi-Viper slithered up to flick its tongue out at Wei Ying and then at Lan Zhan who sat very, very still indeed.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Wei Ying said, patting the Bi-Viper’s nose fondly. “This guy isn’t going to hurt us. Someone must’ve done the best beast taming techniques on him or something because he’s very nice. Shy, gentle. He’s the reason that I’m not dead several times over. He protected me as a little kid and then got me here so that I could patch myself up after Wen Chao.”

“But… this is a demonic snake,” Lan Zhan said in such confusion that Wei Ying took his hand and gently squeezed his fingers.

“I know,” Wei Ying agreed. “All bi-vipers are demonic. Resentful at the very least. But this one isn’t. He’s… well, he’s very kind. I called him Snake-gege when I was little. He’s as smart as we are. He just can’t talk.”

The Bi-Viper perked up at “Snake-gege” which made Wei Ying grin at him. The little wiggle, well, little for him even though it was kind of like watching a mountain come alive and dance in front of you. His little wiggle was adorable.

“Xian-gege!” A-Yuan yelled as he came running up and then climbed right over Snake-gege without the slightest hesitation. “Is Rich-gege okay?”

“He’s still very, very weak and has lots of owies,” Wei Ying warned.

He caught A-Yuan in his arms and held him so that A-Yuan could reach a little hand out to just barely brush against Lan Zhan’s green-clad shoulder. The delicate silk didn’t even dimple, which made Lan Zhan’s eyes wrinkle at the corners again.

“Rich-gege feels better soon?” A-Yuan asked with the big sad eyes of doom.

“Mm,” Lan Zhan promised.

“Rich-gege comes home?” A-Yuan asked, twice as excited, bouncing in Wei Ying’s lap.

“If Qing-jie says so, yes,” Wei Ying promised. “If not, no. Qing-jie is in charge.”

“Mm!” A-Yuan agreed like that was the immutable law of the universe. “A-Yuan goes and asks!”

He kicked his way out of Wei Ying’s arms, just barely missing connecting with Wei Ying’s groin as he went. As Wei Ying wheezed, Snake-gege hissed softly, little huffing hisses that were so obviously laughter that Wei Ying stuck his tongue out at Snake-gege.

“Mean,” Wei Ying complained as he straightened back up.

“You… plan on staying?” Lan Zhan asked Wei Ying, one hand warm on Wei Ying’s back.

“Well, yeah,” Wei Ying said, sad and wry and missing the smell of lotuses, Shijie’s cooking, Jiang Cheng yelling as they chased each other up and down the piers. “I mean, I don’t have much of a choice. This place chose me years and years ago. The Wen don’t have anywhere else to go and they can be happy, healthy and free here. It’s the best choice for everyone.”

Other than Jiang Cheng. And Shijie. But maybe he could find a way to communicate with them. Or, maybe, once Lan Zhan healed up he could take a message to them.

“Mm,” Lan Zhan hummed, nodding. “I will stay, then.”

Wei Ying grinned. “Well, you’re stuck until you heal up, either way, Lan Zhan. I’m glad you’re here, though. There’s so much cool stuff I want to show you.”

Lan Zhan’s nod and tiny little eye-wrinkle of a smile set his heart to singing. And if it also set Snake-gege to hiss-laughing at them, well, that was fine. Snake-gege had been alone for a very long time, too. It was fine.

#

In the borderlands between Yiling and Cang Qiong:

Shang Qinghua frowns as he tracks Lan Wangji’s running battle against the fierce corpse defenders: Man, he’s really good. Really good. He almost made it through the defenses, my King.

MBJ: *frowns and stares at a broken chunk of wood*

SQH: What? What’s that? Oh. Oh shit. That’s a guqin! Shit, it’s really broken. I mean, what happened? Did someone bash a fierce corpse’s head in with it or what?

MBJ: *looks sad*

SQH: *sucks a sharp breath between his teeth* Oh no, is that Lan Wangji’s guqin? Oh, shit! That’s…

MBJ: *raises an eyebrow*

SQH: Huh. Well, I mean, I suppose we can always ask. The worst Cucumber can do is yell at us and say it’s impossible. He might just be able to fix it, though. Maybe. Possibly. Yikes.

SQH gathers up the broken bits and pieces of Wangji before MBJ gates them back to the demon realm, leaving no signs that they’d been there at all other than the missing guqin.

 

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