Reading Time: 103 Minutes

Title: Twin Patriarchs of Yiling
Author: MeyariMcFarland
Fandom: The Untamed
Genre: Drama, Family, Fantasy, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Kid!fic, Suspense
Relationship(s): Lan Wangji/Wei Ying, Lan Wangji/Original Character, Lan Wangji/Wei Ying/Original Character
Content Rating: R
Warnings: Major Character Death, Murder, War, Discussion-Incest, Discussion-Rape, Discussion-Child Sexual Abuse, Discussion-Child Sexual Trafficking, Violence-Graphic, Discussion-Violence Against Children
Beta: Chiara
Word Count: 98,830
Summary: After Mama and Baba died, Wei Ying thought he could take care of himself, but winter was coming, and the wind had gone cold. The feral dogs were getting bolder, and Wei Ying had nowhere to stay safe. He just… needed help. When the terrified scream rang out, Wei Ying didn’t hesitate. Even if he didn’t have help, he could maybe help someone else and that was almost as good. Turns out, yeah, it was as good, in ways that Wei Ying couldn’t have seen coming.
Artist: Silver Dragonfly

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9. Friend

Ying grinned as he raced Gang up the main street of Yiling towards the teahouse. They’d long since passed out all the black jade beads to everyone in Yiling. Well, everyone who had lived in Yiling for generations. The latest batch of new people were evenly spit between dock workers who sailed back home to Lotus Pier every couple of days and spies sent in by the Wen.

The spies were so painfully bad at spying. Wen Ruohan obviously didn’t have a clue how to be properly sneaky. Elder Entai thought they were especially pathetic. She complained about them every time the two of them came to town.

None of the spies had figured out that Ying and Gang were anything other than kids who lived in Yiling.

Seriously, they were convinced that Ying and Gang lived in Yiling. Itself. Like at one of the eight houses and farms. Which, really? How could they do that and still not be seen on a regular basis?

Such idiots. Completely aside from the effect of the wards on the unprotected spies minds, they were stupid. At least their stupidness and laziness kept Wen Ruohan from coming to Yiling himself. Ying wasn’t at all sure that the wards were strong enough yet to keep them all safe. Gang was pretty sure they could catch someone flung into the Burial Mounds, but he agreed with Ying that the wards around the town needed more work.

None of which mattered today.

Today was their official “act like kids” day, as decreed by General Kwan and Lan Yitian. The summer hadn’t gotten so hot that running around was punishment yet, so they were racing around town and goofing off and generally acting their age.

Despite the Lan in town. Ying hesitated outside of the teahouse.

“Ugh,” Gang complained at the Lan with a beard and his maybe fourteen-year-old fellow Lan who sat so politely next to him.

“Yeah,” Ying agreed. “Race you to the Cho farm!”

Ying dashed off, laughing at the way Gang squawked at him. Their play clothes were kind of worn down, patched a dozen places and mended in twice as many spots, but they were clean and comfy and decent enough despite the growth spurt he and Gang had had over the winter.

They probably looked like peasant kids, honestly. It made Ying grin and then howl with outrage as Gang caught his shoulder and then pushed past Ying. The two of them smacked their palms into the wall of the Cho barn at the same time.

“I beat you!” Ying tried to claim even though he knew he hadn’t.

“Oh, no you didn’t!” Gang huffed. “I beat you.”

“Tie.”

They both whirled, startled. A little Lan who was maybe eleven to their nine stood behind them. He was cute in his white and blue robes with the pristine ribbon around his forehead. Though he didn’t really make any expressions at all.

Ying tilted his head to the side. “Do you just not show emotions?”

“Obviously,” Gang said, frowning at Ying.

“Be nice,” Ying huffed at him. “You used to be that way until you started mirroring me all the time.”

“True,” Gang agreed. “But it’s still obvious.”

The little Lan blinked at them. His face didn’t show how startled he was. No, the startlement showed in the way his shoulders stiffened and the way his ears went red. Also in the way his breath picked up, flaring his nostrils.

“I’m Wei Ying,” Ying said, bouncing an approximation of a proper bow to the little Lan. “This is my twin Wei Gang. We live here. Are you visiting with your family?”

“…Mm.”

The little Lan didn’t introduce himself. For the longest time he stared at them while his ears burned in a blush and his heartbeat pounded at his throat and temple. Finally, the little Lan licked his lips and bowed very formally to the two of them.

“This one is Lan Zhan,” the little Lan said.

His voice was a little bit hoarse, as if he hadn’t spoken in a very long time. Ying frowned to Gang who scowled and nodded that he agreed. Lan Zhan was not well treated. Ying didn’t know why or how, but no kid should be that scared of introducing himself. And no kid’s voice should be so hoarse from disuse.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lan Zhan,” Ying said with his brightest smile. “We’ve been playing. Would you like to play with us, too?”

“The other kids are older than us so they’re always working on their apprenticeships,” Gang agreed.

“Or babies,” Ying said. “There’s two new babies in town but all they do is cry and eat and sleep. They’re boring.”

Lan Zhan blinked at them and nodded ever so slightly that he would like to play.

Unfortunately, Lan Zhan very clearly had no idea how to play. He didn’t know what tag was. Or how to race unless it was a very serious formal race. Wrestling was something so foreign to him that he recoiled when Gang explained it.

None of them had a proper stone ball so they couldn’t kick a ball around. They also didn’t have any kites to fly so that was out.

“Hide and seek?” Lan Zhan suggested.

“Mmm, not a good idea in Yiling,” Gang said with a grimace.

“Yeah, there’s too many scary things that can get you in Yiling,” Ying agreed as they meandered back through town towards the teahouse where Lan Zhan’s relatives were waiting. “I mean, if the mushrooms don’t get you, the snakes might. And there’s always the slime molds to be worried about.”

“Those are so nasty,” Gang agreed. “Cho Dahong has an old xiangqi set that he sometimes lets us play with. How about that?”

“Gang’s really good at xiangqi,” Ying said proudly. “I’m not quite as good as he is at it, but I try really hard. Someday I’m gonna beat him at it.”

“Nah,” Gang scoffed, though he was grinning as he said it.

Lan Zhan seemed perfectly content to listen to them tease each other, though he started every time Ying or Gang touched him. Ying got the feeling that poor Lan Zhan never, ever, ever got hugs. From the scowl on Gang’s face, he saw the same thing.

They bracketed Lan Zhan as they walked, eventually looping their arms through his elbows. The instant they did it, Lan Zhan’s ears went blazingly red. Ying grinned.

“You’re so shy,” Ying said, giggling. “It’s cute.”

“Not,” Lan Zhan protested with a distinct pout to his bottom lip.

“Are too cute,” Gang agreed with Ying. “Not sure you’re shy as much as really bad at people.”

“Gang is bad at people, too,” Ying confided when Lan Zhan pouted even harder. “It’s fine. Some people are chatty monsters like me. Some people are scowly like Gang.”

Lan Zhan frowned disapprovingly at Ying. “Wei Ying is not a monster.”

That was the most words that Ying had heard out of Lan Zhan and it was kind of awesome, even if his firm refusal to accept the term had Ying blushing brightly. Gang snickered over Ying’s blush which led to a little slap fight while laughing that Lan Zhan watched curiously.

Cho Dahong waved at them and then bowed respectfully to Lan Zhan. “Did you two make a friend?”

“We did!” Ying exclaimed. “This is Lan Zhan. His family is here for something.”

“They’re talking to Elder Entai,” Gang agreed while patting Lan Zhan’s back because he’d jumped and then swayed a little when Ying said they were friends.

“Which is boring,” Ying huffed. “We wanted to play xiangqi if you’ll let us use your set.”

“Absolutely,” Cho Dahong said with a huge grin at them all. “I just finished firing new pieces for it, so you’ll have plenty to play with.”

The xiangqi board was a battered old cypress stump that’d been squared off and then had the lines carved into it. At one point, the lines had had yellow paint carefully applied to them, but it was mostly worn off by now. The surface of the board was a grey-blond wood after bleaching in the sun, which contrasted pretty well with the darker wood of the lines.

Cho Dahong’s new pieces were simple round buttons with the proper characters carved on top. He’d added whimsical pictograms in tiny, tiny handwriting around the edges of the pieces. One side was red. The other side was a bright jade green.

“Oh, these turned out good,” Gang commented as they set up the board.

“Thank you!” Cho Dahong said from his spot in the glazing shed. “I’m thinking of carving statues for each piece but that’ll have to wait. I might get Du Xilin to carve them and then cast replicas, though.”

“Ohhh,” Ying crooned at the thought of that. “Let us know if you do. I wanna see how it turns out.”

Lan Zhan nodded his agreement as he and Gang set to work playing against each other. Ying watched instead of playing. It was pretty obvious in moments that Ying was way out-classed by both Gang and Lan Zhan.

They played with the intensity of two young boys who could focus for hours on end without getting bored or frustrated. Sitting still for long periods of time was never, ever going to be something that Ying was good at, though he had a ton of fun for a quarter shichen or so bouncing from Gang to Lan Zhan and back, encouraging them and rooting them on.

Lan Zhan blushed every time which made Gang grin which made Lan Zhan huff which made Ying giggle and tease him some more.

So much fun!

“They’re so cute,” Ying said to Cho Dahong after he wandered over to help Cho Dahong with his glazing.

“Enjoying themselves, anyway,” Cho Dahong agreed.

Ying helped paint pretty flowers and fun nonsense pictograms on the bowls and cups that Cho Dahong had set up for glazing. Between the two of them, they made short work of the project, which meant that Ying got the joy of helping to knead clay for another set of tiles that Cho Dahong was working on.

Kneading clay was a lot like kneading bread, just much muddier.

“You’re such a mess,” Gang commented after Lan Zhan won the current match.

“…Trouble?” Lan Zhan asked with a worried little wrinkle right between his eyebrows.

“Nah,” Ying said, grinning at them both. “I’ll wash off before we head home. These are our play clothes so it’s fine. The clay will wash right out.”

“I’ve got a “clean up quick” array, too,” Cho Dahong said.

He spluttered a laugh when both Ying and Gang whirled to stare at him with excitement. Lan Zhan looked mildly interested, too, which probably meant that he was super-curious about it as well. Ying would’ve insisted on Cho Dahong showing them the array right then but there was clay to knead, so they got that done first.

“Hold that,” Cho Dahong said as he dropped a thumb-sized bead into Ying’s hand. “If you hold it close to your chest and press a little qi into it, it’ll clean you right up.”

“Neat,” Ying said as he did exactly that.

The bead’s array sent a rush of wind over Ying that dried the clay coating his sleeves and hands instantly. A moment later, a vibration rattled though Ying’s teeth. It knocked all the dried clay off his clothes and body, leaving him clean. Then, a third wave of combined wind and vibration, much more gentle this time, curled around his sleeves. The mud-colored stains lifted right off and fell to the ground, leaving Ying perfectly clean.

“Oh, wow, that’s amazing, Cho Dahong,” Gang breathed as he studied Ying.

“Impressive,” Lan Zhan agreed.

“It’s an adaption of the cleaning arrays the Lan use to keep their robes white,” Cho Dahong said with a huge grin. “None of us here have the strength to do it on the fly, but imbuing it into a bead makes it usable for most anyone.”

Lan Zhan blinked and studied the bead in Ying’s hands. “Very impressive.”

“Thank you!” Cho Dahong said. He laughed and shooed them off with a big grin. “Go on now. It’s getting close to dinner time. I’m sure your families are looking for you.”

Ying blinked, looking up at the sky in surprise. It actually was getting close to evening. The sun hadn’t quite started setting but it would be soon. That meant that everyone was heading back to their homes, or, in Lan Zhan’s case, back to the inn next to the teahouse.

“Wow, I completely lost track of time playing xiangqi,” Gang admitted.

“Mm,” Lan Zhan agreed.

“I never keep track of time,” Ying said proudly, skipping along at Lan Zhan’s side.

Du Xilin laughed quietly from the front porch of his shop. He nodded to the three of them as he pulled his shop sign back inside. Up the street, the dock workers were busy tying their boats up and finishing the last loads for the night.

Lan Zhan watched Yiling shutting down for the coming night with a puzzled frown.

“It’s Yiling,” Gang said with a little shrug. “Everyone knows it’s dangerous to be out at night. We all try and be home before the sun goes behind the Burial Mounds.”

“Which means that we gotta go,” Ying said with a little sigh.

He skipped to a stop and turned to smile at Lan Zhan who was so cute with his perfect white and blue robes, his blushing ears and the pretty ribbon around his forehead. Gang stepped to Ying’s side so that they could perfectly mirror each other.

“Thank you for playing with us today, Lan Zhan,” Ying said.

“We had a lot of fun,” Gang continued with a smile that matched Ying’s somewhat less obnoxiously bright one.

“I hope we can continue to be friends,” Ying said, biting his lip and scuffing his toe in the dirt of the road.

“I’d really like to play against you again,” Gang agreed with a little shrug and a tiny laugh when Ying bumped their shoulders together.

“You can write to us, maybe?” Ying suggested. “We’re doing pretty good learning to write.”

“If you send it to Elder Entai, she’ll make sure we get it,” Gang offered.

“I… would like that,” Lan Zhan said.

His blush had overtaken his whole face as they talked. The way he looked at Ying and Gang was kind of intense, overwhelming and awed and sweetly innocent, too.

“Ah, there you are, A-Zhan,” the bearded Lan said from the front porch of the inn. “Xichen and I wondered where you’d gotten to.”

“He was playing xiangqi with us,” Ying said, bobbing a bow to the bearded Lan. “We had a bunch of fun, too.”

“But it’s getting late, so we have to go home now,” Gang agreed, bobbing a matching bow to the bearded Lan.

“We hope that you’ll let Lan Zhan write to us,” Ying said with his very best sad, hopeful eyes.

“Yeah,” Gang agreed, doing the toe in the dirt thing and then doing his version of the sad, hopeful eyes.

The bearded Lan seemed to still as his breath caught for a moment. He cleared his throat, nodding sharply. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt anything.”

“Thank you!” Ying said, clapping his hands as Gang beamed at Lan Zhan, making him flush even brighter than before. “Elder Entai will see that we get the letters.”

“What are you two doing still out in the street?” Elder Entai called to them as she hobbled down the stairs of the teahouse, leaning on her staff. “Shoo! Go home before it gets dark.”

Ying darted over to give Lan Zhan a quick hug. Gang didn’t hug Lan Zhan, though he did dart over to pat Lan Zhan’s shoulder. Seriously, from the sheer shock in Lan Zhan’s eyes, no one ever touched him. That was ridiculous.

Either way, they waved and bowed again to both Lan Zhan and his uncle, who introduced himself as Lan Qiren while saying goodbye, and brother Xichen before running out of town towards the Cho’s farm, laughing together at Elder Entai’s shouting admonishments to hurry on home.

They did not hurry home.

Instead, they ran around the side of the Burial Mounds until the sky went red and gold and purple, stars staring to peek through the growing black velvet darkness overhead. Only once the colors faded out of the trees and grass around them did they turn into the Burial Mounds.

Their purification beads lighted the way perfectly as the soul globes and their glowing lotuses formed. Ying raced Gang up the hillside, around the black bamboo stand, and then up the long road that one upon a time had led straight to Xue Chonghai’s palace.

General Kwan glowered at them as they ran into the Sanctuary. “You’re late. It’s full dark.”

“Sorry!” Ying said as he flung his arms around General Kwan’s waist. “We made a friend and played xiangqi and Cho Dahong has a new bead that cleans clay right off you. It even takes out the stains in your clothes!”

“We’re going to write to our friend,” Gang agreed, leaning into General Kwan’s side for a one-armed hug that made General Kwan smile as he urged them back to the cave. “Lan Zhan is a little older than us but he’s really nice.”

“He’s like Gang,” Ying said, bouncing and delighted. “Not much on the facial expressions and very literal but super nice.”

General Kwan laughed and shook his head. “Well, come get your dinner and tell us all about it. I’m sure Lan Yitian will be delighted to hear about her kinsman.”

Ying skipped along at General Kwan’s side, heart singing with happiness. It’d been a really good day. As much as he loved Gang and their little family of dead soldiers in here, it was nice to meet someone their own age and to make a new friend.

Hopefully they’d get to keep writing to Lan Zhan. As isolated as they were in Yiling and the Burial Mounds, news from outside would be amazing.

And besides, Lan Zhan was great so writing to him would be a ton of fun. Ying was just certain of it.

 

 

10. Fields

Ying stretched his arms up over his head, sighing as he studied the field of barley they had planted just outside of the ring of protective rock spires. They’d had to expand their inner wards to do it, but growing enough food was important.

Purification of the dry, bone-filled soil hadn’t been too hard. They’d figured out an array to pulverize the bones and purge out all the toxins along with the resentful energy before they restored the Sanctuary. That part was easy. Tilling the still-dry soil, arranging irrigation and hitting the barley with accelerated grown arrays had been a bunch more work.

Successful work, of course. Now they just had to harvest. It’d worked really well, honestly. Four years of research and testing had their growing arrays working nearly perfectly.

The barley in the middle was taller, stronger, and had more grains than the ones at the edge of their field, but they didn’t have just a central clump with no growth on the edges anymore. The first dozen or so attempts had been… pretty sad, really.

Still, Ying wasn’t happy with how healthy the barley was or with how the grain at the borders of their plot had grown.

Gang snorted from his side of the field, waggling his scythe at Ying. “You going to work or what?”

“Just considering how to get full growth all over the whole field,” Ying said with a little shrug. “And giving my back a break. Bending over cutting grain is tiring.”

“Pfft, you’re just lazy,” Gang said with a smirk that made Ying snicker at him.

“Not wrong about that,” Ying said as he set back to work on the harvesting.

They didn’t need this much barley, honestly. The two of them had grown a lot in the last four years, but not to the point where they needed bushels upon bushels upon bushels of barley and rice, hundreds of crocks of pickled vegetables and fruits.

But it wasn’t for them, entirely. It was for the future that everyone in the Burial Mounds and in Yiling could see coming.

Their preservation box, an expansion of the idea of the qiankun pouch that Lan Zhan had told them about in one letter a couple of years ago, worked well to let them store food in a way that would keep it from going bad for years on years. Ying had worked with Xue Chen to make preservation boxes for the Cho family and the Du family. The Pan family had resisted for a bit before they accepted theirs.

He’d only gotten the Xin family to take their box once their two daughters returned from the Nightless City with babies and some disturbing scars that their husband had given them. Everyone in Yiling, well, all the old-timers in Yiling, had listened to Xin Mo and Xin Lin’s stories of the soldiers filling the Nightless City.

“No one talks about it,” Xin Lin had said as she cuddled her little girl with her head down so that no one could see the line of scars cutting across her chin. “But the Nightless City is almost all soldiers now.”

“Soldiers and their wives,” Xin Mo had said bitterly while staring down into the crib her baby girl rocked in. Her scars cut across her nose and through the corner of her mouth. “Our husband swore that we’d be treated well but he lied. Almost the moment we got there, he started beating us up and threatening to come kill everyone here.”

Xin Lin had sighed and nodded. “He was really angry that we both had girls. I mean, I don’t know why. We told him about our family’s curse of always having daughters before we even held hands.”

Xin Mo had snorted. “He thought that Wen blood would overwhelm the curse.”

“Fool,” Elder Entai had said, shaking her head at the whole mess. “Well, we’ll get you girls settled in again. The Twin Patriarchs have done a good job making town safer. I’ve got protection beads for you and your girls.”

No one had looked at Ying and Gang when the Twin Patriarchs were mentioned. Every summer, the stories from outside of Yiling got scarier. Wen Ruohan was building an army. He was sucking all the small sects into the Wen, not giving them a choice to ally or anything, just conscripting them wholesale into the Wen.

The Jin didn’t care. They only cared about their money and looking good.

The Jiang were far enough away from Qishan that they didn’t think that they would be affected. Which was stupid. No one was far enough away.

The Lan? Lan Zhan wrote in his letters that the Elders were certain that Wen Ruohan wouldn’t dare to attack the Cloud Recesses’ “excellent” defenses.

Ying was pretty sure that the slant of that “excellent” was as sarcastic as it could get.

“There’s going to be a war,” Gang had whispered late in the night, just after the harvest two years ago, after they’d crawled into bed together.

The others had all been working outside the cave since they didn’t need to sleep. Ying had been so very glad about that as he nodded and then shivered despite the heat of the summer penetrating even into their cave.

“I know,” Ying had agreed in a whisper so quiet that he wasn’t sure Gang would hear him even being nose to nose. “We’re not ready. No one is ready. We can’t keep the town safe. We can’t even keep us safe.”

“No, I think we’re better off than that,” Gang had mused. He’d bitten his lip. “But we need more food. Better supplies for everyone. Like, a lot more. More food, more water, more wards, better ways to keep the people here safe.”

Thus planting dozens of fields full of everything they could think of and growing them as fast as they could.

Lan Zhan’s last letter had been full of carefully veiled references to the Wen’s steadily increasing demands for tribute, control, and obsequious behavior. He’d not said outright that the Lan were preparing for war, but Ying and Gang had both been able to read between the lines.

The Nie were already on a war footing. That’d happened after Lao Nie, the sect leader, had died in a Yao attack. His heir Nie Mingjue had blamed Wen Ruohan, which Ying couldn’t really blame him for though he didn’t know how a Yao attack could be Wen Ruohan’s fault.

Hardly mattered when Wen Ruohan was undermining everyone as he searched for every bit of cultivation knowledge and power he could get his grubby hands on.

Sweeps of Yiling for the Yiling Patriarchs happened every month or two anymore.

They’d gotten more and more frequent. Once became twice a year became four times a year became spies living in town and searches happening all the time. The Wen had ransacked Elder Entai’s house just hours after she passed the latest letter from Lan Zhan over to Ying and Gang.

That Elder Entai had sent the spies running with blood dripping down their heads and limping from cracked kneecaps didn’t stop it all from being terrifying.

“The grain around the edges needs something more,” Ying mused as he and Gang worked their way across the little plot of barley.

“I think I know what it is,” Gang said with enough confidence that Ying turned and stared at him, sickle hanging uselessly midair.

“Really?” Ying asked, instantly curious. “What? What’d we forget?”

“Worms,” Gang said and then snickered at the way Ying glared at him. “No, really. We purified the soil, sure, and it’s way better. But all the small lives are missing. There’s no worms. No beetles or fungus, you know, that white stuff?”

“Huh,” Ying mused as they finished the scything and started gathering up their bundles of barley for threshing. “That’s a good point. But how can we fix that? It’s just something that happens with time, isn’t it?”

Gang shrugged. “I’m pretty sure that we can speed it up. You’ve been getting way better with sculpting resentful energy with your dizi. If you channel the resentful energy through me, I can use it to power one of the health restoration arrays.”

“Oh!” Ying breathed, abruptly excited. “Apply it to the earth instead of to people! That might work. Heal and strengthen the little lives instead of just people or animals or whatever.”

“That,” Gang agreed with his version of Ying’s excited grin. “Once we get this taken care of, let’s try it. If we get it to work correctly, we can go into town and do it on everyone’s fields. That’ll give them a chance to grow more food, better food, in a way that won’t be obvious to the spies.”

“I still think we need to drive them out,” Ying agreed while grumbling about those stupid spies.

Elder Entai had overruled Ying every single time he brought it up. He kind of thought that she saw it as a game she was playing with Wen Ruohan that she was determined not to lose. Which it wasn’t. Not that Elder Entai listened to him or Gang.

It would be so easy to tweak the wards to make outsiders so uncomfortable in town that they left of their own accord.

“Let us get that,” Lan Yitian said once Ying and Gang had all the barley bundled up. “You’ve both got the inventing face on.”

“We don’t have an inventing face,” Ying protested despite knowing perfectly well that they did. He saw it on Gang’s face all the time.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gang agreed, blushing at Lan Yitian’s knowing look.

“Go play then,” Lan Yitian ordered. Smugly. So very smugly.

Darn Lans, always seeing right through you. Lan Zhan did it through letters which was even more amazing and even more rude of him.

Either way, they headed off to the area where they’d been planning on putting in another new field. There should be terraces to make it work properly, but the ground was so terribly dry and dead that Gang and Ying had agreed to wait on that. It made more sense to bring the soil back to life and then put in terraces than the other way around.

“Play,” Gang grumbled as they marked out a five pace wide by twenty pace long section of hillside to work on.

“I know,” Ying complained. “We’re thirteen, not nine. I mean, we’re not grown up yet, but we’re not little kids anymore either.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gang said, glowering towards the cave where the others were working on making some good sturdy furniture out of the trees that hadn’t come back to life. “We could be a hundred and they’d still look at us like we’re kids. It’s the whole dead thing, I think.”

“Maybe,” Ying said as he pulled his black bamboo dizi out. “It could just be that they actually are a lot older than we are.”

“Mmm, I think there’s something to the deadness that’s making a difference in the way they think,” Gang said. He grimaced. “Not sure about that but it seems likely. They’re all really set in their ways, even Lan Yitian.”

“That’s a Lan thing, though,” Ying said with a grin at the way Gang rolled his eyes. “So, what are we going to do?”

Gang let Ying change the subject with only an eyeroll and a little snort for Ying’s refusal to keep griping about being treated like a little kid when they really and truly were not little kids anymore. He smoothed out the dirt and then sketched out the arrays he wanted to try.

One was for reconditioning soil gone so dry that it wouldn’t let water soak in. The second was for making everything in the soil, bones and branches and anything other than metal and big rocks, draw moisture from the air to rehydrate the soil. Then the third one was the healing array they used when Cho Ming broke his ankle so badly that Elder Entai was afraid that he’d lose his foot.

“Really?” Ying asked, crouching down to study the arrays. “That one?”

“Mhm,” Gang agreed. “I think it might help the small lives grow again. A bit anyway.”

“Yeah, but there’s nothing for them to eat,” Ying countered as he drew the one they’d used to grow mushrooms super-fast. “Do this third, then do the healing one. That will give the small lives food. And it should help the soil, too. You know the mushroom patches have done better than anywhere else.”

“Huh, true,” Gang said, nodding. “Right. If you can draw in the resentful energy, I’ll guide it into the arrays.”

They’d found that working as a team instead of taking turns was way safer for both of them. General Kwan always yelled at them when they went too far. Sharing the work of managing the resentful energy made it much less stressful and hard on their bodies.

Ying stood and lifted his dizi. The gathering song was a simple one, just a lullaby that they’d altered to be lilting and happy instead of soothing and slow. It was the emotion that you put into the song that made it work. After this long doing it, Ying was pretty sure that he could get the same result with horrible screechy noises if he was really determined.

The resentful energy spun down out of the clouds overhead, filled with the formless ghosts who’d lost their sense of identity ages ago. Ying pulled them free, filtering the resentful energy before he handed it to Gang.

It was always way easier with pure energy instead of energy all clogged up with ghosts who didn’t remember enough to be able to go onto the cycle of reincarnation.

Gang knelt, bowed his head as the resentful energy spun around his shoulders and arms, flowing down to form dark clouds around his fists. He blew out a breath and then touched the dry earth by his feet.

The dusty soil bubbled dramatically, sending up puffs of ash as the earth fought against Gang’s demand that it accept water. Then the air around Gang went misty. A swipe of his hand send the water-filled air over the field where a downpour in miniature flooded down. There was still a lot of soil that didn’t want to mix with the water, but Gang’s arrays bullied them into doing as he wanted.

Ying kept playing, feeding Gang more energy, as Gang blew out a breath and activated the Mushrooms Really Fast array.

The dizi’s music went screechy for a second as Ying stumbled backwards a pace or two.

Where Gang’s hand punched into the ground, the earth roiled like a boiling pot of soup bones. Sickly greenish-white fungus stabbed outwards from his fist, blanketing the bubbling surface of the new plot for a count of seven. Then the green-white fungus collapsed into a yellow slime that sank into the earth.

Three breaths later, the entire plot shuddered as fine white enoki mushrooms grew like a carpet across the plot. Wherever there was wood, shitake mushrooms pushed up their fissured dark brown caps. Wood ear mushrooms sent up fans here and there and as the enoki died back, meaty little white button mushrooms grew over the field’s plot.

Ying nodded thoughtfully. They could make a ton of money if they could figure out a way to grow and sell the mushrooms that array sent up. Not this time, though.

He pulled a final thread of resentful energy down to feed to Gang who had sweat turning his shirt dark under his arms and across his back. Ying was getting pretty tired too. His whole body felt like it was a walking, dizi-playing puddle of sweat.

Gang still gritted his teeth and activated the healing array.

They both fell over backwards as the ground under their feet bounced and thrust upwards like they’d set off an earthquake. Ying dropped his dizi, grabbing Gang and hauling him to his feet so that they could scramble out of the way of the widening wave of growth transforming their test plot from a dry patch of ashy soil into deep green grass and turnip greens so luscious they were nearly black. There were little trees thrusting up and a patch of bamboo stabbing towards the sky so fast that it looked like spears flung into the air.

“What did you two do?” General Kwan shouted as he and Xue Chen came running.

“Well, we kind of figured out a thing,” Ying laughed breathlessly.

“Yeah, that worked way better than expected,” Gang agreed.

General Kwan stared at the slowly widening swath of vigorously growing plants and then sighed. “You two. What were you up to?”

“The barley field wasn’t growing as well as it should have,” Ying explained with one arm around Gang’s shoulder.

“So we worked out a new method to test,” Gang agreed as he looped an arm around Ying’s waist. “It worked. I mean, it was hard, and we have to figure out how to make it smoother and less, I don’t know, heavy, but it did work well. We need to do this outside of the wards. I mean, in Yiling.”

“You’re doing no such thing, Ying,” General Kwan said, wagging a finger at Gang. “We’ll study it and ask Sect Leader Xue before you go outside and do it.”

Ying grinned. So did Gang.

It was so very rare when they managed to confuse General Kwan about which of them was which. Xue Chen snickered into his fist before coughing at General Kwan’s glower. Ying was pretty sure his dizi was lost to feeding the new field, but that was fine. He’d just make a new one.

Totally worth it if they could fix this method and make it something that they could set off in just a few seconds instead of taking so much preparation and casting time. At least this patch of the Burial Mounds was cleaned of resentful energy and growing beautifully now. Once they had it working, Ying was absolutely going to teach it to everyone in Yiling.

They needed to have good healthy soil, too. Especially with the Wen Sect rattling their swords everywhere.

The war definitely wasn’t going to wait for Ying and Gang to grow up.

 

 

11. Family

Ying looked overhead. No one there.

It’d gotten to be a habit over the last three years. The Wen Sect had taken to making the people they conquered “disappear” into the Burial Mounds by flying overhead and throwing them in. The first time it happened, Ying had screamed as the pretty young prostitute fell sobbing out of the sky.

Their wards had worked.

Barely. Lingling had gotten a broken shoulder and a dislocated ankle when the wards caught her, which wasn’t all that bad considering that she’d also had a horrifying slash cut around her throat. Ying and Gang had all but flung her into Xue Chonghai’s Repair the Dead array.

Lingling hadn’t been dead, but she’d been close enough that Ying had been able to hold her blood inside her body while Gang eased the edges of the wound shut. Lan Yitian had been right there to help keep Lingling alive with bandages and directions on how to provide healing energy. She’d sobbed without tears the entire time she helped save Lingling, which neither Ying nor Gang commented on.

Afterwards, Lan Yitian spent a bunch of time patrolling the borders of the Burial Mounds instead of interacting with anyone.

Lingling had spent a few days delirious, then a solid month and a half recuperating, and then she’d moved into Yiling where she’d married Cho Dahong who walked around with a stunned smile on his face for a solid year afterwards.

The second person thrown in had come a month after Lingling’s arrival. He’d been dead when he was tossed in, soul already gone, so Ying and Gang had said the proper prayers before using his body to house one of Xue Chonghai’s soldiers who’d given up on physical form a while back.

In the first year it was only a handful of people thrown in, about one a month. Then the next year, last year, it’d been one a week. This last year had gotten worse and worse as the Wen rolled over the small sects and attacked everyone they could get their hands on. There were days where three or four people got thrown into the Burial Mounds.

“No one?” Gang asked as he peeked out of the cave.

“Not right now,” Ying confirmed. “The wards aren’t warning of anyone flying overhead.”

“I’m so glad,” Gang groaned.

Their shared seventeenth birthday was only a month away. Since Gang had no clue when he was born, they’d decided to share their birthdays like real twins. The little village that had grown around the Sanctuary were doing their best to pretend that they weren’t planning a huge party for Ying and Gang’s upcoming birthday.

That was, of course, the other thing that Ying scanned for as he stepped out of the cave. Nope, no one out and about this late in the evening.

The sky had gone velvet black overhead stained to indigo blue at the mountains to the west. The hints of red and gold had gone away, replaced by fading purple ghosting across the clouds as diamond-bright stars twinkled down at them.

The village of huts looked grey and dead in the looming dusk. During the day, they were bright and cheerful, walls painted bright red and yellow and green because living in the middle of the Burial Mounds with Xue Chonghai’s soldiers patrolling was weird enough. Might as well have bright, happy homes to live in, you know?

Nobody inside of the Sanctuary was from Yiling. Ying and Gang had talked about it, dozens of times, and they’d decided that they couldn’t risk anyone from Yiling disappearing into the Burial Mounds. Wen Ruohan paid too much attention to the Yiling Patriarchs. If anyone disappeared, their family would get taken to the Fire Palace the very next day.

He still hadn’t figured out that Ying and Gang didn’t live in Yiling, mostly because Elder Entai was having far too much fun tweaking Wen Ruohan’s nose. She’d made up a dozen different stories for every single person in Yiling, complete with forged paperwork for the civilian authorities.

So no, nobody from Yiling knew what Ying and Gang had built in the Sanctuary. The only people here were Wen Ruohan’s victims. His son’s victims. One older prostitute who’d been beaten and thrown in by Jin Guangshan, yes, but other than that it was all strangers who had forged their own little families in the Sanctuary.

Families that Ying and Gang weren’t part of.

“You’re frowning,” Gang murmured as they made their way down the main street between the woodworking shop and the forge towards the road that led down to Yiling.

“Just… I don’t know,” Ying admitted with a sigh. “I always thought we’d have family, you know? That if people started living here, they’d adopt us. And now we’ve just got a town but we’re not a part of Sanctuary any more than we are of Yiling.”

Gang grimaced. “Yeah, but they’re afraid of us, you know? None of them can do what we can do.”

Ying nodded. Lan Zhan still wrote to them. He was their best informant on what was going on in the wider world. He hadn’t been able to come back since that first visit but it hardly mattered. Ying and Gang both missed Lan Zhan.

He wouldn’t have locked them out and treated them like they were terrifying and potentially dangerous monsters.

Probably.

The resentful energy thing wouldn’t go over well, but it wasn’t like Ying and Gang hadn’t come up with a dozen different methods to purge and purify resentful energy. The Healthy Fields one was the best one so far, even if mushrooms remained the scariest thing in the world. Worse than dog-yao, mushrooms. It was so creepy the way they ate resentful energy and then spawned in great puffs of spoors that drifted through the air like ashes.

Anyway. They had work to do on the wards around the Burial Mounds. Once they passed a hundred people in Sanctuary, they’d had to go out and do so many more fields. The ring of true Burial Mound ground, contaminated with resentful energy and full of bones, was getting more and more narrow by the day.

Most of the aimless ghosts who’d lost their sense of self had already moved into the cycle of reincarnation. The ones who remained, only a hundred or so, were all Xue Chonghai’s soldiers who would gladly take physical form if they had bodies to inhabit.

No more resentful corpses, either. There were just General Kwan’s men and women.

In a year or two, they were going to have to set up all new wards.

“I always dreamed of being adopted,” Gang murmured once they reached the edge of the wards. “I thought someone would see me and love me so much that they took me home.”

“I sort of did except we had to build our own home,” Ying said, shoulder-bumping Gang.

“True,” Gang agreed, smiling shyly as he shoulder-bumped Ying back. “But that wasn’t the dream.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ying agreed. “I get it. I felt the same way.”

The markers for the wards hadn’t been tampered with. Those were all just fine. The weird thing was that someone had tossed logs across the line, apparently to see what happened to them. Ying huffed and left the logs where they were. The line of the wards was perfectly clear.

One side, the outside, had an old cedar log with a rotted core and bark mostly intact. Inside, the cedar log had gone to dry rot so extreme that it would fall apart into a puff of dust if either of them touched it. Perfectly normal and exactly what was supposed to happen, which meant this wasn’t the spot where they wards had been attacked.

They followed the edge, Gang’s scowl deepening every time they found a log or a branch thrown across the line of the wards. Ying started scowling, too, when they came to the spot where they usually cut inwards across the wards. Six or seven branches lay across the wards there, most older but one was so fresh that the Burial Mounds had yet to take the green from the cedar branch’s needles.

Ying exchanged a glance with Gang, both of them pulling their dizis from their belts.

This had to be a trap.

Ying wrapped shadows around himself as Gang activated his Disguise the Face and Voice array. They moved as one past the wards and up the side of the Burial Mounds, Gang in the lead and Ying matching each move he made like was a literal shadow trailing from Gang’s heels.

The terrain on this side of the Burial Mounds was too steep for anyone to go much further, so Ying wasn’t surprised to hear voices about the time they saw a low fire. Gang hesitated for a moment before slowly moving forward.

The camp was a poor one. Four men sitting on logs around a tiny fire. All of them were scruffy, robes worn and stained. There was a lump that Ying seriously suspected was a fifth man lying just out of the circle of light. All four of the men were exactly the sort of people that Wen Ruohan sent to Yiling as spies: vicious, desperate, with nothing much to live for and everything to gain.

“Still say this isn’t going to work,” the shortest of the four complained as he poked the fire with a stick. “There’s nothing fucking in there.”

“There’s the dead and no one’s been able to find the Patriarchs anywhere else,” the tallest one with a scar down his cheek snapped. “They gotta be in there. Don’t you turn coward on me, Yang Bo, or I’ll cut your throat and toss you in to join the walking corpses.”

Yang Bo exchanged a black look with the one sitting next to him. “Don’t go threatening me, Sung Ling. I’m the one that brought you in on this, not the other way around.”

Ying and Gang paused at the edge of the camp, just far enough in the darkness for the four men to easily miss them. They were a problem. A big one. Ying’s stomach squirmed at the idea of killing them.

Killing them made sense. More sense than letting them live. But he just… didn’t know if he could kill them.

Gang pulled back, prompting Ying to move back, too. They’d practiced this shadow thing enough that Ying mirrored Gang instinctively now. It was a total disaster any time Ying tried to play the lead and Gang tried to shadow, so they didn’t do that anymore.

“Shift the wards over this part of the valley,” Gang whispered to Ying. “Then we can call General Kwan and he can deal with them.”

“Oh, good idea,” Ying agreed.

Much better to let actual soldiers deal with these creeps than do it themselves. If General Kwan wasn’t standing right on the line glowering as he watched them sneak around like they thought that they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted, Ying would eat his dizi.

They slipped up the far side of the camp, creeping up the hillside to scribble temporary ward anchors on various rocks and trees. Then they slowly crept down to the camp again, on the far side of it this time so that they could grab the man Yang Bo and Sung Ling had captured.

While they were adjusting the wards, Yang Bo and Sung Ling’s argument had risen in volume and in violence. All four men had knives out by the time Gang reached out to grab their captive.

Who wore purple the exact shade of Baba’s purple trim.

“Stay still,” Gang whispered to the man in purple.

His eyes flicked open. In the darkness, there wasn’t much that Ying could make out of his face. Especially with all the bruising around his eyes and mouth. Still, he frowned at Gang, blinking repeatedly as Ying stood up and pulled his dizi out.

To someone else, it probably looked like a shadow rose up out of the night. The first trill of Ying’s dizi shocked all four of the bandits silent.

Yang Bo whirled, gasping when he spotted Ying standing there playing the wards over their heads.

“Yiling Patriarch!” Yang Bo shouted, something like greed and something like terror in his eyes. “We’ve come to be your disciples!”

“Fuck, I told you it would work,” Sung Ling breathed.

He sheathed his knife and then pulled his sword, grinning like a dog-yao spotting a baby left unattended.

The wards snapped into place behind Ying.

Resentful energy flooded over them all in an ashy cloud that choked Sung Ling as he tried to charge at Ying.

Gang stood up, stepping over the captive in purple. “What makes you think I want you?”

“We’re, we’re… we’re…”

Whatever it was that Yang Bo wanted to say died in his throat as General Kwan spun out of the clouds of resentful energy to snap Yang Bo’s neck. The other two bandits died without ever saying their names. Sung Ling screamed as he slashed at Gang, then at General Kwan. He managed to run his sword right through General Kwan who looked down at it and then up into Sung Ling’s eyes.

“Did you think that would work?” General Kwan asked.

“Swords are only effective on the living,” Gang said in his creepy distorted voice.

Sung Ling screamed and tried to run.

Xue Chen was there with Lan Yitian. His scream choked off as they cut him into three separate chunks, head, torso and legs.

Ying dropped the shadows and tucked his dizi away in his belt. “Well, that went well.”

“You should have brought one of us along,” General Kwan complained.

“We knew you were shadowing us, General Kwan,” Ying huffed as he cut the ropes off the purple-clad cultivator. “Besides, you couldn’t come out here unless we adjusted the wards, anyway.”

“He’s really beaten up,” Gang agreed.

“Who are you?” General Kwan demanded while glowering down at the purple-clad cultivator. It was way more intimidating than normal what with the sword still thrust through his chest.

“General, let us take the sword out,” Lan Yitian drawled with enough amusement that the cultivator breathed a tiny, shaky laugh. “Then ask questions.”

Gang promptly headed over to help since he’d figured out the mending portion of Xue Chonghai’s repair the dead array. Ying wasn’t as good at mending bodies, but he was way better at getting souls to settle into flesh than Gang was. Between the two of them, though, they had it all covered if they had to resurrect and repair someone while they were away from home.

The cultivator watched Lan Yitian remove the sword, then watched Gang mend the wound in General Kwan’s chest, trembling slightly under Ying’s hands. Shock, probably. The night wasn’t cold enough for a cultivator to be chilled, even when he was dealing with some pretty bad injuries.

“I am Jiang Fengmian,” the cultivator finally said once Gang was done with General Kwan. “Thank you for aiding me. I… I need to get back to Lotus Pier. The Wen. They were planning on attacking Lotus Pier. I was supposed to be bait for my wife, but the bandits killed the Wen soldiers holding me and, and… well. Then I was supposed to be bait for you.”

Ying stared at Jiang Fengmian.

There was so much bruising on his face that Ying couldn’t really see a resemblance to Baba. He didn’t remember much of his parents anymore. It had been far too long.

But there was something about Jiang Fengmian’s jaw that reminded him of Baba’s. And of his own jaw, too. The nose was broken so that wasn’t anything like his and Gang’s noses. But the eyebrows and the jaw were painfully familiar.

“We’ll bring you into our hideout,” Ying announced, glancing at Gang who was just as wide-eyed as Ying felt. “We have some healers in there who can help you.”

“You can’t be serious,” Xue Chen hissed at Ying. “He’s an outsider.”

“He’s our uncle,” Ying said, standing up and helping Jiang Fengmian to stand, too. “He’s our father’s younger brother.”

“He’s family,” Gang agreed.

All three of their soldiers rocked back on their heels in surprise. General Kwan accepted it first, nodding slowly as he studied Jiang Fengmian’s face. Lan Yitian just pursed her lips over it while Xue Chen frowned as if he didn’t think that was sufficient reason to allow anyone inside Sanctuary.

Jiang Fengmian grabbed Ying’s shoulder and wrist as he went bone-white outside of his bruises. “Wei Ying? But…”

“It’s a long story,” Gang said.

“It’s not safe here,” Ying agreed with a wry little smile.

“Come on,” Gang agreed as he took one of Jiang Fengmian’s elbows. “Let us take care of you.”

“We’ll tell you the whole story once we’re safe,” Ying promised.

They took three steps towards the Sanctuary, Jiang Fengmian staring at Ying and then at Gang and then at Ying again, before Ying stopped in his tracks.

The wards!

“Oh, shoot,” Ying groaned. “General Kwan, bring him into the Sanctuary. We’ve got to remove all signs that we changed the wards before we head inside.”

General Kwan shook his head, but he scooped Jiang Fengmian up in his arms despite his obvious doubts. “Stay with them. Don’t let anyone harm them. Erase all signs of the camp and their bodies, too.”

“Yes, sir,” Lan Yitian replied with a salute.

“Understood, General,” Xue Chen agreed with a significant nod towards the four dead men’s bodies.

Well, that was a good idea, though it was probably going to make Jiang Fengmian freak out. Four more bodies for the soldiers who were waiting for physical form. That would be good. General Kwan had been complaining for the last two years about not having his best armorer and best smith available.

They could both come back to physical form with their best doctor and Xue Chonghai’s archivist who wanted badly to work on recording all of Ying and Gang’s inventions.

Yeah, four more bodies was a good thing, no matter what anyone outside of Sanctuary might think.

Jiang Fengmian stared back over General Kwan’s shoulder as he was carried off into the darkness. Longing and confusion mingled with hope on his battered face. Ying bit his lip and then shoulder-bumped Gang.

Gang nodded and allowed a tremulous little smile to flit across his lips.

Family. Jiang Fengmian was family. They might not be able to live with him or be adopted the way they’d always dreamed, but he was family and they’d saved his life.

Come what may, Ying was determined to keep Jiang Fengmian and his family alive.

 

 

12. Leader

Jiang Fengmian’s nose was never, ever going to be the same. It’d been broken too badly and healed too much by the time Ying got to examine it.

“Yeah, that’s always going to look like it got broken,” Ying said, sighing and shaking his head. “Sorry. I’d have to really break it to fix the problems. At least the inside is all right now.”

Jiang Fengmian grimaced a smile at Ying. “I appreciate the effort. I couldn’t breathe through my nose at all until you fixed that.”

“Deviated septum,” Gang agreed as he washed his hands and then nudged Ying into doing the same.

General Kwan hadn’t been too happy about leaving Ying and Gang alone with Jiang Fengmian. He’d gone, glowering, when Ying insisted. As nice as it was that General Kwan wanted to take care of them, always and forever, this wasn’t a discussion that would go well with General Kwan or the others around.

“I suppose we should explain,” Ying said once his hands were clean, and he’d wrung the towel to the point that he was somewhat surprised he hadn’t torn the thing.

“I know that my brother only had one child,” Jiang Fengmian said slowly as he stared at the two of them. “But you’re… the very image of Changze. Both of you.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Gang said. Then hesitated.

“I’m Wei Ying,” Ying explained because words were never going to be Gang’s friends. “This is Gang. After my parents died, I was a street kid in Yiling. Gang’s family died, too. He’d been on the streets longer than I had. He helped me out and we…”

“Started cultivating together,” Gang continued when Ying’s mind blanked on how to explain it further. “I had a very small core. Tiny really. Ying taught me how to grow it.”

“We changed ourselves to be twins,” Ying said. “Matched eyes, moles, hair, skin, everything.”

“It’s safer when you have someone at your back,” Gang said with a little sigh as Jiang Fengmian looked appalled.

“I couldn’t get on a boat,” Ying said softly, gently, sadly enough that Jiang Fengmian’s horror shifted into a sort of regret that was easier to handle. “I couldn’t send a message. After Mama and Baba died, the inn I was at took everything. All I had was the clothes on my back. Gang saved my life from a pack of dog-yao.”

“Then he saved my life, and we saved each other’s lives,” Gang said, chuckling as he thumped the back of his hand against Ying’s shoulder. “And we just worked well together. This, the Burial Mounds, was desperation but it’s…”

They both thought about it, automatically mirroring each other. Jiang Fengmian’s eyes went wide again but he waited silently for them to marshal their words. It was nice. Outsiders so rarely were patient that way.

“It’s the best thing that could possibly have happened,” Ying finally said.

“That,” Gang agreed, nodding and pointing at Ying. “We’re helping people here and in Yiling. Everyone who lives here was thrown in to die.”

“Other than the soldiers,” Ying corrected. “Well, that’s not true. Lan Yitian was thrown in, too, but that was fifty plus years ago. Totally different from everyone else.”

“This is what the Wen do with the people they kidnap,” Jiang Fengmian whispered.

“No, a lot of them end up in the Fire Palace,” Gang corrected. “We just get the ones who are thrown away. Anyone vaguely useful or “entertaining” goes back to the Nightless City.”

Jiang Fengmian blew out a breath, glaring towards the entrance to the cave with black fury on his face. His hands clenched into fists on his thighs, though he didn’t say anything.

It had been long enough that Ying didn’t remember very much of what Baba had said about his brother. Jiang Fengmian was younger, but he’d been chosen by the Jiang Elders as the leader for some reason. Baba had fallen in love with Mama, and they eloped. Then they left to be rogue cultivators.

Ying frowned. “Did your wife actually kill most of the Jiang Elders or is my memory tricking me?”

“Oh!” Jiang Fengmian burst into startled laughter. “No, not most of them. My father and his shu wives killed six of the ten Elders who’d been causing problems. My wife, Yu Ziyuan, killed three of the remaining Elders on the Council. The remaining one was always very helpful. The Elders we have now are… much better.”

Gang’s lips twitched with amusement. “Better than Elder Entai, I hope.”

“Mmm, yes,” Jiang Fengmian allowed, grinning so brightly that it was like looking at Ying’s smile reflected on Gang’s face. “Mostly, anyway. I rather like her. She’s fierce.”

Jiang Fengmian looked at the entrance to the cave again. Instead of anger, there was impatience.

Made sense. He probably wanted to go home, to make sure that his wife and his family and his sect were safe. If Jiang Fengmian got kidnapped, twice even, the Jiang Sect was probably in a big old mess.

Ying looked to Gang who nodded slowly that he saw Jiang Fengmian’s desperate desire to go home, too. He raised an eyebrow at Ying, asking without words what Ying wanted to do about it. Which was a question.

What did Ying want to do? They were just shy of seventeen years old. Not full adults by anyone’s measurement other than their own. There was a whole war gearing up outside of Yiling.

Wen Ruohan earnestly wanted to capture them.

But they could make a difference. Maybe more of a difference than anyone else in the Jianghu given everything they’d learned over the years from Xue Chonghai.

“I think we should,” Ying finally said to Gang.

“We’ll have to seal Yiling entirely,” Gang said, nodding that he wanted to help, too. “You know General Kwan’s going to have a fit if we don’t take the army with us.”

“True,” Ying agreed. He hummed thoughtfully. “We can’t quite take the whole army, though. And we have to run off everyone who’s not an old-timer before we seal Yiling. Otherwise someone will just wander out and let Wen Ruohan’s men in.”

Jiang Fengmian blinked at the two of them, frowning as if he didn’t quite follow what they were talking about. Or maybe like he was afraid that he was misinterpreting them in his desperate need to go home and save his family.

“That’s easy enough,” Gang said, patting his dizi. “We could kick those assholes out in a matter of a quarter shichen.”

“Well, true,” Ying said. “We just need to warn Elder Entai before we do it.”

“…Are you planning on leaving Yiling?” Jiang Fengmian interrupted hopefully.

“Mhm.” Gang nodded with his normal matter-of-fact tone. “Wen Ruohan’s a problem. We’ve known that we had to deal with him for ages. It was just a matter of buying enough time for us to protect the people we care about.”

“We’re pretty much there,” Ying agreed. “Frankly, we’ve been waiting for our next birthday before we did anything outside. That’s only a month away, so it’s close enough.”

The ghosts or Xue Chonghai had to have been listening in because General Kwan and Xue Chen came stomping into the cave. Well, General Kwan stomped. Xue Chen bounced in, grinning with excitement at the prospect of getting to go outside of the wards for the first time in generations.

“Oh, joy,” Gang sighed as he rolled his eyes towards the arrays blinking on the ceiling of the cave. “Here comes our lecture on being responsible and letting adults take care of things for us.”

“Yay.” Ying huffed at General Kwan who glowered at them both. “I’m sure it won’t be yet another version of “you’re still young so you should be children and play and have fun while you can”. Not with a literal war about to happen.”

“No, no. Obviously, it’ll be the one about how we’ve just barely begun to learn to fight and defend ourselves and thus we should keep training instead of looking for stupid fights to leap into,” Gang said to Ying even though General Kwan started huffing at them at the same time that Xue Chen turned away to snicker and Jiang Fengmian hid his grin behind one hand.

The sound of General Kwan’s gritted teeth was louder than Xue Chen’s cackling as he stumbled out of the cave to hoot with laughter.

“Maybe,” Ying said, meeting General Kwan’s eyes much more seriously, “it should be that lecture about how we’re not the Sect Leaders yet and thus we should appeal to the sect leader to see what he says.”

“Sect Leader?” Jiang Fengmian asked at the same time that General Kwan’s eyes went wide with surprise.

Ying didn’t explain.

He pulled out his dizi and played the summoning spell that they’d figured out for making ghosts appear as if they were still alive. Xue Chonghai was there, no surprise. So was old Popo Li who studied Jiang Fengmian with a little smile before nodding.

“He’s a good boy, I think,” Popo Li said. “It’s a pity he didn’t find you boys before you came to live here. I think you would’ve had a good life in his house.”

“What is this?” Jiang Fengmian asked, standing and staring at Popo Li’s bloody hands, many stab wounds and smiling face.

“What do you think, young man?” Popo Li said with a little snort of amusement. “I’m a ghost, just like our dear sect leader. We were the last two to die here. I held him as he bled out, as we both bled out.”

“This is Popo Li,” Gang said since Ying was playing. “She’s everyone’s granny. That’s Sect Leader Xue Chonghai. He built the Sanctuary to protect his people which included Popo Li and General Kwan and his son Xue Chen who’s laughing like a braying donkey!”

Gang shouted the last bit at Xue Chen who just laughed harder.

“What the Jianghu called demonic cultivation was a method of purifying resentful energy by transforming it,” Xue Chonghai explained to Jiang Fengmian with his normal grave, serious expression that only came out when he was talking about what he’d tried to create. “Energy is energy. There are techniques, ancient techniques that long predated me, hidden here in Yiling. I learned from them just as the boys have.”

“And then the Jianghu became so greedy for what we’d created,” General Kwan growled as he stalked over to stand at Ying and Gang’s side, “that they hunted us all down on the flimsiest of pretexts.”

Ying could see how overwhelmed Jiang Fengmian was. Which, you know, didn’t really matter. What mattered was keeping everyone safe and deciding if they were going to leave or not.

So Ying turned to Xue Chonghai and raised an eyebrow at him.

“You boys,” Xue Chonghai complained while rubbing insubstantial hands over his face. “Do you really think this is the right time?”

“If not now, when?” Gang asked gently enough that even Jiang Fengmian relaxed a bit. “He’s literally family. Yes, the Jianghu hasn’t changed all that much since they destroyed you. Yes, it’s dangerous. Yes, we could die. Easily, even. But the whole reason we started learning your ways was to keep people safe. To make a difference. To keep ourselves safe from Wen Ruohan.”

“He will come here,” Jiang Fengmian offered hesitantly as if he wasn’t sure that he should even be listening to this conversation. “The soldiers that kidnapped me laughed about how they were going to come and take everyone from every town, every sect. They attacked the Cloud Recesses. They’re planning on attacking Lotus Pier. Nowhere is safe.”

Xue Chonghai sighed and then nodded as if it literally hurt him to give his approval. “Fine. You’ll take half the army with you and most of the ghosts. I’ll share the traveling repair array so that you can grant more of the ghosts bodies when they become available. But we have to seal Yiling before we do anything else.”

“Agreed,” Gang said. “Gladly.”

Ying nodded his agreement, too.

Popo Li patted Xue Chonghai’s elbow fondly. “Don’t forget the other item, Chonghai, dear. That’s very important. There can’t be any issues with the chain of command.”

“Ah, right,” Xue Chonghai said with a wry smile down at Popo Li. “Thank you for reminding me, Popo.”

This time Xue Chonghai focused on Ying and Gang, not on anyone else. Ying kept playing though he frowned because he didn’t know what the “other item” might be. His song wobbled a little bit in his curiosity, but not enough to make either Xue Chonghai or Popo Li disappear.

“I’ve been the Sect Leader of the Xue Sect for far too long,” Xue Chonghai said. His saddest smile flickered into place for a moment before fading away into exhaustion so deep and all-encompassing that it hurt to see.

“What.” Gang stared at Xue Chonghai with enough suspicion that General Kwan coughed a laugh into his hand.

“It’s time for me to retire as sect leader and focus solely on keeping the wards around Yiling and Sanctuary in place,” Xue Chonghai said. “That means that the two of you must lead from now on. We’ve all discussed it for years. Ever since the two of you arrived.”

“Ying,” Gang said, pointing straight at Ying who glared at him. “Should be Ying! Not me!”

“No, it should be you,” Xue Chonghai said as he grinned. “Both of you. Sects have their leaders, and they have their furen, too. The two of you swap roles all the time. You swap all your duties including inventing things. It’s both of you, together. I’d suggest Gang being the official “leader” while Ying is the “furen” but with how identical the two of you are, it would be easy enough for you to switch out depending on whether chatty or stoic is needed.”

Ying nodded at that, wagging his eyebrows at Gang who groaned dramatically. It wasn’t like they didn’t switch names whenever they were in town.

Mostly when it would be funniest, of course, but it made sense in this too.

Gang sighed and rubbed his hands over his face before glowering at Xue Chonghai. “Fine. I hate it, but fine. As long as he,” Gang pointed to General Kwan who wiped his sly grin off instantly, “understands that an order from one of us is the same as an order from both of us.”

“Absolutely,” General Kwan said.

“Then I’ll do it,” Gang grumbled. “I’ll hate every minute of it, but I’ll do it.”

Ying nodded his agreement that he would do it, too, though he was far less reluctant than Gang. There was a ton of work that needed to be done, but this was a logical first step. Xue Chonghai stepped back, visibly relieved to give Ying and Gang control over the proto-sect they’d been building.

“Now,” Popo Li said with a gentle smile that hid nothing of her determination, “you boys go make sure that our people in Yiling are safe. Chonghai and I will keep the children here safe while you’re gone.”

“We’ve already got plans,” Gang admitted with a wry smile at Ying. “We’ll wipe out the last of the contaminated land, set it to growing properly, and then extend the wards so that the whole of Yiling is inside the middle barriers. We’ll keep the Sanctuary as it is, of course, but having more room for everyone in Yiling to retreat to if anyone attacks would be good.”

“Wise,” Popo Li said. “Let us go, Ying dear. You need your breath for other things now.”

Ying bowed and then ended the song, allowing Xue Chonghai and Popo Li to fade away. He grimaced, working his lips and shaking his fingers out.

“How…?” Jiang Fengmian asked while staring at the spot where Xue Chonghai and Popo Li had been.

“Most of it is actually what Xue Chonghai did here in the Burial Mounds,” Ying explained as he headed for the entrance to the cave. “Ghosts tend to hold onto their awareness much longer and much better, especially if they’re one of Xue Chonghai’s people.”

“But a big part of it is simply that we’re using a… an adapted technique from the Lan,” Gang continued, waving for Jiang Fengmian to come with them.

Outside, the sky was brightening as dawn crept closer. No sleep for them tonight, but that was all right. They could catch a nap later, get a good sleep tonight. There was no way they could get everything done in time to leave this morning. Just talking to Elder Entai was going to take ages.

Jiang Fengmian looked around Sanctuary with slowly widening eyes as more and more details were revealed as golden light shot across the mountains to illuminate the village built by the people Ying and Gang had saved.

It was small, just a couple dozen single- or double-room huts without proper walls or courtyards. Maybe someday they would have the time to build proper houses like what everyone else had, but not yet. The spires around Sanctuary worked as a sort of wall, anyway, so no one had complained.

They were too relieved to be alive, probably.

“Right,” Ying said, smiling wryly at Jiang Fengmian. “We’ve got a couple of tasks before we can head into town, but you’re welcome to come along. I’m sure the ghosts already have the soldiers getting ready so that’s started. It’s just a matter of fixing the last couple of things and then dealing with everyone in Yiling.”

“That’s going to take so long,” Gang complained without any heat. “Elder Entai always wanted us to explain everything, and we never did. She’s gonna have a thousand questions.”

“So tomorrow or the next day at the latest?” Jiang Fengmian asked.

“I think so,” Ying agreed. “Once we head into town, I’ll send some ghosts off to make sure Lotus Pier is safe. If not, we’ll rush things here or something.”

“We won’t let your family and home be destroyed,” Gang promised, mirroring Ying exactly. “You’re family. That matters.”

Jiang Fengmian breathed in deeply and let it out slowly. His smile was a bit nervous but deeply grateful.

“Thank you,” Jiang Fengmian said. “Please, let’s get to work. The sooner you’re done, the sooner Lotus Pier can be secured.”

They headed off towards the thin strip of unhealed land. Fix that so that it was purified and healthy. Adjust the middle layer of wards. Then talk to Yiling’s old-timer families and make clear that they had a place to retreat to in case of disaster.

No problem.

 

 

13. Allies

Ying literally couldn’t remember the last time he’d stepped outside of Yiling. Well, you know, other than into the Burial Mounds, but that didn’t count because the Burial Mounds were more Yiling than the town of Yiling was.

No, he didn’t remember much of traveling with his parents. There were vague images of a donkey, Baba walking by its side while Ying cuddled in Mama’s arms on the donkey’s back. That was all.

He couldn’t remember any other towns or if there were forests or rivers or lakes or mountains or anything. Just that sense of contentment and the warmth of his parents’ love.

Traveling from Yiling to Lotus Pier was nothing at all like that.

General Kwan and the other soldiers, since they were all dead, had no ability to fly on their swords.

Ying and Gang had no spiritual swords.

They had their dizis, of course, and sturdy bamboo staves and the non-spiritual swords they’d trained with. It was easy to imbue spiritual energy into any of the three.

Flying on one was… not so easy.

Ying caught onto the trick of it first, mostly because he was much more willing to fall off of things and look like an idiot than Gang. It really didn’t matter what he imbued with his spiritual energy. A rock, a stick of bamboo, or his practice sword; they all worked the same way.

“It’s just lifting with an instinctive levitation array,” Ying explained as he hovered over Gang’s head on the edge of Yiling where they’d gone to practice and make sure that the wards were fully active and impenetrable from the outside.

“So… the feeling of lifting without actually using the array,” Gang said thoughtfully. “Huh. Makes sense.”

“That’s not quite how it works,” Jiang Fengmian said with a troubled frown.

“Well, I imagine if you have a spiritual weapon, then no, it wouldn’t be,” Ying agreed. “But we’re cheating and coming up with a sideways method of doing the same thing. As long as it works, that’s all that matters. We’ll look at getting proper swords later. There’s no time to fuss over it right now.”

Jiang Fengmian looked like he really, really, really wanted to argue the point. Gang ignored the troubled little noises he made in favor of imbuing his staff with spiritual energy, just like Ying had. It took him two more tries, but then he was up in the air and flying just as well as Ying.

Mostly because he closely mirrored every movement and shift of his feet and arms and legs that Ying made, but hey, it worked.

Interestingly, Ying kind of thought that their method might be less energy-intensive than using a spiritual weapon to fly on. He wasn’t sure, but from the way Jiang Fengmian looked concerned after they’d been flying incredibly fast for a half shichen, they should’ve been tired already.

Neither of them were.

“Are we stronger than we think or is this easier?” Gang called to Ying.

“Don’t know yet,” Ying called back, grinning at his twin. “I need to do a bunch of math to compare the two methods.”

Neither of them mentioned that they would normally have sent a letter off to Lan Zhan to ask his opinion and to see if there was any data on the question in the Cloud Recesses’ library. They’d both soundly ignored the whole “Wen Ruohan attacked the Cloud Recesses” thing since Jiang Fengmian mentioned it.

Lan Zhan had to be okay.

He had to be.

Because if he wasn’t, Ying and Gang were both going to tear the Wen apart and that would absolutely attract all kinds of attention they didn’t want to get.

The mountains of Yiling gave way quickly to rolling hills with winding rivers and so many lakes that Ying wasn’t sure where the lakes ended, and the rivers began. There were massive old weeping cypress trees with drooping branches covered moss. Ferns and lilies hid the dividing line between land and water.

Jiang Fengmian flew up the river without hesitation. His eyes were locked on the river’s winding path. The route he took Ying and Gang on was much more direct than the path that General Kwan led the soldiers in.

Yiling’s army.

Ying and Gang had an army. It was so weird, but then they’d grown up around the so-called army. General Kwan and the others were just friends and found family.

When they weren’t wearing their restored armor. When they weren’t carrying swords and snarling with pitch black eyes and visible black veins on their necks. Even Lan Yitian was a terror when she ran like the dead, despite the fact that she’d insisted on white and blue armor instead of the black, grey and red armor that everyone else had.

They rounded a bend in the river and then suddenly, across the river / lake’s lotus-decorated surface, there was a profusion of buildings sprouting up at the shoreline like mushrooms in the groves surrounding Yiling.

Ying bit his lip as he stared at the place. It felt familiar? Sort of?

It was more the smell of the lotuses and the water that reminded him of something, but the docks and ships and the many, many purple banners and sails felt familiar too. He just couldn’t remember anything more than that vague feeling of knowing it without knowing it.

“You good?” Gang signed at Ying.

“Familiar,” Ying signed back because he absolutely agreed with not telling Jiang Fengmian that he had only the vaguest memories of this place. “Distantly. The smells.”

Gang nodded as if that made sense.

Neither of them said anything else as the three of them rushed towards the docks of Lotus Pier. There was a town there, not just the sect, now that Ying looked at the place. The sect had walls around the land-side of the buildings. The town itself had the port built right next to the sect, but the people obviously lived further up on shore in buildings set up on stilts.

The sect was on stilts, too, more than half over the water as if they’d decided that they were so tied to the waters of the river that they couldn’t bear to live on land all the time.

A shout went up.

People in purple came running to the longest dock leading out of Lotus Pier including a boy about Ying and Gang’s age in purple, a sternly frightened woman in purple and a thin, delicate-looking girl in lavender and soft, pale green.

Jiang Fengmian leaped off his sword, sheathing it with a gesture, and then hugged all three of them desperately.

Behind the four of them, more people came running.

Including Lan Zhan in white and blue, limping with a cane.

“Lan Zhan!” Ying shouted as he rushed past Jiang Fengmian and his family.

“You’re all right!” Gang exclaimed as he ran along with Ying.

“Ying, Gang,” Lan Zhan breathed before catching both of them in as desperate of a hug as Jiang Fengmian’s.

Lan Zhan trembled in their arms, making little noises of distress that Ying recognized as the sort Gang made when he was so upset that words just weren’t going to come. Gang recognized it too, because he patted Lan Zhan’s back and hugged him and helped Ying move Lan Zhan off to the side away from the press of all the people coming to babble questions at Jiang Fengmian.

“We were so worried,” Ying murmured once they were off to the side underneath an awning made of more of the ubiquitous purple silk. “Jiang Fengmian only told us that Wen Ruohan attacked the Cloud Recesses two days ago. We worked ourselves silly to get here.”

Lan Zhan frowned, confusion open on his face.

“He’s our uncle,” Gang explained very quietly indeed. “Our father was his half-brother, Wei Changze. It’s a long story. We had to come here first, to make sure our family we’ve never met was okay.”

“We’re planning on liberating the Cloud Recesses next,” Ying agreed. “Are you alone here? Did any other Lans escape?”

Lan Zhan huffed and pulled free just enough that he could use sign language with them. They’d all talked about learning sign language over the years of their correspondence, but this was the first time that Ying had put it to use with someone besides Gang and General Kwan’s people.

Also the first time where it mattered so much if he understood.

“My brother is missing,” Lan Zhan signed, mouth twisting in a grimace. “Uncle is still trapped in the Cloud Recesses. The Elders did not reinforce the wards as you suggested. I was away, on my way back from a night hunt. The Wen caught me, beat me and broke my leg. I escaped before they could take me to the Nightless City. There are no other Lan here currently.”

Ying nodded and signed back to be polite. Also to practice. Certainly not because he was so upset that all he could make were spluttering sounds of outrage and worry, of course. “We have our own army, Lan Zhan. It’s a really, really long story. We’ll help.”

“We’re the Yiling Patriarchs,” Gang signed, raising his chin defiantly. “We’re the leaders of the Yiling Xue sect. I suppose it should be the Yiling Wei sect now.”

“Nah, keep it Xue sect,” Ying signed, flipping his fingers at Gang to Lan Zhan’s quiet amusement. “More impressive.”

“True,” Lan Zhan agreed. “Army?”

Both Ying and Gang hesitated. Lan Zhan wasn’t like most Lan, as far as they knew. Not like they’d met a ton of Lan. But from what Lan Zhan had written to them, the Lan were super-orthodox, very regimented and inflexible about most everything.

“You won’t like it,” Ying signed with a sigh of resignation, “but we’re safe and we have excellent methods of purification.”

Gang nodded, hands firm and confident as he signed. “We based a lot of it on the things we learned from your letters, actually. Not all. Some of it is really ancient purification arrays we found in Yiling, but we got some really good ideas from you.”

They all started when a hand reached out to grip Gang’s shoulder, sharply pulling him away from Lan Zhan.

Gang spun and kicked low. Ying whipped his bamboo staff around high, stopping just shy of crushing the young man in purple’s throat.

“Don’t do that,” Gang snapped at the angry grape-man.

“A-Cheng!” Jiang Fengmian snapped, making Jiang Cheng flinch. “They saved my life. Don’t be rude.”

“They’re crowding Lan Wangji!” Jiang Cheng protested. “Even I know better than that.”

“Not crowding,” Lan Zhan countered immediately, though his voice came out a little hoarse and unused.

“We’ve been friends forever,” Ying said, rolling his eyes though he didn’t move the tip of his staff from Jiang Cheng’s throat. “Since we were nine and Lan Zhan was eleven. We write to each other every couple of weeks.”

Jiang Cheng’s throat worked as if he wanted to say something bitter and angry but was too afraid to do so.

“Apologize,” Ying snapped at him. “Manhandling a guest is bad enough. Insulting and manhandling a sect leader is worse.”

Jiang Cheng went white. “What?”

“These are Wei Gang and Wei Ying of the Yiling Xue Sect,” Jiang Fengmian announced to everyone listening in, not just to Jiang Cheng and his very intent, very threatening-looking wife. “They just ascended to the post two days ago. Immediately after saving my life. And setting my broken nose so that I could breathe.”

“It was a mess,” Gang muttered to the sudden amusement in Jiang Fengmian’s wife’s eyes.

Jiang Cheng shut his eyes, jaw jumping and hands in fists, before stepping back to bow very properly to Gang. “I apologize for my impertinence, Sect Leader Wei. It will not happen again.”

Ying lowered his staff, nodding approval.

Gang huffed at both of them while shaking his head. “Yeah, fine. Whatever. We’re mostly a farming sect, anyway, so there’s no need to get all formal with us.”

“Generally,” Ying said when Lan Zhan made one of his profoundly disapproving noises at Gang.

“Generally, there’s no need for formality,” Gang clarified while rolling his eyes. “Can we get back to the thing where we have an army incoming, and the Wen are on their way to invading Lotus Pier? That’s way more important.”

This time Lan Zhan’s little noise was curious, not protesting. Ying made a face over his shoulder and signed “later” which Lan Zhan nodded at. There wasn’t time to tell Lan Zhan everything, not that Ying was going to no matter how much he trusted Lan Zhan.

Jiang Fengmian’s wife stiffened with as much offense as Jiang Cheng had showed. “You dare to bring an army to Lotus Pier?”

“Well, if you want to be exterminated, I suppose we can go rescue the Lan instead,” Ying drawled at her.

“Ziyuan,” Jiang Fengmian snapped, glaring right back at her when she speared him with a furious look. “These are Wei Changze’s sons. They have as much right to be here as we do. They saved my life and they offered, of their own free will, to leave the defenses they created in Yiling to help save my family.”

“Strictly because he is family,” Gang said as Ziyuan spluttered furiously. “Neither of us are really interested in staying here. Our homes and families are in Yiling.”

“This…” Ziyuan hissed at Jiang Fengmian who held up a hand as if to warn her to watch her tongue.

“Whatever it is you’re trying not to say,” Ying said in that same drawling tone that always made people pissed off at him, “we don’t need to know. We don’t want to know. This isn’t our place. We’re just here to keep Wen Ruohan from conquering absolutely everyone.”

“He’s such a pest,” Gang agreed in the exact same tone.

No surprise, everyone from Lan Zhan on down stared at them like they were crazy. Which, you know, fair. But they’d spent their whole lives watching Elder Entai dealing with the Wen, so it wasn’t like they’d learned a single bit of respect for the man.

“You two spend too much time with Elder Entai,” Jiang Fengmian complained as he rubbed his forehead.

“Well, she’s kinda fierce,” Ying said with his best grin.

“She almost cut off Wen Ruohan’s heavenly pillar and nearly cut his throat when she was our age,” Gang told Jiang Cheng.

“No,” Jiang Cheng breathed, eyes wide.

“Yup,” Gang said with his best grin. “She’s been running circles around the Wen since we were tiny. It’s amazing. Either way, Wen army incoming?”

“Yes,” Jiang Fengmian said, redirecting everyone except his wife from focusing on Ying and Gang. “We need to raise the defenses. Get the townfolk to safety and send messages to all the towns in our territory. We must hurry or the Wen will wipe the Jiang out entirely.”

Everyone scrambled.

Well, everyone other than Lan Zhan and Yu Ziyuan.

Lan Zhan stayed right there at Ying and Gang’s back while Yu Ziyuan stared at them with hard, suspicious eyes. Ying sighed and waved her over though she didn’t come close enough that either of them could have attacked her.

“I’m Ying,” Ying said quietly. “Gang saved my life when I was a street kid in Yiling. There were dog-yao, a whole pack. We both had cores and we decided to be twins because it was safer than trying to survive alone.”

“Decided to be twins?” Yu Ziyuan asked in an angry hiss that Ying refused to quail before.

“Decided,” Gang agreed. “Your core can heal your body. You can also use your core to… slowly and carefully affect your body. I changed my eyes, my nose.”

“I changed my chin and cheekbones,” Ying agreed. “And we… hah, figured out a way to dual cultivate that… well. It’s not sexual at all. But we can combine our spiritual energy to the point that you can’t tell us apart.”

“Among other things,” Gang said in the “don’t keep blabbing all our secrets, you idiot” voice.

Yu Ziyuan stared at them, hostility shifting to confusion and then shocked awe at the dual cultivation. She shook her head sharply as she pursed her lips.

“You will explain that further later,” Yu Ziyuan snapped at them.

“No,” Ying said blandly.

“We won’t.” Gang glowered at Yu Ziyuan.

“You’re not a member of our sect,” Ying continued.

“So you’re not learning how we do it,” Gang finished with a scowl that was just as fierce and intimidating as Yu Ziyuan’s.

Lan Zhan made a little noise of amusement behind them. He was so good at that, being quiet and unnoticed until he decided that people needed to remember him. Ying grinned over his shoulder at Lan Zhan, laughing as Lan Zhan’s ears went red.

“I missed you, Lan Zhan,” Ying said. “You say so much with so little.”

Lan Zhan’s ears got even redder.

“Quit teasing,” Gang said, smiling wryly at Lan Zhan and then blushing as Lan Zhan’s ears blazed. “Gah. Let’s go get the whole army of Wen thing dealt with. You need to warn your people that our army is… well. We’re from Yiling. That should be a warning in and of itself.”

Yu Ziyuan’s head went up as she stared at them both. Then she strode off snapping orders at the scurrying Jiang disciples in their expensive lavender, purple and blue silks. So much silk. They must spend a ridiculous amount of money just on fabric and dye.

“Can you protect the kids and staff with your guqin, Lan Zhan?” Ying asked. “With your leg, I don’t think you should be fighting the Wen.”

“Mm,” Lan Zhan confirmed, nodding firmly.

He waved for them to follow him through the sect and then out into the rapidly emptying town beyond. Jiang Fengmian apparently had some pretty good procedures for evacuation of his people because there wasn’t any screaming or crying, no refusals to go.

There were just streams of people carrying their belongings in rough qiankun bags stitched with hasty purple lotuses. Those must have been done a while ago. If Ying had to guess, he’d say that everyone had packed their most precious belongings a while back and only now were running off with them.

By the time Lan Zhan delivered them to Jiang Cheng at the gates, the town was half-empty.

By the time Jiang Cheng took them to the road that led into Lotus Cove and then Lotus Pier, the town was empty of everyone but the Jiang Sect’s disciples.

“Where’s your army?” Jiang Cheng asked with a suspicious scowl at Gang.

“Should be here anytime,” Gang said, looking at the crows rising in squawking clouds from the stands of bamboo and swamp cypress around the expansive lotus and rice fields that ringed Lotus Cove.

Ying was kind of glad that Lan Zhan wasn’t there to see General Kwan and the Yiling army of the dead arrive at a run. All the Jiang stumbled back, shouting and pulling their swords as if General Kwan would attack them.

“Sect Leader,” General Kwan said as he neatly skidded to a stop in front of Gang and Ying. “Furen. The Wen aren’t far out. All living, no puppets or yao.”

His eyes went back to normal the instant he stopped running. The black veins retreated. In every way, he looked like a normal, if intimidating, soldier wearing old-fashioned black and red armor.

Until you noticed that he wasn’t breathing. And how still he stood.

Then it was obvious just what he was.

“Thank you, General Kwan,” Gang said calmly as the rest of the Yiling army skidded to a stop behind him, settling into the tight, careful formation that General Kwan had tested out before they left Yiling.

“What?” Jiang Cheng spluttered. “What the hell is this?”

Ying and Gang turned as one, mirroring each other as the smiled confidently and raised their chins in unison.

“This is the Yiling army,” Gang said.

“The army of the dead,” Ying continued with a nod to Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Fengmian who arrived at a run.

“What did you expect, anyway?” Gang asked with a little snort. “We’re from the Yiling Xue Sect.”

“What else would our army be?” Ying agreed.

Before Jiang Cheng could start cursing as his snarl suggested he wanted, Jiang Fengmian put a hand on his shoulder. Jiang Cheng went still. Not happy, just still.

“How long do we have?” Jiang Fengmian asked Gang and General Kwan.

Gang turned to General Kwan who bowed respectfully to both of them.

“Less than a quarter of a shichen,” General Kwan said. “I don’t know if they’ll attack immediately or if they’ll pretend that they just want to talk, but you’d best be ready to fight before half a shichen passes.”

Jiang Fengmian nodded, patting Jiang Cheng’s shoulder in an absent sort of way that still made Jiang Cheng look at him with shock.

“Very well,” Jiang Fengmian said. “Please come into the town. I think it would be best if we surprised them. The more time we can give our people to get to safety, the better.”

“Lead on,” Gang said.

“We’re here to help you,” Ying said, waving for Jiang Fengmian to take the lead. “Let’s see what we can set up before they get here.”

 

 

14. Enemies

The Wen didn’t arrive in a quarter shichen. They didn’t arrive in half a shichen. They didn’t come to Lotus Cover at all. They put up camp just outside of the borders of Lotus Cove and settled in for the night instead of coming straight in.

It was so weird.

Ying stared through the gates towards the plumes of smoke from the Wen’s campfires. This far off, there was nothing to smell but the wet earth of the rice paddies and the smell of the lotus flowers. Felt like they should have the stink of the Wen soldiers sweating in their armor right there with them.

“I do not like this. Not at all.” Ying huffed towards the stupid Wen army.

“No, it’s bullshit,” Jiang Cheng agreed with a glower towards the Wen that should’ve leveled the crops and chopped down all the trees in the way. “What the hell do they think they’re doing?”

Ying grinned at him. “You really swear a lot.”

“Shut up,” Jiang Cheng grumbled at him, cheeks bright red instantly. “I grew up around dock workers. It’s a habit.”

“I’m just surprised your mom hasn’t scolded you until you stopped.” Ying laughed when Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes. “Elder Entai would’ve tanned our hides if we swore like that.”

Jiang Cheng huffed. “Mom doesn’t care about swearing. She only cares if I’m a good fighter and leader. Father cares. I mean, some. I try not to swear any more than he does when he’s upset.”

From the way Jiang Cheng refused to meet Ying’s eyes, Jiang Fengmian swore really, really bad when he was upset. Which was kind of funny, actually. Ying had spent his whole life being super careful about his language, both in the dialects he used with different ranks of people and in the “do not swear where Elder Entai can find out about it” way. To find out that he would have been a sweary, sweary person if he’d grown up in Lotus Pier was giggle-worthy.

“Oh, shut up,” Jiang Cheng groaned.

They both got sent back into Lotus Pier once night fully fell. General Kwan sent Lan Yitian to shoo Ying away from the gate. She took one look at Jiang Cheng and firmly collared him, too.

“I’m the heir!” Jiang Cheng yelped as Lan Yitian dragged him along towards his bed. “I should be out here!”

“You’re a boy even younger than Ying and Gang,” Lan Yitian said with zero apology or care for Jiang Cheng’s blushing. “You need your sleep, or you’ll make stupid mistakes during the battle tomorrow.”

“We don’t even know if there’ll be a battle,” Jiang Cheng grumbled.

He didn’t really fight, just complained, and cursed a little bit. The hard part was getting back to the quarters that he and Gang had been given right next door to Lan Zhan’s quarters.

Because Lan Yitian froze when she saw Lan Zhan.

“Oh,” Ying breathed as he put a hand on her arm. “You can go if you want. We can explain to Lan Zhan.”

Lan Yitian stared at Lan Zhan who was very pale and very still. She nodded jerkily before hurrying back the way she came. Jiang Cheng frowned at her back.

“What’s wrong with her?” Jiang Cheng asked in such an accusing tone that Ying glowered at him.

“She used to be Lan,” Ying said. “Before… well. Bad things happened. The sort of bad things that happen to women.”

Jiang Cheng went as white as Lan Zhan’s robes. “Oh, shit. Seriously?”

“Mhm,” Ying confirmed. “Seriously, it’s… I didn’t think about it. I doubt General Kwan did, either. She’s been one of the ones who takes care of Gang and me so it was probably just habit that he sent her to shoo us off to bed.”

Jiang Cheng glanced at Lan Zhan’s face. His good night was so fast that Ying almost missed what he said. Then Jiang Cheng was gone, leaving Ying to guide Lan Zhan into the room he was sharing with Gang.

Who was still not back from whatever meeting he’d been in. Or maybe he’d wandered off to fix something to deal with his nerves?

“Where is Gang?” Ying asked, frowning at their two narrow beds. Like they’d sleep on separate beds.

“Meeting,” Lan Zhan said. “Who…?”

Ying sighed. “Her name is Lan Yitian. She was attacked by Wen soldiers about fifty years or so ago. They raped her and then stabbed her before throwing her into the Burial Mounds. She died, obviously. The Burial Mounds and the ghosts helped her hang onto her body which rose as a resentful corpse. She joined Xue Chonghai’s soldiers because she wasn’t ready to leave this life yet. Not sure why. She’s never explained what she had to stay for besides vengeance.”

Lan Zhan’s legs gave way, dropping him to the left bed where he shivered. He licked his lips but signed instead of trying to speak.

“She’s my great-aunt,” Lan Zhan signed. His hands shook badly. “She disappeared on a night hunt. No one knew what happened.”

“Oh, wow,” Ying breathed. “Hang on.”

He whistled, summoning one of the ghost ladies, Xiaoling, who nodded that she’d pass the word onto General Kwan to keep an eye on Lan Yitian. Lan Zhan stared at Xiaoling’s cut throat, her long sharp nails, and then the way she smiled gently at Ying and nodded reassuringly to Lan Zhan.

“They’re… aware,” Lan Zhan said with his actual voice.

“Oh, yeah,” Ying agreed. “It’s part of why the Burial Mounds is the Burial Mounds. Or was. We changed a bunch before we left.”

They both started when the door slid open with a loud crack against the frame. Gang frowned at them both before shutting the door more gently. He looked so very exhausted, which was no surprise if he’d had to be in a meeting all that time.

“What happened?” Gang asked.

“Lan Yitian is Lan Zhan’s great-aunt,” Ying said. “She escorted me and Jiang Cheng back so that we could go to bed. You know, because battle tomorrow.”

“Oh, wow,” Gang said. He grimaced sympathetically at Lan Zhan. “I had no idea. She never talked about her family with me or Ying. Give her some time before you try and talk to her, Lan Zhan. She’s always said that there was no reason to even try to go back given what she’d become, but I know she missed her family.”

“It showed,” Ying agreed. He frowned at the dark bags under Gang’s eyes and the way his shoulders drooped. “You need me to take Gang tomorrow? I can if you want.”

“Nah,” Gang said with a tired sigh as he flopped on the too-narrow bed with a grimace. “You missed enough that it would be tough. We should sleep. Um, if you want to stay in our room, you can, Lan Zhan. We always share a bed since we have such terrible nightmares.”

“Really helps,” Ying agreed though he grimaced at how narrow the bed was, too.

Lan Zhan smiled wryly at them, getting up with the help of his cane and Ying’s hastily flung-out hands. “Push them together. Wider that way.”

Ying and Gang looked at the narrow beds, then grinned in unison at Lan Zhan. He huffed a little laugh, bowing slightly to them before limping towards the door.

The night was one of the twitchy ones where neither of them could drop into a deep sleep. Xue Chonghai wasn’t there, either, which meant that they only had their dreams and the occasional points where they woke and stared into the darkness of their unfamiliar room with the quiet slap of water underneath them, and the weird scents Ying sort of kind of but really didn’t remember.

Morning didn’t come soon enough as far as Ying was concerned.

Worse, the Wen didn’t attack in the morning.

They didn’t attack midday.

It was mid-afternoon when a haughty woman that Xiaoling identified as Wang Lingjiao sauntered into town. She was followed by Wen Zhuoliu who had been to Yiling a couple of times searching for the Yiling Patriarchs. Probably not often enough to actually remember Ying or Gang, especially in their good, visiting people clothes instead of their patched play clothes.

There was also a small company of Wen soldiers who looked so smugly certain of their superiority that they didn’t even bother to look at all of the Yiling soldiers manning the various booths and stalls along the path to Lotus Pier’s gates.

Seriously, how could any of them miss that no one was breathing?

That was so obvious, along with the standing to still and staring way too long. Dead eyes didn’t need to blink anywhere near as often as living ones. General Kwan and the rest truly stood out if you paid the least little bit of attention.

Wang Lingjiao couldn’t be bothered to notice anything other than her own pettiness.

Wen Zhuoliu couldn’t be bothered to care about anything that he did notice. His eyes stopped on each of the Yiling soldiers, a little wrinkle appearing between his eyebrows, but he never once opened his mouth or lifted a finger to signal to any of the Wen soldiers what he saw.

When he met Ying’s eyes, standing there just to the right and behind Gang as they’d planned, Wen Zhuoliu’s faint frown deepened ever so slightly. There was a sort of recognition there though he didn’t seem to be able to figure out who he was looking at.

“Who are you?” Yu Ziyuan snapped at Wang Lingjiao with a sneer so scathing that it should’ve made the foolish girl flinch.

She huffed instead. “How outrageous! You can see that we’re Wen. Aren’t you going to invite us inside for tea?”

“No,” Yu Ziyuan replied with the flat, lethal hostility that Ying was used to seeing out of a tiger yao.

“I can’t believe that the Jiang are so ill-mannered,” Wang Lingjiao said while dramatically tossing her hair and studying her nails. “Really, I would have expected more from a sect mourning their Sect Leader.”

Yu Ziyuan’s lips curled in a tiger-yao smile that made Wen Zhuoliu stiffen and shift up onto the balls of his feet. Behind the Wen, the Yiling soldiers abandoned their pretend merchant posts, moving as silently as only the dead could to encircle the Wen.

“My husband is not dead,” Yu Ziyuan said, low and deadly, as Zidian crackled with purple lightning on her wrist.

“…What?” Wang Lingjiao asked, blinking at Yu Ziyuan. Her surprise was almost comical.

Then she turned to Wen Zhuoliu, only to scream short and sharp when she saw the Yiling soldiers lurking behind her and her men. Wen Zhuoliu whirled, too, flinging a glowing hand out against General Kwan’s belly.

“Looking for something?” General Kwan asked as the dark veins rose on his neck and his eyes turned completely black.

The other Yiling soldier’s eyes went black. Their veins rose like black veins of resentful energy along their necks and wrists. As one, as they had practiced at Ying’s suggestion, they rumbled threateningly deep in their chests.

For one endless moment, Wen Zhuoliu stood there staring into General Kwan’s eyes.

Then he jumped backwards, out of range of an immediate attack. It put him close to Ying and Gang and nowhere near Wang Lingjiao who panicked as she stared around at the Yiling soldiers and the Jiang disciples.

“Wen Zhuoliu!” Wang Lingjiao screamed as she pulled out a signal flare.

“No, you don’t,” Yu Ziyuan said.

Zidian sliced through the air, wrapping around Wang Lingjiao’s wrist. A flick of Yu Ziyuan’s hand cut Wang Lingjiao’s hand off, sending the signal flare tumbling to the ground. Blood spurting, Wang Lingjiao screamed.

Wen Zhuoliu stumbled backwards, face surprisingly pale for a man so incredibly emotionless and apparently without independent thought. He stiffened and whirled as Ying and Gang moved as one to block him from heading into Lotus Pier.

The smell of death, fresh and rank, rose in the air as the Yiling soldiers killed the Wen. Nothing bloody, of course. That would render their bodies harder to fix and really, cleaning bloodied clothing was so much harder than fixing broken bones.

A simple snapped neck was so much neater than stabbing or slashing at the Wen.

“You,” Wen Zhuoliu murmured as his eyes locked on Ying and Gang with a sort of recognition.

Not real recognition. Just an awareness that there were walking dead and thus, obviously, the two strange young men had to be the Yiling Patriarchs. From the way his eyes scanned Ying and Gang’s faces, he didn’t recognize them from the two young street kids in Yiling.

Good.

“You’ve been looking for us,” Ying said.

“Well, now you’ve found us,” Gang continued.

They moved as one, Gang leading, Ying shadowing. The dark shadows of their ghostly cultivation swept up and around Ying, turning him into a living, breathing shadow that made the few surviving Wen soldiers scream in terror the way the Yiling soldiers hadn’t.

Their screams didn’t last very long.

Wen Zhuoliu’s mouth fell open for a moment. “The Yiling Patriarchs. You serve the Jiang?”

Gang laughed. “Oh, no, we don’t serve. We’re family. Not direct, of course, but close enough to care that the Wen have decided to kill our relatives.”

“That wasn’t what drew us out, though,” Ying said with an extra little trill to his voice from the shadows sheathing his body.

“No,” Gang agreed in the low, threatening growl that Xue Chonghai had trained them to do. “You attacked the Lan. You hurt Lan Zhan.”

“Not allowed,” Ying agreed in the same growl.

It came out more like a yao’s roar what with the shadows.

Two of the remaining Wen soldiers turned and ran straight into General Kwan’s waiting arms. They only lasted a blink of an eye before every single Wen soldier was dead. Wang Lingjiao stumbled to her feet, clutching the bleeding stump of her arm to her chest while she stared at Yu Ziyuan in terror.

Or maybe fury given the way she snarled at Yu Ziyuan.

Didn’t really matter. Yu Ziyuan could take care of one stupid girl who didn’t have enough sense to be afraid when surrounded by a literal army of the dead.

Ying and Gang had more important things to worry about.

“Join us or die,” Wen Zhuoliu said in a flat, inflected tone as he hurled himself at Gang’s belly, glowing hand stretched out.

“No,” Gang and Ying said at the same time.

They darted to the side, pivoting and dodging as if they were one person instead of two. All this time, General Kwan had said that it would be a useful technique to learn.

He wasn’t wrong.

After two lunges, three clashes between Wen Zhuoliu’s glowing hand and Gang’s bamboo staff, and a near-miss where Gang’s boot nearly punted Wen Zhuoliu’s testicles, Wen Zhuoliu’s eyes stopped tracking Ying.

Ying was just a shadow. Not a real person with his own weapon and his own ability to attack.

You know, Ying hadn’t honestly expected that it would work.

As often as General Kwan said that it would give them a moment of complete shock to exploit, he hadn’t thought that anyone would be able to forget that Ying was a separate person covered in shadows instead of a shadow given independent form and then reclaimed for the fight.

General Kwan watched their fight, lazily signaling to his soldiers to go attack the remaining Wen hiding off in the woods behind the edge of the fields. They darted off so quickly it was as if they’d disappeared entirely. He sauntered over to observe Ying and Gang fighting Wen Zhuoliu with that “going to critique every mistake you made” face that Ying loathed so much.

No surprise, Wen Zhuoliu looked nearly as disturbed by it as Ying and Gang.

“You will be destr—” Wen Zhuoliu’s pointless threat cut off as Zidian sailed through the air to wrap around Wang Lingjiao’s throat.

Her head toppled to the ground next to her amputated hand. The body fell right after that.

“Pity,” Gang said, ducking under one of Wen Zhuoliu’s attacks.

“We could have used that body,” Ying finished.

The startlement in Wen Zhuoliu’s eyes faded as Gang attacked hard with his staff.

It quadrupled when Ying pulled out his dizi and summoned the waiting ghosts from the sky overhead. Where blue spotted with fluffy white clouds had been, suddenly black ash swooped down to form a dense fog around them all.

Ying played the disembodied souls of Xue Chonghai’s warriors into the available bodies, trilling quick fixes for the broken necks that would have to be properly repaired later.

Wen Zhuoliu shouted something incoherent, eyes wild as he stared at Ying with sudden realization that no, Ying wasn’t just a shadow.

Gang’s staff flashed out and crushed Wen Zhuoliu’s throat in that moment of distraction.

The impact was hard enough to shatter Wen Zhuoliu’s neck. He dropped to the ground, hand glimmering fitfully for a moment before his soul slipped free of his body. With the amount of resentful energy flooding the area and the weight of Ying’s playing, his soul was visible.

He stared down at his body, horror obvious. Wang Lingjiao wailed over her body. The other Wen soldiers were also there, shaking their heads and shouting silently for Ying and Gang to stop.

Ying switched tunes, playing the purification song that they’d perfected in Yiling.

Glowing lotus flowers bloomed underneath each soul, bubbles of pure light floating up to encase the newly dead. The power of the purification soothed their resentment, cleared the hate and sorrow and fear and regret that made them cling to life.

Most of the Wen soldiers moved on in a shower of light drifting upwards like embers. Wang Lingjiao took a little longer, but she wrapped her arms around herself and let go after just a little longer.

Wen Zhuoliu stared at Ying and Gang, as expressionless in death as he was in life.

Four rounds of the song later, Wen Zhuoliu sighed silently and submitted, fading away from the world of the living as he moved into the cycle of reincarnation.

Hopefully next time he wouldn’t make such horrible choices of who to follow.

One Wen soldier remained, floating over his body and batting at any of Xue Chonghai’s disembodied soldiers that tried to claim it.

“Xilun!” Gang gasped, staring at him. “I thought you’d died ages ago.”

Ying stopped playing the purification song as he dispelled the shadows covering his body. “Did they make you fight for them? How rude!”

Xilun laughed a little as Gang and Ying helped him settle enough to be heard properly. “Yeah, no, I stayed alive. Hated those assholes. I kept trying to run away but it never worked out. They had this array on my armor that made me fight no matter what I tried to do to escape. Can you guys fix my body? I don’t mind fighting as long as I’m fighting for Yiling.”

“Of course,” Ying exclaimed. “Just a sec. I’ll fix your neck and then you’ll be good as new.”

He lifted his dizi, but Yu Ziyuan’s hand clamped onto his wrist hard enough that she nearly broke the bones.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Yu Ziyuan snarled.

 

 

15. Aftermath

Ying instinctively flinched away from Yu Ziyuan, but she only had her hand on him for a moment. The next moment General Kwan was there to tear her hand free and fling her away from Ying and Gang. Every single one of their soldiers, the newly restored to bodies ones, growled. All the disembodied soldiers hummed with outrage, making resentful energy billow around the battlefield as if a bonfire had just been doused with swamp water.

“You do not touch our leaders,” General Kwan snarled at Yu Ziyuan.

“You don’t have the right to tell us not to help our own people,” Gang agreed as he pulled his dizi out and set to work fixing Xilun’s neck.

Gang had that slant to his shoulders that hunched inwards like he was utterly done with people, so Ying pulled his face into Gang’s scowl, squared his shoulders the way Gang always did when he had to face down important people who thought they were arbiters of everything, and let Gang take on Ying’s looser, more cheerful demeanor.

They hadn’t moved around enough for the switch to be seamless, but they’d done this before. Just blatantly switching names and personalities right there in front of people. It usually worked on most everyone.

Not always. Elder Entai always saw through it if they switched in front of her, even though they could fool her every time if she didn’t see the switch happen.

It would be interesting if he could sell the switch to Yu Ziyuan who was as suspicious as she was spooked. Maybe leaning into the resentful energy thing would help?

Yeah. Definitely.

Ying swirled resentful energy between him and Gang in a way that made it look almost like something semi-solid shifted between their two bodies. Amazingly, Yu Ziyuan’s eyes went wide as if she thought they’d just switched souls or something.

“Cho Xilin is one of our people who was kidnapped,” Ying snapped at Yu Ziyuan. He thumped his staff against the ground just like Gang would have. “We don’t tell you not to give your people medical care. Don’t you try and stop us from treating our own.”

“It’s demonic cultivation!” Yu Ziyuan shouted. Zidian sparked on her hand like she wanted to strike out all of them.

“Ghostly,” Ying corrected. “Demonic cultivation uses the dead against their will. Ying liberated the souls of the dead. The ghosts who inhabit those discarded bodies are all willing and sworn to the Yiling Xue Sect. No one here is being forced to do anything.”

“I really don’t know what your problem with us is,” Gang said in Ying’s breezier tone, with the little sniff of disapproval he’d copied from Cho Lianmin and the roll of his eyes that was all Ying. “We’re here helping save your husband and your sect’s lives and you treat us like an enemy. It’s ridiculous.”

Zidian sparked again, but there was a flicker of uncertainty in Yu Ziyuan’s eyes as she looked at Gang and then at Ying and then back again. She raised her chin as Zidian stilled.

Her hands were still fists, though.

“You have Xilun, Ying?” Ying asked Gang.

“Sure,” Gang said waving Ying off. “Go be all Sect Leader Gang at them. I’ll take care of giving the ghosts new bodies.”

“Call if you need help,” Ying said with a worried frown just as Gang always did when Ying took on too much.

Gang grinned because he always grinned when Ying was properly Gang-like at him. “I’m fine. Shoo. General Kwan will keep us all safe.”

“Right,” Ying said.

At least they’d had time to go over everything that had gone on in the meeting yesterday. Not that it was very much. Lots of people fussing about the threat of the Wen, lots of worries and very little constructive action being taken. Gang had used the Yiling light array to show Ying pictures of all the Elders and senior disciples who’d been rude about them being there.

It was enough for Ying to take Gang’s place.

“You,” Ying said, leveling a finger at Yu Ziyuan. “Come with me. Your husband needs to know what’s happened out here.”

“He will not take your side against me,” Yu Ziyuan sniffed as she whirled and stomped back into Lotus Pier.

“Who cares about that?” Ying snapped right back at her. “The Wen army did come. Wen Zhuoliu is dead. Shortly Wen Chao should be dead, too. Your issues are unimportant.”

Yu Ziyuan looked so utterly offended at the sheer concept that what she cared about might be insignificant that Ying rolled his eyes at her. Really, the woman had so many issues. He was deeply grateful that he’d never figured out how to come live at Lotus Pier. Having to grow up under Yu Ziyuan’s messed-up thumb would have been worse than living on the streets in Yiling.

At least in Yiling he always had places he could retreat to. Here, he would have been under threat all the time.

“I… do not understand what you did,” Yu Ziyuan murmured once they were away from the gate and out of easy hearing range from the other Jiang.

“Which?” Ying asked, side-eyeing her.

“You were Ying,” Yu Ziyuan murmured. “Now you are not. That… should not be possible.”

Ying snorted so that he wouldn’t cackle with delight that they actually had managed to pull the switch off right in front of her face. They were going to have to remember that swirling shadow thing.

“When we work as one, we are one,” Ying said. “When we work as two, we are two. Bodies are unimportant. We are where we need to be, where we want to be. And you will never hurt my brother like that again. Understood?”

Yu Ziyuan’s lips pressed together. She stopped dead in her tracks, empty stalls all around them. The fear in her eyes was kind of surprising. He wouldn’t have thought that a warrior like Yu Ziyuan could be that afraid of anything.

“What?” Ying asked in Gang’s most disapproving tone with his deepest scowl.

“Wei Changze should have been the Jiang Sect Leader,” Yu Ziyuan murmured so quietly that Ying barely heard her. “By all rights, Wei Ying should lead here.”

Ying snorted at her. “Absolutely not. Don’t ever say that nonsense again. Wei Ying is Yiling Xue, not Jiang. He’s the Xue Sect Furen, not whatever ridiculous threat you’ve built up in your brain. When all of this is over, Ying and I will be going home. To Yiling. There is no possibility that he would ever sit on the Lotus throne, even if every single other person of the bloodline died.”

She still frowned as if she couldn’t quite accept that. Ying shook his head at her, a sharp little gesture that made her eyes narrow at him. It was deliberately a kind of scornful headshake, the sort you made when you thought someone was such an idiot that there was no point in correcting them because anything you said would just wash right over them like water off a duck’s back.

“Where would your husband be?” Ying asked before Yu Ziyuan could do more than curl one lip up in a sneer.

“Follow me,” Yu Ziyuan snapped at him.

Better.

She led Ying straight to Jiang Fengmian who frowned at the bruises on Ying’s wrist. He didn’t ask, instead staying silent as Ying reported what they’d accomplished so far in all of Gang’s mannerisms.

“I should get back there to help Ying,” Ying said once he was done with as brief of a report as he could get away with. “Repairing broken necks is somewhat finicky work. Ying’s good at it, but extra support is always better than doing it by yourself. And we will have the majority of Wen Chao’s army to ensoul, too.”

Both Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan looked disturbed by that. Lan Zhan had limped over as Ying explained. His lips had twitched in the tiniest of smiles when Ying referred to Gang with Ying’s name.

“How many?” Lan Zhan asked.

“That need bodies?” Ying clarified.

Lan Zhan nodded, one eyebrow going up inquiringly.

“There are about a thousand surviving souls,” Ying said. “We had ninety-seven already in bodies. The group at the gate put us at about a hundred and fifteen if everything goes properly. I doubt we’ll get everyone back into a body with Wen Chao’s little army but who knows? Wen Ruohan might be stupid enough to give his immature jerk of a son an actual army.”

“Possible,” Lan Zhan said and sighed while shaking his head sadly enough that it seemed to reassure the others somewhat.

Not a lot. Yu Ziyuan still stared at Ying like she was convinced that he would kill Jiang Fengmian any second and steal the Lotus Throne right after that. Jiang Fengmian just looked disturbed at the idea of resurrecting dead bodies and putting ghosts into them.

Which, yeah, fair. It was kind of heretical but whatever. There was a war to fight, and Ying was absolutely not going to let Wen Ruohan win it. Nor was he going to let any of the other sect leaders threaten Yiling with their greed and stupidity.

Getting as many of Xue Chonghai’s soldiers back into bodies so that they could protect Yiling was more important than all the fussing the various sect leaders would do. Wen Ruohan was only the first threat.

Xue Chonghai’s fate was a clear warning of what would happen if they weren’t prepared for when the Jianghu inevitably turned on them.

“You should probably send messages to the other sect leaders,” Ying said to Jiang Fengmian. “This is the start of a true war. Burning the Cloud Recesses might have been the warning shot, but this was fully intended to be the destruction of the Jiang. All of you. The other sects need to know.”

Jiang Fengmian shut his eyes for a moment. Then he nodded as he opened them and stared at Ying grimly.

“I’ll do exactly that, Wei Gang,” Jiang Fengmian said. “Go help your twin with your soldiers. The sooner your army is ready, the sooner we can strike back against Wen Ruohan’s insane demands.”

Ying nodded firmly, patting Lan Zhan’s shoulder as he passed just as Gang would have. From the way Lan Zhan’s lips quirked in a teeny tiny little smile, he was deeply amused by Ying switching places with Gang.

Honestly, so was Ying. He hadn’t expected it to be so effective. But apparently people will believe anything at all if there’s resentful energy involved.

Which…

…Actually, that was a problem that they were going to have to take care of. The rumors had been the first thing that Xue Chen had noticed. All kinds of stories about the terrible, awful, no-good, very bad things his father had supposedly been doing. None of which were based on reality.

Someone had fanned the flames against Xue Chonghai by spreading horrible rumors about who he was and what he was doing.

Then the Jianghu had gone against him without hesitation because they were greedy and because they were afraid and because they were easily led by the people who wanted to steal Xue Chonghai’s techniques for themselves.

It would happen again.

“Can you come help?” Ying asked Lan Zhan instead of leaving him there at the heart of the Jiang Sect. “Once we have everyone that we can get back into a body, purification of the remaining resentful energy will be important. I mean, we can absolutely super-charge the fields around here but I’m not sure what that would do to the crops.”

“Wait, what?” Jiang Fengmian stared at Ying, as did Yu Ziyuan though she was frowning more than staring.

“…We’re a farming sect,” Ying said in Gang’s “how are you this dim-witted” voice. “We channel resentful energy into producing crops that we couldn’t otherwise grow in Yiling’s terrible soil. I thought you understood that.”

Jiang Fengmian opened his mouth and then tilted his head to the side as he shook his head. “No, actually, I hadn’t realized that. You grew all that food? In Yiling?”

Ying sighed and rubbed his forehead because wow, no wonder Gang got so many headaches when he had to deal with outsiders being stunningly stupid.

“Yes, we grew it all,” Ying agreed. “That’s what the Yiling Xue Sect does: grow things in places where you wouldn’t think it was possible. Which is kind of irrelevant. I don’t know how those arrays will work on ground that’s not polluted, water-phobic and burned over. We’ve never tested them on good earth. Lan Zhan’s purification songs are probably a much safer bet.”

Instead of just Ying and Lan Zhan heading back out to Gang and General Kwan, they ended up with a whole parade behind them. Jiang Fengmian had to go see a test of the soil healing arrays which meant that Yu Ziyuan had to come along just in case they suddenly turned on Jiang Fengmian.

Since both of them where going, Jiang Cheng insisted on coming, as did the first disciple, half the Elders, Jiang Yanli and both of Yu Ziyuan’s maids.

“What?” Gang asked with Ying’s wary “about to bolt for the hills” smile. “We’re just fixing people’s spines. And associated other injuries from before they died.”

“Other injuries?” Ying asked.

“Lots of beatings,” Cho Xilun explained while moving between Ying and the crowd of Jiang. “Almost everyone here had whip and cane marks from discipline.”

“Wen Ruohan is a terrible leader,” Ying complained. He shrugged that off and jerked his chin at Gang. “Jiang Fengmian would like to see a test of the soil healing arrays.”

“Yikes.” Gang grimaced. “That’s not the best idea in the world. We don’t know what they’ll do here.”

He looked over at Jiang Fengmian and rolled his eyes dramatically at the gently hopeful expression there. Mostly because Jiang Cheng and Yu Ziyuan bracketed him while scowling hot death in Ying and Gang’s direction.

This time, Gang was the one who swirled resentful energy between them. Which was nice. Ying wasn’t sure how long he could keep up Gang’s scowls when there were experiments to perform. As soon as the resentful energy swirled between them, Ying made a point of grimacing and shaking his wrist.

“Shoot, forgot about that,” Ying complained while making a face at his bruised wrist.

“Give,” Gang huffed.

They’d come up with dozens of different sorts of healing arrays to help the people who’d been tossed into the Burial Mounds. The one Gang used was as simple as they got, just qi pushed into the pictogram for “heal” drawn over Ying’s wrist.

The finger-shaped bruises promptly disappeared, fading through all the shades from purple to green and yellow in a matter of moments.

“Right, so where should we do this?” Ying asked even though Cho Xilun whistled with awe at the healing. “Off where the rest of the army died or here?”

“Here,” Gang said. “There’s a small enough amount of resentful energy that we shouldn’t cause any truly obnoxious explosions.”

“Mmm, hope so,” Ying said doubtfully. “But we’ll see, I guess. You’re sure about this?”

He asked Gang, not Jiang Fengmian, to further the whole switching places deception. Gang just nodded, which was fine. Lan Zhan was the only one making an amused face, though probably no one else had watched Lan Zhan smirking as Gang cursed after losing at xiangqi.

Ying openly grinned at Lan Zhan. He cackled with delight when Lan Zhan huffed a quiet little laugh. To Ying’s joy, Gang smirked at Lan Zhan and then cackled as well when Lan Zhan’s ears went red.

“I do not understand that,” Jiang Cheng pretend-murmured to Jiang Yanli.

“Hush, A-Cheng,” Jiang Yanli said, smiling sweetly as all three of them went red while Jiang Cheng frowned thunderously at her. “They’re cute. Don’t destroy their courtship with your scoffing.”

“Courting,” Jiang Cheng groaned like he was twelve instead of sixteen. “Ugh!”

Ying shook his head and turned away from the Jiang. He truly didn’t know if this test was a good idea, but what could you do? They needed to know how ordinary ground, or in this case ordinary rice paddies and lily ponds, reacted to the earth healing array. Testing now was just logical.

If still nerve-wracking.

“All right,” Ying sighed when Gang nodded that he was ready, “you all need to be way further back. General Kwan, please make sure that everyone hangs back at the safe distance.”

Nobody liked that order, on either side, but the Jiang pulled back behind their gate while Ying and Gang moved right to the edge of the rice paddies. It took more effort to draw resentful energy out of the soil and air and water. There was far less of it to work with so Ying could only feed a thin stream of resentful energy to Gang instead of their normal small tornado.

Gang glowed more brightly than normal, too, which made sense. He had less resentful energy moving through him and more spiritual energy by comparison, so he was kind of like looking at a bonfire.

When he pushed the array out into the rice paddy, Ying expected that they’d have some bubbling, maybe the rice would grow by a finger’s width or so, but that would be it.

As soon as the array entered the rice paddy, the water boiled with rapid growth. Fish and crustaceans, duck weed and rice, lily pads and great enormous lotuses that thrust up out of the water to stand a full head above Ying.

And it wasn’t just close to them. The healing array spread across the entire set of rice paddies. It swept onwards to the lily pond and then into the bamboo forest beyond. The bamboo forest shifted as if it had started walking, new stalks of bamboo shooting upwards to loft gracefully arched fronds half again above the existing bamboo stalks.

It went on and on and on for what felt like forever, even though Ying and Gang had both stumbled backwards in shock when the water started boiling. Lan Zhan hummed as he helped Gang up, keeping one hand under Gang’s elbow because oh yeah, Gang’s knees were all shaky. Just like Ying’s.

“A full ke?” Ying squeaked when the array finally stopped. “It lasted a full ke? What the hell, Gang? It’s never done that before!”

“I’m… more curious about the distance it covered,” Gang agreed with a shaky laugh. “Because um, that… General Kwan? Would that be about the size of a fairly standard battlefield?”

“Approximately, yes,” General Kwan agreed in the calmest, most annoyingly level tone a person could possibly use.

Ying and Gang glared at him.

General Kwan smirked.

“Okay,” Gang said, just as high-pitched as Ying. “Sect Leader Jiang, we… might want to go check and see how wide-spread the effect is. That was…”

“A hell of a lot more than we’re used to, wow,” Ying groaned. “We barely get ten chi by two chi for each usage of the array back home. This is ridiculous. Unfair! Blatantly unfair.”

Gang snort-laughed, though he looked like he totally agreed. “Well, maybe in a generation or so we’ll get that, too. Unreal.”

Well, one way or the other, it was a good test. It’d cleared out the resentment from the battle at the gate, helped the Jiang grow things better, and they’d found out that the earth healing array was a lot more powerful than expected.

Now they just had to survive the coming conference and take Wen Ruohan down. Oh, and save the Cloud Recesses, too, so Lan Zhan could go home. That was important. Couldn’t forget that.

 

 

16. Conference

Ying did his best not to fidget as the many brightly dressed sect leaders gabbled at each other like geese. Tucked off in a corner with Gang, Ying wasn’t finding much to be impressed by. The minor sect leaders had just about as much spine as an overcooked noodle. The Great Sect leaders were…

…well.

Jiang Fengmian wasn’t ever going to be impressive, not after they saved him from random bandits and set his nose for him. Yes, Yu Ziyuan was scary in a fight, but her bone-deep fear of Ying had robbed her of any of Ying’s respect. She was just a woman so afraid of the past that she wasn’t clearly seeing what was going on around her.

Sort of. She did really well with the other sect leaders, and she was a terrifyingly effective instructor, but no, Ying wasn’t impressed by her.

Jin Guangshan was as slimy as any of the creepy guys who worked the docks back in Yiling. Worse, really. He was more like the creeps that specifically came to Yiling because the flower house by the docks didn’t care whether the girls there got hurt. Or killed.

The rumors about Jin Guangshan’s many bastards and numerous perversions weren’t overblown.

Lan Qiren wasn’t there. He was still stuck in the Cloud Recesses, which Ying really wanted to fix. Lan Zhan had to fill in for Lan Qiren and his still-missing older brother Lan Xichen.

“Poor Lan Zhan,” Ying murmured to Gang.

“Yeah, no kidding,” Gang agreed. “He looks like Sect Leader Yao is tearing his fingernails off one by one with every word he speaks.”

Ying pondered going over to rescue Lan Zhan, very carefully because the brief not-quite-introduction he’d gotten to Sect Leader Yao on the way into the audience hall where the conference was being held had been excruciating. Sect Leader Yao was obnoxious.

He didn’t go.

Mostly because it would draw way too much attention to Ying and Gang. They weren’t ready for the entire Jianghu to focus on them yet. And really, poor Lan Zhan didn’t need even more attention focused on him. Once everyone knew that they’d been friends and corresponding for years, the eyes locked on Lan Zhan would be a thousand times worse.

“Were the Nie coming?” Ying asked, eyeing the door out to the main courtyard that the Nie would have to enter through.

“Jiang Fengmian said so,” Gang said. He pursed his lips. “He also said not to expect them to arrive early. Apparently Nie Mingjue is paranoid and won’t arrive until everyone else has.”

“Can’t blame him,” Ying mused. “He’s borne most of the attacks from the Wen so far. You know, until the Lan and the Jiang were attacked.”

Gang nodded.

They both stiffened as a wave of resentful energy swept in outside. Having lived so long in Yiling, they were both sensitive to resentful energy. You could hardly help it when a mushroom could bite your leg off if you weren’t aware of it.

General Kwan was waiting outside, on their side of the audience hall from the incoming wave of energy, with Xue Chen and Cho Xilun and a few others. No Lan Yitian because she was still avoiding Lan Zhan like her continued existence depended on it. Ying was letting that one go for the moment but pretty soon he was going to make Lan Yitian sit down and talk to Lan Zhan, even if it was one of those very Lan conversations where there were long silences, occasional raised eyebrows, and a few hums. Running away from her family just wasn’t good for Lan Yitian.

Besides, Lan Zhan looked all sad every time Lan Yitian came up.

The Jiang’s second disciple bowed the door open, eyes a bit wide as she cleared her throat. “Sect Leader Nie Mingjue. Sect Heir Lan Xichen.”

Lan Zhan stiffened, staring across the room like a hawk that had just spotted a pigeon.

Nie Mingjue was as broad as an entire mountain as he marched in. There were a ton of Nie warriors with him, all big and strong and carrying sabers that radiated resentful energy.

Fully sentient and sapient sabers. Interesting. Ying hadn’t known that anyone cultivated their blades to the point that they became actual people. Huh. That would be… problematic if the saber and the cultivator every got out of sync.

Well, maybe. Hard to tell with so little exposure.

Either way, Lan Xichen limped in at Nie Mingjue’s back. He looked a bit battered, very twitchy, but he was clearly alive, which was the important part. Ying brightened, elbowing Gang who smiled and nodded happily. They’d not spent much time with Lan Xichen and had only exchanged a couple of letters with him over the years, but it was so nice that he wasn’t dead in a ditch somewhere.

“Xiongzhang,” Lan Zhan said in the perfect silence of the echoingly still audience chamber.

“A-Zhan!” Lan Xichen gasped.

They ran at each other, both limping though only Lan Zhan had to use a cane. Their hug made Ying lean into Gang’s shoulder, patting Gang’s arm as he fought against the need to cry that their Lan Zhan had his big brother back.

Nie Mingjue glowered around the room for a long moment as if daring the other sect leaders to comment on Lan Zhan and Lan Xichen’s reunion.

When his eyes reached Gang and Ying, his eyes narrowed at the same time that his saber rattled in her sheath.

“Oh, stop that,” Ying said to the saber. “We’re not a threat to you or to him. Let us be happy about Lan Zhan getting his family back.”

The saber all but blinked at Ying in shock, not that anyone else could tell that. You know, other than Gang. And definitely Nie Mingjue.

Maybe his people, too, but Ying doubted it.

“What?” Nie Mingjue asked, blinking at his saber and then at Ying.

“What?” Lan Xichen said at the same time. He lit up with a delighted smile when he spotted Ying and Gang. “Oh! Ying and Gang! Goodness, I had no idea you’d joined the Jiang.”

“We haven’t,” Gang said, smiling at Lan Xichen just like Ying did. “We’ve got our own sect. It’s kind of a long story.”

“We’re so glad you’re okay,” Ying agreed, beaming at Lan Xichen. “We’ve been worried to bits about you and your uncle. Once this whole conference this is over, we have to sit down and talk about how to save your uncle without destroying the Cloud Recess’ wards.”

Lan Xichen blinked in surprise just like Nie Mingjue had blinked.

“They have… extensive knowledge,” Lan Zhan said, so carefully picking his words that Lan Xichen raised an eyebrow.

“Really?” Lan Xichen said. “Well, I’m delighted that you’ve come up in the world since we first met. What sect did you join?”

He looked around at the others only to frown when there was a wave of confused frowns and shaken heads. Gang sighed like his soul was about to leave his body while Jiang Fengmian rubbed his thumbnail over his bottom lip as if that would hide his deeply amused smile.

“We have our own sect,” Gang explained. “It’s old, very small, a farming sect. But we’ve got some very useful techniques for dealing with resentful energy since we’re from Yiling. You know. Yiling is Yiling.”

Lan Xichen’s blank smile said that no, he didn’t know. At all. But he was clearly willing to just accept that even though he had no clue. Ying sighed internally, trying not to let it show.

“Um, we should get started, I think?” Ying said to Gang. “I mean, is there a procedure or something for these meetings?”

“There is,” Jiang Fengmian said with a fond little smile that made both Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue look at him like he’d grown a second head. “If everyone will take their seats, we should begin.”

Ying and Gang’s seats were near the Jiang seats. Lan Zhan and Lan Xichen ended up to Ying’s right, which was nice. Made sense. They were associated with both the Jiang and the Lan. The other smaller sects that were allied with or subsidiaries of the Great sects had their seats close to whoever they belonged to, too.

The other smaller sect leaders looked like they desperately wanted to object to Ying and Gang’s placement. Especially the ones eyeing Jin Guangshan who ran his tongue over the edge of his upper teeth while studying the two of them as if they were radishes at the market, waiting to be bargained for.

Nie Mingjue huffed at Ying and Gang. “Those can’t be their seats.”

“Ying and Gang are my nephews,” Jiang Fengmian explained in a blandly threatening tone that made Nie Mingjue lean back a tiny bit. “They saved my life. They defeated Wen Chao and his army when they came to kill everyone in Lotus Pier and Lotus Cove. They then purified the battle fields with an old farming technique that strengthened the rice paddies and lotus ponds to such a degree that we have little fear of starvation.”

“Still not sure how long the effect will last,” Gang said with a grimace. “The earth here reacts so differently than Yiling’s polluted soil that it’s impossible to say.”

“…An old farming technique?” Nie Mingjue asked, this time staring at Gang.

“We’re an old farming sect,” Gang confirmed with a shrug. “Our techniques are all about dealing with resentful dead, because Yiling, purifying the soil, because Yiling, and helping crops grow, because Yiling.”

Ying grinned at him.

“Oh, shush,” Gang huffed at Ying. “Everything we do and how we do it is because we’re from Yiling.”

“Oh, I know,” Ying said and then laughed when Gang made like he was going to swat Ying. “I just love the way you said it. Because Yiling. I’m answering every question with “because Yiling” from now on.”

The suspicious frown on Nie Mingjue’s face shifted into amusement. That was better. Lan Xichen looked outright delighted by the teasing, which was amazing, especially when compared to the bland smile he had been wearing.

Jin Guangshan watched Ying and Gang exclusively as the formalities, which were the dullest, driest, most boring speeches and lectures on what had been happening at the other sects, went on. And on. And on.

“I’m going to punch him in the dick,” Ying signed to Gang.

“Not if Lan Zhan gets there first,” Gang countered, flicking his fingers towards Lan Zhan.

“I may,” Lan Zhan agreed, lips thin and eyes narrow as he glowered at Jin Guangshan.

“Please don’t,” Lan Xichen signed, hands held low in his lap where the signing wouldn’t attract quite as much attention. “We need the Jin’s support.”

“Won’t get it,” Gang signed as Jin Guangshan started pontificating about how rich and powerful the Jin were and how well-settled they were and how nothing terrible or troubling had happened in Jin territory at all. “He’s clearly decided that it’s not his problem.”

Across the open center aisle, Yu Ziyuan had her lips pressed together as her eyes flicked from hand to hand even though she listened apparently politely to Jin Guangshan’s pompous bragging about how amazing his sect was.

“…I don’t know how you got anything useful from that speech,” Nie Mingjue signed. His lips quirked in an amused little smile despite his resting scowl of a face.

“Do any of the smaller sects have anything to report?” Jiang Fengmian asked, voice shaking with laughter that didn’t show on his face.

Ying looked at Gang who sighed when none of the other minor sect leaders looked willing to speak up. Probably stunned into unconsciousness by Jin Guangshan’s boasting.

“I suppose I’ll go ahead,” Gang said, nodding to Jiang Fengmian. He waited until Jiang Fengmian nodded approval and then made a face at Jin Guangshan. “The Wen kidnapped all the dock workers out of Yiling, ran frequent raids through town and the surrounding hills to try and find my twin and I, and they have bounties out on our heads. All because we made some heating tiles with Cho Dahong, the potter in town. That’s over the last oh, decade or so. Bit less than that.”

“He attacked the Cloud Recesses,” Ying continued when Jin Guangshan started spluttering and Sect Leader Yao huffed as if they had no right to bring up the obvious. “Then he hunted down Jiang Fengmian. If we hadn’t saved his life, he’d be dead. We came here at Jiang Fengmian’s request with our army, which is probably a good thing since Wen Chao showed up to kill everyone in the sect and in the town.”

“So,” Gang went on in his best attempt at a bellow as the rumbling from the other sects, Great and small increased to the point that Ying would’ve had to shout, “I don’t know what trash you’re trying to sell as treasure, Sect Leader Jin, but we’re looking at a war. If you’re standing out of it, say so. We’d appreciate the clarity one way or the other.”

Jiang Fengmian put on hand over his eyes, not that it did any good hiding his giggles. Next to him, Yu Ziyuan had her lips pressed together as laugh wrinkles formed at the corners of her eyes. And across from Gang and Ying, Nie Mingjue stared at them as if they were either stunningly stupid or ridiculously brave.

“How dare you?” Jin Guangshan shouted overtop everyone else’s squawking outrage. “You think you could do better than the Jin?”

“Yes,” Gang said, curling a lip up in a sneer that Ying copied.

“Because we’re from Yiling,” Ying agreed.

“And we’ve been planning for this war since we were eight years old,” Gang continued.

“Apparently, all you’ve been planning for is how to get your dick wet and how to make pretty speeches,” Ying said with a disgusted huff, flipping his fingers at Jin Guangshan.

“Sit down and shut up,” Gang finished. “Let the actual sect leaders talk. You’re not going to help. You’re not going to contribute anything to either side. You’re going to sit it all out. We got it. You can shut up and drink your crappy wine in peace now.”

Nie Mingjue started laughing into his fist. He looked at Jiang Fengmian who shrugged as if there was nothing to be done about either Ying or Gang.

Accurate. There wasn’t. Kind of rude, but still accurate.

Lan Zhan, of course, looked delighted by them and their bluntness while Lan Xichen had the most complicated twitching smile on his face as if he couldn’t decide whether to cackle like a goose or put on a Buddha’s smile instead.

Jin Guangshan did not sit down.

He didn’t shut up or start drinking his wine.

Jin Guangshan started ranting about the power and the majesty of the Jin Sect’s cultivators, emphasizing just how powerful and skilled they all were.

For a really, really, really long time. All without actually promising that he would send anyone to fight the Wen. Or provide supplies. Or even offer shelter to the wounded that would inevitably come after the battles.

Gang sighed when Jin Guangshan finally sat down, glaring at Gang as if he’d proven something with his pointless hot-air of a speech.

“We got it the first time,” Gang drawled. “Your sect is amazing, and you won’t promise to fight, support the fighting or offer any supplies.”

“We were keeping track,” Ying agreed with a little nod to Jin Guangshan that made his ruddy cheeks go white. “Nice speech. Very dramatic. No substance. No promises.”

“Anyway,” Gang said to Jiang Fengmian, Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen, “we did bring our army. It’s not the biggest army, of course, but they’re pretty well trained. We kind of thought that we should liberate the Cloud Recesses. Having the Lan cultivators would be a good idea.”

“They’re really good at purification of resentful energy,” Ying said with a nod to Lan Zhan, whose ears went bright red, and Lan Xichen, whose lips twitched more obviously as he fought against a grin.

Nie Mingjue nodded approvingly, holding a hand up when Jin Guangshan moved as if he was going to get up to yell some more. His saber rattled curiously in her sheath. Ying was seriously curious about the saber, all of the sabers, but the thousand and ten questions he had were something that would have to wait until later. Probably in private.

“You say you have an army,” Nie Mingjue said. “Of farmers? I didn’t think that you had that many people in Yiling.”

Gang barked a laugh while Ying snickered.

“Oh, no,” Ying said, grinning at Nie Mingjue. “There’s only about two hundred people who live in Yiling. Just four families.”

“No, our army is an army of the dead,” Gang said. “We’re the Yiling Xue Sect, heirs to Xue Chonghai’s techniques and in command of the army he created. Which, yeah, I know, you’re all going to treat like it’s demonic cultivation. It’s not.”

“It’s ghostly cultivation,” Ying said in his completely serious voice. “It’s helping the souls of the dead to find release into the cycle of reincarnation or giving them bodies so that they can burn off their resentment constructively. Sometimes that means plowing fields. Sometimes that means putting on armor and fighting.”

“Either way,” Gang said as the mutters and stares went both frightened and angry, depending on who you looked at, “we’re going to fight Wen Ruohan. We’re going to take him down. He’s attacking our people, stealing our children, and threatening the world. It’d be nice to have help along the way, but if we have to do it alone, we absolutely will.”

The chaos of shouting that erupted was so loud that birds on the water outside the audience hall went up in a clamor of wings and startled cries.

This was going to take forever.

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