Reading Time: 91 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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17. Suspicions

Days. Discussion conferences lasted for literal days. Start early in the morning, much too early as far as Ying was concerned, and talk endlessly until way too late at night when everyone was drunk and sleepy and cranky from all the talking. With no solutions.

That was the part that drove Ying crazy. No solutions at all, just lots of people talking and making threats about stuff they didn’t understand.

“If we could just do a demonstration,” Ying groaned to Lan Yitian who eyed him narrowly as they walked along one of the long piers that poked out into the river, “that would help. I mean, seriously, they just need to see what it’s all about.”

“That won’t work,” Lan Yitian said in her primmest, stiffest tone. “They’ll only see what they want to see and hear what they’re afraid of.”

Ying raised an eyebrow at her. “Like you?”

Lan Yitian’s glare could have frozen all the water around them. Her cold fury didn’t hide how her fingers trembled or the way she kept looking ahead to the moon pavilion at the end of the pier. Gang was already there, explaining quietly to Lan Xichen and Lan Zhan about Lan Yitian’s existence.

General Kwan stood by the door, arms crossed over his chest.

Xue Chen walked behind Ying, lips pressed together as he eyed the water and the boats out on the river like he expected someone to attack Ying out of nowhere.

Justified.

It’d already happened several times. Not the Nie or the Jiang or even the Jin. They all seemed to be willing to wait and see. The Yao had gone into conniptions about their army. The Ouyang alternated between horrified and covetous. Every single small sect that was allied with the Jin had started angling to be best friends with Ying and Gang.

The Jianghu was such a mess. Xue Chonghai had been a hundred percent right that this was going to be a disaster. None of them had a brain in their heads.

“All right,” Ying said, putting his hand on Lan Yitian’s elbow. “I know you don’t want to do this, but we already talked to Lan Zhan. He’s not upset about your being dead. Honestly, the Lan figured that out ages ago. He and Lan Xichen just want to get to know you. You’re family and they care about you.”

Lan Yitian bit her lip before shutting her eyes and visibly steeling herself. “I hate this. I hate every part of this. But fine. We’ll talk.”

“Good,” Ying said. “Gang promised to stay so you won’t be alone with them. General Kwan and Xue Chen and I are going to go talk to the Nie.”

“…I hate that even more,” Lan Yitian said after a moment of horrified contemplation. “You keep him alive.”

“Obviously,” General Kwan drawled at her, smirking when she glared at him. “The ghosts are keeping track of everyone. It will be fine. Talk. Use actual words.”

“Yes, General.” Lan Yitian sighed at the actual order, bowing properly in acceptance of it.

She headed into the pavilion as if she was going to her execution, which just made Ying roll his eyes and General Kwan shake his head at her dramatics. Seriously, neither Lan Xichen nor Lan Zhan were a threat to her.

The rest of the Lan sect, maybe, but not them.

“Do you know what he wants to know?” General Kwan asked as they headed through Lotus Pier towards the Nie pavilion up on the land that didn’t flood with the tides of the river.

“Oh, well, no,” Ying said, shrugging at the narrow look both General Kwan and Xue Chen gave him. “He said he wanted to verify that you guys weren’t, you know, enslaved and tortured and stuff. I wanted to talk to his saber. There’s something very unique going on there. The resentful energy feels all warped, compared to the other Nie sabers.”

“You noticed it, too?” Xue Chen asked, perking up. “I thought I might be misinterpreting things.”

“Don’t think so,” Ying said.

They fell silent once they were among people again. The Jiang were, for the most part, accepting of Ying and his people’s oddities. They didn’t exactly like General Kwan and his people, but they didn’t act like they were terrified or offended or furious the way the Jin did when the thought Ying wasn’t looking.

Ying really didn’t know what the Jin, especially Jin Guangshan, thought they would gain by trying to pretend to be accepting to his face while talking trash behind his back. It wasn’t like they weren’t perfectly aware of all the nonsense Jin Guangshan was trying to plot and scheme into existence. Every single time Jin Zixuan saw Ying and Gang, he grimaced like he was trying to apologize with his eyes even though he was really bad at making communicative faces.

There were a couple dozen ghosts dedicated specifically to following Jin Guangshan around to make sure that Ying and Gang knew exactly what he was doing at all times.

And it wasn’t like Jin Guangshan had ever promised to contribute in a single way to the war effort. Still.

The Nie pavilion was set up on a short little cliff that was above the hundred-year flood line. Unlike most of the rest of the Jiang Sect buildings, it had stone outer walls with wooden inner walls. The building had an amazing sky well that let in light and rain, cooling the interior dramatically compared to the humidity outside. It was old enough that the central pool in the sky well had a lovely coating of fine moss on the stones.

Lotuses decorated the walls and light bamboo furniture. Most of the decorations where in shades of lavender, purple and blue which must be so ridiculously expensive. But the pavilion itself was delightful so Ying smiled as he entered.

Nie Mingjue sat sharpening a dagger by the side of the sky well when Ying entered.

The singing sound of the steel against the whetstone set both General Kwan and Xue Chen to glaring. Ying peered at the knife, nodding approvingly.

“Good gutting knife,” Ying commented. “Did you make it?”

Nie Mingjue’s hand paused at the end of one stroke. He stared up at Ying with the blankest look of suspicious confusion that Ying had ever seen. Ying grinned at him.

“Yes,” Nie Mingjue said. “Why? Did you want to commission one?”

Ying laughed. “No, we’re mostly vegetarian. What meat we do eat is usually fish. Occasionally a chicken or rabbit, but that’s really rare. Only for the biggest festivals. Though if you have a nice cleaver that’s designed for the biggest radishes, that would be delightful. We need a new one. Ours is worn down to a third its original diameter.”

He held up his hand, three fingers extended, to show how wide the poor old cleaver was. Even General Kwan felt bad about it, but no one in Yiling was willing to give up on a piece of steel no matter how old and battered it was.

Though Ying still thought they should reforge the cleaver into a knife or something. You know, once all this war stuff was over.

Nie Mingjue looked horrified at the idea of a cleaver that old and worn. He shook his head, eyeing Ying narrowly for a long moment before huffing at him as if Ying was being sneaky or something.

“Okay, so, you have questions for me,” Ying said as he sat on the other end of the bench Nie Mingjue had commandeered. “I have questions for your saber. Why don’t we get started?”

“Where’s your so-called twin?” Nie Mingjue asked, all thin-lipped and narrow-eyed as he put down his whetstone and knife so that he could grip his saber’s handle protectively.

“Well,” Ying said with a grimace and a roll of his eyes that made Xue Chen grin, “Gang is stuck in the moon pavilion with Lan Zhan, Lan Xichen and the Lan in our army, Lan Yitian. He decided that someone had to be there so that actual words were used instead of the whole… you know, Lan extended silence and eyebrow dramatics to convey emotion.”

Nie Mingjue turned his head aside as he burst into snickers. Back in the velvet shadows, grins bloomed on the other Nie warriors’ faces. The bright light flooding in through the sky well made the shadows especially dark, but Ying didn’t feel any threatening rise in resentment, so he wasn’t worried.

Besides, General Kwan was right there. No one was getting Ying with General Kwan around.

“Okay, that makes sense.” Nie Mingjue coughed and studied Ying. “You didn’t deny that he’s not your twin?”

“I didn’t comment either way,” Ying said. He let his smile go a little bit mean. “Don’t assume. Why do you think we’re not twins?”

“Because my father hosted Wei Changze and Cangse Sanren after their son, their only son, was born,” Nie Mingjue. “I was young, but not so young that I would forget an entire twin.”

Ying opened his mouth, then shut it because well, what could you say to that?

“Right, well, Yiling,” Ying said after pondering for a moment. “Either way, we’re twins now, except when we’re not. Did you know that there’s a warp in the energy in your saber? It’s making her energies do weird things. I kind of wanted to ask her about it because it would be really easy to bleed the excess resentful energy she’s storing off, but I wouldn’t want to do that if it would hurt her.”

Nie Mingjue frowned at the “except when we’re not” and then dropped his jaw open in shock as Ying continued talking.

“You can do that?” one of the other Nie warriors asked as he strode into the light at the center of the sky well.

“Yeah,” Ying said, shrugging. “We figured out how to do that to deal with the Burial Mounds. And the mushrooms. Those things are so awful. I hate them so much, always trying to bite people’s feet off. Dealing with resentful energy isn’t that hard, at least not for us.”

It wasn’t often that Ying said something that fell into a well of total silence. Shocked silence, for that matter. Most of the time the things he said were met by spluttering, rolled eyes and the occasional whap to his shoulder for being ridiculous.

Nie Mingjue stared at Ying with so much hope in his eyes that Ying fidgeted. The Nie warrior behind him actually sucked a breath between his teeth as if he had just been stabbed.

“What?” Ying asked. No answer so he turned to General Kwan who had a hand over his eyes and Xue Chen who had his hand over his mouth. “What?”

“Most people aren’t from Yiling, Wei Furen,” General Kwan said with an entirely deliberate and utterly dramatic sigh. “They don’t have your facility for sensing and manipulating resentful energy. And they’re not as casual about just…” General Kwan waved on hand aimlessly, “creating things out of nothing.”

“Okay, fine, I suppose you have a point,” Ying mock-complained despite his grin. “But still. I expected shouting and spluttering, not dead silence. Nobody ever just goes silent on me. That’s Gang.”

“True,” General Kwan drawled at Ying, smirking at Ying.

Possibly so he wouldn’t show just how unhappy he was to have a room full of Nie warriors staring at Ying with hungry, desperate eyes. Yeah, it was a bit creepy, but they radiated so much desperation that Ying couldn’t feel threatened.

Well, not much, anyway.

“…I still have questions about them,” Nie Mingjue said, wagging a finger at General Kwan and Xue Chen. “Raising the dead is forbidden for a reason.”

Ying shrugged. “We didn’t raise them. Gang and I just fixed them up. The only person we’ve raised is our childhood friend Cho Xilun. He specifically asked us to after he died.”

“How does a dead person ask to be raised?” the Nie warrior behind Nie Mingjue asked.

Ying bowed his head as he pushed spiritual energy into the purification bead around his neck. Shimmering lotuses formed all around him, several hundred of them. In the air over his head and behind Ying, the ghostly honor guard currently following Ying shimmered into visibility, all of them staring down at the Nie with grave serious expressions.

“We follow the Yiling Ghostly Path,” Ying explained, holding the purification array with ease after all these years. “These are the warriors of Xue Chonghai. He created the Ghostly Path. It’s designed to purify resentment, send those dead who wish to leave on into the cycle of reincarnation, and give those who died with too much resentment a chance to burn it off in doing something good for the world.”

“We died,” Xue Chen said for his cousins, friends, brothers and other warriors, “defending my father from the Jianghu’s greediest, stupidest sects. They were very like Jin Guangshan. Like Wen Ruohan. What my father was creating would have brought prosperity and health to the entire Jianghu, but the sects of the time refused to let him do it.”

“They couldn’t profit off his ideas,” General Kwan agreed with his normal tired grimace, “and they couldn’t control him.”

“So they destroyed Xue Chonghai and everyone loyal to him,” Ying finished while letting the purification array fade. “Gang and I found the shattered remnants of what he built in Yiling. It saved our lives even as it changed us. We don’t want power. We don’t want fame or money or any of the nonsense that the sects seem so attracted to. We just want to make Yiling a safe, healthy place to live and grow crops.”

The honor guard faded away slowly, most of them exerting themselves to stay visible just long enough to make it clear that yes, they really were there, and yes, they absolutely were guarding Ying.

Nie Mingjue rubbed a hand over his face which had gone pale. “That wasn’t demonic. It wasn’t even resentful.”

“Nope,” Ying agreed. “Spiritual energy through an ancient array out of Tubo, though it might have come from as far away as Tianzhu. It’s a Buddhist array, not Daoist, so it’s a bit odd. Still not demonic or resentful at all.”

Nie Mingjue looked over his shoulder at the Nie warrior who looked and felt the hungriest for Ying to do… something. Something with the sabers, that much Ying could tell. What exactly, well, Ying was pretty sure he was going to find out in short order.

“I say let him look,” the Nie warrior said.

“Zonghui,” Nie Mingjue groaned.

“What point is there in delaying?” Nie Zonghui asked completely seriously. “They can tell. They can see it, feel it. There’s no point to not asking.”

Nie Mingjue shook his head before resting his hand on the hilt of his saber. She sparked resentful energy the instant he touched, sending a troubling swirl of it back through Nie Mingjue in ways that were…

“That’s going to kill you,” Ying said, staring at Nie Mingjue’s hand on his saber’s hilt. “That’s really, really unhealthy.”

“See?” Nie Zonghui exclaimed, flinging out his hands at Ying as if Nie Mingjue was being stupid.

“Fine,” Nie Mingjue grumbled before pulling his saber from his belt and offering it to Ying. “You’re not wrong. The Nie method of cultivation does lead to qi deviations, especially among our sect leaders.”

Ying took the saber who purred a threatening little curl of resentful energy at him. “Gang is going to give you the look. The “I can’t believe you manage to walk and breathe at the same time” look.”

General Kwan turned away to snicker into his hand while Xue Chen cackled along with Nie Zonghui.

Unimportant. Because the saber was a living being, as alert and intelligent as Ying himself was. She was a lot like General Kwan and Xue Chen and the other soldiers, an entity composed of resentful energy bound to a physical form. Her form was just steel instead of flesh.

“Hello, lovely lady,” Ying murmured as he cradled her form on his lap, fingers curled loosely over her hilt and her sheath. “Can I help you not kill your wielder?”

There was a long moment where the saber’s regard felt a lot like a tiger yao watching you from the tree line as it licked its chops. Ying just waited. She was very non-human, but not threatening, really. After all, she was a saber. Sabers by nature wouldn’t be all kind and cuddly, even if they were the friendliest creatures around.

“̵̤́Ỹ̸͈ǒ̷̱ú̵͙ ̴̺̉m̶̙̕à̶̝ÿ̵̰,̴̺̕ ̵͔͠l̷̼̃ī̷͙t̶̲̊ṱ̷̔l̴̤̈́e̸̦͑ ̶͚͘h̸͓͑u̷̢̔m̴̨̽á̶̰n̴̩̏,̶̥̈́”̵̛̼ the saber said, her voice echoing only in Ying’s head, not to his ears or in the outside world.

“Her name is Baxia,” Nie Mingjue said. He bit his lip as if he was a much younger man. “Do you think you can… do anything?”

Baxia was just as hopeful as Nie Mingjue, if a good bit fiercer about it. She didn’t quite prod Ying to do something, but her impatience echoed through her hilt and up Ying’s arm.

“Draining the excess resentful energy buildup is easy,” Ying said as he delicately did just that, letting the cloud of it shift around his head and shoulders. “Fixing the backwash that’s causing the qi deviations will take much more work. But with less resentful energy in both of you, the qi deviation should be put off for a while. You know, other than the inevitable build up when we go to war.”

“You can fix that as needed,” General Kwan offered as he put a hand out and let Ying push the resentful energy into his body. “Even a war won’t build as much as half a lifetime’s worth of practice.”

Ying stared at him; lips pressed together. Xue Chen groaned and rolled his eyes up towards the bright sky well overhead. From the way Nie Zonghui turned away to laugh into his fist, he knew what General Kwan had done, too.

“I did not just jinx us,” General Kwan protested to all the Nie’s amusement, even Nie Mingjue’s. “I just stated a fact. Who’s been through a war, here? None of you. Just me.”

“And me,” Xue Chen said, grinning as he patted General Kwan’s shoulder. “And you did just jinx us.”

Ying passed Baxia back to Nie Mingjue, grinning along with her because she thought it was funny, too.

True, but still funny.

Well, even if the coming war was horrible and endless, which Ying and Gang absolutely weren’t going to allow, Ying would make a point of visiting the Nie’s lines. To help Nie Mingjue and his people with their built-up resentful energy, yes.

But also to beg for stories of his parents from Nie Mingjue, whenever he could get them.

 

 

18. Council

If Ying had thought that the so-called Discussion Conference was bad, he’d been so very short-sighted. At least there, the various sect leaders had reasons to behave as if they were adults working towards a common goal.

Once everyone, other than Jin Guangshan, agreed that they were going to war against the Wen, everyone, other than Jin Guangshan, turned into petty toddlers determined to be the loudest, most obnoxious, most ridiculous temper-tantrum-throwing babies possible.

Jin Guangshan, even though he flatly refused to commit to sending anyone or anything to fight the Wen, went all gracious and supportive of the million and one tantrums people were throwing even as his son Jin Zixuan tugged at his sleeve, rolled his eyes, and looked as exasperated as anyone Ying had ever seen.

Yiling tended to be a lot cooler in general than Lotus Pier, and a lot less humid overall, but Ying didn’t think that the heat rising all across his chest and cheeks had anything at all due to the weather. From the flicker of a glance from Jin Guangshan and his smug, self-satisfied quirk of the lips pretending to be a gregarious smile, he knew it, too.

“I understand,” Jin Guangshan said entirely too sympathetically to Sect Leader Yao who had just been spluttering about how his little bitty sect was powerful enough to face down the might of the Wen all by themselves. “Of course you’re eager to show the might of your disciples.”

“Exactly!” Sect Leader Yao exclaimed, nodding vigorously at Jin Guangshan and pouting at Jiang Fengmian. “We are not so weak that we cannot contribute to this war.”

“Unlike the Jin,” Gang drawled as he had every single time Jin Guangshan prodded people into offering more than made sense for their sects. “They are so weak that they can’t even commit to giving the war effort a single apple.”

Jin Guangshan’s glare should’ve knocked Gang flat.

It only lasted for the blink of an eye, and then Jin Guangshan laughed as if Gang had made a tremendously funny joke.

No one else laughed. Not even Sect Leader Yao who looked away from Jin Guangshan while his breath hissed between his teeth. He didn’t quite move away from Jin Guangshan, but he did sway a little as if he suddenly wanted to be anywhere else.

“Ah, to be so young again,” Jin Guangshan said, just the faintest edge of knives and death in his wide smile. “You’ll learn the cost of things in time.”

“So will you,” Gang said so flatly that even Jin Guangshan’s determined cheer stumbled.

Jin Zixuan blew out a breath while rubbing his forehead, but he didn’t speak up.

Jiang Fengmian sucked a breath between his teeth as he waved back at the plans for the battles they would need to fight. “If we could focus on the matter at hand? The first battle should be decided before we argue about who will contribute what.”

“Do what you want,” Gang said, arms crossed over his chest just a bit defensively. Not obnoxiously, no, but certainly not with the furious sort of glower that Nie Mingjue had going on the other side of the table. “We’re going to go to Gusu to free the Lan. If the rest of you want to pick a different battle, that’s fine. Go ahead and do that.”

“Well,” Jin Guangshan said with that awful smile of his, eyes intent on both Gang and Ying’s faces, “perhaps it isn’t wise for such a small, young sect to fight on their own. An older sect, a more experienced leader, should be in charge.”

“Are you committing your sect and your leadership to the battle to save the Lan?” Gang asked with his version of that awful smile. “How many disciples will you send? Who will your general be? What doctors will you have waiting behind the lines? Can we expect food supplies? Medical supplies? What are you committing to this “supervision of our army” project you’re proposing?”

Yu Ziyuan blatantly turned away to laugh into her fist as Jin Guangshan went purple with outrage.

She might be afraid of what Ying and Gang meant to the Jiang line of descent, but she continued to be delighted by Gang’s refusal to let Jin Guangshan’s heaps of steaming bullshit pass by unremarked.

Honestly, Ying couldn’t blame her. He kind of wanted the spicy peanuts from Yiling’s teahouse to snack on as Gang and Jin Guangshan politely (and not so politely) ripped at each other.

The sound of Jin Guangshan’s teeth gritting echoed in the suddenly silent too-humid conference room. It took him several very hard breaths to get his smile back on. It looked far more like he wanted to bite Gang’s throat out.

“You’re young,” Jin Guangshan said, yet again.

“Yep,” Gang agreed. “We certainly are. Of course, we’re going to war with a general who’s fought in multiple wars and who is, don’t forget, more or less invulnerable. Along with all of our soldiers. Not to mention all the ghosts. All of which we’re committing to the war effort. Unlike the Jin who refuse to commit so much as a single apple.”

“What ghosts?” Jin Guangshan snarled, finally pushed past the point where his mask of wise elder dispensing advice shattered.

“These,” Ying said, smiling as he touched the purification bead and the honor guard bloomed all around them. “You might have exiled our general from the room, but the ghosts are carrying all the news back and forth to him so that he knows what needs to be done.”

“Demonic cultivation!” Jin Guangshan bellowed, pale-faced and wide-eyed at the ghosts clustered around and above him.

“No, it’s not,” Nie Mingjue said. “We’ve been through this six times already, Sect Leader Jin. Sit down. Shut up. No one wants to hear from a sect leader who won’t be participating in the war.”

Jin Guangshan spluttered as Jin Zixuan tried to pull him away from the table, but Lan Xichen stared at him with thin lips and a hard look in his eyes. Jiang Fengmian just sighed and shook his head. Even Sect Leader Yao, who seemed to be incapable of doing anything without Jin Guangshan’s encouragement and direction, looked as though he kind of wanted to stop listening to Jin Guangshan’s comments on everything.

“You’ve corrupted everyone!” Jin Guangshan shouted at Gang.

“You mean like you and the elders who follow you into brothels?” Ying asked with a mean little smile that he absolutely meant right down to his toes. “Or are you talking about all the very, very young girls you seduce? Yu Ziyuan already got that twelve-year-old girl you were stalking to safety, just so you know. Our ghosts made sure that she knew about it before you could get the girl alone.”

Jin Guangshan stared at Ying blankly. “You’re following me.”

“You and every other Jin,” Gang agreed. “You can’t be trusted. You clearly won’t help our side, which means you’re supporting the Wen’s side but don’t want anyone to know it. Even if you’re aiming at neutrality, you’re still untrustworthy. Every single breath you take, every step, every word you say, we will know about it.”

“We know which prostitutes you threw into the Burial Mounds,” Ying said in the exact same implacable tone as Gang. When Ying straightened up and put his hands on the table, Gang mirrored him.

“We know where your illegitimate children are,” Gang continued.

“We know how they’re being treated,” Ying said with a frown because some of those poor kids needed so much help and Jin Guangshan was doing everything he could to make sure that they never got any help at all. From anyone.

“There are no secrets from the dead, Jin Guangshan,” Gang said with the inevitability they’d practiced for years before emerging from the Burial Mounds, much less from Yiling.

“You can’t hide anything from us.” Ying said in the same tone.

“And you’re definitely not hiding anything from Wen Ruohan,” Gang said, shaking his head so Ying shook his head, too.

“He’s been doing this for far longer than we have,” Ying said.

“We know the recent things,” Gang said as everyone in the room went very still and very quiet while Jin Guangshan went paler and paler by the moment.

“Wen Ruohan has to have known your every secret since before we were even born,” Ying said.

Gang leaned back in the way that meant he wanted to break the mirroring, so Ying leaned his hip against the table again, looking at Gang who hummed and shrugged. The other sect leaders and their generals, first disciples and assorted followers stared at the two of them.

“So yeah,” Gang said, clearing his throat and waving a hand at the map. “You can do as little as you want. It won’t make a single bit of difference to Wen Ruohan. He knows what you have. He’ll take it when he wants to. We can keep his ghosts away from the council meetings, at least for a little while, but we still need to get moving. There’s a limited amount of time before he decides to swat everyone down like mosquitoes.”

That, finally, got the council moving again. The plans that they’d come up with already were deemed good enough to start with. General Kwan was allowed back in to give his opinion, despite Jin Guangshan’s attempts at spluttering and pretending to be horrified.

General Kwan had several changes and suggestions that were nodded over approvingly by the Nie. It helped that General Kwan looked like a living person, other than the stillness and his pale skin. He wasn’t blood-soaked or slavering, staggering about. In fact, he was better bathed than anyone else in the room since General Kwan had made a point of buying, “borrowing” or stealing half his weight in bars of soap.

By the time dinner was served, they had a plan for the war. Not a great plan. Not the best plan. It was a good-enough plan to get started with because Nie Mingjue and General Kwan agreed that all their plans would be smashed to bits by events. No plan survived engagement, apparently.

And after dinner, while Jin Guangshan drank and complained to anyone who would stand still long enough, Nie Mingjue, General Kwan, and Lan Yitian met privately with Gang and Ying.

This conference room was so tiny that they were nearly shoulder-to-shoulder around the wobbly table that Jiang Yanli used to sort incoming vegetables for the kitchen because it was actually a storeroom not a conference room. It had the advantage of no windows, solid stone walls and about twenty different arrays to keep anyone from overhearing what they said.

“We’re not going with the public plan,” General Kwan said, holding a hand up when Ying started to protest. “I know, I know. You want to save the Lan.”

“They don’t need saving,” Nie Mingjue explained while Lan Yitian nodded her agreement. “We’ve gotten some messages through the Wen lines. They’re ready to counter-attack from the caves where they’ve hidden.”

“There are whole cave systems hidden in the hills where civilians retreat,” Lan Yitian explained, pointing to the spots where the caves lay on the map. “I already sent ghosts off to confirm that the openings are in the same places. They didn’t go too close to the wards, but the exits are right where they should be. If we send a small force, we can get the civilians out.”

“That lets the warriors in the Cloud Recesses fight back,” General Kwan said while staring both Gang and Ying down. “We’ll lead a small force to attack the Wen from behind. It should be pretty easy to weaken them. But we, your army, cannot go into the Cloud Recesses.”

Ying sucked a breath between his teeth because he’d honestly forgotten about Lan Yitian’s insistence that she couldn’t ever go home.

Gang groaned, rubbing his face with both hands. “The wards are that dangerous to you?”

“Lethal for us,” Lan Yitian said with a little shrug. “I confirmed it with Xichen and Wangji. After Xue Chonghai’s fall, the Lan of the time ensured that no walking corpses at all could enter the Cloud Recesses. We can be in Gusu. We can fight up to the stairs. We can’t go any further than that.”

Ying rubbed his thumbnail over his bottom lip. “What about ghosts? Can they enter?”

Nie Mingjue frowned as Lan Yitian grimaced and shrugged.

“We don’t know,” General Kwan said. “They could be purified if they try. They could be fine.”

Ying nodded, pushing power into his purification bead. Ghosts bloomed all around them, dozens upon dozens of them stacked like cordwood so that they could hear what was decided.

“Volunteers who are willing to go into the cycle of reincarnation?” Ying asked. “I’m not going to force anyone to go test the wards if they don’t want to risk moving on, but if there’s anyone who has released enough resentment that they’d be willing to move on in the process of testing this, I’d appreciate the help.”

Three ghosts shifted to the front, one of them a prostitute who’d been thrown into the Burial Mounds before Ying was born. Suzhi smiled sweetly at Ying even though her throat had been cut from ear to ear. The other two were a pair of twins from Xue Chonghai’s forces who had always hung back a bit when the chance came for getting a new body.

“I’ll go, sweet baby,” Suzhi said. “I think I’m ready for a new life. Hopefully it will be a better one next time.”

“I think you’ve earned it,” Ying said, smiling at her. He turned to the twins, Bo and Fa. “How about you two?”

Bo shrugged. “I don’t want to leave yet, but someone should accompany Miss Suzhi.”

“We’ll watch and see what happens to her,” Fa agreed. “Then if she does move on, we’ll come back and report.”

“Take another couple of the guard with you,” General Kwan ordered. “Testing one spot isn’t enough. We’ll need testing on the gates and near the entrances to the caves.”

“You should be okay to find the caves,” Lan Yitian warned them, “but if you enter the caves, you’ll hit the wards. Be very careful about that. It would be so useful if we could send ghosts in to warn them that we’re coming, but don’t take risks if you aren’t truly willing to move on.”

Bo and Fa exchanged looks, smiling quietly to each other. As a sort-of twin, Ying could see the “I’m ready” from Bo and the “yeah, me too” from Fa, though neither of them said a word. They turned back to Ying and Gang with that same quietly confident look on their faces.

“All right then,” Gang said. “If you don’t get sent onwards and still want to be released to the cycle, tell us when you get back. We’ll send you onwards with pride. You’ve all done so well and we’re grateful for everything you’ve done.”

“Agreed,” Ying said, trying not to sniffle when Suzhi teared up at them. “Now shoo. Go check. Just be careful!”

Suzhi laughed, blowing a flirty little kiss at Ying that he grinned tearfully over. The three of them disappeared with another handful of the ghostly honor guard. Ying let the purification spell go, sighing as he leaned into Gang’s side.

It wasn’t a bad thing.

Really, it was a good thing. They’d done something right enough that Suzhi, Bo and Fa all had reached the point where they weren’t resentful ghosts anymore. They could move on, be reborn, have all new lives.

“I hate saying goodbye,” Ying complained finally.

“It sucks,” Gang agreed.

“You two are so young,” General Kwan said, shaking his head.

“No, we’re just traumatized by losing our family,” Ying said, rubbing his nose and wiping his eyes so that they would stop being all blurry from the tears he wouldn’t let fall.

As he always did, General Kwan moved around the table so that he could rub Ying’s back reassuringly. Gang leaned into his side, getting General Kwan’s arm around his waist and a quickly murmured question if they would be all right to continue.

Ying nodded. He would be fine. It was always going to be hard to watch friends move on to the cycle. There was no way that it couldn’t be hard. But it was a good thing, a thing that they’d been working towards ever since that first terrified trip into the Burial Mounds.

“We’re fine,” Gang said with his broken little smile that was all Gang, no Ying at all. “Or we will be.”

“You know there’s going to be a lot more dead, right?” General Kwan asked.

“Of course,” Ying said while Gang nodded. “And we’ll be upset over it when they’re friends dying.”

“Probably be upset about all of them dying, whether they’re on our side or the other side,” Gang said with a long sigh and a dramatic eyeroll. “But it’s life, General Kwan. If you live, then you die. Nothing lives forever.”

“Except immortals,” Lan Yitian quipped.

“Are you sure about that?” Gang asked. He raised an eyebrow when Lan Yitian stared at him in confusion. “They might live a lot longer, but I’d bet that the reason there’s only one immortal that anyone knows about means that even Immortals don’t last forever. Not that it matters. We’re all mortal. Even you and General Kwan and the army are all mortal. You just live and die differently than we do.”

“Fair,” Lan Yitian agreed.

“This is the strangest war council I’ve ever been on,” Nie Mingjue mumbled.

They continued discussing the plan to liberate the Cloud Recesses, not so much because there was much need but because they were all too worried about Suzhi, Bo and Fa to leave the room. Ying hadn’t yet started fidgeting out of his skin when Suzhi swooped back into the room with Bo and Fa on her insubstantial heels.

“We can go right in!” Suzhi exclaimed as she manifested in front of Nie Mingjue, clapping her hands in delight. “Lan Qiren says that you need to tell his nephews that they’re to be exceedingly careful if they come with the army.”

“He’s not in good shape,” Bo said, frowning. “The Wen beat him pretty badly and his leg is a mess. So are his lungs. I think he has pneumonia or something.”

“And broken ribs at the same time,” Fa said, scowling ferociously. “The civilians are safe and secure. Most of the warriors are in hiding, too. The Wen somehow haven’t realized that they caught barely a quarter of the Lan. I guess they think that new Lan are carved out of the mountain’s stone because they don’t think it’s odd that they didn’t find a single child or woman.”

Lan Yitian rolled her eyes right towards the ceiling while groaning dramatically.

“Wow,” Ying drawled.

“That’s sad,” Gang drawled, too. “So very sad.”

“But convenient,” Nie Mingjue said, nerves banished by the good news. He thumped two strong fingers into the center of the map of the Cloud Recesses. “We’ll head out tomorrow. The sooner we have the Lan on our side, the sooner we can take the fight straight down Wen Ruohan’s throat.”

 

 

19. Battlefield

Lan Zhan leaned on his cane, staring up the stairs into the Cloud Recesses without saying a single word about all the screaming going on inside. Ying stood at his side, breathing in the amazing crisp scent of the alpine pines that loomed around them. They had pine back in Yiling, but it didn’t smell anything like this. It was like the trees, scarred by Wen swords and defaced with carved-in graffiti, were the embodiment of high mountain winds.

They’d arrived in the middle of the day, swooping in on their staves and swords to attack the Wen guards outside the gate. That battle had gone so quickly that it was over before Ying even had a chance to pull in a single shadow. He’d been kind of disappointed not to get to show off for Lan Zhan but there would be time later.

“Hey, how long until your leg is healed, Lan Zhan?” Ying asked with his eyes locked on the stairs just like Lan Zhan.

A particularly long scream echoed down the mountainside. Lan Zhan looked viciously delighted by it for a moment. Sort of. His lips twitched in a tiny smile while he lifted his chin by a hair, eyes narrow and intent, but for Lan Zhan it was all but thrusting a fist into the air the way Ying would have.

“Three more days of rest,” Lan Zhan said. And huffed over the delay.

“You gotta rest your leg or you won’t be able to fight,” Ying told him purely because everyone else was saying it and Lan Zhan wasn’t listening. “Gang and I will be so upset if you’re marching around and fighting on a broken bone. We’ll worry ourselves to bits.”

“And then we’ll set the ghosts on you to keep you from doing it,” Gang said from behind them. “Anyone running down the stairs yet?”

“Not a one,” Ying replied chirpily as he grinned at Lan Zhan’s open outright scowl at the two of them. “The ghosts are apparently unsettling the Wen so much that they Lan are picking them off with ease.”

Which was pretty much what they’d hoped would happen. While their physical army couldn’t really go into the Cloud Recesses, the wards didn’t stop the ghosts at all. It was kind of weird and something that Ying fully intended to talk to Lan Qiren about while he was holding the man down so that his ribs and lungs and whatever else was wrong got healed up.

The Lan’s wards should not let ghosts in. For that matter, neither should the Jiang or the Jin or the Nie or anyone else’s, but they all did. It was odd and Ying was going to get to the bottom of it eventually. If it had to wait until the end of the war, so be it. He’d still figure it out.

Nie Mingjue had gone in. So had Lan Xichen despite his wounds. Lan Zhan had protested that in his inarticulate glaring sort of way, but Lan Zhan had a really badly broken leg while Lan Xichen has pulled several muscles in his leg and back, most of which were healing rapidly.

“They’re clear!” Suzhi exclaimed as she appeared in front of Ying and Gang. “All the Wen have either died or surrendered. Lan Xichen asked if you two could come in and do your purification thing. Apparently Lan Qiren was going to insist on doing the Lan version for every single person and it’ll take forever and he’s way too sick for it, the poor boy.”

“We’re on our way,” Ying promised. “Let him know we’re coming up.”

General Kwan growled about it, but they had a hundred ghosts forming an honor guard around them. All invisible and hovering where people wouldn’t walk through them and be chilled, but still, it was pretty serious overkill.

The Cloud Recesses must have been truly beautiful before the Wen came. From the wreckage left behind, the buildings looked to have been grand old structures with arched roofs and carefully maintained whitewash on the walls. No bright colors or worn anything anywhere, despite the damage.

The grounds looked like gardens. That had been trashed. The pathways were extravagantly covered with slate stonework that must have taken years and cost more than Yiling, collectively, made in twenty years. Most of the stones were cracked and shattered.

So many dead lying on the grass, draped over rocks and flopped on the broken stairs leading up to the burned-out husks of the buildings.

“Wow, the Wen suck,” Ying said as he stared around with one hand on Lan Zhan’s too-tense arm.

“They really do,” Gang agreed. “Okay, you’re on the dead?”

“Yep,” Ying said. “You go take care of the leader nonsense, Gang.”

“Thanks, loads,” Gang grumbled though he actually looked a little grateful not to have to help so many dead into letting go of their resentments.

Gang marched off towards Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen while Lan Zhan led Ying off in the other direction towards a small crowd of Lan clustered around an older man who scowled at everyone.

“Uncle Qiren!” Ying called, hurrying over in a fast walk that was just shy of a run because Lan Zhan had always claimed that the no running rule was one of the most important ones in the Cloud Recesses, though Ying still didn’t understand why it would be.

“…Wei Ying,” Lan Qiren blinked at him as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

A deeper breath kicked off a cough that set Lan Qiren to shuddering as it wracked his body and nearly drove him to his knees. The other Lan around him fluttered like distressed butterflies, not quite daring to touch Lan Qiren’s grubby white sleeves.

Ying dove right in and caught him by the elbows because yikes, he needed to sit down before he fell down.

“Oh, wow,” Ying huffed at Lan Qiren as Ying pushed him onto the folding stool that the other Lan had been trying to get him onto. “Goodness, you sound awful. I’m totally helping Lan Zhan bully you into healing. That’s ridiculous. What are you thinking, being up and around this way?”

“There are dead which must be, must be put to rest,” Lan Qiren wheezed, losing his breath halfway through. His lips were blue-tinged and his face as grey as a newly raised corpse.

“That’s why I’m here,” Ying said, patting his shoulder gently. “You always said you wanted to see the old Buddhist methods of purifying the dead. Well, now’s your chance. If you’ll give me permission, I’ll do the thing and send them onwards. Purify all the resentment here, too, while I’m at it.”

One of the other Lan, a young man about Lan Zhan’s age, scowled at Ying as if he was being ridiculous.

“Do not joke about such things!” the Lan said.

“Su She,” Lan Qiren huffed. “Be polite. This is Wei Ying, the young man from Yiling I have been corresponding with for years.”

“Yiling kinda has to be extra-good at dealing with the dead and resentful energy,” Ying said, shrugging as if it couldn’t be helped. “My twin Gang and I learned how to do that pretty much as soon as we got our cores, years and years ago.”

Su She blinked at Ying in confusion. So did the other Lan. They clearly didn’t get it, but that was fine because Lan Qiren nodded for Ying to go ahead.

Clearing a battlefield of the dead and of the associated resentful energy was a bigger project than his purification bead could handle. Besides, Ying absolutely didn’t want to expose all the ghosts they’d sent in to fight the Wen. Or make his ghost army move on when they weren’t ready for it.

So Ying pulled one of the talisman’s he’d prepared with Gang’s help. It didn’t look like a standard talisman, of course. They’d had to use the black bamboo as a base for the paper which turned the paper they’d created a deep purple-black. Instead of painting black lines on white, they’d ended up painting red lines on black, thick with cinnabar and the mud that Cho Dahong used to make heating tiles.

Not the most correct way to do things, but it was what it was.

“That is… odd,” Lan Qiren commented as Ying added the final few marks that would let him activate the talisman.

“We couldn’t afford to buy paper originally, so we used the black bamboo that I wrote you about,” Ying explained. “Turns out it works better than regular paper for this array. Everything around the Burial Mounds gets turned black, you know, even if the soil has been purified completely. Gang thinks that there’s some odd minerals in the soil that’s doing it. Very little iron. Iron makes the soil red, that we already know because Cho Dahong told us so. The Burial Mounds has something else that we’ve never tracked down, so we get black mud and black bamboo and black turnips instead of normal stuff. Very tasty, though. You should come try the turnip stew Gang makes sometime.”

Lan Qiren’s lips twitched in an almost-smile. The other Lan, especially Su She, looked sort of offended by Ying’s chatter. At least until Lan Qiren’s breathing eased as he relaxed on the folding stool. Then there was a sort of surprised approval that Ying could get to like, honestly.

Either way, Ying kept chattering about the people back home as he finished up the talisman and then carefully powered it up with a slow push of qi into it that made both him and the talisman start glowing.

“Now, the thing with the really old arrays and talismans out of Tubo and Tianzhu,” Ying said once both he and the talisman gleamed with a pure shimmering light that wasn’t white and yet wasn’t any other color because it was all the colors all at once, just very faintly, “is that they take constant attention. You have to focus on them to have them keep working.”

“They don’t self-sustain,” Lan Qiren breathed.

“Mm,” Ying agreed. “So please excuse me as I focus here. I can hear you, but this is a big area and I need to be careful so I’m not going to answer questions until I’m done. All right?”

“Of course,” Lan Qiren said promptly. “Please proceed. We will wait until you are finished.”

Ying grinned at him. “Good. The other thing to be aware of is that this talisman is, um, really, really dramatic. Just. Wow. So showy. Sorry about that.”

Rather than explain what was going to happen because there was no point to explaining when he could demonstrate, Ying got right to it.

The talisman’s energy swept out from Ying, covering the entire area, all the buildings, all the walkways, the torn-up lawns and the mangled mats of moss underneath the looming pine trees. Everywhere it went, glimmering lotus flowers bloomed on the ground. Above each lotus, one of the familiar soul globes formed.

Most of them were red with resentment, rage at having been killed. Some were orange or yellow, indicating that the person had died full of fear and regret, respectively. But a good number of the soul globes were pale, beautiful blue, representing people who had died the good death, fighting for what they believed in.

Ying didn’t let himself cry over that.

Barely.

He whispered mantras that doubled as verbal arrays to help all the dead release their resentment. The contented dead, the blue and the green and the lavender, left quickly and easily as their globes drifted upwards and then gently popped like soap bubbles. It took a dozen more repetitions of the mantra/array to get the yellow, then another few for the orange.

Ying had to do a full one hundred and eight to get the angry red souls to release their resentment and move on.

“That’s… really inefficient,” Su She commented once all the souls were gone, and the lotuses slowly faded back into nothingness. “It took forever.”

“No,” Lan Qiren said, lips pursed as he wiped his eyes without the slightest bit of shame. “That was stunning. Those last ones, the… red?”

“Resentful,” Ying said as he smiled at Lan Qiren. “Those were the ones who died full of so much resentment that they would have become resentful ghosts, the really bad ones. The orange and yellow could’ve been a problem if they continued, if they’d been around a source of resentful energy. You know, the ones that just need a little bit of encouragement to move on. The others, well, they died well, and I think…”

He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck while smiling sheepishly at Lan Qiren who raised one eyebrow at him. The thing of it is, the talisman and the mantra/array lets you get a very clear idea of what the dead felt, what they’re feeling as they’re sent into the cycle of reincarnation.

“They, um, wanted to make sure that the Cloud Recesses was okay,” Ying admitted. “That you were okay. Most of them, the ones around here, felt like they were the people who died protecting you and the women and the kids. They just needed to know that they did well, that you were safe. That the Wen were defeated, and the Cloud Recesses had been liberated. Then they moved on with barely a nudge from me.”

Even Su She looked like he wanted to cry over that. Ying couldn’t blame him, couldn’t blame any of them for the furtively wiped eyes and quiet sniffling noises that he studiously ignored.

Lan Qiren ducked his head, huffing and shaking his head. “Thank you, Wei Ying. I. Appreciate. Your help.”

“I’m more than happy to help, Uncle Qiren,” Ying said with his biggest smile to try to hide the tears that welled up in his eyes. “Now, this is the time for asking questions. I can use the talisman another four of five times, so why don’t we move to another area. You can ask along the way and I’ll explain whatever I can. Some of it is proprietary, of course, but the general concepts I can tell you all about.”

Amazingly, as soon as it was question time Su She turned out to be just as intense about the questions as Lan Qiren. Really defensive about it, yeah, but when Ying took his questions seriously and answered him in detail, the defensive hunch of Su She’s shoulders eased as he brightened up.

Su She asked questions about as fast as Ying could answer them. He was pretty fun to talk to, actually, keeping up with Ying easily. They purified all the main areas of the Cloud Recesses, so they wandered over to where Gang was looking like he wanted to cut his own throat to escape the politics.

“Gang, Gang, we need to adopt Su She!” Ying exclaimed as he bounced over to grab Gang’s shoulder.

“Don’t steal other people’s disciples, Ying,” Gang complained at him with the wrinkle between his eyebrows that meant he had a horrible headache.

“But Gang, he has the best questions,” Ying whined like they were nine years old again. “And he’s super-good at coming up with neat little improvements. He’d be amazing!”

“No,” Lan Qiren said, mustache twitching as he fought a smile. “Su She is one of my best students.”

Su She stared at Ying and Lan Qiren as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. As if he’d spent his whole life waiting to hear anyone praise him. Which, yikes, he was going to have to scold Lan Qiren and Lan Xichen for not saying nice things to Su She sometime when he could get them alone. No one should be that unsure of themselves and their welcome.

Later. After this was over.

“Fine,” Ying complained, rolling his eyes to the sky. “But if you want to have a new sect, do come find us, Su She.”

“Absolutely,” Gang agreed readily. “I trust my twin. If he says you’d be a credit, you would be. If you ever get tired of the Rules, look us up.”

Su She breathed a laugh, rubbing his thumb over his bottom lip. “I ah, will. I mean, I’ll keep it in mind. Thank you, Wei Furen, Sect Leader Wei.”

“Sect Leader Xue, actually,” Gang clarified. “Personal name is Wei. Sect name is Xue. But it’s fine. It trips everyone up. Anyway, how’d it go?”

Ying put on his bounciest voice and explained the whole thing, complete with bright smiles and wide hand gestures. When Gang got this tired, he tended to relax into Ying’s highest energy like Ying was deflecting everyone’s attention away from him.

Which, you know, he was. It only took a few moments before everyone was focused on Ying which let Gang breath a quiet sigh of relief. Lan Zhan, lurking off behind Lan Xichen, looked like he’d unclenched every muscle in his body, too, so yay! Obnoxious cheerfulness for the win!

Either way, they all meandered off towards the stairs because no way were Ying and Gang spending the night behind wards that General Kwan and the army couldn’t go through.

“So it worked super-well,” Ying said once they hit the top of the stairs. “I still kind of wonder how the array for healing the earth would work here but I think we might not want to do that.”

“No,” Gang said thoughtfully as he stared around the carefully manicured grounds that even in the middle of an actual battlefield looked like they’d spent the last three hundred years being carefully trimmed and primped and polished to perfection. “We’d make such a mess if we did.”

“What heal the earth array?” Su She asked just before Lan Qiren opened his mouth to say it.

“We’re a farming sect,” Gang explained. “In Yiling. With tons of resentful energy tainting the soil. There’s an array that we use to remove the resentful energy and strengthen all the plans, fungus and small lives. It’s… kind of explosive when there’s not tons and tons of resentful energy.”

“Or possibly when there’s not scorched-over earth that might at one point have been deeply salted,” Ying corrected. “We’re not sure yet which it is. Either way, the soil in Yiling tends to be terribly dead. No bugs, no worms, no fungus except the haunted mushrooms. Dead soil and too much resentful energy is Officially Bad.”

Su She pressed his lips together as he fought against snickers.

“That would be bad,” Lan Qiren agreed in a grave voice that shook ever so slightly with laugher. “Interesting. There is a field on the other side of the Cloud Recesses where they salted the earth. You could test it there.”

Ying and Gang exchanged looked, eyebrows rising as Ying asked if Gang wanted to and lips twisting as Gang looked back down the stairs to where General Kwan was waiting. They both shrugged at once because yeah, this was kind of an important test. Once they got to battlefields where Wen Ruohan had messed things up with massive amounts of resentful energy, they would need to know if it was the resentment or the salt that kept Yiling earth healing from being successful.

The sun was just starting to go behind the high mountain peaks once they arrived at the field. It was more like a meadow, steep hills and torn-up sod dead and crusted over with salt. A lot of salt. Gang knelt down and put his fingers into the dirt, grimacing when it came up dry and crusty.

Actual salt crystals stuck to his fingers.

“Oh, this is really bad,” Ying complained. “Why in the world did they do this?”

“The bunnies lived here,” Lan Zhan said, soft and sad. “This. They killed the bunny field.”

Ying gaped at him, horrified. Lan Zhan nodded back with a sheen of tears in his eyes.

“Well, let’s see if we can fix it,” Gang said over his shoulder to Ying.

Ying nodded, waving everyone to back way, way off. “This is very dramatic and very scary-looking but we have it down to an art by now. Gang will direct the energy up the hill and away from everyone but there’s always a bit of backwash, so you need to be all the way back on the path. Unless, you know, it is the salt that keeps the array from working in Yiling. Then this will be very underwhelming.”

Lan Qiren’s lips twitched as he nodded. “Very well. I’m… curious… to see how this works. Your letters always left a great deal out.”

“On purpose,” Gang said.

It felt very strange to cover himself in resentful energy, becoming Gang’s shadow, while Lan Zhan watched with his whole family. If it was just Lan Zhan, that would be fine. Ying trusted Lan Zhan. So did Gang.

Doing it in front of Lan Xichen who was simultaneously the nicest and the most judgmental person in the world and in front of Lan Qiren who was the strictest person alive was horrible. Add in Nie Mingjue who knew that they weren’t actually twins?

Yikes.

Either way, Ying let himself become Gang’s shadow, focusing on pulling every shred of resentful energy out of the soil, the air, the rocks around them. There was a lot. The Wen had killed a bunch of people here and then dragged their bodies away, probably for intimidation purposes. The bunnies had lost a large portion of their warren here and their grief and animal resentment was thick in the ruined grass and earth.

“What the fuck?” Nie Mingjue whispered as Gang and Ying walked as one a few dozen paces further into the field, just to be safe. “I thought they were two people.”

“Mm,” Lan Zhan hummed. “And they are one. It is… complicated.”

Ying didn’t look. He really, really wanted to look to see if Nie Mingjue looked like he’d been clubbed up back the head or if he was furious that someone had tricked him. No time for it, not when Gang blew out a breath and then dropped his chin towards his chest before kneeling.

At the same time, Ying pulled out his dizi and began to play.

The cloud of resentful energy bloomed above the two of them, swirling into a hurricane that Ying fed down to Gang. As soon as it touched Gang, he lit up with the healing array, going so bright that it was like staring at the sun.

After account of ten, Gang thrust his fist down into the salted earth, sending the earth healing array off across the meadow in a ten chi by twenty chi block, just as they always did.

In Lotus Pier, that standard block had filled the entirety of the rice paddies and the lotus pond, sweeping onwards to make the bamboo on the far side thrust up new stalks as if it was spring. The effect had lasted for hours without any reinforcement on Ying and Gang’s part.

In Yiling, they rarely got the earth healing array to actually work all the way to the edges of the standard block. In fact, they had to overlap repeatedly and focus their hardest just to get the basic effect in place.

Here, in the Cloud Recesses bunny field, Gang precisely filled the standard block. That much, no more. There was no overflow, no prolonged effect after he stopped focusing. Gang sighed once he was done.

As he stood, Ying let the shadows fade away, leaving them two people again instead of one.

“It’s the salt,” Ying said as he checked the earth.

“Yeah,” Gang agreed. “We’ll have to teach people how to do it here. It’ll take repeated treatments to fix the bunny field.”

Ying nodded. And then sighed before waving a vibrating with excitement Su She and a profoundly disturbed-looking Lan Xichen over.

“Right,” Ying said. “Let us teach you how to do this so that you can fix your land. There’s ways to do it without our twin thing. That’s what we’ll show you.”

And if it gave them a chance of getting the Lan on their side, well, that was a good thing. After all, the war wasn’t going to last forever, and the ghosts were tracking all the rumors that Jin Guangshan was trying to spread.

Xue Chonghai’s downfall came after a rumor campaign painted him as a monster.

They could not let anyone do the same thing to them.

20. Death

Wars were ugly, horrible things. General Kwan had said so a thousand times while Ying and Gang were growing up. He continued to say it as the newly named Sunshot Campaign moved to push the Wen back. Slowly and painfully in places, such as around Gusu, and incredibly quickly, such as around Lotus Pier.

The name had come from Jin Guangshan. Not one of the generals used it without putting a heavy sarcastic emphasis on it. Honestly, even Jin Guangshan had smiled ironically when he suggested it.

Right before Gang stared him right in the eyes and asked if the name was the only thing that Jin Guangshan was going to contribute to the war effort.

“Your continued disrespect alone would drive me to switch sides!” Jin Guangshan bellowed at Gang, red in the face and so furious that Ying had to fight not to snicker at Gang’s successful goading.

“What difference would it make?” Gang asked in that same pointedly blank tone while staring Jin Guangshan straight in the eyes. “You’re not contributing anything to us. I’m sure you’d do the same to Wen Ruohan. I’d love to see what it gets you.”

The high-pitched sound of utter outrage Jin Guangshan stayed in Ying’s mind for, oh, the next three battles. None of which had Jin participating in them on either side. After that, it faded into the background misery, pain and death that was apparently the core of war.

Plus exhaustion. Lots of exhaustion. And awful food, too.

At least Ying and Gang got to do a lot about the bad food. While General Kwan and the Yiling army was out there killing the Wen in ever-increasingly efficient ways, Ying and Gang marshalled the ghosts, soothed the dead, and then used all the resentment from the battle to grow epic amounts of food.

Toss some seeds into the middle of the battlefield. Do the earth healing array. Harvest food. Pass it out. Repeat the next day and the next and the next.

Sadly, the kinds of food that they could grow on battlefields tended to be things like turnips, shiso and eggplants. Lots of beansprouts, too, but beansprouts weren’t a huge improvement over the beans themselves. Ying made a point of getting cabbage and bok choy in there on a regular basis. Twice he managed to grow some lovely green Chinese squash which always produced in huge quantities.

Ying sighed as he stared at his bowl of deeply uninspired soup with an old apple. “I really want to go home, Gang.”

Gang grimaced. “I know. These radishes are so flavorless. I’d say it was growing them so fast, but I think it’s just that they’re, you know, not as good as home.”

Lan Zhan looked at them, all primly amused as he silently ate his soup and apple.

“You hush,” Ying said, wagging a finger at him because it would be horrible rude to point his chopsticks at Lan Zhan even if he deserved it for snark like that. “The radishes are like water.”

“You’re crazy,” Jiang Cheng pronounced around a mouthful of apple. “They’re perfectly normal radishes.”

“Eh, so bland,” Ying complained mostly to watch Jiang Cheng glower at him while chewing aggressively. “The bite is there, yeah, but where are the undertones? There’s no subtle nutty flavor. No hint of apple to the crispness.”

“It really is sad,” Gang said completely seriously.

General Kwan huffed a laugh behind them. “If it’s that bad, then you should all come to the command tent,” General Kwan said. “We have news.”

They exchanged worried looks. Then they passed their bowls off to the Nie soldiers who had cooking duty today.

Jin Zixuan stood in the command tent, trembling.

He’d been there at a few meetings before the war got started properly, silent and wide-eyed every time Gang prodded Jin Guangshan about his refusal to participate in the war. His cousin, that rude boy Jin Zixun, had been there several times, too, confident and certain of the Jin’s absolute right to do whatever they wanted. Or not to do whatever they didn’t want.

Jin Zixuan was alone today. Alone, splattered with dried blood, and shaking like an aspen leaf in a gale.

“What happened?” Ying asked as everyone filed in behind him and Gang. “Are you all right?”

“I’m…” Jin Zixuan paused, breath hitching in his chest. “No. No, I’m not all right. I had to run. Wen Ruohan announced that he was taking Jinlintai. Father decided that we would submit, that we’d become part of the Wen. My, my mother protested and fought him.”

Jin Zixuan stopped talking as he started shaking even harder. Ying gently pushed Jin Zixuan onto a stool while Gang pulled out one of their “going into shock and needs to calm down quick” talismans. While Nie Mingjue looked like he might protest, he didn’t stop Gang from charging it up and placing it in Jin Zixuan’s hands.

“Oh,” Jin Zixuan said, blinking at the array. “Oh… That’s. That’s very good. That helps.”

“We use it when the Wen throw people into the Burial Mounds and they get caught by our protective wards,” Gang said, patting Jin Zixuan’s shoulder hesitantly. “Calms them down enough to explain where they hurt so we can fix it.”

“I’m glad that someone is there to help the people Father throws in, too,” Jin Zixuan said distantly enough that Ying pulled out the tea set he kept in his sleeve, starting some soothing tea brewing. “Mother’s dead. Father had the archers fill her full of arrows when she pulled her spiritual whip. He laughed when I shouted at him, said that he has dozens of other children. That he didn’t need me. And then he told the archers to kill me, too.”

“What?” Nie Mingjue asked as he went nearly as pale as Jin Zixuan.

“I know,” Jin Zixuan agreed. He laughed softly, tears starting to flow down his cheeks. “Zixun stabbed Mianmian. As I was running. Mianmian was protecting me, helping me escape. We were going to run together, but Zixun stabbed her and then he, he… I’m pretty sure he cut off her head.”

Gang hummed, wincing while touching his purification bead. A young woman’s ghost appeared right behind Jin Zixuan, throat cut and eyes frantic as she stared down at Jin Zixuan. Who sobbed at seeing her before rocking on his stool with the talisman clutched to his chest.

Shit. Falling apart right in front of them. Ying needed to get that tea done faster.

Ying rubbed Jin Zixuan’s back as the tea steeped, trying to comfort him in the face of betrayal, death and the loss of everything he’d ever known. None of the other sect leaders said a word. Jiang Cheng stared with such wide eyes that Ying thought he might run away if given a chance.

“Ah,” Gang sighed. “Yeah. He did. I’m so sorry. I know you were close friends.”

“I’d have married her if I had the choice,” Jin Zixuan whispered. “But I never had a choice. Not once. I can’t. I can’t go home. I can’t bring you any warriors. Or anything useful. Father never let me see their plans. He’s, he’s just…”

“We don’t need you to bring us anything,” Ying said as he poured the tea for Jin Zixuan, holding it to his lips so that he would drink it. “Our ghosts have already seen all that stuff. It’s fine. Just drink. You’re safe here. We’ll make sure your father doesn’t kill you.”

Jin Zixuan drank. There was just enough opium in the tea that he relaxed by increments, answering questions from all the other generals. General Kwan didn’t ask anything. Neither did Nie Mingjue. Eventually, Nie Mingjue slashed a hand in the air, cutting Sect Leader Yao’s endless yammering off.

“Take him to eat and rest,” Nei Mingjue ordered Ying.

“Done,” Gang said, making the little quirk of his eyebrows that meant he needed a break from the ruling side of things. Or from the high-running emotions, more likely.

Gang’s shoulders relaxed as Ying stood straight and crossed his arms over his chest. It was always a little weird to hear Gang chattering, but he did a good job encouraging Jin Zixuan out of the tent and off to their encampment.

“Have Lan Yitian take care of him,” Ying called over his shoulder.

“On it!” Gang called back cheerfully. “Don’t you worry. She’ll mother-hen you to the point that you’re about to scream. She’s really good at that. She helped raise us so she’s very effective at taking care of lost boys.”

“I would have preferred to have Gang stay,” Nie Mingjue grumbled.

“What do you mean?” Ying asked with Gang’s raised chin, defiant stare and pursed lips. “I did stay.”

The moment of silence had a perfect edge of uneasiness as Nie Mingjue frowned, mouth half-open, and Lan Xichen glanced over at Lan Zhan who shrugged that of course it was Gang, not Ying, standing in front of them.

Lan Zhan was always and forever the very best person alive.

“Right,” Jiang Cheng said. “Mom is going to lose her mind over this. Dad isn’t going to be much better. They’ve been planning on marrying A-Jie off to the peacock for ages. Madame Jin is… was… Mom’s best friend.”

Ying shook his head, staring at the map. “They’re getting something significant out of this. They have to be. Wen Ruohan doesn’t just allow people to join. He demands fealty, heavy fealty.”

“True,” Nie Mingjue agreed. “Wen Ruohan rolled right over the Yueyang Chang.”

“Last week, he took the Pingyang Yao territory,” Sect Leader Yao said, hands shaking as he touched his sect’s former homeland. “We barely escaped with half the sect.”

“Taking the Jin means that he’s coming close to encircling the Nie,” Lan Xichen said, visibly worried as he studied the map. “The Yingchuan Wang and Yuncheng Bao won’t offer much resistance to him.”

“The Laolin Qin are a target, too,” Ying said. “Their sect leader is friends with Jin Guangshan, but that hasn’t protected the women of the Qin. The ghosts report… several highly placed rapes. Some with issue.”

“He’d rape his friends’ wives?” Nie Mingjue asked with disgust only to roll his eyes. “Of course he would. A woman would just be…”

“Unimportant,” Ying said, just as angry as Gang would have been over it. “He doesn’t value the lives of women or anyone less powerful than he is. With Wen Ruohan as his ally, he’ll go after everyone between him and what he wants, whether on the battlefield or in the hallways of Jinlintai.”

Nie Mingjue nodded slowly, tapping the land between the Jin and the Nie. “They’ll grind the smaller sects between them, then turn on the Nie. They won’t have much success with that. Our wards and walls are strong.”

Ying shook his head. “Not strong enough to resist an army of the dead. Wen Ruohan doesn’t have the same control that we do. His dead are just walking corpses. We need to try and get at him, to attack him more directly.”

“No,” General Kwan said, making everyone start other than Ying and Lan Zhan because he’d been lurking so quietly in the shadows at the corners of the tent.

He stalked over to look at the map. General Kwan swept all the markers off and then set them up again. This time he put all the Sunshot Campaign’s markers to the south between the Jiang and the Lan territories. The Wen and Jin went to the north, blocking the Nie off from their home base in the north.

“He’s dividing the forces,” General Kwan said. “Distract. Separate. Pick off the weak. Roll over the strong once they’re divided and confused. Wen Ruohan is holding back. Jin Guangshan’s got thousands of cultivators that are sitting on their asses instead of fighting. Between the two sects, they should be able to crush everyone else, but they’re not.”

“The Jin don’t really know how to fight people,” Ying said as he nodded thoughtfully. “But I suppose with enough numbers it doesn’t matter. Like the dog-yao pack.”

“Exactly,” General Kwan agreed. “The Jin are the haunted mushrooms, waiting to snap but content to sit silently if not disturbed. The Wen are roving monsters that need to be put down. There’s one sect that has stayed out of it all.”

General Kwan thumped his fingers down on the symbol for the Meishan Yu.

“Erg,” Jiang Cheng groaned, making a face. “They won’t help. They’ve got no interest in the rest of the Jianghu.”

“Maybe,” General Kwan said. “But they’re the closest to the Nightless City. Would they be interested if we said that we’d lure the Wen out, bring them here,” he pointed to the center of Henan where the Yingchuan Wang and Yuncheng Bao lived, “leaving the Nightless City open for an attack by their forces. We could offer them the right to keep what they wanted from what they found, as long as it wasn’t something that would let them become the next Wen Ruohan.”

“Don’t worry about the Yin Iron,” Ying said because he and Gang had been talking about that late at night when the nightmares kept them up. “Ying and I have ideas of how to handle it. If we get anywhere near the Yin Iron, we can take it from him and purify it.”

“Good,” General Kwan said. “Old Sect Leader Xue’s spiritual tool shouldn’t be treated like that anyway.”

“Exactly,” Ying agreed.

The others didn’t look terrifically pleased by that thought, but Ying wasn’t at all surprised by that. The entire Jianghu seemed to think that the Yin Iron was just a standard tool instead of the broken, tortured remnants of a spiritual tool as sentient as Baxia.

“And why do you think you should have it?” Nie Mingjue asked, glowering at Ying.

“If you lost your entire sect,” Ying said, staring right into Nie Mingjue’s eyes exactly the way that Gang always did to Jin Guangshan which made Nie Mingjue start and back off a step, “down to the new babies and your own granny who died in your arms. If you then took Baxia, who is a living being for all that she’s a saber, and you broke her to keep Wen Ruohan from doing horrible things to and with her. If that happened, while the Wen laughed and stole everything you’d ever built. Would you want Baxia’s shattered fragments fought over like dogs fight over scraps?”

Nie Mingjue roared something incoherent in his rage.

“Because that is exactly what happened to Xue Chonghai and the Yin Iron which was not “the Yin Iron”!” Ying bellowed at him. He waited as Nie Mingjue stilled. “It was Xue Chonghai’s Baxia. It wasn’t a sword. It was an amulet. It held a soul just like Baxia does. And now everyone in the entire fucking Jianghu argues over it’s still bleeding, still hurting, still aware corpse. If you don’t want it to happen to Baxia, then don’t you dare tell me that we shouldn’t do something to lay the Yin Iron to rest finally. It’s been suffering for ages. It’s only right. It’s what we do, and you know it.”

Even Sect Leader Yao who was nearly as greedy as Jin Guangshan, if nowhere near as blatant about it, looked guilty.

Nie Mingjue rubbed the back of his neck as he sighed. “That. I apologize. That was uncalled for on my side.”

“It’s normal,” Ying grumbled in Gang’s most grumpy tone, the one that meant he’d rather you stopped being nice and went back to being an asshole so he could stop having to have inconvenient emotions. “Just annoying. Do you think the Meishan Yu would do it?”

Jiang Cheng started at the sudden shift of topic. Not too surprising given that he’d looked like he wanted to duck out of the tent to escape the emotions, too. He and Gang were both so very bad at emotions.

“They might,” Jiang Cheng said. “I’ll contact Mother, see what she says. It can’t hurt to try, anyway.”

“Do it,” Ying said before anyone could argue the point. “Get Ying and I close enough to Wen Ruohan, and we can end this war, one way or the other. It won’t be pretty. It may not keep everyone alive, but we will end the threat from him.”

Nie Mingjue nodded slowly. “If you can handle Wen Ruohan, then we’ll handle Jin Guangshan. I should not have left it to you to oppose Jin Guangshan all this time. He’s been undermining all of us and we let it happen.”

“He’s… always been good at that,” Sect Leader Yao said without meeting anyone’s eyes. He poked at the table as he grimaced. “It’s easier to let him lead you than to deal with his constant picking away at you.”

“Why do you think I never let him get away with anything?” Ying said with Gang’s best drawl and wry smirk. “Ying and I were street kids. We’ve seen the worst of humanity. And the best. It was always obvious what Jin Guangshan was, even before we found what Xue Chonghai left behind.”

The meeting didn’t last long after that, thank goodness. Ying made a point to prod one of the honor guard ghosts to remember everything that was decided so that Gang could be briefed later. With his memory, he’d probably forget at least a couple of details.

Not that the details were as important as the big picture.

They were going to draw the Wen and the Jin out into a huge battle over the Yingchuan Wang and Yuncheng Bao territory. They would take down Wen Ruohan and liberate the Yin Iron.

And then they would turn to the Jin to make sure that Jin Guangshan paid for all his many and varied crimes.

 

 

21. Rebirth

Thirty-eight days. It took thirty-eight long, bitter, bloody days before they managed to draw both the Wen and the Jin out into battle.

Ying snarled as he fought at Gang’s side, arms aching from the shichen and a half of swinging his staff while waves of Jin attacks between slavering hordes of resentful corpses. The corpses are easy enough to deal with. Ying and Gang had cobbled together enough purity beads that the entire Sunshot Campaign had at least two of them, some more than that. Before they’d gone out to fight, everyone had charged up their beads.

Corpse gets close to bead. Bead activates. Corpse falls down, purified of Wen Ruohan’s control and all its resentment.

Ying had gotten really, really good at making purification beads over the last thirty-eight days.

General Kwan and their army was taking the vast majority of the real fighting, of course. They were fast and almost impossible to kill and so far beyond Wen Ruohan’s ability to control that it was like Wen Ruohan was throwing feathers at them.

But today they had Wen Ruohan at the front. At the same time Jin Guangshan was at the front. Both of them.

So obviously, today was the day that General Kwan had to pretend to be driven back by the Yin Iron’s wails of misery, which let the Jin charge at Ying and Gang.

“I,” Gang grunted as he cracked a Jin cultivator’s skull, killing him. “Hate this!”

“I know!” Ying agreed as he ducked and then killed another Jin cultivator who looked like he was maybe seventeen, far too young to be in the middle of a war.

The battlefield stank. Blood and urine mixed with death and vomit coat the back of Ying’s throat. He knew the scent of death, grew up with it, but this was worse than anything he’d every smelled before. For one wild moment as he swung his staff as hard as he possibly could at the neck of a Jin cultivator as old as the hills, Ying thought that he’d never smell anything else ever again.

There was mud all over his boots. Ying had blood on his face, soaking his robes and making them stick to his arms and legs. Sweat dripped down his ribs, tickling as it went.

All around him the dead wailed as they left their bodies.

“Focus!” Gang snapped at Ying.

“Tell me they’re close,” Ying said through his gritted teeth as he nodded and got ready for the next wave of Jin soldiers rushing their way.

There wasn’t another wave.

The Jin pulled back, stumbling as if they’d just seen something utterly terrifying. Or as if they’d almost overrun a pre-arranged signal for something worse to happen.

The Sunshot Campaign’s cultivators pulled back, too, just as Gang had insisted they must. None of them were prepared for what was coming. They didn’t understand what Gang and Ying did. Most of them were blatantly terrified of the way Ying and Gang manipulated and purified resentful energy.

Ying couldn’t even count how many times he’d heard whispers of “demonic cultivation” and “heresy” when he passed other sects’ campsites.

It was just like what had happened to Xue Chonghai. Well, not just like. Nie Mingjue was firmly on their side. So was Lan Qiren, amazingly enough. He didn’t spend much time at the front since his lungs were still a mess and his leg hadn’t healed properly yet, but every time he was there, he spoke up for them and their methods.

Yu Ziyuan never spoke against them. She also never spoke for them.

Jiang Fengmian and Jiang Cheng were on their side, quietly.

Lan Zhan, always and forever, backed them up with every fiber of his being.

So maybe they wouldn’t end up being hunted back to Yiling and slaughtered.

If they survived this battle.

As the Sunshot Campaign’s cultivators ran back, away from Ying, Gang and Wen Ruohan, General Kwan brought their army close. They stood in an iron-hard line between Wen Ruohan and the rest of the Jianghu, weapons at the ready.

Come what may, General Kwan and the others would make sure that the sects survived.

Wen Ruohan’s laugh carried over the blood-soaked, muddy battlefield. He stood, pristine in his white and flame-bedecked robes. The Ying Iron lay clenched in his fist, twitching against his white-knuckled grip.

Interestingly, Wen Ruohan showed signs of having ghosts infesting his body. Even at this distance, Ying could feel the resentful energy riddling his body. There were holes through him.

Not physical. Spiritual. The Yin Iron and the ghosts of Xue Chonghai’s people had been battling against Wen Ruohan, eating him from the inside out.

They weren’t in him now.

Ying could hear them calling from the Yin Iron. Begging for release from their misery. Shouting their hatred of the Jianghu and their so-called righteous cultivators.

Other ghosts lurked inside him now.

Good.

Whoever they were, they had to be better than Wen Ruohan.

Unfortunately, Wen Ruohan still seemed to be in charge of his body. Another few years and he would’ve been a flesh puppet for the Yin Iron. The war had obviously happened just a bit too soon for the Yin Iron to win the battle for them.

“Finally,” Wen Ruohan said. His voice echoed across the suddenly quiet battlefield. “The Twin Patriarchs of Yiling.”

“Asshole,” Gang said as he straightened up just so. “Who are you calling a twin?”

Ying mirrored him as the resentful energy of the battlefield billowed around the two of them. It was as thick as night, pitch black with ashy edges that swirled around Ying as he pulled it into his body. Where normally he was an ash-soaked shadow, this time he became a human-shaped void with swirling edges to mark where he started and the world ended.

“What?” Wen Ruohan asked, suddenly alert.

His voice echoed weirdly through the resentful energy. Ying could see. Could hear. Could feel every single one of the dead, recent and from the distant past.

“What?” Gang asked in that same flat tone he always used to deal with Jin Guangshan who stood white-faced next to Wen Ruohan. “Did that rapist little asshole tell you that we were two people? Shows how little he knows. Everyone knows that Wei Changze and Cangse Sanren had one son, not two.”

…Ying so loved his twin!

It was so hard not to cackle with delight as Wen Ruohan swung a fist around to hit Jin Guangshan in the face.

There was a crack of bone breaking. Jin Guangshan went down, boneless and lifeless. His soul lifted up off his body to scream in horror at all his elaborate plans falling apart so easily.

Ying and Gang flicked their fingers at Jin Guangshan, throwing a purification lotus at his soul.

Jin Guangshan slipped away into the cycle of reincarnation as easily and quickly as he’d died.

One less distraction.

“What was that?” Wen Ruohan snarled.

“Purification,” Gang said, raising his chin challengingly. “It’s the specialty of the Yiling Xue sect.”

“Destruction was Xue Chonghai’s specialty!” Wen Ruohan bellowed.

He waved the Yin Iron at them as if it was a sword, not a broken amulet, not a dead and rotting soul trapped inside it’s body. As if it wasn’t the container for hundreds of lost souls who yearned to enter the cycle of reincarnation.

“No,” Gang said, stabbing his staff into the bloody earth which meant that Ying had to do it, too. “The Yiling Xue Sect and Xue Chonghai wanted to raise vegetables and ensure that everyone, even the peasants, lived long, healthy, happy lives. People like you and Jin Guangshan hounded him, hunted him, and killed him.”

Gang dropped to one knee. He thrust a fist into the bloody earth while Ying pulled out his dizi. Back in Yiling, they’d done this version of purification once.

Only once.

The Great Purification array, the one that was designed to purify the world, couldn’t fight against the salting of the earth in Yiling. It couldn’t win against all the suppression wards and punishing arrays that the Jianghu had set up.

Here?

On a battlefield full of recently dead killed in a war that no one wanted?

Ying kind of thought that they might be able to send a wave of purification around the entire planet that would liberate all the dead, subdue all the yao, and purify the entire Earth itself.

If they could get the Yin Iron away from Wen Ruohan.

Ying started playing.

The first step, always, was to call up the purification array that created the lotuses and showed the soul orbs of the dead. If you were going to purify a place, you needed to know what was there, first. Sure, Ying had done it blind before, but it was always stupidly inefficient.

Gang hated having to do things two or three times to make them stick.

Thus, lotuses and soul orbs and Wen Ruohan’s eyes going wide while the Yin Iron perked up hopefully in his desperate, white-knuckled grip. This time, the lotuses blazed like tiny bonfires all around Ying and Gang. They spread out in a tidal wave that made Wen Ruohan stumble backwards as his mouth dropped open.

There had been other battles here, several of them. As much as Gang and Ying had hated it, they’d left the dead’s souls and the resentful energy alone. It hurt to do it, but it meant that now there were layers upon layers of resentful energy for Ying to harvest and so many dead to call upon.

Ying had so much resentful energy that he gifted each of the lotuses with enough power that their dead could appear as ghosts hovering over the lotuses instead of just manifesting as globes. Red, red, orange, red, so many angry, resentful souls lifted their heads. Their toes disappeared into whisps of light that faded into nothingness just above their lotuses.

Every single one of the dead turned to stare at Wen Ruohan.

“We are the Yiling Xue Sect,” Gang intoned, voice pitched to carry over Ying’s achingly sad dizi. “We live among the dead. We speak for the dead. We purify the earth so that the dead may be reborn into a better, happier, healthier life.”

Wen Ruohan barked a laugh even though the Jin stumbled backwards and away, even though the Wen soldiers were slowly backing off with their weapons at the ready and their eyes showing whites all the way around.

“A quaint trick,” Wen Ruohan sneered. “Do you expect me to quake with fear?”

“We are the chosen guardians of the Yiling Xue sect,” General Kwan said into the gleaming silence that hovered over the battlefield. “We lived. We died. We will serve and protect until all are safe, happy and healthy.”

Every single one of General Kwan’s soldiers thrust a fist into the air as they shouted a wordless roar of a battle cry.

Ying didn’t speak.

Instead his song shifted until it was an entreaty to the dead all around them. He poured his soul and about half the resentful energy he carried into the array that let the dead speak for themselves, let them act and help and kill as they burned off the resentment that kept him from moving on.

I see you, Ying played. I hear you. Will you help us? Please, this needs to end. Help us free the Yin Iron and end this stupid, stupid war.

His music swept over the dead, pushed past Wen Ruohan and onwards to the far edges of the valley they’d been fighting in. More and more lotuses bloomed. More ghosts appeared; eyes locked on Wen Ruohan.

As Ying played and begged and yearned for his home and everything they’d left behind, the dead all turned to stare at Wen Ruohan.

Then they began to sing.

Thousands of voices lifted up in harmony with Ying’s song.

Ying’s fingers fumbled on the dizi, just for a moment, but the dead carried the song while he flailed mentally, allowed himself an eyeblink’s worth of panic, and then returned to playing the purification array/song.

“Stop that!” Wen Ruohan yelled as he staggered back a step.

His right foot landed on one of the lotuses.

While the dead Jin soldier didn’t react to Wen Ruohan at all, Wen Ruohan gasped as if the touch of the lotus was agony.

Or maybe ecstasy given the wide, unseeing eyes and dropped-open mouth.

Wen Ruohan staggered forward again, chest heaving as he fought to breathe. He swallowed, shook his head, and glared at both Ying and Gang.

Or at the Yiling Patriarch since they were pretending to be one person, sort of, right now.

“Your tricks will not save you,” Wen Ruohan shouted as he waved the fist clenched around the Yin Iron at Gang. “I have the ultimate power. The Yin Iron serves me.”

“That’s not its name,” Gang said in his flat, calling Sect Leaders out on their bullshit voice.

Wen Ruohan blinked, then stared at the Yin Iron as it screamed inaudibly at both Wen Ruohan and at Gang.

“No,” Wen Ruohan said, staring at the Yin Iron as blood dripped between his fingers and then down the back of his hand. “No! You are mine! You obey me!”

Ying pushed a wave of resentful energy into Gang, letting him light up like the sun.

“I told you,” Gang said as the tornado of ash-soaked energy transformed into pure, glorious spiritual energy to fuel the Heal the Earth array he’d formed under his feet. “That’s not its name.”

As Ying played to summon the souls and the stored resentful energy out of the Yin Iron, Gang pushed everything he had into the healing array.

The ground under their feet bubbled. The mud boiled as fragile spiderwebs of fungi sped across the wet earth, seeking nutrients and all the organic matter that made mud into soil that could bring forth life.

Mushrooms thrust up all around them, wiggling their way out of the mud and grass, curling up around dead bodies. White and brown and yellow and spotted red, the mushrooms flung themselves into life as if a hundred years passed in the blink of an eye.

Wen Ruohan yelled something as he fell to his knees. Blood still ran down his wrist, but the Yin Iron glowed just like Gang did.

Gang sucked in a slow breath and pushed on to the next step.

The millions of mushrooms collapsed back into the earth as the ground rumbled and shifted. Deep underground, the battered, severed roots of grass and flowers, tiny saplings that had been trampled, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dormant seeds, all burst into life at once.

It had been dramatic at Lotus Pier.

An explosion of life.

Here, in the middle of a blood-soaked battlefield at the end of a horrifying war, the earth healing array was an eruption.

A volcano of life launched up out of the mud. Ferns flung up arching spirals that unfolded into graceful fonds. Moss crept across the valley like an army of caterpillars on the march. Spears of fireweed shot towards the sky, their leaves shaking off earth as their bright blossoms snapped open and then sprayed forth seeds in less than a shocked breath.

Then grass and shrubs, patches of wild rice and barley, fast-growing aspen that threw up spindly trunks with coin-sized leaves.

Wen Ruohan’s wail matched the singing of the dead.

Slowly, so slowly, his fingers unclenched.

The Yin Iron, still glowing like a tiny star, drifted up off his palm.

As the dead sang chorus to Ying’s purification, the Yin Iron slowly flew over to Ying and Gang.

Rest, Ying played. Your work is done. It’s okay. You can let go now. We’ll protect Yiling. We’ll protect Xue Chonghai. It’s safe. You can finally, finally rest.

More souls flowed out of the Yin Iron’s fractured body. They spun off into the cycle of reincarnation almost faster than Ying could see them. Children and women and old men and so many people who had served either Wen Ruohan, only to be betrayed by him, or Xue Chonghai, only to be betrayed by the Jianghu.

As Wen Ruohan collapsed on a bed of ferns and bright yellow flax flowers, the Yin Iron gave up the last of its stored souls.

The earth stopped rumbling under their feet.

General Kwan and the rest of the Yiling army turned, facing back at the Sunshot Campaign.

Ying let the shadows go as Gang stood to hold his hands underneath the Yin Iron.

“Let go,” Gang told the Yin Iron gently, sadly, with so much empathy.

Let go, Ying played, his whole heart briming with sympathy for all that the Yin Iron had endured.

“We’ll find the rest of you,” Gang promised.

We’ll set the rest of you free, too, Ying agreed.

The Yin Iron sighed.

A gust of energy drifted up off it. Gang’s hands gleamed as he did the healing array. All around them, the dead began blinking out, their voices leaving the heavenly chorus as they moved on into the cycle of reincarnation.

Ying kept playing until they were all gone.

He kept playing until all the lotuses faded.

Until the Yin Iron in Gang’s hands was nothing more than spiritually active iron carved in a beautiful shape.

“It’s done,” Gang murmured as he pulled the dizi away from Ying’s lips.

“Wen Ruohan?” Ying asked.

Gang looked over his shoulder. A delicate white butterfly rested, wings slowly flapping, on Wen Ruohan’s cheek. His eyes didn’t blink. His chest didn’t move.

“It’s done,” Gang repeated.

“Oh, good,” Ying breathed.

This time the darkness that rose up to engulf Ying was exhaustion, not resentful energy. He sighed as his legs gave way, dropping him into Gang’s waiting arms.

Done.

Now they just had to survive the aftermath…

 

 

22. Aftermath

Ying woke to the feeling of Lan Zhan carefully running his fingers through Ying’s hair. His nails gently scratched against Ying’s scalp sending tingles of lazy pleasure through Ying’s slowly waking mind. There were voices, angry ones, off in the distance but they didn’t matter as much as Lan Zhan’s gentle attention to Ying’s scalp.

“Feels good,” Ying mumbled.

“Mm,” Lan Zhan hummed.

It was a distinctly pleased hum. Ying levered one eye open.

Lan Zhan knelt properly on a woven grass mat, newly created from fragrant green grass, at the edge of Ying and Gang’s bedroll. He’d cleaned up, or maybe he’d done the Lan cleanliness trick. His white and blue robes were perfect, not a single stain on them. As Ying smiled up into Lan Zhan’s eyes, Lan Zhan hummed a good morning while massaging Ying’s scalp a little more.

So nice, their Lan Zhan. Brought them right back to…?

Their tent.

Well, that meant he hadn’t been out for too long, anyway. If it had been longer than a few shichen, maybe overnight, General Kwan and Lan Yitian would have carried both Ying and Gang off to Yiling where they could recover safely.

At least the smell of death was gone. Instead of blood lingering in the air, Ying could smell a thousand different kinds of flowers. The rich, wet smell of fertile earth lingered in his nostrils, mixing with the sandalwood Lan Zhan used on his hair.

Even their simple bedroll felt more comfortable. There was a lot more grass underneath it than there had been. Good for them. Not so good for the grass but it should bounce right back after they packed up their tent and went home.

Gang lay warm and quiet against Ying’s back.

There was a warmer spot around Ying’s waist where Gang’s arm must have been until recently. Must have rolled over because of the nonsense going on outside. Ying frowned as the voices came closer, not right outside but near enough that the rumble of people arguing differentiated into a few clearly upset and shouty people being lectured at by a few fed-up and tired quieter people.

“That was horrific! The Jianghu cannot allow such degenerate practices to exist. They must be destroyed lest they follow in Wen Ruohan’s footsteps.”

Ying sighed. “Sect Leader Yao is horrific. Like we’d do anything Wen Ruohan would approve of. He was a jerk.”

“Hate Sect Leader Yao,” Gang mumbled from the other side of Ying. “So loud. So rude.”

“Stupid,” Lan Zhan agreed.

They listened as Sect Leader Yao yelped about demonic cultivation this and loss of precious artifacts that. From the sound of it, he had a handful of minor sect leaders behind him. Nie Mingjue’s growl was firmly against Sect Leader Yao. So was Yu Ziyuan’s snapping comments. Jiang Fengmian’s mock-thoughtful comments were mellow and very sarcastic as he so kindly considered each of Sect Leader Yao’s concerns and then dismissed them.

“How long were we out?” Ying asked Lan Zhan as he stretched and yawned.

“Overnight,” Lan Zhan said. “The Jin have surrendered. So have the Wen.”

“And so it starts,” Gang sighed from his place flopped face-down on their bedroll. “General Kwan?”

“Outside the tent,” Lan Zhan said. “Keeping watch.”

“Good,” Gang said.

“Lan Zhan,” Ying asked as he quickly stripped off his grubby robes and switched to the one spare set that he had as that was marginally clean, “can you do the Lan clean things up trick? Gang and I need to look good.”

“Mm.”

Lan Zhan nodded firmly before sitting Ying down and dragging a comb through all the many tangles and knots in Ying’s hair. Gang took his time getting up, but that was fine. He was much better at taking care of his hair than Ying was. There were a lot less tangles, even with passing out on the battlefield and not getting cleaned up until they woke up.

Their robes were still simple linen, still kind of worn, black and grey and red on the innermost layer. Lan Zhan made a point of dressing their hair exactly the same. His eyes twinkled with mischief as he made sure that their robes lay exactly the same over their shoulders, arms, and chests. He even made sure that they had the exact same pouches at their belts and that both of them carried a dizi before he nodded approval.

“Lan Zhan,” Ying said, grinning at him, “are you suggesting that we mess with their minds?”

Lan Zhan’s eyebrows twitched up while his eyes widened slightly as if he was trying to look innocent.

“You trouble-maker,” Gang snickered. “Just smirk right at them. It’ll confuse them more than looking innocent.”

“True,” Lan Zhan said, employing his minimal and utterly devastating smirk.

“Oh,” Ying breathed, patting his chest. “Gang, we gotta propose. How can we be parted from our Lan Zhan?”

“Oh. Oh, shit!” Gang whispered, eyes going wide as he stared at Lan Zhan who’d gone wide-eyed for real this time. “You’re right. He’s got to go back to the Cloud Recesses. Shit. We really do need to propose.”

“You… want me?” Lan Zhan asked.

His voice shook as his ears went bright red in Lan Zhan’s adorable version of a blush. Ying took Lan Zhan’s left hand. Gang took his right. From the way Lan Zhan’s breath caught, he hadn’t expected this.

“You’ve been our friend since we were all little, Lan Zhan,” Ying said quietly enough that the arguing sect leaders wouldn’t hear them. General Kwan and the others had to be listening in. Their ears were way better, after all.

“No matter what we tell everyone else, you know we’re not really twins, right?” Gang asked.

“Mm,” Lan Zhan agreed as his blush spread across his cheeks, too.

“Well, you’re one of the few things that we’ve always agreed totally on,” Ying said. “Not exactly the same way, of course, but we both agree that life is better with you than not.”

His own cheeks were going hot. So were Gang’s, to the point that Gang looked at Ying with a plea in his eyes. Ying laughed and knocked his shoulder against Gang’s.

“I’m always the one for words,” Ying said to Gang before turning back to Lan Zhan. “We decided when we were ten that we’d marry you over anyone else in the world. Gang wants you around more on the friend side of things. He’s not much interested in sex. I’m, ah, interested in that sort of thing much more. You’re smart. You’re kind. You’re gentle and sarcastic and you just fit with us, Lan Zhan. It’ll take a little bit to work things out, but if you’re interested, we’d like to marry you.”

“Somehow,” Gang said with a jerk of his chin for the sect leaders outside. “It’ll be complicated because of those idiots. And the whole twins but not twins thing we set up.”

“And we gotta make sure that Yiling isn’t destroyed again, too,” Ying said seriously enough that Lan Zhan straightened up and nodded that he understood. “This is the most dangerous time. We’ve shown them all what we can do, some of it anyway. They’re going to be frightened and angry and greedy.”

“I just hope with Jin Guangshan dead things won’t go as badly as I was afraid they would,” Gang said.

All three of them shuddered for the thought of Jin Guangshan in charge of the Jianghu, potentially with the Yin Iron and no one who could effectively challenge him. At least they’d avoided that. Things could and probably would go wrong, but not having Jin Guangshan around had to be a good thing.

It just had to.

Lan Zhan hummed thoughtfully, squeezing their fingers gently. “I would… like… to stay with you. Your company is… pleasant. But I do not know if Uncle will allow it. Or the Elders. There are… concerns… about your manipulation of resentful energy.”

“Yeah, no surprise,” Ying snorted. “We’ve got plans for this.”

“We really do,” Gang said. He glowered over his shoulder towards the sounds of Sect Leader Yao getting increasingly annoyed at being stymied. “So far, everything that General Kwan and Xue Chonghai predicted is happening. Just follow our lead, as much as you can.”

“First, identify the threats,” Ying explained to Lan Zhan’s serious nod. “Find out who’s fanning the flames behind the scenes. Neutralize the secret behind-the-scenes leader. Display just what we can do for the Jianghu. Show how little we care for signs of rank. Keep the defenses high. Burn it all to the ground if nothing else works.”

Lan Zhan nodded slowly. “Burning it down should come sooner.”

Gang hooted with laughter while Ying shouted a laugh. No surprise, General Kwan promptly opened the tent to raise an eyebrow at them, letting them know that all the other sect leaders knew that they were awake now.

But he also grinned, as fast as a stiletto to the kidney, at Lan Zhan so it was fine.

“Sect Leader,” General Kwan said. “Ying-Furen. We have some food for you.”

“And guests,” Ying said, grinning at him. He dared to kiss Lan Zhan’s knuckles before letting his hand go, hooting with laughter at the way both Lan Zhan and Gang went blindingly red.

Then he pushed the two of them out of the tent, still hand in hand. Right into the face of all the sect leaders, including Lan Xichen who promptly lit up with delight, Nie Mingjue who hummed and nodded as if it made sense, and Sect Leader Yao who immediately started spluttering.

“They’re so cute!” Ying said as he bounced past Gang and Lan Zhan to take the congee that Lan Yitian held out. “It’s so amazing.”

“Wangji?” Lan Xicheng asked, visibly hoping so hard that he looked like he was barely holding on to his Lan dignity by his fingernails.

“Mm,” Lan Zhan said as he went even redder.

“You are officially the worst,” Gang grumbled to Ying.

“No, I’m the verbal one,” Ying said, passing the congee to Gang, taking a second bowl and passing that to Lan Zhan and only then taking the third bowl from Lan Yitian. “You two never use your words if you can help it. Gang and Lan Zhan have been dancing around courting since we met when we were tiny. It’s so cute. I’m so glad they finally admitted it.”

The little dance of making sure that Gang had food first, as the sect leader, then Lan Zhan, as his prospective Furen, made Nie Mingjue’s eyes narrow. Because of course it did. Nie Mingjue was as paranoid as a person could be and still be on the right side of qi deviation.

On the other hand, the open respect to Gang and Lan Zhan seemed to reassure that sect leaders following Sect Leader Yao. They eased back a little bit, shoulders going down and hands relaxing on their sword hilts.

Sect Leader Yao kept right on huffing in outrage, muttering about “impropriety” and “degeneracy” under his breath. He did seem to be confused by a Lan allowing Gang to court him, but not enough to actually question why he was so upset.

Whoever had gotten Sect Leader Yao all wound up had done a pretty good job of it, obviously.

“Didi!” Lan Xichen exclaimed as he rushed over to hug Lan Zhan. “I’m so glad! I’ve been waiting for an announcement for years!”

“Xiongzhang,” Lan Zhan murmured, returning the hug one-handed.

“We’ll have to sit down and discuss the details later,” Lan Xichen said, beaming at Gang and then at Ying and then at the entire world.

It was approximately like being hit by a beam of animate sunshine the size and weight of Nie Mingjue’s saber.

“Weaponize that smile and no one in the Jianghu is safe,” Ying muttered to Nie Mingjue.

Nie Mingjue cough-laughed into his fist, shoulders shaking with his effort not to laugh out loud. At least the new courtship seemed to give them a bit of breathing room on the blooming plot to destroy the Yiling Xue Sect.

Instead of a near-mob out for their blood, breakfast turned into a happy, chatty celebration. Not quite a feast, but they were still on a literal battlefield so it wouldn’t be appropriate anyway. But it was much more relaxed, and Ying was able to circulate and be cheerfully delighted about Gang and Lan Zhan’s courtship in an effort to gauge how everyone would react to it.

As well as asking a million questions about who’d died, who was wounded, which sects would have issues with their harvest this year.

“Well, no, we can come and do the Heal the Earth array on your fields,” Ying said to one of the really tiny sect leaders mid-morning. “It should give you enough to make it through the winter. Doesn’t work that well on our fields, but that’s not a surprise. When the Jianghu destroyed Xue Chonghai, apparently they salted the entirety of Yiling. That’s why it’s so hard to grow anything there. If your fields haven’t been salted, they’ll react a lot like this.”

He waved at the riot of life covering the battlefield.

Overnight the aspen had grown into stands of trees. The mushrooms were back again, sprouting in clumps all over the place. The rice and barley were richly gold while there were wild radish and spinach and so many other volunteer vegetables growing.

“It’s… safe?” Sect Leader Bo asked with a frown.

“Safer than in Yiling,” Ying said with a shrug. “I mean, the entire point of what we do is to transform the resentful energy into spiritual energy. It’s… I guess it’s the mushrooms that do it. They’ve got a talent for consuming resentful energy the same way a mule will consume thorns and rough forage. Once they’ve consumed the resentful energy, the mushrooms release spiritual energy as they collapse back into the earth, fertilizing it. And then the spiritual energy fuels growth of all the plants and worms and whatnot, leading to explosive growth. You know, when the ground hasn’t been salted.”

Sect Leader Bo hummed thoughtfully. “I thought Yiling had haunted mushrooms.”

“Oh, we so do,” Ying groaned as he rolled his eyes to the sky. “I hate those things. They’re doing it, purifying the soil, they’re just doing it slowly and naturally. What we figured out how to do when we were younger was how to speed it up so that it wouldn’t be generations of haunted mushrooms. Nobody should have to deal with haunted mushrooms. When we get back home, Gang and I are going to work on ways to remove the salt from the earth. Maybe then we can get Yiling’s fields to produce the way everyone else’s do.”

For a moment, Sect Leader Bo looked like he was going to fling accusations at Ying. There were dark questions lurking behind his eyes as he frowned and pursed his lips. But then he looked out over the fields and sighed as if he felt he didn’t have a choice but to ask.

“What will it cost to have you come help us?” Sect Leader Bo asked, the first person to do so all day. His sect must really have been hard hit.

“I dunno,” Ying said, shrugging. “I’ll have to ask Gang, of course. But I doubt it would be much. We’re really short on wood and we don’t have a good way to grow cotton or linen. Maybe a trade for wood or fabric? What does your sect focus on?”

Sect Leader Bo blinked; mouth open. He shook himself as he snapped his mouth shut again.

“We live in a mountain valley, quite high up,” Sect Leader Bo said. “We have very little arable land but a great many trees. We could certainly harvest some for you.”

“Oh, that would be wonderful!” Ying breathed, rounding his eyes, and clasping his hands in front of his chest. “Du Xilin would just about dance in the street. He’s our builder. Amazing carver. There’s no one who’s as good as Du Xilin at working the necessary pictograms and protective arrays into house beams.”

Sect Leader Bo promptly perked up. “Protective arrays? What do you mean?”

Ying grinned and waved for Sect Leader Bo to follow him over to Gang who was way better at explaining the amazing ways that Du Xilin used the Yiling pictograms to create arrays that kept houses warm, dry, and safe.

One sect leader potentially neutralized. A bunch more that Ying was pretty sure of where they stood. There were still wary looks and scolding murmurs as they walked by, but it was better than it had been when Ying and Gang woke up.

Ying wished that he could talk to Xue Chonghai. He’d have so many insights into why people were doing what they were doing. Unfortunately, until they got back to Yiling there was no way to ask him.

But General Kwan was there, watching and waiting. So were Xue Chen and Lan Yitian and Cho Xilun. Even if Ying couldn’t ask Xue Chonghai for advice, he had a whole slew of people who could help Ying navigate this political nonsense.

“Gang!” Ying said, bouncing up with Sect Leader Bo at his heels. “This is Sect Leader Bo. His people’s fields were kind of ruined, but they live in a high mountain valley with lots of good trees.”

“Oh,” Gang said, brightening from his impending scowl. “We need more wood. Yiling’s wood is terrible, even out on the far edge of town. Did you want to trade Earth Healing for lumber?”

“That… was the thought, yes,” Sect Leader Bo said slowly, cautiously, obviously very aware of the many, many eyes on them.

“Absolutely,” Gang said with a sigh of relief. “Seriously, let’s sit down and discuss it. We were trying to plot out how to afford to buy lumber from another town before all this nonsense started. If we can trade instead of paying outright, that would be ideal.”

Lan Zhan drifted to Ying’s side as Gang drew Sect Leader Bo into a detailed discussion of how much lumber, how much farm land, and how quickly each side could get to work. When Lan Zhan frowned at Ying, Ying shrugged.

“Life goes on, Lan Zhan,” Ying said. “Winter isn’t all that far off. People need to eat. They need homes with good walls and roofs. Just because there was a war doesn’t mean that normal everyday things stop. We’re farmers. The simple things will always be our first focus. All of this,” Ying waved at the listening sect leaders and the battlefield beyond with a dismissive flip of his fingers, “is a distraction from our true purpose. The Yiling Xue sect exists to feed and house and support the people of Yiling. That and not much more.”

None of the listeners seemed to believe it.

Lan Zhan, though, nodded slowly. His little smile was approving enough that Ying beamed at him. They really did need to figure out the whole courtship thing before everything went sideways on them.

Ying never wanted to have a day without Lan Zhan by his side.

 

 

23. Spies

“I was kind of surprised that you decided to follow us instead of joining the Jiang,” Ying said as he and Jin Zixuan hauled a log onto the stack to be strapped up and sent to Yiling. “I mean, weren’t you engaged to Jiang Yanli?”

Jin Zixuan grimaced. “Yeah, but that was never my choice. I wanted to marry Mianmian, not Jiang Yanli. I mean, she’s nice enough, I suppose, but we have nothing in common. Just… nothing. Every time we talked, it was awkward and stilted and neither of us could find something to say.”

Bo Muye, who’d begged Ying to stop calling him Sect Leader Bo after they’d cut down one tree and limbed it together, snorted. His people worked all around them, felling trees, limbing them, cutting the logs up into the proper lengths with smooth efficiency.

The trees themselves were tall, stately pines with straight trunks and a fine-grained wood that had made Du Xilun cry in delight when he got the samples. The forest smelled amazing around them and felt even better given that there was none of the resentful energy Ying was used to back home.

“I’d have thought you’d go back to the Jin and take over,” Bo Muye said.

“Ah, well, no,” Jin Zixuan said with a grimace and a sigh. “That’s not going to happen, I’m afraid.”

“Jin Zixun claimed the throne,” Ying explained when Jin Zixuan didn’t say anything else. “He’s declared Zixuan a traitor and struck him from the family line.”

The featherlight talismans that the Bo Sect used to move their logs around were amazing. Ying had already begged for instruction on how they worked since they had very different principles from the ones that Ying and Gang used.

One talisman the size of his thumb would make a log as thick as Ying was tall and three times as long weigh less than a single chicken. A scrawny chicken at that.

Bo Muye shook his head as he placed talismans on the next dozen or so logs. “And I thought the Jin were a mess under Jin Guangshan. How’s that awful boy getting away with it?”

“Blackmail,” Jin Zixuan said as they hefted another log onto the stack.

“Large stacks of money and blackmail,” Ying agreed. “Everyone knows. They’re just not saying it openly.”

“Must be impressive blackmail,” Bo Muye said, shaking his head as he secured the house-sized stack of logs and waved for his people to take them off to the river where they’d be floated down to Yiling.

“Yes.”

Jin Zixuan didn’t say anything else. He didn’t really need to, not with an expression that grim. And frankly, Ying couldn’t blame him. The things the ghosts had come up with on the Jin Elders, seniors, courtiers and general hangers-on were…

…Well.

All the kinds of things that people had accused Xue Chonghai of, other than the eating babies bit, except that they were true. Rape, lots of it. Child rape, lots of that too. Bribery, murder, corruption of all types. Influence dealing and information peddling. Embezzlement and espionage both internal and external.

Jin Zixun had been one of the kids who’d been molested, trafficked, and treated horribly.

He’d seized the Peony throne and promptly used everything that had happened to him as leverage to hold over all the people who’d treated him like shit. Add that to his “kill them if they question me” attitude and the way he flung money around, and Jin Zixun had very firm control over the Jin.

Ying had been prepared to deal with Jin Guangshan. Their plans had been pretty solid. No matter how debauched and corrupt Jin Guangshan had been in private, he’d been deeply invested in everyone seeing him as an upright and honorable cultivator. Or at least in their saying that they thought he was, which was close enough for Jin Guangshan.

Jin Zixun didn’t give a damn about looking, acting or being thought of as an honorable cultivator. He’d been abused, mistreated, and shamed his whole life so all he cared about was power. Whatever it took to hold the power he’d seized, he’d do it.

No matter who had to die for it.

Ying sighed, brushing the sawdust off his face, hair, and robes once they were done for the day.

“What?” Jin Zixuan asked.

“Just your cousin,” Ying admitted. “I’m not sure how to handle him. I mean, your father sucked, no offense, but we had ideas of how to keep him contained. Your cousin’s just… out there, doing all these things and we’re not sure what to do about it.”

“Ah, yeah,” Jin Zixuan agreed with a tired sigh of his own. “I wish I knew what to suggest but I have no idea. He still wants me dead.”

“Would joining another sect, taking another name, convince him to leave you alone?” Bo Muye asked.

He passed the some of the wonderful spicy bao that his grandmother made. Ying beamed as he took his while Jin Zixuan winced and eyed his as if it might bite his hand off. He still ate it, of course. Food was food and Jin Zixuan had apparently figured out that he couldn’t afford to be picky anymore.

“Doubt it,” Jin Zixuan said between bites of bao that had him sucking air into his mouth while wiping his watering eyes. “I’d still be a threat. I could change my mind.”

“Meant if you married into another sect,” Bo Muye said, trying not to grin at Jin Zixuan’s reaction to the spice and failing, just like Ying. “Took the name and everything.”

Jin Zixuan hesitated with the last bite of his bao halfway to his mouth, blinking thoughtfully. “It might. But it would have to be somewhere small, unimportant. Very out of the way.”

“Not it,” Ying immediately said when both Jin Zixuan and Bo Muye turned to look at him. “Gang and I have a thing going on with Lan Zhan and the whole two people but actually one person thing makes it all super complicated.”

“…I really don’t understand that,” Jin Zixuan muttered before cramming the last bite into his mouth and suffering through the spice burning his mouth and his eyes watering.

“Can’t say that I do, either,” Bo Muye agreed, eating much more comfortably. “I was just thinking that you know how to run a sect, the behind-the-scenes work, at least a little bit. I could use a Furen to handle things here at home. We’re out of the way, unremarkable, and generally just not important enough for anyone to pay attention to. Might work.”

Ying stared at Bo Muye. Then he stared at Jin Zixuan who gaped at Bo Muye as if he couldn’t believe he’d just heard that.

While slowly blushing and getting all fidgety at the way Bo Muye stared confidently at him.

With an inviting smile.

Ying promptly decided that he should supervise the logs heading down the river because nope, he definitely didn’t need to be involved in that courtship. He had his own courtship that he was missing out on.

The trip home took two days. Ying and Bo Muye’s people flew, occasionally nudging the bundles of logs so that they wouldn’t get caught anywhere or drift off out of the pack. Getting them out of the river was way easier than expected since Bo Muye’s people all knew the featherlight talismans.

Du Xilin did a victory dance, shouting prayerful thanks to the heavens, when he saw the logs.

Ying left him to that so that he could go report to Gang and Lan Zhan who were at the teahouse together, as expected. Gang hadn’t wanted to risk the Sanctuary by taking Lan Zhan inside. Not yet, anyway. Yiling had gotten twice as big after the war as it had ever been.

Not from the normal terrifying and lazy dock workers. No, the sudden increase in population came from spies from most of the sects. Ying was of the opinion that over half were Jin spies. All of those ones had far too fine clothing for Yiling and none of them seemed to know what to do with themselves when they didn’t have people waiting on them hand and foot.

“How’d it go?” Gang asked when Ying plopped down next to him, Lan Zhan and the huge pile of mail they were sorting through with grim scowls.

“Where is Jin Zixuan?” Lan Zhan asked with his smallest puzzled frown, the one that meant the was only mildly curious about the answer.

“Bo Muye asked to court him,” Ying said.

Everyone in the teahouse turned to stare at Ying, including Gang and Lan Zhan. And all the spies, of course.

“Could you repeat that?” Gang asked, shaking his head as if to clear his head. “I can’t have heard that right.”

“Nope, you definitely heard it right,” Ying said with his biggest grin. “Bo Muye asked to court Jin Zixuan. He wants Jin Zixuan to be his Furen, take the Bo name, and take care of the inner sect matters. Jin Zixuan was seriously considering it when I left. He’s very done with the Jianghu and all the politics. I think he likes the idea of raising Bo Muye’s nieces and nephews.”

Gang and Lan Zhan exchanged long, confused, silent looks. They both shook their heads and went back to the mail which Ying couldn’t really blame them for. He didn’t get it, either, but if it kept Jin Zixuan safer, well, that was great.

Probably wouldn’t work, but it was a good try.

Ying took a third of the stack of mail and set to work sorting through it. Most of it was nonsense, political nonsense.

Requests for the dread Yiling Patriarchs to take so-and-so’s daughter as a concubine in payment for the certainty that the sect wouldn’t be struck down. Offers for trade deals for things that no one in Yiling wanted or needed. Proposed treaties that various idiots who should never have been sect leaders desperately wanted Ying and Gang to give opinions on.

Message after message after message thanking them for healing the earth at every battlefield of the Sunshot Campaign.

Plus a few asking very politely and respectfully if they would consider coming and doing the same thing at other places, as they had with Bo Muye’s fields. Ying set all those aside to be considered in private. The thank yous got their own pile to be answered with short notes that said nothing much serious.

The rest of it was garbage, though Lan Zhan made a point of taking every single concubine offer and setting them to his left with a pointed glare at them. Ying and Gang exchanged grins. The replies to those were going to be amazing examples of how to be scathingly rude while being pointedly polite. Lan Zhan was so good at that.

Gang had already set wards around their table to keep anyone else from snatching the piles of mail. Or slipping anything into it without them noticing.

Very wise on his part because wow, some of those spies were so very bad at hiding their curiosity and their intent to cause mischief. Or maybe Ying was better at seeing those sorts of things. When Elder Kangren came in, he didn’t seem to notice any of the spies.

Elder Entai noticed every single one of them. “Out.”

Her glare could’ve stripped the stripes off a tiger yao, so it wasn’t a surprise that everyone she targeted with her glare found immediate reasons to be elsewhere. Elder Kangren sighed over that, as if it was inappropriate for her to send people running.

“Don’t you sigh at me that way, you old fool,” Elder Entai snapped as she lightly thumped him in the shoulder with her knobby staff.

“Don’t you hit me, you old crone,” Elder Kangren snapped right back at her. “You can’t go running off residents of town that way. This is a public teahouse.”

“Spies,” Ying said with his biggest grin at Elder Kangren. “You missed two.”

“Those two know what they did,” Elder Entai said as she squinted threateningly in their direction. “They’ll stay right there and keep their hands on top of the table.”

Both the young men, obviously senior disciples of the Jin scrubbed clean and put in ratty old borrowed robes, blanched. They didn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

They also kept their hands in sight while sweating nervously.

“I am so curious,” Ying murmured to Lan Zhan.

“Embarrassing, not dangerous,” Lan Zhan explained. For all that he didn’t roll his eyes, he so rolled his eyes on the inside, shoulders going back and down while his lips pursed ever so slightly for a moment.

“Really, really embarrassing,” Gang agreed while grinning over his shoulder at the two Not-Jin.

They just ducked their heads, blushing right down under the collars of their robes.

“I miss all the fun stuff,” Ying complained.

“You got to watch Jin Zixuan get courted,” Gang said. He snorted when Ying rolled his eyes.

“That wasn’t fun,” Ying said. “That was embarrassing. He’s so very bad at acting like a normal person. Awkward and stilted and just… wow. It’s sad. Though I am kind of glad that he might move somewhere else. He keeps following me around like a lost puppy and I just don’t know what to do with that.”

“Put him to work,” Gang said as the three of them put the sorted letters into separate qiankun pouches to be handled later. “That’s what I did.”

Ying grimaced, waving the wards down because Elder Entai was standing there glaring at them because she couldn’t sit at their table. Once they got the table cleared, there was a pot of tea and some nice vegetable and tofu soup from the kitchen.

“Which of you is marrying this nice Lan boy?” Elder Entai asked as soon as she sat down.

“The plan is both of us,” Gang said. “That’s what the Lan have agreed to and that’s what Lan Zhan wants.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Elder Entai grumbled while eyeing Lan Zhan.

“No talking while eating,” Lan Zhan scolded her.

With just enough of a hint of mischief in his eyes that Ying had to focus very hard on his soup so that he wouldn’t laugh at the pure outrage on Elder Entai’s face. She huffed and scolded the whole way through the meal, getting not one more word out of Lan Zhan.

Gang, of course, just ate and grinned over it.

Once Lan Zhan was done and the dishes had been taken away, Lan Zhan looked at Elder Entai and bowed his head a bare finger’s width in a sketch of respect for her age and position as an elder. Ying was kind of surprised that Lan Zhan had accorded her that much respect. Over the course of the Sunshot Campaign, Lan Zhan had told Ying stories about the Lan Elders.

They weren’t much better than Jin Guangshan, though they tended more towards excessive, inappropriate discipline and seizing power from behind the throne than they did towards sexual crimes.

“Why are our marriage negotiations important?” Lan Zhan asked.

“Why wouldn’t they be?” Elder Entai huffed. “You boys are making a great deal of work for me. I don’t appreciate information being kept from me. I’m in charge of Yiling and I—”

“You are not the Yiling Xue Sect Leader,” Lan Zhan said so sharply that Elder Entai snapped her mouth shut. “You are the civilian leader of Yiling. You have no power or authority over the Yiling Xue Sect or over either Wei Gang or Wei Ying.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say no power,” Ying said thoughtfully. “I mean, she’s really good at making you feel super guilty about all your life’s choices, but that’s just because she’s such a great grandmother and mother. It’s not like, you know, the power to make us do things.”

Gang shrugged when Elder Entai started huffing at the three of them. “It’s true. We respect you. We trust that you’ll do your best for the locals and that you’ll keep the idiots in town under control. We lowered the war wards at your request. But we’re not under your authority, Elder Entai. You’re under ours because we’re what’s keeping the yao and the mushrooms and the Burial Mounds under control.”

The two Not-Jin spies had turned to stare at their table. Most of the locals were causally listening in while sipping tea and eating toasted peanuts. The spies took it utterly seriously. The locals understood that this was just the latest version of the arguments that Ying and Gang had had with Elder Entai over the years.

“We refused to let you place us in homes of your choice when we were nine,” Ying said, holding up a hand when Elder Entai opened her mouth to shout. “We found our own safe place. We refused to let you clothe us when we were eleven. We had our own supply of clothing at that point. We refused to let you give us weapons or education or anything. Because we’ve been taking care of ourselves since we were two kids on the streets trying to survive a pack of dog-yao. You didn’t save us. You didn’t feed us. You didn’t protect us.”

“We did that ourselves,” Gang agreed. “We’re of Yiling. We are not under your authority, Elder Entai.”

She sighed, mouth like a prune and eyes mostly closed as her shoulders sagged and her knuckles went white from her grip on her empty teacup. Elder Kangren shook his head as he poured tea into her cup.

Elder Entai sipped. “So I just tell Sect Leader Jin that he has to contact the two of you directly about his nonsense?”

“Which nonsense is it now?” Gang asked with a huff that Ying agreed with and Lan Zhan sighed over.

“He’s decided that one of the two of you is going to take a Jin bride,” Elder Entai said, staring at them hard-eyed and challenging over the rim of her cup of tea. Steam curled around her lips much the way resentful energy bloomed around Ying and Gang, both.

“No,” Lan Zhan declared in a voice so loud and so harsh that everyone in the room started, even Ying. “There will be no Jin bride. They are mine and I will not share.”

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