Chapter Text
When he wakes up, he has been dead for a very, very long time.
He’s not sure how he knows this—or even if he really knows this—only that the alienation between his soul and a physical shell is now an old friend. The soul untethered from the world of breath perceives a distorted, untranslatable chronology. He was a pinch of salt dissolved in a lake, essence dispersed and suspended. Death is strange. Time is a stranger. It could have been a thousand years. Maybe even the briefest absence from life is an eternity.
Sensation comes back to him staggered. First to return are the pains and aches of the flesh, a burning in his arm and a pounding in his head like the footsteps of a predator. Next is the vertigo, his body a thing suspended even while sprawled on uneven earth. Then he realizes the roughness against his cheek is dirt, the cloying dryness on his tongue blood and dust. He’s cradled in blood, the stink of it mingled with milder fragrances, sweat and animal shit.
Dying is strange, the sudden non-being not quite a memory carried in body or in soul, but rather a spectre that snags on the jagged corners of you. Sometimes it feels like it never happened at all, like the only significant journey you’ve ever taken is out of the birth canal and into the open air. Sometimes the spectre catches, and a sudden awareness spreads through your veins: here is my heart, here is every tenuous beat. I am blood, bone, body. I am stitched painstakingly into this skin, but anything—really, just anything—could tear these threads.
I do not inhabit this body. It drags me around by the throat.
The last awareness, after he begins to taste his heartbeat cracking his teeth, is the sun. The light drips in muted through his eyelids. Light drags him to knowledge: I am alive. I am alive. How the fuck am I alive?
The answer, surprisingly, comes very easy. Between getting kicked in the chest by a spoiled young master and blinking at an unfamiliar reflection in the trough, Wei Wuxian sees what the intrepid heart might call a blast from the past. The Soul-Summoning Array, his own clever little trick, is as good as a perfumed note from his desperate benefactor. What exactly the note says is up in the air, but he interprets it as something like this:
‘Hey, hey demon. Vengeful spirit. Get up, get up, get up, evil young master! Being dead sucks, right? Well, you can be not dead, if you just take revenge for me! Revenge, that should be easy for you, right? Because you’re a demon. Need some proper motivation? Okay! If you fail, your soul gets torn to shreds and you’ll never return to the cycle of reincarnation, just like me! Oh, wait, you want me to tell you who to take revenge on? And how? What am I doing here, running a charity? Figure it out yourself. Because fuck you and fuck your mother, that’s why.’
He considers chasing the Mo family’s young master into the village and teaching the brat a lesson or two, testing around the limits of easily inflicted pain and humiliation to find the proper range for vengeance. At least he assumes Cousin Asshole is one of the four marks on his arm. Like, who else? However, standing up hits him with a wave of dizziness and a dull ache in his stomach that he’s beginning to recognize as prolonged starvation. Oh hello, an old friend.
The ritual is an old friend too, he shouldn’t neglect that. But how the hell did it follow him to this life? It’s another one of his bullshit thought experiments that shouldn’t have survived past his own expiration date. Shouldn’t Wen Qing have burned those notes?
His heart lurches.
If this ritual, if any of the tricks and blasphemies he was fine-tooling in the months before his death has somehow spread and fallen even into the hands of the disgraced bastard relative of a little mud-brick village’s head family—if—what does that mean for the Burial Mounds? The Wens? Were his protections—even in death—so useless after all? He doesn’t want to, but he can imagine it too well: the houses razed, the fields unplowed and wild, his work plundered by a greedy invasion, and the Burial Mounds silent once again.
If this ritual was in those notes, then—then—
“I was not,” he demands, poking accusingly at the lines of the array with a stick, “working on you when I died.” He was not. If he thinks it hard enough it’ll be true. “Hmm. Oh, shit. Of course.”
There's a flood of relief, tentative hope. He lets it wash over him, falling down on to his back.
Not quite a year before he died and a few months after he brought back Wen Ning, there was a trespasser into the Burial Mounds. They’d seen their share of skulking cultivators in nondescript uniforms of sect-unaffiliated shades, exposed, however, by the Jin sect metalworking and gilding on their undisguised pommels. The trespasser was different. His clothes were ripped from a fight and he was stinking with yao innards. He stumbled towards their village with a tooth still embedded in his arm, trailing behind him blood like a flower chain. He had seemed so helpless.
At the activation of the wards, Wei Wuxian, Wen Ning, and Wen Qing sprinted together to the intruder’s point of entry. It had taken one look for Wei Wuxian to stagger forward with a steadying hand, before both of them flinched back, the man at the sudden movement and Wei Wuxian at a searing lance of doubt and fear.
“Help,” the man rasped. His sword was nondescript, a cultivator’s weapon, surely, but crafted with much more economy than any Jin blade. A rogue cultivator struck with misfortune, so they had thought.
“This is the Burial Mounds.” Wen Qing’s words were ice and her spine was a stone pillar, but she was also a healer first and foremost.
The man croaked an honest “I know” and stumbled to his knees. “You’re the doctor,” he said, “from Qishan Wen. A doctor.”
Despite the noise she’d make otherwise, Wen Qing was really just like the rest of them, with a soft heart for the weak and ailing. She gave Wei Wuxian a barely decipherable look, sliding some precautionary needles in her fingers, and he nodded. He stepped forward and pulled the man past the warding.
Wen Ning, the fastest, went back first, to tell everyone else to stay quiet in their huts. But A-Yuan somehow escaped his grandmother’s supervision to greet them. He was cheerful, inured by now to the sight of blood. Despite the bleariness of pain, the stranger was kind to A-Yuan.
They seated the stranger on a stone slab in Wei Wuxian’s dark and damp little cave, which was the furthest living space from the rest of the village. After Wen Qing cleaned, stitched, and bandaged his wound, he stopped her by the arm. He dropped a handful of coins in Wen Qing’s still-bloody hand. “For medicine,” he said.
“This is more than—” Wen Qing froze. They were too hungry to be above this. She mentally tallied the extra coin, something in her relieved even as her pride likely shuttered. “I’ll go to Yiling. Wei Wuxian will keep an eye on you,” she warned, but if it was with an edge of softness then, well.
The stranger was kind to A-Yuan.
The stranger then waited until Wei Wuxian lost his vigilance and buried himself in drafting talismans, to lunge for the warded Stygian Tiger Seal.
But the stranger was still a stranger. He underestimated Wei Wuxian’s jumpiness and Wen Ning’s attunement to Wei Wuxian’s alarm. Wen Ning was really quite extraordinary. Cornered by a furious demonic cultivator and a fierce corpse, the stranger lunged, grabbed a stack of notes, and threw down a teleportation talisman.
Wen Qing returned soon thereafter, with medicinal herbs and a basket full of food.
That was the final time anyone took advantage of the Burial Mounds’ hospitality. Wei Wuxian liked to believe that they learned their lesson from that brief foolishness, but, really, they never let in any other supplicants for aid because no more came, only incompetently incognito clan cultivators and hopeful demonic cultivation disciples. Once or twice, even a challenge for a duel to the death. Glory-chasers.
No one else was let in. They could try to break through his wards themselves, but it would take more than even a dozen cultivators. From these little wanderers, at least, the Burial Mounds were safe.
What blindness, Wen Qing would berate herself when it was just Wei Wuxian around to hear, to think that anyone would seek us for aid, that a plea from a weak and weary traveller could be anything but a trap?
In his head, Wei Wuxian would say that Wen Qing is a healer in heart as well as skill, that it’s no shame to want to help, to take a leap of faith on a stranger. It was his fault, anyways, for being tricked by false kindness and lulled away from attentiveness.
Out loud, he shook his head and laughed at their own stupidity, just as scripted.
In a way, this was the beginning of the end. That small betrayal heightened his reckless anxiety and sense of finite time, ignited his need to safeguard this hearth from a fever to an obsession. Hand-in-hand with that obsession he began to court death, even though he never really chased it. Dying was an inconvenient side-effect, not a target.
The last weeks, when he could barely sleep and his hands collected tremors—now that he thought about it, the ritual could never have been from those final days, because those notes were probably indecipherable—he was always in pain, from the real and phantom aches of fractures that never healed quite right, knitted back with resentful energy after he was thrown in the Burial Mounds. Wen Ning’s stiff face looked at him with quiet disappointment, an expression like he was trying to remember how to cry or forget how to scream. A-Yuan became at times bratty and resentful, at others needy and hyperactive, failing to figure out why Xian-gege hardly played with him anymore. Wen Qing was—she was angry at him, so angry she stopped shouting at him, but—but she was also the greatest comfort, because she understood. When he looked at her, he saw his own manic desperation reflected back.
Arrays, talismans, blood rituals. He plunged his fingers into the Stygian Tiger Seal and tried to mould raw resentful energy. He needed to work faster, faster, and faster, though that conviction didn’t always translate to results.
The last ritual—well, his death was sudden. One moment, plumbing the depths of resentful energy, and the next, a hook gored his soul and pried it out of his cornered flesh.
He thought of his parents. Maybe they were a sign, the beginning. Time would never be on his side.
Time passed.
They never found out who the stranger was, who he was with. They never found out who wanted the notes, for what, and if they succeeded.
And now, Wei Wuxian supposes, lying on the dried blood of his newly gifted body, he has touched upon the beginning of the answer.
He takes a deep breath, stuttered by the pain in his ribs. Yesterday he was dead. Between dying and being hooked back to lifelike a fucking fish, kingdoms could have fallen. A little boy, all grown up. He raises his arm, sees it silhouetted against the sky. He counts the weeping cuts: one, two, three, and four.
They have to be terrible people, he tries to convince himself, to have pushed a man to this. Cousin Asshole’s bearing does have a superficial resemblance to Wen Chao.
A vengeful spirit, that’s what he’s been reduced too. Well, that’s not completely wrong. During the war, maybe that’s what he was.
Alright, Mo Xuanyu, you’ll get your revenge.
He just—he wants to go home.
At this point, Wei Wuxian has been whistling resentful energy into the corpses for a drinking song and a half. The fucking arm, he wants to kick the shit out of its murderer, dismember-er, or whatever. Never mind the cruelty it would take to create such a grudge with death, who kills someone with such strength of conviction and cultivation and then fails to take the proper precautions? This kind of short-sightedness is like, well, Wen Chao throwing him into the Burial Mounds, for one.
Unless, of course, the arm is meant to wreak its havoc.
This isn’t sustainable. Even with the Lan juniors caging in the arm with their swords whenever it escapes the corpses, even with the corpses tearing at the corpse with all the resentment Wei Wuxian can channel with his second-hand, untested lungs, the arm gets no weaker, while every moment the strength—and structural integrity—of the Mo corpses wane. They can’t keep it up. He can’t keep it up. The starvation and deprivation of Mo Xuanyu’s body as well as his own exertion make him lightheaded, and he begins sliding down against a column without quite realizing it.
His knees are molten. This skeleton might have even worse joints than his last one.
The little Lans, far from their previous composure and conviction, are shaken now. One of the girls, a Qiu Hushan—who seems to take the lead the most, along with another one, a Lan Xingqi, or something—shoots him a look of mingled worry and suspicion.
Lan Xingqi follows the direction of her gaze. “Hey, you,” he grits out, heavy with irritation, “get out of the courtyard. It’s not safe.”
Qiu Hushan forces the arm back with a long strike, grunting with the effort. “Jingyi, he’s controlling the corpses.”
Lan—Lan Jingyi almost drops his sword. The other disciples look appalled.
Well, the secret was out the moment he began to whistle a resentful jaunt, but without Chenqing and so many li away from the Burial Mounds, he’s surely not recognizable as Yiling Laozu. And after that utter embarrassment of a death he had, he should be too shameless to show up again! Maybe the little Lans will let this humble, lowly demonic cultivator off easy.
Probably not, with his luck.
The arm tears off Madame Mo’s head—his strongest corpse too, shit—so it’s probably time for a more direct approach. The arm leaks resentful energy with every jerk, so maybe, maybe, he can draw on that resentment to create a kind of self-sustaining cage to subdue the arm until some kind of help arrives. More resentful energy would seep out when the arm struggles, so the cage would be self-reinforcing, like a finger trap—the more you pull, the tighter it gets. He doesn’t know if that’ll work though, not for sure, and redirecting his efforts from bolstering the corpses might put the Lan disciples at risk. Playing Rest could help, but, with Mo Xuanyu’s weak golden core and no instrument, it’ll have little effect without a partner’s spiritual energy to bounce off of. There’s also the possibility that one of his old arrays might be able to seal it, but there’s no time now for trial and error, not when error means the arm tearing through a white-robed chest. He—he needs to—he’ll have to—
He never gets to make that decision.
The strum of a qin rings through the courtyard, echoing down into Mo Xuanyu’s half-formed golden core. The fierce corpses collapse under the weight of that spiritual energy, while the arm shudders and contorts as if in agony.
The Lan disciples chorus an awe-struck, “Hanguang-jun,” as if he needs the reminder, as if Lan Wangji could ever be mistaken for anyone else. However many years later, and his beauty is still peerless and untouchable as the night they met—those solemn golden eyes and a face fashioned of moonlight. He is balanced on Bichen with feather-lightness that cannot hide the weight of his strength.
It makes him feel young, suddenly. White like mourning, but also white as a first page. It feels like a distant dream, the last time he was still clean enough to be afforded the privilege of this sight—Hanguang-jun suspended in light, untouchable as a dancer of feathered robes from the poems.
He feels like there should be fear. Lan Wangji knows him, knows him well. For all their disagreements in the war, might even recognize him, but maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe he’ll be exposed with a single burning glance, and Lan Zhan, who’s so soft for children, will let him go, at least for a while, at least to see A-Yuan. Lan Wangji might want to see him cured and corrected, but the virtuous Hanguang-Jun would give him a chance to ensure the safety of the Wens, of—
He knows what the world has said about him and Lan Wangji, and Lan Wangji’s conviction against the heretic path of demonic cultivation has always been inflexible, true steel. But that afternoon in Yiling, when Lan Wangji had been around for a night hunt—he didn’t think—they didn’t part on such bad terms, did they?
Lan Wangji plays a song of suppression. It feels so natural, shifting his whistled tune to join in.
After all—
Death is strange. Memory is a stranger. They say dying is like falling asleep.
Lan Zhan, Lan Wangji, look, will you—
He remembers what it was like to die.
It’s like you said, I lost control, but it wasn’t so bad, so this time—
He cannot remember falling asleep.
His chest is full of needles. His head is full of tar. He closes his eyes and lets himself fall—which, it turns out, feels nothing like dying at all.
He blinks awake to sticky sunlight that resolves into a face full of Lan—Lan Jingqi?
“Good morning,” the Lan disciple says. “You’re really messed up.” He pauses. “I brought you food.”
Everything aches, but the smell is heavenly. “Thanks.”
“Hanguang-jun picked you up like you were a sack of rice. It was really funny.”
Ah, he’d almost forgotten. Lan Wangji. “Oh, uh… great.” Like a sack of rice?
“Half your servants have run off. The rest are preparing for the burial. You probably have some input for that.”
His input? Why? This time he just groans.
“I am sorry about what happened to your family, though I don’t think you liked them very much?”
Right, right, he’s supposed to be Mo Xuanyu. Wei Wuxian buries his face into the blankets in lieu of speaking but grunts in assent.
“Hanguang-jun handled the arm. Also, Hanguang-jun needs to question you since you, you know, are a demonic cultivator. And we found a demonic summoning ritual in your shed. I think that makes you super suspicious, but Hanguang-jun doesn’t think you summoned the arm, and he’s Hanguang-jun, so.” So, you’re not locked in irons just yet, he means.
Another voice butts in, this time higher but much quieter, though not precisely quiet. “You could have a little tact, Jingyi. No need to frontload all the bad news at once.” She turns to Wei Wuxian and bows. “Mo-gongzi, Gusu Lan sect apologizes for the deaths of your household and the damage to the Mo manor.” That momentary contrite politeness and grace is ruined immediately by her saying, “See, Jingyi? That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be helping with clean-up?”
“I delegated. That’s strong leaders do. And good thing I did, too! Just a little tact, Jingyi. Zewu-jun would agree.”
“Hushan, no one asked you.”
“And yet I still offer my knowledge.” She folds her hands dramatically. “I shoulder the weight of morality.”
He pokes her in the forearm. “You can’t even shoulder an empty carrying pole.”
“You beat me at arm wrestling, but I can still beat you up, Lan Jingyi.”
“With what arm strength?”
“Arms, arms, arms. Who said anything about arms? I can kick you.”
Oh, yes, Wei Wuxian knows how this goes. “Tact,” he says, sitting up, “is forbidden in the Cloud Recesses.” The Lan disciples blink at him. They probably forgot he was there.
It takes him seconds to inhale the soy milk and another few to scarf down the steamed meat bun, filled with roast pork and wood ear. His stomach protests the rough treatment, Mo Xuanyu’s body too used to its prolonged deprivation. It’s a little frustrating. He understands that starvation has consequences, how could he not? But Mo Xuanyu’s body, he reasons mutinously, should also be used to brief binges of food, considering the irregular pattern of feeding by the servants. Either way, it’s food in the body. His stomach is just being an ingrate.
He takes a more sedate pace with the congee, taking it with a fortifying accompaniment of bean curd preserve and dry radish pickles. He reflexively blows on the first spoonful, but it’s already cooled to lukewarm. He needs, probably, to establish a timeline. “So,” he starts, between mouthfuls, “when did the Lan sect stop separating night hunts by gender?”
“Don’t talking while eating,” Qiu Hushan answers.
“You’re talking.”
“But I’m not eating. Don’t worry, I’ll answer your question.” She frowns and counts back on her fingers. “It’s been three years.” Ah, so he died at least three years ago, probably more; the Lan sect he remembers is still a while from such a development.
“My aunt was the one who convinced the elders!” Lan Jingyi boasts. “She argued with them from maoshi to haishi! When that didn’t work, she set her stand outside their quarters at sunrise and continued arguing with them in qin language, so they couldn’t ignore her. She had to use her zheng instead of qin, though, to make sure it was loud enough.”
“Hey,” Wei Wuxian interjects, “aren’t you being too prideful for a good Lan disciple?”
“I’m not being prideful about me,” Lan Jingyi huffs, “I’m just rightfully appreciating an esteemed family member! Are you saying she’s not worth praising?”
Qiu Hushan sighs. “Jingyi, your aunt is so cool. Why can’t you be like her? She's mastered five instruments. Zheng! Qin! Xiao! Erhu! Pipa! She knows pipa!”
Rather than bite back, as Wei Wuxian has grown to expect, Lan Jingyi’s expression turns comically mournful. “Oh, I wish. I can’t even get xiao right. I think Xu-laoshi is going to kick me out of the senior class.” These Lans are so talkative. He was really robbed to get Lan Wangji first, forever colouring his perception of the whole clan. Though he supposes Lan Qiren also quite liked the sound of his own voice.
She gives Lan Jingyi a bracing pat on the shoulder. “You just need to practice more.”
“Who said I’m not practicing?”
Wei Wuxian feels a smile settle, like a feather.
After Wei Wuxian finishes the congee, there’s a lull. He doesn’t know when it started, but Lan Jingyi is staring at him with narrowed eyes. “Hey, wait a second,” he demands, “how do you know so much about our gender segregation in the first place?”
He opens and closes his mouth, scrabbling desperately in the memory of Mo Xuanyu’s background for a plausible lie. Oh, right, “You know, I used to be part of a sect too—before they kicked me out. Of course I would know all about Gusu Lan! Everyone gossips about everyone else.”
Lan Jingyi relaxes. “Not in the Cloud Recesses, we don’t.”
“Finish your breakfast,” Qiu Hushan commands. She still seems suspicious of him, though.
She’s pointing at the single fried sesame ball, oily and sticky-sweet, left on the tray. He was never huge on too much sugar before, but after his last years in the Burial Mounds, it’s a delight. “I got it as a treat,” she explains, “since you’ve had such a hard… well.” She trails off into an awkward, pitying stare at Mo Xuanyu’s bony wrists. Oh, and the suspicion is gone from her too. Children really are so easily moved.
Lan Jingyi snorts skeptically. “You just wanted some for yourself.”
Her awkwardness vanishes. “I didn’t see you complaining about your share. Anyways, Hanguang-jun said yes.”
“Yeah, but Hanguang-jun always says yes. We’re like rabbits to him. He likes to fatten them up.”
And then—then Qiu Hushan just nods in defeated agreement, as if her fellow disciple has not just said the most incomprehensible sequence of words Wei Wuxian has heard since returning to the firmament.
As soon as he’s finished his breakfast—possibly the most satisfying breakfast he’s had since, well—with the sweetness of black sesame paste still stuck between his teeth, the Lan disciples retreat. “I was mostly here to make sure you weren’t dying or anything,” Lan Jingyi clarifies.
Qiu Hushan nods brightly. “You should probably change now. Someone filled a basin for you.” They slide the door closed behind them.
So, the door shuts, and the empty room becomes achingly alien.
Someone changed his outer robe; he wonders who, considering the fresh-faced looks of even the most leader-like disciples, and the general prudishness of the Lan sect. Maybe one of the servants? Whoever it was probably also bandaged his little cuts and scrapes. They left his inner robe untouched, though, despite the reek of sweat and blood. Prudishness and unfamiliarity. No one left who knows this body enough to touch. There’s an abrupt, hollow pain in his throat, in the shape of this body’s name. Mo Xuanyu, does anyone know you?
He strips down and cleans himself as well as he can with the water he has, which turns a rusty brown by the end. The grey robes he slides on are soft and ill-fitting, rather loose around the shoulders. They’re clean, though. He feels clean.
He does not feel ready to see Lan Wangji. Pity he already finished the food.
He steps out into the courtyard’s brisk air, squints at the sunlight, and the first thing he sees, of course, is—
Lan Zhan.
“Mo-gongzi.”
Lan Wangji’s stare bowls him over like an evening tide.
He takes a stuttered breath and summons up a nervous smile—of course he’s nervous, he’s allowed to be! He’s a known demonic cultivator in front of Lan Wangji! He can’t get dragged to the Cloud Recesses for rehabilitation, he has places to be. Well, a place. “Ah, Hanguang-jun!” He bows deeply. Lan Wangji, gentleman that he is, bows back even to him. Most of the Lan disciples are milling about in the courtyard, pretending not to eavesdrop. “This lowly one thanks you for your aid and—uh—begs forgiveness for his actions last evening.”
“There is need for forgiveness?”
This stops him short. “I, uh, used demonic cultivation.” Oh, that sounds bad. “Only out of necessity, I swear! And I’m completely out of practice! It’s not a habit! But I did, uh, control corpses. I did do that. I thought you might want an apology...”
“He did control corpses!” Lan Jingyi confirms from across the courtyard. To Lan Wangji’s look, he responds, “It’s not eavesdropping, Hanguang-jun. He’s really loud.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t count,” Qiu Hushan says in support. She continues, with a confused frown, “And, Mo-gongzi, you were helping us.” The ‘for some reason’ goes unspoken. Lan Wangji gives her a slight nod of dismissal, though, and she backs away.
“The demonic cultivation,” Wei Wuxian begins, and then stops, a weariness seeping into his marrow. Demonic cultivation brought him back, and demonic cultivation tore Mo Xuanyu’s soul to bloody shreds, to dissipate into the earth. He has pride in his invention—how couldn’t he? But it is gluttonous. “It’s a harsh world.”
Lan Wangji’s brow furrows lightly. He must hear something else in Wei Wuxian’s words than what was meant—whatever was meant, he doesn’t really know. “You aided the disciples. Heretical cultivation for a just purpose.”
Excuse him, is this the same Lan Wangji? Is he possessed? What happened in all these years in-between to make him so open-minded? “Hanguang-jun flatters me.” That, he decides, is nice and short. No space to fuck up.
Lan Wangji answers in a noncommittal hum. “We have found signs,” he puts it very delicately, “of mistreatment.”
The kindness in Lan Wangji’s voice is unbearable; it feels stolen. It is stolen. And what a shameful theft, too. He’s stolen kindness before—he thinks of Uncle Jiang, of Lotus Pier—but this is the first time he’s stolen it under someone else’s name. Two lives in, and he can still be left reeling by the depth of Lan Wangji’s sheer goodness. Maybe if Mo Xuanyu held out just a few more days, then surely Gusu Lan sect would’ve helped—well, he has no time for hypotheticals. If he wasn’t summoned, some of the little Lan disciples might’ve died. Wei Wuxian coughs awkwardly, rubbing his hands together. “Ah, that was my terrible family! Complete brutes, just jealous of my good looks, if you ask me. They’re all dead now—not that I—well, there’s just no need to concern yourself. And I don’t plan on staying, so that’s that.”
Lan Wangji tilts his head in acceptance of the answer and moves on. “The array, in your shed—”
Shit, he forgot about that.
“—it was a summoning ritual. It said. It said ‘Wei Wuxian’.” Lan Wangji paused. Was he waiting for a confirmation?
He needs to think of an, an explanation. He takes a deep breath and leans back against a pillar. He doesn’t know if it’s the mental excitement or bodily stress, but he’s already winded. “It was—to ask something, of Yiling Laozu.” There, that would be true no matter how much Lan Wangji has already figured out about the array.
“Why.” The question—statement is like a sudden frost.
“I needed to ask him a question. Like Inquiry.”
“Inquiry,” Lan Wangji repeats, “for the dead.”
“Uh, yeah. Doesn’t the Gusu Lan sect have a rule somewhere forbidding repeating the obvious?” And then, as he watches Lan Wangji narrow his eyes in the amount of time honey drips, he processes what he just said. “Uh, ignore about that. My mouth is too sharp. Regardless! My questions for Yiling Laozu did not get successfully answered. But I’m not conspiring to take over the cultivation world or anything! I just have—I have concerns! Unanswered concerns about, uh, protections. Yiling Laozu’s famously strong protections.” Specifically, whether or not those protections have held. Whether they are still holding now that he is alive again. “Unanswered concerns that will require a journey to answer, so I really must be setting off, Hanguang-jun. My relatives didn’t like me much at all, so it’s better if I’m uninvolved with the burial—”
He flinches at a gentle interruption.
“Mo—zhuren—” Ah, a servant. Wei Wuxian breathes again. “—you are the master of Mo Village. We serve you now.”
This is—Mo Xuanyu, why do you leave me with so much shit to deal with? There’s a muted panic crawling up his throat now because, well, none of these people realize that he has somewhere to be. Can they just let him go, nothing to see here? “That’s ridiculous. Find someone else. Next one in line after me. Cousin’s cousin or something. Related only by marriage is fine too! Or just find a new head altogether! Just don’t look at me!” He swings his arm out broadly in a gesture meant to encompass the whole village, but mainly just results in the servant flinching back and wincing. “Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you said? I’m a raving lunatic! I’m some cultivator’s illegitimate spawn! I literally just admitted to trying an arcane ritual to speak to Yiling Laozu! You can’t rely on me! If you make me village head, I’ll order you all to bury yourself neck deep in mud and make duck noises all day!”
The servant nods with a pained expression. “Then—”
“Just do whatever you would’ve done if I died too. Or never existed. Whichever works for you.” Oh, right, “Just, uh, let me take a donkey. And the steamed buns were very good?”
The servant bows with long-suffering resignation. Poor man, first Madame and Master Mo and their spawn, and now a demonic cultivator. “You can take a donkey.”
With the servant gone, Wei Wuxian returns his attention to Lan Wangji, who’s been watching him this whole time with—was that amusement? He’s probably hallucinating.
“You are going to Yiling.” This is probably not a question.
“Ah, no, of course not! Why would you think that?” Well, actually, that’s probably obvious, with all the repeated mentions of ‘Yiling Laozu’. But Mo Xuanyu really forced his hand with that array, his name drawn so large in those thick strokes of blood! “I should get going, really.”
Lan Wangji’s stare hardens. “You had a question for Yiling Laozu, and received no answer. You are going to the Burial Mounds.” Yes, yes, Lan Zhan. I’m going to Yiling. Will you let me treat you to dinner? I’m even more tragically poor than last time, I must warn you. We'll have to eat watermelon rinds off the streets. They're quite tasteless raw, though good in a soup, like wintermelon.
He shakes himself out of that line of thought. As if—as if Lan Wangji would want anything to do with him if he knew. This—Mo Xuanyu is a much more innocent demonic cultivator, compared to Yiling Laozu.
Lan Wangji continues, “We are headed west. There are rumours, surrounding Dafan Mountain.” If Mo Village was in Gusu, then that would be on the way to Yiling. Did that mean—? “You may accompany us.”
He feels like he had just been dunked in lake water. What? He's looking for freedom to travel, not a Lan sect escort. Lan Wangji doesn't lie, but what is he playing at, helping a demonic cultivator go to Yiling? Lan Wangji should have no idea what this Mo Xuanyu wants at all, and knowing that he wants it from such a suspicious source? From Yiling Laozu Wei Wuxian. Lan Wangji isn’t going to try to, Wei Wuxian doesn’t quite know, maybe sway Mo Xuanyu back to the orthodox path? Stealth-indoctrinate him into Gusu Lan by dangling all these pink-cheeked juniors in front of him?
“That’s not necessary, Hanguang-jun. You cultivators travel so fast. The servants might’ve told you I was once part of a sect, but I’m actually quite weak! I didn’t even earn my sword. That’s why I learned demonic cultivation. All I have is my donkey!” A donkey that, hopefully, is domesticated enough not to have run off by now.
“That is not an issue.”
Unhelpfully, Lan Jingyi walks over. “Mo-gongzi, do you really think we’re going to be travelling full-speed on our swords? After last night? We’re tired!”
Qiu Hushan follows like an added shadow of misfortune. “As long as you don’t fall off the donkey, you’ll be fine,” she adds, with what must be some of the most backhanded concern.
Wei Wuxian squeaks indignantly. “Do I really look that weak? You saw me control corpses!”
Lan Jingyi snorts. “Hmph, as if that’s something to brag about!” Which, hey, Wei Wuxian would bet real silver taels he does not have that all the little Lans thought his demonic cultivation looked ridiculously cool, Lan Jingyi especially. It’s got a whole, like, aesthetic.
“You passed out right after,” Qiu Hushan points out. She gets a curious expression on her face. “As soon as Hanguang-jun showed up, actually…”
“Resentful energy—” Oh, and there it is, a three-pronged attack. Absolutely merciless. “—harms the body and the mind.”
Wei Wuxian waves dismissively in Lan Wangji’s face with as much insolence as he can muster. “Aiya, I already said I’d only use it if necessary, didn’t I? My life has been uneventful for years—” He was dead, so not a lie! “—and what do you think the likelihood is of something like last night coming up again? There’s no need to worry!”
“Resentful energy leaves residue. Cleansing should be played.”
This is a joke. His second life is just the timeline of the first contracted. Cleansing, Cleansing, Cleansing, always Cleansing. Though… Mo Xuanyu has a wheezing little golden core, even if it may be dissonant with his soul, so maybe—
He’ll have to discuss it with Wen Qing, if—when they see each other again.
“I really wouldn’t want to inconvenience you—”
“Qiu Hushan has near mastered Cleansing on erhu. Lan Yeyan on qin.” The disciples in question blush instantly. “It will be educational.”
There’s a sudden swooping feeling in his gut. Ah, well, how can he argue against education? Children are the future. Though, there was just a part of him, he doesn’t know why, that was hoping to hear Lan Wangji play again, for him, like the Sunshot Campaign, like—
“Mo-gongzi,” Qiu Hushan interjects, “the path will be safer with us.” There’s that concern again.
“I—alright,” he laughs, mouth dry. Who knew Gusu Lan would be so persistent? Isn’t it quite shameless of them, to badger him with all their guileless caring like this? “Alright.” They’re shameless? He’s the shameless one. He’ll annoy his way into freedom soon enough. “You,” he drags Lan Jingyi by the sleeve, “are helping me find my donkey.”
They’ve stopped by the river for some water when Qiu Hushan asks, “You're really going to the Burial Mounds?"
"What, you don't believe your Hanguang-jun?"
She sputters. "That's not what I mean. It's just that—it's really, really dangerous there. You're kind of... delicate."
He must be hearing wrong. "Delicate?" The absolute disrespect. Sure, he might call this body delicate, but he's earned the right to complain about it.
She takes a moment to consider it. "You're, you know, skinny."
He slouches. "That's not so hard to fix."
At that point, Lan Jingyi decides to pick up where his sect sister left off. "Did you learn your demonic cultivation from Yiling Laozu?”
Wei Wuxian scoffs. The answer, technically, is yes. Of course, Wei Wuxian likes lying his ass off. “Your question is so shamelessly direct! Yiling Laozu, really? Of course not! How long has that guy been dead for? There’s plenty of other demonic cultivators around if you know how to look. First sign—”
“As if any Gusu Lan disciple would want to hear about that!” Lan Jingyi interrupts. “Wait a second, what the fuck—”
“Jingyi-xiong,” a Lan disciple hisses, “what if Hanguang-jun hears you?”
“Sorry, Yeyan. But, Mo-gongzi, what are you even talking about? Do you have rocks in your head? Why would Yiling Laozu be dead?” Oh, so it didn’t get out. That’s—that’s probably a good sign, right? The Burial Mounds settlement needs to be intact to keep a secret. And he didn’t bring Jiang Cheng and his shijie more grief.
Qiu Hushan cuts in, “So you really weren’t taught by Yiling Laozu and requesting for aid from your master!”
Lan Jingyi shakes his head in disbelief. “That was number one in the betting—oh, uh.”
Wei Wuxian grins, leaning back onto the grassy bank. “In the betting what?”
Qiu Hushan has the sense to seem just a little embarrassed. “It was more like a—speculation. Mystery solving is an important skill on night hunts!”
Lan Yeyan looks mortified. “I apologize for my fellow disciples, Mo-gongzi!”
The youth are the future... "What were you betting with?" He gasps in exaggerated disbelief. "Not money?"
"Gambling with worldly goods is forbidden," Lan Yeyan mumbles.
"But," Lan Jingyi retorts, "gambling with acts of service is not." He just stands there, hands on his hips, looking ridiculously proud of himself, while Wei Wuxian's mind does horrified cartwheels at what exactly 'acts of service' would imply with his class of disciples, before he clarifying, "Polishing or sharpening blades, marking tests for the child classes. That kind of stuff."
“Really, though,” Qiu Hushan speculates, off on her own distant mental journey, “it’s actually not so implausible that Yiling Laozu is dead. The Burial Mounds have been sealed for ages. No one’s seen him at all! He could’ve transformed into a resentful spirit!” She stops, squinting at Wei Wuxian. “Mo-gongzi,” she says, rueful, “you really have the most awful posture. Are you sure you won’t fall off the donkey?”
The Burial Mounds have been sealed for ages. It—that must mean it worked. Home is a point on a map. Yiling is a silk flag in lucky red, and its dangling thread thread has tied taut a neat bow right around his newly lurching heart. He can only follow.
“Ah,” sighs Lan Jingyi, “I really wonder what he could be doing. No one has seen him for over thirteen years!”
His breath stutters with a lancing pain in his chest. Thirteen years. That is quite a long time. Enough time for a village to grow and burn, enough time for a thousand lotus blossoms to wither.
Enough time, he thinks, for a child to grow up.
He does end up falling off the donkey.
“Do not,” Hanguang-jun says to the juniors, “exult in excess.” They stifle their laughter dutifully. But then Lan Wangji—who does not touch strangers—gives him a helping hand to get back on Lil’ Apple, and Wei Wuxian feels the horizon list. What mirror world has he landed in, where scruffy, loud-mouthed demonic cultivators get Lan Wangji’s consideration?
Somehow, he feels like the joke.