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Water for the Lotus, Chapter 1 [MDZS]
Title: Water for the Lotus
Fandom: The Untamed | Modao Zushi
Pairing/Characters: Jiang Cheng & Wen Qing, Jiang Cheng & Nie Huaisang & Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng & Jiang Yanli, Jiang Cheng / Lan Huan, Lan Huan & Lan Zhan, background Wei Ying / Lan Zhan, background Jiang Yanli / Jin Zixuan
Rating: NR (probably T?)
Warnings: Canon typical
Word Count: 6697 | Ch. 1 / 8 | Chapter Directory
Summary: Jiang Wanyin tries to save the people living in the Burial Mounds, and in the process, he loses the people most important to him. Fortunately, he's not the only one on the job.
Notes: Not everybody dies / Some people live, Nightless City-canon divergent fix-it fic.
He tells no one but his sister.
Together, they spend the weeks leading up to her wedding meticulously embroidering the complex qiankun seals onto every spare scrap they can find, ending with dozens of special qiankun pouches.
“That’s impossible,” he had told Nie Huaisang with a scoff that didn’t quite mask his desperate hope. “Nothing can stay alive in qiankun space, no matter how fancy the seals are.”
“I don’t know, I really don’t know!” said Nie Huaisang, flapping his fan frenetically. “I just found these notes in one of my… special books, one that I had lent to Wei-xiong back when we were students. I thought you might want it now.”
Jiang Wanyin stiffened at the implications, but he also noted the friendly way Nie Huaisang still used to refer to the Yiling Patriarch. “Why?”
“Hmm? What? I don’t know?”
So Jiang Wanyin took the plans home. It had been a long time since the days that he had sat at his sister’s feet, leaning on her knee as he painstakingly outlined a simple flower drawn on a piece of scrap fabric using basic stitches, but he knew the method well enough, and his hands were steadier these days.
It was much more difficult than he remembered. In the end, Jiang Yanli had to create the first seal, with him feeding qi into the design. They tried placing a flower into the pouch first, still growing in a tiny clay pot. It vanished into the qiankun space, and when they retrieved it, it didn’t seem to have changed at all, though the pouch disintegrated immediately after. For their second attempt, they tried a bird, holding their breaths as they did so. The bird went into the pouch singing, and the bird came out still singing.
Wei Wuxian had done the impossible, as he so often did. This qiankun seal that he had designed could store life.
They test the pouch obsessively, even as they make more and more and more of them. The pouch rejects any attempts to place more than one living creature inside, so they will need one pouch for every person they want to hide and relocate. The design is complicated and requires a large burst of qi to create, and so they can’t make more than three, sometimes four, a week in the midst of their other duties, and after Jiang Yanli leaves Lotus Pier to join her new husband, even that speed becomes untenable. But slowly, their collection of pouches builds.
They come up with a plan. Jiang Wanyin will declare that he’s going to put an end to the Yiling Patriarch once and for all. He’ll enter the barrier Wei Wuxian has set up, and while he’s making a big fuss, the Wen refugees will enter the qiankun pouches, one at a time. After another dramatic “battle” with Wei Wuxian, Jiang Wanyin will collect the pouches, set fire to the mounds, and declare that the Wens and their demonic cultivator of a protector are dead. Back in Yunmeng, they’ll scatter the Wens at different farming villages that were wiped out during the war, and they’ll somehow hide Wei Wuxian, too, and everything will be okay.
They come up with a plan, and then Jin Zixuan dies, the sects demand justice, and Jiang Wanyin is out of time.
Jiang Yanli is run through with a sword meant for Wei Wuxian. The location of the wound means a slow, painful death, and no one makes any protest when, once her breath has slowed and her movements have ceased, Jiang Wanyin stores her body in a qiankun pouch to take back to Lotus Pier for the funeral rites.
But he makes a detour on his way to Lotus Pier.
“Get in, get in,” Jiang Wanyin snarls at the Wens. He has to demonstrate the pouches’ safety by entering and being pulled out himself three times before they start to listen to him and disappear into the pouches themselves. It’s a good thing he brought extra pouches, as each one is single use and unravels as he exits. He saw his sister stabbed, his brother torn apart by his own fierce corpses, and they don’t have time. Even discounting the army descending on them, they can’t hold back the fierce corpses without Wei Wuxian and his demonic cultivation. Finally, there is no one living remaining, and he stows the qiankun pouches in his bag and lets the mounds burn.
There is nothing to distinguish one pouch from another. He releases everyone at once behind an abandoned farmhouse deep in Yunmeng territory, and Wen Qing immediately turns to treating Jiang Yanli.
He believes, he really believes, in that moment that the worst of the tragedies is behind them. But after a headcount—
“Where is a-Yuan?”
—they realise they’re missing two people.
“You didn’t bother to find a-Ning and a-Yuan?”
“I didn’t—” Jiang Wanyin can barely breathe. “I didn’t know—I got everyone out who was there.”
“We sent a-Ning off with a-Yuan, to save him. You didn’t find them?”
“I didn’t know—” Jiang Wanyin says helplessly.
“Our cousin is over there right now, treating your sister! But what about our a-Yuan?”
“What kind of person saves the elderly and leaves a child to burn?”
“You should have let us burn, and saved him!”
Jiang Wanyin flies back to the Burial Mounds and searches for hours, but there’s nothing there. He doesn’t find Wen Qionglin. He doesn’t find Wen Yuan. He doesn’t even find their corpses.
When he returns to the farmhouse and the Wens, some of them send him furious, condemning glares, but worse are the ones who sit, empty-eyed, knowing that their future has burned.
And Jiang Yanli hasn’t woken up.
Much of the planning for where and how to hide the Wens had already taken place before a-Ling’s disastrous hundred day celebration, though it is only in the long days and weeks after that the Wens themselves are consulted in those plans.
“We are all that remains of our people, and you expect us to split up? You expect us to abandon our names, our heritage?”
Jiang Wanyin can’t look at them, can’t bear to see the resemblance in their features to the little toddler he failed to save. “I expect you to survive,” he tells them, his tone like icy daggers to hide the shame of his unending inadequacy. “Or if you insist on dying, then go do it somewhere outside of my borders.”
The Wen cousin he is speaking to rears back, face flushing in fury.
“I should think that the advantages of spreading you out are clear,” Jiang Wanyin continues. “You make a less obvious target as a few small groups of travellers rather than a large one, and if anyone—if the Jins—were keeping track of how many of you were in the Burial Grounds, this will help to confuse those numbers. It will also help you to integrate with the local villages more easily if you arrive in little family units rather than descending on them with enough people to populate an entire town.”
The Wens stare at him with faces like stone.
Jiang Wanyin sighs. “You can’t all fit in this little farm house. You can’t all survive on what you can harvest from this little farm. And your name places each and every one of you in danger. I am a Jiang, not a Wen, but surely we’re not so different that we can’t agree that protecting your family members is more important than protecting your family line.”
The Wens eventually agree to disperse and to quietly adopt new names, mostly by reclaiming names from their maternal lines. But their resentment is palpable as they travel to yet another new home.
Wei Wuxian had always reached for the impossible. His failures were as impressive as his successes, and his successes were as explosive as his failures. Wei Wuxian was the kind of person who bent the world to suit his image.
Jiang Wanyin is the kind of person the world bends instead. How can he strive for the impossible when he falls short of even the possible? And yet, he has a vulnerable infant nephew, a vulnerable infant sect, and a vulnerable, decimated land, all of which depend on him. What can he do but continue standing up after every humiliating failure and fight to move forward?
He wonders what his parents would do in this situation. They had always sought and fostered alliances with the sects around them, large and small. No doubt they’d turn to those allies for help.
Jiang Wanyin wondered if they’d be surprised by what they’d find.
"Sect Leader Jiang, it's wonderful that you've been doing so well, given the circumstances," says Madam Qin. She probably meant it earnestly, but the reality is that Jiang Wanyin's home is still half in ashes even after all this time, buildings and fields alike only slowly recovering after a string of natural disasters and bandit attacks caused setbacks in rebuilding and replanting. Housing and feeding the people of Yunmeng is not made any easier by the soaring prices of rice and wood, some of which is a natural remnant of the ravages of the war, and some of which is artificially inflated by that shark Jin Guangshan and Madam Qin’s own husband. Given that she is ultimately one of the obstacles he must overcome to "do well," he is barely able to keep his face blank as he stares down at her, never mind attempt a smile.
Sect Leader Qin clears his throat. "And that issue you had with that demonic cultivator—that's all cleared up?"
Wu Zi, a medicine man in a village on the edge of Yunmeng, had started using demonic cultivation to speed up the process of clearing the land of the detritus of war, so that his farmer neighbours could begin preparing the soil for planting. The bodies had all been cleared out, of course, but weapons, clothing, camping gear, and other human leave behinds were scattered throughout what had once been farmland, and it had to be removed before the land could return to that purpose. So Wu Zi turned to the forbidden path to ferry everything away en masse, and it worked! And it kept working, long after the fields were cleared.
By the time the Jiang sect was notified that there was a problem, Wu Zi had killed ten villagers and was half dead himself, and it took six of Jiang Wanyin’s half-trained cultivators to restrain him and bring him back to Lotus Pier as he laughed and laughed.
He wasn't laughing now, locked in one of Lotus Pier's prison cells.
"I thought you healed him," Jiang Wanyin said to Wen Qing, grimacing at the eerie screams echoing from the dungeon.
"I did," Wen Qing replied calmly. She had remained in the original, largest farmstead, alongside the eldest of the refugees, and she made frequent trips along with several other Wen cultivators to nearby Lotus Pier to experiment with and advise on new medicines and procedures. "The demonic cultivation made a disaster of his qi pathways, but I was able to get them at least tolerably realigned, and I also repaired the destruction it caused in his digestive and respiratory tracts. He's gaining weight again, and he's breathing normally."
The screaming had continued all day without ceasing. "Then why is he in so much pain?"
Wen Qing looked at him. "Demonic cultivation is highly addictive. Once you get hooked, you need to practise it more and more until nothing is enough anymore. And the wards in the specialised recovery rooms—fine, the 'prisons'—prevent any demonic cultivation from being practised."
"You mean, it's the withdrawal that's doing this to him?" He’s never seen a drug withdrawal look like this before.
"That's what I just said. Physical addictions can be immensely destructive, but spiritual addictions are something else entirely." Wen Qing raised her eyebrows. "Are you sure you still want to go through with this?"
Wu Zi had only practised demonic cultivation for a few months, and this was what happened to him, this quickly. Wei Wuxian practised for years. If he returned—when he returned—he would need to go through his own detoxing program, would need to suffer his own withdrawal, and no matter how inexplicably resistant he was to the symptoms of demonic cultivation, he wasn't immune. Jiang Wanyin had seen that with his own eyes.
"Yes," Jiang Wanyin had replied then, and he says the same now to Sect Leader Qin. "There will be no demonic cultivation in Yunmeng."
And yet, there is an uptick of demonic cultivation in Yunmeng. Some of that was no doubt due to the spectre of Wei Wuxian, who was an inspiration at his worst as well as his best, but some of it is simply due to the desperation of the times. People are hungry, people are cold, people are mourning—how can they be blamed for turning to a solution they can grasp within their own means? Didn’t he support his own brother in turning to that solution, before they learned what a false promise it was?
Of course, they did learn that lesson, and it’s frustrating to have his warnings—and his laws—ignored. But in this, as with everything, all he can do is face the world as it is and continue trudging forward.
The old structure of Yunmeng’s dungeons had been dug deep into the earth and had largely survived the Wen invasion. The top, surface-level building had been a stone guardhouse, and every level below that had been for progressively more dangerous criminals with progressively more powerful wards. It was ancient, but it had rarely been used in Jiang Wanyin’s childhood—most people accused of crimes were held in city jailhouses, not transported to the sect, and disciples’ punishment rarely involved imprisonment.
Wen Qing had taken one look at the elaborate wards and claimed the whole structure for herself. The top floor is now a relatively conventional healing and medicine room, and the deepest level, three floors down from the guardhouse, had been converted into an entirely new type of prison—comfortable little cells with soft floors and walls. Talismans preventing demonic cultivation and encouraging healing have been carved and drawn into every surface, and sunlight and moonlight charms mark the passing of the days.
The goal is to refit the intermediate floors into mediation rooms. Once the demonic cultivation has been purged and their bodies have healed, they should be able to progress up the levels to begin the process of repairing their raw and tangled spirit veins, until they’re able to once again face the outside world.
The mediation floors aren’t ready, but neither are the demonic cultivators.
Sect Leader Ouyang pales as the screams echo through the meeting room, which is one of the few fully furnished rooms in Lotus Pier. He clears his throat delicately. “Is that…?”
Jiang Wanyin had expressed doubt when Wen Bo, one of the refugee cultivators who now assisted Wen Qing, had suggested placing the hospitality rooms in the same quarter of Lotus Pier as the converted treatment centre.
“You want a fierce reputation,” said Wen Bo in his quiet way. His mannerisms were so similar to Wen Qionglin. Jiang Wanyin wondered if they’d been friends, back before the war. “The other sects are watching, waiting. You want them to be too afraid of you to strike. Too afraid to make you their enemy.”
Jiang Wanyin scoffed. “Tactics you learned from Wen Ruohan?”
Wen Bo shrugged. “In his youth, the Wen Sect was almost destroyed, too. Not like this,” he acknowledged, tilting his head to indicate the charred wood of the hastily erected building they stood in. “But it was weakened. He used fear to draw in the surrounding sects and bind them to him. By the time the largest enemies noticed, he was too powerful in truth for them to stop.”
“I’m not trying to build an empire. I just want—”
“You just want your home back,” agreed Wen Bo, his face carefully blank. No one but his wife would have ever dared to interrupt the previous Sect Leader Jiang, but Jiang Wanyin is long past the point of trying to pretend he has earned the unimpeachable right to be heard. “You do not need to follow in Sect Lead—in Wen Ruohan’s footsteps to achieve this. But you can still position yourself advantageously. Your friends, your people, they will know your truth, but your enemies will fear you.” Wen Bo smiled a little oddly and did not specify whether Jiang Wanyin’s ‘truth’ was any better than the facade they were creating. He, like all of the Wens but Wen Qing, barely tolerated Jiang Wanyin at the best of times, and though he had come to Lotus Pier to support and protect Wen Qing, this was the first time he had ever spoken directly to Jiang Wanyin. “And you won’t even need to build an actual Fire Prison to be seen as a mad sadist.”
“We captured a demonic cultivator yesterday,” says Jiang Wanyin now to Sect Leader Ouyang with practised stoicism.
He did not invite Sect Leader Ouyang to visit. The minor sect, with its close ties to the Lanling Jin, is unlikely to offer Lotus Pier any meaningful support. It’s likely he’s here instead as yet another carrion eater, circling as Yunmeng limps desperately along, ready to scavenge anything of value as soon as he finds a fatal weak point.
“Ah.” Sect Leader Ouyang appears slightly queasy. After all his loud ranting about eliminating the Wen dogs and the Yiling Patriarch, he doesn’t seem to have a stomach for the process. Maybe he should have thought of that before he backed the siege with such eagerness. “So, you’re still…?”
Still waiting for you to finish a single sentence that you start? Yes. Yes, I am. Jiang Wanyin has better things to do, more important things to do, than to host this vulture. “We continue to make progress in eliminating everyone who practises demonic cultivation.”
Sect Leader Ouyang smiles weakly. “Good,” he says. “That’s… good.” He does not stay long after, and he never manages to make the purpose of his visit plain.
Wen Bo, Jiang Wanyin concedes, is a genius.
Wen Bo, Jiang Wanyin decides, is a lying bastard.
“Doctor!” he screams, tearing through the freshly constructed buildings of Lotus Pier in a frenzy. At least he has the presence of mind not to holler her original name, but that’s the limit to his ability to compose himself as he leaves Wen Bo’s rapidly paling face behind in his search for Wen Qing. “Doctor!”
“I’m here,” snaps Wen Qing, appearing from around a corner. “I was in my research room”—which was how she referred to the converted, surface-level building above the dungeons—“exactly where you should have expected to find me.”
When Jiang Wanyin simply stares at her, Wen Qing frowns sharply. “Well? I assume there’s an emergency?”
“Where did my core come from?” he asks her, voice very low.
Her eyes widen in surprise, but she doesn’t quail. “If you’re asking, then you must already know, so there’s no point in my repeating it. Who told you? That’s confidential medical information.”
Wen Bo has caught up to them and shakingly tries to stand protectively in front of Wen Qing, who shoves him aside without looking at him. It’s not like Jiang Wanyin’s informant could have been a mystery, anyway, given that Wen Bo is currently the only Wen other than Wen Qing in Lotus Pier.
“It’s confidential medical information about me,” Jiang Wanyin snarls. “And how funny that you’d be interested in protecting your patients’ interests now. I don’t recall you asking if I wanted you to transplant my brother’s core into me.”
“You wanted a core; I provided you with one,” she argues dispassionately.
“I wanted a new core, or my old one. Not someone else’s! Would you have accepted your brother’s core?”
“You wanted a core,” Wen Qing repeats, even more coldly than before, “and I found a willing donor.”
When Jiang Wanyin gears up with his rebuttal, she adds ruthlessly, “Besides, I wasn’t concerned with your preferences on the matter. I wasn’t performing the transfer as a favour to you, but as a favour to Wei Wuxian.”
He flinches back despite himself, but it’s not like he didn’t know that, even if he hadn’t yet processed the information deeply enough to have put that instinctual knowledge into words.
“How could he do this?” he asks, half whispering, collapsing in on himself.
Wen Qing must know the question is rhetorical, but she responds nevertheless. “I told him you wouldn’t want to. I told him it probably wouldn’t work, and you’d both probably die. But this is what he wanted, so I agreed.”
Jiang Wanyin looks away. “I want you to leave Lotus Pier,” he tells her.
Wen Qing doesn’t soften. “No, you don’t,” she says pityingly.
No, he doesn’t.
“Go mediate,” Wen Qing orders. “This is a problem that has already been solved, however illogical the solution that was found. There are many problems still to be solved, and you need a clear mind to face them, or you will only create new, worse problems.”
Jiang Wanyin stands to go.
“After all,” says Wen Qing with a strange curl to her lips, “The only direction is forward.”
It’s true that Jiang Wanyin faces many problems that feel insurmountable in his everyday life, and he doesn’t need any new ones. He frowns over the maps and lists and contracts and letters that make up the administrative nightmare of running a sect, he struggles to record half-remembered lessons from his childhood on the Jiang method of cultivation, now that he is one of its last surviving students, he negotiates with people he hates and with people who hate him, and he fights to protect his people from the surge of yao crossing over his borders.
And yet, of all of those problems, the one that has him routinely breaking down to tears is only a little over 3 chi in length.
“Come on,” says Jiang Wanyin. “I know you’re hungry.”
A-Ling glares up at him and keeps his lips tightly sealed. His face is smeared with Jiang Wanyin’s earlier attempts to convince him to accept his breakfast.
Jiang Wanyin opens his own mouth wide, hoping the goofy face will inspire a-Ling to mimic him.
But a-Ling is already wise to his tricks.
“I swear you like xifan,” mutters Jiang Wanyin. He eyes the porridge. Is there something wrong with it? He turns the wooden baby spoon toward himself, intending to test it.
A-Ling’s eyes go wide and furious. “No!” he shouts as he reaches up to try to grab the spoon with his little fists.
“No?” asks Jiang Wanyin, trying not to grin. “I thought you didn’t want it.” He brings the spoon a little closer to himself, and a-Ling opens his mouth pointedly, still trying to snatch away the spoon. “Well, if you’re sure,” says Jiang Wanyin, and a-Ling finally deigns to take a bite.
Meal time is necessarily followed by bathtime, which is one of a-Ling’s favourite times of day, because he gets to splash water all over his uncle and then giggle delightedly at it.
Jiang Wanyin is gently towelling a-Ling’s hair dry when a Jiang Hao, his most senior disciple, requests entrance.
His disciples try very hard to avoid interrupting Jiang Wanyin’s few stolen moments alone with his nephew, but their situation is unstable enough that emergencies crop up often.
“Sect Leader, one group of disciples sensed traces of demonic energy during their routine patrols in northern Yunmeng,” Jiang Hao reports. “But we haven’t heard from any locals about any suspected activity. Should we investigate?”
Jiang Hao knows that the answer to that question is ‘yes,’ of course. He is really asking if Jiang Wanyin intends to lead the mission.
Whenever possible, he does. He is proud of his disciples’ progress, but they’re still relatively new to cultivation—in the antebellum world, they would still be juniors, always under a senior’s watchful eye. The reality of their current life has denied them that luxury, but when facing an antagonist of unknown strength—and it is so difficult to predict the strength of demonic cultivators—Jiang Wanyin tries to ensure he can accompany them.
And lending his personal power to the mission can protect more than simply his disciples; his higher cultivation makes it just slightly more likely that they will be able to bring the demonic cultivators safely back to Lotus Pier for their attempts at rehabilitation.
Jiang Wanyin sighs and stands, picking a-Ling up as he rises. “Yes, I’ll come,” he tells Jiang Hao, and a-Ling’s nurse, who had followed Jiang Hao into the room, approached to take a-Ling.
“No!” A-Ling grabbed hold of Jiang Wanyin’s outer robes and clung to him. “No!”
A-Ling is sometimes testy and grumpy in Jiang Wanyin’s care, but they have yet to find anyone else he tolerates for more than a few minutes. His uncle is by far his favourite person in the world, though Jiang Wanyin is certain that his character-judgement skills will approve as he grows older.
“I’m sorry,” Jiang Wanyin whispers into a-Ling’s downy hair, and he presses a kiss to a-Ling’s head. When they finally extract him from Jiang Wanyin’s robe and pass him over to his nurse, a-Ling begins outright bawling. His nurse bears the onslaught without wincing and carries him from the room.
Jiang Wanyin watches them leave with a heavy heart, but he steels himself and turns to Jiang Hao. “Let’s go,” he says.
His first mistake is not asking more questions before heading out.
“A trace, you said.” Jiang Wanyin looks around the village, which has been completely decimated. Bodies litter the ground, and the air is thick with the scent of rotting flesh and the foetid sense of resentment. “A trace.”
The disciples who followed him north to track the source of the report take in the scene with pale faces.
Or maybe his first mistake was not thinking too deeply about the nature of the report he’d received. His disciples aren’t strong or skilled enough to sense even a moderate user of demonic cultivation from a distance. If they sensed anything and weren’t near enough to see or guess at its effects, what could it be but an immensely powerful ritual?
The vitality had been entirely stripped from the bodies around them, and these bodies aren’t new. And yet, there is no sign of the demonic cultivator themselves, and it’s difficult to tell which of the hastily emptied houses belonged to them.
“I don’t understand,” says Jiang Hao. “Did they move on? To another village?”
“Not another village,” Jiang Wanyin tells him. “The resentful energy is centred here. No, they’re hiding out somewhere else. Somewhere nearby.”
Jiang Hao shivers.
“We’ll find them.” Jiang Wanyin makes sure his voice is firm and confident. “But first, we’ll visit the nearby villages ourselves. Maybe someone has heard something.”
“They were such a sweet, normal family,” a villager tells them tearfully. “I never could have imagined that they’d—that they’d turn out like this.” She is apparently a survivour of the massacre who had fled to stay with her maternal family when the horror had begun.
His disciples look deeply suspicious at her story, but Jiang Wanyin thinks she’s probably telling the truth. He sees no sign of resentful energy on her, and he remembers how Wei Wuxian would fly into a frenzy during the war, noticing nothing but the enemy immediately before him. It seems perfectly possible that a demonic cultivator glutted on resentful energy wouldn’t see or care about a few souls escaping.
“Why didn’t you report this to the Jiang Sect?” asks Jiang Hao stiffly.
The woman exchanges glances with those around her.
Jiang Wanyin’s fearsome reputation has been growing by leaps and bounds—more than he would have expected, really. In and out of cultivation sects, people whisper that he’s lost his mind in grief, that he will destroy not only demonic cultivators, but their families, their friends, their entire village, to burn the disease off the face of the earth.
Given those rumours, it’s no surprise that someone wouldn’t want to admit to a near connection with an entire family of demonic cultivators.
Jiang Hao can read the air as clearly as Jiang Wanyin can, and he flushes dark with anger. “You’ve seen us before, patrolling through the villages,” he snaps at them. “You’ve seen us tilling fields, building houses, bringing food and medicine. You know us. We can’t help you if you don’t believe in us!”
Jiang Wanyin puts a hand on Jiang Hao’s shoulder, silencing him. “It’s hard to believe in anyone, when you’ve seen people you’ve known and trusted your whole life turn on you,” he says quietly. He knows they’ll take those words as autobiographical, but they’re not, not really. Wei Wuxian betrayed him in a thousand, painful ways, but broken promises, casual cruelties, and abandonment were hardly on the same level as the violent deaths they were facing now. As unstable as Wei Wuxian had grown, he had really been on a whole other level in his ability to harness this volatile and poisonous power. “Resentful energy changes people, whether it comes from a natural buildup from improper burial, or whether it’s intentionally cultivated.”
The villagers are watching them with wide eyes.
Jiang Wanyin keeps his voice calm. “What do you know about this family? Anything you can tell us would be helpful.”
By the time Jiang Wanyin finds their hideaway in a system of caves, one of the family of demonic cultivators, the oldest, is already dead, blood leaking from every visible orifice. The others don’t seem to have noticed. They scatter through the caves, leaving Jiang Wanyin to chase after them one at a time. He’s exhausted and drawn thin by the time he faces the last one, and his qi supplies, already low after a long night of travelling, searching, and placing protective wards around the surrounding villages, are beginning to dry up.
Also, the kid bites. Just, you know. A point to consider.
The demonic cultivator seems to float, and the air has a hazy quality that Jiang Wanyin is mostly sure he’s not hallucinating. This deep in the caves, it should be cool and damp, but instead the air is searing hot, and the dryness aggravates his lungs and makes it difficult to breathe. The demonic cultivator swoops in towards him—maybe for another bite—as Zidian sputters and fades, and Sandu grows too heavy to lift. Once, as an adolescent playing in the lakes of his home with his siblings, he would have assumed this was a result of low, perhaps nearly terminally low, qi-levels. Now, he has to wonder if it’s a sign of his stolen core—unsolicited, unwanted—finally failing him, rejecting him as it should have done when it was first placed in his unconscious body. He grips his clarity bell, trying to centre himself, but the demonic cultivator is now close, too close, and Jiang Wanyin swings a backhanded blow with every bit of power he still has in him.
The physical blow lands and forces the underfed demonic cultivator back. But as this happens, the bell, the clarity bell that is still clenched in his fist, clangs with a shockwave that ripples through the haze of the cavern. The air is cooler now, and breathable, and the demonic cultivator collapses, panting.
“What the fuck,” rasps Jiang Wanyin. He places the barely conscious demonic cultivator in the last of the human-storage qiankun pouches and begins the laborious process of heading home. If he passes out for a little bit first, well, there is no one here to see it happen.
“I’m beginning to think I should just move in,” says Wen Qing drily as she climbs out of the wagon she’d ridden to Lotus Pier.
Jiang Wanyin shrugs distractedly. “If you want,” he says. It would be a relief to have her here full time, practising her medicine for the sect, but the distance from her remaining family would wear on her quickly, and even with her modesty veil and cosmetically reshaped eyes, the risk of her being recognised would rise with her constant presence.
Wen Qing raises her eyebrows, but doesn’t comment. “Well? What is it you wanted to show me?”
He takes her to the special dungeons, the ones that have been refitted as detoxification chambers. Six cells are currently occupied with the only demonic cultivators they’ve been able to bring back alive—Wei Wuxian’s death of being torn apart by his own ghostly servants seems to be a common ending for those who channel resentful energy. One contains Wu Zi, now curled up and crying quietly into the padded floor. His agonising withdrawal pangs have long since ended, but now the worse agony has arrived: his recent memories are vague and spotty, but not so spotty that he doesn’t remember clawing out the throat of his best friend and watching him bleed out. Four of the rooms each contain a member of the surviving cave-dwelling family of demonic cultivators, separated and still at the screaming stage. The final occupied cell contains a former Jin disciple, Gu Xiang. She is still barely more than a child, but they had found her shivering in an abandoned farmhouse just barely on the Yunmeng side of their border with Lanling with blood dripping from the walls and the ceiling. Based on the jagged wounds covering her arms and legs, most of the blood may have been hers. She watches them as they walk past her cell. She doesn’t speak, and hasn’t since they found her. She spends most of her time meditating these days.
He leads Wen Qing to the cell containing the oldest survivour of the family of demonic cultivators. They haven’t yet been able to learn their names. Wen Qing is about to enter, assuming he summoned her here for her healing. And he did, but—he stops her and stares into the room, holding his bell and feeling embarrassment creeping along his spine. What if he had simply imagined it? What if it doesn’t work now that Wen Qing and her cold, clean science are here to observe?
“Well?” asks Wen Qing, frowning at him.
He takes a breath and rings the clarity bell, channelling a heavy flow of qi through the tiny instrument as he does so. The bell rings, and the demonic cultivator quiets in the cell.
Wen Qing inhales sharply, staring into the cell. She pulls out her needles and tests the air with them, which, he’s pretty sure that’s not what those things are supposed to be used for, but they seem to give her some kind of sign. “It’s acting as a powerful spiritual cleanse,” she says. “I’ve never—what is that bell? I know it’s a Jiang sect symbol, like the Lans’ forehead ribbon, but—”
“It’s—I don’t know.” Jiang Wanyin swallows and reaches for the lessons of his early childhood, half remembered. “They’re supposed to provide clarity in troubled times. To help us see what’s really there, and not what we want to see. I’ve never heard of them used for this before.”
Wen Qing shakes her head impatiently. “We didn’t have a formal cultivation path for demonic energy before. This is unbroken ground.”
After treating the new residents of the special dungeons and checking on the older ones, Wen Qing and Jiang Wanyin hold many long, involved meetings with the craftspeople of Lotus Pier, the ones charged with creating the clarity bells. Jiang Wanyin spares a moment to be grateful that this knowledge, unlike so much of his sect history, survived the destruction of Lotus Pier, carried on in the memory of several retirees and their new apprentices. They leave the meeting with a schematic, but Wen Qing asks to run it by her cousin before they produce a test sample.
“In fact,” she says slowly, looking at Jiang Wanyin for a long moment. “He was a cultivator smith in my family, before Wen Ruohan forced everyone to become a soldier. Perhaps he can serve your sect in his original capacity.”
Jiang Wanyin laughs mirthlessly. “After all your arguing when I forced you to leave your family names behind, now you want your cousin to take mine? Don’t you think he might protest? Your entire family hates me, and I don’t blame them.”
Wen Qing is quiet. “They don’t know you. And they don’t hate you, not really. They’re in mourning, and they have no other target than you, that’s all.”
Jiang Wanyin looks away. He would certainly never forgive anyone who saved him and left a-Ling to die.
“Anyway,” says Wen Qing, “Even Jin Guangyao wouldn’t recognise my cousin. He has the most forgettable face that you never remember seeing.”
Jiang Wanyin snorts, amused despite the heavy weight of guilt still resting in his stomach. “Fine, ask him. It would certainly make things easier for me.”
After a moment of seeming hesitation, Wen Qing adds, “Speaking of my family, another cousin of mine would like to apologise to you.”
Jiang Wanyin stares at her blankly until she sighs in exasperation.
“Wen Bo,” she clarifies, “would like to apologise for the revelation he shared with you.”
Jiang Wanyin stiffens. “I’m not interested in any apologies for telling the truth,” he says coldly.
She nods as though he had politely accepted the apology instead of dismissing it altogether. “Still, there is a time and place for everything, and that wasn’t either.”
“You were never going to tell me,” he accuses.
Wen Qing shrugs, unrepentant. “No. It’s hardly relevant, is it? The procedure was successful, and the only person negatively impacted by it is now dead. Why bother saying anything about it? How does it change anything for you to know?”
Jiang Wanyin likes Wen Qing. He really likes Wen Qing, in the same way that he likes—liked—Wei Wuxian, though with less intensity. But this ambivalence that she is revealing now is the same that once moved her to carve open two people and move a living core from one to the other.
“Knowledge matters,” is all he says to her, but he sees it land in her expression like a slap to the face.
The newly renamed Yin Yu arrives at Lotus Pier with Wen Qing and many ideas.
“What did you think of the designs for the larger bells?” asks Jiang Wanyin.
Yin Yu seems to find it more polite to disregard the question entirely rather than respond to it truthfully. “I made some changes,” is all he says, and did he ever.
In the place of the large bell design that Jiang Wanyin and Wen Qing had laboured over, Yin Yu’s drawings are for wind chimes. Everything about their shape and the complex arrays to be engraved on them promotes clarity of mind and spirit. Yin Yu has somehow conceptualised a design that should activate automatically—the presence of resentful energy should act like a breeze to jingle the chimes, the sound of which should cleanse the resentment.
“How do we power it if there’s no cultivator feeding qi into it?” asks Jiang Wanyin doubtfully.
Yin Yu raises his eyebrows. “It’s powered by the ambient resentful energy. I actually used Wei Wuxian’s evil-attraction flags as a baseline for that part of the design.”
Nothing makes Jiang Wanyin more frustrated in his own impotency or more confident in a product’s likelihood of success than hearing that Wei Wuxian had a hand in its design, even one as distant as this. “Start the prototype,” he tells Yin Yu, who bows and walks away without another word.
Well, it’s not like Jiang Wanyin has any leg to stand on when it comes to cheery demeanours.
The chimes work. The chimes work really, really well.
Fandom: The Untamed | Modao Zushi
Pairing/Characters: Jiang Cheng & Wen Qing, Jiang Cheng & Nie Huaisang & Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng & Jiang Yanli, Jiang Cheng / Lan Huan, Lan Huan & Lan Zhan, background Wei Ying / Lan Zhan, background Jiang Yanli / Jin Zixuan
Rating: NR (probably T?)
Warnings: Canon typical
Word Count: 6697 | Ch. 1 / 8 | Chapter Directory
Summary: Jiang Wanyin tries to save the people living in the Burial Mounds, and in the process, he loses the people most important to him. Fortunately, he's not the only one on the job.
Notes: Not everybody dies / Some people live, Nightless City-canon divergent fix-it fic.
He tells no one but his sister.
Together, they spend the weeks leading up to her wedding meticulously embroidering the complex qiankun seals onto every spare scrap they can find, ending with dozens of special qiankun pouches.
“That’s impossible,” he had told Nie Huaisang with a scoff that didn’t quite mask his desperate hope. “Nothing can stay alive in qiankun space, no matter how fancy the seals are.”
“I don’t know, I really don’t know!” said Nie Huaisang, flapping his fan frenetically. “I just found these notes in one of my… special books, one that I had lent to Wei-xiong back when we were students. I thought you might want it now.”
Jiang Wanyin stiffened at the implications, but he also noted the friendly way Nie Huaisang still used to refer to the Yiling Patriarch. “Why?”
“Hmm? What? I don’t know?”
So Jiang Wanyin took the plans home. It had been a long time since the days that he had sat at his sister’s feet, leaning on her knee as he painstakingly outlined a simple flower drawn on a piece of scrap fabric using basic stitches, but he knew the method well enough, and his hands were steadier these days.
It was much more difficult than he remembered. In the end, Jiang Yanli had to create the first seal, with him feeding qi into the design. They tried placing a flower into the pouch first, still growing in a tiny clay pot. It vanished into the qiankun space, and when they retrieved it, it didn’t seem to have changed at all, though the pouch disintegrated immediately after. For their second attempt, they tried a bird, holding their breaths as they did so. The bird went into the pouch singing, and the bird came out still singing.
Wei Wuxian had done the impossible, as he so often did. This qiankun seal that he had designed could store life.
They test the pouch obsessively, even as they make more and more and more of them. The pouch rejects any attempts to place more than one living creature inside, so they will need one pouch for every person they want to hide and relocate. The design is complicated and requires a large burst of qi to create, and so they can’t make more than three, sometimes four, a week in the midst of their other duties, and after Jiang Yanli leaves Lotus Pier to join her new husband, even that speed becomes untenable. But slowly, their collection of pouches builds.
They come up with a plan. Jiang Wanyin will declare that he’s going to put an end to the Yiling Patriarch once and for all. He’ll enter the barrier Wei Wuxian has set up, and while he’s making a big fuss, the Wen refugees will enter the qiankun pouches, one at a time. After another dramatic “battle” with Wei Wuxian, Jiang Wanyin will collect the pouches, set fire to the mounds, and declare that the Wens and their demonic cultivator of a protector are dead. Back in Yunmeng, they’ll scatter the Wens at different farming villages that were wiped out during the war, and they’ll somehow hide Wei Wuxian, too, and everything will be okay.
They come up with a plan, and then Jin Zixuan dies, the sects demand justice, and Jiang Wanyin is out of time.
Jiang Yanli is run through with a sword meant for Wei Wuxian. The location of the wound means a slow, painful death, and no one makes any protest when, once her breath has slowed and her movements have ceased, Jiang Wanyin stores her body in a qiankun pouch to take back to Lotus Pier for the funeral rites.
But he makes a detour on his way to Lotus Pier.
“Get in, get in,” Jiang Wanyin snarls at the Wens. He has to demonstrate the pouches’ safety by entering and being pulled out himself three times before they start to listen to him and disappear into the pouches themselves. It’s a good thing he brought extra pouches, as each one is single use and unravels as he exits. He saw his sister stabbed, his brother torn apart by his own fierce corpses, and they don’t have time. Even discounting the army descending on them, they can’t hold back the fierce corpses without Wei Wuxian and his demonic cultivation. Finally, there is no one living remaining, and he stows the qiankun pouches in his bag and lets the mounds burn.
There is nothing to distinguish one pouch from another. He releases everyone at once behind an abandoned farmhouse deep in Yunmeng territory, and Wen Qing immediately turns to treating Jiang Yanli.
He believes, he really believes, in that moment that the worst of the tragedies is behind them. But after a headcount—
“Where is a-Yuan?”
—they realise they’re missing two people.
“You didn’t bother to find a-Ning and a-Yuan?”
“I didn’t—” Jiang Wanyin can barely breathe. “I didn’t know—I got everyone out who was there.”
“We sent a-Ning off with a-Yuan, to save him. You didn’t find them?”
“I didn’t know—” Jiang Wanyin says helplessly.
“Our cousin is over there right now, treating your sister! But what about our a-Yuan?”
“What kind of person saves the elderly and leaves a child to burn?”
“You should have let us burn, and saved him!”
Jiang Wanyin flies back to the Burial Mounds and searches for hours, but there’s nothing there. He doesn’t find Wen Qionglin. He doesn’t find Wen Yuan. He doesn’t even find their corpses.
When he returns to the farmhouse and the Wens, some of them send him furious, condemning glares, but worse are the ones who sit, empty-eyed, knowing that their future has burned.
And Jiang Yanli hasn’t woken up.
Much of the planning for where and how to hide the Wens had already taken place before a-Ling’s disastrous hundred day celebration, though it is only in the long days and weeks after that the Wens themselves are consulted in those plans.
“We are all that remains of our people, and you expect us to split up? You expect us to abandon our names, our heritage?”
Jiang Wanyin can’t look at them, can’t bear to see the resemblance in their features to the little toddler he failed to save. “I expect you to survive,” he tells them, his tone like icy daggers to hide the shame of his unending inadequacy. “Or if you insist on dying, then go do it somewhere outside of my borders.”
The Wen cousin he is speaking to rears back, face flushing in fury.
“I should think that the advantages of spreading you out are clear,” Jiang Wanyin continues. “You make a less obvious target as a few small groups of travellers rather than a large one, and if anyone—if the Jins—were keeping track of how many of you were in the Burial Grounds, this will help to confuse those numbers. It will also help you to integrate with the local villages more easily if you arrive in little family units rather than descending on them with enough people to populate an entire town.”
The Wens stare at him with faces like stone.
Jiang Wanyin sighs. “You can’t all fit in this little farm house. You can’t all survive on what you can harvest from this little farm. And your name places each and every one of you in danger. I am a Jiang, not a Wen, but surely we’re not so different that we can’t agree that protecting your family members is more important than protecting your family line.”
The Wens eventually agree to disperse and to quietly adopt new names, mostly by reclaiming names from their maternal lines. But their resentment is palpable as they travel to yet another new home.
Wei Wuxian had always reached for the impossible. His failures were as impressive as his successes, and his successes were as explosive as his failures. Wei Wuxian was the kind of person who bent the world to suit his image.
Jiang Wanyin is the kind of person the world bends instead. How can he strive for the impossible when he falls short of even the possible? And yet, he has a vulnerable infant nephew, a vulnerable infant sect, and a vulnerable, decimated land, all of which depend on him. What can he do but continue standing up after every humiliating failure and fight to move forward?
He wonders what his parents would do in this situation. They had always sought and fostered alliances with the sects around them, large and small. No doubt they’d turn to those allies for help.
Jiang Wanyin wondered if they’d be surprised by what they’d find.
"Sect Leader Jiang, it's wonderful that you've been doing so well, given the circumstances," says Madam Qin. She probably meant it earnestly, but the reality is that Jiang Wanyin's home is still half in ashes even after all this time, buildings and fields alike only slowly recovering after a string of natural disasters and bandit attacks caused setbacks in rebuilding and replanting. Housing and feeding the people of Yunmeng is not made any easier by the soaring prices of rice and wood, some of which is a natural remnant of the ravages of the war, and some of which is artificially inflated by that shark Jin Guangshan and Madam Qin’s own husband. Given that she is ultimately one of the obstacles he must overcome to "do well," he is barely able to keep his face blank as he stares down at her, never mind attempt a smile.
Sect Leader Qin clears his throat. "And that issue you had with that demonic cultivator—that's all cleared up?"
Wu Zi, a medicine man in a village on the edge of Yunmeng, had started using demonic cultivation to speed up the process of clearing the land of the detritus of war, so that his farmer neighbours could begin preparing the soil for planting. The bodies had all been cleared out, of course, but weapons, clothing, camping gear, and other human leave behinds were scattered throughout what had once been farmland, and it had to be removed before the land could return to that purpose. So Wu Zi turned to the forbidden path to ferry everything away en masse, and it worked! And it kept working, long after the fields were cleared.
By the time the Jiang sect was notified that there was a problem, Wu Zi had killed ten villagers and was half dead himself, and it took six of Jiang Wanyin’s half-trained cultivators to restrain him and bring him back to Lotus Pier as he laughed and laughed.
He wasn't laughing now, locked in one of Lotus Pier's prison cells.
"I thought you healed him," Jiang Wanyin said to Wen Qing, grimacing at the eerie screams echoing from the dungeon.
"I did," Wen Qing replied calmly. She had remained in the original, largest farmstead, alongside the eldest of the refugees, and she made frequent trips along with several other Wen cultivators to nearby Lotus Pier to experiment with and advise on new medicines and procedures. "The demonic cultivation made a disaster of his qi pathways, but I was able to get them at least tolerably realigned, and I also repaired the destruction it caused in his digestive and respiratory tracts. He's gaining weight again, and he's breathing normally."
The screaming had continued all day without ceasing. "Then why is he in so much pain?"
Wen Qing looked at him. "Demonic cultivation is highly addictive. Once you get hooked, you need to practise it more and more until nothing is enough anymore. And the wards in the specialised recovery rooms—fine, the 'prisons'—prevent any demonic cultivation from being practised."
"You mean, it's the withdrawal that's doing this to him?" He’s never seen a drug withdrawal look like this before.
"That's what I just said. Physical addictions can be immensely destructive, but spiritual addictions are something else entirely." Wen Qing raised her eyebrows. "Are you sure you still want to go through with this?"
Wu Zi had only practised demonic cultivation for a few months, and this was what happened to him, this quickly. Wei Wuxian practised for years. If he returned—when he returned—he would need to go through his own detoxing program, would need to suffer his own withdrawal, and no matter how inexplicably resistant he was to the symptoms of demonic cultivation, he wasn't immune. Jiang Wanyin had seen that with his own eyes.
"Yes," Jiang Wanyin had replied then, and he says the same now to Sect Leader Qin. "There will be no demonic cultivation in Yunmeng."
And yet, there is an uptick of demonic cultivation in Yunmeng. Some of that was no doubt due to the spectre of Wei Wuxian, who was an inspiration at his worst as well as his best, but some of it is simply due to the desperation of the times. People are hungry, people are cold, people are mourning—how can they be blamed for turning to a solution they can grasp within their own means? Didn’t he support his own brother in turning to that solution, before they learned what a false promise it was?
Of course, they did learn that lesson, and it’s frustrating to have his warnings—and his laws—ignored. But in this, as with everything, all he can do is face the world as it is and continue trudging forward.
The old structure of Yunmeng’s dungeons had been dug deep into the earth and had largely survived the Wen invasion. The top, surface-level building had been a stone guardhouse, and every level below that had been for progressively more dangerous criminals with progressively more powerful wards. It was ancient, but it had rarely been used in Jiang Wanyin’s childhood—most people accused of crimes were held in city jailhouses, not transported to the sect, and disciples’ punishment rarely involved imprisonment.
Wen Qing had taken one look at the elaborate wards and claimed the whole structure for herself. The top floor is now a relatively conventional healing and medicine room, and the deepest level, three floors down from the guardhouse, had been converted into an entirely new type of prison—comfortable little cells with soft floors and walls. Talismans preventing demonic cultivation and encouraging healing have been carved and drawn into every surface, and sunlight and moonlight charms mark the passing of the days.
The goal is to refit the intermediate floors into mediation rooms. Once the demonic cultivation has been purged and their bodies have healed, they should be able to progress up the levels to begin the process of repairing their raw and tangled spirit veins, until they’re able to once again face the outside world.
The mediation floors aren’t ready, but neither are the demonic cultivators.
Sect Leader Ouyang pales as the screams echo through the meeting room, which is one of the few fully furnished rooms in Lotus Pier. He clears his throat delicately. “Is that…?”
Jiang Wanyin had expressed doubt when Wen Bo, one of the refugee cultivators who now assisted Wen Qing, had suggested placing the hospitality rooms in the same quarter of Lotus Pier as the converted treatment centre.
“You want a fierce reputation,” said Wen Bo in his quiet way. His mannerisms were so similar to Wen Qionglin. Jiang Wanyin wondered if they’d been friends, back before the war. “The other sects are watching, waiting. You want them to be too afraid of you to strike. Too afraid to make you their enemy.”
Jiang Wanyin scoffed. “Tactics you learned from Wen Ruohan?”
Wen Bo shrugged. “In his youth, the Wen Sect was almost destroyed, too. Not like this,” he acknowledged, tilting his head to indicate the charred wood of the hastily erected building they stood in. “But it was weakened. He used fear to draw in the surrounding sects and bind them to him. By the time the largest enemies noticed, he was too powerful in truth for them to stop.”
“I’m not trying to build an empire. I just want—”
“You just want your home back,” agreed Wen Bo, his face carefully blank. No one but his wife would have ever dared to interrupt the previous Sect Leader Jiang, but Jiang Wanyin is long past the point of trying to pretend he has earned the unimpeachable right to be heard. “You do not need to follow in Sect Lead—in Wen Ruohan’s footsteps to achieve this. But you can still position yourself advantageously. Your friends, your people, they will know your truth, but your enemies will fear you.” Wen Bo smiled a little oddly and did not specify whether Jiang Wanyin’s ‘truth’ was any better than the facade they were creating. He, like all of the Wens but Wen Qing, barely tolerated Jiang Wanyin at the best of times, and though he had come to Lotus Pier to support and protect Wen Qing, this was the first time he had ever spoken directly to Jiang Wanyin. “And you won’t even need to build an actual Fire Prison to be seen as a mad sadist.”
“We captured a demonic cultivator yesterday,” says Jiang Wanyin now to Sect Leader Ouyang with practised stoicism.
He did not invite Sect Leader Ouyang to visit. The minor sect, with its close ties to the Lanling Jin, is unlikely to offer Lotus Pier any meaningful support. It’s likely he’s here instead as yet another carrion eater, circling as Yunmeng limps desperately along, ready to scavenge anything of value as soon as he finds a fatal weak point.
“Ah.” Sect Leader Ouyang appears slightly queasy. After all his loud ranting about eliminating the Wen dogs and the Yiling Patriarch, he doesn’t seem to have a stomach for the process. Maybe he should have thought of that before he backed the siege with such eagerness. “So, you’re still…?”
Still waiting for you to finish a single sentence that you start? Yes. Yes, I am. Jiang Wanyin has better things to do, more important things to do, than to host this vulture. “We continue to make progress in eliminating everyone who practises demonic cultivation.”
Sect Leader Ouyang smiles weakly. “Good,” he says. “That’s… good.” He does not stay long after, and he never manages to make the purpose of his visit plain.
Wen Bo, Jiang Wanyin concedes, is a genius.
Wen Bo, Jiang Wanyin decides, is a lying bastard.
“Doctor!” he screams, tearing through the freshly constructed buildings of Lotus Pier in a frenzy. At least he has the presence of mind not to holler her original name, but that’s the limit to his ability to compose himself as he leaves Wen Bo’s rapidly paling face behind in his search for Wen Qing. “Doctor!”
“I’m here,” snaps Wen Qing, appearing from around a corner. “I was in my research room”—which was how she referred to the converted, surface-level building above the dungeons—“exactly where you should have expected to find me.”
When Jiang Wanyin simply stares at her, Wen Qing frowns sharply. “Well? I assume there’s an emergency?”
“Where did my core come from?” he asks her, voice very low.
Her eyes widen in surprise, but she doesn’t quail. “If you’re asking, then you must already know, so there’s no point in my repeating it. Who told you? That’s confidential medical information.”
Wen Bo has caught up to them and shakingly tries to stand protectively in front of Wen Qing, who shoves him aside without looking at him. It’s not like Jiang Wanyin’s informant could have been a mystery, anyway, given that Wen Bo is currently the only Wen other than Wen Qing in Lotus Pier.
“It’s confidential medical information about me,” Jiang Wanyin snarls. “And how funny that you’d be interested in protecting your patients’ interests now. I don’t recall you asking if I wanted you to transplant my brother’s core into me.”
“You wanted a core; I provided you with one,” she argues dispassionately.
“I wanted a new core, or my old one. Not someone else’s! Would you have accepted your brother’s core?”
“You wanted a core,” Wen Qing repeats, even more coldly than before, “and I found a willing donor.”
When Jiang Wanyin gears up with his rebuttal, she adds ruthlessly, “Besides, I wasn’t concerned with your preferences on the matter. I wasn’t performing the transfer as a favour to you, but as a favour to Wei Wuxian.”
He flinches back despite himself, but it’s not like he didn’t know that, even if he hadn’t yet processed the information deeply enough to have put that instinctual knowledge into words.
“How could he do this?” he asks, half whispering, collapsing in on himself.
Wen Qing must know the question is rhetorical, but she responds nevertheless. “I told him you wouldn’t want to. I told him it probably wouldn’t work, and you’d both probably die. But this is what he wanted, so I agreed.”
Jiang Wanyin looks away. “I want you to leave Lotus Pier,” he tells her.
Wen Qing doesn’t soften. “No, you don’t,” she says pityingly.
No, he doesn’t.
“Go mediate,” Wen Qing orders. “This is a problem that has already been solved, however illogical the solution that was found. There are many problems still to be solved, and you need a clear mind to face them, or you will only create new, worse problems.”
Jiang Wanyin stands to go.
“After all,” says Wen Qing with a strange curl to her lips, “The only direction is forward.”
It’s true that Jiang Wanyin faces many problems that feel insurmountable in his everyday life, and he doesn’t need any new ones. He frowns over the maps and lists and contracts and letters that make up the administrative nightmare of running a sect, he struggles to record half-remembered lessons from his childhood on the Jiang method of cultivation, now that he is one of its last surviving students, he negotiates with people he hates and with people who hate him, and he fights to protect his people from the surge of yao crossing over his borders.
And yet, of all of those problems, the one that has him routinely breaking down to tears is only a little over 3 chi in length.
“Come on,” says Jiang Wanyin. “I know you’re hungry.”
A-Ling glares up at him and keeps his lips tightly sealed. His face is smeared with Jiang Wanyin’s earlier attempts to convince him to accept his breakfast.
Jiang Wanyin opens his own mouth wide, hoping the goofy face will inspire a-Ling to mimic him.
But a-Ling is already wise to his tricks.
“I swear you like xifan,” mutters Jiang Wanyin. He eyes the porridge. Is there something wrong with it? He turns the wooden baby spoon toward himself, intending to test it.
A-Ling’s eyes go wide and furious. “No!” he shouts as he reaches up to try to grab the spoon with his little fists.
“No?” asks Jiang Wanyin, trying not to grin. “I thought you didn’t want it.” He brings the spoon a little closer to himself, and a-Ling opens his mouth pointedly, still trying to snatch away the spoon. “Well, if you’re sure,” says Jiang Wanyin, and a-Ling finally deigns to take a bite.
Meal time is necessarily followed by bathtime, which is one of a-Ling’s favourite times of day, because he gets to splash water all over his uncle and then giggle delightedly at it.
Jiang Wanyin is gently towelling a-Ling’s hair dry when a Jiang Hao, his most senior disciple, requests entrance.
His disciples try very hard to avoid interrupting Jiang Wanyin’s few stolen moments alone with his nephew, but their situation is unstable enough that emergencies crop up often.
“Sect Leader, one group of disciples sensed traces of demonic energy during their routine patrols in northern Yunmeng,” Jiang Hao reports. “But we haven’t heard from any locals about any suspected activity. Should we investigate?”
Jiang Hao knows that the answer to that question is ‘yes,’ of course. He is really asking if Jiang Wanyin intends to lead the mission.
Whenever possible, he does. He is proud of his disciples’ progress, but they’re still relatively new to cultivation—in the antebellum world, they would still be juniors, always under a senior’s watchful eye. The reality of their current life has denied them that luxury, but when facing an antagonist of unknown strength—and it is so difficult to predict the strength of demonic cultivators—Jiang Wanyin tries to ensure he can accompany them.
And lending his personal power to the mission can protect more than simply his disciples; his higher cultivation makes it just slightly more likely that they will be able to bring the demonic cultivators safely back to Lotus Pier for their attempts at rehabilitation.
Jiang Wanyin sighs and stands, picking a-Ling up as he rises. “Yes, I’ll come,” he tells Jiang Hao, and a-Ling’s nurse, who had followed Jiang Hao into the room, approached to take a-Ling.
“No!” A-Ling grabbed hold of Jiang Wanyin’s outer robes and clung to him. “No!”
A-Ling is sometimes testy and grumpy in Jiang Wanyin’s care, but they have yet to find anyone else he tolerates for more than a few minutes. His uncle is by far his favourite person in the world, though Jiang Wanyin is certain that his character-judgement skills will approve as he grows older.
“I’m sorry,” Jiang Wanyin whispers into a-Ling’s downy hair, and he presses a kiss to a-Ling’s head. When they finally extract him from Jiang Wanyin’s robe and pass him over to his nurse, a-Ling begins outright bawling. His nurse bears the onslaught without wincing and carries him from the room.
Jiang Wanyin watches them leave with a heavy heart, but he steels himself and turns to Jiang Hao. “Let’s go,” he says.
His first mistake is not asking more questions before heading out.
“A trace, you said.” Jiang Wanyin looks around the village, which has been completely decimated. Bodies litter the ground, and the air is thick with the scent of rotting flesh and the foetid sense of resentment. “A trace.”
The disciples who followed him north to track the source of the report take in the scene with pale faces.
Or maybe his first mistake was not thinking too deeply about the nature of the report he’d received. His disciples aren’t strong or skilled enough to sense even a moderate user of demonic cultivation from a distance. If they sensed anything and weren’t near enough to see or guess at its effects, what could it be but an immensely powerful ritual?
The vitality had been entirely stripped from the bodies around them, and these bodies aren’t new. And yet, there is no sign of the demonic cultivator themselves, and it’s difficult to tell which of the hastily emptied houses belonged to them.
“I don’t understand,” says Jiang Hao. “Did they move on? To another village?”
“Not another village,” Jiang Wanyin tells him. “The resentful energy is centred here. No, they’re hiding out somewhere else. Somewhere nearby.”
Jiang Hao shivers.
“We’ll find them.” Jiang Wanyin makes sure his voice is firm and confident. “But first, we’ll visit the nearby villages ourselves. Maybe someone has heard something.”
“They were such a sweet, normal family,” a villager tells them tearfully. “I never could have imagined that they’d—that they’d turn out like this.” She is apparently a survivour of the massacre who had fled to stay with her maternal family when the horror had begun.
His disciples look deeply suspicious at her story, but Jiang Wanyin thinks she’s probably telling the truth. He sees no sign of resentful energy on her, and he remembers how Wei Wuxian would fly into a frenzy during the war, noticing nothing but the enemy immediately before him. It seems perfectly possible that a demonic cultivator glutted on resentful energy wouldn’t see or care about a few souls escaping.
“Why didn’t you report this to the Jiang Sect?” asks Jiang Hao stiffly.
The woman exchanges glances with those around her.
Jiang Wanyin’s fearsome reputation has been growing by leaps and bounds—more than he would have expected, really. In and out of cultivation sects, people whisper that he’s lost his mind in grief, that he will destroy not only demonic cultivators, but their families, their friends, their entire village, to burn the disease off the face of the earth.
Given those rumours, it’s no surprise that someone wouldn’t want to admit to a near connection with an entire family of demonic cultivators.
Jiang Hao can read the air as clearly as Jiang Wanyin can, and he flushes dark with anger. “You’ve seen us before, patrolling through the villages,” he snaps at them. “You’ve seen us tilling fields, building houses, bringing food and medicine. You know us. We can’t help you if you don’t believe in us!”
Jiang Wanyin puts a hand on Jiang Hao’s shoulder, silencing him. “It’s hard to believe in anyone, when you’ve seen people you’ve known and trusted your whole life turn on you,” he says quietly. He knows they’ll take those words as autobiographical, but they’re not, not really. Wei Wuxian betrayed him in a thousand, painful ways, but broken promises, casual cruelties, and abandonment were hardly on the same level as the violent deaths they were facing now. As unstable as Wei Wuxian had grown, he had really been on a whole other level in his ability to harness this volatile and poisonous power. “Resentful energy changes people, whether it comes from a natural buildup from improper burial, or whether it’s intentionally cultivated.”
The villagers are watching them with wide eyes.
Jiang Wanyin keeps his voice calm. “What do you know about this family? Anything you can tell us would be helpful.”
By the time Jiang Wanyin finds their hideaway in a system of caves, one of the family of demonic cultivators, the oldest, is already dead, blood leaking from every visible orifice. The others don’t seem to have noticed. They scatter through the caves, leaving Jiang Wanyin to chase after them one at a time. He’s exhausted and drawn thin by the time he faces the last one, and his qi supplies, already low after a long night of travelling, searching, and placing protective wards around the surrounding villages, are beginning to dry up.
Also, the kid bites. Just, you know. A point to consider.
The demonic cultivator seems to float, and the air has a hazy quality that Jiang Wanyin is mostly sure he’s not hallucinating. This deep in the caves, it should be cool and damp, but instead the air is searing hot, and the dryness aggravates his lungs and makes it difficult to breathe. The demonic cultivator swoops in towards him—maybe for another bite—as Zidian sputters and fades, and Sandu grows too heavy to lift. Once, as an adolescent playing in the lakes of his home with his siblings, he would have assumed this was a result of low, perhaps nearly terminally low, qi-levels. Now, he has to wonder if it’s a sign of his stolen core—unsolicited, unwanted—finally failing him, rejecting him as it should have done when it was first placed in his unconscious body. He grips his clarity bell, trying to centre himself, but the demonic cultivator is now close, too close, and Jiang Wanyin swings a backhanded blow with every bit of power he still has in him.
The physical blow lands and forces the underfed demonic cultivator back. But as this happens, the bell, the clarity bell that is still clenched in his fist, clangs with a shockwave that ripples through the haze of the cavern. The air is cooler now, and breathable, and the demonic cultivator collapses, panting.
“What the fuck,” rasps Jiang Wanyin. He places the barely conscious demonic cultivator in the last of the human-storage qiankun pouches and begins the laborious process of heading home. If he passes out for a little bit first, well, there is no one here to see it happen.
“I’m beginning to think I should just move in,” says Wen Qing drily as she climbs out of the wagon she’d ridden to Lotus Pier.
Jiang Wanyin shrugs distractedly. “If you want,” he says. It would be a relief to have her here full time, practising her medicine for the sect, but the distance from her remaining family would wear on her quickly, and even with her modesty veil and cosmetically reshaped eyes, the risk of her being recognised would rise with her constant presence.
Wen Qing raises her eyebrows, but doesn’t comment. “Well? What is it you wanted to show me?”
He takes her to the special dungeons, the ones that have been refitted as detoxification chambers. Six cells are currently occupied with the only demonic cultivators they’ve been able to bring back alive—Wei Wuxian’s death of being torn apart by his own ghostly servants seems to be a common ending for those who channel resentful energy. One contains Wu Zi, now curled up and crying quietly into the padded floor. His agonising withdrawal pangs have long since ended, but now the worse agony has arrived: his recent memories are vague and spotty, but not so spotty that he doesn’t remember clawing out the throat of his best friend and watching him bleed out. Four of the rooms each contain a member of the surviving cave-dwelling family of demonic cultivators, separated and still at the screaming stage. The final occupied cell contains a former Jin disciple, Gu Xiang. She is still barely more than a child, but they had found her shivering in an abandoned farmhouse just barely on the Yunmeng side of their border with Lanling with blood dripping from the walls and the ceiling. Based on the jagged wounds covering her arms and legs, most of the blood may have been hers. She watches them as they walk past her cell. She doesn’t speak, and hasn’t since they found her. She spends most of her time meditating these days.
He leads Wen Qing to the cell containing the oldest survivour of the family of demonic cultivators. They haven’t yet been able to learn their names. Wen Qing is about to enter, assuming he summoned her here for her healing. And he did, but—he stops her and stares into the room, holding his bell and feeling embarrassment creeping along his spine. What if he had simply imagined it? What if it doesn’t work now that Wen Qing and her cold, clean science are here to observe?
“Well?” asks Wen Qing, frowning at him.
He takes a breath and rings the clarity bell, channelling a heavy flow of qi through the tiny instrument as he does so. The bell rings, and the demonic cultivator quiets in the cell.
Wen Qing inhales sharply, staring into the cell. She pulls out her needles and tests the air with them, which, he’s pretty sure that’s not what those things are supposed to be used for, but they seem to give her some kind of sign. “It’s acting as a powerful spiritual cleanse,” she says. “I’ve never—what is that bell? I know it’s a Jiang sect symbol, like the Lans’ forehead ribbon, but—”
“It’s—I don’t know.” Jiang Wanyin swallows and reaches for the lessons of his early childhood, half remembered. “They’re supposed to provide clarity in troubled times. To help us see what’s really there, and not what we want to see. I’ve never heard of them used for this before.”
Wen Qing shakes her head impatiently. “We didn’t have a formal cultivation path for demonic energy before. This is unbroken ground.”
After treating the new residents of the special dungeons and checking on the older ones, Wen Qing and Jiang Wanyin hold many long, involved meetings with the craftspeople of Lotus Pier, the ones charged with creating the clarity bells. Jiang Wanyin spares a moment to be grateful that this knowledge, unlike so much of his sect history, survived the destruction of Lotus Pier, carried on in the memory of several retirees and their new apprentices. They leave the meeting with a schematic, but Wen Qing asks to run it by her cousin before they produce a test sample.
“In fact,” she says slowly, looking at Jiang Wanyin for a long moment. “He was a cultivator smith in my family, before Wen Ruohan forced everyone to become a soldier. Perhaps he can serve your sect in his original capacity.”
Jiang Wanyin laughs mirthlessly. “After all your arguing when I forced you to leave your family names behind, now you want your cousin to take mine? Don’t you think he might protest? Your entire family hates me, and I don’t blame them.”
Wen Qing is quiet. “They don’t know you. And they don’t hate you, not really. They’re in mourning, and they have no other target than you, that’s all.”
Jiang Wanyin looks away. He would certainly never forgive anyone who saved him and left a-Ling to die.
“Anyway,” says Wen Qing, “Even Jin Guangyao wouldn’t recognise my cousin. He has the most forgettable face that you never remember seeing.”
Jiang Wanyin snorts, amused despite the heavy weight of guilt still resting in his stomach. “Fine, ask him. It would certainly make things easier for me.”
After a moment of seeming hesitation, Wen Qing adds, “Speaking of my family, another cousin of mine would like to apologise to you.”
Jiang Wanyin stares at her blankly until she sighs in exasperation.
“Wen Bo,” she clarifies, “would like to apologise for the revelation he shared with you.”
Jiang Wanyin stiffens. “I’m not interested in any apologies for telling the truth,” he says coldly.
She nods as though he had politely accepted the apology instead of dismissing it altogether. “Still, there is a time and place for everything, and that wasn’t either.”
“You were never going to tell me,” he accuses.
Wen Qing shrugs, unrepentant. “No. It’s hardly relevant, is it? The procedure was successful, and the only person negatively impacted by it is now dead. Why bother saying anything about it? How does it change anything for you to know?”
Jiang Wanyin likes Wen Qing. He really likes Wen Qing, in the same way that he likes—liked—Wei Wuxian, though with less intensity. But this ambivalence that she is revealing now is the same that once moved her to carve open two people and move a living core from one to the other.
“Knowledge matters,” is all he says to her, but he sees it land in her expression like a slap to the face.
The newly renamed Yin Yu arrives at Lotus Pier with Wen Qing and many ideas.
“What did you think of the designs for the larger bells?” asks Jiang Wanyin.
Yin Yu seems to find it more polite to disregard the question entirely rather than respond to it truthfully. “I made some changes,” is all he says, and did he ever.
In the place of the large bell design that Jiang Wanyin and Wen Qing had laboured over, Yin Yu’s drawings are for wind chimes. Everything about their shape and the complex arrays to be engraved on them promotes clarity of mind and spirit. Yin Yu has somehow conceptualised a design that should activate automatically—the presence of resentful energy should act like a breeze to jingle the chimes, the sound of which should cleanse the resentment.
“How do we power it if there’s no cultivator feeding qi into it?” asks Jiang Wanyin doubtfully.
Yin Yu raises his eyebrows. “It’s powered by the ambient resentful energy. I actually used Wei Wuxian’s evil-attraction flags as a baseline for that part of the design.”
Nothing makes Jiang Wanyin more frustrated in his own impotency or more confident in a product’s likelihood of success than hearing that Wei Wuxian had a hand in its design, even one as distant as this. “Start the prototype,” he tells Yin Yu, who bows and walks away without another word.
Well, it’s not like Jiang Wanyin has any leg to stand on when it comes to cheery demeanours.
The chimes work. The chimes work really, really well.