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dalamood · 3 years
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And at the bottom of the box lay
((Fierce corpse Wen Qing, post-canon, horrible concoction of novel elements into CQL-verse, just run with it. You WILL come to appreciate second person perspective.))
The biggest task after Jin Guangyao's death, the one that no other sect could help with, nor currently-sectless-and-already-far-too-involved Wei Wuxian, is tidying up the Jin Sect. Much of it, you  can delegate in theory, but in practice,you have no idea who you can safely delegate things to. Some of the people in Koi Tower are loyal only to Jin Guangyao; some were loyal to your grandparents. None of them are really loyal to you.
You curse Wei Wuxian for revealing himself, under your breath, because if he hadn't, then "Mo Xuanyu," as yet another of your grandfather's bastard children, could have helped you with this. And you really could use the help; no one would have questioned you rescinding your youngest uncle's exile.
As it is, all you have is Fairy and the knowledge that Jiujiu rebuilt the Jiang sect from less (but perhaps that was easier, to begin with a blank slate), and the distant support of the Jiang, Lan, and Nie. Even if the lesser sects would love to chew you up and spit you out, you can be confident that Jiang Cheng will ward off any outsider threats.
So it's just the inside of Koi Tower you have to worry about. The treasure hall is... Okay, you aren't actually going to open some of the warded cupboards without Wei Wuxian here, actually, you know now that one of them had the head of a fierce corpse in it so who knows what else might be in those. But the rest of it should be fairly easy to go through. Some of it was from Qin Su's dowry, and you can return those objects to her family. It's the least you can do, now that the truth of that marriage has come out and disgraced their sect by proxy.
That's how you plan to spend the first day. But things go off the rails pretty much immediately, because you bring Fairy into the treasure room with you. It's just meant as a precaution, but you can't shake the thought that this dog has saved your life by going for help once already.
You tell Fairy to lay down, but the dog, in a way that's almost unheard of, ignores you to start furiously sniffing the room. He starts pawing at one of the chests covered in talismans that are clearly demonic cultivation - the largest one, big enough that you haven't even considered moving it, the one you'll have to actually bring Wei Wuxian inside to take a look at it.
"What is it?" you ask the dog, who whines, pawing at the chest, and then stopping to look back at you with a tilted head before barking harshly, the sound echoing in the enclosed space of the treasure room. Your throat goes tight.
Spiritual dogs raised by the Jin Sect are trained in a number of signals to communicate with their masters. If either Wei Wuxian or Lan Wangji had been more familiar with them, they would have recognized Fairy's behaviour at the Nie burial shrine as the signal for a living person trapped. The same signals the dog is now giving his master, though with an undercurrent of uncertainty that you've never seen before, like Fairy is only mostly sure that the person is alive.
You gulp. There are a lot of signals you can ignore, but not that one. Not when it might be weeks before Wei Wuxian appears again - you haven't even sent to Cloud Recesses for his help yet - and it's already been days since the last time Jin Guangyao was in here. Days since the last time a person in that chest would have been given water, nevermind food.
"Guard," you tell Fairy. You'll have to put your sword down to remove the talismans. You send a butterfly through the mirror first, and then after a moment's hesitation, a second one. The first is to the servants; the second is to Wei Wuxian. In a worst-case scenario, you're sure he'll find some way to sneak in here again.
Then you set about opening the chest. Talisman-by-talisman, papers building up on the floor next to you, some of the marks on them close to familiar but just different enough that you can't be sure of their function. Resentful energy begins to leak out of the corners of the chest, through the wood and holes in the protections that must be worked on the inside. You bite your lip, pausing in your work to run your fingers reassuringly through Fairy's fur.
With this level of resentful energy, the person inside is probably a demonic cultivator. Not that that really means anything, not when the two demonic cultivators you've actually met were as far at opposite ends of the scale as possible, but it's suddenly very uncomfortable being a Jin and opening this chest. People always used to say that you look like one of your uncles and acted like the other; you know the resemblance between you and the person who put the prisoner in this chest is strong.
The resentful energy curls around your fingers as you set the last talisman down. You undo the latches on the chest, using the keys you now carry, the Sect Leader's keys that Lan Xichen, with shaking fingers, had wordlessly handed you, not saying a word and not meeting your eyes. There was blood on them, then, and you can't erase the memory of it.
One lock, two. Whoever is in the chest isn't fighting to open it, at least, so you're able to take a deep breath, toss the keys aside, and left your sword. If they're still alive, they're probably too weak to fight, but you can afford the extra moment to be cautious.
(You're a cultivator, and your duty is to protect the weak, no matter where you find them.)
With Suihua's tip, you dig into the gap between lid and chest. It takes more effort than you expect. You have to push to flip the lid back, and when you do, a cloud of dust billows up in front of you.
You immediately cough and cover your mouth with the sleeve of your sword arm, waving your other arm to clear the air. Fairy barks once, and then whines before sitting next to your leg. There's no sound from inside the chest.
You shake your head and lean forward to look inside. The figure inside the chest is curled up among numerous talismans, the yellow papers not so much as fluttering. It's a woman, thin and small for all that she takes up almost all the space within the chest, her body arranged awkwardly as though she couldn't entirely bend her arms and legs. Her hair is loose, obscuring her face, but her robes...
A single layer of almost transparent red silk, over rough linen and wool. Both layers have seen much better days, but it's the red silks - red as wedding clothes - that make you stare. No one would dare to wear red that brilliant anymore, not in the entire time you've been alive, because...
The woman's hand is grey, and she isn't breathing. And yet the resentful energy still pours off her in waves, as she sits in her box, as she has sat in this box for who knows how long. There is a different quality to it, like a living thing, like the only other time you've been close enough to a member of the Wen sect to touch them.
You reach out, every tendon straining against your fear, and brush the woman's hair back, away from her face. Her eyes are closed. Your fingers hesitate over the line of black across her throat, the mark of a garrote matching the line of red still across your own, except deeper, fatal, and then stitched up by some careful hand with red thread.
Even in death, Wen Qing looks enough like her brother that even you can recognize her.
Fairy barks, sounding satisfied. Startled, your fingers brush the skin of Wen Qing's throat (cold, as a corpse, but with an energy underneath), and her eyes shoot open.
They aren't bright and clear, the unsettling life you're used to seeing in the Ghost General. They're the milky white of Song Lan's in Yi City, the empty white of a fierce corpse under someone else's control.
You jerk your hand back and slam the lid closed. There's no movement, but you slap a talisman on top of the chest just in case. You don't know if a fierce corpse with their will taken will try anything, but better safe than sorry.
"Come on, Fairy," you say, fighting back the fear in your voice. "Let's... Let's leave this until Wei Wuxian gets here, all right?"
Fairy sniffs at the chest one more time and whines, but dutifully follows you as you very much to do not run from the room.
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dalamood · 3 years
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actually can i add a thought i'm gonna add a thought right here this, but then with ADDITIONAL time travel by other people it doesn't really matter who except for the scene where it comes out completely of nowhere that hey yeah actually wen ning has been a time traveller this entire time already and what do you MEAN it could have been WORSE than what we already had (ideal other time travellers: wwx, jc, oh god give me this for Jiang Cheng + Wen Ning Working Things Out Fic)
after reading a lot of (very excellent!) Untamed fanfics where a variety of characters travel back in time to avert the catastrophic events of the first half of the series – Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng, even Nie Huaisang –
I was kinda playing around with the idea of a fic where Wen Ning travels back in time in order to try to avert catastrophe and save his friends and family. but as I pored over the sequence of events, I wasn’t exactly sure what Wen Ning could do differently from what he did. He defied his family and clan in order to do the Right Thing when everyone around him told him not to, he was the lynchpin of so many events.
which made me wonder, what if Wen Ning was already  a time traveler come back to Set Right What Once Went Wrong? 
what if he came from a future where Wen Ruohan completely conquered the world, crushed the rest of the cultivation clans under his heel and killed all our heroes, and little Wen Ning, completely disregarded and overlooked, looked around at what his family had wrought and said “no.”
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dalamood · 3 years
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Jiang Yanli always wears mourning white. She died in white, and now lives in it, if such an existence can be called living. 
 Jiang Yanli was not a strong cultivator. But she doesn’t need to be, in order to break down the doors that sought to keep her away from her son. Jiang Yanli, the last fierce corpse raised by the Yiling Patriarch, the woman brought back from the dead by the last gasp of a madman’s power, refused to let other people raise her son while she could still stand on her own two feet. Jiang Yanli is her brother’s sister (if you ask her, she is her brothers’ sister), and had no mercy for her enemies. 
Anyone who tried to keep her from taking her son back with her to Lotus Pier was an enemy. 
 It was a part of her marriage contract that her body would be returned to the Jiang sect when she died, after all. It wouldn’t be proper to keep her from returning.
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dalamood · 3 years
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Jiang Cheng didn’t really intend to cultivate to immortality. It was almost by accident, born out of his stubborn refusal to leave the sect to anyone else, to get married and have children or to name anyone not of his blood as sect heir. (Both of his siblings had children, who grew up to be the leaders of their respective sects. That’s more than enough for him.)
So, he doesn’t marry. And when the issue comes to a head at a Cultivation Conference - where Jiang Cheng is now the oldest sect leader, old enough that people are starting to wonder even if he hasn’t confirmed anything - he says that no one should be forced to marry if they don’t want to. And then he says it again the next year, and the next, until the issue disappears on its own. (It doesn’t, actually, but Jin Ling’s eldest, the only daughter of three, takes more after the Jin side of the family than Jiang Cheng ever wants to see, and she’s quite handy with a bribe.)
At a certain point it becomes a known thing in the cultivation world: in a marriage arrangement you don’t want? Well, they say Sect Leader Jiang cultivated to immortality all by himself, and that the Jiangs are a small sect that’s always looking for new disciples…
They remain a small sect, without a named heir, but being one of the great sects doesn’t matter, not with all the stress and political jockeying that comes with it. Besides, the leaders of the Jin sect and the Lan sect have consistently called him Uncle for generations now. Jiang Cheng doesn’t have to worry about fading into obscurity. He doesn’t follow in the footsteps of most immortals, leaving the mundane world behind to go be a hermit on a mountain or whatever other option there might be. Home is here, in Lotus Pier, and he has no intention of leaving.
He’s known for being harsh but fair with juniors; half of the ones who run away to him (most of the ones who were just throwing tantrums when they did it) go back to their sects within a year. It’s not quite the Gusu Lan guest disciple classes, but for certain personalities it seems to work better. And then there are the ones that stay, fierce and loyal and creative, who make the sect great.
Yunmeng Jiang remains one of the great sects, and not only for its leader, but for the personal attention he gives to every lost child he takes under his wings. Strong core, weak core, it makes no difference to the Sect Leader of Yunmeng Jiang - he treats them all the same, and they become stronger for him.
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dalamood · 3 years
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okay, Animorphs fandom, here it comes, the number one controversial opinion I came back to tumblr entirely to share with you:
Andalites inventing computers before books actually makes sense. In fact, they possibly invented computers before they had any kind of writing system, if we assume their computers (at their most basic) were functionally similar to ours (at their most basic). (this proceeded to get very long so have a readmore)
Keep reading
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dalamood · 3 years
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514
Wei Wuxian did, indeed, die in the Burial Mounds.
He died seven times, actually, mostly of starvation. (The first was of an infection, developed from the left leg that snapped on impact with the ground, along with so many other bones. He’s still shocked it wasn’t the blood loss that killed him.)
The thing is that there are far more than seven people, whose lives were taken untimely from them, whose spirits do not rest easy in the mountains north of Yiling.
Wei Wuxian did not stop dying, when he left the Burial Mounds. He died twice in Sunshot, both times to poisoned wine, as though it mattered. He still doesn’t know the identity of the Wen spy responsible for the second time.
(He doesn’t know for sure that it was a Wen spy. It doesn’t matter, now.)
Wei Wuxian left the Burial Mounds with the gifts of the 514 angry spirits who remained there (minus, of course, the ones he had already used) -
Wei Wuxian looked Jin Zixun in the eye at Qiongqi Pass, and said, “Shoot me,” without the faintest trace of fear in his heart.
The arrow, which unmistakably pierced that heart, he pulled free and twirled between his fingers the same way as his flute. And he walked on to Carp Tower, whistling a merry tune as he walked, leaving a crowd of terrified cultivators behind him on the mountain.
- the gift of the lives that had been stolen from them. In trade for their revenge, Wei Wuxian will live out the rest of their years, and go quietly when death comes for the last time to claim him.
(“It wasn’t so much the crooked path,” he would say later, of his development of demonic cultivation, “as it was a backwards one.”)
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