#I feel like he has plenty of reason to become a hungry dissatisfied spirit when he dies

[paradife-loft]

while doing some various Ghost Research™ for fic purposes over the past week, one piece of information I’ve seen mentioned or implied in a couple of places* is that, while generally mourning & veneration for the dead is only performed for ancestors, people older than you - that rule doesn’t necessarily hold for Zhongyuan Jie/the Hungry Ghost festival, since part of the deal there is making offerings for any visiting ghosts that might show up to cause trouble, particularly those that were forgotten/not buried right/otherwise have reasons to be displeased and out to Cause Problems?

anyway, what I’m thinking about here because of that specific detail is. yearly visits from small unmourned violently killed toddler ghost Jin Rusong.

hot, late summer visits to Jinlintai, and a private corner in one of Jin Guangyao’s half-enclosed gardens, set up with a few plates of offerings in the style he grew up setting out, for the child he cannot publicly perform his grief for, for the child poisoned before he was even given life by his father’s failings. folk religion generally disdained by the cultivator elite, but - these customs his mother taught him are still a part of him, and his son still crosses over into the living, sad and bewildered and looking for all of what he was cut short from. how can he deny him?

(Lan Xichen watches as he lights paper money and lanterns, and offers a silent hand on his arm. he can feel the cold yin of the spirit lingering faintly nearby. he understands enough not to offer to help release it.)

#look I simply think that jinlintai deserves to be. very very haunted. #(I would really like to find a more detailed and thorough discussion of the festival so I could feel more comfortable stating anything #without approximately eight billion hedges on implications? #but ah well) #'wouldn't JRS have gotten a soul-calming ceremony and not be ghost material tho?' I hear you say and well #yes probably he would have but consider: ghost kiddo #and if he is too young to have done MUCH cultivation practise at all when he dies.... SHRUG SHRUG? #I feel like he has plenty of reason to become a hungry dissatisfied spirit when he dies #(and unless the Nies also do not do those ceremonies... we have canonical evidence that they are not a foolproof thing Either) #anyway sometimes you are hanging out kind of melancholy in a lovely blooming flower garden and it is just #you and your sworn brother/boyfriend and the unrestful ghost of your sworn brother/boyfriend's dead child who nobody talks about #('doesn't it make more sense for him to mourn his kid with qin su rather than lxc' I hear and also: yes however) #(there is simply a xiyao Vibe that is Parts Of Us That Cannot Be Acknowledged Otherwise That We Share With Each Other and so..) #(also yeah I do think it's kind of implied that a lot of superstitious/religious practises are not... taken v seriously by cultivators?) #(and so there's more reasons for why this wouldn't be a Jin Family Affair if none of the rest of them grew up with it) #(meanwhile LXC exists in the liminal space of We Were On The Run Together Outside of Cultivator Society And Normal Rules history) #no good things for the poor sad cultivators #Jin Guangyao #I suppose I will just end up. writing this post instead of fic bc that's very responsible of me