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#supportive lan qiren

wangxianficrecs · 11 months

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our shadows fall away like dust by lamusadelils

our shadows fall away like dust

by lamusadelils

T, 4k, Wangxian

Summary: Lan Qiren's best PhD student drops out of his class. Lan Qiren will not have it. Kay's comments: A very heart-warming story about Lan Qiren helping Wei Ying out of a troubling situation, talking openly with Lan Zhan about their relationship and past mistakes and accidentally ending up as Wangxian's matchmaker! Every now and then, I'm in the mood for some good!Lan Qiren and supportive!Lan Qiren stories and this one scratches the itch, delivering wonderfully without feeling out of character! Excerpt: An hour and some calls later, it is established that Wei Ying can stay with a friend of Lan Qiren's nephews. The Nie boy, as decadently irresponsible as he is, has enough space for a guest without being cramped. Pampered boy. So that's one problem down. Lan Qiren can help Wei Ying secure a scholarship. Won't be difficult, with his good track record. He may be disruptive and full of cheek, but he always delivers excellence when it counts. Maybe that's what always exasperated Lan Qiren about him. Wei Ying mentions he may want to come out, live on his own terms, if he's gonna be on his own now. Lan Qiren is absolutely livid that the boy's family would send him away for a gender thing, in this day and age!

pov lan qiren, modern setting, modern no magic, good parent lan qiren, supportive lan qiren, trans wei wuxian, matchmaker lan qiren, professor lan qiren, good uncle lan qiren, coming out, family feels, found family, college/university, graduate student lan wangji, graduate student wei wuxian, misgendering, @lamusadelils

~*~

(Please REBLOG as a signal boost for this hard-working author if you like – or think others might like – this story.)

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starrywangxian · 3 months

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happy international hot and spicy food day to wei wuxian

(Image Description: The cover art for the extra episode Glutinous Rice Congee from the Chinese MDZS audio drama drawn in a cute simplistic comic style. There are two rows of tables with characters sat at it with Wei Wuxian in the bottom left hand corner. The character in the back row to the left is Lan Qiren. He is red in the face covering his mouth with red liquid around his fingers and his hand is slamming against the table holding a sign that reads zero in Hanzi (零). Lan Wangji is next to him in the back row in the middle. He is sipping on a bowl with a small amount of red liquid dripping over the top of the bowl, his eats are red and a bead of sweat is on his right cheek. He is gripping a sign that has the Hanzi for ten (拾). In the table in front of him has a plack with his name written on it like he's a judge in a contest. Next to him in the back row on the right end of the table is Jiang Cheng. He is looking at Lan Wangji to his left with a look of disbelief and much judgement (typical jc behaviour). He's holding a sign that says the Hanzi for the number three (叁). In the front row to the left is Lan Jingyi. His tongue is out and he is red in the face and on his ears. He is looking very worriedly at Lan Qiren. On the table in front of him is a bowl of red glutinous rice congee with a soup in the bowl and a little of the liquid has spilled onto the table. He has a name plack in front of him too and he's holding a sign that has the number one in Hanzi (壹) on it. Lan Sizhui is sat next to him in the front row to the right. He has a slight blush on his cheeks and ears. His mouth is open in an O shape and he's looking at Lan Qiren. On the table in front of him is a bowl of the glutinous rice congee and he has a name plack. He's holding a sign in his left hand with the number eight in Hanzi (捌) on it. Wei Wuxian is in the bottom left hand corner smiling with his eyes closed holding a big steaming pot of glutinous rice congee with cloth to act as oven gloves. Rising from the pot is a mist of red and little stars. He has a slight blush to his cheeks and he's wearing a pink-ish white bandana on his head. There is a little heart to the right of him <3)

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thoroughlycollected · 1 year

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Regarding the MDZS donghua:

So I was rewatching random episodes, as one does, when I got Lan family feelings.

(First, I should say that I’ve long held the interpretation (headcanon?) that in the Lan Sect if the Sect Leader is indisposed then the “heir apparent” takes over until a proper heir is born and old enough to lead. For this reason as long as QHJ is in seclusion, LQR leads. And depending on adaptation LXC is either an adult or coming into adulthood when the Wen attack, meaning that if QHJ is dead afterwards then LXC is the Sect Leader. And if he’s on the run [indisposed] then his “heir apparent” is LWJ! I’m saying I think that one of the reasons Wangji sprinted back to his people after the false Xuanwu cave rescue is because he was worried about his family foremost and concerned he might technically be in charge secondly.)

So anyway, I’m watching the donghua, it’s episode 12, Lotus Pier just got wrecked, Wangji is vining in his Ancestral Shrine, and this Lan Elder approaches Wangji. According to the Tencent youtube channel’s subtitles the conversation goes—

Lan Elder: Wangji

LWJ (bowing in greeting): Great Uncle (Shufu).

Lan Elder: I heard that you’ve sent disciples to Yunmeng and Meishan to look for the Jiang Clan leader’s daughter and son, and his senior disciple.

LWJ: Yes.

Lan Elder: Wangji, this time Wen Clan of Qishan used a heavy hand and destroyed Jiang Clan of Yunmeng in one night. They even hunted down the three young people at that night. With every effort to kill them all. Do you know why?

LWJ: I understand.

Lan Elder: Then why did you have to help Jiang Clan and get yourself in trouble? Wen Clan of Qishan made such a big deal to deter us just to show it’s the unchallengeable leader of the clans. Who obeys will live and who objects will die. Now the rest of the clans avoid confronting them. Our Lan Clan has been hit hard. It’s better to bide our time and focus on building up strength.

LWJ: Great Uncle, the clans are closely related, the others will be in danger if one of them falls. At times like this, we should contend with the Wen Clan together.

Lan Elder: To contend with? Wen Clan of Qishan is so powerful and strong. How’s it possible to get rid of them easily? The one taking this lead will be the target of Wen Ruohan later. The Cloud Recesses is the legacy that our ancestors have built with hundreds of years of efforts. We shall not ruin it.

LWJ: When a nest falls, all the eggs break. And someone must take the lead.

[Lan Qiren enters the scene]

Lan Elder: Just listen to you, why are you so stubborn? notices LQR Qiren, your timing is perfect. Come on, talk some sense into Wangji.

LQR (bowing in greeting): Uncle, I think what Wangji said was totally right.

Lan Elder: What?

LQR: When a nest falls, all the eggs break. Facing such a crunch, all the clans should join their hands to pull through this. Tomorrow, I’ll hit the road to Qinghe.

Lan Elder: Unbelievable!

And then the Elder leaves! And Lan Qiren encourages Wangji, reminding him that the Elder is only worried about the clan, and then asks Wangji for any updates on Xichen. Wangji hasn’t heard anything and he’s like “no news means good news. He’s smart. He’ll survive this.” and then he asks for updates on the Jiang kids!

And like. Imagine Lan Qiren who knows what it’s like to have your older brother suddenly not there, leaving you in a position of authority you weren’t really trained for, supporting Lan Wangji as he tries to lead his family into the beginning of uncertain times with war on the horizon. Where’s the fic about those uncle-nephew conversations?

#mdzs donghua #mdzs #long post #lan posting #thinkin about the lans again #i'm always thinkin about them tho what a loving and also fucked family unit amirite #Lan Qiren #Lan Wangji #LQR and LWJ plotting together how to rally the smaller clans bc they can't rely on Lanling Jin #LWJ making hard choices and LQR supporting him and checking in with him #lan qiren must feel sick watching history repeat #and he's like trying to be the adult he would've wanted by his side when his brother first became ~indisposed~#and then that GOOD bit of history continues as lan wangji is the adult he would've wanted #always hovering nearby like a constant safety net for his little coterie of juniors #i know we like to call them wwx's ducklings #but the duckies were only in a row to be scooped up bc the lan+ouyang ones were a line behind hanguang jun #when the adults pay forward the good stuff everyone benefits and when ppl focus on revenge and violence everyone fckin suffers lol #pre-sunshot campaign

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the-ma-an · 2 years

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I see a lot of autistic Lan Wangji posts, which is great, but I don't see any posts on how the two people closest to him (Wei Wuxian and Lan Xichen) accommodate him. So here it is!

(Please keep in mind that this is based on my own experiences of growing up autistic, having less than a handful of close autistic friends and doing a tiny bit of research. I'm far from an expert, so I apologise in advance if I said anything that doesn't gel well with other MDZS fans on the spectrum.)

-----

Lan Xichen:

- Is a literal saint in part because of his brother, because showing frustration at every little thing Lan Wangji did didn't help either of them (especially since he had a lot more difficulty understanding why Lan Xichen was always angry when they were little). However, he made a note not to enable certain behaviours when Lan Wangji actually did something wrong and will gently let Lan Wangji know when his patience is being pushed.

- Lan Wangji learned to follow rules religiously from Lan Qiren, but Lan Xichen was always there to encourage him to bend them a little bit when need be (within his comfort level of course).

- This leads me to my next point of Lan Xichen generally just being there to act as a wingman to Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, not only because there was someone who was so invested in befriending him (a rarity because of his reputation and seemingly aloof persona) but also to encourage the above. Plus it was endearing to see that eventually turn into his brother's first crush.

- Lan Xichen was always there to translate what Lan Wangji wanted to say (especially because of his tendency to respond in three words or less), as well as politely excuse him to a safe space whenever Lan Wangji was getting overwhelmed at social gatherings. He'd also be the one to ask as soon as they arrive (always a full hour before the social gathering starts) if there's a quiet room they can go to.

- I'm aware this is something a parent should have to deal with, rather than a sibling who's only 1-3 years older, but Lan Xichen knew from a young age that their actual parental figures weren't able to care for Lan Wangji the way he needed, because one was too busy and generally had little patience (Lan Qiren) and the other was just not around to help (their actual dad). However, he's also learned to manage his frustration in healthy ways when it started to get too much for him.

- Lan Xichen picked up a lot from how their mother treated Lan Wangji before she passed away, so continuing to behave like her is his way of honouring her memory and to provide comfort to Lan Wangji.

- Lan Xichen made sure Lan Wangji knew how to take care of himself, because he knew he would become sect leader once he was 20 (I'm assuming that's how it would have gone if their dad didn't pass away sooner?) and would be too busy to always be there for him. So when he does become sect leader at 17-19, he did so knowing Lan Wangji would be fine without him.

- While I'm on the topic, I really didn't like Lan Zhan leaving Lan Xichen alone after Jin Guangyao's death, so I headcanon that he and Wei Wuxian do immediately leave the Cloud Recesses (since Wei Wuxian is incapable of following their rules), but live close by enough for a few years so that Lan Wangji can visit his brother every few days. This is Lan Wangji's way of caring for his brother after everything Lan Xichen has done for him. (Also, I like to imagine he and Wei Wuxian find an abandoned house at the edge of the woods, and rumours eventually start of screaming and moaning coming from it at around the same time every day lol)

-----

Wei Wuxian:

- Wei Wuxian was a newcomer in Lan Wangji's life and didn't have the same experience as Lan Xichen, so he behaved in his usual hyperactive self around Lan Wangji. However, after seeing Lan Wangji have a shutdown for the first time during their month of isolation (something that may have been caused by WWX), he had the insight to give him space at that moment.

- The second shutdown was when they were in the cave, when Lan Wangji suddenly became so overwhelmed by having to mask through recent events (the burning of Cloud Recesses, his father essentially being in a coma and Lan Xichen missing). Wei Wuxian learned from his previous experience to give him space. However, Lan Wangji was comfortable enough around him at this point to let him hug him, so that's what Wei Wuxian did. That was also the first time Lan Wangji cried around anyone that wasn't his brother and uncle.

- The rest of the novel's events pretty much play out the same up to them meeting again after Wei Wuxian's resurrection. It's from then on that Wei Wuxian gets to really know Lan Wangji. I won't get into specifics because there are a ton of really great autistic LWJ readings and headcanons out there and this post is long enough already, but I personally have one of Lan Wangji clenching his clothes (around his hips specifically) to signal when he's overstimulated. Eventually, he adds gently squeezing Wei Wuxian's hand as a signal once they get together.

- Wei Wuxian has ADHD, so while he isn't able to fully understand Lan Wangji's autism, he at least can relate to having hyperfixations, the need for stimming, and so on.

- Wei Wuxian's constant chatter has become something of a comfort to Lan Wangji, as it reminds him of better times and also that Wei Wuxian is back and with him.

Edit: Mistook shutdowns for meltdowns, so I corrected it. Since it doesn't tie into his relationships as much, I personally headcanon LWJ as being more prone to shutdowns than meltdowns, regardless of who he's around. However, I imagine he did have meltdowns a handful of times when he was very little.

#mo dao zu shi #mdzs #grandmaster of demonic cultivation #autistic lan wangji #autistic lan zhan #lan wangji #lan zhan #wei wuxian #wei ying #adhd wei wuxian #adhd wei ying #wangxian #lan xichen #just lan xichen being the very supportive neurotypical companion i wish i had growing up 🥲#lan qiren

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grandapplewit · 5 months

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I desperately want an AU where Lan Qiren helps his sister-in-law (yet unnamed) escape Cloud Recesses with her children, but for various reasons finds he can’t join them as he’d originally planned. After a long handful of years, a devastated woman begs him to take her infant daughter somewhere she’d be safe, from both her husband and the baby’s father. Lan Qiren, now the proud father of one lovely Lan Su, makes it his mission to hunt down all of Jin Guangshan’s illegitimate children and give them (and their mothers) the best life he possibly can.

#I desperately want to see Lan Qiren trying (and failing) to reign in his gaggle of murderous children #Lan Qiren is dad shaped I don’t make the rules #I think Lan Su would make a wonderful Lan-Zongzhu #she would be a marvelous healer - having studied under the Dafan Wen #and would absolutely take none of her families shit #Meng Yao would be in a place where he was loved and supported and be allowed to mircromanage down to the smallest detail #who needs revenge when you have an annual study convention to plan #Mo Xuanyu is allowed to grow up in a safe environment with access to an incredible library #so he’s allowed to experiment to his hearts content #under Lan Qiren’s supervision of course #In all honesty they do team up to plot Jin Guangshan’s downfall #but no one would suspect them because they’re the perfect Lan disciples!

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shuang-hua · 9 months

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hi hello sorry for the lack of posts lately ; - ; there has also been some lack of drawing but not actually as much as the silence here makes it seem haha. i have a few pieces to post which i just never got round to, even though some of them were ready approximately three million years ago. here is one of them!

this was done a while ago for the Bearer of Light LWJ zine! links to the pdf are here~ i just think, baby twin jades. thank you for your consideration.

this has alt text. extended image description below the cut.

In a clear pool shaded by trees, a young Lan Wangji, his face serious and focused, practices swimming. He holds onto his brother's outstretched hands for support, and water splashes behind him as he kicks. Lan Xichen pulls him along with an encouraging smile. In the background, Lan Qiren watches over them from the banks.

Watercolour on paper.

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wangxianficfinder · 1 month

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In the mood for...

March 25th

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1. hi! y'all are really cool! A) are there any fics where a-yuan (raised by the wens/wwx) wields suibian when he gets older?

also, are there fics B) where jiang cheng dual wields suibian with sandu? @writeitinsharpie

1A)

Though one were strong as seven, he too with death shall dwell (For many times and lands) by sjyl_lotus (E, 148k, wangxian, WIP, Major Character Death, Graphic Depictions of Violence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, YLLZ WWX, LSZ is a Wei, WWX Adopts LSZ, WWX doesn't go to nightless city, WWX runs away with a-yuan and granny Wen, Little bit of angst, Wéi Yuan is an excelent son, WWX Doesn't die, people is people and overall JGY is JGY so shit will happen, JYL Lives, Wangxian Reunion, Canon Divergence, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Lanling Jin Sect, Yunmeng Jiang Sect, Gusu Lan Sect Rules, Gusu Lan Sect, Burial Mounds, granny wen is best, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Implied/Referenced Torture, Panic Attacks, supportive WSZ, Anxiety Attacks, Canon-Typical Violence, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Slow Build, MXY Deserves Happiness)

🔒❤️ kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight by AlfAlfAlfAlfAlf, tardigradeschool (T, 75k, WangXian, Hurt/Comfort, Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Eventual Happy Ending, Getting Together, Burial Mounds Settlement Days, Inspired by The Parent Trap (1998), Kid Fic, teen shenanigans, two a-yuans, Fluff and Angst)

1B)

The Twin Blades of Yunmeng by GhostySword, ofmindelans (T, 89k, JC & WWX, wangxian, JC/NHS, Canon Divergence, Yunmeng Brothers Reconciliation, BAMF JC, protective LWJ, Golden Core Reveal, Swords and Feelings, WWX Resurrection, Canon-Typical Violence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Slow Burn, Embedded Images, Sect Leader QS)

~*~

2. Hi!

For the next itmf :

Looking for the fics that talk about NHS a) as the real author of the spring books he was distributing. Imagined and painted .

B) Or another version where he specifically was giving WWX spring books with gay sex or bi threesomes maybe

C) fics with focus on wwx browsing NHS spring books and doing some thinking about sexuality and self exploration

Thank you!

2B)

Fentao-laoshi’s Guide to Cut-Sleeve Pleasures by occultings (microcomets) (E, 31k, wangxian, canon divergence, pining while fucking, friends with benefits, first time, cloud recesses study arc, practice kissing, sharing a bed, jealousy, getting together, confessions, happy ending) could also fit 2C

~*~

3. hii this is for itmf!!

fics where lan yuan is still like a toddler!! or even an infant!!!

💖 The Simplest Way Forward by harriet_vane (E, 71k, wangxian, modern, accidental baby acquisition, slow burn, pining)

box your errors by mellowflicker (T, 42k, WangXian, Modern AU, single dad lwj, Domestic Fluff, Family Issues, Slow Burn, Kid Fic, let lwj have friends agenda, Hurt/Comfort, Pining)

🔒 so take my hand (take my whole life too) by cicer (E, 92k, wangxian, Modern, Accidental Baby Acquisition, oh my god they were roommates, Idiots in Love, Mutual Pining, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, this fic is not about trauma, it's about the yearning, slowburn, some characters have a pretty strong bias against folks with drug addiction, (this does not reflect the author's opinion of people with addiction disorders!), none of the really grim abuse/drug use affects our main characters, and it takes place offscreen)

The stuffed bunny, the beautiful nephew, and other gifts from Lan Qiren by deliciousblizzardshark (G, 8k, LQR & WWX, wangxian, Modern, Single Parent WWX, Good Uncle LQR, Accidental Uncle Acquisition, Found Family, Fluff)

Let's Play Pretend and Live Our Lives by Tassos (E, 50k, wangxian, Modern, On Purpose Baby Aquisition, Accidental Husband Aquisition, Idiots in Love, WWX Has Self Esteem Issues, Domestic Fluff, Kid Fic, Light Angst, the Lans and Jiangs make an appearance, NHS Gives Great Advice, Pining, Getting Together)

Magic Mishap by Regency_Bunny (T, 8k, wangxian, Modern, imbo LXC, Single Parent WWX, Kid Fic, Magic Tricks, Fluff and Humor, Child LSZ, Meet-Cute, Bunnies, Misunderstandings, Love at First Sight)

~*~

4. Hi, I'm in a mood for fantasy AUs with necromancer WWX ^^ Can also be modern w magic

Darkness Before the Dawn by Selenay (E, 64k, wangxian, Zombie Apocalypse, Modern With Magic, Necromancer WWX, Reunions, toddler A-Yuan, There Was Only One Bed, There are zombies but not graphically horrific zombies, Angst with a Happy Ending, Find a home in the middle of an apocalpyse)

all the bonds of nature by Anonymous (E, 68k, wangxian, MXY & WWX, MXY & LWJ & WWX, WIP, Modern with Magic, Romantic Comedy, Roommates to lovers, Pining LWJ, Pining, LWJ falls in love in roughly fifteen seconds, he's a mess what can i say, Necromancy, ethical necromancer WWX, Music Teacher LWJ, Fluff and Smut, a lot of meditation on the bullshit of being a public school teacher, musings on the nature of personal property and land ownership as one is wont to do, Ghosts, Urban Fantasy, Low Fantasy, wangxian are extremely weirdo4weirdo in this, Light Angst, Anal Sex, Oral Sex, Rimming, Felching, Light Bondage, Virginity Roleplay, (just a little. wwx is not good at playing the virgin), Kink Negotiation, Praise Kink, BDSM, Developing Relationship, Dominant LWJ)

necromancy is a valid career path! Series by coslyons, Skadiseven (T, 41k, WWX & XY, XY & WQ, WN & XY, WWX & WN & WQ, LSZ & XY, LWJ & XY, wangxian, Granny Wen & XY, Modern with Magic, Seattle, Necromancy, Found Family, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Gardens & Gardening, Mathematics, Running, and other crimes against Teenagers, XY is a shitty teen, sometimes a family can be three mildly feral twenty-somethings and the extremely feral teenager that adopts them, Growing Up, The Mortifying Ordeal of Realizing Your Pseudo-parents are People Too, Big brother XY, A-Yuan is a little gremlin, WWX is a much larger gremlin)

~*~

5. Hi! 🤗

This one is for ITMF. I'd like to read new fics about WWX having a new golden core. No mordern fics or dark ones, please, I'm not in the mood 🙏. I want happy endings!

Thanks again! You make my days much better!!

🥰✨ @wangxiansgirl

The Core Issue by Hauntcats (T, 21k, wangxian, WQ & WWX & WN, NHS & WWX & NMJ, canon divergence, golden core rebuilding, golden core tied to soul, angst w/ happy ending, not JC friendly) WWX meditates a golden core back

when you’re doing all the leaving (then it’s never your love lost) by tardigradeschool (T, 26k, WangXian, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Sharing a Bed, Sharing Clothes, Fix-It, the inherent eroticism of under robes, Golden Core Transfer) LWJ gives WWX a part of his own core

🧡 a stone to break your soul, a song to save it by rikke ( M, 180k, WangXian, Arranged marriage, Canon Divergence, Hurt/comfort, Light angst, Canon typical violence) Technically not a new golden core, but a new core of a different type

The Fire Lapping Up the Creek by notevenyou (E, 66k, WangXian, Canon Divergence, Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Injury, Injury Recovery, Blood, Respiratory Illness, Major Illness, Fever, Grief/Mourning, Burial Mounds, Angst with a Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Hunger and food scarcity, Surgery, Fix-It of Sorts) WWX gets part of someone else's core transplanted into him

Ghosts Shouldn’t by ShanaStoryteller (Not Rated, 15k, WangXian, Grief/Mourning, Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending)

Righteous at a Cost by thunderwear (G, 21k, wangxian, LQR & WWX, Canon Divergence, Fix-It, no one dies, LQR finds out about WWX's core, WWX and LQR are friends??, In My Fic?, its more likely than you think, LWJ in the bg like whats happening?, Fluff, WWX goes to Gusu, Mutual Pining, Golden Core Reveal)

Can't Tell Me Nothin by natacup82 (T, 35k, wangxian, Canon Divergence, Everybody Lives, Family Feels, Communication, BAMF Women)

🔒Away from Trouble by Ilona22 (M, 15k, wangxian, Alternate Universe, Not JC Friendly, WangXian Get a Happy Ending) This is one of my personal favorites, for the growth wwx goes through and what he accomplishes separate from the sects while regrowing a new core for himself. (However, the author doesn’t spend enough time on wangxian romance for it to not just feel like something they tacked on to fill that required box, so don’t go in expecting good wangxian)

What Is Left Over by Loriqod (T, 30k, wangxian, JC & WWX, Yunmeng Shuangjie, Yunmeng brothers, Post-Canon Fix-It, WWX Has a New Golden Core, Happy Ending, WangXian in Love, SO SO SO IN LOVE, bite-sized angst, Canon-Typical Violence, JC & WWX Reconciliation, Training Montage) This one’s WWX redeveloping a core in MXY’s body. It might not be quite what you had in mind, but give it a chance, this fic is ALL about him actually cultivating with the idea of making a new core, & it’s rare to find a fic with that focus. (Even amongst fics that are suppose to be all about that(for some reason people are allergic to showing WWX actually cultivate))

I’m Sorry & Thank You by Iamnotawriter (T, 12k, wangxian, post-canon, Canon Compliant, Golden Core, Canon-Typical Violence, LQR’s epipheny, Angst with a Happy Ending)

Bitter Plants Bearing Sweet Fruit by Kryal (T, 83k, wangxian, canon-typical horror elements, Worldbuilding, Desert, Misuse of Historic Setting, Original Character Death(s), Case Fic, aftermath of canon, Established Relationship, Nothing Explicit But Shameless Innuendo)

~*~

6. Alright everyone, give me everything you have where either: (A) WWX is an actual rogue cultivator at the start of the fic, or (B) he leaves the Jiangs (via Madam Yu banishment or getting fed up with them an leaving on his own) and spends time as a rogue cultivator. (I want to see my boy in the wild doing the wild cultivator thing) if he doesn’t have a core at the beginning of the fic, I would appreciate recs where he regains it at some point. I have a Wangxian agenda btw, so WX endgame plz. @omgnectarina

Ad Oblivione by Baph, HikariNoHimeWriter (M, 70k, WangXian, Time Travel Fix-It, Temporary Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, POV Multiple, Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Identity Reveal, Golden Core Reveal, Cultivation World Critical, Not JC Friendly, Abusive YZY, Angst with a Happy Ending) WWX is sent back in time to when he was a child & doesn't get taken in by the Jiangs

We Meet at the Thousandth Step by Admiranda, Rynne (T, 258k, wangxian, CSSR/WCZ, WIP, Canon Divergence, No Sunshot Campaign, CSSR & WCZ Live, Rogue Cultivator WWX, Different First Meeting, Night Hunts, Genius WWX, Inventor WWX, Romance, Drama, Fluff, Strangers to married, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Everyone Lives AU, Developing Relationship, Minor Violence, Case Fic, Mystery, Flirting, WWX's Canon-Typical Flower Flirting, Arson, There Was Only One Bed, Getting Together, First Kiss, Meeting the Parents, Resolved Sexual Tension, Resolved Romantic Tension, WWX Is a Good Big Brother, New Relationship Bliss, Chinese Mythology & Folklore, Blood and Injury, Yiling siblings)

Cultivating immortality by KizuKatana (E, 230k, wangxian, Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Rogue Cultivator WWX, Pining, Mutual Pining, WWX low self-esteem, BAMF WWX, BAMF LWJ, Angst with a Happy Ending, not sure if this qualifies as fix-it but that was my emotional need/intent, Hurt/Comfort, unreliable narrator (wwx's self image is…), sect wars happening, Canon typical darkness, demonic cultivation descriptions in detail, self-indulgent exploration of the creation of demonic cultivation and how it changed WWX, JC and LWJ are reluctant (VERY RELUCTANT) allies, YZY & LQR are made to face up to their faults, JYL is badass (fight me) though not in terms of cultivation strenght, JC gets a chance to redeem himself, Found Family, First Time, novel canon relationship dynamics)

🔒 crying like a fire in the sun by Reverie (cl410) (T, 10k, wangxian, SL/XXC, JC & WWX, BSSR/LY, Runaway WWX, Canon Divergence, Everyone Lives AU, rogue cultivator WWX, Angst, Post Cloud Recesses, Not YZY Friendly, Happy Ending, BSSR is WWX's grandmother instead of grandmaster)

Inchoate by Marinelifeclub (T, 20k, wangxian, Child Abuse, Bad Parent JFM, Bad Parent YZY, Protective LQR, Protective LWJ, Rogue Cultivator WWX, YZY Bashing, JC Bashing, No Golden Core Transfer, Dark JFM)

A Thousand Things by tickertape (M, 108k, wangxian, Canon Divergence, WWX Isn't Adopted by the Jiāngs, Developing Friendships, lots of OCs because I can't help myself and I love them, most of the canon cast make cameos at some point, miscommunication and misunderstandings (they’re idiots your honor), Nightmares, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Night Hunts, The Cloud Recesses Rabbits, Cloud Recesses Shenanigans, Slow Burn, like really slow burn, like if it was a bushfire it would take 8 years for it to burn through one (1) forest, the wangxian strangers to obnoxious best friends to obnoxious lovers pipeline, 'shitty cultivation world bureaucracy' is also a running theme, WWXHas a Fear of Dogs)

~*~

7. hello! I was hoping you could recommend fics where wei ying is taken hostage by people who hate lan zhan and lan zhan gets beaten up trying to save him. Maybe kind angsty and emotional? @ivybookworm

~*~

8. hi - for the next itmf, any fics that go on from that haunting almost last scene in the Untamed where LS, WN and LWJ all leave WY alone on the road. angsty ones that explore the idea of WY having no-one would be awesome. thank you so much for all you do! @oldoni

Story-Shaped by lingering_song (T, 13k, NHS & WWX, wangxian, Post-Canon, Chief Cultivator LWJ, Inventor WWX, Found Family, NHS needs a new hobby, And apparently that’s spoiling his Wei-Xiong, Mentioned Character Death, Alcohol, Protective NHS, WangXian Endgame, Not JC Friendly, Not particularly gentry sects friendly overall tbh) NHS finds WWX wandering about. Possibly not as angsty as requester is hoping for, but does address how bad an idea it is to let WWX wander alone

im reminded of a fic but cant recall the one. Wwx is travelling by himself, writing letters to LZ, he stays in a town and it ends up cursed. LZ and the juniors arrive to solve the case. Wwx is acting weird and hides his letters. The juniors read the letters and find out wwx is angry and full of resentment about how he's been treated. They find out the curse resonates from him. They talk it out to resolve matters. Any idea?

Rotten Work by ShanaStoryteller (Not Rated, 63k, WangXian, WWX & JL, Post-Canon, Protective WWX, Protective JL, Yunmeng Bros Reconciliation, Reluctant Matchmaker JL) similar to Story Shaped, but it's Jin Ling who finds wwx. // might fit the bill? It isn't overly angsty, but it does have characters remarking on how bad of an idea it is to let WWX go off on his own.

Judge Softly by Chrononautical (E, 32k, wangxian, LSZ & WWX, LQR & WWX, accidental voyeurism, non-consensual mind reading, oblivious WWX, bamf WWX, genius WWX, post-canon Fix-it, angst w happy ending, LQR tries)

the soft animal of your body by howodd5ever (M, 21k, wangxian, Post-Canon, Getting Together, WWX has feelings about having a body, sort of a case fic, a little bit of epistolary goodness, graphic descriptions of wounds, Feelings About Death, WWX gets seriously injured, quoting chinese poetry at each other as a love language, Art Embedded, wound-tending as an act of love, Bathing/Washing, the mortifying ordeal of being asked to stay, Sharing a Bed, Finding home, WWX's canonical alcohol abuse makes an appearance a bit)

my age has never made me wise by idrilka (E, 63k, wangxian, Post-Canon, Part-epistolary, Mutual Pining, Getting Together, Marriage Proposal, Homecoming, One Brain Cell WWX Strikes Again)

~*~

9. Itmf: what's a story premise/trope that's really hard to do well, and what stories have done them really well?

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10. Itmf, what's ur fav story prompt/initial premise that you've seen, regardless of the execution(s) of it?

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11. thank u for ur hard work! any fic recs of lan zhan hurting wei ying and he regrets it? thankss

Concord by Deastar (T, 41k, WangXian, Arranged Marriage, Gūsū Lán Sect Rules, Depression, Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending)

我的皇后是農民 | sowing seeds in the cold palace by sweetlolixo (E, 84k, WangXian, Imperial Palace, Emperor LWJ, Imperial Consort WWX, Farmer WWX, Angst, Romance, Wingman LJY, Wife-chasing-LWJ, Arranged Marriage, Best Boy A-Yuan)

Honesty is the Best Policy (Except if You’re an Asshole) by piecrust (E, 22k, wangxian, college/university au, porn w/ feelings)

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12. ITMF like, historical perspectives. Like people in modern times talking about/teaching about/learning about LWG, WWX, and possibly others as historical figures

Historical Precedents for the Concept of Time Travel and Transmigration by meyari (G, 21k, wangxian, Fluff and Crack, dubious academic writing, Historical Research, it's practically its own character in this, vague college setting, Modern, Good YZY, Good Person SS, Reincarnation) It's the second part of a series, the first one takes place in canon era, and the second one is about modern Wei Ying researching about historical Wei Wuxian for his thesis! I recommend reading the first part first (or at least looking at the premise) for much-needed context, and also because it's so good!

DID YILING LAOZU REALLY EXIST???: a Thread [1/?] by el_em_en_oh_pee (G, 6k, wangxian, Academia AU, Social Media, Research, Cartographic Mishaps, HOW IS CARTOGRAPHIC MISHAPS AN ESTALISHED TAG. NO HAPS WERE MISSED HERE I ASSURE U, Folklore, LJY's Hot Takes, Procrastinating Your Dissertation Proposal By Writing A 104-Tweet Thread: The Lan Jingyi Story, Mixed Media, POV Outsider, this is kind of an AU - Modern and kind of not???, it's a modern academic/researchy exploration of canon lol) it's AMAZING

For 12, there's also the one where Wangxian are majoring in cultivation in University and there's a talk about the meaning of Hanguang-jun compositions with several one liner "titles" like fried watermelon rinds are terrible or something like that. Can't mine it on my AO3 history but it's there, I know it's there!

🔒 Night of the Living History (an edutainment special!) by Aerlalaith (T, 51k, wangxian, Modern with Magic, Workplace Relationship, Fluff and Humor, Museums, living history, the author's feelings about, the edutainment industry, museum workers, Some Plot, Slice of Life, Injury, a minor haunting, the stakes are low, unless you're on the museum board i guess, WWX does not get an employee discount)

~*~

13. Hi! For the next ITMF, could anyone recommend wangxian fics that also feature LWJ & JC not getting along/being hostile toward each other? I'm talking like anything from them having disagreements to physically fighting to just outright hating each other.

Untitled tumblr fic where LWJ punches JC in the face (sharing my reblog as writer seems to have deleted their blog & I can't find it on their Ao3)

the only way out by cafecliche (T, 12k, wangxian, JC & WWX, JC & LWJ, Post-Canon, this is one part character study, one part comedy of errors, and one part fix-it, WWX is a people pleaser in this essay I will, my event planning experience rearing its head again, Podfic Available)

Wei Wuxian’s Kidnapping Back and Forth Farce (Starring Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji) by misscam (M, 5k, wangxian, JC & WWX, Humor, Switching)

some good mistakes by Lise (T, 18k, WangXian, JC & WWX, JC & LWJ, Road Trips, (terrible road trips), Post-Canon, Rescue Missions, Hurt/Comfort, ish, Awkward Conversations, POV JC, JC & WWX Reconciliation, (ish they’re working on it)) should be noted that the Wangxian is background and the primary focus is on LWJ and Jiang Cheng having lots of emotions coming out sideways at each other

~*~

14. Hey, guys. Hope you're having a great day. ITMF some Wen Ning POV/Wen Ning-centric stuff @thispatternismine

🔒 The Moon Reflected Upon Two Springs by Rubberduckieassassin (M, 2k, Post-Canon, Fierce Corpse WN, WN-centric, Farmer WN, WN Needs a Hug, Gusu Lan Juniors Dynamics, Good Kid LSZ, Good Kid LJY, Wen Remnants Mentioned, Burial Mounds Settlement Days Mentioned, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Five Stages of Grief, Melancholy, Building A Home, Family Feels, WN is learning how to 'live' again)

🔒 do not go gentle by RoseThorne (G, 684, WN & WQ, WN & WWX, LSZ & WQ, Canonical Character Death, Spirits, Ghosts, LWJ Plays Inquiry, Song: Inquiry, Protectiveness, Grief/Mourning, Love, Acceptance, Family, Angst, Post-Canon, POV Third Person, POV Wen Ning)

Tea with the Unquiet Dead by treemaidengeek (G, 1k, SL & WN, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, finding healing in unexpected places, Fierce Corpse Friends!)

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15. For the next ITMF, are there any fics where Lan Wangji comes to terms/wrestles with his darker sexual desires?

Come Back to Gusu… by AitchNKay (E, 90k, wangxian, WIP, Major Character Death, Fluff and Smut, Drama & Romance, Angst, Fix-It, Canon Compliant, Anal Sex, BL,, Switching, Bottom LWJ) Currently less than halfway through this one & it's a WIP so not sure how it goes, but has scenes of LWJ worrying about if his desires are too fucked up

💖 Magical Marriage Ribbons Series by starandrea (Varies, 1m, WangXian, Canon Divergence, Accidental Marriage, Fluff, Happy Ending, Telepathic bond, Kink Negotiation, Family Drama, Magical Pregnancy, Dual Cultivation, Shapeshifters, Modern with Magic, Immortality, Yilling Wei Sect) has LWJ continuously struggling to vocalize nearly ANY of his sexual wants even well after wangxian get together

~*~

16. Hi! ITMF your favourite recommendations with LWJ being petty and pouty (maybe bratty too?) - modern AUs and modern with magic are preferred. Thank you <3

Sorry! Just to add on to last ask petty LWJ ITMF ask --> Judgy LWJ reccs please.

the soft animal of your body by sysrae (T, 15k, wangxian, modern cultivation, Golden Core Reveal, Hurt/Comfort, Whump, Animal Transformation, Shapeshifting, Getting Together, Confessions)

with you, I am home by tellthemstories (M, 47k, wangxian, Modern Cultivation, fake dating for reasons, Meeting the Family, There Was Only One Bed, Casual Domesticity, wwx is oblivious in more ways than one, 'this fic is like emotional edging’, this comment sums up the entire fic)

i really want to know (who are you) by Stratisphyre (M, 19k, wangxian, LQR & WWX, Modern with Magic, Golden Core Reveal Single Dad WWX, Reasonable Authority Figure LQR, Allusions to violence and murder, Hospitalization)

The Twelve Days of Christmas, OR, How to Drive Your Brother-in-Law Insane by Following One Traditional Carol by Hobbsy3 (T, 3k, wangxian, Fluff, Crack Treated Seriously, Twelve Days Of Christmas, sending someone six geese and seven swans is definitely not an act of love, OR IS IT, Christmas Fluff, JC is So Done, LWJ is a Little Shit, Modern) Ooh! One more for 16 (it's a Christmas fic but features a very hilarious and petty Lan Zhan)

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17. Hi Hi i'm looking for two sets of fics a) lan qiren time travel fics where he's good and actually likes Wei Wuxian or atleast let's their relationship happen b) kid fics where wwx and lwj have a lot of children adoption or birth or a mixture of both but just them having a lot of children. @thatperson0-0

17A)

Lessons relearned by Iamnotawriter (T, 44k, WangXian, LQR & WWX, Not Madam Yu Friendly, Time Travel Fix-It, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Inventor WWX, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, No Golden Core Transfer, YZY Bashing)

in stillness, clear water to the bottom by Stratisphyre (T, 40k, CSSR/LQR/WCZ, NHS's Mom/Sect leader Nie/NMJ's Mom, Canon Divergence, Time Travel Fix-It, Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Threesome - M/M/F, Getting Together, Friends to Lovers, Background WangXian, Everyone lives/Nobody dies, (mostly), (not you qingheng-jun), Family feelings, Minor NieLan, Madam Lan lives, references to past rape)

17B)

❤️ Attempting the Impossible by Ariaste for williedustice (T, 36k, WangXian, JC & WWX, Post-Canon, Yunmeng Bros Reconciliation, Adoption, Family Fluff, Kid fic, Family drama, Fluff, 🔒[PODFIC] Attempting the Impossible by Ariaste by lunatique)

travelers through the empty gate by stiltonbasket (M, 107k, wangxian, royalty au, mistaken identity, emperor WWX, poor LWJ, forced marriage, (by LWJ himself), confused WWX, parenthood, misunderstandings, empress LWJ, fluff & humor, married life, angst w/ happy ending, WIP)

The Wei Family Series by Setari (T, 65k, wangxian, WWX & OCs, Kid Fic, Canon Rewrite, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Mpreg, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, Family Feels, POV Multiple, Next Generation Original Characters, Subverted Blame the Bastard Trope, Miscarriage Scare, Horny Teenagers, Hopeful Ending, Crack Treated Seriously, Oblivious WWX, Pining LWJ, Not As Dark As The Tags Make It Sound, 5+1 Things, set during the 13 years Wei Wuxian is dead, POV Original Character, Fix-It, Not Everyone Dies AU, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Work In Progress)

~*~

If you didn’t get an answer to your ask here, don’t forget to make use of @mdzs-kinkmeme and MDZS KINK MEME on Dreamwidth. Authors actually do use them for ideas. You may get what you order!***Your prompt doesn’t have to be kink! Fluff, crack, whatever - it’s all good!***

#wangxian #mdzs #wangxian fic recs #i'm in the mood for a fic #the untamed #wangxian fic search #wangxianficfinder #long post

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thepurplewombat · 7 months

Text

The Sin List

okay, so as we all know, it is vitally important that any character we stan must be morally pure and a good example to emulate in real life.

So I have decided to create a list of MDZS characters and their sins, which everyone can easily refer to in order to make sure that they are not following some horrible criminal or murderer!

This was a lot of work, but I'm very proud of it. Just doing my bit to ensure the moral purity of the fandom!

Wei Wuxian - Necromancy, disrespecting his elders, disrespecting the dead, killed Jin Zixuan, punched Jin Zixuan in the face one time, cannibalism, mind control, deviant sexual fantasies, trespassing, oath-breaking, urged Wen Qing to perform untested and possibly fatal operation on Jiang Cheng without his consent.

Lan Wangji - Defied his elders, broke the Lan Clan rules, sexually assaulted Wei Wuxian, deviant sexual fantasies, GBH (JGY)

Jin Guangyao - betrayed and killed Wen Ruohan, betrayed and killed Jin Guangshan, murder (NMJ), murdered assorted people, disrespecting the dead, assorted Spy Things for Wen Ruohan.

Nie Mingjue - Killed a lot of people during the war, verbally abused Nie Huaisang, burned Nie Huaisang's stuff, attempted murder (JGY), attempted murder (JGY), attempted murder (JGY), murder (JGY), killed the Mo family (well, his arm did anyway). In favor of the genocide of the Wen Remnants

Jin Guanshan: Sexual assault, rape, murder, ordering human experimentation with resentful energy to be done by his sect, played both sides during the war, didn't take responsibility for his children, ultimately responsible for getting WWX killed because he wanted the YTT so bad

Wen Ruohan: Attempted world domination, murder etc

Lan Qiren: has a stick up his ass

Su Minshan: Refused to die for the Lan, supported JGY in his efforts to prevent undead Da-ge from killing him. Also cursed Jin Zixun.

Sect Leader Yao: Weathervane politician

Jiang Wanyin: strangled Wei Wuxian that one time, keeps trying to talk to him but is way too tsundere about it, killed many during the war, didn't immediately forgive WWX for getting JYL killed, threatens to break Jin Ling's legs weekly.

Jin Ling: rude. rude rude rude. Also stabbed WWx one time

Lan Jingyi: not respecting his elders, rude rude rude. Also loud

JFM: shit dad, throw him in a volcano

Madame Yu: Angry mom, beat Wei Wuxian for things that weren't his fault, yelled at JC a lot, didn't appreciate JYL, very mean.

Lan Xichen: killed people during the war. Randomly starts doing flute solos in conversation

Meng Shi: was a prostitute. Told Meng Yao his dad was amazing and he should totally look him up later.

Madam Jin: awful person, she can go into the volcano with JFM. physical and verbal abuse (JGY)

Nie Huaisang: killed cats, nearly killed the juniors, let his sect fall into ruin, traded obscene materials, disrespecting his sect's traditions, lied to Lan Xichen to make him kill JGY

Wen Qing: went along with WRH's plans, performed surgery on JC without his consent

Wen Ning: Was part of the burning of LP

Mo Xuanyu: Summoned Satan to murder his relatives, harassed his brother

Jin Zixun: asshole, rude, broke the Geneva Convention on the ethical treatment of prisoners several times. Useless person

FOR THE SAKE OF SAFETY AND YOUR MORALS YOU ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO STAN THE FOLLOWING CHARACTERS

Jiang Yanli

Qin Su

Lan Shizui

#Wombat rambles #wombat's danmei hours #Jin Guangyao #meng yao #Lan Xichen #LXC #My favourite son-in-law #best boy lan Xichen #not a himbo #mzds #mo dao zu shi #grandmaster of demonic cultivation #wei wuxian #lan wangji #nie huaisang #nie Mingjue #NONE OF YOU ARE FREE OF SIN

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shanastoryteller · 1 year

Note

💕Happy Valentines Day! Heaven Officials Blessing or MDZS? 💕

Jin Ling has had it.

He loves his parents. He loves Uncle Wanyin. But they're all busy training for their own competitions and they've stuck him the Nie Huaisang as his coach, which he really thought was a joke up until the first practice. This is his first year competing as a senior skater and this is the best they can do? Come on.

"This is shit. Why did my old coach have to retire? I hate this," he complains to Jingyi.

"At least Lan Qiren isn't your coach," he points out.

He pauses, considering. "I guess it could be worse."

Poor Sizhui, honestly. Jingyi at least gives as good as he gets.

It's not like anyone can say anything about his effectiveness, with Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen fighting each other for the top spot every year. He's glad that Uncle Wanyin pair skates with his mom because he feels like the two of them on the ice would end in bloodshed. They hate each other for some reason that no one has ever bothered to explain to him.

"Why are you mad about Nie Huaisang anyway?" Jingyi asks. "He placed really well until he retired, and his footwork is great, unlike yours."

"Shut up about my footwork," he says automatically. "He's annoying, and I hate his choreography, it doesn't work for me at all. Screw this. I'm going to go to my uncle's and make him train me. It's not like he's doing anything anyway."

"Um, Jiang Wanyin is very busy practicing which is why you're with Nie Huaisang in the first place," Jingyi points out.

Jin Ling rolls his eyes. "Obviously I'm not talking about him."

"Mo Xuanyu doesn't even skate? And Meng Yao never even placed, which is why he's a manager," he continues.

"Uncle Yao had his own reasons for not placing," he says defensively, "but no, obviously not them either, are you being deliberately obtuse?"

"Are you?" Jingyi pokes him in the side. "Do you have another uncle?"

He has to be joking. "Yes? Obviously? I'm going to fly to Uncle Wuxian's and make him do it instead."

"Who?" he blinks.

Unbelievable. "My uncle? My mother's brother? Wei Wuxian?"

Jingyi's jaw drops before it snaps shut and then he's screeching, "YOUR UNCLE IS WEI WUXIAN? Like, the only person to ever beat out the Lan brothers Wei Wuxian, the one who won gold in the Grand Prix Final three years in a row and then disappeared into smoke Wei Wuxian?"

This is ridiculous. "He didn't disappear into smoke, he just moved to the coast. I don't know why you're acting surprised by this, I visit him every summer."

"You said you were going to visit your uncle in the summer!" Jingyi says accusingly.

Jin Ling blinks. "Yeah? I was."

Jingyi mimes strangling him then says, "Okay, you know what, we'll put that aside for right now. I fully support your decision to go and harass Wei Wuxian, who is apparently your uncle, and I'm coming with you."

"You are not, Lan Qiren would kill me," Jin Ling says, but Jingyi clearly isn't listening to him.

#prompt answers #prompts are closed #asks #anon #untamed #shout out to that figure skating untamed art i reblogged #it's been living in my head rent free

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mikkeneko · 3 months

Text

What we miss when we don't talk about friendship (in MDZS)

I'd like to open with the statement that this is not about shipping -- none of my thesis is to say "don't ship this" or "this ship isn't real." People can and have shipped whatever the hell they want and should continue to do so for as long as it makes you happy. It's not even a question of "sure you can ship it but it's not CANON," because the MXTX canon is wonderfully good at being ambiguous and supporting multiple interpretations.

What this thesis is to say is that some of these themes and motifs to explore are about friendship, and they don't tend to get talked about much, because people are mostly focused on the romantic and sexual dimensions of a dynamic. Romantic and sexual dimensions are great, but they don't annihilate or even subsume platonic dimensions -- yes, sometimes you can be a lover and a friend, but sometimes you can just be a friend and not a lover and that's no less important. As a post I saw recently said which stuck with me -- don't remember the poster, alas, but it was something in the vein of -- "it's not about the intensity of the relationship, but the flavor of it." Platonic character dynamics can be just as obsessive and consuming as romantic dynamics, they can be discussed and analyzed separately without needing to invalidate romantic and sexual dynamics.

So! That disclaimer aside, let's talk about: FRIENDSHIP IN MDZS, and what we miss when we don't talk about friendship as a dynamic in this story separate from romantic and sexual interest. Friendship shows up repeatedly in this story with its own sub-plots and arcs and undercurrents and hazards separate from the romance that's going on, and it's mostly going on with the Lans.

Part 1: Lan Xichen and friendship

A cornerstone of this analysis has to do with a meta post I read very early on in the fandom about the Lans when viewed through a Confucian lens. Lan Qiren in particular is a very, very Confucian character, and he raised his nephews to those traditions and values. The pertinent one here is the topic of the "Five relationships" which outline the relationships that a man of authority can expect to have throughout his lifetime: self to ancestors, self to descendents, self to authorities and subordinates, self to marriage partners, and self to friends. Each one comes with a set of strictures and requirements which when added up combine to a world that is very, very emotionally taxing and extremely short on interpersonal and emotional support. He is expected to obey and submit to guidance from his seniors, but he can't ask them for help. He is expected to lead and govern his subjects, but he can never be wrong or show weakness or doubt. It's especially important, I think, that Lan Xichen is raised to expect that even any romantic relationship he might have (read: marriage to a woman) would not actually be emotionally supportive to him in any meaningful way; it would be another set of obligations to uphold, another place he would be expected to be remote and poised and never show weakness or ask for help.

The exception is friendship. Friendship is the only relationship structure Lan Xichen can have in his life that has any hope of actually being nurturing and emotionally supporting to him, a place he can let down his guard and ask for help with the expectation of receiving it. It becomes very clear from very early on that friendship means everything to Lan Xichen as a character. He enters the story with a strong, supportive friendship with one of the only true peers a man of station can have (Nie Mingjue) and it's clear that this has formatively set his expectation of what a friendship can and should be. Lan Xichen really wants to be the Friendship Is Magic guy. He believes that friendship is the best way to solve problems, and that everybody would be able to solve their problems if only they had a friendship like his, and that belief is a lot of what runs him into a meat grinder later in the story. He thinks that Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao are capable of maintaining a friendship post-war, and does not understand why they cannot, and his attempts to friend-matchmake the two of them ultimately lead both to disaster.

Part 2: Lan Wangji and friendship

The header says Lan Wangji, but this is actually about Lan Xichen again, and about Wei Wuxian. A pretty common joke in the fandom is that Lan Xichen is "the #1 WangXian shipper," that he recognizes Lan Wangji's sexual and romantic attraction to Wei Wuxian from very early on and supports him in pursuing such a relationship. It's a nice joke, but I think it misses the mark, because the looming specter of their parents' disastrous and traumatic marriage means that Lan Xichen would never approach the idea of his brother entering into a romantic relationship so cavalierly. (Lan Qiren, in some ways, had a clearer notion of what shape Lan Wangji's interest in Wei Wuxian had the potential to be than Lan Xichen did, perhaps because he doesn't have the same obsession with friendship; if he has any close friendships of his own, we're not shown them.)

Lan Xichen is not encouraging Lan Wangji to have a romantic summer fling. Lan Xichen encourages his association with Wei Wuxian specifically because he thinks Lan Wangji needs friends. Not just in the sense of any parent or adult wanting their child to make friends, but specifically in the context of these restrictive hierarchical relationships that hem in their world. Lan Xichen is afraid that Lan Wangji will be alone, and emotionally starved, and have no one he can ask for help or rely on, because that is his experience of a world without friendship. (Lan Wangji, of course, is not in the same position as Lan Xichen because he has Lan Xichen to rely on.) Lan Xichen wants Lan Wangji to have the same kind of friendship that he himself has with Nie Mingjue, and he thinks that Wei Wuxian has the potential to be that kind of friend. That is the context in which he encourages their association, and tries to arrange for them to have time together, and to become closer; not as a potential romantic partner but as a steadfast emotional and logistical support through Lan Wangji's adult life.

If Lan Xichen knew that Lan Wangji would fall in love with Wei Wuxian (had already started to,) I'm not at all sure that he would have encouraged that. In pretty much any arc past the Lan Lectures, he doesn't, both because Wei Wuxian stopped being a good candidate for supportive friendship (he's clearly got too much of his own shit going on) and because he realizes that what is developing in Lan Wangji bears very little resemblence to his own relationships. He might not outright try to sabotage the relationship but he's clearly worried about its potential to bring disaster on Wangji -- and he's very correct to be worried, as it turns out.

Part 3: Lan Sizhui and friendship

So, All Of That Happens; Wei Wuxian dies, Lan Wangji is laid low for years and seems poised to grieve for the rest of his life; Nie Mingjue dies and takes Lan Xichen's support with him. Now we come to the present day, and the present day has Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi.

Let's take a moment to step back and ask from an analytical perspective: Why is Lan Jingyi, as a character, in the story? Assuming that in a novel as polished as MDZS, each element is included for good reasons. Why is Lan Jingyi in the story and why is he Lan Sizhui's best friend? In the new world we're introduced to, the Lan are already represented, and very positively represented by Lan Sizhui. Lan Jingyi provides a convenient avenue for both exposition-dumping and sass -- saying the things that everyone else is too polite to say -- but we could have gotten that through another character (Jin Ling also plays this role) or introduced another Junior who isn't Lan, like Ouyang Zizhen. Why is it important to the story that Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi are friends?

The Juniors in general represent hope for the world to change, hope for the new generation. In Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi, we see that the terrible loneliness that drove their seniors to disaster in the previous generation, is averted. Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi have a friendship that is close and true, and we are never given reason to doubt it. Their priorities are aligned; it's unlikely that Sect politics or personality conflicts will ever drive them apart. They have what Lan Xichen craved: a friendship that will support them through tragedy and disaster. Their friendship stands to demonstrate that in the new generation, things will get better.

#untamed meta #lan xichen #nie mingjue

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wangxianficrecs · 1 year

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Proud Author of a New Work

~*~

I just wrote a side fic to "the thread may stretch or tangle but it will never break," featuring Lan Xichen having a difficult conversation with Lan Qiren. I hope you enjoy! @rosethornewrites

Honor Good People

by RoseThorne

(Teen, <1k, wangxian, lxc & lqr, lxc & lwj)

Summary: Lan Xichen does not ask permission before adding Wei Wuxian to the family registry as Wangji’s husband. Lan Qiren disapproves.

~*~

(Please REBLOG as a signal boost for this hard-working author if you like – or think others might like – this story.)

#Author boost #Proud Author of a New Work #New Work by a Proud Author #Wangxian Fic Recs #Wangxian #The Untamed #MDZS #I HAVEN'T READ THIS YET #lan xichen #lan qiren #disobeying orders #brotherly love #gusu lan sect rules #supportive lan xichen #family #short fic <15k #Teen #Honor Good People #RoseThorne

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least-carpet · 2 months

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For the fandom trash questions, 13 and 14?

Hello very belatedly!!

13. What is your heart-breakingist head canon?

Part of the reason the Jin Sect was willing to hand Jin Ling over was that he basically became a sickly nightmare baby after the deaths of both of his parents. Losing both parents is potentially hugely traumatic, and Jin Ling went from a fat cheerful baby to an anxious baby losing weight in response, and one of the only adults who could carry him around without him howling uncontrollably was Jiang Cheng. (The other was his wet nurse, who was either a woman from the Yunmeng region or a woman from the Yu sect—either way, a woman who was there to be Jiang Yanli's support in the Jin sect. Given how many YMJ sect members and servants got massacred, probably the latter, especially since Madame Jin could have had her brought in—which would introduce different complications, of course.) Should have let xiao-shushu hold the baby (at least in CQL-verse), Jin Sect!

Faced with the decision between "potentially dead baby" and "baby temporarily living over there and extending our political influence," the Jin Sect picked the second option, and Jiang Cheng basically strapped Jin Ling to him and got back to work (unless the wet nurse had him). Frankly, this also helped keep Jiang Cheng alive, and is part of the reason those two are so tightly bonded to each other despite Jiang Cheng's whole deal.

If you want other sad headcanons, I also answered this here! And Jiang Cheng's crying room probably also qualifies.

14. What is ur crackiest crack ship?

Tied between ningcheng and zhancheng (usually as a precursor to zhanchengxian). Also now two of my main ships because I incepted myself into both of them.

OH WAIT, ALSO UNCLE4UNCLE (rencheng, Lan Qiren/Jiang Cheng). So far, I'm still kidding about this one (mostly) but if you make a good case, I'm willing to be persuaded!

#asks #fandom trash ask game #ask game #jin ling #jiang cheng #ningcheng #zhancheng #rencheng #uncle4uncle #mdzs +#least-carpet thoughts #a-ling and his jiujiu

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robininthelabyrinth · 6 months

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The Other Mountain - ao3 - Chapter 30

Pairing: Lan Qiren/Wen Ruohan

Warning Tags on Ao3

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“Let us begin,” Lan Zhengquan said. He had a look of mild superiority, as he often did. “As accuser, you have the right of first statement. What say you?”

Lan Qiren glanced around the room.

“If I am correct, elder, we all know what happened,” he said, then paused. “No, let me be clear: we know what you did in Xixiang, you and Lan Muzhi, your elder brother, and furthermore we know what others here joined in later to do as well, covering up what was done, whether in action or through their silence. Is that agreed?”

No one disagreed.

“In that case, we can skip the preliminaries. I assert that what you did was wrong, that it is a wrong that calls for justice, that justice was not served, that punishment is called for. Beyond that, I yield up the right of first assertion.”

The unhappy ghosts of the Xixiang mine, He Kexin herself – this was a matter involving death, and in such matters, there was no question of reparations, no possibility of mitigation through forgiveness by the victim, as Lan Qiren had accorded Wen Ruohan. Lan Qiren, as accuser, stood in the place of the dead, acting in their name, and it was his duty to bring their resentments into the cleansing light of day so that they could be extinguished.

Yielding the first assertion was a show of faith on Lan Qiren’s part. The first speaker traditionally had the advantage in terms of swaying the audience, setting the stage, and the rules granted that privilege to the accuser, as the person acting on behalf of the sect to enforce the rules. To give it up was to say that Lan Qiren believed that there could be no possible excuse for the conduct, that it was unquestionably wrong – that he thought his own position was so unassailable that he did not require any advantage.

There were murmurs in the audience, and Lan Zhengquan frowned.

Not all the murmurs were disapproving, though. Concerned, perhaps, but not negative, not disagreeing with Lan Qiren. There was also support there.

“Very well,” Lan Zhengquan said. Lan Qiren thought he might look a little more annoyed than he had at the start, but perhaps that was only his illusion; he was far from skilled at reading faces. “I assert that the circumstances in which the conduct at hand was undertaken are exculpatory.”

Lan Qiren had not been expecting that to be Lan Zhengquan’s rebuttal. He only barely resisted gaping at him. “You assert that you did not act wrongly?!”

“No. With such an outcome, it is clear that mistakes were made,” Lan Zhengquan said smoothly, brushing over kidnapping and murder with a politician’s slick gloss. “I mean only that the context justifies our actions. If you know the facts of what happened at the Xixiang mine, Qiren, you must know that we were deceived by others – our error was small, and theirs grave. It was the merchant sect we worked with that gave us assurances on one hand and committed foul deeds with the other. They are the ones that are truly at fault for what took place.”

“Unquestionably they are at fault as well,” Lan Qiren replied, releasing his instinctively clenched fists with an effort. A mistake – after everything that had happened, those innocent cultivators, those lives ruined and then lost, Lan Qiren couldn’t believe Lan Zhengquan had the gall to call all of that a mere mistake. “But I would say that it is wrong to say that they were ‘truly’ at fault, for their fault is no defense to your own conduct. You were the ones who acted in the sect’s name, who enabled them to act. It was for your benefit, as well as their own, that they committed their crimes, and so you, too, bear the burden of answering for them.”

“The punishment applicable to actions taken unknowingly is not of the same severity as for an act committed with knowledge and intent.”

Technically true. But…

“A certain level of recklessness rises to the level of intent, and becomes equivalent to intent,” Lan Qiren said. “You were the ones who put our sect’s name out there, choosing to engage in business, and so you bore the duty to ensure that you took all reasonable efforts to assure yourself that the business was good. In this case, your failure was self-evident: you entered a business that everyone knows to be incredibly unprofitable and obtained an impossible profit – you knew, or should have known, that there was something suspect in what was happening.”

“You say everyone knows the business of mining spiritual iron is unprofitable, but that is not true,” Lan Zhengquan replied, as smooth as ever. “We are cultivators, not businessmen. Our attention is focused on higher duties, not the dirt of the mundane. If they told us that they were acting in good faith, though not necessarily according to custom, how were we to know better? We were reasonably ignorant.”

“Ignorance is no defense. If you were going to go out into the world, to step voluntarily into the mundane, then you had a duty to know what you were getting into. You had a duty to understand what was being done in your name. You should have known, and if you did not know, you should have taken steps to familiarize yourself, to find out.” Lan Qiren shook his head. “You say you are not businessmen: fine, that is true, although I remind you that I too am a cultivator, no more a businessman than you, and yet I know enough to be suspicious of such circumstances. When you are surrounded by signs of danger and look away, you cannot plead mere ignorance.”

Lan Zhengquan pressed his lips together in annoyance. It had been a long time since he had been questioned, and it was starting to tell. “Are you accusing us of willful blindness? On what basis?”

“I am saying that when you step out of the Cloud Recesses to interact with the rest of the world, you bear the sect’s name and weight upon your shoulders,” Lan Qiren said. “And in so doing, it is your duty – your heightened duty – to ensure that your conduct is good, for when you stain your name you also stain ours.”

“You are side-stepping the issue. I assert to you that we were deceived. Are you saying that we must bear the punishment regardless?”

Saying “yes” would be the easy way out. Lan Zhengquan had after all admitted that he’d acted badly, even if he didn’t admit to having done it on purpose – accidental wrongdoing was still wrongdoing, still worthy of punishment, only not to the same degree as intentional wrongdoing. If Lan Qiren agreed with Lan Zhengquan’s statement now, he could end this debate, and everyone would be happy, the whole sect in agreement, feathers unruffled. Those responsible would receive at least some censure, if not exactly the one they deserved.

Do not tell lies.

It would be letting them off too lightly.

“I am saying that you are a sect elder of Gusu Lan, and that being a sect elder gives you great responsibility,” Lan Qiren said. “I am saying that even if you did not know the nature of the business you were entering into, it was your duty not to enter into a questionable agreement without verifying what you were doing. It was your duty not to allow our sect name to be used for evil. I am saying…I am saying that it would be one thing if you were truly deceived, elder, but it is another thing entirely to be deceived because you did not take adequate precautions.”

Lan Zhengquan hummed. “So you are saying our conduct is worthy of censure because we were insufficiently wary.”

He was again downplaying what had happened and what they’d done, making it seem less than it was. He knew that it was hard to condemn someone for merely making a mistake, for being a little careless, for not thinking things through…but that wasn’t what had happened here.

“I am saying you failed to meet even the lowest possible standard of care,” Lan Qiren said. “I am saying that you put our sect’s name out into the world blindly when you could have, and should have, availed yourself of the expertise of others who did know more than you. The sect has resources for precisely that sort of situation. Why not use those?”

Lan Zhengquan blinked.

Under normal circumstances, Lan Qiren might have missed it, the first physical response Lan Zhengquan had given to any of Lan Qiren’s arguments. But his anxiety had narrowed his whole field of vision, focusing on every aspect of Lan Zhengquan to look for clues as to how to continue the argument, studying his posture and his body language, the confined way he held himself, the tension in his shoulders…

Lan Zhengquan was not taking this as lightly as he pretended to be.

And Lan Qiren, intentionally or not, had hit on a good point.

Lan Zhengquan was quiet for a little longer than usual, thinking over what Lan Qiren had said, or else hoping that Lan Qiren would feel awkward in the silence and speak further – unintentionally obfuscating his own argument and allowing Lan Zhengquan to respond to whatever new thing he said, rather than the thing he didn’t want to respond to now.

Lan Qiren had no idea which one it was, but he wasn’t going to give him the victory either way.

He waited.

In the end, Lan Zhengquan said, slowly, “Those resources were not available to us at the time.”

That was what Lan Qiren had thought.

Known, really – but it was so much more effective to force Lan Zhengquan to admit it.

“Those resources were not available to you only because you acted in secret,” Lan Qiren pointed out. “If you had gone through the proper channels to obtain authorization from the sect for your actions, you would have had to submit a copy of the agreement to the records room. While it was being copied, it would have been reviewed by someone familiar with the business to ensure we were not being cheated, even if we had to bring in an expert from the outside to assist us in doing so. We would have had the opportunity to identify suspicious points in the proposal. That way, even if you yourself did not know enough to identify the problems, someone else would have. Disaster could have been averted.”

“Oh, yes, disaster averted if only protocol were followed, very easy, what a solution!” Lan Zhengquan said, shaking his head dolefully as if Lan Qiren had said something very stupid in suggesting that he and his brother had to follow the same rules set out for every person who wanted to use sect funds or the sect name for something. “Ah, Qiren! What you said only reveals the extent of your ignorance.”

Lan Qiren arched his eyebrows when Lan Zhengquan stopped there. “If I am ignorant, then I request that the elder educate me.”

Lan Zhengquan shook his head again. “Qiren – ”

“This is a debate, elder,” Lan Qiren said firmly. “A debate brings out the truth and examines it ruthlessly, without excuse. We are not dealing here in implications and innuendo, and suggesting that I should already know what you mean does not excuse you from explaining yourself when I request it. If you have an argument to make, make it outright.”

Lan Zhengquan sighed, acting as if Lan Qiren were behaving like a petulant child.

“Very well,” he said, and stepped forward, his hands behind his back in a mirror to Lan Qiren’s posture. A reminder, however unintentional, that they were both the same, both of Gusu Lan, raised in the traditions of their sect. “I do not wish to bring up a sore point, Qiren, but if you insist, then you leave me no choice. I remind you, and all those in this room, of a sad fact: the last sect leader, Qiren’s father, gave up on everything after the death of his wife.”

Lan Qiren did not flinch, but it was a close thing.

At least Lan Zhengquan, unlike Lan Qiren’s brother, did not explicitly specify out loud that Lan Qiren’s mother’s death had been caused by the infection she suffered giving birth to Lan Qiren – though the implication was understood all the same.

It was not Lan Qiren’s fault, of course. He had not chosen to be born. He understood that now, in a way he hadn’t when he was just a child. And yet the fact of it was still there, lingering in the background, ruining everything. It had been why Lan Qiren’s brother had initially disliked him, before his dislike turned to resentment and envy, and then through madness into jealousy and rage and hatred, and it had been the reason why a number of his teachers had remained distant and a little cold towards him no matter how well he performed. Whether deserved or not, for many of the older generation in the Cloud Recesses, Lan Qiren’s birth and therefore presence was directly correlated with not just the death of his mother, but the breaking of his father’s spirit, and the ensuing decline of their sect.

“Your father lived for nearly twenty years more, yes, but we all know that he did not really survive it,” Lan Zhengquan said, speaking as much to the room as to Lan Qiren. “He was lifeless, dead but still alive, as much a walking corpse as the evil spirits we fight on night-hunts, and yet he was sect leader, refusing to resign or retreat into seclusion. To get anything approved under his supervision verged on the impossible! He would respond only slowly, if at all, and often forgot that you had even asked. Under his watch, our sect missed out time and again on valuable opportunities, whether for honor or glory or even necessities, food and drink and cloth. It became necessary for us, in our role as sect elders, to go out to the world and start making agreements for the sect’s benefit…even though it was without authorization.”

And that was probably how it started, Lan Qiren thought to himself. Lan Muzhi had gone out and made one deal, and everything had gone fine, everyone doing well, benefits all around. So he had done it again, and again, and it accrued to both the sect’s benefit and his own personal benefit, and so he had forgiven himself for the violation of the rules. He had convinced himself that his behavior was fine. He’d convinced himself that everything was fine.

By the time he reached the disaster of the mine, he had grown too sure of himself – Do not be haughty and complacent. He had run into a situation he did not understand, and he had chosen to act regardless. He had not asked for help. He had not felt it was necessary…and then the situation had surpassed him.

“This is fault, yes; this is wrongdoing, yes,” Lan Zhengquan said. “But I put to you, Qiren, that the fault was minor, and the intent was good.”

And so, he implicitly suggested, the whole thing ought to be forgiven and overlooked.

“Even if the intent was good, the fault cannot be excused, and it was not minor,” Lan Qiren said fiercely. “Intent can start good, and become bad. Recklessness can become intent; good intent, with negligence, can become wrongful. To start a course of action that is unwise is a mistake, but to continue in it once you have gained knowledge that what you are doing is wrong is to turn that mistake into a misdeed.”

That was the core of it.

Anyone could make a mistake. Anyone could choose to trust the wrong person, look away from the wrong thing, follow their heart down a path they should not follow – and there was no limit on the magnitude of the mistake, either, although obviously mistakes that caused greater harm deserved greater punishment. But to persist in what you were doing, to insist that you were right when you knew you were doing wrong…

That was no longer just a mistake.

Such conduct was sanctionable even if it had initially been well-intentioned. Such conduct was sanctionable even if it was justifiable, even if it was understandable, even if what you had done had started out as only good. That was the misdeed, that was the hole in the boat they all shared, the behavior that had to be punished in order for their community to continue with righteousness and without hypocrisy.

If you truly believed you had acted correctly, you had to defend your actions. You had to be able to explain why your actions were the right ones. If you could not stand by what you had done, genuinely and truly, you had to accept that, and accept punishment.

That was what it meant to break a rule.

That was what rules were.

Like Lan Qiren, rules were rigid and inflexible. They were not principles, to be twisted and applied as the situation warranted. They had to be applied as they were, or they had to be changed – but they could not be avoided. You could not conceal the truth of your conduct from the light of day to avoid getting into trouble. You could not act wrongly, knowingly act wrongly, and then refuse to accept the consequences.

No matter who did it.

If it was Wen Ruohan, or even if it were one of his beloved nephews, that did the wrong thing, then Lan Qiren would ask them if they believed in what they were doing, if they thought they could defend it, and if not, he would ask them to accept punishment. If they could not, or would not, accept punishment, and Lan Qiren nevertheless determined in his own judgment that their conduct constituted a wrong, then he had only two choices: to condemn them and require them to pay the price, or else defend them and submit himself to the sect’s punishment. Because separate and apart from anything his loved ones did, he had to look to his own conduct, and if he couldn’t defend his conduct to himself, then he, too, would need to account for it.

No matter the reason, you had to pay your own debts.

Those were the rules.

Maintain your own discipline.

Now it was Lan Qiren’s turn to take a step forward, keeping an eye on Lan Zhengquan as he did.

“Let us concede for the moment, elder, that you and your brother entered into that initial agreement in good faith, although in ignorance,” he said. “Let us accept, for the sake of argument, that your initial recklessness was more akin to negligence, driven by the circumstances, than it was to malintent. But that only explains the beginning. What, then, of what happened later?

“Surely you became suspicious when you began to receive unreasonable profits, which no one else could obtain. Surely, when you became aware that there were cultivators working in the mines, when you looked around and saw that there was no war, no famine, nothing that would explain why they would take on such difficult and dishonorable roles for such low wages when there were other options available, you must have realized that something had to be happening that was not right.

“At that point, you either knew, or had the duty to find out what was going on, what was being done in your name. To refuse to find out when faced with obvious signs of something wrong is to be willfully blind. Yet even that understates the issue here. Here…I say that you knew, elder. You knew what was happening, and yet you continued to do nothing, even as people were suffering. Why not act then? Why not submit the matter to the sect then?”

The answer was pride, of course. Pride and arrogance, an unwillingness to admit fault, to accept punishment for what they had done wrong.

Lan Zhengquan’s eyes narrowed.

Another point to Lan Qiren.

“At the time, my elder brother believed that it was a matter he could handle on his own,” Lan Zhengquan finally said. It was a weak defense, and he knew it. “He was wary of staining the sect’s face with his mistakes, particularly when he thought he had the chance to correct them. He did not want to draw away the resources of the sect to something he believed, even if incorrectly, was under control.”

“That goes well beyond being merely incorrect, elder,” Lan Qiren said. “Your brother was wrong.”

Lan Zhengquan bristled. “Is that not what I said? He made a mistake in judgment.”

“There is a difference between a mistake and a crime, elder. Innocent life is paramount. Your brother found out that innocent cultivators were being forced into labor to satisfy his own greed, and he did nothing. The moment he found that out, the moment he found out what was being done in our sect’s name, that was when mistake became crime! When he put profit and gain over doing the right thing, despite having found out that our sect, our Gusu Lan, had been used to justify kidnapping and enslavement – ”

“Do not exaggerate!”

“I am not exaggerating! How else should I describe cultivators taken from their homes and forced to labor, not permitted to leave or refuse, and for no reason other than another’s profit? There is no indication that those cultivators were criminals condemned to labor, no indication that they had willingly sold themselves and traded labor for shelter, no indication that they were willing at all. To stand aside when you see such a thing is bad enough, but to enable it, and find that you had enabled it, and then to still do nothing is a crime. It is not a mistake, and there is no excuse.”

Lan Zhengquan was shaking his head, but Lan Qiren barreled onwards.

“When your brother found out what was happening, he should have known he had gone too far, and he should have taken immediate action to rectify it, even if it meant submitting the matter to the sect and seeking aid – but he did not. Whatever excuses you make for him, you cannot defend that, elder! Your brother compromised his values and closed his eyes for the sake of salvaging his own pride, for the sake of refusing to admit he had erred. I tell you, it was that which enabled everything that happened later – everything that happened, happened because Lan Muzhi valued covering his tracks over seeking justice.”

“He was protecting the sect!” Lan Zhengquan snapped. “Do not speak of what you do not understand, Qiren. The compromises he made were reasonable in light of the circumstances at the time. We cannot all be pristine and perfect, and neither should we be expected to be.”

“No one is demanding perfection. There are places where one must compromise, to be sure, but after a certain point, you have not merely compromised your values, you have given them away.”

The two of them locked eyes, each glaring at the other.

“Our sect rules guide us all to the right path and show us how to walk, but only we can decide to follow it,” Lan Qiren reminded Lan Zhengquan. “It is not a crime to go astray, although it still calls for punishment. But if we wander astray, it is our duty to return to the right path. To go astray and then to keep going…that is wrong. I put it to you, elder, that our ancestors would not have put up our Wall of Discipline and laid out the rules if they believed that we could make compromises as great as this.”

Lan Zhengquan was silent.

This time, Lan Qiren chose to interpret it as him giving up his right to reply, and so he continued: “This is the crime I assert: with such rules as we have, upon discovering what was going on, Lan Muzhi could not in good conscience have refrained from immediate action to stop what was happening, even if it meant revealing what he had done. He was obligated to do that, but he did not. He did nothing – but in doing nothing, he acted. He allowed and condoned the kidnapping of cultivators for the sake of satisfying greed, he countenanced forced labor, he permitted it to continue, and in the end, it resulted not only in suffering, but in death. The death of innocents, which call for justice. Lan Zhengquan: I put it to you that this is the case. Do you admit it?”

Lan Zhengquan would not admit it. Lan Qiren could tell, just from looking at him, that he wouldn’t.

He hadn’t gotten through to him.

This wasn’t working. Lan Qiren was not enough; his words, though well-meant and earnest, were too clumsy, too weak, too monotonous and too convoluted. He was arguing, trying his best, but he wasn’t succeeding, he wasn’t making his point.

Lan Zhengquan would not admit that he and his brother had been wrong.

Lan Qiren could only hope that the other sect elders, silent witnesses all, were more open-minded.

“I grant to you that my brother made mistakes,” Lan Zhengquan finally said, sounding begrudging, but in fact making no real concession. It was the same place he had started the debate, willing to admit to a mistake but not to a crime, downplaying what they had done, downplaying the direct causation between their actions and inaction and the results of what happened. “Perhaps you are right, and he should have submitted the matter to the sect earlier, and perhaps if he had done so, disaster might have been averted at the time. We will never know. But…even if that is so, he is dead, and the dead cannot be punished, not even in the name of justice.”

“He is dead, but you yet live, elder,” Lan Qiren countered. “You, and all those who acted with you, whether affirmatively or passively, to help cover up your brother’s crimes. Tell me, elder: even if it was your brother’s order to clean up the mine, did you not have a duty yourself to act at that time to stop it? Did you not equally bear the weight of responsibility to undertake justice and uphold morality? Is that not a burden we all bear, to act as soon as we know a wrong has been committed and to seek to right it?”

Suddenly the room was full of whispers.

It was startling, knocking Lan Qiren out of his intense focus on Lan Zhengquan alone. Everyone had been so silent until now, as they rightfully should be under the rules of the debate, and now they were all talking, although not loud enough to fully interrupt…why now?

Had they not realized what it meant, when Lan Qiren had called for punishment?

Had they not realized that the subject of this trial was not merely the actions taken ten years ago by Lan Muzhi, who was indeed far past the reach of justice, but the actions subsequent to that: the deaths that had been caused and not remedied, the laying down of suppression arrays, the conspiracy of silence that had protected them all?

Did they not realize that what was on trial here was their own conduct? Their own complicity?

Lan Zhengquan’s eyes glittered, but his composure did not break.

“Permit me a question before I answer you, Qiren,” he said, slow and steady, calm as ever. He had always been an excellent politician, far better than the often-tempestuous Lan Qiren. “From whom did you hear the story of what happened? How did they know about it? Was their information first-hand, or second?”

Lan Qiren paused, wondering at the nature of the question. It felt almost like some sort of trap.

“I am not sure,” he said, though he supposed it was technically second-hand: with the merchant sect dead, with the victims dead and their ghosts banished, the only real witness left alive was likely Lan Zhengquan. Lan Zhengquan…and He Kexin, who was now dead, and from whom Lan Qiren’s brother had undoubtedly heard the majority of the facts. “But no matter whatever else is between us, I do not doubt my brother’s word.”

Silence again.

He’d played a strong hand there, or so he thought. The Lan sect believed in hierarchy, and the sect leader stood at the top of that hierarchy, above even the sect elders, worthy of respect and of deference. Moreover, Lan Qiren’s brother, of all people, had lost so much on a personal level to the events of the mine and its sequelae – He Kexin’s forced confinement, his own seclusion, his giving up of sect leadership, not ever knowing his children, and perhaps even his madness – that it was difficult to doubt that he would convey the facts as best he knew them.

Surely no one would question the facts as he had presented them. Surely…

And then Lan Zhengquan smiled.

“You have it just right,” he said. “You do not doubt your brother’s word – and neither did I doubt mine.”

Lan Qiren had made a mistake.

He could see nods starting around the room. People were being drawn over to Lan Zhengquan’s side, agreeing with him, everyone thinking of Do not disrespect the elder and Do not fight with family and all the rules around familial harmony. Harmony is the value…

It felt like an excuse, and it was an excuse. But it was a good excuse: Do not blame me, they were all thinking, because I only did what I was asked to do, asked by someone I trusted. Surely you cannot hold that against me.

Lan Qiren could.

Lan Qiren would.

He Kexin’s main flaw was always that she trusted her friends too much, He Zhong had said. She never looked, never questioned, no matter what signs there were that something was off.

Should she have had to pay for her trust, while his sect could be excused for doing the same?

That would be unfair.

Yet it was a good argument, or at minimum a compelling one. It was very much like Lan Zhengquan’s initial claim that he and his brother had been deceived, that their intent was good and their actions only misguided, not wrong, but where there was an obvious need to distrust strangers, one could not say the same for family. You were supposed to be able to listen to family, to trust family, to have faith in family.

To be deceived by family was terrible, yes, but it was not a crime. It was justifiable.

Now it was Lan Qiren who was forced into what felt like the weaker argument: “The instinct may be to obey family, and to trust in their good faith, but the circumstances were too dire for that. They were such that you had an overriding duty to righteousness,” he said. “When the moral obligation to act is clear-cut, to act righteously is a stronger rule than those dictating obedience.”

“Ah, but it is precisely that which is the issue! The conjunction of the rules is such that we are encouraged to err in favor of obedience when matters are unclear,” Lan Zhengquan countered. “Hierarchy begets order and maintains it. You say that the moral obligation was clear-cut, but you speak with the clarity brought about by hindsight. You were not there at the time. At the time it was all unclear. In such unclear circumstances, would you not yourself follow your brother…?”

“No,” Lan Qiren said honestly, and for whatever reason that seemed to cut through Lan Zhengquan’s smugness.

It seemed to cut through the room, too, and suddenly Lan Qiren knew what he had to say.

“I do not trust my brother,” he said, and Lan Zhengquan stared at him, incredulous. Perhaps he hadn’t expected Lan Qiren to admit to his feud with his brother – or perhaps not so calmly, without anger or rancor, not losing his composure or flinching. “I do not trust him, but that is because he has forfeited the right to my trust. It is my duty as a junior to follow in the steps of my elders, to listen to their guidance, but only when their guidance directs me on a path that is right. It is the duty of the elder brother to protect and guide the younger, to show the right path, to act righteously and to ask only righteous things. My brother failed in that duty to me. And so too, it seems, did your brother fail in that duty to you.

“Elder, our rules are about moderation, about balance. Do not disrespect the elder is only valid provided that the elder also fulfills do not disrespect the younger. Your brother, in instructing you to condone or carry out such obviously wrongful acts, abjured his duty to you. He perverted the responsibility that we have, all of us, as teachers and guides to those who are junior to us. But while the sins of the student may be the fault of the teacher, fault does not absolve the sin. Even if you were only following your brother’s orders, you still did what you did. You still committed the wrongful act.”

Lan Zhengquan didn’t like that. Lan Qiren hadn’t expected him to. It was just like his own brother had behaved, denying his own culpability because he had someone else to blame, unwilling to cast off his delusions and admit the truth that he had been the one to wield the blade that ended He Kexin’s life, that it was him and no one else.

In the same way, Lan Zhengquan was naturally reluctant to concede the truth that it had been his order that had led to those deaths. His brother’s by genesis, perhaps, but carried out by him.

He sought to rally: “Again, you speak without understanding. The circumstances were as I said unclear, the balance weighing towards obedience – ”

“But you still did it,” Lan Qiren interjected. It was improper debate technique to interrupt, but he thought the point he had to make was worth it. “In the end, you did it. The decision to act may have been influenced by your obedience to your elders, but the decision in the end was yours. The act was yours, and so too is the crime, and the punishment as well. You were no child, elder, to be excused because you lacked knowledge and understanding of what you did. This all happened only ten years ago; by then, even I, the youngest of all of you here, was already a man full grown. You were an elder of the sect. You bore the heaviest burden to act righteously…you all did.”

“Do you condemn us all, then?” Lan Zhengquan asked. He was scowling. “You said before that all those who acted in concert to carry out what happened, or who passively acted to cover it up, are implicated in the wrongdoing. What of those whose only actions were far later, when everything was already done? Those whose actions were taken to protect the sect from revelations that would only bring us all harm…? By that brush, you would paint us all as involved, every one of us. We rise and fall together.”

“Punishment should be doled out in proportion to fault,” Lan Qiren said, and Lan Zhengquan looked almost shocked when he realized that Lan Qiren was agreeing with him, that he did mean to condemn them all. “Light to those least involved, harshest to the worst offender. But punishment must still be meted out, to each their own measure, each one owning what they did…but surely you must realize that your own fault is compounded by the involvement of others? It was you, elder, that brought in the rest, implicating them. You were the one who took steps to cover up what was done. You were the one who got people involved, staining their own hands, before they found out the full truth of what they had gotten involved with. You were the one who led the rest into complicity, step by step.”

“You condemn me first, then, above all the others.”

“I do. You were the one who mixed private and public interests, you who used your position as sect elder to lead the others. Do not sow discord; do not cause damage. Elder, please, look at everything that has happened, everything that resulted. Do you not see what you have done to our sect?”

“I have helped our sect,” Lan Zhengquan said. He seemed offended. “How can you say I mixed private and public interests? In this case, they were one and the same, but that is not my fault…I have served our Gusu Lan faithfully for so many years. You claim I am due punishment for what I did, Qiren, but even if we accept all your arguments, even if you condemn us all, then can you truly say that I escaped punishment? Surely you know what I have given up. I have not left the Cloud Recesses in so long…”

“Do you think you did wrong?”

Lan Zhengquan stopped and frowned at him.

“You refer to accepting my arguments, you refer to me condemning you,” Lan Qiren said. “You say that your brother made a mistake, as if such horrible things can be papered over as a mere mistake. You say that it was not your fault that your interests happened to coincide with the sect, you say that you were merely obeying instructions, you say that your brother had good intent, that his actions and yours were justifiable…Lan Zhengquan, to be justifiable is not to be just.”

He took a step forward.

Lan Zhengquan, startled, took a step back.

“Let us speak bluntly as to what is at issue here. Cultivators were taken away from their homes and forced into labor, and then killed. That was not a mistake, elder. Once you acted knowingly to enable it, it was a crime.” Lan Qiren shook his head. “You were involved in – no, you committed a crime, elder. You say you accepted punishment, but it was one that did not impede your life in the slightest. It did not impinge on your ability to act as sect elder or to guide our sect. Your restriction kept you from causing future harm in the same manner, yes, but only by preventing you from ever being asked the same question again. And that matters, because if you were asked the same question…would you not give the same answer?”

Lan Zhengquan’s face was ugly.

“You would,” Lan Qiren concluded. “Because you still think you were right.”

Silence.

Lan Zhengquan didn’t deny it.

He didn’t deny it.

Lan Qiren shook his head, almost disbelieving. “How can you think such a thing?” he asked, and meant the question genuinely. “How? How can you think that you acted rightly? With everything that it cost…”

“You are one to speak of cost,” Lan Zhengquan growled, his voice tight and angry. All those arguments, that haughty sneer of the politician, always above it all – it was breaking now, his fury cutting through his cool demeanor and revealing the self-righteousness lay beneath. “You come here to call for punishment, call for justice. You look down at us all for not having done enough, even though we have already given up so much to atone for those mistakes. We have suffered so much. Not just me, with my restriction, but the sect itself…think of your own brother, Qiren! The finest light of our sect, snuffed years before his time, who because of that event was forced into seclusion, a confinement that broke him – ”

“Yes, let us speak of that,” Lan Qiren said, his own ire riled. “Let us speak of seclusion, and confinement. Let us speak of He Kexin, who you imprisoned without a trial – ”

“She didn’t deserve a trial!” Lan Zhengquan roared. “She killed my brother!”

“Ridiculous,” Lan Qiren snapped. “That’s not the truth, and you know it! Your brother died of a qi deviation, brought on by his own misdeeds!”

“She aggravated it, she caused it,” Lan Zhengquan insisted. “My brother was trying to do the right thing, to fix it all with minimal harm, preserving the sect’s reputation. Yes, perhaps he had gotten too involved, perhaps he had let it go too far, let the circumstances get beyond him – yes, maybe even he was culpable for not having raised the alert and confessing when perhaps he should have. But that is only a mistake, not a crime! He was going to fix it.If she hadn’t tormented him, it would have all been resolved. If he hadn’t died, if I hadn’t been summoned away, those cultivators wouldn’t have all died, they would have been paid and sent on their way, and it would all be over. It was her fault, and so she rightfully bore the punishment for it!”

(No, you did it. You killed her, not me. It wasn’t me…)

“You cannot use a punishment inflicted on an outsider to absolve crimes committed by our sect,” Lan Qiren said coldly. “He Kexin was not surnamed Lan, she was not an outside disciple of our sect, she never submitted voluntarily to be bound by our rules. Even if she paid for her own crimes, that would be a completely different thing from our sect paying for ours. For what the sect did through you, what you and your brother did in our Gusu Lan sect’s name. For kidnapping, for forced labor, for enslavement and for murder – ”

“It wasn’t – ”

“It was! Unlawful and unjust, it was murder, slaughter pure and simple, and it was at your command! He Kexin may have been far from guiltless, but she did not do that. She participated, she shut her eyes, willfully blind, but she did not kill. She did not kill those cultivators in the mine, and she did not kill your brother, either. Her punishment should have been in proportion to her crime! It should have been imposed following a proper trial – a trial you never gave her, because you weren’t punishing her for what she did! You were punishing her for being a witness!”

They were shouting now, both of them, standing right in front of each other. Decorum had long been forgotten, propriety set aside, the subject too sore for either of them to maintain their composures.

“That’s not what happened!” Lan Zhengquan insisted. “You don’t understand, you weren’t there! It was complex, it was complicated, it was murky. Once we realized we had gone too far, we were trapped in a mire with no light, no reason, no guide. We did the best we could with what we knew, I did the best I could, and there was nothing better I could have done!”

“You could have told the sect! You could have submitted yourself to punishment back then, you could have both submitted, and the sect would have acted at that time to solve it. You did not do so. You refused, because to do that would be to admit that you erred, that you were wrong. You refused, and you still refuse today. You still think you are right! How can you claim that punishment has been imposed when you have not accepted the truth?”

“Because the truth is that I was right!” Lan Zhengquan shouted, finally breaking. “The truth is that the sect comes first, our Gusu Lan sect comes first, before anything else, before all other considerations – and yes, before the lives of those other cultivators, rogue cultivators and small sects, meaningless in comparison to our great Gusu Lan. If my brother’s actions were found out, it would have shamed us all! It was right to do what we could to erase the evidence. The rules do not demand the truth!”

“But they do demand justice! To say that the reputation of the sect is what is at issue is a lie, for what you were really trying to protect was your own reputation. The sect might have been embarrassed, yes, but it would have been excused if we had tried to stop it as soon as we learned of it; if you had only come and confessed to the sect, the sect’s reputation could have been salvaged. But coming forward would have cost you your own, and so you didn’t. Elder, you put your desire to be right above the rules and used it to justify ordering the death of innocent cultivators, to justify the deliberate implication of the other elders in helping you cover it up, the unlawful imprisonment of He Kexin without a trial, even letting my brother give up his future and go mad in seclusion. All that, because of what you did, and you still say it was justified – ”

“How dare you! You, Qiren, who know nothing! How dare you come to judge? You were not there, you do not understand! You, you who put yourself above us all, you who alone claim to be innocent, to wash your hands of the whole matter – ”

“I do not need to wash my hands!” Lan Qiren shouted. “I have no need, because I was not there, because I did not know, because no one told me. Tell me, Lan Zhengquan: if you were so sure that what you did was right, then why did none of you tell me about it?!”

Lan Zhengquan –

Lan Zhengquan opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“I – ” he said, trying to say something, but tripping over his words, stuttering in a way he had not done in all the years Lan Qiren had known him. “I – that is – it was because of you, of course! Because of who you are, because of what you are, the way you behave, the way you’ve always behaved. You’ve always been the worst sort of stick in the mud, rigid, inflexible, unable to compromise, incapable even of understanding – ”

“We didn’t tell you because we knew you would condemn us.”

Lan Qiren startled, having not expected someone else in the room to speak.

It was old Lan Jinyan who had spoken. He was still leaning heavily on his cane – heavier now, somehow seeming to be older and more tired than he had been before, as if merely listening to the argument had aged him another ten years.

“That’s the truth,” he said, his voice flat and quiet, but somehow still ringing in the sudden silence of the room, a stark contrast from the yelling from only a few moments earlier. “That’s the truth, and there is no avoiding it. You would have condemned us, and you would have been right to do so, as you are right to do so now. You have always been rigid, Qiren, rigid but true. You have always tried to live up to the rules, to speak for righteousness, no matter the cost.

“Even those of us who were only involved in this matter tangentially, whether those of us who made the arrays for suppressing the ghosts or those of who did not speak up against He Kexin’s continued confinement even once we discovered that Muzhi died of a qi deviation…we told ourselves that telling you would only cause a fuss, a disturbance, that it would make our sect lose face. That’s what we told ourselves. But we were lying, and the rules say do not tell lies. Every time we chose not to tell you, we lied. We were not acting as sect elders should, prioritizing the sect’s benefit over our own. We were choosing easy silence over the difficult truth. Be hard on yourself. Maintain your own discipline. We had a duty, and we failed it.”

“That’s not the case,” Lan Zhengquan protested, finally over his own startlement at an interruption from outside the debate, which neither of them had declared was concluded. “Elder – ”

Lan Yuanbai reached out and put his hand on his arm. “Enough,” he said. “Enough, Zhengquan. Do not say more.”

“I am not done. I have more to say.”

“No, you do not.” And that was Lan Bocheng, stepping forward, shaking his head. “Zhengquan, it’s over. You lost.”

“I refuse to acknowledge it!”

“The sect acknowledges it,” Lan Bocheng said gravely, and when Lan Qiren looked around the room, he saw that people were nodding in agreement, shame and acceptance writ on all their grim faces. “If you do not…Qiren is right, Zhengquan. You mixed public and private interests, equated your interests and your brother’s with those of the sect, and put all that above our principles, thinking that preserving your reputation was more important than the loss of innocent lives. We followed you this far, Zhengquan, because we believed in you…but in the light of debate, we saw our self-deceit for what it was.”

He inclined his head to Lan Qiren, who stared at him blankly for a couple of moments before inclining his head back, barely able to believe what was happening.

It had worked?

The sect elders – they had accepted what he had to say? They had listened?

I am myself, and that is enough, Lan Qiren had said at the start of this, even though he hadn’t really believed it. But somehow, despite it all, against all the odds…it really had been. He had been enough.

A crime of ten years’ standing was going to be resolved.

His sect –

His sect was going to change.

He’d changed his sect. Using his words, his best efforts, Lan Qiren had changed the minds of his sect elders, and they were going to change in response. He had shown them the truth, and they had accepted it, they had agreed with him, and they were finally, finally going to do what was right.

It was change. Change of the sort he had always hated, that had never been good for him. But for once, for once, it was a good change, a necessary change. A change he himself had authored, rather than suffered – a change for the good, for the better, rather than for the worse.

Lan Qiren put a hand up to his chest, struck by the sensation of suddenly falling out of his mind and back into his body. That part was normal, after a fierce debate, but he noticed that he felt lighter, somehow, fresher and brighter – stronger.

At first he thought it was merely an illusion brought on by his joy, but upon a closer inspection he realized that it wasn’t, that he was actually stronger than he had been before. It seemed that all that extra power from his dual cultivation with Wen Ruohan had been processed and absorbed by his golden core during the debate. It made sense, of a sort, since the Lan sect’s cultivation style was not merely swords and music, but also encompassed philosophical contemplation. By some standards, debate could be considered a type of contemplation…

At least he wasn’t glowing again.

(He hoped he wasn’t glowing again. Surely someone would have said something…?)

“There is of course the matter of the nature of the punishment that is yet to be determined,” Lan Jinyan said mildly, and the others in the room were nodding along. “Now that fault has been settled, and all are agreed, we must decide what must be done – ”

“I should think that obvious,” someone said – Lan Yiran, maybe, or Lan Yichi, Lan Qiren thought. It was difficult to tell the twins apart. “This is a matter that resulted in death. There can be no reparations made for death, only punishment, and so the punishment must be increased as a result of that. As the leader and primary perpetrator of what occurred, as well as someone who is unwilling to admit his fault, Lan Zhengquan must be confined, or else…”

He trailed off, but they all knew what he meant.

Lan Zhengquan did, too.

“Or else killed,” he spat out, mouth twisted into a grimace full of bitterness, seeming to still not believe he had lost. His eyes looked wild, now, and reddened at the edges in a way that warned that he might himself not be too far from risking a qi deviation himself. Was this what had lain beneath his cool composure this entire time? “Diseased flesh cut away to save the rest, is that it? The thorn has dug so deep, it can only be excised by being destroyed?”

“Death is a serious penalty,” Lan Qiren said with a frown. “It would not and should not be imposed without considerable thought and consideration. Just as He Kexin deserved a trial, so too do you. You must not be held accountable for your brother’s actions, only your own, and all mitigating elements must also be counted. It has not yet been decided – ”

“It will be that way in the end,” Lan Zhengquan spat at him. “I will not accept any other punishment! I will make you own your decision, Qiren, all of you, the whole lot of you – I’ll make you carry it even if it costs me my life to do it! I will not enter seclusion voluntarily or involuntarily, I will not let you confine me, let you lock me away to appease your own conscience, so that you can all laugh at me behind your backs for everything you were willing to consent to up till now…!”

Someone did him the mercy of knocking him out.

Unnerved, Lan Qiren looked at Lan Zhengquan as he was caught by the arms of his peers and gently moved over to one of the benches to be laid down. Was that how Lan Zhengquan had seen his brother’s seclusion? As some sort of farce, a mistake, a decision by the sect rather than the sect leader? Did he see that as the price of appeasing his conscience for the mine? Had he been laughing at Lan Qiren’s brother’s foolish willingness to sacrifice his own future to keep He Kexin alive, to keep the sect from executing her for a crime she had not committed?

“What of the rest of us?” someone asked, and Lan Qiren tore his attention away and back to the ongoing conversation. “We, too, are deserving in punishment, for what we did. Passivity in the face of crime is not as great a sin, but it is still complicity…”

Agreement all around, most of it shamed and guilty.

“We must reflect on what we did and why we did it,” Lan Jinyan announced. “We thought we were acting for the sect, but in truth we were acting for ourselves, for our own reputations and to preserve our own moral influence as sect elders – surely, for the punishment to fit the crime, it must involve yielding up the power that led us astray. Seclusion, for some, to contemplate what we have done; good deeds for others, night-hunts and other actions to improve the world…”

“That’s ridiculous,” someone else protested, and even Lan Qiren was staring, wide-eyed and shocked, at the sheer boldness of such a proposition. It did fit the crime, to be sure, but…all of them? “We can’t all give up our positions! Who would be left to run the sect?”

That was a very good point.

“Running the sect isn’t the duty of the sect elders, it’s the duty of the sect leader,” Lan Jinyan said. “Sect elders are meant to advise, to teach, to support – to offer the weight of their experience and knowledge. But if we have lost our own ways, we cannot offer that guidance with good faith and unburdened heart. It would not break the sect to be without us for a year or two.”

“But there isn’t a sect leader right now! He’s still missing! And even if he returns, what sort of sect leader will he be? He already led us into war…”

“Not just war,” Lan Qiren said heavily, and reached up to rub his eyes. “I say this to you, sect elders, in the privacy of the Hall of Serenity, and it must not go any further beyond these walls, but my brother has gone mad with grief. He did not merely start a war and then lose it. He never intended to win it. He lured the cultivation world to Xixiang, and then deliberately incited the destruction of the mountain there in order to release the ghosts that were trapped in the mine, seeking public punishment for our Gusu Lan sect’s actions.”

The room was full of talking as people digested that, but no one doubted him. He’d earned that much respect from them, at least.

And as for the fact that his brother had been trying to use those ghosts to destroy the sect itself, to make them all complicit and guilty so that they would break their own rules…well, for all that Lan Qiren felt guilty for hoping for his brother’s death, he couldn’t help but admit everything would be much, much easier if Wen Ruohan successfully carried out his promise to kill him while Lan Qiren was away.

If his brother was dead, he couldn’t reveal what he had done, and his reputation could be preserved, even if only a little – for the sake of Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji, at least, who as his sons would bear the burden of that reputation. Theirs was a sect that understood the madness of being in love, and the grief that came with the death of that love; it would be easy enough to explain his brother’s actions as the lashing out of a man who had given up his future for his wife, and then lived long enough to see his wife die a premature death, apparently at her own hand. He would be seen as a tragic figure, yes, but not a monster.

No one would need to know that he had been the one to kill her.

No one would need to know that he had decided to take the sect down, either. Not even the elders. His actions could be excused as seeking public punishment, wanting to unveil the truth to the world as an act of justice, shining a light to destroy the dark; that would be understandable, even a little admirable. No one would need to know that that had not been what he had really intended. No one would need to know that he had wanted to destroy their heart and kill many of their disciples, just for the chance to maintain his own power after getting his revenge.

Maybe they could even find some way to explain away what had happened with the coins…

That was the rational reason, and a good one. But on a more personal and perhaps even somewhat selfish note, Lan Qiren had also concluded that he would be very happy simply never to see his brother again. But there was no point in speculating – what would be, would be.

What needed to be done, Lan Qiren would do.

“Well, that’s just all the more reason that we cannot resign our positions!” someone finally exclaimed. One of the more ruthlessly practical ones, given that he was willing to take advantage of the polite moment of silence the rest of them were giving to Lan Qiren’s announcement to state his views. “Without a sect leader, who will make decisions and manage affairs?”

“Well, there’s always Qiren – ”

“There is not,” Lan Qiren interrupted hastily, distracted from his thoughts by his alarm at the suggestion. “I married out, remember? I’m no longer qualified.”

“I don’t suppose there is any hope of annulment…”

“There is not. And none of divorce, either, thank you. I am very happy with my wife.”

“Even if you’re married out, that doesn’t necessarily exclude you,” Lan Yichi, or possibly Lan Yiran, pointed out. “As you yourself said, you are still by birth and blood a member of the main line clan. There are both rights and responsibilities that come with that, with being the main clan entrusted by our ancestors with authority over the sect…”

“I live in the Nightless City,” Lan Qiren stressed. “You cannot expect me to manage the sect from there! At any rate, even if I could, think of the implications of such a thing. I’m not blind, and neither should you be! Let me remind you that I am now part of the Wen sect. One must admit, of all possible sects – ”

Someone pounded on the door, requesting entry.

“Qiren, there isn’t anyone else! Your brother is unfit, you have no other siblings – will someone answer the door already and stop that awful noise? It’s not as if we’re discussing anything secret any longer – and everyone else is further out of the main line and either disqualified or inappropriate, unable to act as sect leader while holding the place for the next generation…and for that matter, we don’t even know where your nephews are!”

Oh, that.

Right.

He’d never officially confirmed that they were safe, though he was certain that the sect elders must have figured it out – they knew him best, after all, even if Lan Qiren’s brother hadn’t. Even if Lan Qiren’s brother had not himself cared about Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji, the elders knew that Lan Qiren did, and that he would never have prioritized anything over that.

Still, there was suspecting, and there was knowing.

“Xichen and Wangji are safe,” Lan Qiren assured them. “They are with me – ”

“With you?” Lan Yiran looked surprised. “I had assumed you’d gotten confirmation of their location, but – are you saying they’re in the Nightless City? You didn’t take them yourself, someone would have noticed that. So how did that happen?”

“I arranged for them to be taken there by a safe courier – ”

“Madam Wen!”

The room fell silent.

Lan Qiren’s eye twitched.

He turned around to see who had said that. It turned out that the person who had been rudely pounding on the door to the Hall of Serenity had been a Wen sect disciple, with a Lan sect token hanging at his belt. Apparently the debate had taken long enough that he’d managed to get one – though that didn’t excuse the way he’d referred to Lan Qiren.

“That title is inappropriate,” he scolded sharply. “I may have married in, but I am not Madam Wen. By Wen Ruohan’s own agreement, I am the husband, not the wife – ”

“Senior Lan, this is urgent,” the Wen disciple said quickly, interrupting and dropping into a salute. “There’s a message for you, just arrived, from Sect Leader Wen. He says you need to return to Lanling City at once.”

Lan Qiren promptly forgot to be angry. Wen Ruohan summoning him like that, insisting on urgency – he couldn’t tell if it was ominous or promising, or both. Was his brother dead? Was Wen Ruohan hurt? Had they managed to collect all the coins? Had something else happened…?

“I will go at once,” he said, and turned to glare at the sect elders who were making sounds of protests.

Well, most of them. The rest of them were still grinning at him in a way that suggested that they were not going to forget the ‘Madam Wen’ nonsense as quickly as he might have preferred.

“You do not require me for this debate,” he said. “I brought the subject to light, but you are still sect elders, capable of designing and implementing your own discipline. Maintain your own discipline is a rule. I expect you to resolve this and have a proposed punishment for me to review when I return, is that understood?”

“We’re not your students, Qiren,” Lan Jinyan said, sounding long-suffering but somehow a little amused. “Go be with your beloved.”

“Beloved?” someone else asked before Lan Qiren could thank him and go. “He’s married to Wen Ruohan, remember? It was arranged as well, a political match. What on earth makes you say that he of all people is Qiren’s beloved?”

“Pssh, what a ridiculous question. Just look at Qiren. He’s glowing!”

Oh no.

“Hey, Qiren, what say you? Is he your beloved? Wen Ruohan, really?”

“He is,” Lan Qiren said, immediately irritated, and also perhaps desperately trying to use the irritation to overcome his horrible embarrassment. “He is my beloved, and my wife, and you will all pay him the respect due to him as such, regardless of whatever else you may think of him.”

Someone in the room laughed. Several more made sounds that sounded a little like smothered laughs.

“We will, Qiren, we will, we will,” Lan Suiying said. He was one of the ones who was grinning. “Go already. We will continue this debate amongst ourselves, and come to a consensus on the proposed punishment.”

“We will,” Lan Jinyan said. “And I promise you, Qiren, this time, it will satisfy even you.”

His tone had a sense of finality, like the ringing of a funeral bell.

Lan Qiren didn’t have time to worry about that, though he was sure he’d puzzle over it the entirety of the flight from the Cloud Recesses to Jinlin Tower. But for the moment, he had to go.

Wen Ruohan – he hoped he was all right.

After all, if he was, Lan Qiren was going to smack himover this whole glowing nonsense!

#mdzs #lan qiren #wen ruohan #Megafic #my fic #my fics

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fengshenjunlang · 1 year

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I have seen that post about how WangXian owe their happiness to Nie Huaisang.

Okay, I don't know how people even come into such conclusion, but it is very clear that between WangXian and Nie Huaisang, it is a win-win situation. If anything, it is even more beneficial to Nie Huaisang.

1. NHS knew where did NMJ's body parts got thrown into. But he needs someone, to uncover the case.

Someone with considerable status and weight in their action and words. That someone is Hanguang-Jun. NHS must be betting that between JGY and LWJ, Lan Xichen would listen to his blood related brother more. Or even in the worst case where LXC was caught too deep in the lies woven by JGY, there are still Lan Qiren and other Gusulan member who would definitely chose to support their own kin Lan Wangji over the outsider, JGY (when things got worse).

2. However, just to uncover the case is not enough. He needs to completely overthrow JGY. And to achieve that smoothly, Nie Huaisang needs cover. Desperately needs someone who can cover the sky and the ground, and make him completely invisible.

That person can only be Wei Wuxian. WWX is like a bright light bulb, whenever WWX appears moths gathers. Whenever WWX appears he would always be the center of attention. It has always been the case. The reason why NHS chose to revive WWX was not only to add more manpower to fight against LanlingJin who has Xue Yang and Stygian Tiger Seal, or help to quell NMJ's transformed ghoul, but also to make WWX attract all the firepower and attention.

To put it simply, WWX is there to attract aggro from the monsters in a game! LOL

So when WWX is there, NHS can leisurely hide in the shades, leisurely pull the string, until the end of the orchestra. And that is really how it went on, in MDZS.

Why did NHS need cover? Naturally to hide from JGY and from the rest of cultivation sects, so that they won't meddle and ruin all his plan. WangXian knew from the early investigation that there are 2 parties who wanted to hide and wanted to uncover. So, how could JGY not notice such thing when he heard Hanguang-Jun is investigating NMJ body parts?

However, when there is WWX who attract all attention, JGY will have no time to think about the mastermind and focus on how to quickly reclaimed NMJ body parts, Xue Yang, Wen Ning, Yi City, and Stygian Tiger Seal. And that is how it did in MDZS. JGY was suddenly poured so much trouble in just 1-2 months of WWX's revival that he has no time to properly sort out the real enemy. He will focus more on how to lie toward LXC about the body parts, how to throw the blame into WWX, how to arrange things etc. But will have no time to investigate the mastermind behind.

***

Just like how WWX understands that NHS is not the pustule waste everyone mocks him as, but someone whose intelligence was put on something else, based on his observation during the 3 months of their acquaintance,

NHS also understands that WWX is someone who is destined to be the center of the room whenever he appears, based on WWX's personality and ability. This person will definitely gain his own place, and attract all attention wherever and whenever.

During their youth it is has been so. During the Qishan Education and Xuanwu cave it was also like that. During the war it was especially so. And even during his retreat as Yiling Laozu it was still like that. And finally even dying he has always been the center of attention. Lol.

NHS knew that perfectly. WWX is destined to gather all eyes on him and leave no space for others to be noticed😂 and that is why NHS chose him as the best cover.

#wangxian #nie huaisang #lan wangji #wei wuxian #mdzs #mo dao zu shi #grandmaster of demonic cultivation

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jiangwanyinscatmom · 7 months

Note

Also, question! Does original text support that JC raised JL? Or is it just because he has the clarity bell that makes people think JC gave birth and breastfeed him?

Hello there anon, it is said that he was raised "by two families".

Jin Ling had been raised by two families, staying at the tower of Jinlintai of the Jin Clan of Lanling half the time and at the Lotus Pier of the Jiang Clan of Yunmeng the other half. Thus, he should have things from both families on him.

(And a big thank you to @rynne and @ladypfenix for pointing me to the chapter this is in!)

But I say this with stipulation, that this does not mean the adults of sect leader standing were heavily involved in the everyday rearing and care of him. Such as what we are shown first with Madam Yu and how it's stated she was rarely there within the sect seat of Yunmeng, and, how Qinghen-Jun also did not have a hand at all with raising his sons which was left to Lan Qiren instead. Similarly, I imagine it was Jin Guangyao who was the one heavily involved with personally taking the time to visit with Jin Ling as the designated "parental" role due to social etiquette.

It is also the expectation for children of families to be raised within the patriarchal line. They are of their fathers heirs. It would naturally default to Jin Guangyao, in all expectation, to be Jin Ling's official guardian and next of kin to raise him more as a Jin. He wears the robes of Lanling and is the next sect heir of Jin Guangyao he is more Jin in social standing and society expectation than of Jiang. Jin Ling himself is also very invested in his family name as Jin Zixuan's son more than that of anything of Yunmeng Jiang. He tells "Mo Xuanyu" to not make a mess of the name of Jin.

Even as he questions why Wei Wuxian knows so many of the Lan principles, he stops himself given that earlier in that scene, Wei Wuxian has declared his intentions of being a part of Lan Wangji's family name as the wife. The wife of course, is supposed to turn to the family rules of the husband in Chinese marriages and become one of that family, the ties of the "milk name family" are secondary and a bit more to the foreground.

#mdzs #mo dao zu shi #jin ling #socially and by family standard is jin ling is always more of a Jin then holding any claim to Jiang

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