#thunder sect

[healing-fire--rewrite]

Spot // Spotshine

Advisor of Roaring Thunder

A dark spotted tortoiseshell she-cat with white paws and amber eyes.

Wears red flowers for Lord Thunderstorm // Monarch wings to show status

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. ₊ ° . ☆

Daughter of Swiftwing † and Snakefang † // Younger sister of Patchpelt & Leopardfoot † // Littermate of Redtail & Mistlepelt

Trained by Gooseweaver †

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. ₊ ° . ☆

Self-Centered, Vain, Kind

Cis Female / She/Her

AroAce

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. ₊ ° . ☆

shine - advisor skilled at giving advice

Blessed by Lady Mothflight The herbs and flowers that Spotshine cares for do just a smidge better than anyone else’s. They start growing earlier, die later, and rarely encounter disease.

Canon Counterpart - Spottedleaf

#spotshine #thunder sect #warrior cats #warriors #warriors au #character design #character profile #spottedleaf

[enihk-writes]

[thunder bolts in a clear sky]

cross-posted on AO3 (hiatus there until further notice)

pairing: mhdd!chung myung x afab!she/her!reader (undecided)

OC x afab!she/her!reader (doomed yuri) mhdd!chung myung + afab!she/her!reader (queer-platonic attraction that's not inherently sexual or romantic and not fully platonic either, reader is going to end up being very aroace if that's not how you roll then... sorry i guess...)

plot overview: reader is a person from an unspecified distant future, reincarnated into the current mount hua timeline after facing execution for multiple low-level crimes among other false accusations. the chapters will switch between her current timeline and ones which will delve into her past — introducing the world she came from and the people she knew in more depth.

will be attempting to explore the difference in philosophies between reader and chung myung — nihilism in that nothing you do will ever matter vs chung myung who strives to create a better future that he might not even have a chance to see. reader who can connect with people around her vs chung myung who has trouble opening up and trusting others with his burdens... among other topics i.e. reader's feeling of alienation in both lives as someone who physically does not look like she belongs in this community

content warning: canon-typical violence // blood and violence // gore // body horror // execution // torture // emotional manipulation // implied and referenced child abuse // grooming // child soldiers // post-traumatic stress disorder - ptsd // unhealthy coping mechanisms // war crimes // government experimentation // government conspiracy // government agencies // disability // flawed justice system // other additional tags to be added + tags may change

[WILL WRITE A DISCLAIMER AND CONTENT WARNING ON EACH CHAPTER THAT DISCUSSES ANY OF THE ABOVE TOPICS]

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any discussions or mentions of the topics disclosed in the content warnings will be marked at the end of the chapter titles with a [*]

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#enihkwrites #thunder bolts in a clear sky #tbcs #return of the blossoming blade x reader #return of the mount hua sect x reader #chung myung x reader

[cheeekywanker]

get clipped kid

#reverend insanity #manhua #webnovel #fang yuan #thunder ghost true monarch #heavenly court #lang ya sect for life

[cowboyarc]

Mhmm a mando cod au? (Sorry I’m a tags rambler)

#ghost is a mando obliviously #prob from Din’s sect so the whole no removing helmet business #soap as a padawn or a a high caliber merc? I can’t choose #cause if he was a padawn price could be his yoda ya know #gaz could be a foundling that ghost found or something like that #not sure just had this brain worm pop up and wanted to talk about it before I forgot #(sorry if someone else has mentioned or thought of this don’t mean to steal ur thunder #but yeah neat-o #ghost x soap #soast #cause if he was a merc he could flirt with ghost insufferably with such cheesy pickup lines #would prob do that as a padawn too #eh what’s a little handwavy time travel between pals #but due to the time line with the empire coming and then being ka-put #so my a secret underground training or soap has no formal training and has kinda just stumbled through #I am on mobile and too lazy to fix spelling mistakes soz

[shanastoryteller]

HAPPY HOLLYDAZE!! More Lady Mo if possible!!! ✨

a continuation of 52 53 54 55 56 57

"I believe," Lan Wangji says severely, "that what my wife does or does not do is no one's concern but mine."

Xuanyu raises an eyebrow at that, which he ignores. He knows exactly what she thinks about his concern regarding her actions. She'd been irritated that he was upset she faced fierce corpses alone, of all things.

Jin Zixun pales, but he must have a high opinion of his own importance because he says, "For fuck's sake, you're being ridiculous. A year ago no one would have cared if she drunk herself to death and now she can't even have a little wine?"

Lan Wangji does not make the conscious decision to unsheathe his blade, but there it is gleaming in his hand.

Jiang Yanli is being pushed back into her seat by her husband while her son stares wide eyed.

There's some intense shuffling from the Lan section. Although he doesn't turn around, he does hear Jingyi and Sizhui whispering furiously. He wonders who is restraining who.

Jiang Cheng is standing with a hand on his sword and no one is going to any effort to restrain him at all. Li Shuchun, the only one that might have a chance of it, is leaning back to exchange money with another Jiang disciple.

"This is quite enough!" Jin Guangshan shouts. "What's this about? Sect Leader Lan-"

"Oh, be quiet Father," Xuanyu says, getting to her feet and stepping forward to grab his hand and shove his hand down. "What's with you today, Wangji? Put that away." She's very close and glaring at him, so he resheathes his sword.

"Jin Xuanyu!" Jin Guangshan thunders.

She rolls her eyes, turning to Jin Zixun. She punches his shoulder, a move that he dodges instantly. Which leaves him wide open when she grabs his sword off his hip, tosses it to Jin Guangyao, and then drops to kick his legs out from under him.

She pushes down on his shoulder, keeping him on his knees, and says, "Wangji, dear, would you hold him for me?"

She called him dear.

He steps to grab Jin Zixun's wrists, keeping him in place.

"What are you doing?" he howls. "You can't just-"

"You wanted to drink, right?" she asks then picks up a wine bottle with one hand and pinches his nose shut with the other.

He opens his mouth and Xuanyu pours wine down his throat. He can either drink or drown.

"Come on," she says cheerfully, "don't you want to drink to another fruitful year? Have some more!"

He drinks until he's coughing and sputtering, eyes glassy. Everyone just watches, but then again who is there to say anything? Jin Zixuan is keeping himself firmly in his own seat and Jin Guangshan and Madame Jin are just staring, probably more interested in watching everyone else's reaction then anything else.

"There," she says once the bottle is empty. "Feeling better?"

"You're crazy," he coughs.

Xuanyu's grin widens. "I am the legitimate daughter of Sect Leader Jin. I am the wife of Hanguang Jun. What I am is someone who is above you. You're lucky I don't have you whipped for your impudence. Isn't he, Father?"

Jin Guangyao has never once made a fuss about his status, afraid that what was easily given could be easily taken. Xuanyu clearly is, because her own status can't be revoked without making a mockery of the Jin's treaty with the Lan, and Jin Guangshan either reaffirms her rights and privileges as his daughter or risks lowering the authority of the son he does favor - Jin Zixuan.

Lan Wangji is suddenly grateful that Xuanyu hadn't been interested in manipulating him to her benefit.

Jin Guangshan is nearly purple in rage, but he gets out through clenched teeth, "Yes, Xuanyu. Of course."

"Why has the music stopped?" she asks the hall, giving Lan Wangji a look. He lets go of Jin Zixun and can't help the curl of amusement when he falls flat on his face. "This is a banquet, after all!"

The music starts up again and conversation slowly starts once more as Jin Zixun stumbles from the hall. He doesn't want to leave her side, but she's seated by Jin Guangyao once more and chatting about the schedule for tomorrow. Jin Guangyao seems supremely relaxed, which Lan Wangji is given to believe that means he's laughing on the inside.

He sits down next to his brother, waiting for the scolding he rightfully deserves.

"Wangji," Xichen says seriously. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I think I love your wife."

He hides his smile behind his teacup.

#prompt answers #prompts are closed #asks #anon #untamed

[nutcasewithaknife]

I've been obsessed with Jiang Cheng since halfway through my first watch of cql, and here's why. He always keeps doing better than I expect him to.

(wow, this got long. rest is under the cut!)

He's introduced as the brother-killer, the ruthless sect leader with a reputation for being merciless. Then cut to the flashback, a Jiang Cheng who is fifteen, surrounded by his sister and brother and happy about it, occasionally doing stupid teenager things, trying so very hard to be Ideal Heir, while Wei Wuxian is the prodigy that keeps stealing his thunder effortlessly. And you go, "oh, I know this story. It's a tragedy, because these brothers loved each other once, but one's ambition will eventually breed jealousy which will fester into hate and end, tragically, in the death of the better half." It's Cain and Abel! You've seen how it ends, it's the first scene you see, of course that's where it's going!

And then you see how the three siblings help each other survive a frankly horrible and abusive household. They try to do for each other what their parents couldn't; Yanli tries to be their mother, Jiang Cheng doesn't believe the rumours about Wei Wuxian being jfm's illegitimate son or hold it against him as he very easily could've learnt to from his mother, and Wei Wuxian does his darned best to get jfm to acknowledge and love his son as he does for Wei Wuxian.

You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop!! Yunmeng burns, Jiang Cheng chokes his brother in the rain, and you think this is it, this is where it finally breaks. But he sticks with his brother and sister, he makes some stupid decisions in his grief and pays dearly for it. When he wakes up without a core he is broken, his 'ambition' is destroyed, and you remember him choke his brother and think this is it, and then... it isn't. Other than the one grieving rant in the rain, he never blames his brother for their loss, never demands that he fix it all. When Wei Wuxian does come with a solution, Jiang Cheng doesn't act like it's something he was owed. It's his brother, his brilliant genius brother, who miraculously fixed this impossible thing! He's the most Jiang of them all, of course he achieved the impossible!

And then he's the young sect leader in a bloody war, needing to win, needing to prove his worth and his sect's worth at every turn. This is where he becomes the ruthless, powerful man we meet in the first few episodes! Only.... he finds Wen Qing, who is the enemy in the eyes of the Jianghu, and offers to protect her (only her because he knows his limits, he can't protect all her people and his own, and his duty to his sect is first). He goes looking for his brother, months on end, haggard to the bone.

Then Wei Wuxian shows up wielding a power that's the worst taboo in their world, a power frighteningly similar to the power-drunk villain that they war is being waged against! He's doing unspeakable things, terrible torture in the name of revenge! Ah, so this is what it finally is! The moment they finally fall out for good, where Jiang Cheng cannot abide to tarnish his sect's reputation with Wei Wuxian's, and their love turns to hate.

But.... Jiang Cheng sees what he's done, and the first thing he does is to hug him tight. He asks about Wei Wuxian not carrying his sword, but even after the diplomatic nightmare of a war council, Jiang Cheng is just worrying. It's the most open, the most honest we've seen him so far, and he is concerned for his brother. He shuts it down when Jin Zixun tries to pick a fight. He takes responsibility for the person everyone's wary of, because that's his brother and he trusts him! He's hiding things, yes, but one day he will be ready to talk and Jiang Cheng will wait till then.

Then the war's won (by Wei Wuxian, of course!) and he has a sect to rebuild. And his brother is not at his side. First he's slacking off and drinking around town, then he runs away with the Wens to the Burial Mounds. It's terrible for the sect's and Jiang Cheng's own precarious position in Jianghu. Surely, this is the last thread of Jiang Cheng's love for his brother, the beginning of the man we were introduced to? But it's fucking not! Yes, he's frustrated. Yes, he's mad. And yet, he doesn't force his sister into a diplomatically advantageous marriage (which I strongly believe is the bare minimum of being a decent human being, but is something that wouldn't have been a questionable or dishonourable thing for him to do in the culture and world this story is set in) because she is not a pawn and he respects her choice above the politics! He tries to defend his First Disciple, his brother, and is overshadowed by much more powerful leaders who are bigoted and/or afraid of his power. And when it all goes to shit, they fight! This is the end of it, surely? But no! It's all fake! They fight, make up a lie about how the Yunmeng Jiang has supressed Wei Wuxian and his Wens in the Burial Mounds so they can live without being under attack for however long, and then have shady meetups to discuss their nephew's name!!

In the carnage of Nightless City, their sister dies at his hands, and the horrible realisation dawns that this is what pushes them over the brink, literally. And then!! AND THEN!!!!! EVEN THEN IT WASN'T ENOUGH FOR HIM TO KILL HIS BROTHER!!! The first scene was a lie, WEI WUXIAN HAD TO THROW HIMSELF OFF!!!!!! And when he's finally back, what does Jiang Cheng do? Kill him? ban him from ever returning to their home? No! He wants to drag him back home and make him apologise, explain himself!!

A lot of this is very focused on the brothers, but even outside of that, Jiang Cheng keeps subverting the expectations that the story builds for him right in the beginning. For all the talks of 'disciplining' his nephew (which could unquestionably entail some form of corporal punishment, as we see in other parts of the story) and the childhood Jiang Cheng himself had, the idea of his Jiujiu raising his hand against him is unthinkable to the point of incredulity for Jin Ling. When Jin Ling has his breakdown over Suihua on the Lotus Pier docks, I was full bracing myself for Jiang Cheng to yell at him for crying in public without any shame or dignity, but what does he do? Calls his nephew to his side and demands to know who made him cry, so he can fucking wreck them for daring to do that! He has a mere day to process the Golden Core reveal, and after all the yelling, he actually apologises to his brother!!

Then, in the mother of all sucker-punch moments, we find out that the one grief-riddled, frustrating moment of apparent stupidity whose domino effect this entire thing has been, was in fact Jiang Cheng willingly sacrificing himself, sect be damned, to save his brother and sister. And like!! How do you have such a character who simultaneously is and is not what he seems to be!!!

I (and a lot of the audience) immediately played into the simple brotherhood-destroyed-by-jealousy plot that it seems to be at first, but that's the intention! The entire story keeps showing how misleading, how vicious rumours can be and how horribly it can affect who someone is in the eyes of society. We see this happen in the story, of course, but the narrative also relies on the audience to make the same mistake, to take the tropes that seem obviously implied at the start, and then unravels the true complexity of the story as it moves forward. We got played by the narrative and it was so worth it!! Wei Wuxian is the prime example, of course, but cql (and mdzs from what I gather, though I haven't read the books) does it with such nuance and brilliance for Jiang Cheng, how do you not immediately lose your entire mind about it for the rest of forever!!!!!

#this wasn't supposed to be so long but the brainworms commanded it #jiang cheng #jiang wanyin #wei wuxian #wei ying #Jin Ling #jiang yanli #wen qing #meta #cql #the untamed #yunmeng brothers #yunmeng siblings #jin ling and jiujiu

[robininthelabyrinth]

Darlings - ao3

Summary:

“Clarity would not work to fix Chifeng-zun,” Lan Wangji opined.

Nie Huaisang resisted the urge to kick him – Lan Wangji wouldn’t stick his foot in somewhere it wasn’t wanted if he didn’t actually have relevant information – but even Lan Qiren frowned at him.

“You seem remarkably certain about that, Wangji,” he said. “But why not? While it’s not appropriate for every circumstance, it’s an extremely powerful song. I would think that it would be at least worth an attempt.

”Lan Wangji looked distinctly shame-faced, though perhaps only someone who knew him very well would recognize that particular flavor of it.

“I see,” Lan Qiren said. “And what exactly has your brother done that he doesn’t want me to know about?”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I’m bored,” Nie Huaisang complained, and his brother’s eye twitched. “And don’t say ‘go train’, I’m not in the mood.”

“You’re never in the mood,” his brother said, his voice harsher than it usually was. It was often too harsh these days; the version of his brother that Nie Huaisang liked best, teasing and thoughtful and amused despite himself, seemed to have gotten rarer and rarer in appearance. “That’s the problem.”

“Not the point,” Nie Huaisang said. “The point is more fundamental than that. The Unclean Realm is boring! All these years, we’ve kept to ourselves because of the war – limited visits to friends, only going to places that are safe, that sort of thing. But the war’s over, right? So I should be able to go visit whoever I want.”

His brother grunted. Still unamused, when normally Nie Huaisang’s nonsense arguments amused him more than anything else.

Annoyed, Nie Huaisang changed his original plan, which had been to wheedle out permission for a visit to the Lotus Pier to see poor Jiang Cheng who was all alone now that his sister had married off, and instead said, “I want to go visit Wei-xiong!”

“Absolutely not,” his brother said, unsurprisingly. “He’s an outlaw for a reason, Huaisang. He murdered those Jin sect cultivators without warning, didn’t he? Who’s to say he wouldn’t murder you, too?”

“All sorts of reasons,” Nie Huaisang argued back. “Listen, what if –”

“I said no,” his brother thundered, leaping to his feet and slamming his hands against the desk. “You will listen to me, Huaisang, and if you don’t –”

“Why are you always yelling?” Nie Huaisang shouted back, losing his own temper. He was a Nie as well, after all. “Why do you always take everything so seriously? I was just suggesting –”

“It was a stupid suggestion –”

“Even if it’s stupid, you don’t have to hit things –”

“You wouldn’t be so afraid of me hitting things if you’d actually train the way you’re supposed to –”

“I shouldn’t have to worry about it at all!” Nie Huaisang screamed. “You’re my da-ge! You’re not supposed to act like – like – like Father!”

His brother, who was about to yell back, stopped, stricken.

Equally stricken by what he’d just said, Nie Huaisang stared at him.

“It’s not like Father,” he said, because it couldn’t be. It wasn’t allowed to be. Nie sect leaders died young, yes, everyone knew that, even (especially) him no matter how much he pretended that he didn’t, but – but their father had been older than his brother was now, and he’d been fine right up until the time he’d been murdered. If it hadn’t been for Wen Ruohan, they would’ve had him for another decade or two, easy, and he was nearly as good a cultivator as Nie Mingjue was…though he hadn’t had to fight a war on that sort of scale, either. Nie Mingjue’s cultivation had gotten scarily good the past few years. “It’s – it’s not, right?”

His brother said nothing for a long moment.

Then, at last, he sighed and sat down heavily on his chair with a thump.

“We can go visit the Lan sect,” he said, which wasn’t what Nie Huaisang had wanted at all, but for some reason the thought of arguing any further tasted like ashes in Nie Huaisang’s mouth.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go visit the Lan sect.”

-

The one good thing about visiting the Lan sect, Nie Huaisang thought bitterly, and in fact the only good thing was Lan Xichen.

Lan Xichen was nice and friendly and gentle, indulgent the way a big brother ought to be, always thinking first about Nie Huaisang’s comfort and happiness. He would buy him thoughtful gifts, he would take him out on outings to new parts of the mountain where there were beautiful views, he would sit and paint with him and listen to him very seriously even when he was talking nonsense. He would even avert his eyes if Nie Huaisang brought out one of his own books to read during study time, smiling and blushing a little in a very fetching fashion – Lan Xichen wasn’t the most desirable bachelor of the cultivation world for nothing, his face earned all its accolades fair and square in Nie Huaisang’s opinion – and they had long conversations that covered everything and anything.

Fewer these days, since Lan Xichen was busy with rebuilding and with Jin Guangyao, who apparently needed quite a lot of support even as he managed to talk his sect into providing the Lan sect with support of a more financial nature, but Nie Huaisang had been sure that a nice visit to the Lan sect with no politics behind it would give him the opportunity to finally have Lan Xichen all to himself again.

Except, of course, that Lan Xichen wasn’t there.

“Off to the Jin sect again,” Nie Mingjue grumbled acidly under his voice as they walked up to the center of the Lan sect from the gateway where they’d received the bad news from one of the door guards. “Big surprise.”

Nie Huaisang, in an equally bad mood, agreed wholeheartedly. It wasn’t like he’d come here for the food or anything…but now that they were here, there was nothing for it but to grit their teeth and bear it. They hadn’t sent word in advance of their arrival, like a bunch of barbarians, even though they really should have. But the decision to go had been very spontaneous and in all honesty Nie Huaisang had been a bit worried that his brother would change his mind if they didn’t follow through on the decision right away, so here they were, visiting the Lan sect, and it was on their own heads that the main attraction of the Lan sect was not there to greet them.

Instead, they were going to have to deal with…the rest of them.

Nie Huaisang tormented himself briefly by wondering if they’d be greeted by Lan Qiren, that terrifyingly stern and rule-abiding teacher that even Nie Mingjue was a bit afraid of, or if it would be that menace Lan Wangji, who everyone praised as the upstanding and noble Hanguang-jun, perfect in every way, but who when approached alone was definitely still that horrible little hellion Lan Zhan who when they were children used to bite Nie Huaisang any time he didn’t get his way.

The answer, it turned out, was both.

Actually, the answer turned out to be Lan Qiren loudly scolding Lan Wangji, who to untrained eyes looked obedient and submissive and to those in the know looked completely unrepentant.

Lan Qiren knew it no less than anyone else, of course, which was presumably why he was still scolding him quite so fiercely – so fiercely, in fact, that it was pretty obvious he hadn’t noticed any of the lingering Lan disciples who’d clearly come to give him the heads up that there were visitors. He was currently going hard on the subject of responsibility, whether to the sect and to the self, and not being impulsive, and also how going to dangerous places, especially without telling people first, was completely beyond the pale of impulsive, especially extremely dangerous places like –

“Hey, wait, that’s not fair!” Nie Huaisang exclaimed, affronted. “Why does Lan Zhan get to go to visit the Burial Mounds and I don’t?!”

His brother glared at him even as both Lan Qiren and Lan Wangji twisted their heads to stare at their guests in surprise and unhappiness – Lan Qiren presumably because he’d been caught lecturing his perfect Lan Wangji in front of outsiders, and Lan Wangji presumably because Nie Huaisang had slipped up and called him Lan Zhan again, which he’d been banned from doing ever since Lan Wangji had turned ten and insufferable.

“He did not get to go,” Lan Qiren said, retreating into stiffness as he always did when he was embarrassed, but that just made the expression on Lan Wangji’s face change straight back into mulishness.

“There were no serious threats there,” he said flatly.

Lan Qiren promptly puffed up in rage again. “No serious threats – it’s the Burial Mounds! Even putting aside Wei-gongzi’s presence, the resentful energy in the air alone –”

“What do you mean there weren’t any serious threats?” Nie Mingjue demanded, overriding even his old teacher in a bout of rather uncharacteristic rudeness. “All the reports I’ve gotten is that Wei Wuxian has prepared the mountain as if for a siege, surrounding himself with arrays and corpses. Is that not true?”

Lan Wangji shook his head firmly.

That made even Lan Qiren started frowning. “Similar news had come to Xichen and myself,” he said. “The Jin sect said they sent several envoys seeking peace and were repulsed with violence, did they not? Wangji, are you saying you were able to go there with no difficulty?”

“That is correct, shufu. The greatest difficulty I encountered was Wei Ying forgetting to pay for lunch.”

“Good man,” Nie Huaisang said approvingly. “He always knew how to sponge a meal like the best of them. Did he manage to get you to pay for anyone else, too?”

Lan Wangji hesitated, which meant yes.

“One of the Wens?” Nie Huaisang’s brother asked, and his voice had dropped down to a forbidding register.

Lan Wangji straightened his back. “I will not apologize for associating with a child of two,” he said icily. “Regardless of his surname –”

“A child of two?!” Lan Qiren exclaimed, horrified, and even Nie Mingjue’s seeming ever-present anger broke for a moment, leaving him looking aghast. “In the Burial Mounds?!”

“Oh, woe is us,” Nie Huaisang said, delighted by this turn of events, which proved to be far more entertaining than what he thought was in store for him on a visit to the Cloud Recesses. “Clearly we’ll all have to go to see for ourselves, right? Right?”

-

When they got to the Burial Mounds, a lot of things happened in extremely rapid succession.

First, Nie Huaisang’s brother acted like even more of a beast than usual, getting irritated by the defensive arrays and deciding to just smash them open with his saber and march up the hill instead of listening to Lan Qiren’s perfectly reasonable suggestion of just knocking and seeing what would happen.

Second, the Wen sect’s camp on the Burial Mounds, and Wei Wuxian’s ‘fortress’, turned out to be a lot less fearsome than the rumors had advertised, with even the sign on the big cave that read ‘Demon-Slaughtering Cave’ being written in a jaunty and cheerful manner as if it were advertising a wine shop – and the sign was crooked, too. This was a matter of great displeasure to just about everyone, although Nie Huaisang suspected he was the only one disappointed in not finding anything more interesting rather than being upset about how they’d been misled about the dangers involved. Said dangers seemed to be limited to a bunch of elderly folk puttering about in a radish field, Wen Ning the Ghost General who would have probably been a lot scarier if he hadn’t consented to being buried in said radish field by the previously mentioned child of two and had gotten in so deep that he couldn’t easily wiggle out, and a shocked-looking Wei-Wuxian himself who looked as if he’d just been woken up out of an afternoon nap and who had come to yell at the intruders to go away.

Third, there had been an awful lot of yelling, mostly on the part of Wei Wuxian and, of course, Nie Mingjue, who was being awfully shouty even for him. Matters had very quickly deteriorated at that point no matter how much the Lans present (and Nie Huaisang) tried to calm the situation, with Nie Mingjue pulling out Baxia and Wei Wuxian responding by pulling out the Tiger Seal. It probably would have escalated still further – even Wen Ning had managed to crawl out of the dirt by this point, and he was hanging around ominously with white in his eyes – except that when Nie Mingjue stepped forward and lifted up his saber to actually strike his host, an overreaction of such massive extent that even Nie Huaisang couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it was actually happening, Wen Qing had come out of the cave, taken one look at what was going on, and shouted, “He’s having a qi deviation!”

Fourth, Nie Mingjue was definitely having a qi deviation.

Fifth, Nie Huaisang immediately had a panic attack in response to his brother showing symptoms of qi deviation, because qi deviations were what killed Nie sect leaders and Nie Huaisang remembered what they had done to his father in those horrible last few months of his life following his murder.

Sixth, Nie Mingjue’s concern over Nie Huaisang’s panic attack apparently managed to bring him back to himself enough that he apparently willed down the qi deviation, which, according to Wen Qing, was –

“Completely fucking impossible.”

“…Wen Qing, you just swore,” Wei Wuxian said, sounding dazed. “You never swear.”

“Oh, I swear all right,” she said, though her blush suggested she did not, in fact, make a habit of swearing even in the most extreme of circumstances. Not really a surprise, given that she’d been raised as a proper young lady. “At least I do when I encountered the utterly impossible. Advanced surgery that’s never been tried before? Risky, but within the realm of expectation. Reversing a qi deviation out of sheer brotherly worry? That’s just – just – it’s just weird!”

“Can we stop talking about how weird it is and focus on making my da-ge get better?!” Nie Huaisang demanded, clutching his brother’s sleeve. The second Nie Mingjue had put down Baxia and turned to focus on calming Nie Huaisang down, Wen Qing had gotten him in the back of the neck with four needles and he was now completely unconscious, which was probably for the best, really, but which was causing Nie Huaisang no end of distress.

“Nie Huaisang is correct,” Lan Qiren said crisply, and stepped forward towards Nie Mingjue, waving some sort of fancy array into existence that immediately got Wen Qing’s attention.

“That’s way more advanced than the usual diagnostic array,” she said, sounding affronted and also fascinated. “Wait – is that actually measuring the amount of spiritual energy in a given meridian? I thought everyone said that was impossible to track!”

“It’s a matter of resonance,” Lan Qiren said, with a slight melt to his usual frostiness towards all people surnamed Wen – quite justifiable in Nie Huaisang’s mind, given what had happened to the Cloud Recesses. Even Nie Huaisang, who considered himself an amiable and forgiving sort of person, wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the people who helped Wen Ruohan kill his father and, later, lots of his friends and also very nearly his brother. “A number of my sect members specialize in the medical arts, and they invented it while serving as battlefield medics. It’s not actually tracking the spiritual energy directly, which is in fact impossible, but rather tracking the effect of the movement of spiritual energy as it reacts.”

“Reacts to what? Oh, wait, is that what that low droning sound is for? I thought it was a side effect of putting in too much spiritual energy, as it is with most arrays. But instead you’ve actually harnessed the excess sound using your musical cultivation –”

“Can! We! Focus! On! Fixing! My! Da-ge?!” Nie Huaisang interjected. Loudly.

That got them to shut up and focus for a while. Lan Qiren had been the general leading the Lan sect’s forces and managing the back end for most of the war, so he had a lot of personal experience in playing battlefield medic, and Wen Qing herself had of course been well known for her medical skill even before everything had gone down, so the two of them put their heads together over Nie Mingjue and started up a very technical conversation that no one else understood.

In the meantime, the rest of them – Nie Huaisang, Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian, and Wen Ning – just looked at each other.

“Wei-gongzi, are we just going to stand here while they work?” Wen Ning asked Wei Wuxian in an undertone, ignoring (or maybe not understanding) the suddenly hostile tilt of Lan Wangji’s eyebrows.

“Yes we are,” Nie Huaisang said loudly, then glared at Wen Ning. “Anyway, aren’t you her brother? Don’t you know anything about medicine yourself?”

Wen Ning looked taken aback. “Uh,” he said. “Not – not that much? I was only ever her assistant –”

“Then what are you waiting for?!” Nie Huaisang demanded, and jabbed a finger towards where they were working. “Go assist!”

Wen Ning tried to look at Wei Wuxian for permission, but Nie Huaisang hissed at him until he picked up his heels and trotted guiltily over to inquire if there was anything he could do, then promptly got recruited to run errands – which showed he clearly had been needed, and therefore should have been there doing that in the first place.

“Hey, Nie-xiong, have you ever seen those animal traders that come from the far south?” Wei Wuxian asked. “The ones that sometimes have those long ferret-badgers, you know the ones, they always hiss at large creatures and they can fight snakes –”

“…the mongoose?”

“Yeah, the mongoose!” Wei Wuxian nodded, then grinned toothily at him. “Has anyone ever told you, Nie-xiong, that you sometimes resemble a mongoose?”

“This is definitely the first time, Wei-xiong,” Nie Huaisang said. “Definitely the first time.”

“Maybe that should be your nickname! You’re the only one who doesn’t have one, right? I’m the Yiling Patriarch, Lan Zhan here’s Hanguang-jun – you can be the Stubborn Mongoose!”

Lan Wangji’s eye twitched. Why he was getting irritated over Nie Huaisang getting a stupid nickname, Nie Huaisang had no idea, since he was pretty sure Lan Wangji didn’t want to be called ‘Stubborn Mongoose’ himself when he already had a perfectly good title.

Maybe he was just jealous of Nie Huaisang getting Wei Wuxian’s attention. Well, if so, Nie Huaisang was more than willing to throw it right back onto him.

“No thanks, Wei-xiong,” he said, and smiled (somewhat toothily) right back at him. “I’ve had a dislike for animal-related nicknames ever since I was a child – you see, I went over to visit the Lan sect a few times and their precious ‘little Rabbit Bun’ bit me.”

He tilted his head pointedly in Lan Wangji’s direction.

Lan Wangji gave Nie Huaisang a death glare.

Wei Wuxian, on the other hand, looked as if his entire life had been improved by at least six degrees. “Lan Zhan?” he gasped. “Your childhood nickname was Little Rabbit Bun? That’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever heard! You must have been so cute!”

Lan Wangji glanced at him, his ears going red, and then glanced back at Nie Huaisang, who gave him a smug You owe me expression before saying, very virtuously, “Wei-xiong, don’t be silly. Wouldn’t you agree that our Hanguang-jun is still very cute?”

“No, he’s not cute, he’s handsome!” Wei Wuxian objected. “You can’t be ‘cute’ when you’re as dashing and bold as Lan Zhan is –”

“Being handsome doesn’t mean you can’t be cute at the same time! Haven’t you seen him when he’s smiling?”

Wei Wuxian looked stricken. “He smiles? You’ve seen him smile, Nie-xiong? Lan Zhan! Lan Zhan, that’s not fair! You have to smile for me, I have to see it – you can’t smile at Nie Huaisang and not at me, okay, that’s just wrong, I’m the one who wanted to be your friend –”

Nie Huaisang bared his teeth at Lan Wangji – see I’m still better at managing people than you! – and Lan Wangji gave him a half-hearted glare back, too distracted by the way Wei Wuxian was tugging at his sleeve to really put any real heat into it. Or maybe he really did like Wei Wuxian bugging him all the time, who knew?

(Actually, the last time Nie Huaisang had seen Lan Wangji smile, they’d both been at least a decade younger, but he wasn’t about to let facts get in the way of a good taunt.)

The entire thing probably would have continued in that vein for a while, only then Lan Qiren and Wen Qing suddenly got up and that got Nie Huaisang’s attention entirely; he promptly forgot about what the two idiots he was waiting alongside were doing and rushed over.

“Is he all right?” he asked anxiously. “Can you make him better?”

“It will be difficult,” Lan Qiren said, and Wen Qing nodded.

“His meridians are in a bad state,” she said. “His situation was severely aggravated on account of the sheer amount of resentful energy in the Burial Mounds, and then driven into complete crisis when Wei-gongzi unveiled the Tiger Seal, but he was already doing quite poorly. You must have noticed his temper getting worse, less patience, more irrationality…”

Nie Huaisang didn’t want to hear about that. “We’re surnamed Nie, that’s not too weird,” he said shortly. “Anyway, can you fix it?”

“We’ve stabilized him for now,” Lan Qiren said. “There’s no immediate danger.”

Nie Huaisang exhaled. That was – not ideal, but still something. Better something than nothing.

“There are a number of techniques that can be applied to try to correct the deviation,” Wen Qing said. “Including surgery to straight his meridians out again, which I can do. But that’s a one-time fix, and he’s in a state of deterioration; even if I fixed him up, he’d only continue to spiral again, and all the fixes for that take a lot more time and effort and continuous supervision. If it were just me, I’d say there wasn’t anything we could do short of cutting off his access to his golden core for a while – and that’s incredibly dangerous in its own right – but Teacher Lan here says that the Lan sect has some extremely powerful music spells that might be able to do something.”

Lan Qiren nodded. “There is one in particular,” he said. “The Song of Clarity –”

“Clarity would not work to fix Chifeng-zun,” Lan Wangji opined.

Nie Huaisang resisted the urge to kick him – Lan Wangji wouldn’t stick his foot in somewhere it wasn’t wanted if he didn’t actually have relevant information – but even Lan Qiren frowned at him.

“You seem remarkably certain about that, Wangji,” he said. “But why not? While it’s not appropriate for every circumstance, it’s an extremely powerful song. I would think that it would be at least worth an attempt.”

Lan Wangji looked distinctly shame-faced, though perhaps only someone who knew him very well would recognize that particular flavor of it.

“I see,” Lan Qiren said, visibly resisting the urge to sigh and offer Lan Wangji a conciliatory candy the way he had when Lan Wangji had been young enough to still think that all problems could be fixed by biting. Possibly it was just Nie Huaisang that recognized that very particular expression, having seen it the most often out of all available non-Lan sect members – he’d been Lan Wangji’s favorite target, after all. “And what exactly has your brother done that he doesn’t want me to know about?”

“How did he know?” Wei Wuxian whispered to Wen Ning in an undertone barely louder than a breath, though not quite enough to escape being overheard by Nie Huaisang, who standing right next to them. “Did Lan Zhan even change expressions just now? Is there some secret sign language involved?”

Clearly Nie Huaisang needed to give Wei Wuxian a crash course in ‘understanding Lan Wangji body language’, Nie Huaisang decided – beneficently, of course. It definitely wasn’t so that Wei Wuxian could more effectively annoy Lan Wangji to death, no, absolutely not.

(Anyway, Lan Wangji seemed like he enjoyed being annoyed to death by Wei Wuxian, so maybe it really was beneficent after all.)

Facing all of their gazes, Lan Wangji squared his shoulders. “Xiongzhang has been concerned regarding Chifeng-zun’s health,” he said. “Particularly in regard to his family’s tendency towards qi deviations, which xiongzhang fears may be aggravated by Chifeng-zun’s powerful cultivation and the ravages of war. He has been playing him Clarity as a course of treatment.”

“As a course of treatment?” Lan Qiren asked, looking startled, and – oops. Had Lan Xichen not told his uncle about what he was doing? Sneaky sneaky! Yet more proof that Lan Xichen was obviously the finest and most superior of all Lans. “Impossible. A few times at full strength, perhaps…”

Lan Wangji was shaking his head in denial.

“It’s impossible,” Lan Qiren insisted. “As an actual course of treatment, he would need to play for him at least once every fortnight – every week, if possible. Xichen is sect leader now. He simply doesn’t have the time or the freedom to depart from the Cloud Recesses on such a regular basis.”

“Brother said a course of treatment,” Lan Wangj insisted back, stubborn as a mule.

“I would have noticed if your brother were slipping away every half-month, Wangji!”

“Anyway, it’s impossible for another reason,” Wen Qing put in. “If Chifeng-zun were getting regular treatment to help clear his meridians, we would have noticed that when we examined him in depth just now, and he definitely hasn’t been.”

“No, that’s wrong,” Nie Huaisang said, and now they were all looking at him, great. “I mean, he is getting regular treatment, and has been for the last few months. And, uh, sorry, Teacher Lan, it is the Song of Clarity. Only it’s not er-ge playing it for him – as you said, he’s way too busy to come to the Unclean Realm as often as that – but rather san-ge who’s doing the playing. Er-ge taught him how to do it…”

Judging by the color that Lan Qiren’s face just turned, Lan Xichen probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Nie Huaisang mentally apologized to Lan Xichen for the horrible scolding he was going to get when Lan Qiren got ahold of him again, but he figured Lan Xichen would forgive him – it was for Nie Mingjue’s health, after all! The people treating him had to know everything, after all, or else they wouldn’t be able to take proper care of him.

“Well, that’s still bizarre,” Wen Qing said. “Either your sect’s song-spell isn’t nearly as powerful as you think it is, Teacher Lan, which seems unlikely, or else whatever-his-name is playing it completely wrong. Judging from the evidence, Chifeng-zun’s state has deteriorated the past few months, not improved.”

She frowned.

“Actually, now that I think about it…” she said, trailing off, and turned to poke at the diagnostic array still hovering over Nie Mingjue’s body. “Teacher Lan, look here, at the lower levels – think of it as a way of mapping the evidence of what happened over time, the way stone does when it’s being worn away, like by a riverbed. His spiritual veins are strong, and then the deterioration is very slow, then faster but still not fast, and then, here, it suddenly starts going very fast all at once…”

“A few months ago,” Lan Qiren said, studying the array. “Yes, you’re right, that’s when the severe downturn began.”

“Hey, Nie-xiong,” Wei Wuxian said, sounding artificially light-hearted – extremely artificial, actually, and maybe Nie Huaisang wouldn’t have noticed except that he’d said the exact same words earlier when he was actually being light-hearted and the contrast between the two couldn’t be clearer. “When did you say Lianfang-zun started playing the Song of Clarity for your brother?”

“A few months ago…no, no, you’ve got it all wrong!” Nie Huaisang said quickly, realizing what Wei Wuxian was implying. “San-ge has been playing it for him for over half a year! He was getting better!”

Lan Wangji cleared his throat.

They all look at him.

“There is the matter of the Jin sect,” he said. “And their proposal regarding the position of Chief Cultivator.”

“Chief Cultivator?” Wei Wuxian asked, looking amused. “What’s that? How can there be a chief? We’re all different sects, aren’t we…? Well, excluding rogue cultivators like me, I guess.”

“That is how it has always been, yes,” Lan Qiren said. “However, in the interest of preventing another Wen sect and another Sunshot Campaign, the Jin sect has proposed creating a position of Chief Cultivator, which would act as an arbiter for the cultivation world – solving problems, settling disputes, that sort of thing.”

“My brother thinks the idea’s complete trash,” Nie Huaisang volunteered. “He says that we didn’t go to all that trouble to make sure Wen Ruohan couldn’t make himself the lord over all of us using his armies just to let Ji– uh, to let Sect Leader Jin do it using his money.”

“Has he said this publicly?” Wei Qing asked, and Nie Huaisang gave her a strange look for a moment.

Then it occurred to him that she probably didn’t know his brother that well, or even his reputation, so he clarified, “Yes, of course. My brother isn’t the sort of person who says one thing in private and another in public. He’s very straightforward.”

“That’s not what I was getting at,” she said. “It was more…when did he say it in public? I don’t suppose – a few months ago?”

“Well, yes, it was – I mean –” Nie Huaisang hesitated.

“I get what you’re saying,” Wei Wuxian said, and his face was hard, back in the lines that had been cut into it during the Sunshot Campaign. “Nie-xiong, would you say that that whole argument happened right around – or maybe right before – the time your da-ge stopped getting better whenever your san-ge came to play for him, and started getting worse much faster?”

“Lianfang-zun,” Wen Ning murmured. “Jin Guangyao.”

“But – but – they’re sworn brothers!” Nie Huaisang exclaimed. “He wouldn’t!”

“Wouldn’t he?” Lan Qiren asked. He looked older, suddenly, and tired. “Are you sure?”

Nie Huaisang wanted to say yes, he really did, he really really did –

But he couldn’t.

-

“You know, when I said I was bored and that the Unclean Realm was boring, I really was trying to use it as an excuse to go somewhere else,” Nie Huaisang said. “Ideally the Lotus Pier, which has both good food and good shopping and Jiang Cheng, who is pretty funny sometimes – usually not on purpose – but I was willing to settle for the Cloud Recesses because then I’d get to see er-ge. But either way, I hadn’t intended for the end result to be to liven up the Unclean Realm. Or at least, you know, not quite so much, you know?”

“You’re getting exactly what you deserve, you noxious little brat,” his brother said. He was still lying in bed, although he had a desk on his lap that contained all his work. He looked a lot better now that he’d had the immediate intervention surgery Wen Qing had done to straight his meridians out and after both Lan Qiren and Lan Wangji had played him the Song of Clarity – the real Song of Clarity, not whatever messed up version Jin Guangyao must have been using on him – a half-dozen times over the course of as many days. He was even smiling again. “Don’t pretend like you aren’t enjoying it.”

Nie Huaisang was loving it. His home had never been so rowdy, not for as long as he could remember it, and it was already a pretty rowdy place to begin with – but anything got more rowdy when you threw in Wen Qing, who was there to supervise the aftereffects of the surgery, Wen Ning, who was there to assist her, Wei Wuxian, who was there to watch over the still-somewhat-unstable Wen Ning, the rest of the remaining Wen sect, who couldn’t be left on their own and undefended, and of course also Lan Qiren and Lan Wangji in all their grumpy majesty.

And it was going to stay that way.

Well, Lan Qiren, at least, was planning on returning back to the Cloud Recesses, since they were very firmly in the process of rebuilding and he was concerned that Lan Xichen couldn’t do the rest of the work without him, but Lan Wangji was being assigned to the Unclean Realm on a semi-permanent basis since both Wen Qing and Lan Qiren had agreed that Nie Mingjue needed to continue with a daily regimen of Clarity for at least a month, then shift over to three times a week, then two, then weekly, and eventually twice-monthly and monthly before finally, hopefully, tapering off for good. Lan Qiren planned to come back to visit on a regular basis to supervise the musical aspects, and Wen Qing wanted to remain on hand in the event of another crisis – and to study the medical implications of musical cultivation, which was apparently an area she’d completely neglected in her previous studies on account of the Wen sect not teaching much in the way of music.

And if Wen Qing was staying, then obviously Wei Wuxian was going to have to stay as well, a fact that very obviously delighted Lan Wangji to no end. The two of them were completely unbearable when together in a way that made Nie Huaisang pretend to gag and Lan Qiren start heaving long sighs and grumbling about not wanting to deal with matchmakers – which Nie Huaisang hadn’t gotten at first until he suddenly did, at which point he started pretend-gagging even more, just for the principle of the thing.

Possibly Nie Huaisang was also occasionally going and dropping a lit torch into a fire-starting array any time they were showing signs of getting boring, like how just that morning he’d oh-so-casually reminded Wei Wuxian that Lan Wangji used to like to bite people and how everyone used to say it was the way he showed affection, knowing that it would make the ever-competitive (though not as competitive as Jiang Cheng) Wei Wuxian start bugging Lan Wangji about whether or not he would have bitten him –

Nie Huaisang had hope that all that teasing would eventually make it through Lan Wangji’s otherwise impenetrable Lan sect reserve and he’d finally just drag Wei Wuxian into a bedroom and give him the biting he was asking for, but only time would tell.

“I admit to nothing,” Nie Huaisang said righteously, and hopped into the bed to curl up next to Nie Mingjue like he hadn’t since he was much younger. “You like it too. Don’t you?”

“I don’t like the political headache that comes with it,” Nie Mingjue pretended to grumble. “Not to mention that we’re now suffering an undoubtedly permanent infestation of those surnamed Wen – ugh.”

That complaint was probably genuine, Nie Huaisang reflected, since his brother had had to suffer the original Wen sect a lot more than Nie Huaisang ever had, but saving Nie Mingjue’s life meant they owed Wen Qing a life-debt. To pay it off, his brother, good and righteous person that he was, had officially buried his sect’s blood feud with hers, making them equal again, and now they had no grounds to be pissy with them or kick them out. The rest of the Nie sect loved their sect leader enough to begrudgingly forgive them as well, at least provisionally, but provisionally went an awful long way with the Nie sect. Unlike the Lan sect, they didn’t have a rule against bearing grudges, though they did it very well, thank you. It was just that they didn’t have the temperaments to do it more than once or twice in a lifetime, and the rest of the time they tended to forget about their wrongs pretty quickly and move on towards making friends.

All that, of course, meant that the Wen sect now had two places in the cultivation world that they could live – the rest of the cultivation world wasn’t exactly as incentivized to forgive them, obviously – and since the Burial Mounds were in fact pretty terrible, it was no surprise that they were much happier in the Unclean Realm.

“You can distract yourself by watching the Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian circus, like I do,” Nie Huaisang comforted his brother. “It’s really funny. And soon we’ll be able to host a wedding, won’t that be fun? And it won’t even have to be one for either you or me!”

“…that does sound fun,” Nie Mingjue allowed. “Everyone would enjoy that, and it’d be good for commerce, all the things you’d need for that – the Lan sect is still mostly investing in rebuilding, but I can’t imagine they’d allow their Second Jade to be married in anything less than the best.”

“I’ll paint them a nice couple set of fans as a wedding gift,” Nie Huaisang decided. “And you can make them a pair of supplemental spiritual weapons to match – you haven’t done that in ages, da-ge, and it used to be the thing you loved the most.”

Nie Mingjue looked seriously tempted, or at least he did to someone who knew him as well as Nie Huaisang did. His brother wasn’t actually an ascetic, the way Jin Guangyao had once or twice joked in a not-quite-joking tone he was; he just had different vices and hobbies than most men. No wine, women, or song for Nie Huaisang’s quixotic big brother, no – he liked steel, and forging, and sometimes dancing when he thought he could get away with it without losing face. Also those stupid overly complicated puzzles that Nie Huaisang needed to hunt up more of for him.

“I don’t know,” Nie Mingjue said, still hesitating. “My health –”

“I’ll get you cleared by Wen Qing,” Nie Huaisang assured him. “I’m sure she’ll say it’s good for you to engage in your hobbies more often, since you’ve been so bored without training Baxia so often.”

“I need to start doing that, too.”

“Ah, but you can only do that under supervision of doctors, and only in limited quantities until your qi improves. You need to fill your day with something that isn’t work, da-ge – doctor’s orders!”

Lan Qiren’s orders, to be more accurate. He’d been shoved into the role of sect leader, too, though he’d been older than Nie Mingjue was when it’d happened; he was now rigid to the point of unyielding on insisting that Nie Mingjue not allow himself to be swallowed up by it any more than he already had.

Anyway, his brother had already been very pointedly avoiding anything to do with sect business outside the sect, and in specific in relation to the Jin sect, and Jin Guangyao, which Nie Huaisang fully understood and supported. His brother might be tough on the outside, but he had a soft heart, and Jin Guangyao’s actions had broken it – it was better for Nie Mingjue’s health that he not think about it, at least for now.

Nie Huaisang had instead taken responsibility for external affairs into his own hands for the time being.

He wasn’t necessarily very good at it, he wasn’t good at much, but he was extremely capable of being very annoying and given the Nie sect’s current ascendant position in the cultivation world, that was all he needed to be to keep the Jin sect so busy guessing what he was up to that they’d (hopefully) be too busy to scheme any more.

And if Nie Huaisang had a scheme or two he was planning on trying back on them…well, that was his own business, right? Even if it failed, no one would be too surprised, he was just the stupid and useless second young master of Qinghe, after all.

No one broke his brother’s heart and got away with it. No one!

(Also, being in charge of external affairs meant that Nie Huaisang got to spend quite a bit of time sequestered with Lan Xichen, nominally ‘discussing sect business’, and it was great. They barely did any work at all!)

“All right, all right,” Nie Mingjue said. “You win, as you always do. Don’t you have anything better to do than attach yourself to me like some sort of parasite?”

“Nope! Cleared my entire morning just for this.” Nie Huaisang burrowed in more. “I’m going to steal all your heat away, da-ge, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Huaisang…”

“And later,” Nie Huaisang interrupted, marching all over his brother’s half-hearted protest, “you’re going to tell all the things you haven’t been telling me about our family’s cultivation style, and the saber tombs, and all of that.” His brother went very still. “You’re going to tell me, and then we’re going to figure out what we’re going to do about it together. All right?”

He waited to hear his brother’s response.

Instead, he felt the light touch of his brother’s palm on his hair.

“All right, Huaisang,” his brother said. “That sounds good. I’ll listen to you.”

“As you should,” Nie Huaisang said. “As you always should!”

“I’m not buying you any more fans, and you still need to train your saber.”

“Awww, but da-ge…!”

#mdzs #nie huaisang #nie mingjue #lan qiren #lan wangji #wen ning #wen qing #wei wuxian #my fic #this is an old one from the vaults #I THINK I never got around to posting it #if it's actually a duplicate let me know #my fics

[travalerray]

Rewatching Mysterious Lotus Casebook 5/40

the intensity of his expression the moment Di Feisheng comes on screen......The bitter rage....(and perhaps some amount of heartbreak).

You Sure Did. Might want to name this dog of yours?

I wonder how he felt all those years....nursing a single hatred even after having given up on the rest. Biqiu? Forgiven. Zijin is barely in the picture. But man. Di Feisheng, who he had some sort of arrangement with, who supposedly went and had his shixiong killed.....and then he finds out that was a lie too. His shixiong isn't even dead. He's alive and he hates him. He has always.....hated him? All this time? What else did he miss?

What other people have been concealing emotions that he never realised?

.... interesting ranking.

sometimes you need to become your own matchmaker and cling onto your crush like a leech. Does it work? Well,

my favourite part about their conversations is when Li Lianhua tells something to Fang Duobing as an advice but you know he's rebuking his own self. Don't trust the wrong person, check the body, you can't live up to the expectations of others, people must learn to forgive themselves....etc.

Jiao Liqiao......honestly knowing the fact that she was the one who arranged the thundering bombs makes the conversation funnier.

DFS: Did you know about the bombs?

JLQ: Of course, of course! It destroyed parts of both Sigu Sect and Jinyuan Alliance! [Said as I, recall how meticulously I planned my yandere schtick by poisoning and blowing up people]

DFS: *stare*

"Those who betray me will become like these two corpses here, don't you agree" man I know that he doesn't really start to suspect JLQ until a little later but I wonder what he thought of the whole situation. He kills two people suspecting treachery, and perhaps the conversation between him and JLQ is really just to establish his character and to foreshadow her eventual death, but hm. Makes you think about how he trusted only the Four Kings since they established the Jinyuan Alliance together.

#li lianhua #fang duobing #di feisheng #jiao liqiao #shan gudao #mysterious lotus casebook #kk's mlc rewatch #deeply fascinated by fdb. Yeaaaah the final boss appeared no I didn't get to see him well so that the plot #can explain the road trip

[thebiscuiteternal]

Something for the little Fox-Meng Yao gets grabbed/adopted into the Nie Household as a companion for little Huaisang

From his point of view riding in one of Nie-zongzhu's saddlebags, Meng Yao was still trying to figure out the course of events that had put him in this position.

When the array-created cage had snapped shut around him, when he'd seen the size and sect colors of the men and women who'd gathered around him, he'd believed himself already dead.

Even though his mother had only ever interacted with the barest fringes of their non-human cohorts, not wanting to get caught by the humans who were her primary clientele, she'd heard enough passed info and gossip to drill a fear of the Nie into him; how they were practically demons themselves in the wild viciousness with which they battled creatures like him.

And yet the bear of a man who'd crouched in front of his cage had proven himself to be surprisingly affable... kind, even, in comparison to his own father, who hadn't even known what he was when having him thrown down the steps of Koi Tower.

Even when the others had expressed disapproval over just letting him live, even when he, in a terrified panic, had bitten the hands that reached in and plucked him from the cage, the human had made no effort to harm him.

Instead, the human had clucked and muttered over his bedraggled and half-starved state, and then offered him a deal. One that, if the human was being honest, was decidedly in his favor, even!

Maybe, he thought as the horses thundered towards towering stone walls, he was dreaming.

Maybe he was still in the cage, dying, and his feverish brain had invented the last half a day in an attempt to keep him from being miserable as his life snuffed ou-

The loud bang of heavy wood and iron doors slamming shut made him reflexively flatten his ears against his skull.

Well... he was pretty sure his brain wouldn't have thought to include that, which meant all this must actually be happening.

The smell of sizzling meat broke through his mental dilemma, and his ears pricked forward eagerly before he instinctively lunged, mouth watering, as far as he could out of the saddlebag to snap down the large hunk of roasted chicken that Nie-zongzhu had held in front of his face.

There was more in a bowl on the ground, and had Nie-zongzhu not been so quick at lifting him out of the bag and putting him down, he probably would have fallen in the dirt on his face trying to get to it.

"Easy, easy, no rush. Eat as much as you want, then I'll take you to meet Sang-er."

Three bowls later, his stomach practically hurting from all he'd stuffed in it in his desperation, he allowed Nie-zongzhu to pick him up again and carry him towards the inner quarters.

"Just stay with him for now, all right? No doubt you need rest, and he's probably not going to be in any shape for more than that anyway. Come morning, if you're up for changing, we'll see about proper introductions and getting you kitted out," Nie-zongzhu said amiably, paying no mind to confused or wary looks from the assorted servants and disciples they passed.

Nie-zongzhu, he was beginning to realize, was apparently a very strange man in general, not just in choosing not to kill him.

The room they came to held not only a large fireplace, but several small burning censers dispensing both heat and medicinal smoke. Had he lived in the area long enough to grow a proper winter coat, it would have been sweltering, and even with his current one, he could feel his skin prickling a bit.

A boy who looked to be a few years older than him and quite a bit taller was sitting on the floor by a lump of furs and blankets in just his inner robes and trousers, a portable writing desk in his lap. At the sound of the door closing, he raised his head, and his green-eyed gaze flicked from Meng Yao to Nie-zongzhu's face, his mouth pulled into a scrunched frown that Meng Yao had already seen on several of the people in the halls.

Meng Yao craned his head back as far as he could, but that only got him a view of the underside of Nie-zongzhu's jaw. Whatever silent conversation had passed between father and son -and this boy had to be a son, they looked too similar for him not to be- was apparently enough to placate the boy's concern, because when Meng Yao looked at him again, he merely shrugged before going back to whatever he was writing.

Nie-zongzhu carried him around to the other side of the lump, which he could now see was a nest of pallet mattresses as well as the other bedding.

In the midst of it all was a much smaller boy. Despite the fact that he was clearly sweating from the heat, he was curled in a tight ball under his covers, pale and shivering. His breath came and went in little wheezes, punctuated by the occasional small cough.

When Meng Yao's paws landed on the mattress near his head, bleary pale green eyes fluttered open and blinked at him.

If the boy was as confused as his brother by his presence, he didn't show it, merely shifting to make room for him amongst the nest, and once he'd taken the offer to make himself comfortable, little fingers scratched once behind his left ear before the boy was already asleep again, his arm resting loosely over Meng Yao's neck in a gentle cuddle.

Oh... yes. This deal was definitely in his favor, he thought, unable to resist snuggling a little closer and closing his own eyes to sleep.

#mdzs #nie sect #papa nie #nie mingjue #nie huaisang #jin guangyao #fanfic

[wangxianficrecs]

Follower Recs

~*~

I just reread my bookmark and found this WIP. It's character seeing the past

The Characters of MDZS Watching the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation 

by emma_screams

M, WIP, 147k, Wangxian

Summary: What happens when a suspicious letter was sent to all the clans, inviting them to an appointed location to learn about the truth of thirteen years ago and now? Will the Yiling Patriarch finally get the justice he seeks? Will Hanguang-Jun lose some of his regret? Will Jiang Cheng find the peace he desperately needs? And will the other Sect Leaders finally realize what a piece of shit they are get the faceslapping they deserve? But most importantly, will Wei Wuxian allow a drunk Lan Zhan to be viewed by the public? Find out in the epic series of the characters watching the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation!

~*~

i'd like to rec some fics for wip week!

i loved the description of "this is an lqr & wwx get-along-sweater fic" 😂 @danmeiireader

patching the road with vague intentions

by loosingletters (@loosingmoreletters)

T, WIP, 9k, Wangxian

Summary: “What have you done!?” thundered a voice Wei Wuxian had, frankly speaking, never wanted to hear again. “Old man Lan?” Wei Wuxian blurted out, staring at the aged face of his former teacher. At the back of his mind, Wei Wuxian remembered the cut of his robes, that he wasn’t dressed like a widow at all, but like a Lan. Lan Qiren looked around, his gaze stuck somewhere above Wei Wuxian’s head, most likely the half-ruined summoning array behind him – fucking stupid, Wei Wuxian should’ve gotten rid of it immediately. Just why did it have to be a Lan summoning him, why Lan Qiren his visitor at the door? Wasn’t death enough punishment? “Wei Wuxian?” Lan Qiren asked wearily. Or, Wei Wuxian is summoned back to life in the Cloud Recesses. Unfortunately, the person to find him is Lan Qiren, forcing the unlikely duo to work together to keep the circumstances Wei Wuxian's return undiscovered.

~*~

sibling dynamics! dadxian! magically turning yourself trans! 👌🏽 @danmeiireader

deeper than the ink

by loosingletters (@loosingmoreletters)

M, WIP, 49k, Wangxian

Summary: Lonesomeness, the state of waiting and wanting, being caught in an endless fog with no escape. Harried by the distance to Wei Wuxian and his sister’s impending marriage, Jiang Cheng makes a trip to the Burial Mounds that doesn’t end in just another screaming match, but a desperate scheme to keep his brother by his side. On a mountain of corpses, Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng damn themselves to one last lie.

~*~

i ADORE wen ning (like, in general, but especially in this fic) @danmeiireader

Where The Arrow Points

by Nillegible (@nillegible)

G, WIP, 4k, Wangxian

Summary: Wen Ning is thrown back in time to the archery competition at the Qishan Wen discussion conference. Before he died, and before a war. Last time he was here, he missed his shot, and was laughed away. This time he doesn't miss. (Or, Wen Ning pulls a Mockingjay at the Wen Sect's discussion conference, and changes the fate of the world.)

~*~

knives :) @danmeiireader

Every time you fall

by Nillegible (@nillegible)

T, WIP, 9k, Wangxian

Summary: “I always said that you would bring trouble to our sect,” says Madam Yu, following it up with a third strike, then more, one after another, each one jerking his body forward, robbing him of control enough to breathe, to think. He’s never felt pain like this before. Not the fiery lashes tearing the flesh on his back, the pain of his heart shattering as he realizes what will happen now. 'I didn’t know this would happen,' thinks Wei Wuxian. 'I was only trying to do the right thing.' For the first time ever, Wei Wuxian believes Madam Yu’s censure of him. I did this. I brought them here. My fault. (or: WWX decides the Wen attack on Lotus Pier is his fault, so he sends Madam Yu and Jiang Cheng away towards Meishan Yu, and runs back to save the others)

~*~

and i saw that you recced SSJ [💙Stunted, Starving Juvenility] (my beloved!!!), and i wanted to specifically rec its podfic! it's SO well done. the reader has a pleasant tone and pace, and does thoughtful character voices and even regional accents (an interpretation of them!). the podfic is OVER SIXTY HOURS (so far!!!!)(after editing!!!) so i'd like to give a nod to the insane amount of hard work that went into it ❤💙 @danmeiireader

Stunted, Starving Juvenility [Podfic]

by gndmlvr01

E, WIP, Podfic, Wangxian

Summary: Podfic of Stunted, Starving Juvenility, by TomatenMark Read by gndmlvr01, and posted with permission Please note: I did add on extra tags that I find helpful to locate works like this (ex: Genius WWX) Original story summary: At sixteen Wei Wuxian is—through some strange twist of fate, or a nick in the layer between parallel universes, who knows—out of the blue confronted with that one incense burner dream one night. While his curious mind is left unable to stop poking at this new perspective on Lan Wangji, circumstances in the Cloud Recesses begin to change and Wei Wuxian is suddenly presented with life-altering opportunities. Maybe Gusu isn’t so bad after all? (Or alternatively: The fic where I get to give Wei Wuxian the academic scholarship he deserves while simultaneously getting him hitched early on.)

~*~

oh no forgot one for wip week 😅

this fic was recced for an itmf i sent and i love the premise! @danmeiireader

Please Take This Radish

by Wildcard

M, WIP, 7k, Wangxian

Summary: “Are you telling me,” Jiang Cheng said, voice starting out in a low growl and then rapidly rising in volume, “That Wei Wuxian - the YILING PATRIARCH - reincarnated in his old bedroom?!” Xue Yang is the first and best disciple of the Yiling Patriarch. He is excellent at raising corpses, spectacular at making talismans and an expert swordsman. He is also 11 years old, trying to raise a toddler and has been mistaken for a de-aged Yiling Patriarch. Life is not going well.

~*~

(Please REBLOG as a signal boost for these hard-working authors if you like – or think others might like – these stories.)

#Wangxian Fic Recs #follower recs #mdzs #the untamed #follower rec #MDZS #Mo Dao Zu Shi #The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation #Wangxian #The Untamed #Chenqingling #CQL #Chenqing Ling #WIP Rec Week #WIP #September 2023 #The Characters of MDZS Watching the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation #emma_screams #patching the road with vague intentions #loosingletters #Mature #Teen #short fic <15k #epic length fic > 100k #deeper than the ink #medium fic 15k-49k #Where The Arrow Points #Gen #Nillegible #Stunted Starving Juvenility

[healing-fire--rewrite]

Sect Specialties

What Are Specialties?

Many cats have specialties- a job that a cat does often and well. Specialties come about for a variety of reasons; out of enjoyment of a specific task, simply because a cat does a task very well and therefore keeps getting assigned to do it, or because they have specific skills and/or abilities that make them great at some tasks and not-so-good at others. Specialties are like unofficial sub-ranks. There is no ceremony, but everyone in Thunder Sect knows that Commonclaw is a patrol specialist. A cat can specialize in numerous things at once; there's no limit to how many specialties they can have since it's all about their skills.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

Multi-Rank Specialties

Mentoring Some cats gravitate towards teaching. They spend more time with kittens, teaching them history or the codes, and they often volunteer to take on another apprentice or teach a Clanmate's apprentice when they're sick or injured.

Camp Keeping Camp keepers are the cats who spend time building dens and nests, keeping the camp clean and organized, and making sure the camp is well-defended.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

Warrior Specialties

Patrolling Patrol specialists are cats with high stamina who know how to pace themselves.

Hunting Hunting specialists are particularly skilled at stealth. They excel at the hunt itself instead of or alongside setting traps.

Messaging Messengers are the swiftest of the swift, and they're the ones who are most likely to be sent across the territory with important information.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

Healer Specialties

Medic Medics are healers who excel at thinking on the fly with limited medicinal supplies. They're often taken on patrols in case of border skirmishes or encounters with predators, and they're a great amount of help on battlefields.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

Sect-Specific Specialties

Trapping • Warrior Specialty • Shadow, River, & Wind Sects Trappers are skilled at both creating and setting traps. Thunder Sect believes that trapping is undignified and undermines the natural skill cats have in hunting; you will never catch a Thunderian making or setting any traps.

Gardening • Multi-Rank • Thunder Sect While almost all Thunderians garden, some seem to have a particular skill in it.

Swimming • Warrior Specialty • Shadow Sect As the Shadow Sect makes their home in a marsh, swimming is a skill that all Shadowers have at least a basic understanding of. Some Shadowers even enjoy swimming, and employ this specialty to hunt things like turtles!

Fishing • Warrior Specialty • Shadow Sect Fishing isn't a popular specialty in the Shadow Sect. Whereas in the River Sect it's a part of daily life, Shadowers tend to prefer other prey, like birds and lizards.

Artisans • Multi-Rank • River Sect Artisans are Riverish who are particularly skilled in pottery. They know where to find the best clay, how to mold it into the shape they want, how to paint and carve images into the pot, and where the sun dries it out the best.

Diving • Warrior Specialty • River Sect Divers can hold their breaths for a long time and are the ones who collect river oysters, clams, and mussels.

Land Hunting • Warrior Specialty • River Sect Land hunting is a relatively rare skill to find in the River Sect. While all Riverish have the basic knowledge on how to hunt on land, it's not often needed, as the river is large and plentiful.

Gardening • Healer Specialty • River Sect The garden specialty in the River Sect is very different from the one in the Thunder Sect. To the Riverish, gardening is reserved for healers and advisors and is only done with medicinal plants.

Weaving • Multi-Rank • Wind Sect A specialty most often found among those who find themselves with long stretches of time with nothing to do. Weavers sew, dye, and embroider blankets and tapestries using a variety of materials, including long grasses and rabbit hides.

Tending • Warrior Specialty • Wind Sect The only Sect to develop animal husbandry, the Wind Sect has cats who spend most of their time tending the animals they care for

#warrior cats #warriors #worldbuilding #warriors au #shadow sect #thunder sect #river sect #wind sect

[enihk-writes]

[thunder bolts in a clear sky]

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index ║ next ⇢

[PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY TRIGGERS CAUSED BEYOND THIS LINE]

there is a secret that one of the third-grade disciples have been hiding.

chung myung knows, and she knows that he knows.

how?

it's because she told him, not completely by accident, but it was close enough. she wasn't really expecting him to believe her, but he did. the world was a strange place, truth was stranger than fiction. he was a man from the past century reborn into another body with his memories intact, so finding someone who comes from the distant future wasn't that far-off a possibility. though, she's never told him how far into the future she had come from.

would he believe her?

if he hears of a time where humans no longer lived on land, but rather in places among the stars in the night sky — or how in her time, martial arts was an obsolete and forgotten craft replaced by weapons that didn't need one to run or move around, with some even allowing one to use them from the safety of a faraway place...

what would he say to that?

is mount hua still standing?

she feels that might be the question he'd ask her. and if she said no, what then? maybe he'd try to change the outcome of something that was the result of the passage of time and of technological progress. or maybe he'd pick apart her memories and find clues of remnants of their existence. or he might just accept this fact quietly.

the truth was, there was a possibility that mount hua might still be standing. maybe hidden in some corner of the universe where the land was more peaceful and the disciples swung their swords in trained synchronisation under the towering plum blossom trees that were in full bloom. she wouldn't know about it though. her corner of the universe wasn't the greatest place to be, always fighting to live for one more day does put quite a toll on someone's psyche.

she rubs the tips of her fingers together.

again, nothing happened.again, nothing happened.

that makes it the 5894th day. she scratches the numbers down on the makeshift notebook made out of scrap papers, all filled with rows upon rows of tiny etchings. she wasn't too worried about the fact that nothing was happening, in fact, it might be better this way. she hated the idea of having to explain herself if things did begin to happen.

stop spacing out.

right. she was supposed to be helping with dinner at that moment… oops.

#enihkwrites #thunder bolts in a clear sky #tbcs #return of the blossoming blade x reader #return of the mount hua sect x reader #chung myung x reader

[lovewanxian]

WIP Wednesday

For the sequel of Holding onto what remains of my life (it's slipping through my fingers)

The last time Lan Xichen had felt this feral was the day the Wen sect burned down his home. But not even as he fled from the fight and left his clan members to die, had he felt such disgust with himself. 

Worst of all was the uncertainty. The fate of his world was still lying on the periphery and he had no idea which way the scales would shift. 

“Did … did any of you know? That he was an omega?” Came the voice from one of the minor sect leaders. The sound of his voice in the silent room made Lan Xichen startle and he had to take a second to let go of his sword. He couldn’t tell who it was that spoke, when normally he always carefully kept track of who said what. “Did the Jia-” he shut his mouth with an audible click, no silencing spell necessary. 

Lan Xichen’s, as well as many other’s gazes, fell to where Jiang Wanyin was pacing back and forth by the doors to the room. Zidian sparked on his finger and the smell of heavy rain and thunder laid thick around him, creating his own personal thunderstorm. No one dared to approach the furious alpha. 

The question made him snarl and turn towards them with his teeth bared. “Of course I fucking knew!”

“Then why did you keep the information to yourself?” Jin Guangshan asked and leaned forwards in his seat. “The existence of a male omega-”

“Was none of your fucking business!” Zidian uncurled entirely for a second, flashing white bright. Even Jin Guangshan knew better than to speak further.

#mdzs #wangxian #the untamed #mdzs fanfiction #indrel writes #wip wednesday #lan xichen #jiang cheng

[xiyao-feels]

Honestly thinking about it I feel like one thing that happens with JC is I frequently see people, especially people opposed to him, interpret his breaking with WWX at the Burial Mounds in purely psychological terms: he feels he's second-best, he can't handle WWX's righteousness, he is Just Too Selfish.

Which I find particularly interesting because, while obviously the break is real, and obviously they're both upset about it, it is in some sense staged. The fight is explicitly staged, and while JC absolutely cannot be seen coming and going from Yiling—which the text explicitly states, please note (ER 75):

Before they parted, Jiang Cheng spoke, “We won’t see you off. It wouldn’t be good if someone saw us.”

Wei WuXian nodded. He understood that it wasn’t easy for the Jiang siblings to have come out here. If someone else saw them, all those things they did for the public to believe would be wasted.

He nevertheless risks smuggling JYL in all her wedding outfit to Yiling so that WWX can see her (and she can see WWX)! He suggests JYL ask WWX for her future child's courtesy name! I don't want to say there hasn't been an emotional break; clearly there has. But equally clearly the emotional break isn't complete.

On the other hand, there is, uh, a very obvious reason that JC breaks with WWX that isn't about his feelings about WWX at all, and is honestly not exactly subtle—JC is a sect leader. He has responsibilities to the Jiang sect! Which has many many people in it who aren't in fact WWX. WWX's initial rescuing of the Wen absolutely makes political trouble for him—and I think it's very much worth noting here that we're told he's been working late into the night every day for the past few years, because he's working on rebuilding the Jiang sect, and then of course the first day he decides to turn in early this happens (ER 73):

Within these few years, Jiang Cheng insisted on working late into the night every day. That day, just as he decided to rest early, he had to rush to Koi Tower overnight because of the thundering news.

He's working! He's a sect leader! He has responsibilities that don't involve WWX! Of course he also has responsibilities that do involve WWX, as a member of his sect; but WWX has responsibilities in turn, and is not fulfilling them. I don't even just mean drinking while JC is working, I mean he consistently fails to acknowledge JC as having final authority. And this makes trouble for JC, which means it makes trouble for the entire rest of the Jiang sect.

Like...I do sometimes feel that people interpret JC's unwillingness to stand with WWX and the Wen, and risk destruction, as a purely personal reluctance: oh, he's scared for his own life. And it's really, really weird, because—he can't just risk his own life. That's not in the cards. He's a sect leader; if he stands with WWX, his sect stands with him. Even if you say he should abdicate so he can stand with WWX on his own—I mean, that's a politically really stupid plan! He's the last Jiang left standing, and it's only been a few years since the near-complete destruction of his clan, which he's been working very hard and impressively successfully to rebuild. Who the hell could he abdicate to? Who could possibly have the legitimacy to pull it off in his stead? And incidentally, wouldn't it in fact make his sect look weak—actually, in fact, weaken them—and once again it comes down to the trade, his duties to his sect against one man?

I'm not saying you have to be closely attached to the rebuilt Jiang sect; certainly we don't get to know any of its members except JC. But JC's position as sect leader is very important to actually understanding what's going on, and I think that's made clear in the text. Obviously his separation from WWX is also deeply personal! But to act as though it's only about the two of them, only about what JC is feeling about WWX, and not about the entire rest of his life and responsibilities... It's a misreading of the situation, and a particularly silly one.

[robininthelabyrinth]

Lan Qiren was really into demonic cultivation as a teenager and has Opinions on how Wei Wuxian is doing it

If there was one thing Wei Wuxian hated about war – no, that was a lie, he hated many, many things about war, but he had an especial hatred for the fact that even in the middle of awful horrible gruesome war you still couldn’t escape boring meetings.

Most of the time, Wei Wuxian got a pass on account of being the Jiang sect’s very valuable, very scary demonic cultivator, and also because Jiang Cheng very wisely didn’t trust him to have a single ounce of political or diplomatic acumen, but sometimes – like, say, today – Jiang Cheng was busy in the medics’ tents getting stitches put in his arm and someone needed to go play nice with some of their guests, which had arrived shortly before the battle had started.

Guests which, Wei Wuxian discovered to his horror, included not only the usual suspects of irritating subsidiary sect leaders and couriers, but also Lan Qiren.

“I thought Zewu-jun was the Lan sect courier when Lan Zhan can’t make it,” Wei Wuxian blurted out, horrified. If Lan Qiren had gotten here with the others, and there was no reason to think he hadn’t, he would have just seen Wei Wuxian in full Yiling Patriarch glory out on the battlefield, using resentful energy, summoning the dead, and going full crazy.

He was going to get lectured to death.

No, wait, Wei Wuxian was super scary now. He didn’t need to worry about being lectured! He could just tell Lan Qiren to get lost – no, wait, Jiang Cheng would literally murder him if he did that. He could just ignore anything the old teacher said to him.

Yes, that would work. That was the right play.

“My nephews are both needed elsewhere, so I agreed to substitute,” Lan Qiren said. He was frowning thunderously. “I see that the rumors about you did not lie.”

Oh, great. Here they went.

“Indeed, I am ashamed to admit that I once taught such an inefficient musician.”

A what?!

“Hey!” Wei Wuxian protested. “What do you mean inefficient?”

“Would you prefer ‘sloppy’?”

“I am not a sloppy musician!”

The other sect leaders visiting took a look between the two of them, Lan Qiren’s stormy scowl and Wei Wuxian’s indignant expression, and decided, quite wisely, that they would come back at a later time.

Wei Wuxian decided to display at least some of the tact he learned as head disciple of the Jiang sect and slapped up a silencing talisman on the door to let them have this out without bothering the rest of the camp…and hopefully to forestall Lan Qiren from using that horrible Lan sect silencing spell on him.

“All right, then,” he growled, putting on his best ‘fuck with me and you die’ expression, which sadly seemed to have no impact whatsoever on his crotchety old teacher. “Let’s have it out, then. I knew you wouldn’t approve of my demonic cultivation, that’s fine, but what do you mean sloppy?!”

“I meant exactly what I said. Some of us value precision,” Lan Qiren sniffed. “Bad enough that you’re using resentful energy, but you’re not even maximizing your usage – your songs are spilling excess resentful energy left and right! Do you have no shame?! Or if no shame, then at least dignity as a musical cultivator?”

This was not how Wei Wuxian had expected this conversation to go.

“Teacher Lan, are you suggesting that the problem with what I did today is the fact that I wasn’t doing the demonic cultivation well enough?” he asked, bewildered.

“If you’re going to do something, do it well,” Lan Qiren scolded. “Demonic cultivation is intolerable to the cultivation world – you’ll figure that out soon enough, I certainly did – but at minimum, if you’re going to do it anyway, you could do me the favor of not embarrassing me as your teacher.”

“…you did? Wait, when you say you did, you can’t possibly mean –”

“Who among us did not have an adventurous youth?” Lan Qiren said dismissively, and Wei Wuxian really desperately wanted to shout ‘I didn’t expect you to be that adventurous!’ “But let us focus on the musical aspect. That third song you selected, for instance, the one where you gave the instruction for the corpses to attack. Why on earth did you choose that key and tempo for a wide-spread attack? You would have gotten twice the result for half the effort if you’d gone faster and higher.”

What? No, that wouldn’t – hmm. Actually, thinking through the applicable theorems of musical spell-crafting, that was…actually probably true.

What the fuck.

“I was going for a different effect at the start,” he admitted, ducking his head. “It was originally meant for a much smaller target, and I never bothered updating it when I started using larger groups of corpses.”

Lan Qiren huffed. “Like I said, sloppy!”

“…you’re right.” Wei Wuxian looked at the old teacher, who seemed appeased by his admission, and slowly started to grin. “Teacher Lan, you’re completely right. I’m a terrible student, a shame to your name as an instructor. Clearly you have to fix this.”

“Me fix this? How do you mean?”

Wei Wuxian pulled out Chenqing. “Help me figure out how to do it better, obviously! You can’t allow me to go around embarrassing you, can you?”

#mdzs #lan qiren #wei wuxian #my fic #my fics #alt headcanons #mad science hours

[jcs-writing-hell]

MDZS AU | Summoning Gone Wrong

MXY has enough. He whips out everything necessary, proceeds and finishes the ritual - the one where he dies in order to bring back the nightmare from 13 years ago: WWX.

Strange, otherworldy things happen. Animals act crazy, thunder can be heard.. but nothing happens. MXY is standing there, eyes closed, ready.. but the Yiling Patriarch makes no appearance. The young one, already at the end of his strength, breaks down in despair.

At the same time, somewhere on WWX's old turf, the same phenomenons happen.. and to his confusion, WWX actually feels things, his body, the place he was laying on.. he hears things, he.. exists? He rises, wondering why this time waking up feels so different from the last 13 years.

To his bewilderment, once he sat up and opened his eyes, WWX is right where he last remembers being, before nothing registered to him anymore: Burial Mounds.

For some time he just sat there, trying to make sense of things. There are talismans around, those meant for containing spirits that had gone out of control.

It takes some time before he ventures out, in need for food. Then further and further away. He doesn't recognize much of the world he once was so familiar with. Then, one day, as he returns from the edges of town, he sees an elderly couple enter a house on his turf.. well, not on but close enough by.

WWX has two choices, remaining unseen - a live ghost - or approach the couple. He's tired of the questions, aching for social interaction. The latter it is.

What he goes on to hear, from the couple that greets him much too nicely, is hard to stomach.

He had died, 13 years ago, before JL was even born. His body couldn't take the dark arts anymore, his soul shutting down. There was no siege against him, because he collapsed before the war against the Wen's was fully won. However, the worse of it was that.. he'd never began to "rot". He was dead, for all they knew, but he wasn't "fading".

Without any official ties remaining to sects, the choice was made to keep him contained where he last lived. The elderly couple, cultivator that had long since retired. They looked after him, but had nothing much to do: WWX was dead.. but now he wasn't.. and he didn't understand.

The theory was that he'd been so full of the dark energy that, while his soul was failing him, his body had been on the verge of turning into a fierce corps.. but that never happened.

A lot of things never happened.. while a lot of others did. JL had both his parents, WQ was alive and WN living in peace.. because, once found, the secret WWX had been trying to keep got revealed.

For any answer he got, WWX had more and more questions - but the main one everyone had was: Why was he suddenly back alive?

#mdzs #mo dao zu shi #the grandmaster of demonic cultivation #wei wuxian #mdzs au #mdzs fanfic #mdzs fic #wei ying #jc wips and writes #mdzs fanfiction #mxtx #mxtx fanfic #yiling patriarch #mo xuanyu #trying to keep it short for on here #the post doesn't do the idea justice