#where the summoner (qin su) sticks around

[isabilightwood]

The Problem With Authority - Chapter 7

Or, Sacrifice Summon! Jiang Yanli is here to make things right, be the ultimate big sister (step 1: bring back her dead brother), and maybe steal the Peacock throne in the process

[AO3][1][2][3][4][5][6]

Awareness rushed in with a crack like lightning. With it came pain, but not as much as Wei Wuxian would have expected from exploding into a pulp of blood and guts.

The ground beneath him felt solid. Cool and rough like poorly sanded wood, nothing like the smooth, burning volcanic stone that should have bordered the river of lava, should he have been unlucky enough to neither fall in nor die on impact.

Wei Wuxian was still, it seemed, in possession of arms. Because those were what hurt — and only those. That, and a bit of a crick in his neck from lying face down on a hard surface, and a possible splinter in his cheek.

He inhaled the scent of dried blood with every breath, and still, only his forearms burned.

Dust from the floor made his nose itch.

Fuck. He was alive. And definitely not at the bottom of a cliff.

He could only conclude that he had been resurrected. A few feet away he would find the names of whoever someone had decided to give up their very soul to destroy.

What if he just… didn’t? Wei Wuxian hadn’t agreed to this. He hadn’t wanted to be brought back. He’d only wanted the two people left in the world he cared about to live, without him around to get in the way.

He lay there longer than necessary, contemplating it. But in his heart, he always knew he would get up. Besides, he felt… not great, honestly. But more alive than he’d felt in a while. Like his soul had taken a nice sabbatical.

Like he’d come out of an extended, impossibly peaceful meditation. Similar to that used to cultivate to immortality, but for the dead. And landed in a body only slightly less full of resentful energy than the one he’d vacated.

Wei Wuxian pushed against the floor, raising his head. Someone gasped.

As he raised himself into a seating position, he swept the curtain of hair away from his eyes, and laid eyes on a stranger. A short young woman, draped in Jin gold and muted pink, both hands pressed over her mouth. A sword lay on the ground next to her, almost like she’d dropped it.

But cultivators never dropped their swords.

“A-Xian!” The woman breathed.

That couldn’t be good. Only Shijie had ever called him that. Did the Yiling Patriarch still have obsessive followers even after he so publicly self-destructed? Or worse, had the Jin decided to use him for their own purposes.

Wei Wuxian had only just been resurrected, and he was already in trouble.

Unfortunately, wherever he’d been must have been peaceful, because Wei Wuxian was feeling a lot less self-destructive, compared to the last thing he remembered:

Lan Zhan, still trying to save him, though he was already dead long before destroying the Stygian Tiger Amulet sealed the deal. Jiang Cheng, finally done with him, but missing his swing, and nearly killing Lan Zhan as well. Wei Wuxian had been happy to fall.

Yet now he felt more alive than he had in years.

Which meant that whatever this was, he had to deal with it. Ugh.  “Who are you?”

“Oh, right. You won’t recognize me like this.” She hurried to the wall behind her, and picked up a tureen. Wei Wuxian maneuvered himself into a sitting position as she did so, readying himself to run, once his legs felt strong enough.

And once he figured out who this woman and who the poor sap had killed himself for revenge expected the great and terrible Yiling Patriarch to kill.

She set it down on the edge of the array, and lifted the lid.

Only one thing in the world smelled like that. Just the smell was enough to bring tears to his eyes. His world shifted on its axis. “Shijie?”

She nodded, blinking rapidly.

He launched himself forward out of the array, and into her arms. “I’m sorry.” He sobbed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Xianxian, no. I’m here.” She said, but she was crying too.

They fell to the ground together, and, because neither Wei Wuxian nor Jiang Yanli had ever been ashamed of crying, stayed that way for a long time. He stroked her hair and clung like he was nine years old again, and she was the first person he could remember tucking him in at night. The one he ran to when he didn’t understand why Madame Yu hated him so much. But now, she clung back just as fiercely.

He couldn’t believe she was here. Who would ever have summoned sweet, caring Jiang Yanli to take revenge? Few people knew how strong she was in spirit. And the body she was wearing remained entirely unfamiliar. Smaller, but more solid in his arms than Shijie had ever been.

Eventually, she pulled away, just far enough to ladle out a bowl of soup and press it into his hands. She watched him like a hawk until he’d eaten half the bowl, though he was still more than a little choked up.

When she was satisfied he wasn’t going to wither and starve to death in the next five minutes, she said, “There’s something else you should know. Your Lan Wangji —”

“He’s not mine.” No matter how much he wished it. Wei Wuxian had only ever cast his shadow on Lan Zhan’s light. He couldn’t let himself do that to him again.

“You should let him decide that for himself, but that wasn’t the point.” Shijie rolled her eyes as she patted his hand. She even took away his bowl and set it on the ground, which went to show that this was serious. Shijie would never take away soup without good reason. “He saved your A-Yuan. Lan Yuan, courtesy Sizhui now. ”

“Sizhui? Lan Zhan — me?” Lan Zhan couldn’t really have named his A-Yuan Sizhui, could he? That was — Wei Wuxian had been the one yearning, longing for someone out of reach. After Wei Wuxian’s first stint in the Burial Mounds, he never could have been worthy of Lan Zhan, of what they could have meant to each other. Lan Zhan, well meaning, had persisted in trying to help him. But he hadn’t thought Lan Zhan would still — not after all he’d done.

“A-Xian.” Shijie wiped her thumbs under his eyes, and he realized he’d begun crying again. “Those of us who know you for who you are, and not the masks you show the world, cannot help but love you.”

Lan Zhan was — Lan Zhan —

Wei Wuxian could not drag him into this, whatever revenge he was expected take. But maybe, someday —

“Anything else I should know while I’m out of tears?” He asked, when his eyes were swollen and puffy and finally dry.

She told him about the Wen siblings, and he wasn’t out of tears after all. At least Shijie had always been a sympathetic crier, so at least he wasn’t alone in his weeping.

After their tears finally died away, and Shijie had plucked a pair of his drying talismans from her sleeve, she refilled his soup. Wei Wuxian really was out of tears this time, or he might have started off again.

Only then did he remember to clarify what, exactly, was going on. Now that Shijie had told him all the important things. That he hadn’t gotten everyone he ever loved killed or condemned to a life of misery, after all.

“How did you manage this?” He asked around a mouthful off heavenly pork. “Whose body is this, I mean? And yours?”

Wei Wuxian listened with increasing horror as Jiang Yanli told the story of waking up in the body of the new Madame Jin, all the way through to the array he’d woken up in. His curiosity was sparked by the implications of what Qin Su had done — closer to what he’d been trying to accomplish with the arrays than anything he’d been able to achieve.

And she’d done it entirely by accident, with consequences they had yet to fully understand. All of which seemed to rest on Qin Su’s shoulders, with no signs that Shijie was anything but firmly anchored in her body. It bore further investigation anyways.

Though for the moment, another concern was more pressing.

“Xue Yang?” Shijie had gone near Xue Yang to bring him back? That twisted, murdering bastard without even a sense of scale to temper his depravity. And she’d done it for him. He wasn’t worth the risk. He should have killed Xue Yang years ago, when he had the chance — There was a wrenching feeling in his gut as his fear and anger spiked, irrationally, over a matter already settled. “Oh, ow. What the fuck.”

No, not his gut. His lower dantian.  That sure was a tainted golden core, so it really must have been Xue Yang. The state of his golden core would certainly explain why Wei Wuxian felt so off.

Xue Yang’s golden core, which was now his. A golden core, something he’d long believed lost to him forever, resting inside him, an unwilling gift from his enemy.

Wei Wuxian was simultaneously disgusted and euphoric.

He’d never had to deal with the risk of qi deviation before, because the resentful energy hadn’t interacted nearly so badly with the sluggish flow in his meridians after its driving force was removed.

“What’s wrong?” Jiang Yanli put one hand over his forehead, and held his wrist in the other. He felt her, prodding around for what was wrong with spiritual energy. Something she never could have managed before.

Only Wen Qing knew how to treat this, though.

“Well, when a cultivator with a golden core uses demonic cultivation, it taints it with resentful energy. A little is fine and gets burned off, but a lot like Xue Yang — I’m surprised at how well he was holding off from a qi deviation, honestly.” “That’s why when I —” He broke off in a laugh.

Shit.

It was too much to hope that Shijie hadn’t caught his slip. “A-Xian. What happened to your golden core?”

“Um.” He really should have said Wen Zhuliu, but he couldn’t lie directly to Shijie. Not when she was staring at him, wide-eyed and concerned. Even if those eyes weren’t the ones he knew.

Wei Wuxian dared anyone to resist that.

When his confession was complete, she said nothing. Only sniffled.

Finally, she hugged him tight again, and ladled out more soup, though Wei Wuxian had yet to finish the second bowl. He dug in, shoveling each bite in, but chewing slowly, savoring the flavor like he’d never known he should before.

Tainted or not, the golden core inside him was fully formed and strong. An impossibility and a blessing.

“Are you all finished with the emotional reunion?” Nie Huaisang of all people swanned through the door. “Great! Hi, Wei-xiong!”

Gaping, he looked from Nie Huaisang to Shijie.

Shijie’s expression said oh right, him.

Ok, then. This was happening. “Hi, Nie-xiong. How have you been.”

Nie Huaisang plopped down in a heap across the soup tureen from him. “I’ve been better! Jin Guangyao killed my Dage, so we’re getting revenge.”

“Right, Shijie told me. Is he the only one I have to kill?”

Shijie shook her head, confirming his suspicions. “Him, another sect leader, and a few of Jin Guangyao’s guards. I’ll write the names down for you.”

Wei Wuxian really wanted to be done killing people. He wanted to — well, he wanted an impossibility. Traveling with Lan Zhan and A-Yuan, visiting Shijie and Jiang Cheng often in Lotus Pier, helping Wen Ning grow new varieties of vegetables in his garden, and arguing cultivation theory with Wen Qing. Even if Lan Zhan still wanted him, if they saved both the Wens, Jiang Cheng would never want to see him.

Shijie turned to Nie Huaisang. “We need to get him in to see Wen Qing.”

“Well, I can certainly provide a distraction, but he can’t just walk into Koi Tower like that.” Nie Huaisang hummed, tapping his closed fan against his lips. “You need a disguise.”

“A mask?” That would be the easiest thing to get a hold of.

But Nie Huaisang was shaking his head. “No, no, that won’t work. That’s just suspicious. You need something no one will see through.”

“I’ll think about it.” He wasn’t entirely sure that a mask wasn’t the solution — just not the sort of mask anyone else had ever come up with.

“You do that. In the meantime,” Nie Huaisang clapped his hands together. “Questions.”

“How did you get Xue Yang to give up his body to me?” Shijie hadn’t mentioned the details, but Wei Wuxian assumed the trickery had been at Nie Huaisang’s hands.

But Nie Huaisang tsked and shook his head. “I didn’t do it. Your sister did.”

“Shijie?”

“I lied.” She said, a slight flush rising to her cheeks. By the time she finished explaining what she’d done, he was looking at her in an entirely new light. “I wanted you back. I could save you, so I did.”

“Shijie. I — but. Your husband.” Wei Wuxian had been so caught up in having her back, that he hadn’t even apologized yet. What kind of useless brother was he?

Nie Huaisang got to his feet and practically ran for the door at the first sign of emotion.

“It wasn’t on purpose.” Shijie tried to put her hand on his shoulder, but Wei Wuxian flinched away.

“How did you know?” After all the time he’d spent antagonizing Jin Zixuan, calling him the Peacock and even attacking him in public, no one should have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Shijie did not deign to answer, simply looked at him as though the question was ridiculous. As though she still trusted him, after everything.

“Well, you’re right. I didn’t mean to, but it was my fault.” No matter how he thought of it, if it were not for Wei Wuxian — if he’d taken a less obvious route, if he’d taken Wen Qing with him instead or gone alone, if he’d imposed on Lan Zhan enough to ask for an escort, if he’d simply remembered how easily the power given by the Yin Iron could be stolen away — . “I stole Wen Ruohan’s control, and I forgot someone could do the same to me.”

“It is not your fault. You were ambushed, and scared, and trying to defend yourself.” Shijie hugged him, and again, he melted into her arms.

“It is, though. It is.” Wei Wuxian choked down a sob. He really couldn’t start that back up again. “I just wanted to meet your son.”

“You will.” She assured him, petting his hair soothingly, the way she had as long as he’d known her. Wei Wuxian couldn’t believe his luck.

When they emerged from the warehouse, Nie Huaisang was waiting.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Shijie asked Nie Huaisang.

“If it’s here, Xue Yang hid it well.” He sighed heavily, and didn’t even flourish his fan. So clearly whatever he’d been searching for was important.

Something in this little town full of coffins and burial goods, complete with paper mannequins peering out the windows. It was scarcely dusk, but the streets were already empty. He could feel — but not see, not like the mysterious resident of Shijie’s head — the mostly inert resentful energy everywhere. He could see what would have attracted Xue Yang to the town, but not why he wouldn’t have simply made it more of a living hell, and moved along.

The slippery little bastard had done nothing but complain of boredom on the way to what should have been his execution, after all. “What was he doing here anyway? It’s an eerie little town, but you said he’d been here a while?”

“Well, he was kicked out by Jin Guangyao, and it seems he set up a domestic little arrangement with Xiao Xingchen.” Nie Huaisang made an effort to sound flighty but his mind was clearly still elsewhere.

How the — no, actually, he didn’t want to know. Everything Wei Wuxian learned of the events following his death was stranger and more unsettling. “And my shishu won’t wonder what happened when he never comes back?”

Peering into the darkness of an alley, Nie Huaisang flapped a hand dismissively. “I’m having Song Lan tracked down. He’ll forget all about him soon enough.”

Good for his shishu. He deserved his second chance at love. Wei Wuxian hadn’t had time to be devastated over their separation, the failure of what he’d wanted his life to be because he’d been too busy throwing it away.

But maybe, just maybe. If he completed Xue Yang’s revenge and was here to stay, if Shijie and A-Ling and the Wen siblings were all safe and secure. Maybe he could earn a second chance with Lan Zhan someday.

It would take years to make up for his mistakes, Wei Wuxian imagined, a slow courting of hundreds of handmade gifts and tracking down the most challenging hauntings across the cultivation world. He’d remind Lan Zhan that he was good with children, and be there to help him raise A-Yuan the rest of the way. Show him he would never miss another moment.

There went his imagination, wanting things that were distant possibilities as best. Who was to say Lan Zhan hadn’t moved on? All Shijie had to go on was guesses, gossip, and a glimpse.

They passed a row of coffins, just waiting to be filled with some unlucky sap. Wei Wuxian drew up short. “Why do I sense some really strong resentful energy?”

“Xue Yang was turning people into puppets for fun.” Nie Huaisang said, causing both him and Shijie to glare at him. It seemed he’d failed to mention that to both of them.

Though, honestly, Wei Wuxian should have guessed. He pinpointed the coffin that felt like a mass grave, and whistled with no force behind it. Even so, a shifting spiderweb of resentful energy briefly became visible. That was a ward. One that would take him about an hour to unravel, using demonic cultivation.

Or, conveniently, application of Xue Yang’s own spiritual energy.

“No, this is more static. Almost like — “ He shoved hard at the lid of the coffin, and it slid forward a few inches, letting out a cloud of black smoke. “Shit, Xue Yang’s piece of Yin Iron.”

“Excellent! Exactly what I was looking for.” Nie Huaisang perked up, his usual good humor restored. “Do you think you can —” Shijie, uncharacteristically, pinched his arm sharply. “Jiang-guniang, why? I was going to say destroy it.”

“Sure,” He said absently. “Same way I did the Tiger Seal.”

“Can you destroy it without hurting yourself?” Shijie asked gently, reminding him exactly how that had gone.

“I can’t, but didn’t Lan Xichen manage it somehow?” He kept shoving at the lid, to no avail. Right, Xue Yang must have a sword somewhere. He reached into his sleeve and found a hilt, as well as a pair of qiankun bags.

“He said that, but Dage told me in confidence that the pair of them sealed them away again in secret. I don’t know if Erge told him where. I certainly don’t know.” Nie Huaisang paused. “And yes, I do mean that.”

The sword felt worse than the core, like it was used to Xue Yang’s cultivation. Jiangzai, it was called. That felt suiting. But though it resisted him, when Wei Wuxian sent a bolt of energy through it, the lid went flying into a wall thirty feet away.

Oh, so it was either nothing or too much with Jiangzai. He saw how it was.

Wei Wuxian stared down at the contents nestled inside. The Yin Iron was there, shaped into what looked like another Tiger Seal, but less powerful by far. Stacked right on top of two items that were undoubtedly just soaking in that resentful energy. Fuck. “Um. Nie-xiong? I think Xue Yang has your brother’s body. Also Baxia.”

It was agreed that Nie Mingjue’s body would have to be retrieved the next day, as Wei Wuxian had only just been resurrected and neither Nie Huaisang nor Shijie could fly. Shijie didn’t say, but he assumed she either hadn’t had time to learn, or temperamental swords were a side effect of resurrection.

In case it was the latter, he should probably bring that up at some point.

Shijie handed him some talisman paper, so he could construct a ward over the coffin, and they went down the foothills to an inn where Jin Ling was waiting.

His baby nephew had already been put to bed by the time they arrived. Which was all for the better because that meant Wei Wuxian actually got to see him.

Jin Ling was so big already, grown bigger than A-Yuan had been in what seemed to him the blink of an eye. Six years old, when he should have been all of a hundred days. Wei Wuxian reached out and hesitated, looking up at his shijie.

She nodded, watching them both with her heart in her eyes.

He hesitated several more times on the way to touching A-Ling’s hair, afraid that touch would shatter the illusion. But A-Ling didn’t disappear when Wei Wuxian touched him. A-Ling’s skin had the downy texture of childhood and his hair was silky under his fingertips, a sign of how healthy and loved he was. Jiang Cheng had taken such good care of him, though that never should have been his job, if not for Wei Wuxian.

A-Ling stirred under his touch, and he snatched his hand back, but the boy only shifted onto his side, and stuck his thumb into his mouth.

Wei Wuxian loved him so much, just as he’d known he would.

Because Wei Wuxian couldn’t bear to give up his scant moments with his darling nephew, he, Shijie, and Nie Huaisang sat on the floor to discuss how they would break Wei Wuxian into Koi Tower unnoticed.

Not something he ever expected to want. But he did want to see Wen Qing for himself — they needed to yell at each other for self-sacrifice, without her paralyzing him again. And Shijie would worry if she didn’t know he was alright. So Wei Wuxian supposed he would let Wen Qing poke around in Xue Yang’s core.

As Shije and Nie Huaisang heatedly (for them) debated their methods, Wei Wuxian occupied himself by unpacking Xue Yang’s bags item by item.

The current Nie First Disciple, a woman he’d fought alongside on occasion during the Sunshot Campaign, stood guard outside the door. Neither she, nor the younger disciples accompanying her, had seen remotely surprised to see him. So Wei Wuxian assumed resurrecting notorious traitors was just par for the course in things their sect leader did.

He reached in and grabbed something with an odd, elastic texture. Pulling it out, he flinched. And flung it on the floor.

It was a mask of someone’s face. He’d seen them before, when a possessed woman in Yunmeng had started carving the faces off her neighbors and wearing them as masks. This, though, was melded together to form a face disturbingly similar to Song Lan’s. And according to Nie Huaisang, Song Lan was still alive.

Had he written about that night hunt? Xue Yang could easily have modified the method. He would bet Jin Guangyao had focused on the profitable ideas among his inventions, and let Xue Yang make the most grotesque techniques of his demonic cultivation worse. The techniques that could do good had almost certainly been left to languish.

Even if Jin Guangyao wanted to leave reform as his legacy, he couldn’t openly use techniques that showed demonic cultivation was not all sacrificing virgins and creating puppets from amalgamated rotting meat. Better for him that the Yiling Laozu remained a monster under the bed, even if it meant leaving people to starve, their fields and forests tainted with resentful energy.

Well, if Xue Yang could twist his techniques, Wei Wuxian could twist them back.

“You, Wei-xiong, look like you’re having an idea.” Nie Huaisang fluttered his fan. Wei Wuxian’s eyes narrowed as he looked back and forth between it, and the creepy skin mask on the ground.

He thought back to the brightest period of his childhood, flashes of a masked figured twirling and kicking on a stage, flourishing a fan in sharp movements, creating an illusion of transformation. “Nie-xiong. You’re a cultural connoisseur.”

“I make an effort.”

“That dance where the performer changes masks behind a fan — do you know how it works?” The dance, from Meishan, involved face changes, using greasepaint or changing the color of a beard. Or, more importantly, masks. Madame Yu had enjoyed it, often hiring troops from her natal sect’s territory to perform for guests and during festivals. Wei Wuxian didn’t know the trick to it, but Nie Huaisang might.

“The Bian Lian? That is a particular favorite of mine.”

“No, really? I would never have guessed.” He never would have expected Nie Huaisang of all people to enjoy a dance that involved fans! Or masks!

Nie Huaisang rapped him on the shin with his fan, and “Ow, fuck, is that thing made of steel?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Nie Huaisang said primly, which Wei Wuxian took as a yes.

“Huaisang.” Shijie gave him a disappointed look.

It wasn’t quite as stern as in her own face, Qin Su’s heart shaped face rendering it somehow even more gently chiding, but it was just as effective. Nie Huaisang sighed. “Yes, I know how it works. Would you like me to sketch a diagram?”

“Please.”

Wei Wuxian interpreted Nie Huaisang’s caving to Shijie as his having been officially taken under her wing. He wondered if that meant they were brothers now.

It was a little-known secret that Wei Wuxian was not the only child raised by Jiang Fengmian to collect family wherever he went. He had, in fact, picked up that trait from his sister. Around the time she’d decided he was her didi, no matter that Wei Wuxian was never officially adopted into the clan.

“What are you thinking, A-Xian?” Shijie asked, while Nie Huaisang was busy being unnecessarily artistic with his diagram. Wei Wuxian would have so many extraneous swirls to work around.

“Well, I’m not wearing that thing. I’m pretty sure it is human skin, just not the person’s face it’s copying.” Wei Wuxian might control corpses on occasion, but he wasn’t wearing one on his face. That was just gross, in a uniquely Xue Yang fashion. Just remembering the moment he’d touched it made him want to spend the next week becoming a prune in an excessively soapy bath. “But I can’t just run around like this.”

Neither Wei Wuxian’s own face nor Xue Yang’s was exactly ideal. But Xue Yang had committed each and every crime he was accused of, with more undoubtedly yet to come. Wei Wuxian had only committed some of crimes he was given credit for. He was grateful Shijie had ensured he was given his own back.

Besides, Wei Wuxian was clearly better looking than Xue Yang, whether they were being judged on a scale of handsomeness or prettiness.

That didn’t stop either face from being a problem. “So I thought, why not make a mask where I can pretend to be Xue Yang? But where I can also quickly change to a harmless face, and avoid any future angry mobs.”

Wei Wuxian would strongly prefer not to be the target of future angry mobs. The once had been more than enough.

“Impersonate Xue Yang? But A-Xian —” Shijie frowned, an expression he never wanted to put on her face. “Don’t get more involved in this than you need to be for my sake. I brought you back for selfish reasons, and I can ensure those marks disappear and leave you free.”

Obviously, Wei Wuxian would never do that. “Shijie, you brought me back because you care. And I love you too, so don’t tell me not to help you.”

She reached out to pet his hair, and he leaned into it. “You’ve sacrificed enough.”

Shijie might think so, but he would never agree. Wei Wuxian would always want to help. Not because he owed her for what he’d done — which he did — but because he loved her. On top of that, she was trying to overthrow a child murderer, and improve the lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Of course he would do anything he could to help.

And he didn't want her to have to learn how to kill.

He pulled away, and grasped her too-slim shoulders instead to meet those bizarre, smaller eyes that still, somehow, felt like her. “It’s not about sacrifice. I can be a distraction for you. If Jin Guangyao’s as clever as you say — and I remember that was  my impression of him — he won’t stay ignorant of what you’re doing forever.”

“A-Xian—”

Wei Wuxian cut off her protest. This was the best way for him to help. Any protest she had could only be an attempt to protect him. “But if Xue Yang’s a ghost he can’t catch? Maybe you can pull it off.”

#the untamed #cql #wangxian #yanqing #qin su #the sacrifice summon! JYL fic #where the summoner (qin su) sticks around #this time featuring emotional reunions #jiang yanli being the only person in the cultivation world with communication skills #and wei wuxian's mad science tendencies

[isabilightwood]

THE PROBLEM WITH AUTHORITY - CHAPTER 5

Or, Sacrifice Summon! Jiang Yanli is here to make things right, be the ultimate big sister (step 1: bring back her dead brother), and maybe steal the Peacock throne in the process

AO3[1][2][3][4]

Wen Qing knocked the mortar and pestle to the ground as she jumped to her feet, the red-orange powder scattering across the ground.

Belatedly, Jiang Yanli realized she had stepped into view.

“Who are you?” Wen Qing demanded, reflexively reaching into her sleeve for a needle. She came up empty. “This is a warded house. You can’t be here.”

Wen Qing was wan and pale, like the sun had not touched her skin in long years. Dark circles ringed her eyes, though cultivators could manage on little sleep. A woman for whom the nightmare of their youth had never ended.

“I -” Jiang Yanli’s voice caught, and she pressed her hands to her throat. Her umbrella dropped to the ground, and the downpour rapidly soaked her through. “You’re alive.”

“How did you get through the wards?” She demanded again, scrutinizing Jiang Yanli as though trying to place her.

She must be wondering why a Jin is happy to see a Wen alive. Qin Su cut through her shock.

Her thoughts inched into motion, like wading through the muddy shallows of a lake after a long day in the unforgiving sun.

Of course. Wen Qing was not trying to place Jiang Yanli, but Qin Su, who she had never met. She should say something, to allay her fears. Something, anything to explain. But she could do nothing but stare at those suspicious eyes, in that impossible face.

A stirring of air against her neck heralded Nie Huaisang’s arrival at her side. “Wen Qing? Now this is a surprise.”

Wen Qing laughed, harsh and rough, like she hadn’t had reason to in a long time. “Six years in the same rooms and I’ve finally lost it. Nie Huaisang is not standing outside my prison.”

“Nie Huaisang is standing outside your prison.” He swept his fan outwards, giving a shallow bow.

Wen Qing considered this, and let her shoulders slump. “Ok, then. Who are you?”

Jiang Yanli hesitated.

Maybe you shouldn’t have this conversation out in the open. What if a servant comes by with dinner, or something? Qin Su suggested, gently coaxing. Jiang Yanli was reminded that though she usually thought of her like a shimei, Qin Su had been a mother. And from how the young disciples ran to her excitedly, trusting and curious, she had been a good one. However acerbic she might have become, Qin Su still had a good heart.

Qin Su flinched, and closed herself off even as Jiang Yanli gathered herself together. And so she did not hear Jiang Yanli wonder if the same could be said for her.

“Before I say, may I come inside? If anyone comes by...” She glanced over her shoulder, and saw a servant dash past, carrying a lidded tray, unprotected under the rain.

Wen Qing studied her, and Jiang Yanli stared back, unblinking. Finally, she sighed.

“You might as well. But I’m not making you tea.” Wen Qing agreed, shockingly apathetic. Though Wen Qin had often pretended indifference, it had never felt like she meant it before. Now, she accepted an apparent stranger with unknown motives entering her room like it was nothing.

Once, in the calm before the storm after the Sunshot Campaign, A-Xian had joked that if someone tried to kill him, it would be the most interesting thing to happen that week. When he saw how distressed the idea made her, he’d rushed to assure her he didn’t actually want to be assassinated, and never repeated the sentiment. But it had been the truest thing he’d said in those months.

In spirit, this felt the same.

“And you’re going to sit on a towel.” Only as Wen Qing spoke did she realize rivulets of water were dripping from her hem and sleeves, and the pins in her hair dragged heavily at her scalp.

In her own body, Jiang Yanli would have spent the next week lying fevered in bed at least. Now, she would simply have to change before returning to the conference.

Reaching into a cabinet, Wen Qing retrieved not one, but an armful of towels, and lay them out as Jiang Yanli maneuvered herself over the windowsill. As she retreated to her desk, Jiang Yanli dripped her way into a seat on the towel across from her.

Nie Huaisang perched on the windowsill, one leg hanging outside. He, unlike her, had remained mostly dry. “I’ll keep watch,” he said, though he posed like he expected to model for a painting.

But then, maybe Wen Qing was his witness, and he was lying. She couldn’t be sure. The fact that they were both liars did not mean he would be honest with her.

“Explain.” Wen Qing demanded, folding her arms and setting her jaw in a way that did not scream willingness to listen.

And there was the question. Was it safe to reveal her identity? Was it any more dangerous to tell Wen Qing she was Jiang Yanli than Qin Su? If there was a chance she would tell Jin Guangyao, either would crumble her nascent plans, and she’d be lucky to flee to Yunmeng with her life.

Yet she did not believe that Wen Qing would ever be won over by Jin Guangyao’s act.

Well. Wen Qing had always appreciated bluntness. She’d grown up in a snake den, and could smell deceit from a mile away. If Jiang Yanli wanted Wen Qing to trust her, there was only one option.

“I’m a dead woman in a living woman’s body. This,” She gestured at her face. “Is Qin Su, Jin-furen. As for me, you once sheltered my brothers and I at your Wen Ning’s request, and it cost you everything.”

An inscrutable collection of emotions passed over Wen Qing’s face, settling on anger. “That isn’t po—” She cut off, jerking back.

“So you know it is possible.”

Wen Qing’s brows narrowed further. “Prove it.”

And — that was a problem. Nie Huaisang had caught her in a slip of the tongue.  That would not work with Wen Qing. She couldn’t say which stories A-Xian might have told her, or which might have entered common knowledge. She and Wen Qing had been friendly, but not close. “It’s not well known that you helped my brothers and me. But if anyone was actually listening...”

“I did,” Nie Huaisang volunteered, grimacing as he once again admitted to possessing knowledge. “I imagine your late husband’s friends do as well.

These are trying times for him. Qin Su, who had been slowly emerging, surfaced fully to say. If people know he uses his brain, they might expect things from him.

Her guard frayed from recent revelations, Jiang Yanli giggled aloud. “Sorry, Qin Su said something.” And I’m sorry to you as well, she told Qin Su, though she could read the feeling within her.

Qin Su’s exaggerated good humor deflated. I can’t keep running away from him — from the memory of my son forever.

“A joke at my expense, no doubt.” Nie Huaisang tilted his head back to rest on the frame, his mouth curled upwards.

“Did you say Qin Su is within you? But —” Wen Qing snapped her jaw shut.

“That’s not how the array works? Yes, I noticed that. Nevertheless, here we are.” Her hands fisted in her soaked robes, replacing body-warmed fabric with the cold drape of her skirts. Shivering again, she forced her hands to let go, and smoothed out the fabric. “But you wanted proof.”

Wen Qin nodded sharply, retrieving a worn, threadbare red pouch that had been hidden behind the pile of books. She clutched it in her hands.

Jiang Yanli had not, yet, thought of anything truly conclusive to offer. “Anyone could guess we mostly spoke about our brothers, under the circumstances. I must confess those days are something of a blur, thanks to my fever.”

“That doesn’t prove your identity, no.” Wen Qing agreed shortly, but Jiang Yanli barely registered her tone.

The open book to Wen Qing’s left was new, a half-labeled diagram of a person’s meridians on the page. A still wet brush and bowl of ink sat nearby. She didn’t recognize the herbs that had spilled from the mortar, despite her experience in both cooking and field medicine. But the stack of thin volumes with deteriorating bindings were too low quality for even a non-cultivating Jin servant to purchase.

Yet she had seen their like in Koi Tower before.

“Quite the quandary,” Nie Huaisang shifted to put a hand behind his head, his other reaching out to brush the finally slowing fall of rain.

Perhaps not. “Those tattered journals — You’re the one who’s been transcribing A-Xian’s work, aren’t you?” Wen Qing’s eyes widened, and she knew she was correct.  “Would it convince you if I read one?”

“His journals may as well have been written in code for all Jin Guangyao and his minions can make sense of it.” Wen Qing shifted on her knees, her posture losing its perfection in a way that somehow conveyed challenge. “I suppose it would. I haven’t worked through this one yet.”

Selecting a volume from the middle of the stack, she held it out to Jiang Yanli.

She took it with trembling hands, wary of which of A-Xian’s secrets she might find within. Flipping it open, she found lotuses. “He tried to grow lotuses in the Burial Mounds?” She asked, but Wen Qing remained impassive.

Jiang Yanli would gain no sympathy, without sufficient proof. “This describes his attempts to grow less-hardy crops in lands tainted by resentful energy, beginning with the ‘noble lotus’, because ‘as Shijie always said, lotuses are a vital part of any diet, and radishes are rabbit food.” She couldn’t help but smile, almost able to hear A-Xian say those words. Certain, for the space of a breath, that if she turned, he would be standing behind her, grinning and no older than ten. “I definitely never said that last part.”

Lotuses; however, should be a part of any diet. They were, objectively, the best vegetable. Less popular in seafood-loving Lanling than Yunmeng, unfortunately.

A-Xuan’s pond had been maintained, but only as a memorial. No one who truly knew them had been involved in that decision.

“He predicted lotuses could only tolerate a certain level of resentment, and calculated that the levels of the patch of land must be reduced by 60%. He played Chenqing to draw out spirits bound to the plot and — there’s a drop of spilled ink there— the bound spirits willingly moved on.” She turned the page, hoping to find the missing link. “Oh. This is.” There was an unusually detailed piece of artwork filling the next page, depicting Wen Ning and a boy who must be a younger Lan – no, Wen – Yuan elbow deep in a muddy pond of lotuses in full bloom, Wen Qing with an overflowing basket of laundry on her hip, watched them fondly. Smaller figures were grouped together in the background, bent over in the fields, or sitting together over the mending.

This had been the Burial Mounds they all so feared.

“What is it?” Wen Qing asked.

Wordlessly, Jiang Yanli turned the book towards her.

Wen Qing took a shuddering breath, and looked away.

It was a reminder, Jiang Yanli realized, that Wen Qing was the only one left.

Except that she wasn’t. “The boy, A-Yuan. He’s alive.” She said, breathless. “Lan Wangji adopted him. No one else would have guessed, but...”

To her, it had been obvious.

Wen Qing met her gaze, disbelief warring with naked hope. “You’re not lying. And you’re really —”

“I can cook for you if you need more proof.” She smiled, looking down at her hands. “The servants would get a shock out of Jin-furen in the kitchen.”

Soup-making is not a required skill for Qin cultivators. Qin Su said. I could not be trusted not to poison myself.

Only the basics had been required of the Jiang. But Jiang Yanli had taken to it, latching onto the skill instinctively. A young girl who had finally found something she was good for, beyond a marriage alliance.

“Jiang Yanli.” Wen Qing breathed, her lips parting as her grip on her needle tightened.

The sound of her name on Wen Qing’s lips felt like a warm embrace, though Wen Qing had never touched her in anything but a professional manner. The first time she was recognized by someone who mattered to her before everything went wrong.

She shivered, but not from the cold.

Concerned, Wen Qing got to her feet. “I’ve changed my mind. Since you’re not a stranger or a lying impostor, I will make you tea.” She slapped a heating talisman on a cast iron teapot with a peacock motif emblazoned on the side and turned to grab a folded robe from a nearby cabinet. The robe, she handed to Jiang Yanli. “And put this on, or you’ll catch your death.”

She held the robe away from her body. “I won’t. While many of my problems carried over into my new body, my health ones did not.”

“How did I never notice you’re just as bullheadedly stubborn as your brothers?” Wen Qing sighed. “Wei Wuxian told me he invented his drying talisman to hide the evidence when he pushed Jiang Wanyin in the lake, but he never figured out how to make it work while someone was still wearing the clothing.”

Letting her will be faster and less suspicious than going back to the Fragrance Hall to change, Qin Su pointed out.

They were both right, but — since when had accepting help become so difficult?

Maybe she was just like her brothers, when she wasn’t spending all her time as their moderating influence. “I am a Jiang. But I appreciate the gesture.” She hurried behind a folding screen to change, and attached the offered quick-drying talismans.

When she stepped back out in Wen Qing’s robe, she said, “I have some questions.”

“I can guess them.” She poured a cup of tea for Jiang Yanli as she knelt on a fresh, dry pillow.

Jiang Yanli cradled the cup close to her chest, savoring its warmth. “I missed much of what happened while I was  -” shell-shocked and unable to summon the expected wailing sobs, terrified for her brother, while still hoping Zixuan would walk through the doors, and it had all just been a big mistake — “attending to my husband’s mourning rites. You turned yourself in?”

“They promised Wei Wuxian and my clan would live if A-Ning and I turned ourselves in, and then killed everyone except us.” What might have been a broken, bitter laugh tore from Wen Qing’s throat. “Though I don’t think Jin Guangshan ever knew about me, since his son used me to make his heart give out.”

“What on earth made him think it was a good idea to keep you around?” Nie Huaisang asked. “Meant in an entirely complimentary way of course.”

Jiang Yanli grimaced. “What Nie-zongzhu means ask is—”

“Exactly what he said. It’s fine.” Wen Qing rolled her eyes. Nie Huaisang awakened Jiang Yanli’s eldest sibling instincts simply by existing, so perhaps Wen Qing was experiencing the same phenomena. “They wanted A-Ning as a tool, to figure out how Wei Wuxian made him, and how to control him. Me, well — there’s no one else in the world who knows more about golden cores.” She wasn’t bragging. The woman who had kept Wen Ruohan in a semblance of stability for years and kept company with the Yiling Patriarch had no need for boasting. “My familiarity with Wei Wuxian’s work was merely a bonus, he said, though he’s gotten more out of my translations than his original goal.”

“His original goal?” Jiang Yanli took a careful sip of tea. It was a rich golden color, with the fermented taste of a pu’er, of mushrooms and dried fruits and honey. Wen Qing had left the box out, and its label read Qishan, and a date two decades earlier. A purposeful reminder, then, of everything Wen Qing had lost.

A tea or a wine might age into readiness, but Wen Qing lived on borrowed time.

“To strengthen his golden core.” She said. Knocking back her own tea like it was wine, she poured another. “A lack of proper instruction and years with a fake manual left his stunted. Of course, I’m his prisoner. I’d prefer he stay that way. So he doesn’t trust anything I come up with.”

“Greedy.” Nie Huaisang said, “Meng Yao would never have kept you around.”

“If Jin Guangyao erred, it’s our gain.” This time, when Jiang Yanli reached out, Wen Qing let their fingers brush before pulling away.

Shaking her head, Wen Qin continued, “If you’re hoping to use my skill against him, that would be difficult. He takes my methods and has them tested extensively before use. Especially on himself.”

“I’m certain you could find away around that,” Jiang Yanli busied her hands with the teapot to keep from offering unwelcome comfort. “But you’re A-Xian’s family. You are worth finding, whether or not you can be of use.”

Rather than risk eye contact Wen Qing stared at Jiang Yanli’s hands. “Though Jin Guangyao understands it’s not so easy to correct his block, he’s starting to get impatient. Now that his known enemies are out of the way, I don’t know how much longer he’ll take to accept I’d need to treat him directly to have any effect. He would never allow that, of course. I’d kill him.”

Qin Su made an offer to hold him down that Jiang Yanli did not repeat.

“Speaking of murder, did you help kill my Da-ge?” Nie Huaisang asked pleasantly.

“Unless he used something a second time, no.” Wen Qing said. Then startled, “Chifeng-zun is dead?”

Pointedly, he hummed a tune that sounded… off, somehow. When Wen Qing just stared at him, he huffed. “He used an obscure musical cultivation score.”

Wen Qing raised her chin high, and stared him down. “I am the last person anyone would ask about music. My attempts at a lullaby made A-Yuan cry. I couldn’t even clap a rhythm when Wei Wuxian needed one for his cultivation. He had to ask Popo.”

Nie Huaisang did not loose his flippancy when he said, “Then you can live. Perhaps, if you’re willing to trade some information, I could do something about your brother’s situation.”

Wen Qing looked him over, calculating. Glancing at Jiang Yanli only briefly, she nodded. “I doubt there’s much you can do for me, but if you can find a way to free A-Ning, that would be worth it.”

“We came here looking for a witness to Jin Guangshan’s murder.” Nie Huaisang leaned towards them, balanced precariously on his perch.

I’d almost forgotten. Qin Su said softly. Jiang Yanli had forgotten.

“Well, I mixed the poison. But the person you came for might be upstairs. I was restricted to this floor a year ago now? Or so? It’s difficult to keep track of time, these days.” At that, Wen Qing seemed deeply disturbed. Jiang Yanli could understand why — days passing in infrequently interrupted isolation could be no less disorienting than waking up one day to find her infant son reached her waist. “Sometimes, I hear footsteps overhead.”

“Excellent!” Nie Huaisang snapped his fan closed, and jumped down outside the window. A gray flash blasted upwards a moment later.

In his absence, silence crept in. Wen Qing’s hands shook as she reached for her teacup, and she let them fall in her lap.

“I should return to the banquet soon.” Jiang Yanli said, finally. “But I am wondering. What is Jin Guangyao using to keep you here?”

One of Wen Qing’s brows quirked up. “You must have noticed the wards.”

“Yes, but they’re based on A-Xian’s work, and you know it better than anyone else alive.” And after his complicity in her family’s murder, Wen Qing must be unable to overcome his means on her own.

“If it was only those wards, yes.” Grimly, Wen Qing pulled up her sleeve.

An inky blackness ringed her wrist, a chain of distorted characters that wavered before her eyes. Unthinking, Jiang Yanli reached out to touch, but the characters dissolved and scattered up her arm as her fingers connected with warm skin. There was an intake of breath, and Wen Qing hurriedly drew back her hand. As she did so, the characters began to creep back into place, now somehow less comprehensible to her mind. “Sorry, I didn’t think.”

“It’s fine.” Wen Qing refused to meet her eyes. “This is evidence, I think, of the only time Jin Guangyao lowered himself to personally research demonic cultivation. Wei Wuxian filled dozens of journals with his inventions and theories and half-baked ideas he dreamed up at three in the morning. But he never would have come up with anything like this, and Xue Yang couldn’t have managed it.”

“What does it do?” She asked, certain she wouldn’t like the answer.

“If I take a single step out that door, A-Ning will not only die again, but his soul will be shredded.” At that, Jiang Yanli gasped. Wen Qing’s face crumpled. “They — they kept him for experiments. Like he’s nothing more than a mouse.”

“Oh, Wen Qing.” Jiang Yanli wanted, instinctively, to hold out her arms, and let Wen Qing fall against her shoulder. But she knew better than to offer. Wen Qing hunched inwards, clasping her arms at the elbows.

A thump from outside the window startled them, but it was only Nie Huaisang, resuming his perch. “There’s a woman upstairs. She didn’t notice me. But you, Wen-guniang, must have much more interesting information.”

“There’s a problem with that.” Wen Qing had straightened her posture while Jiang Yanli was turned away. Unwilling to show Nie Huaisang weakness, where she’d let some of what she was feeling through when it was only Jiang Yanli. “You can’t come back here. Not when Jin Guangyao is in Koi Tower, at least.”

Jiang Yanli thought she might have a solution. “Are you familiar with A-Xian’s papermen?”

“The ones he pranked the Lans with back in the Cloud Recesses? Of course, but he never had cause to use them in the Burial Mounds. I don’t know the talisman.”

“I do. Here, let me demonstrate.” Once, her mother had confined A-Xian to his room for a month, and for the week it took her father to decide the punishment was too harsh, the talismans had been their only contact.

Jiang Yanli borrowed a talisman paper, since her own were ruined by the rain and cut out the shape of a paperman. She focused, but the world didn’t swirl down into a mouse’s perspective. She registered the empty feeling in her mind at the same time as the paperman twitched, and stood. “Qin Su?”

The paperman nodded. <This is weird> Qin Su’s voice said, as though from a strange distance. Wen Qing and Nie Huaisang startled.

“You can hear her?” She asked, breathless.

Wen Qing stared, open-mouthed at the tottering paper figure “You said she was still around but — this shouldn’t be possible.”

Qin Su’s little paper body wobbled from the center of the table towards the edge, but before she got halfway, it fell, inert. Qin Su was back in her mind. I lost my hold on it. Looking at a giant version of your own face is extremely disorienting.

Much in the way seeing a face that didn’t belong to her in the mirror every morning was disorienting, she imagined.

Still, that was amazing! I need to try it again. Qin Su continued. I wonder how long I could last in there with practice. Just being able to move again…

“You’re welcome to try to figure out what happened.” She told Wen Qing. If anyone living could figure out what had happened to Qin Su’s soul, and if it had affected Jiang Yanli’s, it was her.

“Another time. You said you needed to go.” Wen Qing urged.

“Yes.” She agreed. She’d stayed far too long as it was. “After you make one of your own."

Jiang Yanli returned to the banquet in talisman dried robes, with Wen Qing’s paperman in her pocket. It was uneventful, in comparison. Her absence had gone largely unremarked. the dramatics of Nie Huaisang were universally understood to be time consuming. That she returned without him only helped sell the ruse.

That he’d been cagey about what he wanted to speak to Wen Qing about without her was less comforting.

It was another few hours before Jiang Yanli could retire for the night, but she absorbed little of the conversation.

Finally sliding open the door to her bedroom, Jiang Yanli lit the candles with a wave of her hand. The thrill that went through her at the fact that she could turned to terror at the sight of a figure sitting cross-legged in the middle of her floor.

Until she saw that it was Nie Huaisang. Which wasn’t entirely reassuring, but was unlikely to end in bloodshed.

“I’d appreciate if you could remove your sword from my throat.” He tapped Chunsheng’s edge.

Jiang Yanli was startled to realize she’d drawn the sword. Qin Su’s instinctive panic had bled into her, and she’d acted without thinking. Her ears rung from the force of Qin Su’s scream, visions of splattered blood flashing with each blind.

She sheathed the sword with a sigh. “I’d recommend not hiding in our rooms in the future. Traumatic experiences. Qin Su still wants to gut you.”

She was actually stuck in the panic stage, her volatile emotions ricocheting around the confines of Jiang Yanli’s mind like a coin caught in a crevice. But a part of Jiang Yanli wanted to gut him for her, a heretofore unknown bloodlust that crawled back with her from the grave.

I think that’s just me, Qin Su managed. But Jiang Yanli knew better. I don’t think I could have stopped in time.

“Yes, well. That’s nothing new! Someone tries at least once a week.” Nie Huaisang waved her off, unshaken. “Wen Qing and I came up with a brilliant idea! Just a tiny seed of a suggestion, really.”

She’d been working with Nie Huaisang for one day, almost to the minute, and he’d already begun involving her in schemes that would probably get her killed. A second time. Dragged Wen Qing into it too, as though she weren’t in a dangerous enough position already.

Rather than sit, Jiang Yanli crossed her arms, taking up a position between Qin Su’s two ink paintings. “I’ll listen, if you promise this won’t happen again. And leave, after.”

“If you still want me too!” He agreed brightly. “You should get Wen Qing out for this. The lynchpin was her idea. Very clever. I would have just found someone convenient. I’m nothing if not lazy, after all. But she thinks we can take out two birds with one stone.’

As he was speaking, Jiang Yanli had reached into the seam of her robe, and retrieved the paperman. It stirred in the palm of her hand, as though Wen Qing had been waiting for the right moment.

<I’m flattered.> Her little paper arms folded over one another. <Not that you managed to say anything with all those words.>

Nie Huaisang’s sly smile broke as he grimaced at the paperman. It returned, as he tilted his to look at her from the corner of his eye. “What would you say to bringing back Wei-xiong?”

“Yes.” The part of Jiang Yanli that crafted dark, twisted schemes for that very purpose responded before she could stop herself. She shoved it back into the dark corner of her mind where it belonged. “But the sacrifice summon doesn’t work without casualties, and I can’t —”

“Yes, that is a problem.” He agreed, at odds with his breezy tone. “Who would buy into trading their life for vengeance, and deserve to have their soul ripped apart? Or at least, that’s a problem for you. I care about getting the job done.”

I miss being able to think that pleasant-seeming people were just pleasant people. Qin Su grumbled, and Jiang Yanli wholeheartedly agreed.

Yet Nie Huaisang wasn’t volunteering himself, she noticed. “It wouldn’t be difficult to convince someone I was Qin Su, possessed by my own spirit. But unlike you, it is the destruction of the soul that concerns me.”

<Would you still be opposed if the sacrifice did deserve it?> Wen Qing interjected.

Jiang Yanli’s first instinct was to say that no one deserved that. It was even more unlikely that someone so monstrous would agree. But when Wen Qing explained her suggestion, Jiang Yanli found herself agreeing.

“You don’t want to bring your brother back?” She asked, later, after Wen Qing’s paperman lost its animation. It was not a serious offer. Though Jiang Yanli had not disliked Nie Mingjue nearly so much as most sect leaders, she could not help but think that if he had not been quite so intransigent, A-Xian might not have been driven to the lengths he had.

She would not trade her chance to bring back A-Xian for Nie Mingjue. She simply needed to know if Nie Huaisang was going to be a problem.

You can be kind of scary sometimes, Yanli-jie. Qin Su was likely reconsidering her stance on Jiang Yanli’s general level of bloodthirstiness.

Nie Huaisang’s eyes went wide before he sputtered into a fit of laughter more bitter than a mouthful of lotus pits. Wiping a tear from his eye, he said, “Are you kidding? Dage would murder me. Which would be worth it, except he’d immediately undo all my hard work and send himself into another qi deviation. Resurrect Dage, really.”

He tsked, and laughed again, but this time there was something wistful in it.

Longing, perhaps, for what he could not have.

“And you? You don’t want to bring back your husband?” He asked, startling her.

“Zixuan? I hadn’t even thought about it.” She had loved her husband, and lost him far too soon. But she was, she felt, capable of grieving him, where the place A-Xian belonged was a gaping hollow inside her. She’d practically raised A-Xian, watched him grow and change into a brilliant young man. A world of difference lay between him and the man she’d admired from afar, and only gotten to love for a single year.

There was, she thought, another key difference between them. A-Xian was like her. He’d never move on peacefully to his next life, while those he cared for were unhappy or in danger. Zixuan, on the other hand… “If I know my husband, Zixuan will have already been reincarnated.”

His soul probably belonged to a child not much younger than A-Ling now. One with doting parents and many siblings, for whom the worst thing in the world was sitting inside to memorize characters.

Or so she hoped. “But A-Xian… he’s still waiting. I’m certain of it.”

“Waiting? Not a restless ghost, or in…?”

“A-Xian’s anger never lasts- lasted. He’s always burned bright and hot. If he took revenge, that was it.” The longest grudge he’d ever held was against Zixuan. It had also been his pettiest. There had been Wen Chao, of course, but something had stopped A-Xian from getting to him faster, though he’d never told her what. Otherwise, A-Xian’s anger was like a firework: a spark, an explosion, and gone, as insubstantial as smoke. “And if the kings of hell are as quick to condemn as mortals, then what’s the use of the justice he loved so much?”

Justice that had been stolen from him in every turn in life. Jiang Yanli could only hope that this new life she might — just might — be able to offer him would grant her A-Xian everything he’d been denied in the first.

Nodding, Nie Huaisang produced a jug of wine from his sleeve, and raised it towards her in toast. “To brothers with too many morals and bringing yours back.”

Qin Su spent the night practicing slipping in and out of a paperman, wobbling around on tiny paper legs and indulging in her newfound ability to move and speak, of her own volition. She lasted longer each time.

Each shift kept Jiang Yanli alert and awake, the feeling of being alone in her mind now as strange as sharing it had been at the start. Jiang Yanli didn’t mind. She wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway.

Even as she hoped to see her brother again, she felt the empty space in her bed more viscerally than ever. A-Xuan would not have had advice she could use. Likely, he wouldn’t have approved. Certainly, he wouldn’t have understood. But he wouldn’t judge her, or try to stop her. He would hold her close, stroke her hair, and give her a place where it was safe to feel.

Jiang Yanli hadn’t known that was something she was missing, before him. It was something she would likely never have again.

The paperman Wen Qing had left lying inert on the table surged back to life. <Oh, you’re still awake. Or did I wake you?>

“Couldn’t sleep.” She whispered, propping herself up on one elbow, softly enough that Qin Su — busy scaling the shelving near the door — could not hear.

<I couldn’t either.> Wen Qing admitted. <You gave me a lot to think about.>

“Questions of morality?” Questions like, who was Jiang Yanli to condemn a soul to be torn apart by trickery? Who was she, if she purposefully eliminated a living person’s soul, a line only Xue Chonghai had admitted to crossing? What, then, separated her from Jin Guangyao?

Qin Su had caught her wondering this, as her thoughts cycled through those questions on one of her returns, and scoffed. The difference is you’re not murdering innocents for power.

But Qin Su’s anger was scalding and freshly kindled; her own was a low, steady flame. She had the clarity to stare down the path she’d chosen, and ask where she’d draw the line, if not here.

Jiang Yanli couldn’t help but wonder how much blood she’d have on her hands when the dust had settled. Whether anyone else would be able to see it.

Wondering wasn’t enough to stop her.

But Wen Qing surprised her.

<You gave me hope. I haven’t had hope in a very long time.> She took a flying leap into the air, the little paper figure drifting unevenly down from its peak to land on the bedframe, near Jiang Yanli’s head. <I’m sorry if I’ve caused you inner turmoil.>

She giggled a little into her hand, surprising herself. “Turmoil. That’s a good word for it. But I think — I’m glad you did.”

The silence that settled between them felt warm and comfortable, like she’d just put on a broth to simmer. Like if she waited for it to be ready, maybe she wouldn’t be so lost after all.

After some time, Wen Qing asked, <Would you mind telling me about A-Yuan?>

What she knew wasn’t much. But to Jiang Yanli’s surprise, she drifted off in the telling.

#the untamed #cql #wangxian #yanqing #qin su #my fic #the sacrifice summon! JYL fic #where the summoner (qin su) sticks around #this time featuring the return of wen qing #and plotting wwx's resurrection #finally my yanqing tag is relevant #posting multiple days after i uploaded to ao3 whoops

[isabilightwood]

The Problem with Authority - Chapter 4

Or, Sacrifice Summon! Jiang Yanli is here to make things right, be the ultimate big sister (step 1: bring back her dead brother), and maybe steal the Peacock throne in the process

[AO3][1][2][3]

“A -Su ! I’m so sorry!” Lan Xichen grasped her hands to pull her to her feet. “I wanted to give you a gift, not a bump on the head.”

He was flushed, his eyes bright and manic, his forehead ribbon dangling around his neck. His soft gray geometric patterned outer robe was hanging off one shoulder, revealing the pale blue inner robe beneath. Jiang Yanli felt strangely like she should offer to give him his privacy.

Though they were outside. In the courtyard of her house.

Jiang Yanli felt entirely uninjured, but perhaps she had hit her head after all, and was merely hallucinating the impossibility of a discomposed and rumpled Lan Xichen. “Lan-zongzhu…?”

“Erge, wait!” Jin Guangyao sprinted towards them from the direction of the guest rooms. He stumbled to a halt, doubled over and panting. “You shouldn’t talk to anyone while you’re drunk, remember? Let’s not repeat the Moling incident. Come on, let’s get you to bed.” He grabbed Lan Xichen’s wrist and tugged, but the taller man didn’t budge.

“But I haven’t given A-Su her thank you gift yet.” Lan Xichen looked around, wide eyed and innocent. “Where did the rabbits go?”

Jin Guangyao sighed loudly. “We don’t have rabbits here, Erge. This is Lanling, not the Cloud Recesses.”

“But rabbits are the best gift. Wangji and A-Yuan both think so.” Lan Xichen pouted for a moment, then perked up. “Someone must have rabbits in town.”

Jin Guangyao’s face convulsed.

Lan Xichen nodded decisively. Dropping his sword so it hovered in the air, he tried to climb onto it. Combined with the alcohol, Jin Guangyao pulling on his sleeve was enough to unbalance him, so he fell backwards into his lover’s chest. Jin Guangyao stumbled backwards, but managed to hold him up.

Lan Xichen hummed, tugging on his arms to pull him closer. He seemed to have entirely forgotten his goal, content to remain where he was.

Stymied in his efforts to steal his lover away with minimum embarrassment, Jin Guangyao turned his head towards her. “Erge overindulged by mistake, my apologies. I will get him to his rooms — my rooms, I suppose, shortly.”

“None needed. I was merely startled.” Startled, yes, but also having the time of her life. Doubly so, considering the incoherent gibberish of Qin Su’s thoughts.

“Erge, it’s nearly midnight. You wouldn’t want your uncle to know you stayed up past nine, would you?”

“But Shufu is in the Cloud Recesses. He doesn’t like crowds.” Lan Xichen said as though revealing a great secret. “Wangji is somewhere in Qishan. He doesn’t like crowds either.”

“I could always write him a letter. ‘Lan-Xiansheng, I am sorry to inform you that Lan-zongzhu has taken liberties with the disciplines. Please have him copy the rules with the novices for the next month.’”

“A-Yao, you wouldn’t.” Lan Xichen let his head loll back against Jin Guangyao’s shoulder - somehow without tipping the shorter man over — and stuck out his bottom lip.

“I wouldn’t.” Jin Guangyao confirmed, his expression turning ridiculously sappy. “Please come back with me anyway?”

“But I haven’t thanked A-Su properly yet!” Lan Xichen grasped her hands and squeezed tightly, earnestly shaking them up and down. “Thank you, A-Su! I will take good care of our A-Yao.”

She doubted Lan Xichen would ever have mentioned it, if he wasn’t drunk.

“My deepest apologies for this.” Jin Guangyao grimaced, his cheeks flushed pink. He turned to face Lan Xichen, cupping the back of his neck and stroking the front of his throat with his thumb. “I’ve arranged to have dessert delivered to my room. I’ll feed it to you, if you’re good.”

Lan Xichen perked up, dropping her hands and —thankfully — dragged him away before she and Qin Su could be subjected to anymore unwanted details of their relationship.

As they vanished from sight, headed for a discrete side entrance to Jin Guangyao’s room, Jiang Yanli felt a twinge of guilt. Lan Xichen did not deserve to be shackled to a man who had killed his own son.

But she did not feel as much guilt as she would have liked to.

Because she had told Lan Xichen the truth, and he had chosen to do nothing.

Jiang Yanli had gone to him after she learned what she’d slept through in the aftermath of A-Xian’s defection, after Luo Qingyang left the sect and Lan Wangji slipped away unnoticed. After A-Cheng left for the Burial Mounds without her. “A-Xian did not do this unprovoked. The Wen siblings saved our lives, at great risk to their own.”

He smiled in appeasement. “Be that as it may, he killed the guards, and took away all the prisoners. You must understand what this looks like.”

Jiang Yanli’s patience had been hanging by a thread, and the patronizing you must understand snapped it. “I remember starving, terrified, dirty prisoners dressed in rags being used as target practice.” She laughed, a short, crazed thing too like A-Xian’s. “Oh, but you prefer to forget things that might upset your precious peace. Even if it dooms innocents, or breaks your brother’s heart.”

Lan Xichen stared at her, and Jiang Yanli remembered she was supposed to be the level-headed, soft-spoken one. No matter how little she felt it. “My apologies, that was uncalled for. It is simply that my brother cannot do anything, without your support.

But Lan Xichen only shook his head regretfully. “Both my sworn brothers have sworn to me that only dangerous prisoners were confined to the camp. I’m sorry, Jiang-guniang, but I cannot.”

Lan Xichen had not believed her. And perhaps he had doomed A-Xian. Perhaps it would have changed nothing. But for what she had done — was doing — to Lan Xichen, she clung to her rationalizations.

What just happened? Qin Su asked.

We just experienced the reason why Lans are forbidden to drink. Strange that Lan Xichen would get drunk like that, though. Thanks to A-Xian, she knew the Lan’s rule about alcohol was really because of the main clan’s low tolerance, but —

But I’ve seen him drink before. Qin Su’s confusion was like bubbles popping on surface of her mind.

Jiang Yanli had too. A-Xian once mentioned a trick Zewu-jun used to burn it off, while he was deep in his cups and reminiscing longingly about how cute Lan Wangji looked when drunkenly attempting to straighten his crooked forehead ribbon. Had Nie Huaisang switched their cups by mistake? A prank, perhaps?

Where was Nie Huaisang?

Jiang Yanli pushed open the door to the Fragrance Hall and froze.

That answers that question.

Nie Huaisang swore as a device he was holding up to the mirrored portal to the treasure room rebounded towards his face, using both his hands to force it back to the surface. There was a focused intensity to his expression that Jiang Yanli had never seen before, a far sight from the whining puddle who’d dragged the Chief Cultivator from his own banquet.

But then, she’d never paid him much attention. No one had, save perhaps A-Xian. “Nie-zongzhu. Is there something you need from the treasury?”

Nie Huaisang startled, glaring with a focused intensity that vanished so quickly she might have imagined it, as he threw himself back from the portal. He sprawled inelegantly on the ground, covering half his face with his fan. “Is that what it is? A treasury? I really didn’t know.”

Is it just me or is that bullshit? Qin Su did the mental equivalent of narrowing her eyes.

Jiang Yanli shut the door behind her. “So you didn’t just hide a talisman-engraved device you were using to inspect the wards up your sleeve?”

If Nie Huaisang is competent, I think we can safely say everything I thought was wrong. What will we discover next? Does my  father remember my birthday? Has Yao-zongzhu been possessed by a gossip-loving spirit for years?

“I was just curious, I don’t know!”

She supposed he’d never bothered to come up with another line because this one had worked for his entire life. “Let me satisfy your curiosity then.”

He gave an exaggerated wail as she grabbed his wrist. But whatever else Nie Huaisang might be, he was not strong. Jiang Yanli was able to easily pull him through the portal. He stumbled against her, and, as she reached to steady him, bit her hand.

“Ow! What was that for? Are you a dog?” She demanded, wiping off her knuckles on her outer robe.

“You made unfounded accusations and dragged me in here!” He slumped inward, making himself look smaller. “I don’t know why! I felt unsafe.”

Sure he did. “You wanted to see inside. Now you’re inside. Take the chance or leave it.”

He took it. “Well, if you insist. There is some interesting art in here. Is this where the paintings of the Crimson Swan ended up? Tragic. I could help display them properly, if San-ge gave me half a chance. But no, it’s too soon. Half the sects would throw a fit, and Lan-xiansheng would kidnap me for remedial schooling. I can’t go back to the Cloud Recesses! I simply can’t!”

Qin Su snorted. At least some things stay the same. He’s still annoying.

Jiang Yanli watched Nie Huaisang dart around the room, peering at items on shelves and lifting curtains in what seemed to be no particular order, keeping up his narration all the while. “You know, the Wen really had some gems in their collection. This poetry collection is priceless, and yet here it is, tragically gathering dust — Oh, dear.”

His arm knocked into an ornate vase that had been placed too close to the edge of a display.

Jiang Yanli plucked a talisman from her sleeve and threw it, so it hit the vase, freezing it in place tipped halfway off the shelf.

Nie Huaisang turned, squinting at her with an air of smug satisfaction. “You’re not Qin Su.”

Nie Huaisang of all people notices? That’s it, good night. Wake me when things make sense again. Despite her words, Qin Su remained alert and attentive.

Jiang Yanli tamped down on the urge to throw another talisman, this time at him. “That’s quite the accusation.”

“Qin Su would have reached for her sword when I knocked over that vase. You stopped it from falling with a talisman. Also, she never calls me Nie-zongzhu.” He perched on a vase-free table, his hands folded perfectly, but one leg bounced to the rhythm of his thoughts. “The question is, are you possessing her, or are you using one of Xue Yang’s human skin masks?”

“Neither.” She held up Qin Su’s sword, and drew it. “Do you deny that this is Chunsheng?”

“So that is Qin Su’s body, but you say it’s not a possession. Hmm. Did Wei-xiong find a way to permanently inhabit a living body?” Nie Huaisang jumped disturbingly close to the truth with his second guess.  “Are you Wei-xiong? But no, Wei-xiong wouldn’t have chosen a nice woman like Qin Su.”

Aww. He thinks I’m nice. So long as he’s just a sneak, I forgive him for the deception.

“I’m definitely not A-Xian.” Jiang Yanli realized her mistake even as it slipped out. She clapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes widening.

“Jiang Yanli!” He cried, delighted. “Oh, I have to know how this happened.”

“I don’t know what —”

“No, don’t protest. You’ve been caught. But don’t worry. I’m certainly not going to tell anyone in Koi Tower about you. What would be the use of that?” Nie Huaisang was positively gleeful, and she didn’t trust him for a second.

Qin Su didn’t disagree, but sighed. Unfortunately, I think you’d better tell him.

“Take a seat.” She hung up a talisman to alert her if anyone approached the portal, and checked under every curtain, just in case. Once she was certain the room was secure, she knelt across from him. “You were correct that it was A-Xian’s work that made this possible, but it was not his doing.”

“Obviously, it was Wei-xiong’s invention. His most powerful imitator is Xue Yang, and he has the creativity of a sea slug.” Nie Huaisang sank gracefully to his knees, balancing his fan across them. Seeing him now, a stranger would never guess his reputation. “Now, who is this mysterious benefactor? Do tell.”

She briefly detailed the mechanics of the array. From his performance in the Cloud Recesses, she would not have expected him to understand it, but he nodded along without interrupting. “Qin Su found the wrong journal at exactly the wrong moment. Now I’m in her body, and she lives in my head.”

Was it the wrong moment? Qin Su wondered, and digressed before Jiang Yanli could contradict her. Insult his fan for me, that’s sloppy work. His mountains still look like Jin Guangyao’s hat.

Dutifully, Jiang Yanli repeated her words.

He gave a startled laugh. “Ah, Qin Su has long been my worst critic. Sadly, this revenge business leaves little time for developing my painting skills.”

“Revenge? Does this have anything to do with why you were trying to break in here?” If so, his grudge could only be against —

“Naturally. Jin Guangyao killed my brother.” Nie Huaisang asserted this claim as though it were common knowledge. “He also set up yours, which seems relevant.”

Jiang Yanli stiffened, lightning racing though her veins. “A-Xian? Didn’t he lose control?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I can’t be sure, I wasn’t there.” He said lightly. Jiang Yanli was beginning to believe he was allergic to acting serious. Dropping this on her as though it didn’t shake her entire worldview. “He is, however, the reason Jin Zixuan went to Qiongqi path that day.”

Jiang Yanli could have sworn she heard a dizi playing as she died, when Chenqing was hanging loose in A-Xian’s grasp. But she had been dying — that memory was not to be trusted. And just how clever would Jin Guangyao have to be to plan all of that? Surely not everything that had gone wrong could be laid at his feet.

Maybe we should consider the possibility anyway. Qin Su, for whom all the greatest cruelties of her life could be laid at the feet of that same man, suggested.

Jiang Yanli was uncertain that knowing would do anything more than make their losses hurt more. She sat in stunned silence for a long moment, and wished for a plum to let her retreat and reset. A reply to Tan-daifu’s latest letter was overdue, she thought hazily.

Tan-daifu would say that the truth helps. Qin Su seized the chance to turn her own nagging about Tan-daifu’s advice back on her, which didn’t seem fair.

But the truth would only help if she was ready to face it.  Jiang Yanli still woke every day expecting to see A-Xuan beside her, was thrust back into sepia-tinged memories of afternoons on the Lotus Lakes at the distant sound of adolescent laughter.

She would not be ready until the day she saw A-Xian again.

What day? Yanli-jie? Qin Su asked, but Jiang Yanli was uncertain why she’d thought that. A-Xian was dead. She could not simply trade someone else for him.

“How did you learn this?” She asked, finally.

Nie Huaisang looked up from a book he’d snagged from a nearby shelf while she was lost in her thoughts. “I have my ways.”

“You have spies.”

He picked up his fan to flick it dismissively. “Just a few informants. Mostly, we Nies are simply very good at out-drinking people.”

She had a feeling he was downplaying the extent of his network. “What else have you learned from your spies?”

“I just ask people to keep an eye out, it’s hardly espionage.” He insisted.

“Sure.” She said, seeing this was a hill he would die on.

Mollified, he continued. “Jin Guangyao also killed his father.”

“I’m aware. Shockingly, I’m not actually upset about that one.” Perhaps Nie Huaisang had finally run out of shocking revelations.

But no, he had another left in store. “Who is? No, the interesting part is he left a witness. A little bird told me that somewhere in Koi Tower, there’s a woman trapped in a hidden room.”

Jiang Yanli would never get used to having to sit side by side on the Peacock throne with Jin Guangyao. She had been meant to share it with Zixuan, as not only his wife but his equal.

She hadn’t expected her husband to want her as anything other than the mother of his children. Not until their second engagement, when his earnest, awkward attempts at wooing her had turned to learning each other over the course of honest conversations that slowly grew less stilted. Finally, their words had begun to flow like a mountain stream thawing in spring, and Jiang Yanli knew her heart was right to choose him.

A-Xuan had listened, and confided he needed her help, not only with things like courtesy and public speaking, but in knowing what needed to change.

Jin Guangyao, she thought, was so certain that he was the smartest person in the room, that he didn’t notice his wife-slash-sister was an entirely different person.

Qin Su had nearly always sat in silence during conferences, listening perhaps half the time as she thought about lesson plans and inspected the attendees’ robes and ornaments in case anyone had discovered a talented new artisan. So for the moment, Jiang Yanli did the same, albeit paying the debate her full attention.

No matter the length at which Sect Leader Yao complained about issues that did not remotely involve him (Gusu’s high land tax rates), internal sect matters not on the conference agenda (how a small temple sect and town sect on his lands kept driving yao and gui into each other’s territory), or were entirely out of left field. “See! There’s proof! The Jiang have been hoarding the Yiling Patriarch’s inventions for themselves!”

A-Cheng, who had just reached the point in his status report regarding Yunmeng’s taxes, blinked. Clearly used to  Sect Leader Yao, he didn’t even get angry, merely rubbed his knuckles against his forehead. “The Jin have all of Wei Wuxian’s heretical writings. I explained this last conference. And the conference before that.”

Sect Leader Yao continued to prove himself the least astute cultivator in the room. “But you’ve never let anyone into Lotus Pier to check for themselves!”

At that, the flush of anger filled his cheeks. But in an impressive-for-him show of control, A-Cheng only snapped, “What, exactly, are you insinuating, Yao-zongzhu? Would you like to share Xixia’s cultivation techniques with the class?”

“I see that Yunmeng’s recovery is continuing ahead of schedule. Let’s move on to…” Jin Guangyao blanched, as he realized who was next. “Qinghe. A-Sang, if you please.”

Nie Huaisang got to his feet, looking around with what she had to assume were faked nerves, clutching his fan close to his chest. He stuttered through the beginnings of his presentation, before swaying and kicking a bird cage hidden beneath his table into the center of the room. It spoke, in a disturbingly accurate imitation of A-Cheng.

And all right, that was entertaining. But mostly, the conference continued to star Sect Leader Yao.

At least today, A-Ling was perched on the wide throne beside her, making it a little more bearable.

Leaning into her side, his tongue caught between his teeth, A-Ling scribbled on each new sheet of paper. Ostensibly, he was practicing his calligraphy. And he did do a bit of that, with messy strokes, but only when he noticed her looking down. Mostly, he scribbled blobs that he proudly declared were all the dogs he would someday own, when she asked.

Black flecks of ink spattered the front of her robes, but Jiang Yanli could not bring herself to care. She’d missed so much. She’d take every second with her son she could get.

Jiang Yanli’s continued efforts to pay attention were stymied by Qin Su’s running commentary on everything from the tackiness of the gilded everything to the dust bunny that had attached itself unnoticed to Sect Leader Ouyang’s beard, taking the chance to say everything she’d never been able to.

It’s a shame I never tempted Ouyang-zongzhu’s tailor away. He doesn’t deserve her. And oh, look, Su She’s imitating the Lan more obviously than ever. It’s almost like he sold them out to the Wen or something and misses the status. The off-white and teal blue of Su She’s robes were at most a single shade away from Lan colors, and the wave embroidery on his hems was suspiciously cloud-like.

The most notable detail of Su She’s presentation was the way the Lan disciples — save, of course, for a slightly off-color Lan Xichen — pretended not to snicker as he claimed the peasants in his lands were superstitious about musical cultivation.

She’d ensured Sect Leader Ran was next to him, and noted the two of them speaking quietly during one of Sect Leader Yao’s disruptions. This time, he was one insult away from starting a cat fight with Sect Leader Tang, over some minor territorial dispute. Jin Guangyao actually got up and went over to them to smooth ruffled feathers, though his efforts were stymied by A-Cheng’s utter apathy over whether his young, hotheaded vassal stabbed Sect Leader Yao in the eyes with her chopsticks.

It’s not a cultivation conference if no one tries to murder Yao-Zongzhu. Someday, someone will take one for the team and actually do it. Qin Su sighed wistfully.

From the way Jin Guangyao’s dimples twitched when he returned, he’d contemplated it.

During their break for lunch, Sect Leader Ran approached the Peacock throne. As she’d expected, he asked directly for a meeting with Jin Guangyao to negotiate terms for the implementation of watchtowers.

Sect Leader Zhai’s approach was more surprising.

“Xiandu, Jin-furen.” Sect Leader Zhai bowed to each of them. “I would like to request a private meeting with both of you before I leave Lanling. Jin-furen brought up some interesting points yesterday that I would like to discuss further.”

“Both of us?” Jin Guangyao was a man who planned everything himself, who seemed to believe that seeking a second opinion meant smiling and nodding and then explaining why the other person was wrong.

The implication that his here-to-fore apolitical wife had made a better offer appeared to have broken him.

“I think that could be arranged.” Jiang Yanli said. “A-Yao?”

He recovered quickly, gesturing for his assistant to put a note in his schedule. “Yes, of course. I believe tomorrow, immediately after dinner would be an ideal time.”

“Excellent. I look forward to it.” Sect Leader Zhai bowed again and turned away, without waiting for their dismissal.

Tempers frayed in the afternoon, and Jiang Yanli had to pass A-Ling off to his minders for a nap. As Sect Leader Yao rose for his actual turn to report, Nie Huaisang made his move.

He screeched, jumping to his feet as though bitten, and bumped into Sect Leader Yao hard enough to knock them both to the floor. The wine jar in his hand shattered, sharp edges lacerating his palm. He stared at the cuts for a long moment as they began to bleed. And, clutching his wrist, he drew in a deep breath, and howled.

The majority of the room promptly began to find their teacups or the nearest tacky golden peacock drapes utterly fascinating. But his elder brother’s sworn brothers were at his side in an instant.

“A-Sang, please. Let us see.” Jin Guangyao pleaded.

I think Jin Guangyao really does care about Huaisang. He’s never going to see him coming. Qin Su said, and they both winced at a particularly high-pitched cry. Nie Huaisang should have been born to a theatrical troupe.

“Oh, that looks —” Lan Xichen caught only a glimpse of the injured hand before he had to let go to avoid Nie Huaisang’s wildly swinging other arm.

“Ergeeeeeee,” Nie Huaisang wailed. “I’m bleeding out, aren’t I? You can say it.”

“No, no,” As Jin Guangyao finally captured the flailing hand, Lan Xichen pressed down on the wound with his own handkerchief. “You should see a healer, just to clean and bind it properly.”

“Will you take me?” He sniffed, his eyes wide and filling once again with tears as he looked between the two men.

Jin Guangyao exchanged a pained glance with his theoretically secret lover. “I can’t leave right now, can you?”

Lan Xichen shook his head. “I’m scheduled to speak on our findings about suppressing ghosts summoned with spirit flags next.”

“Right. Right.” Jin Guangyao stared into the distance for a moment. Qin Su hoped he was watching his plans for the conference crumble before his eyes. “Huaisang, you’ll have to go with one of your disciples —”

Nie Huaisang sobbed harder.

That was her cue.

“I’ll take him to get patched up.” Jiang Yanli offered, already striding towards them.

Jin Guangyao looked around at the determinedly apathetic audience, then back to Nie Huaisang. He sighed. “Thank you. A-Su will take good care of you, please let her take you to a healer.”

Nie Huaisang kept up his whining until they were out of sight and earshot of the hall, though still under an awning away from the downpour outside. Then, with a glance around to make sure no one was watching, he plucked a vial of salve and a bandage out of his robes. He only asked her to pop open the salve, but she took it and the bandage from him, gesturing for him to hold out his hand.

“I can do it myself.” He insisted, the vapid act vanishing in an instant.

Jiang Yanli rolled her eyes. “Bandages are more secure when someone else wraps them. It’ll help stop the bleeding.” Cultivators were always such babies about receiving help.

“All right.” He gazed at her with wide and uncertain eyes. As though no one had offered to help him without something in return, or a fit of hysterics, in a long time. Yet even as she finished tying of the bandage, that incongruous seriousness took over once again. “We have at least until the end of the evening banquet, though it would be better if you returned for that. The house should be near the kitchens, in what looks like an empty space.”

They walked back and forth past the kitchens several times, but found nothing. The hems of their robs were soaked from the rain, the line between wet and dry creeping higher with every step.

“Right. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy.” He pulled one of A-Xian’s Compasses of Evil out of his pocket. “Only Demonic Cultivation could hide a building like this, but it must be shielded somehow, or people would notice a cluster of resentment in the middle of Koi Tower. I wonder… hold this.”

He thrust his umbrella into her chest, expecting her to hold it over his head. Bemused, she did so.

“A lightning talisman, perhaps, to imitate the effects of Zidian.” He mused, sketching in the air with his injured hand as though it didn't pain him. “Yes! It’s this way.”

As they walked, she watched him closely. “I had no idea you were so…”

“That I’m in possession of a working brain? Yes, I prefer it that way.” He said brightly.

Being underestimated had its advantages, but that didn’t stop it from hurting.

“I was going to say that I thought you didn’t cultivate beyond the basics.” Jiang Yanli corrected. “Cultivation has no bearing on intelligence. I would know.”

“Yes, I suppose you would. I’ve always preferred talismans to sword cultivation, much less those horrible life-draining sabers, despite Dage’s wishes. Did you think Wei-xiong was only friends with me for my sense of humor?”

She hadn’t spent much time thinking about their friendship at all, not when she was occupied watching A-Xian fall in love.

What sense of humor? Qin Su said. Teasingly, so Jiang Yanli repeated it, earning an insulted gasp.

But Nie Huaisang’s methods bore fruit, his compass leading them to their destination.

From the outside, the building looked like a shed. One of the many near-identical buildings that housed tools or out of use decorations, albeit with an unusual amount of space on either side. But when she looked closely, Jiang Yanli glimpsed a shimmer of golden energy, mixed with writhing shadows. Wards, and made from a combination of resentful and spiritual energy at that. No wonder neither of them had so much as glimpsed it before.

Jiang Yanli stepped forward to inspect the wards in detail. They looked to be designed to hide the building, and keep someone in. Though the details looked overly complicated for concealing a single person, she and Nie Huaisang agreed. Keeping anyone who knew it was there out would require a level of intricacy that risked collapsing the entire ward every time someone passed through.

Their presence would not be detected.

Still, Nie Huaisang stepped through first, claiming, “I can talk my way out of this, if we’re wrong. You, on the other hand…”

When Jiang Yanli stepped through, there was a wave of disorientation, like stepping onto solid ground after hours on a boat. It passed, and a two-story pavilion of modest size stood before her. Far less elaborate than her own, she thought it might once have been used to house servants, before it was repurposed into a prison.

Keeping out of sight of anyone who might look out, they approached the open windows on either side of the door. Jiang Yanli plastered herself to the wall, and peered inside.

She and Nie Huaisang had agreed that if they found the woman’s prison, they would only scout from the outside.

But what Jiang Yanli saw through that window changed everything.

A young woman in linen servant’s robes knelt at a table, her shoulders hunched over as she methodically ground herbs into powder. A text depicting the anatomy of a human body was open to her left.

The woman looked up, and Jiang Yanli was certain she was seeing a ghost.

#the untamed #cql #wangxian #yanqing #qin su #my fic #the sacrifice summon! JYL fic #where the summoner (qin su) sticks around #this time featuring drunk! LXC #NHS's acting skills #and everyone's desire to kills sect leader yao

[isabilightwood]

THE PROBLEM WITH AUTHORITY - CHAPTER 9

Or, Sacrifice Summon! Jiang Yanli is here to make things right, be the ultimate big sister (step 1: bring back her dead brother), and maybe steal the Peacock throne in the process

[AO3][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

The trees shivered under an unnatural fog. Yet the sky above was clear, save for the eerie crimson light of the stars. Every gust of wind against the leaves was a howling moan, every rustle of the undergrowth a giant spider yao gathering itself to lunge. Jin Tianyu wanted to go home. He was going to be an accountant under the Chief Cultivator and help him change the world. Important things. Not like stupid night hunting.

He didn’t need night hunting experience to do math.

But his instructors disagreed. Even Madam Jin had shaken her head when he asked for an exemption, and explained that he needed to be able to defend himself. He’d already delayed too much by avoiding night hunting until he was eighteen, two years away from his coming of age. But what could he ever need to defend himself from in Koi Tower, save the cheek-pinching fingers of elderly relatives?

And if he had to go night hunting, why did it have to be with Fan Caining? If only their regular blademaster or even Madam Jin herself ran these things. Then he would feel safe and protected, and not like his class’ ostensible teacher, appointed to ensure the group made it back in one piece, would turn tail and flee should they run into anything more dangerous than a single ghost.

Which they would. Besides their target, a guai formed from a carpenter’s worktable that had become animated, killed its owner, and run off into the woods, there had been reports of multiple yao formed from clouded leopards in these woods.

Not to mention the giant spiders. Jin Tianyu had had one on the ceiling of his room last night, and his roommate had refused to take care of it for him, right before rolling over and going right to sleep! He’d been forced to suffer through chasing it away with a broom by himself, whimpering all the while. And that was without the massive growth spurt resentful energy gave them.

Fan Caining suddenly swept his sword through the undergrowth, clearing out an ordinary pack of rodents. As he did so, something growled in the woods up ahead.

“That should draw something out.” He informed the group, though they’d been taught in class that the best way to draw out a dangerous guai or yao was to choose a battleground by scouting during the day, and using a lure flag with a limited distance to reduce the risk of attracting anything else.

How a bunch of rodents would draw out a murderous worktable, Jin Tianyu did not know. But it might bring out those leopards!

The senior disciple had a build that seemed to be made of squares, which also described his personality. Flat and boring, with a few pointy spots that made him dangerous to cross. Jin Tianyu had learned that the hard way when he suggested they might, possibly want to scout beforehand, and Fan Caining hit him hard across the back with the flat of his sword. The bruise had yet to fade.

Sure enough, a leopard yao with glowing red eyes pounced on his slightly older cousin as they entered the next clearing. She shrieked and whacked at it with her sheathed sword while Jin Tianyu and everyone else gaped. Even Fan Caining.

As his tangjie managed to get her sword between herself and the leopard, Jin Tianyu shook off his shock and drew his sword. He held it in front of himself like a spear and charged, yelling. Sword pierced flesh with sickening squelch.

He’d screwed his eyes shut to avoid looking, he realized, and opened them. The leopard was dead alright, and his tangjie alive if covered in the leopard’s blood. But it seemed Fan Caining had recovered at the same time he did. Either Jin Tianyu stabbing its gut or it’s beheading could have done it in.

“Thanks.” Tangjie said, as she used his limp arm to pull herself up. “I was starting to think no one would step in.”

The dozen other junior disciples looked sheepish.

“Of course,” Fan Caining drew himself up prouder than any peacock in the Koi Tower gardens, though she hadn’t addressed him.

The groaning noise sounded again, this time cut off with a wail.

Fan Caining waved him and the other junior disciples ahead as though nothing was wrong.  Jin Tianyu cursed his luck for the thousandth time.

It was one of the outer disciples who first stepped in a trap. They tried to take another step, and found themselves immobilized at the edge of the clearing. Tangjie took a step forward and found herself shot up into the branches of the tree above. “I can’t — my hands are stuck to the branch!” She called down, in a panic.

Several other disciples moved to help, but found themselves in the same situation. Jin Tianyu’s limbs felt heavy, and he stood there dumb and immobile.

The groaning noise came again, but cut off in a laugh that could only come from a person.

Lilting laughter that sounded like his worst nightmare echoed through the clearing. Looking around, Jin Tianyu spotted a man dressed in black and silver reclining casually on a tree branch. Beautiful, in the way of jagged glass, only sharper. Like he would not only cut anything that got too close, but shred it into thin, unidentifiable slivers.

If I was better at verse, I could be a poet, and leave cultivation behind forever. Jin Tianyu thought absently.

The man looked familiar somehow, like he might have crossed paths with Jin Tianyu in passing. Except that Jin Tianyu had never left Lanling City before.

Fog rolled into the clearing, but only below the tree line, leaving the man clear and untouched above.

Jin Tianyu coughed. No, not fog. Powder.

Fan Caining stood in the center of the clearing, his sword shaking as he pointed it up towards the man. “Xue Yang? But you’re supposed to be —”

“Dead?” Xue Yang’s teeth shone white, bared in a threat, not a smile. “Yes, you did try very hard to make that happen. Too bad for you, I’m too crazy to die. Lucky for me, none of your friends are here this time to save you. Only a few tasty little children.”

To his surprise, Fan Caining did not try to run. Instead, he jumped up into the trees. “I can take you on my own, you weak little maniac.”

Xue Yang only laughed as he attacked.

Xue Yang. Jin Tianyu knew why he recognized him now. That was the former disciple brought in by the former sect leader, cast out by the current Chief Cultivator. The murderer of the Chang Clan.

He’d called them tasty.

Screw Fan Caining. They needed to get out of there.

Jin Tianyu tried to give himself leverage to get to his cousin by pushing against a tree, and found himself entirely turned around, no longer in the clearing.

He turned, and the trees seemed to spin around him. They continued to spin no matter how long he tried to stand still, stumbling, until finally he hit something solid and rough. A tree. He slid down it. Seated, his vision felt a little clearer.

He soon wished it wasn’t.

Something dropped from the tree to dangle in above Jin Tianyu. He dared to peak, and immediately regretted it.

The slack, inverted features of Fan Caining stared back, his eyes bulging from his head, tongue swollen and hanging from blue-tinged lips.

Jin Tianyu screamed.

He woke to Tangjie slapping his cheeks. “Tianyu! Tianyu, wake up!”

“What… what happened?” Jin Tianyu said groggily, as his memory began to return. He sat up straight. “Xue Yang!”

“He left, but I think there was something in that fog. You inhale the most of it, but all of us breathed in a little.” She explained. “We need to hurry back to the inn. The rest of the group has Cai-qianbei’s body. Come on, we need to go.”

She slung his arm around her neck, but as he stood, the vertigo returned in full force.

Somehow, they made it back to the inn, but he didn’t remember it.

A young man rose from a table, then he was doubled and tripled and on again. He wore gray, with a boar on his shoulder. That meant Nie. Jin Tianyu remembered that.

“Did the lot of you run all the way back here like that?”

“What?” Jin Tianyu asked, and the next thing he knew, the Nie disciple was keeping him upright by the elbow, taking his weight from Tangjie so she could collapse in a chair.

Jin Tianyu stared up into the Nie disciple’s face, at the angles of his defined cheekbones and jaw, with just the right amount of softness. Very symmetrical. He could do math with that face.

Pretty. He thought.

“Thank you.” The Nie disciple flashed him a smile that made him want to faint all over again. “You’ve got corpse poisoning. Let’s get some congee in you, now.”

He was seated and a bowl of congee appeared in front of him out of nowhere, as though it had already been prepared. Even though it was evening, and he didn’t think enough time had passed to make it.

Jin Tianyu couldn’t be sure, though. He was too busy floating, the only thing anchoring him to his body the burning pain on his tongue.

That faded as he forced down more of the bowl, and he realized it was chili. He could see the flakes reddening his bowl. Tangjie, who loved chili, had scarfed it down with no problem. Jin Tianyu tried to put down the bowl.

“No, no, you have to eat the whole thing for it to work.” The Nie disciple —who was even prettier now that his head was clearer — shoved the bowl back into his hands. “That was corpse powder you were poisoned with. You’ll die.”

Jin Tianyu shoveled the rest into his mouth.

The Nie disciple was tall. Very tall, as was the case for every Nie he’d seen with the sole exception of their current sect leader, but surprisingly thin, like he didn’t spend all his spare time building up the muscles the Nie were well known for. The hair braided up into his guan was lopsided, like he’d done it up without looking in a mirror. But even under the influence of the corpse powder, Jin Tianyu had been correct. His face was perfectly symmetrical, without a single blemish or pore to be found. It would have looked unnatural, were his perfect face not so expressive. His brows arched and lips pursed  sternly, but giving the impression that he was laughing.

“Now, would you mind telling me what happened?” His beautiful savior asked.

Speaking over each other, Jin Tianyu and the other disciples hurried to do so. But by the next morning, when they gathered to leave for Koi Tower, their savior was gone.

In Nie robes and a face that did not belong to him, Wei Wuxian did not receive a second glance until he first set foot in the Unclean realm. Once there, he constantly felt eyes boring into his back, but when he glanced over, he’d find disciples hard at work on their forms or their noses buried deep in texts. Which only went to prove their curiosity.

Even with Nie Huaisang for a sect leader, it wasn’t every day that a stranger was brought into the sect and handed a high-ranking position. But the Nie Sect had few elders, and those they had were aged and gray because with saber cultivation, it was the weak who survived the longest. It seemed the Nie elders were retired in truth, pursuing hobbies like needlework and whittling and nagging their grandchildren to eat more.

By the time Wei Wuxian arrived in the Unclean Realm, Nie Mingjue’s body had been hidden away, though not yet buried, for reasons known only to Nie Huaisang. No one said anything about that, either.

“And since I’m the weakest of the lot, I’ll live to be a hundred,” Nie Huaisang completed explaining his free reign to lead his sect however he chose, unparalleled by any other sect even a single generation past its founding as they approached the gates to the Unclean Realm.

Right before dropping a bomb on his head in the form of unwarranted and unwanted respectability. “My closest sect siblings know my motives if not my plans, so no one will oppose appointing you to the vacant position of fourth disciple.”

“What?” Wei Wuxian sputtered, tempted to check if Nie Huaisang was running a fever. “What happened to the last fourth disciple?”

Nie Huaisang snapped his fan closed, and opened it again, staring off into the distance.

Touchy subject. Understood. “Forget I asked.”

“Let’s just say Jin Guangyao owes the Nie Clan more than one life.” Nie Huaisang said, before dragging him through the gates and launching into a series of dramatic introductions that left his head spinning.

Apparently he was going by Nie Wang, courtesy Xiaomeng now.

Wei Wuxian had not been consulted on this. Walking around with everyone thinking his name was hope felt precisely in line with Nie Huaisang’s sense of humor.

True to form, Nie Huaisang did not deign to explain until he wanted something. Despite copious amounts of pleading, Wei Wuxian was forced to wait through a restless night of nightmares and a morning while his apparent new sect leader caught up on work to get his answers.

Finally, Nie Huaisang summoned him around lunch time. He was set up in a pavilion in the garden, with a mountain of paperwork. The garden had been designed by someone with an eye for showcasing Qinghe’s foliage. A lotus pond surrounded the pavilion, and though its cultivated beauty was no match for the wildness of Yunmeng’s lakes, the carefully selected flowers staggered through the surrounding paths were like hidden gems, each intended to stand on its own.

There were birds as well, goldfinches and many others kept there not by cages, but by the feeders full of seeds spread throughout.

“So,” Wei Wuxian said as he sprawled on a bench across the table from Nie Huaisang, who did not look up from his work to greet him. “I thought I was going to be a rogue cultivator. But apparently you had other ideas.”

“If you’re going to pull this off, the easiest way to wander around without notice is as one of my disciples. As a rogue cultivator, you might gather some recognition, get invited along to visit sects and so on. As one of mine, well, there are Nie disciples everywhere.” It was deeply disconcerting to watch Nie Huaisang take something seriously. And he was serious about that paperwork, not even looking up to speak. “They get bored of me, and travel.”

“They’re spies, aren’t they?”

He lifted his brush from a page with a flourish, and pinned it off to the side under a weight to dry, immediately moving onto the next one. “Are you saying I’m not irritating enough to make people need a break? I must have an ulterior motive? I’ll have to try harder.”

“Oh, you’re very irritating. They’re just extremely loyal.”

“After the Sunshot campaign and the losses we had during Dage’s decline, both to desertion and other causes. And then the prospect of me. Well, anyone who’s left is basically family.”

He gestured at Nie Xiaodan, at that moment crossing the bridge towards the pavilion.

Nie Xiaodan patted him on the head as she passed by. “Don’t forget to order lunch, Zongzhu.” She said, and returned to discussing a night hunt with her companion. It seemed she had come for that reminder only.

Nie Huaisang beamed.

“Fine, I’ll pretend to be your disciple.” Wei Wuxian wanted to pretend he’d been given a choice.

“Excellent! We can get you a saber easily enough.”

Uh. He had told him what Wen Qing said about his core, right? Wei Wuxian was often terrible at remembering tasks, but he distinctly recalled completing that one. “I’m banned from resentful energy, doctor’s orders.”

“Our smiths can make sabers without binding an animal spirit, you know. They do make other things.”

Wei Wuxian was summarily introduced to the blacksmiths, a married couple who looked him up and down intently and promptly got into an argument over the saber’s design. When he looked around for Nie Huaisang, the sneaky little spymaster was missing, because of course he was.

Attempts at interrupting failed to distract the couple from their debate over the pattern to be inscribed on the hilt, so Wei Wuxian settled against the wall to wait, and inadvertently took a nap.

He was prodded awake with the end of a (thankfully) unheated poker. “Infuse this with your energy,” The smith holding the poker growled, pointing towards a red-hot block of iron. Wei Wuxian did as requested, feeling only a slight protest from Xue Yang’s — his core.

Then, all he had to do was wait.

During the week it took for his new saber to be prepared, Wei Wuxian was not idle.

If he was going to imitate Xue Yang with no demonic cultivation and an extremely temperamental sword, Wei Wuxian needed tricks. Wen Qing had told him to invent something. But, Wei Wuxian thought, how better to create the illusion of evil tricks than to use something that actually existed.

He had drawn one idea from the stage. Why not the methods for a few more?

Within a day of verbalizing his plan, Wei Wuxian drowned under a sea of texts pulled from the shelves of the Nie library and from the private records of Qinghe’s theater and dance troops. Thanks to Nie Huaisang’s generous patronage, Wei Wuxian had been able to request manuals on the techniques in common between troops, rather than their family secrets. The tricks to raising and lowering a curtain on an improvised stage and to building a smoke bomb in a desired hue for a start.

The combination of practical optical illusions and talismans seemed particularly promising.

The smoke bombs were the easiest, simply a matter of mixing powders together in a casing and setting them on fire. Fun for him, but since he managed to irritate someone no matter where he set them off, Wei Wuxian moved on.

Combining his binding talisman and a sticking talisman, he stuck a disciple to the roof of the library.

(A volunteer, since it wasn’t as though Jiang Cheng was there. Or speaking to him.)

The force holding him in place was a standard talisman, nothing Wei Wuxian had invented, but the disciple struggled against it like he’d never learned how to counter it. Which he probably hadn’t, given how little thought most cultivators gave them beyond wards and the ubiquitous ones for keeping tea warm or sending brief messages.

Which was precisely why Wei Wuxian might just pull this off.

He thought about pulleys and spirit nets, and the next day, he inscribed the talismans within a pressure-triggered array, and sent himself flying upwards. Followed by a plethora of curious volunteers.

What had he expected, though? The Nie were a sect full of adrenaline junkies. Even the first disciple came around for a turn. After that, Wei Wuxian found himself with company and conversation at every meal.

Even so, he never forgot he was wearing a mask. Every night after a long day of study, the mask weighed heavy on his face, leaving him with a headache. He found it easier to ward his door, than keep it on while he slept. Then, and only then, was it safe to be himself.

Many of the most useful tricks required more practice, such as projecting sounds so they seemed to come from a different source. Wei Wuxian practiced each, over and over again, until he felt he had it. And then put on a demonstration.

When he could pull off a trick successfully in front of the little Nie Disciples, he knew he had managed it. If he still couldn’t fool Nie Huaisang, well, Huaisang was Huaisang.

He couldn’t be held to mortal standards.

That left one more problem, perhaps the most challenging.

Along with the skin mask, Xue Yang’s bag had contained: two changes of clothes, a small pouch of silver, a large coil of rope, and several heavy bags full of corpse powder.

Obviously, Wei Wuxian wasn’t actually going to use corpse powder on anyone. That could get messy fast, if anyone else was around, with no guarantee he’d be able to serve the antidote in time. Yet it seemed like corpse powder was a common part of Xue Yang’s modus operandi.

If he didn’t use it, would Jin Guangyao suspect something was off? There was no way of telling.

The problem niggled at the back of his mind all week long, whether he was becoming one with the library or getting caught in his own rope trap. But he got no closer to finding a solution.

Until finally, during breakfast on the day Wei Wuxian was to receive his saber, he sat staring into his congee, stirring it absently.

And had a brilliant idea.

Somehow, having a potential solution took the edge off his nerves, and he was able to hold Yuanzheng for the first time while only making a bit of a fool of himself. To his relief, it didn’t feel like Suibian, though the long, thin saber was also designed for agility rather than power.

Yuanzheng

did feel like a weapon he could use, not the dead, draining weight Suibian had become or the repulsion of Jiangzai. Like it might become an extension of his arm in time, with Suibian and Chenqing out of reach. Wei Wuxian teared up a little, as he went through a series of exercises for the first time in years, and did not pass out.

For the first time, his resurrection really felt like a second chance. The beginning of the long journey he’d named his saber for, with a slim chance that light in the distance was the end of the tunnel. With family and zhiji waiting on the other end.

He had better make it count.

From the privacy of his own room that night, he pulled out his Distance Speaking Stone, and called up Wen Qing. “Hey, disorienting powder can be cleared from the system with congee like corpse powder, right?”

With construction on watchtowers set to begin in several sects, there was little for Jiang Yanli to do on the project but wait. Yet she couldn’t remain idle with only her sect responsibilities and A-Ling to occupy her time. Not if she intended to make herself — or rather, Qin Su — a credible power in her own right, someone who had a chance of being believed when it came time to reveal Jin Guangyao’s crimes.

She needed a new project. Something Jin Guangyao had yet to present a plan for, something Qin Su would get all the credit for.

Word arrived that a Jin disciple had been murdered by Xue Yang, the juniors he had been escorting barely escaping with their lives. The pair of Jin cousins with the rare tea feud (under a temporary ceasefire in favor of vengeance against the Chief Cultivator for the allowance cut, so far consisting of attempts to convince the servants to put laxatives in his tea, which the servants would not do, out of a desire to remain among the living) fainted dead away at the news.

Jiang Yanli, already aware of this through her brother, attempted to look appropriately horrified.

Jin Guangyao paled, and for a moment, lost his composure. Ice in his eyes and steel in the set of his jaw, there and gone again in a blink. Mask back into place but still off balance, he cut off the junior disciples’ explanation of their rescue from corpse powder mid sentence. He immediately sent off three teams of disciples to track down Xue Yang and bring back his body.

“I thought Xiandu always heard all explanations to the end.” A messenger from Fengyang Hua whispered to a group consisting of the wards from Lieshan Du, Zhai Xia, and Mo Xuanyu’s ever-present suitors.

Not always, rumor would now say. Even Xiandu is afraid of something.

Even with fear in the air over the return of Xue Yang — for everyone had a horror story to tell of his time in Koi Tower, mostly to do with dismembered animals in places that were decidedly not the kitchen — Jiang Yanli found she had finally settled into her role.

One day, the paperwork ran out, and Jiang Yanli found herself with an afternoon free. A novel experience, since her return. It was a perfect opportunity to brainstorm her next step.

If only she could dredge up the barest hint of an idea. But her mind felt like a dried-up creek in a drought.

“I was thinking of going to the tailor in the city, Xiao-Heng is growing like a demon and needs more new clothes. Would you like to come with me?”

I bet we’re not thinking of anything because we’re trying too hard. Qin Su said.

As much as Jiang Yanli hated to admit it, she had a point. A-Xian always said that he had his best ideas the moment he stopped trying to force a solution. The difficulty lay in not thinking about it.

I have a solution for that. My beloved nephew is quite the attention hog.

“A-Ling’s robes have been looking rather short.” She said aloud.

Qi Juan beamed, and began tucking her son in his sling. He was soon to outgrow it, and had just reached the troublesome learning to crawl stage.

Kidnapping her son from his lessons was a thrill, though it was the work of a moment. The sour-faced calligraphy instructor dismissed A-Ling with visible relief, and the reminder that A-Ling was still expected to produce ten copies of poems at the next class. Without blotches of ink covering half the page, or brush strokes of uneven width.

A-Ling stuck out his tongue behind the instructor’s back, and ran to grab her hand, already chattering about how he wanted to bring back sticks of tanghulu for the entire class.

“My sweet, grumpy boy,” She ruffled his hair, and he scowled, attempting to push it back into place, but only displacing his top knot further. Just like his jiujiu.

The main streets of Lanling were cleaner than she remembered from six years ago. The shops lining the main street had all recently been given a fresh coat of paint, proprietors and customers alike looking healthier and more prosperous.  Jin Guangyao had reformed the city’s taxes, on the basis that letting the common people keep more of their earnings now would bring the sect more profit in the long term. More than one person recognized her as Madam Jin, and called out a respectful greeting with a smile. At least on a surface level, his plan had begun to work.

There were fewer brothels now as well, reduced by half. The madams who had refused to start allowing their workers to pay off their contracts had been driven out of business or died in mysterious fires. (In some cases, but not all, the workers mysteriously escaped unscathed.) As A-Ling towed her along to a hawker with a tower of tanghulu, she passed an empty lot with the blackened foundations still visible. The buildings next to it were under repair, one of which seemed to have sustained considerable damage to the living quarters on the second floor.

As she looked around more closely, she saw an emaciated old man begging from the entrance of an alley, a woman in what had once been a set of fine performance robes soliciting passerby, and scruffy children lurking in dark corners.

Despite Jin Guangyao’s claims of working towards progress, there were still street children in Lanling.

Making a home for the orphans of Lanling had been a project dear to A-Xuan’s heart, in the last months of his life. Impending fatherhood had made him more perceptive in many ways, more so even than the changes he underwent during the Sunshot campaign. But when she was preganant, her husband had taken her by the arms and informed her with great distress that there are children in the streets, Yanli! Children!

Jiang Yanli had thought better late than never and helped him come up with a plan. She had her own reasons to take an interest in the care of orphans and poor children, after all.

Jin Guangshan had probably signed the funding out of the budget on an advisor’s word, not having been informed how his son and daughter-in-law were spending the clan’s funds in the first place.

Jin Guangyao would not have gotten rid of such a program, she thought, as she fished a coin so her son could get as sticky with sugar as his little heart desired.

Qin Su did not quite agree. No, he would have replaced it with something similar, that he could claim the credit for.

True. But he hadn’t — which meant there was room for Jiang Yanli to fill the gap.

After a moment of thought, she purchased a second stick, and handed it to Qi Juan.

“You looked like you could use it.” She told her.

Qi Juan bit down delicately on the candy-coated hawthorn, but couldn’t avoid the satisfying crunch. And laughed, as parts of the coating cracked, and fell from her lips. “All right. I haven’t had something like this since… before the Sunshot Campaign, probably. Certainly not since my family came up in the world and married me off. You look like you could use one too.”

“Do I?” Jiang Yanli had often thought that helping others feel better was its own reward.

It would make me feel better to taste something sweet. Qin Su said in a blatant attempt to get Jiang Yanli to treat herself. Sweet-sweet though, not hawthorn berries.

I think that stall might be selling lotus mooncakes.” Though the mid-autumn festival had already past, there was never a wrong time for a mooncake.

It was a mistake to mention heaven’s favorite root in front of Jin Ling. “Lotus!” He shouted. “Pleasepleaseplease mooncake mooncake!” And would not let up until she bought him one, in addition to three for herself.

“That’s more than enough sugar for one day, young man.” She informed him as she took a bite of her own mooncake, wrapping the others in a cloth for later.

A-Ling grinned toothily up at her, mooncake leaking lotus paste in one hand, half eaten tanghulu in the other, and the glint of sugar all over his cheeks.

Perhaps she should have insisted he wait until after their errand for his treats, but Jiang Yanli did not possess the earned resistance to his adorable whims of a mother who had gotten to see her child grow. Who could blame her, if she spoiled him a little? “Do you think the tailor will still let us in the shop?”

“It’s not so bad,” Qi Juan said, just as A-Ling smushed the rest of the mooncake in his hand, and shoved it in his face. She grimaced. “I’m certain Tailor Ke has seen worse.”

Indeed, Tailor Ke, a woman who knew her way around hanfu, if the way the one she was wearing flattered her extensive curves meant anything, did not blink an eye. “If you could wipe off the young master’s hands, please, Jin-furen?”

Jiang Yanli took the offered wet handkerchief, and wiped the stickiness off of a protesting A-Ling. “Of course. I wouldn’t want to damage any of your lovely merchandise.”

Sadly, the more vibrant fabrics could not be chosen for A-Ling, who would be consigned to golden peacocks and peonies on off-white for as long as he lived. As a married-in spouse, however, Jiang Yanli had more leeway with under robes. The pale pink of Laoling Qin tempered the gold, making it almost palatable.

Qi Juan freely admired a swatch of vivid green fabric, in precisely the right shade for her natal sect. A daring choice, if it was for her son. Perhaps a sign that Qi Juan would be receptive to opposing her husband.

Tailor Ke bustled around, assembling the appropriate silks in Jin colors for Jiang Yanli’s inspection herself.

“Have you been short handed lately?” She asked as ideas for how, exactly, she would go about outdoing Jin Guangyao in reform measures began to coalesce in her mind.

“Have I ever! There’s all this new demand for clothing and not enough suitable apprentices to go around! Everyone’s looking, not just me.” She dropped a stack of fabrics on the table with a grunt. “Jin-gongzi’s order will take priority, of course.”

She shook her head. Naturally an order from the sect leader’s wife would be prioritized, but there was no need. “Please put Bei-gongzi’s order ahead of mine. A-Ling can get a bit more use out of his robes, but Bei-gongzi won’t fit into his if he grows anymore. And only the peony for embroidery. If it’s any more elaborate, A-Ling will inevitably ruin the robes the first time he wears them.”

“Yes, Jin-furen.” Tailor Ke agreed. “It won’t take more than a week, all told. Kid’s clothes work up fast.”

“And wear out faster.” She sighed as A-Ling chose that moment to snag his sleeve on a nail. “What are you looking for, in an apprentice?”

Many craftspeople would have been hesitant to answer, but Tailor Ke was happy to babble on as she began to drape fabrics over A-Ling’s shoulders, critiquing and sorting them to find the least aesthetically terrible combinations. “Oh, someone who’s quick with their hands, with some basic sewing and embroidery skills. I don’t have time to teach basics, but the rest can come along in time. Someone to do the books for me would also be a dream. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be, though fortunately I can still stitch a straight seam without looking.”

That seemed like simple enough requirements, easily fulfilled with a little education. Though orphans were pulled of the street from time to time, it was usually for menial positions they would lose the moment something went wrong. Or if they were very lucky, to take care of an old, childless widow. Re-instituting A-Xuan’s program and improving upon it — that could be a very real way to distinguish Qin Su in the eyes of not only the Jin Sect, but the cultivation world.

The children could not only learn skills to help find employment, but be tested for cultivation potential.

The sects were always complaining about how difficult it was to recruit new talent. Executed properly, Jiang Yanli could make Qin Su look not only kind-hearted, but clever, reputable, and forward thinking, with the best interests of the sect she had married into at heart.

Even if the actual Qin Su fantasized about burning down Koi Tower on a regular basis.

Hey.

What? It was true.

Qin Su huffed. A semi-regular basis, maybe. And I would never actually. I wouldn’t actually ruin the whole of Lanling’s economy or put the servants and juniors out of house and home.

My apologies then. She suppressed a laugh.

Would there really be enough apprenticeships to go around, though? Qin Su sent numbers bouncing around her mind as she attempted the mental math, but got lost without paper.

Perhaps not. But larger farms could use workers, manors could use servants, and affordable bookkeepers were always in short supply. It could, at least, give them a better start.

“Shenshen look! I’m all twirly!” A-Ling giggled as he spun, the silk draped over him spinning out and threatening to knock over the tailor’s basket of supplies. Jiang Yanli tried not to smile, knowing she would need to scold him later, and prepared to pay for the entire bolt.

“We should discuss the problem with your sword.” Wen Qing said one night through the softly glowing Distance Speaking Stone. A-Xian had popped in earlier, briefly, but he was busy following the second of the Jin disciples on Xue Yang’s list, learning the habits of the group they were part of before he could lead them into a trap.

Jiang Yanli stared into her evening tea. “Must we?”

“Wei Wuxian isn’t having trouble with his new saber. The problem must be that Chunsheng doesn’t fully recognize you as Qin Su.”

“I can’t just get rid of her sword.” That wasn’t done.

<We are not getting rid of Chunsheng.> Qin Su said from inside her paperman. She’d been bent over a copy of some of A-Xian’s notes, researching something she had yet to explain.

“You’re basically unprotected. What if something —” Wen Qing cut herself off, surprisingly panicked.

Replacing a sword would garner more attention than A-Xian had in refusing to carry Suibian around. Whether they would somehow determine the truth or spread rumors about a disastrous fallout with the Qin clan, everyone would know something was off.

Still, it was sweet of her to worry. “Any sword is more protection than I had in my last life, Wen Qing.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry.” She sounded so forlorn that Jiang Yanli ached with the desire to fall into her arms and rub circles into her back until she slept, and even after. “But I worry.”

So did she, far too often. There was no end to worrying, it seemed. Not even after death. “Does A-Xian have any ideas about the talisman keeping you trapped?”

Wen Qing hesitated. “I haven’t let him look at it yet.”

“A-Qing!” A slip of the tongue, in her shock.

Wen Qing’s breath caught. “I’m not letting him put my life before his again. When we’re closer —”

“Last time you put his life before yours, he died anyways.” Jiang Yanli snapped. And sighed. “I’m sorry, that was unfair. It’s just — if you’re allowed to worry for me, I get to worry for you.”

“A little longer. Then I’ll speak to him.”

She could tell that was the best she was going to get. “If you don’t, I’ll tell him myself.”

Jiang Yanli was tired of watching the people she cared about tear themselves apart. She wouldn’t allow it to happen again.

Wen Qing let out a shaky, hiccupping laugh. “That seems fair.”

#the untamed #cq #wangxian #yanqing #qin su #the sacrifice summon! JYL fic #where the summoner (qin su) sticks around #this time featuring wwx traumatizing some teenagers #being subject to the whims of nhs #and jyl spending an afternoon with jin ling

[isabilightwood]

THE PROBLEM WITH AUTHORITY - CHAPTER 8

Or, Sacrifice Summon! Jiang Yanli is here to make things right, be the ultimate big sister (step 1: bring back her dead brother), and maybe steal the Peacock throne in the process

[AO3][1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

iang Yanli was thrilled to have A-Xian back, and she absolutely hated his plan.

He’d had little difficulty creating the device that would cloak him in a face meant for meaningless cruelty. He had carved a simple wooden mask, and etched characters into it with unusual care. While Jiang Yanli was still getting A-Ling dressed the next morning, A-Xian sketched a young man sweeping leaves across the street, and she walked down to breakfast to find a stranger sitting comfortably among the Nie.

There was nothing in his features to give away that this was a mask, or a face that did not belong to him. But his smile was still his own.

Nie Huaisang had already managed to find clothes in Nie gray that fit A-Xian. Jiang Yanli had to wonder if he’d prepared them beforehand, somehow remembering A-Xian’s measurements without even needing to ask her.

“Shiji— Ah, I mean, Jin-furen. Are you going to introduce your little monster to me?” A-Xian grinned brightly.

She’d thought he would only be able to glimpse his sleeping nephew. But with this disguise, A-Xian could meet him, and A-Ling would never be able to give him away with a child’s innocence.

A-Ling hid behind her back, suddenly shy, though he had not been with the Nie disciples the day before.

She knelt to get on eye level with her son. “It’s alright, A-Ling. He’s a friend.”

Setting his jaw, A-Ling looked stubbornly away.

“Hold on a second.” A-Xian sketched a talisman in the air, and it burst apart into a flock of glittering butterflies. He’d invented it for distraction, but it also doubled as a foolproof way of charming small children.

A-Ling gaped, his hand dropping from her sleeve, and ran forward to jump for the butterflies. As they disappeared under his grasping hands, he laughed in delight.

A-Xian laughed with him.

“Would you show me that one?” Nie Xiaodan asked. “It would be great for convincing our novices to get up and start their exercises. Some of them think that because their Sect Leader is a layabout that means they can be too.”

Nie Huaisang looked up from dipping his youtiao, soy milk dripping from the end of the fried bread. “Our finances are in better shape than they’ve ever been, and I let her manage night hunts as she wishes, and this is the thanks I get.”

“Except for the ghoul infestations you have us move or neglect to keep the other sects and your own peasantry convinced you’re incompetent.” Nie Xiaodan patted her Sect Leader hard enough on the shoulder that he shifted forward in his seat. “So, yes, this is your thanks, A-Sang.”

“The disrespect, not even calling me Zongzhu!” Nie Huaisang complained, even as he preened.

A-Xian laughed as he moved a century egg from his own congee to A-Ling’s. “Sure, I can teach you the talisman. I bet I could modify it so the butterflies last longer, and change directions when someone comes near, so they have to keep chasing them. What do you think, A-Ling? Would that be fun!”

“Mnnmf,” A-Ling agreed, as a blob of his breakfast failed to make it into his mouth. A-Xian beat her to wiping his mouth off, and A-Ling didn’t even flinch, already comfortable with him. Shiny new playthings and a smiling face worked wonders with children, but she hoped A-Ling somehow recognized that he should be important to him.

Jiang Yanli smiled, and brushed a strand of hair back away from her son’s mouth.

After breakfast, Nie Xiaodan and the other disciples parted from them to retrieve Nie Mingjue’s body, and transport him back to Qinghe for burial.

A-Ling had started out the ride babbling excitedly over a series of talismans A-Xian showed him, but eventually, he tired out and dozed off in Jiang Yanli’s arms, trusting her implicitly to keep him upright on the horse.

“It works like this, see?” A-Xian explained while they were on the road, still wearing that stranger’s face so A-Ling couldn’t describe his real one by mistake, only some friendly Nie disciple. He rode hands free, pressing the mask over a drawing of Xue Yang’s face as he etched new shapes into a second mask.

With his poor memory for faces, A-Xian hadn’t remembered the details of Xue Yang’s features. But Jiang Yanli’s glaring had not been enough to stop Nie Huaisang from describing him.

Qin Su was a voice of reason where she didn’t want one. You do have to admit it is a good plan. Jin Guangyao’s very observant — your brother’s plan could make a huge difference in how successful we are in undermining him.

Jiang Yanli had to admit no such thing. I thought you were afraid of him.

I stopped the moment he brought out the butterflies. It’s incredible to me now that anyone who met him could be frightened of him.

He can be intimidating when he wants to, make it seem like he doesn’t care about anything. For her, it was only terrifying to watch her brother do that to himself. His act fooled almost everyone, even A-Cheng.

But not you.

No, A-Xian had never fooled her.

Jiang Yanli would feel much better if there were someone out there, watching his back. If A-Xian would let himself be convinced to go see his zhiji before he committed to any reckless plans. But he had so far ignored her hinting.

Pressing it over the first mask, his features changed in the space of a blink, and Xue Yang stared back at her.

Only the malice was missing.

He went on speaking, and that was even stranger. “I’ll add on a few more faces, I think, so I can look like a respectable grandfather, or a random street kid at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t really let me change my body’s shape, so I won’t be able to shrink into a stooped little granny, unfortunately — that would be even less suspicious. Faces should be enough though, I think.”

“Very impressive, A-Xian. Switch it back, please?” It was, in fact, a monumental achievement, and one he’d achieved in only a single night. But there was only so long Jiang Yanli could stand to look at that face.

He sketched a talisman over the mask without looking, and with a shimmer of golden light, the first face returned. She would have preferred his own, but this was far preferable to the alternative.

The mask did solve the problem of how to smuggle A-Xian into Koi Tower unseen.

Nie Huaisang was all too happy to handle it.

Jiang Yanli entered Koi Tower first, the disciples she’d dismissed at Fengyang appearing at the city entrance as she’d predicted. The others waited outside the city until evening. She brought A-Ling to greet his uncle, as that was expected.

“I trust you had a productive trip?” Jin Guangyao reached out for A-Ling, and plopped him down on his lap. A-Ling giggled, and began to fiddle with a brush with a wet tip, promptly staining his fingers and flicking ink splotches onto his robes.

“I did.” She clasped her hands behind her back to conceal the way her hands clenched into fists at the sight of Jin Guangyao touching her son. Every time it happened, Jiang Yanli had to fight the urge to grab him away and run as far from Koi Tower as she could get. Though Jin Guangyao spoiled A-Ling, she and Qin Su both knew sharing blood would not be enough to protect him, if Jin Guangyao decided he wanted him gone. “I believe Zhai-zongzhu’s planned watchtower locations will be well situated to respond to their most difficult to reach locations. I also provided a few suggestions to Qi-zongzhu. Many of his choices were too close to a temple sect and one was on land that floods regularly.”

“Good, good. Would you mind summarizing those suggestions for me? Qi-zongzhu can be so absentminded, we may need to remind him.” He steepled his fingers, the effect ruined as A-Ling spread ink across the curve of his cheek. Jin Guangyao’s smile twitched. “Excellent, thank you. You also stopped in to see our dear cousin, I believe?”

Our cousin, Qin Su repeated bitterly.

Her breath caught. “I did, yes. I know they had a falling out with my sister, but we’re still quite fond of each other.”

“I feel the same way about Huaisang, though he does test my patience sometimes.” Jin Guangyao did not bring up any of her subsequent extracurriculars. Instead, he plucked the brush from A-Ling’s fist as he came dangerously close to spreading ink on his uncle’s robes. He very seriously asked A-Ling his opinion on tablecloths for an upcoming event.

With that, Jiang Yanli understood the conversation was over. She turned to leave.

Nie Huaisang had a sense for timing, and chose that moment to test Jin Guangyao’s patience. He burst in, wailing, with a rumpled, mud-stained, an out of breath steward on his heels.

Simply a disciple left in his supposed Sect Leader’s dust, A-Xian was able to slip in unnoticed.

Jiang Yanli met him near the kitchens, and after making certain the coast was clear, led him to Wen Qing’s prison using the same techniques as the first time. Thankfully, this time it wasn’t raining.

She knocked sharply on the closed window.

It was flung open with a bang only moments later, revealing Wen Qing, flushed with anger and her hair out of place from running her hands through it.

Jiang Yanli was struck with an odd, simultaneous desire to fix it and make it worse.

“Didn’t I tell you not to come here in person?” Wen Qing snapped.

They’d had no time to warn her, as the papermen had a limited range. “Jin Guangyao will be occupied for hours, and this is important.”

“I thought you were supposed to be…” Wen Qing trailed off, her eyes widening. “Did it work? Did he fall for it?”

A-Xian stepped out of the shadows, removing his mask. “Hi, Qing-jie.”

Wen Qing gasped, and grabbed for his sleeve. “Oh, my — Gods, get in here so I can smack you. How dare you die after we gave ourselves up for you?”’

A-Xian let himself be tugged over the windowsill.

He freed his arm from Wen Qing long enough to bow. “This one apologizes for his grave blunder.”

Wen Qing sniffed, and gave him a quick hug. He beamed, even as tears gathered in his eyes, and squeezed back.

Jiang Yanli climbed inside while they were busy with their reunion and stayed by the window to watch for anyone approaching. From a distance, it would be difficult to tell her and Wen Qing apart, so they’d have enough time to hide under the bed if someone did arrive at an unscheduled time.

“You look awful,” A-Xian told Wen Qing, once they were seated at her desk. The stack of A-Xian’s journals was still there, but the rest of the table was now covered with illustrations of meridians covered in notes in Wen Qing’s writing. Most were scratched out.

Likely something to do with strengthening Jin Guangyao’s core then.

Rather than take offense, Wen Qin rolled her eyes. “Six years of confinement will do that to a person. You look like death warmed over.”

A-Xian laughed in delight. “That’s because I am death warmed over. I came back to life two days ago.”

“Your sister doesn’t look like that.” Wen Qing said, with a glance at Jiang Yanli that felt like a compliment.

Qin Su, for some reason, giggled.

“Obviously Shijie is better than me.” A-Xian turned to beam proudly at her. He was wrong, of course, in his belief that she was the best and kindest person in the world. He didn’t know how the plans she’d set in motion would inevitably hurt the brother of the man he loved and treated the sovereignty of minor sects like weiqi stones, or how she’d threatened Nie Huaisang. But she smiled back anyways.

I don’t think he’ll judge, when he finds out. Qin Su said.

For the most part, no, he wouldn’t. But knowing would forever change his perception of his beloved Shijie, leaving the reality of Jiang Yanli in her place. And she couldn’t assume he would be so sanguine over Lan Xichen. A-Xian had always respected him, and hurting Zewu-jun would hurt Lan Wangji.

Qin Su gave the impression of a shrug. Maybe seeing you more clearly will be a good thing.

A-Xian and Wen Qing fell into an easy rhythm. Watching them, Jiang Yanli felt warm to her center.

“As happy as I am to see you, that’s not enough reason for a visit.” Wen Qing said, after a few more rounds of banter in which they pretended not to have missed each other. “What went wrong?”

“He’s having problems with Xue Yang’s core.” Jiang Yanli explained, before A-Xian could reflexively deflect from the reason they were here.

Wen Qing whipped her head towards A-Xian so fast her neck cracked. “You have Xue Yang’s core?”

He nodded, rubbing a hand gingerly over its place of residence. “I wasn’t entirely sure a core would stick around, when I designed that array, but it seems like the array reshaped everything around it.”

Groaning, Wen Qing took a moment to bury her head in her hands. “You never bring me normal problems. Next time, bring me a nice pulled muscle.”

“I would also like a pulled muscle to be the extent of my problems.” A-Xian sighed wistfully.

“We can dream.” Wen Qing said, her tone flat and disbelieving. “What are the symptoms?”

“When I’m agitated — angry or frustrated, but not sad —his core feels like it’s trying to tear itself apart. Like how the beginning stage of a qi deviation is described. On top of that, resentful energy is in his core, like he invited it there. It feels horrible.” A-Xian leaned forward on his knees and gestured as he spoke.

Wen Qing nodded, and turned to her. “Have you had any with Qin Su’s?”

She hadn’t experienced anything along the lines of what A-Xian was describing. Qin Su’s core felt almost like her own at this point. There was only the way her sword resisted her, draining her when she tried to use it as a spiritual tool, rather than merely a weapon. “Only when I try to control her sword. Chunsheng doesn’t like me.”

Qin Su slipped into a paperman and climbed up to her shoulder to elaborate. <It saps her energy, so she can barely move, much less cultivate. We’ve kept trying, but there’s no improvement.>

“Oh, it’s not just Jiangzai then? I bet they can sense we’re not really their cultivators, despite the cores.” A-Xian perked up with excitement at the implications, before he visibly remembered that this affected him. “But, no. Qing-jie, the real problem is that Xue Yang thought mixing resentful energy in with his spiritual energy was a grand old time.”

“Let me take a look.” Wen Qing took his pulse first, then sent a thread of her own spiritual energy into him. “This is a mess. All that resentment is trapped in your core, and it’s not purifying on its own. I’d bet Xue Yang had resentful energy flowing through his meridians, which would reduce how much gathered in his core and hold off qi deviation.”

She went silent, concentrating, as she continued her examination.

“Absolutely no demonic cultivation,” was Wen Qing’s verdict. “The array seems to have cleared out your meridians, but this core is — well, it’s a mess worse than even you’ve managed to get into on your own. We need to clean it out completely before I can start to help you manage the occasional use of a little resentful energy. That will take a while. Lie on your back, first.”

A-Xian obeyed, but not without complaint. “But how am I supposed to imitate Xue Yang if I can’t use demonic cultivation?”

Carefully inserting the needles in several points along his torso, Wen Qing closed her eyes and began working with hr spiritual energy though them. “You’re supposed to be a genius inventor, aren’t you? Invent something.”

A-Xian smushed his features together in childish irritation. “You’re irritated. What did I do this time? I just got here!”

Smoke-like wisps of resentful energy rose from the ends of the needles, and to Jiang Yanli’s eyes, vanished as it drifted away.

Qin Su’s paperman craned its neck towards the ceiling. Its features were, of course, blank, but her voice gave away her interest. <Its coiling into ropes up there.>

“Wen Qing has been transcribing your work for Jin Guangyao.” Jiang Yanli told him when it became clear Wen Qing would keep him in the dark. “Your handwriting is…”

“Atrocious. But that’s not the real issue here.” Wen Qing grabbed a notebook from the desk, and dropped it, open, over A-Xian’s face. “I had to explain to my family’s murderer that your notes sometimes cut off in descriptions of Lan Wangji’s eyes. Or lips. Or other body parts!”

“In my defense, I never meant for anyone to see this.” He reached up to pluck the book from his face, and flipped through it, eyes going distant as he stared at one of his sketches.

“Well, I did.” Wen Qing plucked the needles from his meridians. “I need to work on your back now, flip over.”

Retrieving a new set of needles, she repeated her work on his lower back.

“Peace offering?” A-Xian attempted to turn his neck halfway around without disturbing the needles. “You’ve been talking to each other with papermen, right? What if I could offer a simpler alternative? To talk more easily at a distance. I had this idea shortly before Qiongqi… I was hoping to… I never wrote it down, but I remember how it would have worked.”

“You wanted to be able to talk to Lan Wangji, didn’t you?” Jiang Yanli asked softly.

“And you, Shijie!” He slumped, pouting. As though to express his disappointment that she would consider herself less important to him. Which she hadn’t, but A-Xian had never had a very secure estimation of his own importance, so he didn’t expect others to either. “But yes. It’s pretty simple, actually. Just hand me that paperweight? And a few more stones?”

“Stay still until I’ve removed the needles, you idiot!” Wen Qing pushed him back down by the shoulders.

A-Xian grumbled out his impatience, but to Jiang Yanli’s eyes he seemed more genuinely energetic than he’d been since before the attack on Lotus Pier stole everything from them. She doubted it could last, if he went forward with this mad plan of his, but she was pleased to see it.

When Wen Qing finally removed the last needle, A-Xian immediately hopped up onto his knees and grabbed for the paperweight. He hunted around for something else that would suit, and came up with an empty crystalline box free of decorative carvings. Retrieving the same steel chisel he’d been using to carve the masks, and applied it to stone.

“So the distance should be … and the sound. No, wait, wrong radical.” A-Xian muttered to himself as he worked.

<Forget the demonic cultivation, if Wei Wuxian can just invent things like this on the spot, that’s what the cultivation clans should fear him for.> Qin Su slid down Jiang Yanli’s sleeve to the floor, and took a leap in A-Xian’s direction, slowed by the pressure of the air.

“Yes, all the explosions should be a warning to stay far, far away.” Wen Qing said dryly.

Qin Su paused with one paper leg in the air as she readied to take the next leap. <Is this going to explode on us?>

“I mostly explode things when figuring out to work metal, or with fire.” A-Xian looked up to grin mischievously at Wen Qing. “Qing-jie invents surgical techniques. That’s far more scary.”

Shrugging her little paper arms, Qin Su continued towards A-Xian to watch him work.

Wen Qing grimaced, hiding her amusement.

Jiang Yanli wanted to see her laugh.

“You know,” she said, “A-Xian may be right. A cultivator once told me the medical tent was more terrifying than any battlefield he’d ever been on. Right before I had to help a healer amputate his leg.”

Wen Qing let out a surprised peal of laughter, and caught herself, but her eyes sparkled as she looked at Jiang Yanli. She found herself without any desire to look away.

A-Xian whooped in success, and she saw that the stones in his hands had begun to glow. He jumped to his feet, with Qin Su holding onto his leg to avoid being knocked away into a wall.

“Okay, so! Hold this.” He placed an inscribed paperweight or box in Jiang Yanli and Wen Qing’s hands. “Think about each other, and put in just enough spiritual energy to activate a talisman. No more than someone without a Golden Core could manage, or you’ll overload it.”

Jiang Yanli met Wen Qing’s eyes as she thought about Wen Qing’s voice lulling her to sleep, the way she’d protested their presence but seemed secretly pleased, the way she always seemed so surprised to find herself smiling. The paperweight began to glow in her hands.

When Wen Qing’s did as well, she suddenly looked away.

A-Xian cleared his throat, prompting them, “Ok, now say something. Recite a recipe or something.”

Jiang Yanli started to list off the ingredients for doupi, one of the few recipes A-Xian had the patience for, but cut off when she heard her voice coming from the stone in Wen Qing’s hand.

“This is—” Wen Qing’s voice echoed from Jiang Yanli’s stone.

It worked. “What a fantastically useful invention.” She said, and again her own voice was repeated back. A-Xian beamed.

It would be… nice, to be able to talk to Wen Qing, and know she wasn’t projecting her consciousness across Koi Tower, leaving her body unaware and undefended. Without the small, but constant risk of Jin Guangyao walking in and finding her in that unmistakable, compromised condition.

“We’ll need to run some tests to see if maybe I can talk to you from a distance as well, but this should at least prevent you from needing to replace papermen regularly.”  A-Xian said, as though he hadn’t just made the greatest breakthrough in cultivation since sword flight.

And done it casually. And not for the first time.

Even more importantly, it was accessible. Anyone could use it.

If they’d had these, after A-Xian defected, when he first had the idea… They had both made mistakes in attempting to save people, in their former lives. The Dafan Wen in his case; A-Xian himself, in hers. But their chief handicap had been the impossibility of regular correspondence without giving the appearance of alliance and putting the fragile, still rebuilding Jiang Sect at risk. Without support from any save her husband and Lan Wangji, neither of whom had anything in the way of political influence, she would have been risking A-Cheng for A-Xian — an impossible choice.

This new invention could have made the difference.

Perhaps now, it could make the difference.

“If it doesn’t, I’m certain you’ll figure it out.” She told him.

“I had better hear from you constantly,” Wen Qing said, in a threatening tone that did nothing to disguise how much she cared.

A-Xian seemed to believe her, more than he ever had when A-Cheng expressed similar sentiments. Perhaps it was the time they’d spent merely surviving together, perhaps the secret they’d shared for so long. Perhaps it was that Wen Qing wasn’t all that much like A-Cheng, really, beyond the surface-level gruffness. There was less difference in their positions, and they shared a common curiosity.

“I want to hear from you every day. I — we — want to know you’re safe.” She needed to know. And with this, the ability to check in at anytime and make sure he was still there, Jiang Yanli might be more capable of watching him leave.

She still hated his plan, though.

“I’ll chatter at you until you’re sick of me.” A-Xian promised with a three-fingered salute and a blinding grin.

Jiang Yanli was going to worry over him incessantly, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.

#the untamed #cql #wangxian #yanqing #qin su #the sacrifice summon!jyl fic #where the summoner (qin su) sticks around #this time featuring wen qing's needles #and more mad scientist wwx #(also the fact that I completely forgot to post this on tumblr until i completed the next chapter)

[isabilightwood]

The Problem with Authority - Chapter 6

[Ao3][1][2][3][4][5]

Or, Sacrifice Summon! Jiang Yanli is here to make things right, be the ultimate big sister (step 1: bring back her dead brother), and maybe steal the Peacock throne in the process

Deciding to resurrect A-Xian was one thing. Putting the plan into action was entirely another. And unfortunately, the first step rested entirely on Nie Huaisang’s shoulders.

Nie Huaisang was not inclined to hurry. “I can’t snap my fingers and check every little town in the Cultivation World for one little snake,” he said, when she sent a butterfly to ask for updates. “I’m a miracle worker, not a god.”

Jiang Yanli understood this. But it felt like she was waiting around again for A-Xian to return from the Burial Mounds. Only this time, without an anxious A-Cheng to support, she had far less patience to spare.

One month felt as long as three.

While she waited, Jiang Yanli returned to Qin Su’s duties. The frequency of the garden parties had decreased, fortunately, with the changing weather and replacement of the extended family’s vault access with allowances. They were, as Jiang Yanli had predicted, very upset about the allowances. Muttering about how Jin Guangyao was taking away their rightful inheritance

And so, Jiang Yanli did paperwork in her office. Night hunt expenses and responses to letters about the watchtowers, often with Qi Juan keeping her company. Embroidering cranes onto a plain outer robe, while her baby napped, or crawled determinedly about the floor. Qi Juan found embroidery relaxing, as cooking was for Jiang Yanli — which she still could not do, thanks to Qin Su’s disastrous ability in that department — and was turning out to be very capable in finance.

She took meetings in her office now, too, with more than just the staff. The way she had convinced sect leaders to bend at the cultivation conference had been noticed, and some wanted to feel her out. They brought small but expensive gifts and tested her ability to sidestep seemingly innocuous questions. Asked her advice on night hunting cases or local issues the knew perfectly well how to solve. On occasion, she surprised her visitor with a piece of the puzzle they’d missed, and they left more intrigued by her than they’d begun.

It was never anything that threatened Jin Guangyao. Not yet. But he’d definitely noticed.

Unfortunately, A-Ling rarely joined them. He spent his days in the novice classes, for new disciples still working on forming their golden cores. Jiang Yanli had reorganized her schedule to spend more time with him, a few more hours out of the week teaching the very basics of sword forms. It was time she didn’t have. But it gave her more than just two meals a day — shared with Jin Guangyao, at least twice a week — and A-Ling’s bedtime with her son.

Qin Su continued her experiments with papermen, slowly increasing the amount of time she was able to stay away. It seemed to bring her more genuine pleasure than anything else, and so Jiang Yanli encouraged her, though she was anxious when Qin Su was out of sight. She couldn’t feel Qin Su when she was out of body, and it felt viscerally wrong, like something was missing.

Jiang Yanli was losing sleep over it, but with Qin Su’s golden core to compensate, she could manage.

Wen Qing was a comfort. She, too, had trouble sleeping, and was often up past the time when Jiang Yanli could no longer keep her eyes open.

They spoke frequently of the little brothers they each missed, and especially of A-Xian, two of the only people in the world who truly missed him. Finally, Jiang Yanli learned how he had lived those years in the Burial Mounds, and while much of it was heartbreaking, there was joy there too. So much more than she had dared to hope for.

She told Wen Qing in turn about A-Xian’s first talisman experiment. How he’d made and fastened a gigantic umbrella to Jiang Yanli’s boat, so she, too, could spend the entire day on the lake when A-Niang was in a mood. How he’d tried so hard to hide his pain at every turn.

Other times she simply told Wen Qing about her day, how A-Ling had done well on a quiz, or of his difficulty focusing during quiet solitary core formation exercises. About the antics of her older disciples, and the strangest questions an envoy asked or the most ridiculous demands by the extended Jin family.

Leading the pack was a proposal for a solid gold temple on a branch clan’s lands. They had heard of gold-coated temples in lands to the south that were reportedly more impressive than Koi Tower, and sought to outdo them without a thought for structural stability. Not to mention where they thought to find that much pure gold.

Jiang Yanli had informed them they could gild as many temples as they wanted on their own budget.

In return, Wen Qing told her of medical techniques she had invented or learned, far beyond the extent of Jiang Yanli’s knowledge. From surgeries on clouded eyes from a land of lush river banks and imposing desert pyramids far to the west to Wen Qing’s own use of acupuncture to redirect the flow of qi, enabling her excise the sort of meridian blockages that led to qi deviation, or siphon off resentful energy into the air.

Jiang Yanli had always been a good listener. But it was during those times, when she had the least to add to the conversation, that Jiang Yanli most often drifted to sleep.

She would have felt guilty, but she suspected that was Wen Qing’s intention. Instead, it only made her feel lighter, to be able to speak to someone honestly, about ordinary things without them knowing her every thought.

Usually, if she’d fallen asleep before Qin Su returned, she stirred slightly as she settled back in, and drifted back to sleep.

One night, Qin Su returned from her explorations feeling confused, and darkly contemplative. Though Jiang Yanli had managed to fall asleep in her absence, while Wen Qing was telling her how adding Schisandra berries to Jiang Yanli’s medication might have helped with her breathing problems, she came to full alertness as Qin Su slipped back into her head.

Something had happened.

I thought I saw resentful energy coming from Mo Xuanyu’s sleeve.

That wasn’t surprising. Mo Xuanyu had taken Xue Yang’s place as Jin Guangyao’s pet demonic cultivator, after all.

But he was flirting with the Kong Sect Heir, by the fountain in the garden closest to the Fragrance Hall, it seemed, from the image Qin Su showed her, and he didn’t seem to notice anything strange. He just kept blushing, and making abortive movements towards holding Xuanyu’s hand.

That was strange, she agreed. Not to mention, she’d thought he was flirting with the Luo Sect Heir.

Yes, he was, just last week.

Jiang Yanli had yet to meet the youngest of the Jin siblings. She would need to arrange to meet him, eventually, if he continued to prove elusive. Neither Nie Huaisang nor Wen Qing had the slightest idea what Mo Xuanyu was working on, and that could prove dangerous.

But meeting him would have to wait, because Nie Huaisang had finally found the fugitive he was searching for.

Before the sect leaders departed Koi Tower, Jiang Yanli had received a personal invitation to visit Baota for further negotiations with Sect Leader Zhai. To her surprise, she also been invited to visit the Qi Sect, in Chenggu, which had already agreed to a trial of three watchtowers, in its most productive farming region. Jin Huiqing had also patted her cheek and demanded a visit — it had been too long, apparently.

The behavior seemed strange to Jiang Yanli, but Qin Su insisted it was normal.

She chose a date for her travels only after she heard from Nie Huaisang.

There was no question that Qi Juan and Zhai Xia would join her to visit their families, but Jiang Yanli also wanted to bring A-Ling along.

“I’m concerned about the safety risk,” Jin Guangyao said with his usual plastered-on dimples.

“I’m more concerned with the security at Koi Tower.” Jiang Yanli informed him bluntly.

And because he couldn’t just admit that he had killed his own son, he conceded.

A-Ling might be able to finally meet his dajiu, so long as he didn’t know who A-Xian was.

In Baota, Jiang Yanli prospective sites for watchtowers, and was invited to spar with Zhai Qiaolian and their wives. “Just swords, no tricks with cultivation. We wouldn’t want to steal each other’s secrets by accident.”

Jiang Yanli wasn’t entirely certain what they meant by that, but as it would not require her to have mastered remote sword manipulation, she agreed.

And lost, soundly, to two out of three. It was some consolation that Qin Su claimed she would have also lost. Unfortunately, Zhai Xia finally extracted a promise that when she returned to Koi Tower, Qin Su would spar with her.

But her performance seemed to have pleased Zhai Qiaolian in some way, and they spent her final afternoon there sipping tea under a canopy while watching the Zhai disciples showcase their skills. A-Ling watched the sparring raptly from her lap, while discussing logistics.

As they left the training field, Qi Juan grabbed her by the left arm. Her vision swum at a sudden rush of pain. She fought to keep from crying out. She peeled Qi Juan’s fingers away, and the pain began to ebb.

“Oh, sorry! Are you hurt?” Qi Juan hovered frantically.

Jiang Yanli shrugged her off. “Just a cut. I was careless while sparring with Zhai-zongzhu. What was it?”

“Zhai-zongzhu just let us see their sect’s techniques.”

Oh. Interesting. It was impossible to tell whether that thought came from her or Qin Su.

Her stop in Chenggu was much shorter, but she left Qi Juan with her family, claiming she would herself like to pay a visit to Jin Huiqing on her way back to Lanling.

It was, as Qin Su pointed out, a good excuse to send the guards back to Koi Tower ahead of them. If they complained at being sent away, it could be considered an insult to Jin Huiqing. They were, after all, not only Qin Su’s husband’s own cousin (and though it was not publicly known, her own), but her older sister’s (estranged) sworn sibling.

The guards left. They would likely keep watch in Lanling, and arrange to join her as she returned to the tower to avoid censure from their sect leader. That was fine. It wasn’t as though she intended to parade A-Xian back to Koi Tower.

Jin Guangyao might find out she’d dismissed the guards, if he had spies watching the city closely enough, but the guard certainly wouldn’t tell him.

In Fengyang, Jiang Yanli found herself buried under a mountain of the friendliest cats she had ever met. Even A-Ling, who was loudly insistent that he liked dogs, deigned to scratch a few ears, after the first time a cat purred and planted itself in his lap.

As the Sect Leader was out of town on a night hunt, it proved a perfect opportunity to ask a burning question.

“What happened, between you and Qin- my sister?” Sworn siblings did not simply drift apart. “I know she’s angry, but…”

Huiqing hummed, shifting the placement of one of the two cats on their lap so it was no longer seated on the other’s head. “Oh, she has her reasons. Qin Xifeng would say I shirked my duty.”

She followed Qin Su’s lead for the conversation, as Huiqing might know her well enough to tell the difference. “Just for marrying out? For not, what, bringing Fengyang closer to Lanling?”

“No, no, though perhaps she would argue that as well. Our falling out was a matter of timing.” They sighed, and missed the same cat rolling back on top of its friend. “I would have thought you would agree with her, A-Su.”

Because of my — Qin Su shuddered — marriage? It’s not like my sister talks to me enough for me to know her opinions. A few times, she’s visited Koi Tower to meet with Jin Guangyao, and I only found out after she left. Her former friends must have spent more time with me than she did, growing up. But then again --

“My sister doesn’t have fifty of the friendliest cats in the world.”

They laughed. “That’s true. She doesn’t!”

Visiting Huiqing as Qin Su was a rather different experience from the times they, Mianmian, and occasionally Qin Xifeng had sought her out during the Sunshot campaign, when they drafted idle cultivators into doing the grunt work for Jiang Yanli’s kitchens and infirmary. Or later, during their brief tenure as first disciple, helping her gently bully Zixuan though social interactions.

She was there for no more than two days, but she felt completely and utterly spoiled.

Is this the meimei treatment?  She asked, slightly dazed.

Just wait until you meet my brother. Qin Su informed her with a strange mix of smugness and exasperation. Kind of like Jiang Cheng, on a good day.

From Fengyang, she doubled back westwards, into Lieshan, meeting Nie Huaisang in a town at the base of a small mountain range. Somewhere in those foothills, there was a town that specialized in funeral goods, shrouded in blood-spattered rumors.

She wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of leaving A-Ling with Nie Huaisang, but she wouldn’t take her son into danger under any circumstances. Fortunately, it seemed Nie Huaisang had brought along five of his own disciples. The tallest of them, a woman almost as broad shouldered as Nie Mingjue had been, lit up at the sight of A-Ling, and immediately produced a pair of wooden swords from her sleeve. “May I?”

Jiang Yanli nodded for her to go ahead, and A-Ling was vigorously whacking the sword the woman held firm with his own before she had even exchanged greetings.

Nie Huaisang’s entourage was clustered around two tables, with a spot open across from him. He was not quite the smallest of the group in height, but even the short one had more muscle mass. Yet — when Nie Huaisang asked his disciples to give them privacy, they thumped him companionably on the back, making him grimace and smile, before obeying. He lead them not only because of his bloodline, but because he was theirs.

She placed the pot of lotus and pork rib soup she’d gotten up early to make on the table. At least in an inn, no one thought her likely to burn anything down. A-Ling had wanted to help, when she’d been slicing the roots, pouted when she wouldn’t let him use a knife, and then adorably bouncy when she let him taste the results. Replacing the heating talisman that was beginning to peel off, she took a seat.

“You’re certain this is Xue Yang? Not a local Yiling Patriarch copycat, or someone trying to bring their village notoriety?” After all, the village in question had been plagued with early deaths long before a demonic cultivator began to take a staring role.

Xue Yang would be attracted to such a place, but so would any garden variety demonic cultivator.

Nie Huaisang produced a fan just to flutter it dismissively. “Oh, it’s him. No one else has the skill or ability to play with their victims the way he does.”

Oh, great. We’re using an even more twisted mass murderer to resurrect the Yiling Patriarch. Fuck. Qin Su vanished into the talisman tucked into her sleeve when she realized Jiang Yanli had heard that. She didn’t get the chance to say that she understood why Qin Su, who had never met A-Xian, would be worried.

Jiang Yanli shrugged off her apprehension. “All right. How do I get there?”

“Ah. I’ll be going into the foothills with you.” Nie Huaisang said lightly — too lightly, given his promises to the contrary. “Not to confront Xue Yang, of course. I value my life more than that. But the rumors of walking corpses go far beyond what any demonic cultivator has achieved since the Yiling Patriarch. Since Wen-guniang confirmed that Wei-xiong made his Tiger Seal from some creepy sword he found in a monster’s belly…”

“What do you want with the Yin Iron?” She asked, in a pleasant tone.

If Nie Huaisang took it as threatening, that was his problem. Constant suggestions of ways to throw her baby brother into danger would not be tolerated.

A-Xian would have to help depose Jin Guangyao, because that was how the Sacrifice Summon worked, without risking whatever Qin Su had done to them both. Or leaving A-Xian trapped in a nightmare, with Xue Yang in his head. But she wanted to keep him safe, outside of situations that could not be avoided.

“Nothing! But I bet Wei-xiong could find a use for it.” He backtracked when she glared. No one was handing A-Xian Yin Iron if she had anything to say about it. “Or at the very least destroy it.”

“You were supposed to watch A-Ling.”

At that, he laughed. “Oh, no, Xiaodan is much better at keeping children alive than I am. I’m far too easily distracted for babysitting.”

Nie Xiaodan, the muscular woman, lifted her head at the sound of her name. “We’ll keep your little man entertained. He won’t have a scratch on him.”

“I’ll be very impressed if that’s the case. He’s managed to skin a knee or elbow every day of this trip so far.” A-Ling had been very dramatic about it, every time, even after she bent to his demands to kiss it better. “But isn’t it your duty to protect your sect leader?”

Nie Xiaodan did not miss a beat in her mock duel with A-Ling as she replied, though she was only watching him from the corner of her eye. “Eh, he’ll be fine. If A-Sang can sneak around Koi Tower without getting caught, he can avoid a demonic cultivator. Better to have us guard this little troublemaker, we’d only get in A-Sang’s way. Damn, your nephew hits hard. He’ll fit right in.”

Tall, muscular, and good with children — she would have been exactly Jiang Yanli’s type, as a teenager, when she secretly dreamed of being rescued and carried off to a happily ever after. Before A-Xuan returned her feelings, and she realized how much she liked that he liked being ordered around.

A-Ling beamed, and redoubled his efforts.

“I’d ask you not to teach him any more swears, but his jiujiu has already made that a moot point.” At least A-Ling did not yet understand what they meant, cheerfully exclaiming shit when he dropped something on purpose. Getting him to stop was a hopeless battle.

Jiang Yanli supposed she had no more arguments against Nie Huaisang accompanying her. “Fine. I’m sure you’re very good at hiding.”

He beamed like she’d given him a compliment. “I am!”

From the first step into the foothills, the world felt slightly out of place. It wasn’t anything obvious. The sky was the same blue with wispy clouds as it had been in town. The dirt was dirt; the trees were trees. The grass, such as it was in the wilting autumn, was grass. But the golden haze of the afternoon sun felt more like a nightmare than a dream, and the path forward seemed like the road to hell. Nie Huaisang lagged behind, uncharacteristically silent.

You don’t see it? Qin Su asked.

Looking around again, she could see nothing that might have drawn her interest. See what?

The fog of resentment. At Qin Su’s nonplussed words, she received a flash of an image. A doubling of the scenery before her, but with dark, smoke-like wisps overlaying everything. It didn’t seem to be doing anything, wasn’t drawn toward them with the intent to harm. It was simply there.

When A-Xian had used demonic cultivation to control resentful energy directly, rather than through corpses, he appeared to be pulling the energy from his surroundings as well as the amulet. There were even types of ghosts that could hide, undetectable by cultivation, until provoked. Could Qin Su be seeing ambient resentful energy?

That would explain what I saw with Mo Xuanyu, but not how I can see it. And then, quietly. Am I a tethered ghost?

Jiang Yanli didn’t know how to answer that.  Though Qin Su was certainly angry, she didn’t feel like any resentful ghost she had ever come across. Not that there had been many, given her low cultivation and disinterest in night hunting. She’d only been given enough practical training to be able to get away to find help if she ran into one. Perhaps A-Xian would know.

However I’m seeing it, it’s getting thicker. Qin Su said with an undertone of worry a few minutes later. That probably meant they were approaching the village, and Xue Yang.

Soon after, they came across a teenage girl squatting off the side of the road, picking mushrooms.

“Hello,” she said, “I’m looking for someone. Do you think you might be able to help us?”

Though her irises were almost white, she had clearly been looking at the mushrooms she was gathering. “Might be, if you tell me something about them. Who’s us?”

She turned back to find that Nie Huaisang had vanished while she was paying attention to the girl.

He had claimed to be good at hiding.

“Just me then. I’m a cultivator, looking for a member of my sect. He’s a young man, who favors dark colors and candy. He’s missing a pinky, and I’ve heard his laugh described as skin crawling.”

“Please tell me you’re here to take that asshole away forever.” The girl groaned.

Clearly Xue Yang had not endeared himself to everyone in this town. Likely only, mysteriously, Xiao Xingchen. “That is the plan, yes.”

“Thank the heavens, my prayers have been answered.” She threw her head back and clasped her hands together. Looking back at Jiang Yanli, she said, “No, seriously, I have been leaving offerings in the village shrine and I’ve never done that before for anything. I don’t know why you want him back, but please take him far, far away.”

Qin Su’s amusement bled over into her, and Jiang Yanli laughed. “I see he’s made an impression. Where is he now?”

She shrugged. “Probably bothering Daozhang while pretending to help him peel vegetables. I’ll show you.”

The people they passed in the street looked downtrodden and miserable, more than she would have expected from a town that was a bit weathered and far from wealthy, but in good repair.

The air is chocked with resentful energy. Qin Su shuddered. That can’t be good for them.

The girl brought her to the entrance of a courtyard, and paused.

“He’s over there. I’m gonna go be… somewhere else.” She turned on her heel and walked back in the direction they’d come.

This was it. Her one chance to bring back A-Xian. She took a deep breath, and plastered on a smile.

When Jiang Yanli entered the courtyard, she saw a man dressed all in white, with a strip of cloth over his eyes was bent over a basket, smiling at a man in black who was leaning halfway into his lap, obstructing the first man’s progress. This must be Xiao Xingchen, the celebrated disciple of Baoshan Sanren. Of whose relationship with his former cultivation partner A-Xian had not so much expressed envy, as radiated it from every pore.

Yet now here he was, smiling obliviously at the man who had ruined his life.

Xue Yang pressed a kiss to Xiao Xingchen’s cheek and burst into unhinged laughter as he pulled away. Xiao Xingchen only blushed, and kept working.

(“What?” She’d asked, when Wen Qing suggested that someone might deserve having their soul destroyed.

“If anyone deserves it, it’s Xue Yang.” Wen Qing had said.

Then, Jiang Yanli had not disagreed. And when Wen Qing had explained Xue Yang’s obsession with A-Xian, she had known he was the best — no, only real possibility.

But now, she fully understood.)

Xue Yang looked up, and narrowed his eyes. He recognized Qin Su, of course, but must be surprised she would know enough of him to track him down. “Gege,” He said in a disconcertingly sweet voice. “There’s a pupp—”

“Shidi!” She cried out, and he paused, confused. “We’ve all been so worried!”

Xiao Xingchen was delighted to learn that his young companion was not quite so alone in the world as he’d believed, and immediately invited her to sit, and have some tea. Jiang Yanli was not going to drink anything that had been in Xue Yang’s vicinity, of course, but it wasn’t as though Xiao Xingchen would notice.

“It’s a small temple sect near the border of Lanling. He crossed a group disciples from the Jin Sect by mistake, and by the time we realized what was happening, he was gone.” Turning to Xue Yang, she gushed, “I’m so glad we’ve found you.”

“Are the Jins not still looking for me?” Xue Yang probed.

“Oh, they’ve forgotten all about us.”

“Gege, would you mind giving us a minute?” Xue Yang asked.

“Of course. I wouldn’t want to disrupt your reunion.” Xiao Xingchen patted him on the cheek as best he could, and took his basket of vegetables inside.

She dropped her fake cheer as Xue Yang allowed his malice to come to the forefront. “Xingchen-ge doesn’t eavesdrop. It’s sickening how pure he thinks he is.”

“Yet you’re here, anyway, playing house.”

“Wow, someone grew a spine.” He was cruelly delighted.

Wow, I have not missed him. Qin Su mocked his diction. By the way, he’s not the only source of the resentful energy here, but there is a lot of it clinging to him.

“Oh, oh! Let me guess. You found out you fucked your brother. Are you mad about the incest baby? You want me to take care of the great Lianfang-zun for you?” He laughed. Without the simpering quality he’d added for Xiao Xingchen’s sake, goosebumps immediately covered her skin. “Too bad, I’m busy. Go away and go stab him in the back yourself.”

That hadn’t been the part she predicted having difficulty selling him on. “He had you beaten and left for dead. Don’t you want revenge?”

“Sure.” He shrugged. “I’ll get around to it eventually, if no one else gets there first. Cheer up! You get first whack at him. I have some suggestions if you want them.” He counted them off on his five-fingered hand. “Castration, branding, carving up his skin, peeling off his nails while he screams for mercy. Choose your favorite murder fantasy and go wild!”

Those are his murder fantasies? He is… not creative. Jin Guangyao already went through the branding and skin carving to become Wen Ruohan’s direct servant. I’ve seen the scars. Qin Su paused. Please do not remind me why I’ve seen the scars.

Jiang Yanli did not have to pretend to be disgusted; Xue Yang’s presence alone achieved that effect. “What if I could offer you the spirit of the Yiling Patriarch? All access, in your head, for the time it takes to get revenge.”

There was a spark of interest in his eyes, quickly replaced by fury. “No one’s been able to find the Yiling Patriarch’s spirit. If you tease me too much, I might not let you go after all.”

Presumptuous to assume he could take her in a fight. His skill with a sword was undoubtedly greater, true, but she had A-Xian’s talismans on her side. “Who said I needed to find it? His spirit will be sucked into you from wherever he is.”

She offered him a copy of the body-reshaping version of the Sacrifice Summon, with heavily edited captions in Wen Qing’s handwriting. Most notably, describing an infusion of resentful energy, the desire for revenge, and the caster’s blood as the catalyst for a non-controlling possession.

“Yaoyao did say the next thing to be transcribed would be a summoning of some sort. Is this it?” Eyes glittering, he leaned forward into her space, forcing her to lean back to avoid the stale candy scent of his breath. “How in the world did you get it? No one’s more paranoid than Yaoyao.”

Yaoyao. Qin Su sniggered. He must have hated that. I bet that’s the real reason he threw Xue Yang out of Koi Tower.

She shrugged. “I suppose he didn’t think leaving it where his wife might come across it would be a risk. It hadn’t been before.”

“Why are you offering me this? Why not summon the Yiling Patriarch yourself?” He squinted suspiciously, because it was so far out of the realm of his comprehension that someone might not want the so-called scourge of the cultivation world in their head. “Unless you’re not sure it works, and think I’m expendable and gullible.”

“No, I know it works. I can’t summon him myself because I’ve already used it.” She held out her arm, and pulled up her sleeve to show an old-looking cut, still raw at the edges. Jiang Yanli’s was not from the ritual, of course. If it had been, Qin Su would be gone forever.

Wen Qing had guided her through the steps to keep a cut open, and she’d rubbed the herbal mixture over the cut every night since she’d left Koi Tower. It was the best approximation they could make, for the cuts that wouldn’t heal until A-Xian got Xue Yang’s revenge.

“Who’s in your head, then?” He asked, intrigued.

“Jiang Yanli.”

“Who?”

She blinked. “The — the Yiling Patriarch’s shijie? Jin Ling’s mother.”

Somehow, it had never occurred to her that Xue Yang might not know who she was. She felt a moment of panic, wondering how she could prove it wasn’t simply a trick if they had to resort to Qin Su pretending to be her in a paperman.

He shrugged. “Ok, you’d probably have picked someone important if you were lying. But she really wants me to summon her brother? Seems unlikely.”

This was the trickiest bit — phrasing an argument in a way Xue Yang would both understand, and expect another person to understand. Wen Qing had coached her extensively on how to avoid setting Xue Yang off. Hopefully, this domestic fantasy of his had not changed his perceptions too much. “She’s as angry as I am. You’re good at murdering people; she wants to talk to her brother again. You get the Yiling Patriarch’s expertise in exchange for binding you to something you intend to do anyway.”

“Hm. I don’t like binding contracts.” Xue Yang said, even as his lips curved upwards with wicked intent. “But — Xingchen-ge!”

Xiao Xingchen emerged from the house, stopping in the doorway. “Yes?”

“I’m going on a trip!” Xue Yang exclaimed, the transformation back into his adoring persona even more disturbing now that she’d seen the real thing.

“Are you going home now? Are you certain it’s safe?”

He hummed off-key. “For a bit, at least. Maybe I’ll be back here, before you know it.”

“You will, of course, be welcome.” Xiao Xingchen said softly. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too, Xingchen-ge!” Xue Yang sounded almost genuine as he ran inside. There was a sound of things falling as he presumably packed his qiankun bags.

Creepy. At least he won’t be missing anyone soon.

“Are you already leaving tonight?”

Xue Yang’s focus was already elsewhere. “Oh, yeah, we have time to get down to town before nightfall.”

“You must be eager to see your sect siblings again. I understand.” Xiao Xingchen sounded sad, but he would be better off without him.

“Sure.” Xue Yang said noncommittally.

When Xue Yang was packed, Jiang Yanli walked out of the courtyard a few steps behind him. She didn’t trust him at her back. “There’s an empty warehouse a few streets over. I’ll do it there.”

“You’re eager, for someone who doesn’t like binding contracts.”

“I’ve wanted to steal the Yiling Patriarch’s secrets for years, of course I am. Besides, the strength of the resentful energy in Yi City should help with the array. I barely even had to build it up myself, it was already like this!”

“I… see.” So if Qin Su was worried she was seeing something that wasn’t really there, she could stop that now.

I don’t think Xue Yang’s word proves that. But I was thinking that was what he did.

“No second thoughts now!” Xue Yang turned to walk backwards, clasping his hands behind his back. “What’s the soup for, by the way?”

“You’ll be starving after. I was.” She lied. “And this was Wei Wuxian’s favorite dish.”

Xue Yang’s grin widened to unnatural proportions. “Oh? The Yiling Patriarch’s favorite? I’m learning things already!”

Xue Yang drew the array with an intense focus Jiang Yanli hadn’t thought him capable of only moments earlier. She watched from a safe distance near the wall.

“Hmm, I can add more than one target, right? So that’ll be Su She. Those Jin guards who beat me. Fuck, I need to know their names, don’t I?” He tapped a paintbrush, red with his own blood, against his chin. “Let’s see, it was… Fan Caining, Jin Qian…”

He listed four more names as he inscribed them in the appropriate places around the array, all of whom were relatively strong cultivators, but outer disciples, or Jins too far removed from the main line to be named by the generational poem. All of them, according to Qin Su, sycophants. As happy to take unscrupulous orders as go night hunting.

Xue Yang looked up. “Do you think I should add Yao-zongzhu?”

She didn’t think anyone would be particularly upset if he died, but that was already eight people who would have to die for A-Xian’s new lease on life to become permanent. “Has he ever done anything to you?”

“Only tried to annoy me to death.”

“I don’t think the array would count that, no.” Jiang Yanli knew no such thing. But A-Xian wouldn’t be particularly happy about the guards as it as.

Xue Yang sighed wistfully. “You’re probably right. I’ll just have to get around to him at some point. And I can’t add Xingchen-ge or Song Lan or the brat, because of the time limit. Only a year? No, I want to draw that out.”

With one final symbol, the array was complete. Xue Yang hummed to himself as he carved the incisions into his arms. As he finished the last one, resentful energy was pulled towards him, now visible, from the surrounding air.

At first, he laughed.

Until the first black bubble formed on his hand, like the pustules on a rotting fierce corpse.

Xue Yang stared at it, in shock, and swore viscously as he shook it out. Black blood landed on the ground with a wet splat. That didn’t stop more bubbles from forming, and proliferating. Even as he shook them off, the discarded bubbles began to inch back towards him.

Jiang Yanli was horrified, and a little fascinated, her eyes glued to the transformation.

Qin Su balled up in her mind just enough to block her vision.

Even as she watched Xue Yang die, and she became a murderer, Jiang Yanli did not regret her choice.

Xue Yang finally accepted what was happening as the bubbles reached his neck. “You lied, you bi—”

The bubbles covered his mouth, cutting off the insult. His eyes were left for last, betrayed, and conscious to the very end. The body dropped to the ground, a seething mass of twitching darkness, as the reshaping continued.

Eventually, it lay still, human in appearance once again. Unmoving.

Just as Jiang Yanli was beginning to wonder if that was it, a flash of light shot down into the body - A-Xian’s body now, she could accept nothing else — and a cloud of resentful energy flew out from the array, making her flinch and cough.

When it cleared, Jiang Yanli rushed to the edge of the array, desperate to reach her brother. But she stopped, afraid to cross the barrier too soon.

A curtain of dark hair obscured his features, stealing away her chance to make sure that this body, at least, was his.

Qin Su sent soothing waves to her, but didn’t say anything. She, too, was caught in breathless anticipation.

When he finally stirred, she gasped.

A-Xian looked up at her through bleary eyes.

#the untamed #cql #wangxian #yanqing #qin su #my fic #the sacrifice summon! JYL fic #where the summoner (qin su) sticks around #this time featuring the resurrection of wei wuxian #with a twist #i really need to get better at timely tumblr posts ugh

[isabilightwood]

The Problem With Authority - Chapter 2

[1] [AO3]

Jiang Yanli froze at the sound of Jin Guangyao’s voice. She was nowhere near ready to deal with him, much less the knowledge that they were technically married. She — and Qin Su — needed time before she could hope to successfully deceive him.

And she had seconds to figure out how they were going to get it.

She sniffed, loudly, hoping it would seem like she had only been standing there, crying silently. She tucked A-Xian’s notebook into her robes.

“Oh, A-Su, I miss him too.” Jin Guangyao sounded so genuinely sympathetic that she could scarcely tell the difference, even knowing what he’d done. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, and it was all Jiang Yanli could do not to flinch.

The way Qin Su was practically screaming in her head did not help. She would be little help, this confrontation coming far too soon.

What would a still ignorant Qin Su have done? Jiang Yanli didn’t yet know her well enough to say.

Jiang Yanli wiped her eyes as she turned in his arms, the skin around her eyes still tinted red from learning about A-Xian. That should help sell the ruse, even against a man so devoted to power he had married his own sister.

“I know,” She lied, sniffling again. “It’s just so hard, being here. I keep getting up to check on him in the night —” she didn’t actually know the name of the boy yet, which could be a problem if Qin Su remained incoherent — “And then I remember.”

“I know how you feel.” He said with a sigh. “I keep thinking it’s time to start teaching A-Song his first core formation exercises.”

“I think — I think I need to get away for a bit.” Jiang Yanli whispered.

“Perhaps that would be for the best.” He began rubbing her back, which made her want to sob. “Were you thinking of somewhere in particular?”

Her first instinct was to say Lotus Pier.

Gusu. The Cloud Recesses. Qin Su managed to say.

Of course. There was a healer there, who specialized in recovery from grief. If she were to go on a retreat for recovery, the Cloud Recesses were the logical place. But — A-Ling was in Yunmeng. Every moment away from him was a physical ache in her chest. How was A-Cheng managing, taking care of her son on his own?

He’s been doing fine raising him half the year for six years. Jiang Wanyin is A-Ling’s favorite.

Oh. Jiang Yanli’s heart swelled. It must be difficult, but A-Cheng was doing wonderfully.

It would seem strange if I went to Yunmeng, Qin Su admitted. Unless you want Jiang Wanyin to know?

Not yet, she had to confess. A-Cheng would be overwhelmingly happy to see her, but he would quickly spirit her away and rush off to reveal the truth. Without a scrap of evidence beyond second-hand testimony. Neither of her brothers had ever been logical, when she was even mildly insulted.

“Gusu,” She didn’t have to fake the choked sound of her voice. How long would it be before she could confirm with her own eyes that her son and her baby brother were alive and well?

Jiang Wanyin has A-Ling for the summer, about three more months.

An eternity.

Jin Guangyao’s smile wavered.

A- Lianfang-zun, Qin Su corrected herself, thinks I don’t know, but I noticed him pining after Zewu-jun long before we married. Zewu-jun was here for a week, after A-song — She broke off. He saw more of my so-called husband than I did.

“Why don’t you invite your erge back for a few days while I’m gone?” She suggested. “I know you’re busy, but perhaps he could spare a few days?”

“Thank you, A-Su, that’s very thoughtful.” His smile returned, only now she thought it might be genuine. “I could arrange for you to leave as soon as tomorrow, if that pleases you.”

“Yes,” She said quietly. “I would like that.”

As it turned out, Gusu Lan’s mind healer was useful to both of them for more than merely an excuse.

She had not known what to expect from a healer who specialized in injuries that could not be seen, but it was not Tan Wurui. He was a young man with round, expressive features who wore the plain forehead ribbon of outer disciples.

When he began their first meeting by offering her huamei, Jiang Yanli decided she liked him. Candy was against the rules, outside of festivals, but preserved plums were technically medicinal. She took one, with a carefully weak smile.

Sitting back on her heels, she tried to place why Tan-daifu looked familiar. Finally, she realized. They had been classmates, once. He had lived a few doors down from Jiang Yanli when she was a guest disciple, so he must have transitioned after her stay. He had been friendly and helpful, more likely to correct rules violations than to report them.

“Eat that if you need a moment to gather your thoughts, or you’re starting to feel overwhelmed.” He plucked a plum of his own from the bowl, rolling it between his fingers. “Now, to start, is this the first time you’ve dealt with loss?”

The answer for Jiang Yanli was no, of course. Grief had become almost a familiar friend, since her parents were killed. Yet it had stabbed her in the back as surely as the sword that killed her pierced her heart.

Her loss was different from Qin Su’s. Jiang Yanli’s son was still alive, if out of reach and grown from an infant to a boy in an instant. But she had not had the chance to mourn her husband when A-Xian was stolen as well.

She had no idea, however, whether Qin Su had. And Qin Su wasn’t sharing.

While Tan-daifu waited patiently for an answer that should have been easy.

Jiang Yanli prodded with mental fingers until Qin Su gave up the answer. My mother. But she was… it wasn’t the same.

“No,” She said aloud. “But not like this.”

Tan-daifu nodded. “Are you ready to talk about what happened?”

Qin Su had curled up in her mind since the conversation with Jin Guangyao. Unfurling slowly in fits and starts, only to shrink back at the wrong reminder. As she did then.

Jiang Yanli nibbled at her plum, the spiced sweet and sour flavor spreading across her tongue. As though in response to the flavor, Qin Su startled, cautiously peering out from her ball.

“I thought you might not be.” He offered her a serene smile. “For now, why don’t we discuss how you’ve been coping, and what your goals are in coming here.”

Jiang Yanli conjured descriptions of how she thought the courtiers of Lanling would have treated her, had she lived. It wasn’t difficult to imagine, considering how they had ingratiated themselves when she wasn’t vulnerable. Qin Su confirmed her suspicions, and added on, They wouldn’t let me do anything.

“I felt like I was drowning in Koi Tower.” She concluded. “I haven’t stopped feeling that way. However, there’s… less of him, here.”

Less of Qin Su’s A-Song, and less positive memories of A-Xuan, but more of A-Xian. Happy ones. The last time she could remember him being truly, uncomplicatedly happy.

“Locations can become heavily associated with certain people, or events. If coming here helps you feel a little closer to air, it was the right decision.” Tan-daifu said. “It sounds like you were trapped with your grief, through inactivity. You have not kept up even basic exercises with your sword?”

“The healers in Lanling told me I should refrain from using my spiritual energy.” She said carefully. While in the Cloud Recesses, Jiang Yanli needed to begin learning to use Qin Su’s sword. While Qin Su might not be renowned for her skills like the heroes of the Sunshot Campaign, she was known to be competent. Jiang Yanli could not avoid it forever, when Qin Su trained the disciples.

“Though Lanling Jin’s healers have released a number of revolutionary medicinal treatments recently, they have not yet understood the relationship between the mind and qi.” Though Tan-daifu kept his voice steady, he was no Lan Wangji. A tick in his cheek betrayed his disdain. “Excessive use while recovering could cause a qi deviation. However, light exercise helps rejuvenate the mind and keeps your body healthy and qi balanced.”

With Tan-daifu’s permission, Jiang Yanli was able to practice the Jin sword forms in the private courtyard of her guest house every morning. Twice a week, she met with him. Most of her time, however, was left to her own discretion.

Once Jiang Yanli adjusted to Qin Su’s body, she found that much of her skill had carried over into muscle memory. It was simply a matter of practicing until her mind adjusted to her body’s knowledge.

Cultivation, however, was far more complicated. Cultivation was linked to the spirit, not the physical body, and so Qin Su had to teach her, step by step, skills that junior disciples learned the year they received their swords.

She could not show her by doing. Though Jiang Yanli attempted to retreat within her mind, and allow Qin Su to take control of her own limbs, it seemed Jiang Yanli was firmly rooted within the body they now shared.

Qin Su wasn’t. If she strained, she could reach outward until, for an instant, look down and see her body from above before snapping back inside.

The teaching seemed to help Qin Su more than anything.

Why did no one teach you this? She snapped in exasperation, as Jiang Yanli struggled through the steps of directing her spiritual energy for donation. It was the strongest reaction she’d prompted in weeks.

I didn’t have enough to spare. My parents planned to send me to Dafan, to develop my core without the physical aspect. But by the time I was old enough, the sect had become an ordinary village. No other sect had similar techniques, so she’d had to rely on meditation, talismans, and her brothers.

Oh. You do now. From then on, Qin Su latched onto the teaching like a project. If it did not to make her less sad, it at least made her more responsive.

That would have been enough to keep them busy, but it was critical that Jiang Yanli memorize the changes in the Cultivation world. If she said the wrong thing to a sect leader, or Jin Guangyao, that would be the end. She read through the piles of official documents in the library, with more subjective commentary from Qin Su.

They started with the greatest risk: Qin Su’s family.

Father spoils me, but he still sees me as his baby girl. Jie — Qin Xifeng, the heir — was always busy. It’s Yi-ge we have to worry about. Qin Su explained, as she looked over records of how Laoling Qin’s trade had grown and alliances shifted after their Second Young Mistress became Jin-furen.

Ironically, Qin Xifeng was the only member of the Qin clan Jiang Yanli had met before, when she accompanied A-Xuan to the Sunshot Campaign. She’d found it funny, in retrospect, how awkwardly A-Xuan had interacted with her, considering none of his few close companions were men.

An ache rose in her chest as she remembered teasing him about it, on the night of his cousin Jin Huiqing’s wedding to Sect Leader Hua. Though distantly related, they were his favorite relative. A letter from Luo Qingyang had arrived the same day. Zixuan flushed prettily, and told her that was different. He hadn’t been able to think clearly, through the things Jiang Yanli did to his heart.

She’d grabbed the restraints and climbed on top of him, proceeding to reward her husband for being such a silly romantic. Zixuan had been certain that was the night A-Ling was conceived.

She missed him with her entire being.

Uh. Yanli-jie. Qin Su sounded pained. That’s my half-brother.

She winced. Given Qin Su’s history, that had to be much worse than the time Jiang Yanli had accidentally found A-Xian’s poorly concealed stash. Especially considering how unconventional their sex life had been. Sorry. I’ll work on trying to shield some of my thoughts from you.

Qin Su quickly returned to the original topic. Yi-ge is only a year older than me, so we’ve always been close. He’s been busy setting up the Laoling watchtowers lately, so hopefully we can avoid him until you’re better at acting like me.

Am I that bad? She asked.

Not for most people. But I’m his baby sister, and you’ve always been the eldest.

Jiang Yanli could see how that might be a problem. Are you more ‘A-Su is three’ or ‘go away Ge, no wait, play with me?’

Shock flared from Qin Su. Neither! I just whine a little and he pretends he’s going to say no. What are your brothers?

Damaged. While A-Cheng postured and yelled and hid how much he cared, A-Xian crafted a mask of harmlessness, hiding what he needed. Just as Jiang Yanli had. They hadn’t had much choice.

Qin Su’s silence was its own response.

From there, they moved on to other sects.

So the Luo Sect has climbed back into favor? Though Luo Qingyang had joined the Jin Sect in her youth, as was sometimes done to protect the heir of a minor sect against rivalry, her outspoken support of A-Xian and departure had driven her birth sect to retreat from Lanling. As a result, Jiang Yanli had never met Mianmian’s uncle or cousin, and so had no measure of their character.

The Sect heir is very… earnest. Lianfang-zun likes to surround himself with simple men. I used to think it was because they didn’t poke fun at his heritage. Her more recent conclusions were left unspoken.

Other changes were more startling. Not only had Tingshan He been absorbed into Lanling itself, but there were thirteen sects jostling for territory in former Qishan, most of them vassals to the Jin . Which made sense, as most of the sects had originated as single-town cultivation clans within Lanling. The Jin had been the only sect with cultivators to spare, and taken advantage of the opening.

Sects had only been beginning to spring up in Qishan when she died. Now, they were fully formed, squabbling and jostling for influence.

There was a seemingly endless amount of ground to cover, in the weeks in Gusu.

It surprised her, how little she saw of the main branch of the Lan Clan. During her last stay, she could not have thrown a stone without hitting one.

She had spoken with Lan Qiren only once, upon her arrival. He’d harrumphed and bid her the necessary welcome, and proceeded to ignore her existence. That suited her well enough.

Though Zewu-jun had been expected to return from Lanling a week into her stay, he had been called away to deal with a crisis for Nie Huaisang. That was another shock, Nie Huaisang as sect leader. A-Xian would have laughed himself silly. A-Cheng must be going spare.

Lan Xichen’s continued absence was fortunate. He, unlike any other Lan, knew Qin Su. Enough that he might notice a misstep.

It was Lan Wangji’s absence that concerned her.

If there was anyone who might have mourned A-Xian, it was Lan Wangji, but he was nowhere to be found. Not at meals, and not along the paths of the Cloud Recesses.

Hanguang-jun often travels these days, I’ve heard. Qin Su informed her, with an undertone of surprised curiosity. So he really was in love with Wei Wuxian?

They loved each other. Jiang Yanli had known long before either of them.

It was a shock, the one time she did see Lan Wangji.

On the afternoon Qin Su was ready to discuss her loss, Jiang Yanli knelt on the cushions across from Tan-daifu’s desk, a cup of perfectly brewed tea cooling before her. The usual bowl of plums sat between them.

Tan-daifu smiled pleasantly, waiting for her to begin. And Qin Su froze up.

“Perhaps if we take a walk?” Tan-daifu suggested, when she said nothing.

Tan-daifu led her to the back trails, along the river where Jiang Yanli’s breathing had once faltered as she searched for her brother, and A-Xuan caught her as she fell.

At least this time that’s romantic. Qin Su grumbled, the first thing she’d said since they entered Tan-daifu’s office.

Not really. She remembered how he’d left her behind, the harsh words he’d said.

They tell that story like you were star-crossed lovers kept apart by the Yiling Patriarch. But really, your husband was just being an idiot.

A-Xian punched some sense into him. Remembering the soup incident, she added, Twice.

After a pause, Qin Su hesitantly said, I think I’m ready to talk now.

The words poured from her like a dam had broken.

Jiang Yanli recounted Qin Su’s words verbatim, how she left for a meeting after putting A-Song to bed. How she was accosted the moment she entered the Fragrance Hall on her return. How she fought, desperately, to reach her son, even after receiving a gut wound. How Jin Guangyao arrived with guards, and she finally made it through. How she saw the body of the nursemaid first, sprawled in a pool of blood, and crumbled into denial when she realized her son wasn’t breathing. How she’d had to be sedated to receive treatment for her wound, and refused to believe it for days after.

The words tapered off, and stopped. Jiang Yanli took a plum from the bag Tan-daifu offered her, and popped one in her mouth.

The rest of it could not be shared. But to her surprise, Qin Su did not retreat entirely. She shrank back, but did not become unreachable.

“Thank you, for sharing.” Tan-daifu said. “Sometimes it helps, but only when you’re ready.”

His understanding silence was a pleasant relief.

On the way back, they came across a boy playing in a field of snow-white rabbits. Jiang Yanli stopped, watching with a longing that was not only hers.

She wondered if A-Ling liked rabbits, or if his jiujiu had allowed him to have a dog, as was a more traditional spiritual animal for a young heir.

Jin Guangyao has wanted to give A-Ling a spiritual dog for some time, but Jiang-zongzhu keeps saying no. No one knows why. Qin Su mused.

Oh, A-Cheng. He must be so lonely. Still keeping dogs out of Lotus Pier, as though A-Xian might come wandering back one day.

(And might he not? A part of her whispered, the thought too fleeting for Qin Su to pick up.)

Though she had no doubt A-Cheng had the loyalty of his sect, that the disciples he’d trained loved him and would die for him, he had never learned that letting someone in wasn’t weakness. Without A-Xian, without her…

She wished there was a way she could tell him he wasn’t alone, to hold A-Cheng and A-Ling in her arms, without risking Jin Guangyao piecing together the truth.

She must have made a noise, because Tan-daifu looked at her in concern, and the boy looked up. He set down the rabbit in his lap, and shooed away the others surrounding him with gentle, practiced gestures. Getting to his feet, the boy burst into a run.

When he reached them, he bowed. A model Lan, were it not for the blades of grass clinging to his robes. He was about ten, she thought, if a little short for his age. The cloud embroidery on his ribbon marked him as a member of the main clan. “Daifu! Are you here to play with the rabbits?”

So Lans aren’t born knowing all the rules, after all. Qin Su observed. I thought there might be truth to that rumor.

It was a good thing Jiang Yanli was already smiling.

“Not today,” Tan-daifu said. “Our little radish has already taken good care of them, I’m sure.”

The boy scrunched up his nose, and Jiang Yanli could have sworn it was identical to A-Xian’s. “I’m not a little radish anymore! And the rabbits always want more ear scratches. Will you play with the rabbits, guniang? They always make Fuqin happier when he’s sad, like you are.”

“I-” How insightful. His eyes were wide and pleading, the look of a boy practiced at getting what he wanted by convincing an adult it had been their idea. She would have caved, easily, if a man in white had not come running. He came to a stop, panting, by the boy’s side.

Panting, running, the collar of his robes out of place and his guan tilted out of center. Lan Wangji seemed so little like himself, and yet was unmistakable.

All in white, Jiang Yanli thought with a pang. He still misses him.

“Fuqin!” The boy cried happily, bouncing to grasp Lan Wangji’s leg.

Did you know Hanguang-jun had a son? She asked.

I had no idea. Qin Su was as shocked as she was.

“A-Yuan.” Hanguang-jun stooped to pick him up, a grimace crossing his face as he stood, though he should have been able to lift Lan Yuan with ease. “We have spoken about talking to strangers.”

There was open panic in his eyes, as he glanced at her. She’d seen that look before, when A-Xian was in danger, but never directed at her.

No. Not at Jiang Yanli, but at Madame Jin.

“Put me down! Bobo said you shouldn’t try to lift me anymore.” Lan Yuan squirmed, and was back on his feet. Strange, she didn’t think Lan Wangji had let him go. “And Tan-daifu is here! I wasn’t unsupervised.”

Lan Wangji glanced at her again, his expression back to its habitual blankness. But his distress remained almost tangible.

She bowed. “Hanguang-jun.”

He looked away sharply, taking his son’s hand. “Let us go. It is time for your guqin lesson.”

“Mn!” Lan Yuan hummed eagerly, allowing his father to lead him away, and began chattering about the rabbits. “I think Xiao Yun is going to have babies soon!’

As they walked away, she noted that Lan Wangji’s movements were slightly stiff. A far cry from the graceful Hanguang-jun she’d often glimpsed from afar, fighting back-to-back with A-Xian.

“My most sincere apologies, Jin-furen.” Tan-daifu turned to her and bowed. Before she could ask what for, he continued. “Lan Sizhui was adopted. Hanguang-jun is very protective.”

“I see.” She replied slowly, as her mind linked together implications at the rate A-Xian had jumped from idea to idea.

A boy named A-Yuan, adopted by Lan Wangji. Whose safety he worried about, even in his own home. She couldn’t help a smile, though it made Tan-daifu look at her strangely. It was good to know that one of those A-Xian tried to help had made it.

There was a child in the Burial Mounds? Qin Su was aghast.

Jiang Yanli allowed the recollection of her visit to Yiling to explain as she turned to Tan-daifu. “Is Hanguang-jun injured?”

“Ah.” Tan-daifu stared of down the path, his expression somewhere between regret and wistfulness. “It was brave of you to ask for help. Many do not, even here.”

Only a few days after her encounter with Lan Wangji, Jiang Yanli returned to Lanling. Though Qin Su would have benefited from more time with Tan-daifu, there was little more they could do from afar. The key to removing Jin Guangyao from his position was evidence. The only evidence she would find in the Cloud Recesses was gossip — and Lans did gossip, if less openly — about how frequently he bowed just so Zewu-jun would hold his hands.

Even Jin Guangyao had to slip up sometimes, as he had the day Qin Su learned the truth. Overheard conversations that lead to witnesses or evidence left by a less careful collaborator.

Upon her arrival, Jiang Yanli sent an invitation to Jin Guangyao for tea before she had so much as unpacked.

“I am pleased to see you looking so much better.” He dimpled, but without the usual eager-to-please act. Because he had no reason to think he needed to ingratiate himself with his wife. Or perhaps he was merely too exhausted, the dark purple bags under his eyes the only sign something was off.

“You still look tired, A-Yao.” Jiang Yanli held her sleeve out of the way to pour cups of scalding hot tea. “Was Zewu-jun called away too soon.?”

“Ah.” He demurred, tapping the side of his cup to test the temperature. “I am still having difficulty with a few holdouts. Our vassals have largely fallen into line, save Zhai Qiaoling,” Sect leader of the Baota Zhai, one of the westernmost sects that had formed out of Qishan, “But most of the independent sects are still resistant. My cousin has not yet convinced Hua-zongzhu, even.”

Sympathy for the loss of a child seemed to have worked wonders on the gentry’s approval. But not as much as he’d hoped, it seemed.

Good. That could only make the bait more tempting.

Jin Guangyao’s lips thinned into a flat line. “Apologies, my troubles should not interrupt your recovery.”

Jiang Yanli shook her head. “Actually, I wanted to speak to you about something related. About my role in the future.”

“Oh? If you need more time away, I would understand.” He took a sip of now-drinkable tea.

“It’s not that. In fact, I will go mad if I remain idle any longer.” She stroked the side of her teacup, a nervous gesture of Qin Su’s. “However, there is one duty I’m afraid I cannot fulfill.”

Jin Guangyao took her hand in his. Jiang Yanli did not snatch it back, though her skin crawled. “Please, A-Su. What is it?”

“I couldn’t bear to have another child.” She cast her eyes downward, blinking rapidly, as though to prevent tears from falling. Real tears would have been better, but anticipation was currently stronger than grief.

His shoulders fell as he exhaled heavily. Jiang Yanli read it for what it was: relief.

An innocent wife would not have. She snatched her hand back, to twist them together in her lap. “We have A-Ling to inherit, but I would understand if you want to take a second wife.”

“A-Su—”

She met his eyes, speaking more firmly, with a touch of irritation. “Please don’t insult me by implying I have not noticed you value my company, but not my body.”

“I would never.” Jin Guangyao tossed back his entire cup of tea at once.

Taking a smaller sip, she struck. “Or if you wanted to act on your feelings for Zewu-jun.”

He choked on his swallow, and Qin Su snickered. I’ve never seen him this off-balance. Not even when his father suggested he take remedial cultivation classes with the ten-year-old disciples. Keep going, this is amazing.

Jiang Yanli gently reminded her that the goal today was not to humiliate Jin Guangyao, merely to hand him a distraction in the form of the things he most desired. Nevertheless, she tamped down a rebellious corner of her mouth as she offered him a handkerchief. Jin Guangyao coughed into it, struggling to regain his composure.

“How did you —” His dimples twitched as he broke off, briefly at a loss for words. “Furen, I have been faithful to you. I am not my father.”

No, he was an entirely different kind of terrible.

“I’ve never doubted that. However, I’m not blind. I’ve seen the way you look at each other.” She smiled, reaching for his hand again. This time, he jerked back. “Please, A-Yao. I understand you have feelings for him. A discrete affair with one man, with your wife’s permission, would not be the same as your father’s promiscuity.”

“You really wouldn’t mind?” Jin Guangyao looked at her like she was offering him ascension, but he didn’t trust the offer. He was right not to, but he would take it anyway.

“I wouldn’t.” And that, at least, was true. “I find I have little interest in such things these days, but I respect that you do.”

He let out a heavy sigh, and closed his eyes, simply breathing for a moment. When his eyes opened, he gave a tremulous smile. “If you’re certain, thank you, A-Su. I will speak to him when he visits for the conference next month, then.”

“Speaking of the conference, I would like to be more involved in your projects, if you would be willing.”

“Really?” His mouth hung open, his eyes wide.

It thrilled them both, to know Jiang Yanli had managed to catch him off guard. Not once, but twice in the same conversation. “Your watchtowers are brilliant, and perhaps I could help to smooth the way. Not through public recognition,” she rushed to assure him. “But I am good with finance, and certain sects might be more interested to know  that Lanling’s income took a hit in your father’s final years, but has already recovered under your guidance if I am the one telling them. I believe Ran-zongzhu has been struggling to recover income from several years of bad harvests?”

“That —” His jaw worked, soundlessly, before he grinned. “That would be wonderful, A-Su.”

I didn’t know his face could do that. Qin Su said giddily. Maybe we can pull this off.

Jiang Yanli smiled sweetly back, her own mask impeccable.

#the untamed #cql #wangxian #yanqing #qin su #my fic #the sacrfice summon! JYL fic #where the summoner (qin su) sticks around #this time featuring cloud recesses with therapy #and the beginning of jiang yanli's plotting