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Chapter Text

It wasn’t Wen Qing’s fault, when all was said and done. She was tired, she was sore (though probably not as sore as the two patients), and she’d been working consistently without a break for more than a full day at that point. She had no reason to expect it to happen. After all, it hadn’t happened in the previous day and a half, and as far as she knew or could tell, nothing had changed. And in fact, nothing had changed, not until it actually did change. It happened in a moment, not gradually, so she couldn’t have known it was coming.

She’d prepared for it, in fact. Wen Ning was in charge of making sure it didn’t happen, not that she thought it was all that likely. She knew what she was doing with a needle, and she’d done it before, dozens if not hundreds of times. She knew what she was doing, and she took the proper precautions, so it really wasn’t her fault.

It wasn’t Wen Ning’s fault, in the end, either. He’d been warned, of course, but his sister had very clearly told him exactly what to do and exactly where to do it, so he’d done what she asked and what more could he be expected to do? He was holding Wei Wuxian’s arms, his shoulders really, because everyone knew (well, everyone who was in a position to know, which for the purposes of this moment was really just him and his sister, and maybe Wei Wuxian himself if he hadn’t been in so much pain that he wasn’t really capable of knowing anything else) that Wei Wuxian was a gesticulator. He moved his hands, he moved his arms, they were practically never not in motion, so of course Wen Ning was up by his shoulders holding him down. And they couldn’t tie him down, because if they’d tied him down then they’d have had to untie him every time Wen Qing needed to rotate him, moving one limb and then the other to make sure that this process wasn’t destroying all his spiritual pathways in case she ended up deciding it couldn’t be done properly after all and had to reverse course. And Wen Ning was strong, but he wasn’t that large, so there was no way he could hold both Wei Wuxian’s shoulders and legs at the same time, especially not without getting in Wen Qing’s way, and he never wanted to get in his sister’s way even if she wasn’t doing the hardest thing she’d ever done in her entire life. Which she had made very clear to him she was.

It wasn’t even Wei Wuxian’s fault, not really, because he had no freaking clue what his body was doing, not after a day and a half of the most exquisite torment he’d ever felt in his entire life, pain that made the Wen brand in the Xuanwu cave feel like a loving caress and the tearing beak of the Xuanwu of Slaughter itself a thoughtful kiss. His body was out of his control in a way he’d never experienced before—arguably, no one had ever experienced before—and he didn’t even have full access to the healing and pain-relieving functions of his spiritual energy, so the feeling was even more alien and also more difficult to resist. He thrashed like a caged thing, as he had from the beginning, but somehow Wen Qing’s careful explorations must have hit something eve so slightly different within him (and how ironic was it that the first person to be inside him was inside him from this angle and with absolutely no salacious intent?) because this time when he bit down his scream and thrashed about his leg went there instead of there. But it wasn’t intentional, and he wasn’t really conscious in the same way the other two were, even if he was awake (had to be awake, couldn’t fall asleep), so it wasn’t his fault.

It obviously wasn’t Jiang Cheng’s fault, because, well, needles.

So it was nobody’s fault.                                     

But it still happened. Wei Wuxian still kicked Jiang Cheng, and somehow, improbably, impossibly (and wasn’t it the Jiang motto to attempt, nay, achieve the impossible?) he rolled Jiang Cheng over just enough that the needle hit a rock, and it dislodged just enough that Jiang Cheng stopped being incapacitated and woke up.

In the middle of the operation he was never supposed to know about.

Being Jiang Cheng, the first thing he did was swear.

“What the fuck?” The first thing he was really conscious of perceiving were the two figures standing over the prone body of a man. It took a blink for him to recognize the man as Wei Wuxian, and it was only because his own body was so weak (from the lack of a golden core, weeks of refusing to take care of himself, hours of climbing a mountain, and a day and a half of being entirely immobilized by Wen Qing’s needles) that he didn’t surge to his feet and shove them off his brother. The second blink helped him recognize the Wens, and he was confused enough by that to allow his weakness to pull him back down to the ground, though he made sure his head was turned towards whatever was going on over there so he could at least monitor the situation, even if he didn’t think he could do anything about it.

“Shit.” Wen Qing’s hands were still literally inside Wei Wuxian, so she gestured with her head towards Jiang Cheng and muttered to Wen Ning. “Get him back down.”

“He’s down, jiejie.” Wen Ning was nothing if not literal. “Also, Young Master Wei is still thrashing about. I’m afraid he’ll hurt himself if I let go.”

“Great.” Wen Qing rolled her eyes and spared half a second to glare at Jiang Cheng. “Stay down. Don’t move.”

“All right.” Nothing could have convinced either of the Wens more that Jiang Cheng was still very much out of it than the fact that he agreed to this without complaint. “But only if you tell me what the fuck is going on. You better have a good explanation for why my brother is bleeding out next to me or I’ll break your legs.” So he was still Jiang Cheng. A good diagnostic, she supposed. “Wait, what’s he even doing here? What are you doing here?” His head flopped in what she thought was probably supposed to be a swivel back and forth. “Did something happen to Baoshen Sanren? Oh god, did I fuck this up somehow?”

Wen Qing couldn’t help herself. She laughed. It probably sounded maniacal, like the sort of thing Wen Ruohan would do before enslaving another dozen cultivators’ corpses to the Yin Iron, but there was no one here to judge her. A-Ning was too sweet, too much her dear little brother, to ever tell her she was mad. Wei Wuxian was madder, no matter how far beyond the bend she might have gone. And Jiang Cheng was lying on the ground with a needle still half-sticking out his neck, and also dumb enough to fall for Wei Wuxian’s bullshit (even if there were extenuating circumstances for that), so he didn’t exactly have standing to say anything either.

“There’s Baoshen Sanren.” She nodded towards the hat lying on the ground a few feet away, then turned her attention back towards Wei Wuxian’s interior. She had already extracted most of the core, and fed much of the circulating energy in his medians into Jiang Cheng—which was why they were so close together that Wei Wuxian had been able to kick Jiang Cheng in the first place; her arms just weren’t that long—so this was the trickiest part of the operation in some ways, the part where she had to start actually decoupling his medians and his core, carefully (carefully) making sure she didn’t actually damage either in the process. She’d spent the first day unblocking Jiang Cheng’s medians, slowly undoing the damage Core-Melting Hand had done as he burned out the central core, and so she was pretty sure she knew what not to do with Wei Wuxian’s, but that didn’t really lead her to a definite answer of what to do, and the ancient text she was working from was frustratingly enigmatic on the point.

She made a face at Wen Ning, and her brother took up the explanations while she zoned into her work. Jiang Cheng wasn’t going anywhere, and besides his depression he wasn’t in any actual danger of dying right now. It was her job to make sure his brother stayed in the same state. And to do that, she couldn’t have any distractions.

And anyway, it wasn’t her fault.

Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng is, of course, an awful patient. Hah. Patient. This is the only sense in which she’s known him to ever be patient. She supposes it’s a Jiang trait, though—not in the blood, but in the family—because Wei Wuxian, with the exception of whatever he has going on with that nice Lan boy, is definitely somehow the more chaotically impatient of the two. She remembers Jiang Yanli, and amends that—a Jiang boy thing. Maybe the sister got all the patience and someone up there just forgot about the boys.

Anyway, she needs to stop thinking about this, because it’s all too tempting to zone out into a reverie about Jiang parenting techniques (or really, any topic) when she’s been awake for forty-eight hours straight and her hands are still covered in Wei Wuxian’s blood. Well, covered again. She washed them, repeatedly, but you don’t excavate the lower torso and have it not bleed unless something is even worse than whatever is causing you to cut into that part of the body in the first place. She has to physically stop herself from letting that become another reason to zone out, pinching her thumb to center herself.

Right.

Jiang Cheng is a bad patient because he is still confused and now a little bit angry (for him. If Wen Ning was talking like Jiang Cheng is right now she’d call an exorcist, ongoing surgery or no ongoing surgery). He won’t shut up. Wen Ning has apparently explained repeatedly what’s going on and why—she knows its repeated because even her brother is starting to show some signs of strain—and now Jiang Cheng is basically just whining the word “why” at increasingly loud volumes.

“He can’t hear you,” she finally snaps. “He’s awake, but he might as well not be.”

“What do you mean?” This at least snaps Jiang Cheng out of whatever state he was in, and she finds that yelling at him gives her the focus she needs to make sure her hands don’t slip inside his brother, so she chooses to engage.

“I mean that he’s basically going through the worst parts of childbirth, possession, and being eviscerated, all at the same time, so his brain doesn’t really have the space to process anything we’re saying. Look.” She takes the hand not currently cradling the glowing ball of Wei Wuxian’s golden core and waves it in front of his face. “Hello? Nobody home?” She snaps her fingers in front of Wei Wuxian’s face and he just keeps staring, wide-eyed. He’s stopped moaning after about hour forty, she thinks because he’s dehydrated—she’ll get Wen Ning to pour some water down his throat once he wakes up from the nap he’s blessedly fallen into—but he’s still moving, which is a good sign all things considered. “I’m going to go run off with Lan Wangji and have a bunch of little Lan babies and we’ll never talk to you again.” When Wei Wuxian just twitches and rolls his head slightly to the side, she looks back at Jiang Cheng. “See? Nobody’s home.”

“You weren’t fucking kidding.” He’s looking back and forth between them with a kind of awe on his face, mixed with what she’s pretty sure would be raw concern on a face less dedicated to showing only anger. “He didn’t even react when you talked about Lan Wangji. He never shuts up about Lan Wangji.”

“Lan Zh…” Apparently the second or third time is the charm, because Wei Wuxian starts to talk, only to peter out as if the effort was simply too much—which it probably was. She immediately snaps back to working on the core, because if he’s going to start moving more, she’s going to have to work faster, and she knows she’s sluggish after all these hours.

“What can I do to help?” She doesn’t expect this, not out of Jiang Cheng, not out of the man she’s spent the last several weeks watching wait for death without any particular desire to do anything more than passively accept it. She glances and him and he glares back. “He’s my brother. I want to help.”

“Get him some water.” She gestures at the jug next to him, then frowns. “But be careful. You’re not exactly hale and hearty yourself, and the last thing I need is to be back to taking care of both of you.”

“Back to?” He grimaces as he turns, the incision still raw in his own belly as he stretches for the jug.

“That’s right, you weren’t awake then. I had to start the process with him and then clean you out, so for a while you were both just sitting here bleeding.” And not talking, which was probably a blessing then but which she thinks would drive her crazy now. Not that she isn’t probably crazy already—crazy to try this, crazy after forty hours of doing nothing but carefully, oh so carefully, sliding her hands and needles and cloths around two bodies inside and out, crazy to be letting Jiang Cheng move right now, let alone help—but she can’t imagine how far gone she’d be right now if Jiang Cheng weren’t actually here to talk with her, as Wen Ning sleeps and Wei Wuxian occupies some place hopefully far away from here within his mind. “Then I really had my hands full.”

“They look pretty full now.” He carefully pours a little water into his brother’s mouth, pauses, and holds his nose while he gulps it down. Then he sets the jug back down and lies down without her even having to yell at him.

“What’s wrong.” She doesn’t phrase it as a question.

“Why are you doing this?” He stares up at the sky, avoiding her eyes. “What the fuck kind of hold does he have over you that you’re doing this for him?”

“He asked.” Jiang Cheng snorts, and she supposes that’s fair. “Fine, he asked, and he told me if I didn’t say yes he’d find someone else. And if he found someone else, you’d both die.” Wei Wuxian for reasons that could still go wrong, of course, but she’d been hands deep inside of Jiang Cheng too, after all. She’d spent hours coaxing his meridians to open up, letting in a slow stream of Wei Wuxian’s energy to acclimatize them, inching them closer to usefulness minute by minute, and if she’d done any of that wrong he’d have gone into immediate qi deviation on a bare mountainside.

“So?” Jiang Cheng is still glaring. “What are we to you? What is he to you?”

“You’re people.” She can glare right back, if this is going to be a contest. “I’m a healer, I don’t let people die when I can prevent it.” She must be fucking exhausted, though, because she doesn’t stop there, even though she intended to. “You’re our friends. We don’t have so many of those that I can spend them freely.” She bites her tongue, the pain focusing her attention back to the task at hand. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to start undoing your brother’s qi connections. And I need you to sit back down while I do it so I don’t have worry about you keeling over while I’m trying not to kill Wei Wuxian.”

Chapter Text

Of course, of course, relatively calm Jiang Cheng couldn’t last.

Relatively calm, of course. He’d been bellowing loudly, and swearing, but he hadn’t been angry at her, just confused and a bit out of it (the needle was still halfway into his neck, after all, and he had been out of it for a very, very long time beforehand). Now, however, he is pissed, and she just. Does. Not. Have. The. Spoons. for this.

“What the everlasting fuck are you doing? Put it back. Put it the fuck back right now or so help me I will…”

“What?” she snaps. “What will you do? Break my legs? I’d like to see you try.” She is carefully—carefully—pulling the last qi connections off of Wei Wuxian’s golden core, so she does not need any of his bullshit right now. “Lie. Back. Down.”

“Not until you put Wei Wuxian’s golden core back first!” He isn’t standing, more like sitting up awkwardly, because she is pretty sure his legs wouldn’t hold him even if he tried and there’s still an open wound below his stomach where she’s going to insert the core, but the glare he gives her is definitive proof that the annoyingly self-righteous side of Jiang Cheng was back in full force. She supposes that is technically a good thing. After all, it is the best diagnostic she can think of to show that he had recovered at least somewhat from spending the last however long it was (it felt like ages) flopping around on the floor in Yiling feeling sorry for himself. But apparently Wen Ning, bless his soul, hadn’t actually explained the most important part of the procedure to him, or else he just hadn’t wanted to understand, because what he is asking for is technically impossible. And while she was willing to do this operation with him entirely unaware, for reasons she’s not entirely proud of or willing to fully examine right now, but which felt compelling at the time, now that he’s awake and conscious she’s not going to let slip what feels like a second chance to get informed, willing consent. A part of her is also glad that this way Wei Wuxian won’t be able to do his little pretending-nothing-happened thing, which she was not going to mess up intentionally, again for reasons she’s just going to shove into a box somewhere in her mind right now thank you very much, she’s been up for two days straight she doesn’t need this, but which she’s also pretty sure was going to somehow backfire incredibly spectacularly. So instead, she’s going to tell him what’s going on, and she’s going to make it very clear what his options are from this point forward.

“I can’t put his golden core back, because I just detached it, and in order to that I had to do some very technical things with his meridians that mean it won’t attach properly without another several hours of work.” She rolls her eyes. “And this core is going to dissipate in about a minute and a half outside of a body, so please, for the love of all that is holy, for the sake of your brother and your clan and the revenge you have been insisting on for the past month, lie the fuck down.”

“WHAT?” She had thought he was shouting before. Apparently she had been wrong.

“About a minute now, so if you don’t mind, Sect Leader Jiang…” she has her hands full of Wei Wuxian’s golden core, so she can’t shove him over, but if glares could push him down he’d be underground by now.

“Sect Leader…” he gulps and she sees for a moment the mask fall away and reveal a very scared young man, the same young man she remembers from Cloud Recesses but with a massive weight added to his shoulders. She realizes that this is probably the first time he’s really been addressed as Sect Leader Jiang, not as Jiang Cheng or Jiang Wanyin or Young Master Jiang, the first time since Lotus Pier burned that he’s been anywhere other than on the run or in hiding, and she spares half a moment for sympathy before turning back to the task at hand.

“Yes. You are Sect Leader Jiang, aren’t you? Now, do you want to let your head disciple’s golden core dissolve and benefit no one—thirty seconds now, give or take—or will you lie down and let me put it to some use?”

He lies down.

He doesn’t look happy about it, but it’s not Wen Qing’s problem if he’s happy about it, it’s her problem if this doesn’t work, especially now that she’s bullied him into it. She takes a deep breath and shoves her hands, still full of golden core, into the still open cut on his abdomen, ignoring the shocked inhalation (grateful for the stupid version of masculinity that means he tries not to scream out, her ears are already ringing from Wei Wuxian) and quickly attaches the two most critical connections. Then she lets herself breathe again. Now that the qi can circulate through Jiang Cheng’s system, the core won’t dissipate as quickly and she can take her time with the rest. In fact, she has enough time for that that she can go back to Wei Wuxian and sew him up so he doesn’t bleed out, which she does, because that would be the most ironic part of all—killing him after all. She’ll figure out if the transplant actually worked later. Right now she needs to save her patients.

“What the fuck was…” His voice peters out again. “Holy fuck.” He sounds almost awed, with a strong overlay of anger. “No wonder he was…I can’t believe…WEI WUXIAN.” He reaches out and shoves his brother, harder than he had been able to do before, and she curses under her breath because of course he’d move the person she’s currently suturing. But she supposes that answers at least the immediate question of whether Jiang Cheng can access the golden core.

“Did you know he had this much fucking power? What the hell, Wei Wuxian, have you been fucking holding back? I shouldn’t have…how is this even fucking possible? How could you do this to me? Why would you do this? Is this really how much…answer me! Wei Wuxian!” Jiang Cheng is addressing her now, but he’s not as urgent as Wei Wuxian is right now so she ignores him. “Wen Qing, did you know?”

“Of course not. It’s not my golden core.”

“It’s not mine, either. What the fuck, Wei Wuxian.”

“Yes, it is.” She finishes with Wei Wuxian and turns back to him. “Or at least it will be if you’ll let me finish.” She doesn’t really wait for a response. Now that he’s accepted the core and established at least some connection to it, it’s really not up to him anymore. She has a duty not to let him die, and that includes not letting the core waste away either.

Unfortunately, that means putting her head right next to Jiang Cheng as he continues to yell at his almost unconscious brother about his golden core. But she supposes that’s better than any of the other options, which involved one of them being dead.

Chapter Text

“Jiang Cheng?” Wei Wuxian’s voice is soft but rough, like wool fresh off the sheep, but it has the startling effect of stopping Jiang Cheng in mid-rant. “Jiang Cheng, what are…Wen Qing…” he turns to her, but she’s busy, dammit, busy monitoring his brother’s qi flow to make sure the connections are holding, that the core isn’t being rejected, that this whole stupid crazy plan of his has worked, so she ignores him. He’s not her priority right now; she’s sewn him up, he’ll hold for a while, she has to make sure Jiang Cheng will too.

“WEI WUXIAN!” Apparently the respite from Jiang Cheng’s fury was only temporary. She gestures Wen Ning, now back in business, to be prepared to hold Jiang Cheng down—she can already see in her mind’s eye what it’s going to look like when he decides it’s time to shake his injured brother, and she is not here for it—and lets their argument wash over her, the effort it takes to focus on their words allowing her to stay awake.

“What the fuck, Wei Wuxian? Why would you do this? Why the fuck would you think…why would you give me your core? WHY?” She’s spent more time than she realized listening to the various degrees of Jiang Cheng’s moods, because she can tell this is worry, mixed with despair, not the anger he so very badly wants it to seem. “What did I ever do to you that you would burden me with this? How am I supposed to repay this? How could you put this burden on me?”

All of which, she’s pretty sure, translates to Jiang Cheng’s equivalent of I love you.

“Jiang Cheng? How are you awake?” Wei Wuxian, as usual, doesn’t actually respond to his brother’s words, turning to her instead—though it’s Wen Ning who answers, her hands and mind are too busy.

“Young Master Wei, Sect Leader Jiang woke up several hours ago. I’m sorry, I think it must have been my fault.”

It wasn’t, but then again, her brother has always been the sort to take on burdens that weren’t properly his—it’s one of the things that binds him and Wei Wuxian together. She scoffs anyway, knowing it won’t do any good, because while Wen Ning is stubborn about taking responsibility she is equally stubborn about reminding him he doesn’t have to.

“I’m sure it wasn’t, brother Ning.” Oh, that was not a smart thing to say, Wei Wuxian, she thinks, as she sends a pulse of energy into Jiang Cheng’s chest and feels how it circulates within him. No matter how much you think of my brother as a bro, it’s not a good idea to say so, no t with Jiang Cheng right there. She should probably get back in the habit of thinking of him as Sect Leader Jiang, or at least Jiang Wanyin, but weeks of living in close quarters with them both has eroded that barrier because Wei Wuxian cannot and will not call his brother anything but Jiang Cheng. It’s been easier just copying him than trying to correct herself in her head every time—but now that the man himself is not only alive but willing to stay so, it’s probably a good idea to try to break that habit.

Whatever she calls him, she has corrected predicted his reaction. “Brother Ning? So he’s your brother now?”

“Jiang Cheng…” It’s weak, and hardly enough to stop him in his flow.

“No. We’re not doing this. You’re going to fucking tell me why you did this, why you lied to me, why you let me believe you’d found Baoshen Sanren…” Jiang Cheng lunges forward and she catches him before he can rip the wound in his abdomen further, with a whispered but firm be careful. But it turns out he wasn’t reaching for Wei Wuxian after all, as he lets her stop him and leans back down with the stupid hat in his hands. “Baoshen Sanren my left foot!” He throws the hat at Wei Wuxian, who catches it and stares at it dumbly. “Why, Wei Wuxian? Why couldn’t you just tell me what you were doing? Why couldn’t you trust me? Have I been such a bad brother that you couldn’t even do that?” She can feel his ab muscles tensing, and knows it must be hurting him, but of course he doesn’t stop. “Answer me, goddammit!”

“What do you want me to say?” Wei Wuxian sounds as exhausted as she is, which makes sense since he’s been awake just as long and also undergone major surgery, losing his golden core, in the same time. “You needed it. I didn’t.”

“The fuck you didn’t.” Jiang Cheng is weeping now, the tears splashing warm on her fingers, and all she can think is if they’re this warm, after all the blood he’s lost, he must be drawing on the spiritual energy to thermoregulate. “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. I never wanted you to…” But apparently he can’t say what he didn’t want Wei Wuxian to do. “Why?”

“Why?” Wei Wuxian’s voice is still rough, but no longer soft. “You were dying, Jiang Cheng. Dying. Did you think I wanted to see that? Did you think I wanted to have to tell shijie I lost you, too? What the hell else was I going to do?”

“But why did you lie?” For once, Jiang Cheng’s voice is lower, softer than Wei Wuxian’s, and Wen Qing is very, very glad she can busy herself with his qi flow and not have to look up into his face at this moment.

“Would you have agreed if I hadn’t?”

“Would that have stopped you?”

She invents new things to try to test Jiang Cheng’s spiritual energy—it’s clearly fine, the transplant has taken, he’s drawing on the power like he cultivated this core himself, but she has no interest, absolutely zero, in drawing any attention to herself right now by doing something stupid like talking—and keeps her eyes down as the silence builds, until Jiang Cheng (of course) breaks it.

“Fuck you.” Apparently her efforts at being invisible haven’t worked, not that she really expected them to, because he brings her into the conversation anyway. “Wen Qing told me what she was doing. Too late for me to fucking do anything about it, but at least she told me, unlike my fucking brother.”

“Too late?” Wei Wuxian looks over at her and she nods, but doesn’t have the chance to speak before Jiang Cheng is off again.

“Yes, it was too late. She stood there, calm as you like, your golden core in her hands, and asked if I wanted to take it or let it dissolve, because apparently it couldn’t go back inside you, where it belongs. You idiot.”

“You took it, right?” Wei Wuxian suddenly looks panicked. “Wen Qing, tell me he took it.”

“Of course I took it! You’re the idiot, not me,” Jiang Cheng growls. “But I didn’t like it and I don’t like it, and you should have fucking told me.”

“I know. But Jiang Cheng, you didn’t see yourself, you didn’t see the way you were, you were going to die, I couldn’t let you die, I couldn’t lose anyone else…”

“You think I fucking wanted to lose you? You self-sacrificing idiot. Do you know how I lost my golden core? Do you? Huh?”

“Jiang Cheng…”

“Shut up! I lost it because they were going to grab you.”

“What, no, you were…”

“I said shut up. You idiot, you didn’t even see them, there were Wens everywhere…” That does sounds like Wei Wuxian, now that she hears it.

“You…what…” Wei Wuxian is, uncharacteristically, completely out of words.

“I wasn’t going to let them have you. You were the only one of us who could fucking do anything, our sister needed you, I needed you, so…” Jiang Cheng slugs his brother in the shoulder, which Wen Qing already knows from Cloud Recesses means he’s pretty much back to normal.

“You needed me? You sacrificed yourself for me? Jiang Cheng…” Wei Wuxian is going to cry—no, scratch that, he’s been awake for forty-eight hours and more, he is crying—and he’s only holding his shoulder a little bit so Wen Qing doesn’t think it’s because he needs medical attention right now. “Hey, if you could sacrifice yourself for me, why do you think I don’t get to return the favor?”

“Because I’m your fucking sect leader, that’s why.”

“I’m pretty sure that means I’m supposed to sacrifice for you. Yup, right there in the job description.” Wei Wuxian pretends to be reading something, because of course he deals with traumatic information with humor, and Wen Qing is going to have to have a talk with whoever heads up the healers at Lotus Pier after this is all over about healthy coping mechanisms and how these boys do not have them. “Head disciple: trains juniors, organizes night hunts, doesn’t let the sect leader die of depression…it’s all there.”

“Shut up, you idiot.” Jiang Cheng shoves his shoulder again, more lightly this time.

Coming from Jiang Cheng, she thinks, that sounds almost like acceptance.

Chapter Text

Now that the brothers Jiang have apparently spent their emotional self-expression budgets for the entire year, Wen Qing can finally get back to what she ought to be doing anyway, which is making sure that neither of them dies from it. Wei Wuxian, she knows, had been planning to sneak down to town again before Jiang Cheng was fully healed and she took out the needles to let him awake and walk down the mountain from “Baoshen Sanren.” It has been part of the idea from the beginning; he’d even told Jiang Cheng he’d meet him down at the bottom of the mountain, as if it was going to be safe for him to waltz down to town without his golden core immediately after a major surgery. It was stupid, and it was reckless, but it was something he had insisted on because he didn’t want Jiang Cheng to know what he’d done. But now that’s completely unnecessary, because Jiang Cheng knows, and so she puts her foot down. Neither of them is going anywhere until she is completely satisfied that the transplant has taken and that Wei Wuxian is not catching any of those non-cultivator illnesses that so often crop up after surgery—the fevers, the blood infections, the other dangers that a golden core and good qi circulation keep off, but that ordinary mortals are subject to.

“What would you know about that?” asks Jiang Cheng, offended on his brother’s behalf (and of course this would be the way he expresses his filial affection, by being a bloody annoyance).

“I’m a healer.” She brushes him off; he doesn’t understand and she doesn’t particularly care to explain. Except apparently she’s going to have to explain, because Wei Wuxian has decided to show his filial affection in the same way, by backing up his brother when she knows he usually would just trust her damn judgment.

“Yeah, Wen Qing, aren’t you a cultivator? Why should I waste your skills to look after little old me when I’m sure I can find a regular healer in Yiling?”

“First of all, you’re my patient, so I’m not letting you walk down into Yiling on your own without any medical attention along the way, through a forest that, knowing you, you’ll just decide to climb trees in and get dirt in your wounds.” She glares at him and he has the good grace to at least look abashed, though she has no doubt he’d still do it if she let him. “Second, I’m a cultivator, but not everyone in the Dafan Wen is, and I didn’t learn to be a healer just for the cultivation world.” She’s set Granny’s bones and treated Uncle Four through pneumonia two winters ago, and there’s no way she’s going to let Wei Wuxian discount the value of that experience, or of having learned to do those things. True, she didn’t learn healing of non-cultivators from all the healers she trained with—there were definitely those who thought that non-cultivators could go fend for themselves—but there were enough who thought like her, and enough who had written things down in the past (Cloud Recesses was actually particularly helpful for that, it had turned out) that she was able to learn despite the obstacles. “Third, have you ever met a child?” She rolls her eyes. “If you haven’t developed a golden core, you might as well not be a cultivator as far as diseases are concerned, and even cultivator children take a while to develop them.” She sighs, and adds the last reason she knows how to treat those without cores differently than those with them. “And fourth, I know Wen Zhuliu.”

“What?” Jiang Cheng springs to his feet and stares at her. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means I’ve had to treat people whose cores he’s melted before!” She finally lets the last sixty or so hours of intense work and lack of sleep infuse her voice. “How the hell else do you think I knew how to repair your meridians? How the hell else do you think I had the text on core transfers lying around? I haven’t done this before, no one has and if I had my way no one ever will again, but I’ve had to treat the aftereffects of this before. And. That. Includes. Infections.” She pokes Jiang Cheng…Sect Leader Jiang in the chest with each word. “So you will both sit here and take my advice, or so help me you will die, because you are both complete idiots who don’t know the first thing about medicine.”

“Now, Wen Qing…” Wei Wuxian tries to intervene and she snaps at him.

“What? Do I have to stab you both with needles again to make you sit still and actually let your bodies heal? What is it with you? Do you want to die? Am I surrounded by idiots with death wishes? And if so, would you like me to cut to the chase right now?”

“Ahahah, Jiang Cheng, I think she means it.” Wei Wuxian puts his hands on his brother’s shoulders where he’s staring down at her finger, which is still in his chest, and pulls him away. “Let’s just let the nice healer have her way this time, all right, before she goes for the needles.”

“Nice.” He scoffs, but he goes and sits down next to Wen Ning, who has calmly continued preparing dinner, confident as always that she’ll get her way—and right as usual.

“All right. Is that agreed? You’re going to stay, and do what I tell you, and not endanger yourselves again with your stupidity? No running suicidally into Wen patrols or taking voluntary elective surgeries or any of the other idiotic things you Jiangs tend to do when left unchecked?”

“No, Wen Qing.” Wei Wuxian bows to her and hisses at his brother then stares at him until he echoes him. “We’ll be good.”

“Good. Then I’m going to go to sleep for the next day and a half, and you can keep healing. I’ll check on you then.” She grabs her bowl of soup from Wen Ning, downs it in three large spoonfuls, and lies down under the nearest tree. She’ll deal with them when she’s had some sleep, assuming they’re still there.

And if they aren’t, well, then they’re too stupid to keep alive anyway.

She has to admit, deep down, she hopes that they aren’t that dumb.

Chapter Text

When Wen Qing wakes up, she is less surprised than she probably should be to find the two Yunmeng boys sitting side by side and talking exactly like she remembers from Cloud Recesses, as if everything in the past year never happened. The Jiangs may not be good at healthy coping, but she’s well aware from previous encounters that they’re past masters of whistling past the graveyard and going on as if nothing was wrong—in fact, that was what had convinced her that Wei Wuxian truly needed help, back when he first approached her, before she’d even heard the words “golden core” out of his mouth. The mere fact that his brother wasn’t stopping him from demanding help, that he wasn’t pretending it was all right, had shown her something was truly, horribly wrong. So it’s a blessing to see them nudging each other and trading food back and forth like old times. Wen Ning is sitting across from them, his adorable little face (what? she’s an older sister, her brother will always be an adorable little kid to her, even if he is technically an adult now) looking between Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng as if he were watching some kind of sporting match. She pulls herself up and listens to their conversation without intervening, allowing the relief of the moment, of the idea that things could be all right even after everything that’s happened, wash over her.

They’re exchanging ideas about what they’ll do when they rebuild Lotus Pier, ranging from the practical (“seriously, the training field was never large enough, when I’d release a wind talisman it would always blow into the storage rooms next door”) to the ridiculous (“let’s make the entire entrance hall out of living lotus blossoms!”). When they notice Wen Qing is awake, they include her in the conversation—Wen Ning, as always, politely demurs when asked his opinion—and soon she’s expressing mock-serious opinions on the relative value of elevated walkways versus floating bridges among the lotus ponds, and whether it would be possible—or appropriate—to include a small detail of a tiger eating a peacock inside Jiang Yanli’s rooms (“just to make her think twice about marrying that idiot!” grumps Wei Wuxian when she shoots down this idea). It’s probably the most relaxed she’s been since wandering the back hills of Cloud Recesses.

Of course, it can’t last.

Eventually the conversation turns to those ominous next steps, and she is forcibly reminded that she is in charge of the Yiling supervisory office of the Wen sect, while of course they are the leaders of the Jiang sect, and thus of the resistance to the Wens. She won’t deny it hurts her heart to think of fighting against these people—to think of fighting at all, she’s a healer, not a warrior, damnit Wen Ruohan—and she knows without asking him, just from the set of his face, that Wen Ning will simply reject any suggestion that he ought to fight what are definitely the only friends he’s ever made independently.

So it’s not easy for her, thinking about the future right now. Especially when the Yunmeng boys start openly speculating in front of her about how they can turn the other sects against the Wens, assuming she won’t use this information against them, that she won’t turn them in to Wen Chao or Wen Xu or Wen Ruohan himself (of course she won’t, she wouldn’t have done any of this if she were going to do anything like that, but it’s still a gut-churning conversation to have to listen to). It gets substantially less easy, though at the same time more precious, when Jiang Che…Sect Leader Jiang turns to her during a discussion of what they’ll do to convince Jin Guangshan to ‘get off his butt’ and formally asks her to accompany them to Carp Tower.

“Why me?” She hasn’t really been following the conversation—it’s much easier to tell Wen Ruohan that she doesn’t know their enemy’s plans if she, you know, doesn’t know their plans—but she’s not sure what could have happened to make that seem like a good idea.

To her shock, it’s Wen Ning who answers. “Jiejie, they need you to tell everyone what you did.”

“Wait, what?” Apparently she should have been paying more attention. They want her to tell people about the utterly insane, completely secret procedure that Wei Wuxian hadn’t even wanted her to tell his own brother, the recipient of the transplant, about? “Sect Leader Jiang…”

He rolls his eyes. “Lady Wen, you literally put my new golden core inside my chest, I think we can dispense with the formality.”

“Jiang Wany…” his eyes roll again and she gives in. “Jiang Cheng. Why on earth would you want me to tell anyone about this?”

“Politics.” Wei Wuxian cuts his brother off. “I thought we could keep this a secret, but you see how well that turned out. Jiang Cheng thinks if we go the other way, make a big public deal out of the Wens dissolving a sect heir’s—no, a sect leader’s—golden core and assuming they’ll get away with it, we can convince even Jin Guangshan to get off his gold-plated butt and help us.”

“Not to mention,” Jiang Cheng adds with a shove to his brother’s shoulder, “it will help explain to everyone why this idiot won’t be able to use his sword. We can emphasize how loyal he is, how selfless, how idiotic…”

“Hey!”

“Anyway, if we can make it clear how much he sacrificed and why he had to do it—well, why he thought he had to do it, because he didn’t have to do it, why did you…” Jiang Cheng visibly shakes himself away from that line of thought and moves back to his point. “If we can make them realize that, maybe they’ll be shamed into doing their own much lesser sacrifices of things like time and money.” He shrugs. “Not that Jin Guangshan is much prone to shame, but he does like to look like he’s on the right side of history, if only for his own gain.”

She nods. Jin Guangshan is a snake, but snakes can be predictable—they like to curl up on warm rocks—and so can he. “What’s in it for me?” She cuts off any suggestion that she’s looking for money or power or anything like that—she hates being in charge of the supervisory office, heaven keep her from any larger responsibility in the future—by gesturing towards Wen Ning. “If I come with you, I’m putting my brother and the rest of my people in danger for you. What can you offer me beyond empty words about their safety?”

“Our everlasting thanks and love?” Wei Wuxian offers, with a smirk on his face, and she shoves him in the shoulder.

“I had better already have that, after all I’ve done for you.” He grins and blows her a kiss, and she shoves him again. Jiang Cheng clears his throat.

“You should bring Wen Qionglin with you.” He nods to her brother, who smiles shakily at him. “So you can see to his safety yourself. As for the rest of your people…” he taps his hands idly on his leg and she watches the patterns his fingers make on his folded thigh. “Are any of them not in Yiling? Are any of those in Yiling cultivators, besides you and your brother?”

She’s surprised by the question so it takes a moment for her to answer. “No, we are the only two real cultivators left in the Dafan Wen. And no, none of them are missing—I gathered them all to me when Wen Ruohan put me in charge there.” Everyone, from her grandmother down to her pregnant cousin Wen Chen, had taken the opportunity to relocate away from Dafan Mountain in the aftermath of the horrific possession event that (to her everlasting shame) Wei Wuxian and his friends had been not only witnesses to but potential victims of. “They’re all in Yiling right now except for the two of us.”

“Good.” Jiang Cheng smiles—and she realizes that she has not seen him smile since they were at Cloud Recesses, and she would very much like to see that again, thank you very much—and bows to her. “Then, Wen Qing, I would like to propose that our first target for conquest would be the Wen Supervisory Office in Yiling. I think there’s a good chance it might just fall without a fight—and those inside, especially the civilians, would of course be welcome to join the correct side of the campaign.”

She nods. This is a deal she can accept. “You promise?”

“I give you my word.”

“Then let us go to Lanling.”

They head down the mountain first, back into Yiling, so they can arrange transportation and supplies for the trip—she has her sword, of course, and Wen Ning has his, but the two others’ swords are at the indoctrination camp, and so they will be traveling by land, and not by air. When they arrive in Yiling, however, she is immediately accosted by Granny Wen, who drags her into the main hall, fortunately separating her from her two fugitive guests, in order to show her who has arrived for a ‘surprise inspection.’

It is, of course, Wen Chao. She’s never happy to see him, but this, in particular, is not a good time.

Chapter Text

Of the two young masters of Qishan Wen, Wen Qing is definitely more afraid of Wen Xu. He is, after all, at least moderately competent, and no less evil than his brother. Wen Chao, on the other hand, is the one she likes least; the one she would most gladly watch be tortured to death, healer’s oath be damned, and not lift a finger. She didn’t come to this hatred easily. It was hard-won on Wen Chao’s part; it had not fully flowered when he accompanied her to Cloud Recesses, but had already taken root due to the casual cruelty he showed on an everyday basis at Nightless City (not that Wen Xu was particularly kind, or kind at all, but his cruelty always seemed thoughtful, somehow—pointed, or at least purposeful—while Wen Chao’s was simply his own personality seeping out into the world). It truly began to spread, however, when he deliberately used her own people to menace Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian (and Nie Huiasang, but like her she’s pretty sure he was barely aware the third boy was there). She could have forgiven his attack on her friends, or if not forgiven it at least considered it no worse or better than the rest of the behavior of all the Wens in the Qishan branch, but making their own people undergo that…terrible transformation, the same transformation that had taken her own parents’ lives and a slice of A-Ning’s soul, was simply unconscionable. It had been the catalyst for her bringing the entire Dafan Wen into Yiling; she could no longer trust that the main branch of the family would treat all Wens as worthy of basic respect, let alone protection. She had talked to her family about it, and it had made her blood boil to hear their descriptions of the experience; not only that, but she had treated far too many of them for post-traumatic stress disorder from it to feel even a sliver of good feeling towards Wen Chao.

So it would have been infuriating to have him waiting for her in her main hall even if she didn’t have two of the highest profile fugitives from Wen “justice” waiting in her own rooms—and even if he weren’t accompanied by Wen Zhuliu, whose horrible core-destruction technique she’d just treated firsthand in Jiang Cheng. She has always had some actual respect for Wen Zhuliu, knowing a little of his history and understanding at least some of his motivation for his service, but the brutality of his treatment of fellow cultivators is chilling, even among the Wens. She has known this for a long time, of course; Jiang Cheng is not even the first person subject to the core melting technique she’s treated. But he is the first she’s treated out of the watchful eye of Wen Ruohan, and so she was able to indulge her own reactions to it more fully, which took it from bad to horrific.

“Second Young Master Wen.” She bows politely as she enters the hall, where of course Wen Chao has flopped himself inelegantly into her own chair (not a throne—she is not suicidal, and while Wen Ruohan loves the gesture of establishing the Wens as superior to the surrounding populace, he is equally intolerant of any lesser Wens seeming to challenge his family’s position), and Wen Zhulius is in the process of dragging a second chair up to the dais for Wang Lingjiao, who is fanning herself as if she were the one doing the labor. “Lady Wang.” Wang Lingjiao is, of course, not anyone’s definition of a lady, but Wen Qing is not so self-assured at this moment to draw any attention to that at this moment. “Wen Zhuliu.” As a relative of the dominant family, and head of this supervisory office, she should outrank Wen Zhuliu, but his position in the hierarchy is complicated by his status as a primary retainer to the dominant family and his utility and importance for the sect. Nevertheless, the two of them have encountered each other frequently enough that they have worked out their relative positions, and he nods back in acknowledgement of her; it is the only acknowledgement she receives from any of the three.

“It is strange, is it not my dear, that there was no one here to greet us when we arrived at the supervisory office?” Wen Chao disrespects her by addressing Wang Lingjiao instead of Wen Qing, and of course she also bristles just a little at the implication that she had left the office entirely empty: there were still Wens, both guards and family, in place, even if Wen Qing and Wen Ning were both absent. “Especially at a time like this, with Jiang fugitives on the loose, such sloppiness and inattention speaks poorly of the Yiling office. One might even be tempted to consider whether it was intentional.” His foot swings back and forth as he slouches in the chair and she forces her attention away from it, to his words—which is good, because he is suddenly focused entirely on her. “Well, Wen Qing? Explain yourself.”

She takes a deep breath. It’s showtime. Fortunately, her hatred of Wen Chao is by now so ingrained that she has been able to multitask while thinking about it, and come up with some kind of plan to deal with his presence and his accurate but unhelpful insinuations. With Wen Chao, one must simply be more nonchalant, more collected than him, because he is so used to inspiring fear with his mere identity that it puts him on the wrong foot when people do not cower. That said, one cannot be too fresh; it is a fine line to walk, but one she is familiar with.

She bows. “Of course it was intentional. We in the Yiling supervisory office would never be so lax as to leave things to chance. This head official was simply pursuing rumors regarding the locations of the three Jiang fugitives.”

“Three? Who said there were three?” Wen Chao is trying to treat this like it reveals some deep secret, when it’s completely and hilariously obvious.

“Certainly news has spread to us here of your victorious and triumphant success at Lotus Pier, Young Master, my lady.” She bows to them again. “It was my understanding that in that glorious event, you captured and executed both Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan.”

“Of course.” Wen Chao smirks. Wang Lingjiao fawns. It’s sickening, but it proves her point at least.

“Well, since I did not hear that you had executed any other inner clan members, I merely assumed that the fugitives we are all looking for were Jiang Wanyin, Jiang Yanli, and Wei Wuxian. Therefore, three. Was I mistaken?”

“I suppose not.” The agreement is grudging, but it is there. “So what rumors were you pursuing that were so important they took you both you and your brother from your posts for so long?”

She experiences a moment of relief that she was not on the mountain for the extra day that Wei Wuxian’s initial plan had called for, his day to slip down to Yiling ahead of Jiang Cheng and keep up the fiction that he had not been involved with Jiang Cheng’s golden core at all. Imagine if Wen Chao had had another day to ponder that question.

“I heard rumors that the fugitives had passed close by, on their way into Qishan.” She shrugs. “I was able to confirm those rumors, and was about to send you a messenger to that effect. It seems you have saved one of my servants a trip.”

“Into Qishan, you say?” Wen Chao taps his fingers against his mouth and swings his leg down to sit more properly in the chair. “Why on earth would they be heading into Qishan?”

“Apparently they planned to retrieve their swords from the indoctrination camp.” She rolls her eyes, making sure Wen Chao catches the gesture. “My sources say Young Master Wei in particular was most insistent on retrieving his sword—it has some ridiculous name, doesn’t it?”

“It does.” Wen Chao seems amused by the memory of Wei Wuxian’s sword—and now, of course, diverted from the possibility that Wei Wuxian, not Jiang Cheng, is the one without a golden core. Not that he was ever likely to think that Wen Qing could perform a miracle previously untried, but it was never a bad idea to be careful. “Strange, that they would seek to recover their swords, given what Wen Zhuliu here did to the new sect leader.” He mimes pressing his hand to his core, and laughs coarsely—but then again, he does all things coarsely.

She shrugs. “You know the three of them. Do you doubt Wei Wuxian would get his way?”

Wen Chao laughs. “A fast-talking fool, indeed.”

She could do without ever hearing that sound again, but she is at least convinced, as the conversation moves away from the Jiangs, that he believes her story.

Chapter Text

Wen Qing spends the rest of the evening having dinner with Wen Chao, his mistress, and his lackey, which just gives her a headache. They serve wine and Wen Chao insists on a taste-tester, which she decides she ought to be offended by even though she knows exactly why he’s doing it. A-Ning never could keep anything from her, so she knows exactly what he did with the wine in Yunmeng, and she’s made absolutely sure that he won’t do the same here. After all, even if she doesn’t drink (which would be difficult, since she’s technically the host), having the second young master and his entourage fall asleep again, this time in her area of authority, would definitely start to ring alarm bells for even someone as stupid as Wen Chao. Instead, she’s able to make just enough of a fuss about it that it bleeds Wen Chao’s attention away from inconvenient questions like why she didn’t send any word of the rumors she’s claimed to be hearing ahead to Qishan. She backs down quickly, and one of her cousins comes in to sample the food and drink before Wen Chao consumes it, and the little insult to his mother’s honor preens about the victory as if it meant something.

He really is completely useless.

Seriously, useless—after dinner, he insists on entertainment, and then spends the entirety of her best guqin player’s set loudly planning what he’s going to do tomorrow. It’s a clear insult to Wen Liang (another cousin—she’s not letting anyone else she doesn’t know into the compound right now), but he’s used to being insulted by cultivators anyway, so she doesn’t think he’ll take it too hard. She makes sure to press a little extra silver into his palm when she dismisses him for the evening, and hopes that in future times he’ll at least be around to remember this offense, instead of what she fears might happen to all the non-cultivators if the war that’s already starting comes to Yiling without the intervention of the plan she’s committed herself to.

Wen Chao, fortunately for her, is also the sort of useless person who, once they get an idea in their head, cannot keep their focus on their previous plans. So whatever plans he had had to torment her (such as asking more details about her or A-Ning’s involvement with the Jiangs, or just staying in Yiling under her roof) have apparently gone right out of his head with the new idea he’s formed out of her false reports. He’s going to set a trap in Qishan, one which will, in his own words “destroy that insolent Wei Wuxian the way we destroyed his overweening fool of a sect leader.”

Of course, even if there were any chance that Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian were going to fall into the trap, it wouldn’t do anything to Wei Wuxian’s golden core. And Wen Chao is definitely the overweening fool in any situation in which he is involved. But it won’t do for her to mention either, so she is silent as he plots, and cackles, and eats the special plum cakes she had been saving for herself as a reward if no one died on the mountain. And then the next day he leaves, thankfully taking Wen Zhuliu and Wang Lingjiao with him, as well as most of the money she had saved up by buying stores for the supervisory office frugally, and a full two-thirds of her guards—a number she had subtly negotiated up from half, by strategically demurring when he asked for half of them and thus causing him to ‘punish’ her by taking more—and thus leaving Yiling even more undefended than usual.

He’s in such a hurry, in fact, that he absolutely forgets to do anything intelligent, like set up any communication system between them and him, or ask about any of her sources, or even go beyond the main hall and the high-ranking guest quarters where he’s appropriated the best rooms (not that they weren’t for him and his family anyway). She does not remind him. In fact, she takes advantage of the fact that he explicitly asks her not to accompany him beyond the gates of the compound (let alone outside of Yiling) to hunt down Uncles Four and Five and convince them to counterspread the rumors she claims to have already heard among the farmers.

It doesn’t take much convincing, since Wei Wuxian somehow used the night before to bond with Uncle Four about alcohol.

In fact, it takes more time for her to drag the two of them out of bed, since apparently “bonding” necessarily involved consuming as many of said alcoholic beverages as possible, which was a surprising number given that by some miracle they had actually not left the confined grounds of her own personal suite of rooms (she had slept the night in Wen Ning’s room, just to make sure no one noticed an extra space being filled overnight). Her own family had to be informed—which is why Uncle Four was even aware of Wei Wuxian’s existence—because they have been serving as her personal attendants, but the rest of the supervisory office, and indeed the rest of Yiling, should hopefully be completely oblivious to the presence of two fugitives in the head office.

She is very glad she doesn’t know exactly where Jiang Yanli is at this particular moment. Even if this whole house of cards comes down, at least one of her friends’ family will be safe.

The next day after Wen Chao’s overeager departure, she makes sure that Uncle Five reports to her in the hearing of some of her more enthusiastically supervisory subordinates that rumors now suggest that Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian were instead headed to Qinghe and not Qishan—an easy enough mistake to make, and one that allows her to head out with a small contingent in plainclothes (including two new recruits, Wen Chan and Wen Xian) in that general direction.

As soon as they’re in the clear, this turns into a flight to Lanling, with Wei Wuxian on Wen Ning’s sword and Jiang Cheng with her.

She really, really hopes this is a good idea.

On the other hand, she supposes, it doesn’t really matter if it is; at this point, the die is cast.

Chapter Text

Lanling is, of course, ridiculous. She’s never visited before, but she doesn’t think she was missing much. Carp Tower is pretty, but everyone there is so ridiculously petty and out for themselves that she’s fairly confident the only way this sect even survives is because they have more money than any two gods you might care to name, and throw it around at every problem. Except the threat of Wen Ruohan, of course, because heaven forbid they use any of that gold for good. But this is, she reflects, ultimately a good thing for her, if not for the world as a whole, because it means that the discussions that started with the arrival of Sect Leader Yao at Lanling before the fall of Lotus Pier are somehow still ongoing, and Lanling is buzzing with other cultivators from sects both major and minor alongside those idiotic Jins.

Fortunately for her and the Yunmeng boys, the first Jins they encounter are under the command of Jin Zixuan. This doesn’t initially seem like a benefit, since he and Wei Wuxian start squabbling almost immediately, but it does mean that someone vouches for both them and her on the approach to Carp Tower—which is highly convenient since they’re all dressed like Wens and would probably have been attacked as spies or enemy combatants if Wei Wuxian hadn’t started yelling that the “peacock had better not have laid a hand on my sister.” Instead of focusing on her Wennishness or their costumes, everyone’s attention is clearly on the Jiang sect’s arrival at the conference, and she and her brother are swept along in the tide of questions about the fate of Lotus Pier.

The Jiang Cheng she sees at Carp Tower is in many ways the complete opposite of the one she tended with Wei Wuxian in Yiling before the core transfer. Where he was listless and self-recriminating, now he is bold and determined. Where he was weak and if not quiet not particularly interested in asserting anything but his pain, now he is strong and forceful. Where he was angry at all Wens everywhere, now he is strategic and thoughtful about how to split apart the sect that Wen Ruohan has forged—beginning, of course, with her own Dafan Wen at Yiling.

It’s actually quite impressive.

Wei Wuxian is, of course, the same person he has always been, though she has a chance to observe him more closely now that the four of them are meeting every day so that she can monitor both Jiang Cheng’s new core and Wei Wuxian’s lack of one. She doesn’t know what excuse the young masters have given for her close attendance on them; she does know they haven’t told anyone about the core transfer yet because, as Wei Wuxian puts it, “there’s a difference between keeping it a secret and not using it to the best of our abilities.” Giving away knowledge to Jin Guangshan for no reason would definitely not be the latter, she agrees. But it does mean that they have to sit through interminable discussions while they wait for the right moment to announce it.

“I’m telling you, Wen Ruohan is sitting on a powderkeg.” Jiang Cheng doesn’t slam his hands onto the table, but Wen Qing can tell he really, really wants to. “Not all the Wens are vicious homicidal maniacs. It’s just his family. If we can divide the others from the main body in Qishan…”

“It’s too risky. What if we end up stuck between two Wen armies that way? We’ll get slaughtered.” Sect Leader Ouyang is just as weak and vacillating as his best friend, Sect Leader Yao, and is clearly taking his cues from Jin Guangshan, who hasn’t spoken yet but whose skepticism is swirling through the room like a living fog.

“Obviously we wouldn’t do this if there was a Wen army in Yiling.” Wei Wuxian chimes in, for once taking things seriously. “But there isn’t. Wen Chao pulled out most of the garrison three days ago, headed for the indoctrination camp in Qishan.”

“How do you know that?” Jin Zixun is also, unfortunately, at this meeting. “Does Wen Chao provide you with personal updates on his movements?”

“He knows because we were there.” Jiang Cheng is not doing as good a job as she would prefer at hanging onto his temper, but he can probably be excused. “As we have already said, multiple times.”

“And why were you there, Sect Leader Jiang? What business did you have at the Yiling Supervisory Office?” Sect Leader Yao is almost as useless as Wen Chao, if less violent.

“They were there because my brother smuggled them out of Yunmeng to save their lives.” Wen Qing doesn’t add ‘as we’ve already told you,’ but she’s well aware that her tone of voice implies it. “The Dafan Wen have no interest in Wen Ruohan’s war. All we ask is that you let us live in peace. In exchange, we offer you Yiling Supervisory Office and my own services as a healer.”

“And what value is that, Lady Wen?” Jin Guangshan finally speaks, and the other voices fall silent, as if it were a cue. “Why should we long to have a Wen as our healer in our campaign against the Wen?”

She shares a glance with Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng. They’d always planned to do this. This might not be ideal, but apparently now is the moment.

Or perhaps not.

“Excuse me, Sect Leader Jin.” The dulcet tones of Lan Xichen do not cut through the silence but merely slide into it as if the silence had been waiting for them all along. “My sect can vouch for Lady Wen’s healing skill. During her time at Cloud Recesses, the healers there have informed me, her innate skill at healing was only matched by her inquiring mind, seeking out new knowledge in the healing arts.” He bows to her. “Lady Wen, I commend you on your diligence. It is because of you that your brother is as strong as he is, is it not?”

“It is.” She doesn’t like talking about Wen Ning’s past, but she was about to metaphorically spill Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian’s guts out on the floor, so she might as well admit to this as well. “My brother has been ill since he was a youth, and I have dedicated my life to his health and safety.”

“And look how well he’s turned out!” Wei Wuxian slings a casual arm around Wen Ning and pulls him forward. “Young Master Wen here is a fine young man, and one of the best archers I’ve ever seen.”

“Ah, th-thank you, Young Master Wei.” A-Ning hates being the center of attention, and blushes hard as the eyes of the cultivation world swing towards him.

“And you expect us to believe that?” Jin Zixun seems personally offended by the idea that Wen Ning could be good at anything, and Wen Qing bristles.

“Indeed.” A deep voice from the entrance of the hall takes the attention from Wen Ning, who slides back next to her while the others are occupied.

“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian seems to hardly notice Wen Ning’s absence. “What are you doing here? When did you arrive?”

“Now.” Lan Wangji strides into the room at the exact moment when everyone’s attention is most focused on him with the innate drama that the Lans possess, but which they would all deny point-blank if asked, and bows to his brother. “Brother.” He turns to Jin Guangshan and bows as well. “Sect Leader Jin.” He does not thank Jin Guangshan for his hospitality, as would normally be expected, but Lan Wangji is known for his laconic nature, so it passes unremarked, though Wen Qing is sure she is not the only one who notices.

“Wangji. What brings you here?” Lan Xichen greets his brother and the two somehow move without visible effort to present a unified front.

“You had not returned. Uncle worried. Thought you might need support.”

“Ah.” Lan Xichen smiles, and it occurs to Wen Qing that he may have as much use for his smiles as Lan Wangji does for his frowns. “At the moment we are discussing Lady Wen’s skill as a healer.”

“Most skilled.” Lan Wangji nods to her and she nods back.

“Thank you, Second Young Master Lan.”

“Yes, yes, she’s a very good healer.” Sect Leader Yao has apparently had enough of not being the center of attention. “But that doesn’t explain why having her in the healing tents would be worth changing our war plans for.”

“There is also Yiling.” Nie Mingjue decides to insert himself into the conversation, and Wen Qing is mildly surprised to find him apparently on her side. “Gaining it as a base would make retaking Lotus Pier much easier as well.”

“Eventually, yes, but why now?” Sect Leader Ouyang is not conscious, she thinks, of how close he comes to death by Zidian for having the temerity to suggest that retaking Lotus Pier should be anything but the highest of priorities. Instead, Jiang Cheng takes a deep breath, meets her eyes, and steps forward, drawing eyes to himself almost as effectively as a Lan.

“As to that…”

Chapter Text

Wen Qing has to hand it to Jiang Cheng. He manages to put the blame squarely on Wen Chao and by extension Wen Ruohan, not on the Wens as a whole, and to somehow paint the destruction of his golden core as worse and more worthy of revenge than the fall of Lotus Pier. Well, maybe not that, but certainly as an exacerbating and incriminating detail: something outside the pale, beyond the supposedly civilized world of honorable warfare.

If Weng Qing were to give a single useless piece of unadorned rock from the foot of Dafan Mountain about the concept of honorable warfare, it would infinitely increase how much she cares about it—healers either love or hate war, all war, because of the horrors it calls on them to fix, and she knows which side she falls on—but she has to admire the effort.

She’s also impressed at how he manages to connect the horror of Wen Zhuliu’s core-melting hand (a horror that he clearly feels bodily even with Wei Wuxian’s core pulsing into his meridians, and which he manages to make his hearers, even her, feel too) to the urgency of the need to attack, take Yiling, retake Lotus Pier, and overthrow Wen Ruohan.

“I am not asking any of you to sacrifice more than we Jiangs have already sacrificed,” he concludes. “Nor am I asking you to sacrifice as much. I am merely asking you to assist me in regaining what is mine and rejecting utterly the deviltry of Wen Ruohan. If we strike now, there is no need for any other sect—any other sect leader—to suffer as we and I have suffered. If we delay, who is to say which of your sects he will burn next—or upon which of you Wen Chao may next unleash the horror of the Core Melting Hand.”

The silence that follows is heavy, and Wen Qing feels it as defeat. It is the kind of silence spread by men who know they ought to act one way, in all honor, dignity, and humanity, and who desperately do not want to. Even though the conference has confirmed their willingness to stand up to the Wens, it has been an abstract willingness, a theoretical opposition that, she can now tell, each sect was hoping another would shoulder in the immediate present. Some of this is the influence of Jin Guangshan, who has never explicitly said he and his sect will contribute to the war effort, even though they are hosting the conference, instead sitting apart and apparently disinterested for most of the talking. Some is the inherent risk-aversion of the sects themselves, even those like the Yao who have already been attacked. But Jiang Cheng’s ringing speech has brought out to the fore the weakness of the alliance, its fragility, and she can already feel the room turning against him.

To her surprise, however, the silence does not last long enough to tear them fully apart.

It should not be a surprise which sect chooses to speak up for the Jiangs. Lotus Pier was not the first major sect headquarters to burn; Jiang Cheng was not the first sect heir to flee his home in fear. Cloud Recesses may not have become a Supervisory Office in Gusu, but Lan Xichen only recently came out of hiding. So it is not really a shock that it is a Lan who speaks next.

It is more of a surprise which Lan it is. She should have paid more attention to Wei Wuxian when he insisted that Lan Wangji liked him, she supposes. Or at least to Jiang Cheng when he complained about the same.

“I agree with Jiang Wanyin.” She’s not sure she’s ever heard those words from Lan Wangji’s mouth before, and from the look of it neither has Jiang Cheng. “We should act now. Should take Yiling.”

“Why should we do the Jiangs work for them? You Lans took back Cloud Recesses on your own; we Yaos are doing the same. Why shouldn’t the Jiangs do what is necessary for to help the Jiangs without involving us?” Sect Leader Yao is not only a sniveler but a hypocrite and liar; Wei Wuxian has already filled her in on how the man came to Jiang Fengmian for help in the days before Lotus Pier fell. She feels a sudden urge to stab the man, not with a needle but with her seldom-used sword.

Apparently this is the last straw for Jiang Cheng as well, as he thumps the table and bellows into the hall. “You speak of the Jiangs helping the Jiangs. I tell you the Jiang sect has already sacrificed more than you could possibly know or ever hope to equal.” Wen Qing’s eyes meet Wei Wuxian’s as he steps up beside his sect leader, the knowledge of what he is about to admit to—what they are about to admit to—heavy in his expression. Jiang Cheng’s voice modulates into a cold flat sound that Wen Qing has never heard before, and hopes never to hear again. “I speak not of my own sacrifice, but that of my first disciple, Wei Wuxian, who has given more to the rebuilding of the Jiang sect than anyone could ask—more, in fact, than I would have let him give me, had he merely offered it. I told you how Wen Zhuliu melted my core; how Wen Chao laughed at the idea of burning out the Jiang’s new sect leader just as surely as he burnt my home. But I have not told you everything, because I do not stand before you as a mediocre suppliant, devoid of spiritual energy. I carry a golden core—his golden core—because Wei Wuxian gave me his so that the Jiang sect might not burn with mine and Lotus Pier.” He turns and bows to Wei Wuxian in acknowledgement, and then embraces his brother with one arm as he turns to the shocked faces of the cultivation world. He seizes the moment before they can break into pandemonium to incline his head to Sect Leader Yao and continue as if he were speaking to him alone, knowing of course that the entire room is hanging on his words. “I do not ask that you equal his sacrifice. I could never ask that of anyone. I did not ask it of him; he offered freely. But I do ask that you honor his bravery, his pain, and his dedication by putting the words you have already spoken here into deeds, and do not allow Wen Ruohan, Wen Chao, and Wen Zhuliu to triumph in despite of all that he has done.”

Then he pulls Wei Wuxian into a full embrace and allows the room to descend into chaos.

Chapter Text

Somewhere in the chaos, of course, Lan Wangji has managed to get his hands on Wei Wuxian’s wrist to check his qi, and then loudly confirms the truth of Jiang Cheng’s assertion to the rest of the room. Now he’s standing next to the two Yunmeng boys, his hand still wrapped around Wei Wuxian’s wrist, and Wen Qing is reconsidering everything she remembers from her time at Cloud Recesses. Not least of all the moment when Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji appeared out of nowhere (or worse, out of a freaking hole in an unbroken cliff wall), tumbled on top of each other, and then appeared to be tied to each other by the wrist with Lan Wangji’s headband—his sacred headband that (according the endless rules she’d had to learn) was only supposed to be touched by parents, children, and spouses.

Maybe that had been less of a mistake than she’d thought at the time.

As it happens, though, it’s very good that it’s Lan Wangji who’s chosen to take the initiative and confirm this, because no one else (except maybe Lan Xichen) seems to have made the same connections she has, and so the reaction of the room has been to accept whatever Lan Wangji says about Wei Wuxian as absolute gospel, because everyone knows (for a certain flavor of everyone) that Wei Wuxian does nothing but annoy the Second Jade of Lan, and so if he is speaking on his behalf, it must be only because Lan Wangji is such a fine upstanding young man. As far as she knows he is one, but the way his hand has gone from testing Wei Wuxian’s flow of energy to simply circling his wrist suggests something else might be at play. She wouldn’t accuse him of lying (after all, in this case she knows for certain he is not) but she doesn’t think it would be out of the question for him to at least bend the truth for Wei Wuxian.

No one else needs to know that, however, and she files it away for future use—not for blackmail, she would never do that, but definitely for endless teasing as soon as she can.

The two Lans are eyeballing each other now in that slightly creepy way they do and then Lan Xichen is the first sect leader to stand forth and declare that his sect will stand with the Jiangs. Nie Mingjue nods and adds his assent as well, and suddenly the sects are piling over each other to assure Jiang Cheng that they never had any intent of doing anything but providing the Jiang sect with the immediate assistance it requires, and they are honored by his willingness to accept their aid. Even Sect Leader Yao vomits out something about his great gratitude to Jiang Fengmian for having brought him safely to Carp Tower, and she can see a vein in Jiang Cheng’s eyebrow twitch as he keeps silent, while Wei Wuxian places a calming hand on his shoulder. To her surprise, he meets her eyes before visibly taking a deep breath and thanking Sect Leader Yao in terms that are biting if you know him but seem sufficiently gracious to someone as oblivious as the other sect leader.

She notices Jin Zixuan whispering in his father’s ear urgently and is shocked when this appears to bear fruit. She was under the distinct impression that Jin Guangshan had no real interest in ever listening to his only legitimate heir, keeping him around more as a decorative ornament than anything else, but the peacock (as Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian have gotten her thinking of him as well since they won’t call him anything else and he comes up in discussion more than she would think their sister’s ex-fiancé ought to) appears to have some eagle in him after all.

Jin Guangshan, of course, makes a spectacle out of it, drawing everyone’s attention away from Jiang Cheng and making it clear that he is acting entirely out of the benevolence and goodwill in his heart (as if he had any—though he’s at least no Wen Ruohan, she’ll give him that). But he does end up promising not only money and supplies but active support, and when he sees Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue make their way over to Jiang Cheng to start discussing strategy he even gets down from his dais and joins them, the four major sect leaders making a stark portrait of cooperation. She knows it’s for public relations, but it’s more than she ever expected from him.

Speaking of more than she expected, she finds herself being drawn into the same conversation by a hand on her wrist, one she recognizes as Jiang Cheng’s in the moment before she’s thrust into the circle of sect leaders.

“Lady Wen should be a part of our discussion,” he interjects, ignoring the look she’s trying to send him that says ‘don’t waste your political capital on me any more than you have to.’ “She is, after all, the head of the supervisory office in Yiling and thus the highest ranking Wen on our side.”

“Is she really?” She is very glad that a lifetime of knowing Wen Ruohan has taught her how to keep her eyes wide and innocent while thinking very hard about the pain points she might access on a human body, because that same lifetime has taught her that Jin Guangshan isn’t actually asking about the factual nature of Jiang Cheng’s statement (it’s a bit obvious, since there are only two Wens here and the other is her younger brother) but questioning her loyalties. As if saving the Jiang clan, hiding them from Wen Chao, flying them here, and offering to hand over Yiling without a fight weren’t evidence enough.

Fortunately, she doesn’t have to respond because Nie Mingjue snorts audibly beside her. “Of course she is.” He doesn’t touch her, which she’s grateful for (since stabbing sect leaders in a non-surgery context is probably frowned on), but his expression looks like he’d like to put a hand on her shoulder and pat it indulgently. “My little brother always said she was good friends with the Jiangs at the lectures in Cloud Recesses. I’ll bet she’s just as mad about Lotus Pier as any of us.”

“Indeed, I am certain Lady Wen is a most valuable ally.” Lan Xichen bows to her and Jiang Cheng squeezes her wrist, which is how she realizes he hasn’t let go yet. She doesn’t have time to process that realization, however, because Jin Guangshan just scoffs and starts asking technical questions about the defenses of Yiling—questions she has easy answers to, because she is the head of the supervisory office and also not an incompetent wastrel like Wen Chao—and then Nie Mingjue, who is clearly the general here, has follow-ups, and she gets pulled into the discussion of how to plan their campaign almost without knowing it.

And that is how she somehow becomes assigned as Nie Mingjue’s chief strategy officer in the first phase of what they’ve apparently decided to call the Sunshot Campaign.

She has no problem with the name. It’s not like she’s ever particularly felt like being a Wen made her like the glorious sun; if anything, she’s spent her entire life trying to keep her particular branch of the family in the shade.

Chapter Text

She stays only a day, because she has to get back to Yiling in order to ensure it will fall appropriately. She leaves Wen Ning with Wei Wuxian, and with strict orders to make sure he takes more care than he will want to, because he doesn’t have a golden core anymore. She has never voluntarily left A-Ning with anyone but Granny before, but she somehow knows she can trust Wei Wuxian and the rest of the Jiangs with him; something bound them all together when she held Wei Wuxian’s core in her hands, at his request, and she feels as if she is leaving her two little brothers together. If something happens to her—and for all she’s kept a brave face in front of A-Ning, she knows the possibility that Wen Chao will return angry at her deception before the Sunshot cultivators arrive is not zero—at least Wen Ning will be with family.

The flight back to Yiling is uneventful, and she falls back into the rhythms of running the family and the supervisory office without difficulty. She spreads outside the compound the news that Wen Ning was following Wei Wuxian’s tracks—it’s not even a lie!—and within, with her family, she quietly prepares them all to evacuate after their upcoming surrender. She has no intention of leaving her people in Yiling, in case there are retaliatory attacks; once she hands over the town, she herself will fulfill her promise and serve in the campaign, but her family will be spirited away somewhere safe.

Because she is in Yiling, she is able to attend at the birth of Wen Chen’s child, a beautiful bouncing boy. They name him Yuan, and he is absolutely adorable. Well, adorable for a baby; all babies are, fundamentally, jowly old men who poop all the time, but Wen Qing has seen enough of them, served at enough births, to be certain that A-Yuan is a particularly cute little baby given all that. She hands him over to Granny, who is after all his grandmother too, and wishes that Wen Chen’s husband were with them—but he is a soldier in Wen Xu’s army, and even her best efforts have not been able to get him reassigned to guard duty in Yiling.

A-Yuan’s cuteness helps distract her from the worry. When will Nie Mingjue’s army be large enough for him to move on Yiling? When will Wen Chao realize she’s lied to him? What will his reaction be? These questions pound in her brain as she waits, and she plans, and she prepares. She starts a notebook full of all the seemingly important information she can glean from the official Wen documents that pass through her office, then a second composed of all the seemingly unimportant information that someone else might find meaning in. These notebooks quickly become more like entire files, but her bags are large enough to hold them all, and she would hate to lose vital information for the campaign simply because she didn’t bother to keep track of it. She notes the locations of the Wen armies and supply bases; the particular strengths of individual cultivators; the status of Wen Ruohan’s ongoing search for more Yin iron. Whatever comes to her goes into the books, and she is grateful for the activity.

As it turns out, the two things she has been worrying about happen simultaneously, or almost so. The very day she sees the Nie, Jin, Lan, and Jiang banners arrive outside Yiling a messenger arrives from Wen Chao announcing his imminent arrival and her arrest.

Fortunately, the messenger does not know what he is carrying, and so hands the message to her.

Even more fortunately, he does so when only she and two of her uncles are in the receiving hall.

Well, fortunately for her. Less so for him, although she is kind. She gives him a choice. It’s not her fault he chooses “try to run” over either “quietly sit in the dungeons until they do a prisoner exchange” or “join us.”

Well, like she always says, a needle a day keep the doctor okay. At least if she’s flinging it into the neck of someone trying to get her killed.

She opens the gates of Yiling to Nie Mingjue, exchanges bows with him, and escorts him to her compound while his men round up the city guard and give them a similar choice to the one she gave the messenger. Either their methods are more effective or there’s some latent misogyny in Wen culture, because they are far more successful than she was. The walls of Yiling are guarded by Nie and Lan cultivators, Jin stewards are taking stock of the town’s resources (or, more accurately, verifying the information she’s already given them) and Jiang Yanli is organizing a massive soup kitchen in the central square to introduce everyone to their new position in the alliance.

It’s the first time she’s seen Jiang Yanli since the surgery, and she’s a little nervous when she comes to get her own bowl. After all, she cut open both of Yanli’s brothers, and lied to one about what she was doing while betraying the trust the other had given her that she would never tell the truth. She ripped the core out of the older of Yanli’s brothers and messed with the self-determination of the other. She isn’t really looking forward to what she has to say about it. After all, Jin Zixuan may be an idiot, but Wen Qing knows that there’s a lot more to Yanli than meets the eye.

So she’s more than a little surprised when Yanli puts down the bowl of soup she was about to hand her, rushes around the table, and throws her arms around Wen Qing.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She lets go before Wen Qing can do more than goggle at her, but then starts to bow to her and really, that’s not necessary or appropriate, so Wen Qing stops her before she can get below a fifteen degree angle.

“Lady Jiang!”

“Thank you, Lady Wen. Thank you for my brothers’ lives.” If she can’t bow, apparently, Yanli is going to go in for another hug—she really is Wei Wuxian’s sister—and so Wen Qing is enveloped again. “I know A-Cheng wouldn’t have done anything about his problems, and A-Xian would have just let himself suffer in silence if you hadn’t told A-Cheng about what he did,” she explains. “So then A-Cheng would have been mad at A-Xian for not letting him know what was wrong, and A-Xian would have pulled away, and I would have lost them both.” That is…distressingly plausible, Wen Qing realizes. “So, thank you.” She pulls back and hold Wen Qing at arms length. “But if you ever hurt either of my brothers again…”

“Understood.” Wen Qing relaxes. This kind of talk she’s more comfortable with. “I promise I will only perform surgeries on your brothers in the case of medical emergencies.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant, but I’m glad to hear it.” Wen Qing is saved from asking just what she did mean by Yanli taking her by the arm and whisking her away to a table under a tent with two chairs. Yanli maneuvers her into one, disappears for a moment, then reappears with two bowls of the soup. “Now, you must tell me everything I need to know about what symptoms to expect in those boys. You know them—they both insist they’re fine—but I know that A-Xian at least must need some additional care…”

Wen Qing lets herself get carried off down the river of medical advice. Whatever Yanli meant by hurting her brothers is a problem for another day—as is what they’re all going to do when Wen Chao arrives tomorrow. After all, he’s expecting to find her in prison, not supported by an army of Nies and Lans. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when he finds out…she supposes she’ll have to settle for seeing his face after he’s captured, and that alone should be sweet enough.

Chapter Text

She doesn’t get to see Wen Chao’s face after being captured, because he’s never captured.

She’s okay with this, because he’s dead instead.

Nie Mingjue is standing next to her on the training ground, planning out the next steps of the campaign, when the sentries report the small flight of Wen cultivators coming in on their swords over the town. This morning they were reinforced with a second wave of Sunshot cultivators, including those closest to her: Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, joined at the hip, and her own brother tagging along behind them. A-Ning and Wei Wuxian are drilling Nie and Lan cultivators in archery exercises in the training ground, which is why she and Nie Mingjue are doing their planning outdoors today—she’s not willing to let A-Ning out of her sight if she doesn’t have to, and she’s seen enough of Nie Mingjue and his little brother that it doesn’t surprise her when he offers to do their work near hers. Nie Huiasang is somewhere nearby, she knows; he avoids the training ground like the plague, but she has no doubt that he’s somewhere in the vicinity, probably gossiping with Jiang Cheng or pestering Lan Wangji since she can see Wei Wuxian.

Of course Lan Wangji is here too; Jiang Cheng complained to her when he came to see her and Yanli this morning that he can’t get five minutes with his slightly older brother without Lan Wangji barging in. They were having tea—somehow Yanli made good tea out of the dregs left in the Yiling storehouses, which that confirms the Jiang theory that Jin Zixuan is an idiot for not snatching up Jiang Yanli when he had the chance—and unfortunately for her Wen Qing was drinking when he made his observation that Wei Wuxian still didn’t see anything usual about Lan Wangji’s behavior, so some of that delicious tea ended up sprayed across the table.

Wei Wuxian is so smart about some things and so stupid about others that she’s very glad she’s adopted him as one of her own. A-Li (as she now insists on being called) shouldn’t have to bear that whole burden.

But wherever Lan Wangji is, he’s not on the training ground when the news comes in. Nie Mingjue has the Sunshot cultivators scatter, in addition to his standing order to the troops in the larger city to make themselves invisible when Wen Chao arrives, but he waves Wei Wuxian and A-Ning over to where he and Wen Qing are sitting around their strategy table.

“So…” he looks at her expectantly. “What do you think we should do, Lady Wen?”

She shrugs. “How many cultivators did your scouts report?”

“A dozen.” That matches with what Wen Chao took with him, suggesting he didn’t reinforce the indoctrination camp guard at all. She makes a mental note of that for the future and turns to Wei Wuxian.

“How good is this group at shooting?”

“They’re getting there.” He grins at her. “Some live action targets wouldn’t hurt.” See? Sometimes he’s pretty quick on the uptake.

“A-Ning?” She turns to her brother. “Are you all right with…live targets?” She doesn’t want to shame her brother in front of his friends, but she knows he’s never shot at a living person before—though she’s not entirely sure Wei Wuxian has either—and she wants to be very sure he knows what he’s getting into.

He nods, slowly. “If they’re bad people.” Then a firmer nod. “Cousin Chao is a bad person, isn’t he, sister?”

“He is.” She can agree with that firmly without qualms.

“Then it’s settled. “Wei Wuxian hugs Wen Ning and she can see the tension seep out of her brother’s shoulders. “You’ll shoot at Wen Chao, and I’ll shoot at Wen Zhuliu, and we’ll let the others sort out who they want to shoot at, okay?”

“Yes, Young Master Wei.”

“Ah, ah, ah, none of that.” Wei Wuxian wags a finger in A-Ning’s face. “What did I tell you to call me?”

“Yes, Brother Wei.” A-Ning’s tone of voice is familiar to her—it’s the one he uses when he wants to sound like he’s frustrated but he’s actually smiling—but she’s never heard him use it to anyone other than her before. She tries her best not to feel dismayed at not being special anymore and to remember it’s a good thing that her brother is making friends.

“That’s better.” Wei Wuxian claps him on the shoulder and then gets up and starts yelling directions at the cultivators hiding in the pavilion. Wen Ning stands up and grabs his bow, then follows after a moment.

“You’ve raised a good kid.” She’d almost forgotten Nie Mingjue was there. “Any way you can get him to talk to Huiasang about the importance of being willing to actually use a weapon?”

“He can talk, but I doubt your brother will listen.” They exchange wry smiles and then there’s no time for more conversation because the Wen cultivators appear over the top of the pavilion and suddenly the air is full of arrows.

It’s not a fair fight. It was never intended to be a fair fight. Lotus Pier wasn’t a fair fight; neither was Cloud Recesses, and don’t get her started on the indoctrination camp. Fortunately for her sense of humanity (she is a healer after all), the Nie and Lan cultivators really aren’t that good at archery, and the ten cultivators accompanying Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu are knocked off their swords and injured, but not killed (except for Wang Lingjiao, who falls at a very bad angle directly onto stone steps, but that is at least a quick death, which is more than she deserves if the stories the Jiangs told her about Lotus Pier are true). Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu, on the other hand, are pierced through by arrows from her brother and Wei Wuxian, respectively, but are both stronger cultivators than their companions and manage to land in the center of the training ground.

“What treachery is this!” Wen Chao is definitely going for bravado but landing somewhere more around ‘pained and whiny.’ “Wen Qing…”

“Get her name out of your mouth.” Wei Wuxian strides forward, and Wen Qing briefly considers joining him before deciding that not being an idiot is the better part of valor. “Young Master Wen.” The honorific is definitely mocking. “Surprised to see me?”

Wen Zhuliu still has the strength to put himself in front of his master and so he does—a move that apparently gives the injured Wen Chao the sense of security needed to mock at Wei Wuxian.

“Be careful, little Wei, or my friend here will do to you what he already did to your fool of a sect leader.”

“He’s welcome to try.” Wei Wuxian laughs grimly and it occurs to Wen Qing that he is literally the only person here who Wen Zhuliu can’t do that to, and that Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu are the only two who don’t know that. “Or he can stand aside, and let me give you the justice you richly deserve.”

“I’m afraid not.” Wen Zhuliu is staggering still, but tips his head towards Wei Wuxian. “I owe the Wens a debt, and it will be repaid.”

“Tsk, tsk. How many other people’s lives must be spent to repay your debt?” Wei Wuxian shakes his head. “Besides, Wen Chao owes me more than one life by now.”

“Nevertheless.” Wen Zhuliu raises his sword as Wei Wuxian steps forward, clearly preparing to do battle, even though Wei Wuxian is not, Wen Qing notices, carrying Suibian—what would be the point?

He shakes his head again. “I’m sorry, Wen Zhuliu. That’s not how this is going to go.” In a single swift move he draws his bow and fires, and it seems to catch Wen Zhuliu off-guard, such that he makes no move to use his spiritual energy to block or deflect it—and Wen Chao is likewise immobilized, though the arrow now sticking out of his left eye might be a contributing factor. He crumples to the ground in an undignified heap, like a patchwork doll thrown down by a child in a tantrum.

Wen Zhuliu’s reaction may have been slow, but it still comes. He charges Wei Wuxian with a cry and for a moment Wen Qing thinks that he will succeed in running him through—until Wen Zhuliu too suddenly falls backwards, with the heavy blade of Baxia protruding from his chest. She turns to the side and yes, there is Nie Mingjue, his arm outstretched and his face like thunder (though when is it not, except with Nie Huiasang?).

He strides over and removes his saber from the corpse. “The Qishan Wen are not the only ones with loyal allies,” he says to the dead body of Wen Zhuliu, then turns to her again.

“So, Lady Wen—where were we?”

Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng is jealous when he shows up late to find Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu already taken care of. He’s a little shifty about where exactly he was, but Wei Wuxian doesn’t notice, being too excited about having slain the destroyer of Lotus Pier. Wen Qing later finds out that he’d been taking his brotherly role seriously, trying to get Lan Wangji to stop pestering Wei Wuxian about his lack of core, so he’d been sitting Lan Wangji down for ‘tactical debriefings’ where they compared the burning of Cloud Recesses and of Lotus Pier to glean details of how the Wens fight. It’s adorably Jiang Cheng of him—simultaneously practical and completely unnecessary, because obviously Wei Wuxian wants Lan Wangji’s attention—and she has to hold back a laugh when he tells her about it, all serious and indignant because Lan Wangji is still hovering around Wei Wuxian like a moth around a candle.

She’s not entirely sure, though, which is the insect and which the flame, because Wei Wuxian seems equally interested in Lan Wangji’s presence, as he always has.

Lan Wangji, it seems, spent the days before arriving in Yiling scouring the libraries in both Cloud Recesses and Carp Tower for information about cultivators who have lost their golden cores. Consequently, he has found several scores in a forgotten section of the Cloud Recesses library that apparently heal and soothe the bodies of non-cultivators particularly well. Since Wei Wuxian is now, technically, a non-cultivator, Lan Wangji has naturally memorized and perfected these songs and is now going through them in some kind of ranked order, one a night, playing each for Wei Wuxian.

Wen Qing knows this because he has asked her to check whether they are having any effect, since he is not a doctor and she, of all people, knows Wei Wuxian’s health the best.

Wei Wuxian definitely does not know Wei Wuxian’s health the best, because he keeps insisting to Lan Wangji and to her and to anyone who will listen that he’s totally fine and nothing has ever been wrong with him ever. Wen Qing doesn’t even know where to begin with that statement, since it’s about as false as anything Wen Chao ever said. Fortunately, A-Li seems to be of a similar mind, and Wei Wuxian is much worse at lying to her than anyone else, so they do occasionally get some sprigs of truth out of him.

His back hurts.

He can’t run as far or as fast as he could before, and his knees hurt when he tries.

His feet hurt after a long day standing.

Basically, he sounds like Granny Wen, only he’s a young, physically fit man.

Wen Qing takes the time to sort through his complaints and distinguish which are just Wei Wuxian being the whiny drama queen he always has been, and which are legitimate. Since Wei Wuxian’s typical complaints (the non-serious ones) are frequently interlaced with requests for Lan Wangji to carry him or similar shamelessness, this is not a difficult task. If Wei Wuxian is hiding it, it’s probably a real problem.

After about a week of dealing with this around planning for future campaigns with Nie Mingjue and caring for Wen Chen and little A-Yuan, she comes to a realization.

The reason Wei Wuxian is doing so poorly is not just that he doesn’t have a golden core. Ironically, all that work she did to take his golden core out in a safe manner means that his body still expects to draw on that qi for strength and healing, and now it can’t, so it isn’t properly healing using other means. A non-cultivator’s body learns how to heal, slowly but surely, and how to signal to the brain that it needs to rest through pain and fatigue earlier than a cultivator’s does. But Wei Wuxian has a cultivator’s body, and it hasn’t learned yet to prioritize those methods of healing that don’t require a golden core, or to signal pain and fatigue before things start to go wrong.

Long-term they’re going to have to find something to do about that, so that he can live a healthy and productive life. Short-term, during a war, it’s enough to have someone else ‘seal up’ his spiritual energy for him, a cue to his body that it needs to work around the blockage. But this has to be done every day, because external seals don’t linger that long. Usually this is a safety measure, since a longer-term external blockage would be dangerous to a cultivator. But for them, it is frustrating—or it would be, if Lan Wangji didn’t simply volunteer to do this service for Wei Wuxian every night before he plays his songs.

She bullies Wei Wuxian into accepting, because if he lets his stupid awkwardness around his crush ruin his physical body she will kill him, and damn the inconsistencies in that approach.

So now they are a unit: her, Wei Wuxian, and Lan Wangji, all working together to try to heal him. And she suddenly has a great deal more sympathy for Jiang Cheng, because third-wheeling those two is an intensely frustrating experience. More than once she just wants to beat her head against a wall at how they manage to pine at each other while in the same room without either of them noticing the other’s feelings.

It would be enough to drive her to drink, if she didn’t think have Jiang Cheng to complain to.

Fortunately she does, and so it becomes her daily tradition: help Lan Wangji with Wei Wuxian before the ridiculously early Lan bedtime, check on Wei Wuxian’s vitals, then swing around next door to Jiang Cheng’s suite to talk. Sometimes Nie Huiasang is there, since he and Jiang Cheng are old friends; sometimes Yanli is, because of course she’s equally worried about her younger brother; sometimes no one else is, because they don’t have to be. It’s a good few weeks, she realizes, looking back. She enjoys it. The challenge of Wei Wuxian’s condition combined with the company she keeps manages to make her both occupied and satisfied with life.

Of course, since the world is terrible, none of that lasts.

Chapter Text

Wen Chen is not doing well after the birth, and Wen Qing is worried. A-Yuan is doing great: a big happy squalling baby. But Wen Chen hasn’t stopped bleeding the way she ought, and her qi feels listless, like it doesn’t want to circulate properly. Wen Chen was never much of a cultivator; even among the Dafan Wen, whose cultivators tend to be healers rather than the more heavily developed warrior cultivators of the Qishan Wen, she was considered weak. But this is more than that; it’s alarming, and Wen Qing desperately wants to keep an eye on her herself.

Unfortunately, it looks like that’s not going to be possible, because she herself is the one bargaining chip she had with the cultivation world beyond Yiling, and it’s being called in.

She, along with most of the Nie forces in Yiling, is being called north to start a new front in Qinghe, heading directly for Qishan. The idea is that by threatening the Nightless City more directly, they can either draw attention off of the Yiling front or trap whatever army does head for Yiling between the forces remaining there (under the joint command of Jiang Cheng and Lan Xichen) and the hammerblow from the north.

She makes the Lan healer who is taking over as head healer in Yiling for the occupying forces promise to pay close attention to Wen Chen, but she did promise her services to the Sunshot Campaign as payment, along with Yiling itself, and so where Nie Mingjue commands she must go.

He’s called her north because she is the member of the campaign who has the most recent experience with the approaches to the Nightless City. She’s sure they’ve changed the passcodes three times and added layers upon layers of defenses—or they will once they hear about Wen Chao, if they somehow haven’t already—but she can’t deny that she did work for Wen Ruohan, which is something none of the other cultivators there can actually say. So she’s going to do what she can; and besides, since this front is anticipated to involve open warfare in the fields, her healing skill will be in demand.

It still breaks her heart to leave Wen Chen in someone else’s healing tents, but she can’t fly her north, so she has to.

She does, however, bring Wei Wuxian with her. It’s a knockdown, drag-out fight with Jiang Cheng, who blusters and screams and demands that his brother stay with him, but with Yanli’s help she’s able to convince him that if A-Li comes with Wei Wuxian there will at least be another representative of the Jiang interests. It also helps that Wei Wuxian himself points out that Wen Qing is the only one even vaguely competent to help him recover further, and so he has to be with Wen Qing wherever she goes.

So, apparently, does Lan Wangji, though she has to admit that his musical choices have been helping, so she will put up with the pining.

She shouldn’t have to put up with any pining, since they’re so clearly mutually interested, but then again while they’re two of the most brilliant cultivators she’ll ever meet, no one said they were smart.

She wishes she didn’t have to leave one of her two patients behind, but with Yiling so close to Yunmeng, Jiang Cheng’s place is clear. One of the three Yunmeng leaders needs to stay on that front, and Yanli is hardly a military specialist. So that’s that.

She says goodbye to Jiang Cheng, resists the urge to tell him to be good, doesn’t resist the urge to tell him to keep up the core-strengthening exercises she’s assigned him to make sure his meridians stay accepting of Wei Wuxian’s core, nags the Lan healer once more about Wen Chen, and gets on her sword for Qinghe.

Her impression of the Unclean Realms is that its name is justified. Not because it’s actually dirty, but because something in her skin itches wherever she goes, as if the qi in the place were just subtly off. As a healer, she’s constantly attuned to the rhythms of the energy around her, especially the spiritual energy, and the Unclean Realms just feel…off somehow. She can’t quite describe what it is, but it’s strongest on the training ground. She’s never felt this way around Nie Mingjue or Nie Huiasang alone, but she begins to suspect it’s something about having so many Nie cultivators constantly around her. She doesn’t know quite what that would do, or why it should matter, but she keeps the spiritual equivalent of an eye out in any case.

She somehow gets roped into following Wei Wuxian and Nie Huiasang around on the latter’s enthusiastic tour of his home, which means spending hours admiring fans and birds while he tells them in exquisite detail about why and how he acquired each one. 

It’s not as bad as it sounds. Nie Huiasang’s enthusiasm is actually infectious—she’s literally never seen him care so much—and his descriptions are apt and often quite funny.

It doesn’t hurt that he lets Wei Wuxian rag on his taste in a way that reminds her oddly of Jiang Cheng, minus the shoving Wei Wuxian’s shoulder or punching him in the arm after he says things.

Her creepy feeling dissipates somewhat after that, especially since Nie Mingjue gets them on the march extremely quickly: the Nies are clearly loaded for bear and quite inspired to follow their leader’s emphatic commands.

She thinks at least a little of it is also her own clear anxiety about being away from Yiling and worrying about what’s happening there, which spurs Nie Mingjue, like the good friend she’s beginning to suspect he is, to make sure the second front is opened as soon as possible. Oh, he coats it in military necessity and strategy, but the pace is clearly increased once she lets slip that she’s worried.

She lets him have his purported reasons, but she’s nevertheless glad to be on the move and out of the Unclean Realms.

She’s a little worried about Wei Wuxian, too, and hopes that even though he can’t fight like he used to a movement towards something will help her friend be a little less listless. Even Yanli’s soup isn’t having its usual effect, and that is extremely worrying. It’s nothing physical; it seems more like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. She finds things, and asks Nie Mingjue to find things, but she knows he can tell things are different. Of course they are. How could they not be?

Still, though it’s horrifying to think of it as a good thing, the war does provide a distraction of a sort. The battles start quickly as they march towards Qishan, and soon she has her hands literally full of injured Nies to care for. War is hell, she thinks. At least hopefully this one will be a short one.

She notices that the spiritual energy of the Nie soldiers she treats is slightly unusual, at least from her experience. She ropes in Wei Wuxian to speculate and theorize with her about it, since she hopes that having something to concentrate on, something she actually needs his help with, will draw him a little bit more out of himself. It works for that, thank the heavens, but neither of them can come up with what, exactly, is going on.

In fact, she doesn’t get an answer about it until she questions Nie Huiasang—and even then, only when he’s drunk on Wei Wuxian’s secret stash of Qinghe grain alcohol.

It’s only when he holds a finger to her lips (he’s drunk, so she doesn’t bite it off for the familiarity) and says “no, no, Lady Wen, it’s no mystery, it’s just the sabers” that everything falls into place.

Chapter Text

Wen Qing makes a few connections for herself.

Number one: she has never worked with saber-wielders before; neither has anyone outside of the Nie sect, really. She’s never ever heard of a rogue cultivator using Nie techniques, let alone a member of another major or even minor sect. Well, there are a couple of Nie-adjacent minor sects in the valleys nearby Qinghe, but they might as well be Nies.

Number two: perhaps because of this, when she treats the Nie cultivators, their sabers are never in the tent. They’re not far away, but it’s a practice she’s carried over from her normal experience, where having another sharp object in the room is an unnecessary danger. The swords are held by a trusted friend or, in their absence, one of her assistants, with all due respect owed a spiritual weapon. So here, she has been doing the same with the sabers. She wonders if this was a good idea. Perhaps she has underestimated how different treating saber-wielders might be from sword-users.

Number three: the eeriness she felt in the Unclean Realms was definitely because of whatever the heck this was. Now that she thinks about it, the feeling in the Nie headquarters is just what she would expect if the strangeness from the sabers were wound around everything. So they have to be connected.

Number four: she has the perfect person available to her to explain it.

She doesn’t waste any time. She drags Wei Wuxian with her (which means she drags Lan Wangji with her as well, now that they’re not drinking) and accosts Nie Mingjue the next time she knows he’s supposed to have free time on his schedule. As it turns out, that’s the time he’s blocked out for spending time with his brother, which she has no compunction about interrupting. After all, it was Nie Huiasang who made the suggestion to her in the first place.

“Tell me, Sect Leader Nie, what is it about your sabers that makes my healing less effective?”

She knows Nie Mingjue well, by now, knows he appreciates bluntness in a way that would make even Jiang Cheng blush, and so she simply barges ahead.

“About the sabers?” Nie Mingjue looks at her and then at his brother, who is fanning himself rapidly in the corner. She wonders why he immediately looked to him, and then notices Wei Wuxian staring—so she elbows him to pay attention.

“Yes, about the sabers.” She walks up to him and looks him in the eye. “There is something different about the spiritual energy in your soldiers, and if I’m to treat them properly, I need to know about it. The only difference I have been able to find is the sabers.”

“You found?” Nie Mingjue eyes his brother again. “Somehow I suspect my little brother had something to do with it.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!” Nie Huiasang waves his fan in front of his face, but apparently his brother takes this not as doubt but as confirmation, because he snorts at him and rolls his eyes.

“Well, if my brother thought you ought to know, who am I to say otherwise? I’m only the Sect Leader.”  

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about, elder brother.”

Nie Mingjue rolls his eyes again. “How much do you know about Nie saber cultivation, Lady Wen? Young Masters?”

“About as much as you just described. It’s done by the Nie, it uses sabers, and it’s definitely cultivation.” She thinks this will get him to laugh. She’s right.

“And it does weird things to their spiritual energy,” Wei Wuxian adds.

“And it has been doing so for a long time,” she says, thinking of the Unclean Realms.

“Including yours.” Lan Wangji finally speaks, and when she and Wei Wuxian turn to him he is his usual unreadable self. “Brother worries.” Ah, so this whatever-it-is is something Lan Xichen is also aware of.

“Right.” Nie Mingjue nods sharply, and then goes into a surprisingly detailed explanation of exactly how the first Nie butcher because a cultivator, peppered with amusing color commentary by Nie Huiasang. On second thought, it’s not actually that surprising, given what he says. If every one of her forefathers had died from a qi deviation probably associated with their cultivation practices, she’d learn all she could about it too.

Of course, it fascinates her; to her mild surprise it also fascinates Wei Wuxian. It’s not that he isn’t brilliant, of course, or that she would not expect him to be interested in the intellectual puzzle presented by Nie cultivation, but he hasn’t been this responsive since the loss of his golden core.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he interjects at one point shoving Nie Huiasang in the shoulder in a move that reminders her intensely of his younger brother. “You’re saying you use resentful energy? From beasts and night hunts, and so on?”

“Uh, yes?” Huiasang looks confused, but then again he always does, and Wen Qing can see where this is going.

“So when Old Master Lan threw a book at me for suggesting a fourth option for what to do with a resentful spirit, I was right?” He looks downright ecstatic. Lan Wangji looks…thoughtful. She remembers that day in class well—it is still the angriest she’s seen a Lan, and Cloud Recesses has since been burned to the ground—and Nie Huiasang must too because he has the good grace to look abashed.

“Sorry, brother Wei, but I already failed once. I wasn’t going to make Old Master Lan fail me again by agreeing with you!”

“Fair, fair.” Wei Wuxian waves it off. “But seriously, brother Nie, resentful energy? Doesn’t that mess with your spiritual energy?”

“It does.” Nie Mingjue rejoins the conversation with a sigh. “Though of course the resentful energy is mostly contained within the spirit of the blade, our bonds with our blades mean we cannot be entirely unaffected.”

“Is that the reason for the qi deviations?” She can’t help but ask the obvious question.

“Probably?” Nie Huiasang waggles a hand back and forth. “I don’t know?”

“Yes.” Nie Mingjue is more to the point. “Of course, my little brother here doesn’t actually cultivate his saber, so he wouldn’t know, but…yes.”

“Elder brother!”

She nods. “Sect Leader Nie, would you allow me to examine you and Baxia?”

Chapter Text

One of the good things about Nie Mingjue is that when he wants to say no to something he just says no to it. He doesn’t waste time getting offended or lecturing her, he just tuns her down flat. She’s fortunate, she thinks, that they’ve been working well together for over a month now, because she can tell he’s still not entirely over her status as a Wen, but he’s getting there.

Nie Huiasang is apparently entirely there.

“You can use mine, Lady Wen.” He prances out of the room—yes, prances, she’s pretty sure it’s entirely deliberate—and the four people remaining in the room share a look before he comes back. Well, three of them do, because Wei Wuxian has found a piece of paper from somewhere and is writing something down with a focused look on his face, and she’s not sure when the last time he was the most focused person in the room was. Possibly when he was trying to convince her to switch his golden core for Jiang Cheng’s.

Nie Huiasang scampers back into the room surprisingly quickly. So quickly, in fact, that his brother feels compelled to comment on it.

“I wasn’t even sure you knew where it was, little brother.”

Nie Huiasang looks abashed, but she’s rapidly beginning to think that he has a lot more control of his facial expressions than anyone ever imagined. He says quietly “you gave it to me, older brother. Of course I know where it is.” Then he brightens and fans himself as he adds, sotto voce but still clearly audible “I just don’t use it.”

Nie Mingjue snorts, but doesn’t object further when Nie Huiasang pushes the saber towards her on the table. She rolls her eyes at him.

“I need to examine you both.”

“Oh, right. Where do you need me?” He bounces back to his feet and she has him stand in front her with the saber next to him on the table while she starts examining his qi.

Wei Wuxian is still writing, and Lan Wangji is now looking over his shoulder.

“Hmm…” She pushes her own spiritual energy into Nie Huiasang, feels the way it curls into his meridians and cycles through his golden core. She can feel a faint tang of the same strangeness that she’s felt in the other Nie cultivators, but more diffused, which seems appropriate if Nie Huiasang has actually been as lax about his training as his brother has suggested (and he has all but confirmed).

“Can you pick up the saber?” She thinks Nie Mingjue mutters something like ‘I don’t know, can he?’ but her focus is on Nie Huiasang, who shrugs and hefts his saber into a dual-handed grip. She feels a pulse of something pass between the saber and the wielder, something similar to what she’s used to seeing when a cultivator grabs a sword but recognizably different too.

“Do you want me to do anything with it?”

“No!” The shout comes from Wei Wuxian, to her surprise, and Nie Huiasang almost drops the saber on his foot. “Sorry, Brother Nie, but the only thing you could do with that saber that would make an appreciable difference to Wen Qing’s tests is if you killed someone, and I rather like everyone in this room alive, thank you very much.” He looks a little shamefaced to have admitted this, and rushes on. “Sorry for ignoring you, but I was thinking about what you said about the resentful energy, Sect Leader, and I wanted to work it out.” He waves the bit of paper with his illegible calligraphy scrawled all over it. “I think the problem is in the interface between the spiritual energy of the wielder and the resentful energy of the blade spirit.”

Wen Qing nods. This tracks her assumptions as well.

“Yes, yes, we figured that.” Apparently it tracks Nie Mingjue’s too.

“Sure, sure, but get this: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about resentful energy recently. Don’t look at me like that, Lan Zhan, I don’t have a golden core, what would you do? No, wait, you’re a Lan, you’d probably accept your fate in gorgeous, dignified silence, wouldn’t you?” Lan Wangji wisely remains silent, though Wen Qing suspects there’s a hint of admonishment in the set of his eyebrows. Wei Wuxian smirks at him and continues. “Anyway, I was wondering if there was any way to cultivate resentful energy instead of spiritual energy, so I was thinking a lot about how resentful energy might circulate in the body…don’t look at me like that, I didn’t try it out!”

“Yet.” Apparently Lan Wangji knows the same Wei Wuxian she knows.

“Ai, ai, ai, fine, I didn’t yet. But you should be proud of me, Lan Zhan, I resisted the temptation! You know I can resist anything but temptation.”

Wen Qing decides to intervene before he goes so far as to bat his eyes at Lan Wangji.

“And what did you find out about resentful energy in the body?”

“Oh! Right! I was thinking—resentful energy is known to harm the temperament and the body, right? So it has to do some harm to the spiritual energy pathways, right, or the spiritual energy would just cure it. Now for me, that’s not a problem, because no golden core, but for the cultivators…”

“We already knew this.” Nie Mingjue rolls his eyes and Wei Wuxian nods.

“I figured you did! Now, I’d been hoping that you could dose the body—that prolonged short exposure would build up resistance. But it sounds like it’s the opposite: like the more you get exposed, the worse it gets, even though you have your spiritual energy circulating normally the rest of the time.”

Nie Mingjue nods, while Wen Qing ponders that idea. “It almost sounds bioaccumulative.”

“Exactly.” He grins at her. “It’s like the resentful energy is building up completely independently of the spiritual energy circulation.”

“Hmm…” Wen Qing taps her thigh. “So, Cleansing?”

“If it were as simple as Cleansing, I think the Nie would have figured it out for themselves by now.” Wei Wuxian bows to Nie Mingjue. “After all, even if you cleanse the wielder, the sabers are still cultivated using resentful energy. But Lan Zhan and I were thinking…” he turns to the other man, who Wen Qing would swear hasn’t said or written a word since they began, but who chimes in now.

“Inquiry.”

“Inquiry?” Nie Mingjue and Nie Huiasang exchange a look. “What?”

“The sabers are resentful, right? They want to kill everything, and their bloodlust eventually affects the wielder. But other resentful spirits don’t just want to kill. They want to do something, and then they kill because they can’t.”

“So you figure out what the saber needs…but wouldn’t that just undo the resentful cultivation of the spirit in the first place?” Wen Qing is excited, but this seems like a major flaw in Wei Wuxian’s plan.

“Right. So you don’t quell the resentment in the saber itself—but it’s still the same resentful energy in the wielder’s body afterwards, and if we can do whatever it needs to the cultivator…”

“You can expunge the resentment.” Wen Qing nods. “But what if the saber just wants to kill anyway? Or what if you’re far from the source of the resentment by the time you have a chance to inquire?”

Lan Wangji chimed in again. “Rest.”

There was an idea. “Hmm…Rest for the energy and not for the cultivator…would that even work?”

“I don’t know, but it’s worth a try, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would. But it’s not up to me.” Wen Qing looks at Nie Huiasang who shrugs.

“Don’t look at me. My saber barely has enough energy to be mildly peeved.” He waves his fan and peers at his brother.

Nie Mingjue huffs. “Fine. You can try to talk to Baxia.” He sounds so put upon Wen Qing almost laughs. “But no one else is touching her.”

“We wouldn’t dream of it, Sect Leader.”

Chapter Text

Talking to Baxia is less helpful than Wen Qing had hoped. It’s not that the saber isn’t willing to chat; in fact, it seems aggressively eager to do anything that it believes will be helpful to its wielder, a fact that makes Nie Mingjue almost blush even delivered through the calm and flat medium of Lan Wangji. Apparently Baxia is very devoted.

But it’s also extremely confused.

It has no actual answers to the standard array of questions for dead and resentful spirits. It expresses a desire to kill Nie Mingjue’s enemies and to help him become victorious, but if that were all it took to calm and alleviate the resentful energy of a blade the Nie would not die of qi deviation. Unless it’s a horrible curse that means all the Nie must fight a forever war, slaying their brethren to avoid their own horrifying deaths.

Probably not, or at least they’re not going to assume that unless it’s forced upon them.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are having a quiet conversation about whether they’re asking the right questions when it hits Wen Qing like…well, like Baxia hit Wen Zhuliu.

“It’s not the questions. It’s who we’re questioning.”

Wei Wuxian’s head snaps up and she can almost see the gears turning. He snaps his fingers. “Oh! Baxia isn’t a resentful spirit at all!”

“What do you mean? Of course it isn’t. How dare you suggest such a thing!” Nie Mingjue rises and Wen Qing puts her hand on his shoulder to suggest he remain calm.

“No one is suggesting it. It’s just…Inquiry to discover how to liberate only works on the resentful spirits directly. Baxia is using the resentful energy, but it isn’t actually resentful itself.” “Yes!” Wei Wuxian starts pacing back and forth as if the excitement of this realization is too much for him to contain in one place. “It’s like…cover your ears, Lan Zhan,” Lan Wangji takes this literally, and it is all Wen Qing can do not to break into laughter at the Lan sitting at his guqin with his hands over his ears “It’s like if I’d done what I was planning on doing and cultivated with resentful energy myself in place of my core. I wouldn’t be a resentful spirit. I’d just be interacting with the resentful spirits. If we could convince Baxia it was worthwhile, it might be able to talk to the resentful spirits it has been cultivated with somehow, but we can’t just talk to Baxia about them any more than you could have talked to me and had some poor Wen soldier’s voice come out of my mouth.” He nods to Wen Qing. “No offense, it’s just we are fighting the Wens right now.”

“I’m aware.” She rolls her eyes and pushes his shoulder and Lan Wangji takes this as a sign that it’s all right to uncover his ears. “Basically, Wei Wuxian thinks we need to get directly to the resentful energy, not just to Baxia,” she explains for him, in case he missed anything. He nods his thanks to her.

“But how is this useful?” Nie Huiasang, whom she’d almost forgotten was in the room, chimes in. “How are we going to help elder brother if we can’t talk to Baxia? Or if it doesn’t help to talk to Baxia,” he hurries to clarify when Wei Wuxian raises a finger to argue.

“I…don’t know.” Wei Wuxian deflates slightly, then perks back up. “But I’m sure we can figure it out! We have the smartest people in four sects here, and it’s not like the Jins are going to be any help anyway.” He points at each of them in turn. “If we each think very hard…”

Wen Qing interrupts him, because Lan Wangji clearly wants to but can’t, because Lans aren’t allowed to. “Lan Wangji has an idea.”

“Lan Zhan! You know I’ll just keep talking forever if you don’t stop me! And there I go again! What is it?”

“Nie Mingjue.” Wen Qing is confused, but nowhere near as confused as Nie Mingjue, who looks at Lan Wangji as if he’s crazy.

“Ah! Yes!” Wei Wuxian seems to have figured out whatever Lan Wangji was trying to say in his normal overly laconic manner. “Yes! We need to do inquiry on the resentful energy once it’s separated from Baxia. So Nie Mingjue needs to use Baxia, and let the energy flow into him, and then it can be expunged after he uses it.”

“But won’t that have the same problem as trying to talk to Baxia?” Nie Huiasang asks, but Wei Wuxian has a response ready.

“It would, except I’m pretty sure Sect Leader Nie works differently than his saber.” He turns to Nie Mingjue. “Can you feel the resentful energy in your body and isolate it? Somewhere other than in your golden core? If it’s all collected together, we might be able to contact it more directl.”

“I can try.” Nie Mingjue stands up and grasps Baxia. “What do you want me to do?”

“Uh…” Wei Wuxian seems at a loss, so Wen Qing decides it’s time to step in with her superior knowledge of the use of spiritual energy and its circulation in the body.

“The simplest thing will be if you can spar with the saber just enough to pull some resentful energy into yourself, then relax and focus on moving it around.” She points at Nie Huiasang, whose blade is leaning against the chair beside him. “Since you don’t need to actually fight, I think Nie Huaisang would do admirably as an opponent.”

“I don’t want to die!” Nie Huiasang flings up his hands, but Lan Wangji shuts him down.

“You won’t.”

Nie Mingjue snorts. “Come on, little brother, up and at them. I know you can make the stance if nothing else.”

“Elder brother gave me a fan every time I got the stance right for a whole month,” Nie Huiasang confides as he grasps his saber and goes to stand as far away from his brother as possible. “And a starling when I finally managed to beat one of the disciples in single combat.”

“He was six and you were fifteen,” Nie Mingjue huffs, but Wen Qing can tell this is an old joke between them by now. “And I still think you cheated somehow.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nie Huiasang says, primly, and then ruins the effect by grinning. “It was a very nice starling though.”

“All right, let’s get started.” Wei Wuxian claps his hands. “Wen Qing, I think one clash of sabers and then we test? Lan Wangji, you ready with the guqin?”

“Hm.”

“On my mark…now.”

Baxia clashes hard against Nie Huiasang’s blade, breaking his grip and sending his two hands apart, though not entirely disarming him. Nie Mingjue visibly restrains himself from the follow-on kill strike, and closes his eyes, while Lan Wangji strums on the guqin in the same tones he’d tried with Baxia before.

The guqin’s strings vibrate crazily. Lan Wangji plays a different sequence, then the first again, and this time the response is clearer, but much longer than Wen Qing had anticipated.

“Multiple spirits.” Lan Wangji says. “One at a time.” He listens carefully, then plays a short sequence and receives a short response. “One desire.” He seems to be avoiding Nie Mingjue’s eyes. “They want to…climb a tree.”

“What?” Nie Mingjue’s eyes go wide. “Climb a tree?”

“I believe from their responses that you recently eliminated a nest of monsters—or possibly yao?—in the shape of tigers?”

“A nest of yao, yes.”

“These are their spirits. Their wish appears to be to…”

“Climb a tree. I get it.” Nie Mingjue shrugs. “And you really think this will help?”

“What could it hurt, elder brother?” Nie Huiasang has retrieved his fan and bats it in front of his face. “I’m sure we have enough trees in the private courtyard that no one needs to see you climbing one.”

“I suppose…” Nie Mingjue clearly doesn’t want to do it, so Wen Qing steps in and puts her fingers on his pulse point.

“I can feel the resentful energy—you isolated it to your left hand, didn’t you?” He nods. “I’ll check again after you climb.”

He sighs. “Then I suppose I’d better find a tree, hadn’t I?” He looks around at all of them. “If this doesn’t work, though, I’ll…”

“I know, I know, you’ll break our legs.” Wei Wuxian waves him off with a laugh, but Nie Mingjue shakes his head.

“I’m not Jiang Wanyin. If this doesn’t work, I’ll make you all climb a tree too, and then I’ll cut the blasted thing out from under you.”

It’s definitely a good thing for Wen Qing’s peace of mind that it does work. More importantly, it means they finally have an idea of what might work to help the Nies—and an agreement from their sect leader, once he emerges from the tree, to try a controlled experiment with the next group to come back from facing a Wen raiding party.

For the first time in her life, she finds herself actually looking forward to a battle.

Chapter Text

The minor skirmish is a rousing success, the small advance scouting party of Wens driven off without much if any loss of life. This makes the Nie cultivators who fought all the more willing to accede to their Sect Leader’s request (well, more of an order, really) that they let the party of Lans in the camp play Inquiry to them afterwards. They’re even willing to try to isolate the resentful energy they’ve pulled from their sabers in a single clump rather than letting it disperse. The Lans dutifully chime out their musical cultivation (with silencing talismans courtesy of Wei Wuxian hanging between them so they can actually distinguish each others’ inquiries). The Nies roll their eyes, but with Nie Mingjue glaring at all of them they rather sheepishly agree to the various cures suggested to them.

One cultivator is particularly indignant that his saber apparently used resentful energy from a feral dog, which wants nothing more than to roll around in something smelly (“I’m sorry, young master Nie, it didn’t specify anything more detailed” says the young Lan disciple who happens to have this particular assignment) and she thinks Nie Mingjue is about three heartbeats away from throwing him in the latrine pits himself before Nie Huiasang runs up with a bottle of perfume (“it’s old, elder brother, so this isn’t wasting it! Besides, brother Wei will be so disappointed if we don’t at least try everything!”). They sprinkle it on a mat, the soldier rolls himself around in it, and Wen Qing verifies that the resentful energy has indeed dissipated.

She manages not to smile at him because he looks embarrassed, but it’s a near-run thing.

Later, they reconvene in Nie Mingjue’s tent with drinks (tea for Lan Wangji) to debrief.

“It seems to have worked.” She leads with that because it’s obviously the most important point. “Every cultivator seems to be accounted for, and each of their resentful energies responded to the Lans.” She bows to Lan Wangji, who inclines his head in acknowledgement. “In fact, while the behaviors may have seemed random or ridiculous, on the whole I think we got off easy. No one’s spirit asked for them to murder anyone, for instance.”

“Ooh! Ooh! I have a theory about that!” She yields the floor to an excited Wei Wuxian who bounces up and down next to Lan Wangji but doesn’t get up from where their legs are pressed together on the cushions. “So you notice how all the things they were asked to do were silly, normal things? Like climbing trees and napping in the sunshine? I think it’s because by the time the resentful energy has been through the saber it’s already gotten out all its violent regrets.”

“What do you mean, brother Wei?” Nie Huiasang fans himself and cocks an eyebrow at his friend. “Every time I communicate with my saber all it wants to do is kill something.”

“Exactly!” Wei Wuxian waves his hands in the air as if he’s trying to shape something out of it—maybe trying to compress all his thoughts into actual words. “The saber leeches out the violent regrets to itself, so what it leaves when it comes into the cultivator is all the softer, gentler resentment that the saber doesn’t know how to use. The things it resents losing but that aren’t themselves murderous impulses. ‘I never got to lie in the sun again’ or ‘I used to have fun rolling in dog…’”

“Wei Wuxian!” Nie Huiasang’s fan is going a mile a minute. “That was very expensive perfume, I’ll thank you not to mention it again.”

“You wasted good perfume? I thought you said it was old!” Nie Mingjue starts to rise and Nie Huiasang hurries to correct himself.

“Oh, it was expensive when I bought it, but only a little bit was left, elder brother. I was just teasing brother Wei!” Wen Qing is pretty sure the second half of that statement is true, but she saw the bottle—it was full. “I wouldn’t make you spend anything unreasonable or waste anything good.”

“See that you don’t.” Wen Qing is pretty sure Nie Mingjue also saw the bottle, but his point has been made so he settles down.

“Anyway…” she redirects the conversation. “Interesting hypothesis, Wei Wuxian. We’ll have to test it going forward. There is a larger problem, though. Well, two larger problems.” She nods to Lan Wangji.

“Too much work.” His flat gaze sweeps across them, though she imagines it is slightly lighter than it has been before, especially towards Wei Wuxian. “Too little time.”

“Exactly. While I still think it would be a good idea to try this on a broader scale, the timing is difficult. This was a short engagement. What if they’d been out there longer? Used more energy?” She taps her fingers on the cup holding her drink. “And what if we didn’t have a Lan cultivator standing by for every Nie?”

“I think Lan Xichen would give you as many cultivators as it took, elder brother, but I agree that it might not be the most efficient idea.” Nie Huiasang’s eyes are sparkling over his fan.

“Brother would.” Lan Wangji deadpans. “Better not.”

“I think our two problems are really one problem,” Wei Wuxian muses. “If we can’t address all the cultivators in time, or if they have to keep using the sabers’ resentful energy longer than they can isolate it, what we’re really looking for is some way to undo the damage after it’s been done.”

“That would be nice.” Nie Mingjue doesn’t speak a lot, but when he does it’s to the point. “I have, after all, been cultivating this way for most of my life.”

“Fair, fair, fair!” Wei Wuxian throws back his drink. “So we keep looking for that. But are you all right with us using Inquiry as much as we can until we figure that out?”

“I already climbed a tree for this. I’m in.” Nie Mingjue tosses back his drink as well. “I’ll send to Xichen, see if we can get more of your musical cultivators, if he has any ideas about what might undo the damage.”

“And until then, I guess you’ll keep climbing trees, elder brother.” Nie Huiasang scampers away before his brother can swat at him, but Nie Mingjue decides it’s too much effort and pours himself another drink.

Chapter Text

The next few weeks go surprisingly quickly, and the war is going well. The Nie cultivators are still a little sheepish about the sometimes ridiculous activities they have to keep doing in order to dispel the resentful energy, but they also report a continued increase in well-being and self-content, so Wen Qing and company definitely consider the experiment a success. Lan Xichen sends another battalion of musical cultivators and a sharply worded note that indicates Nie Mingjue should have told him about his concerns earlier and suggests playing Clarity to reverse the effects of resentful energy on the soul.

Well, it’s sharply worded for Lan Xichen writing to Nie Mingjue, which means it calls him “Sect Leader Nie” at the start and ends with “Sincerely” instead of “Yours.”

At this point the Nie and Lan cultivators are starting to pair off—not romantically, at least Wen Qing doesn’t think so, but platonically—with certain soldiers seeking out certain musicians to play for them more consistently. Nie Huiasang suggests this is because they want to avoid too much blackmail material being spread around too widely (after all, if the same person knows you’ve danced exuberantly under a full moon, slept all night in an underground burrow, and eaten raw pig’s blood, they can’t really blackmail you three times, but three different people certainly can). Wen Qing just thinks it’s natural, a building up of routine.

Either way, it’s definitely effective. The Nie cultivators are needing less and less recovery time between missions, and they’re pushing back the Wens at a remarkable rate.

Wen Ruohan is being cagey with his remaining son; after the death of Wen Chao, Wen Xu has rarely been seen on the front lines. So Wen Qing knows they’re doing very well when they start to see him leading Wen armies more and more often. He’s not actually a great cultivator, strategic genius, or brilliant tactician—they beat him every time—but Wen Ruohan overestimates him because he’s his own son, so his presence indicates that the Qishan Wen are really trying their best.

She hears frequently from Jiang Cheng, who always buries a note or two for her in his constant letters back and forth with Yanli and Wei Wuxian. Yiling is quiet, which means he’s been able to build up both its and Lotus Pier’s fortifications in case of a surprise Wen assault. He’s moved her family back to Yunmeng, given the probability that Wen Ruohan will retaliate once he is convinced of her treachery, and gives her updates on how they are doing whenever he is able to slip back there himself.

When he leaves, he leaves Wen Ning in charge of Yiling, and while she misses her brother intensely she feels a deep pride to think of him finally coming into his own.

He writes only one letter directly to her, and it almost breaks her heart to read that the Lan healers were not able to save Wen Chen. Jiang Cheng is very careful to assure her that Wen Ning is taking care of baby A-Yuan, and that Granny has stayed in Yiling as well to help him, but that doesn’t stop her grief.

Now that they’ve settled into a routine, she finds herself spending more and more time with Yanli, who still insists she call her A-Li. They’re often joined by Wei Wuxian—that is in fact how this all started, since she was always meeting with Wei Wuxian about his core and the Nies, and Yanli was looking in on her brother—but not always, and she’s grown to very much like the other woman in her own right, not just as Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian’s sister.

She starts teaching Yanli her healing magic after the letter from Jiang Cheng arrives, because she needs to do something. It’s very clear that A-Li is not a strong cultivator like her brothers, but healing magic doesn’t actually require a strong core (though Wen Qing thinks most people would be surprised by the strength of her own). What it requires is attention to detail and empathy for others, and Yanli has those beyond measure.

For healers, that empathy does not have to be positively oriented. Wen Qing herself is proof of that; she knows how people are feeling, but doesn’t actually give a tinker’s toss unless it affects their healing. But Yanli’s definitely is, and that means that between them they can treat the more seriously wounded more effectively than either could do alone. Sometimes Wen Qing is the one willing to recommend harsher, more aggressive treatments with an eye to the state of the damage itself while A-Li advocates for simpler, more palliative care while the patient’s mental state improves. In others, A-Li comes charging in on the patient’s behalf for the most aggressive care possible because of their concerns, while Wen Qing is the one suggesting a gentler, more cautious hand might allow the issue to go away on its own.

They make a good team, and she finds she enjoys the work more with a friend.

This is important, because while the work with the Nie cultivators is going well, extremely well, better than well, the war starts turning after that first month or so.

Lan Xichen’s suggestion of Clarity is a good one, and well-timed because the battles start taking longer and so the cultivators start needing less immediate liberation of their sabers’ resentful energy and more restorative treatment afterwards.

The battles get longer because Wen Ruohan is doing something awful. He’s literally raising the dead to fight for him. And the fierce corpses take a lot of killing.

They’re still winning. In fact, they’re winning so much that in one battle Nie Mingjue is able to outflank the main Wen force and fall on their rear—which means he’s able to cut off and defeat Wen Xu directly. This in turn means that the head of Wen Xu is no longer attached to the rest of him.

She’s not particularly sorry about that, though not quite as glad as she was with Wen Chao.

But that death seems to send Wen Ruohan into a frenzy, and the dead rising becomes not a terrifying incident to be told over a campfire years from now but an every battle occurrence. The worst is when their own dead cultivators lurch into battle against them, but having to double-kill the Wens is bad enough.

She tries very hard to remember that these are the Qishan Wen, not the Dafan Wen, not her people.

That thought carries her through until she sees the fierce corpse of Wen Chen’s husband reaching for Wei Wuxian’s throat, only for Lan Wangji to strike him down for the second time that day.

A-Li finds her after the battle with a bowl of soup, and listens to her weep.

The next day there is another bowl of soup, and the next, and the next. Some of the days the soup is saltier than it should be, and she realizes it’s her tears.

But A-Li’s shoulder is always there to cry on, and the rest of what she fondly thinks of as her research team start reaching out in their own ways as well. Wei Wuxian throws her complicated questions about how resentful energy circulates in the body; Lan Wangji starts playing Rest over the battlefields for the defeated Wens as well as the Nies and Lans; Nie Huiasang asks her for help learning how to sew better; Nie Mingjue insists she have the first and best cuts of what meat they’re able to find along their route of march.

It’s nice to realize how much they care. To realize that they’ve noticed, without her having to say anything about it. To realize that she’s found herself a new family that will fight to defend her old one, even against their relatives.

But they’re no substitute for her actual family. She wonders how little orphaned A-Yuan is doing; she misses her brother; she wishes she could sit for an hour with Granny and her uncles and just talk like they used to before all of this happened.

When the next message from the southern front is delivered not by their usual messenger but by A-Ning, it’s like an answer to a prayer she hadn’t even dared to whisper into the world. He comes in on his sword, carrying a little bundle that she realizes as she rushes to greet him must be A-Yuan.

It’s a happy moment and a sad one at the same time, that recognition that she and A-Ning are the only ones of A-Yuan’s parents’ generation left to care for him, but also that they are here, together.

She brings them in out of the cold to find an extra bowl of soup has been laid out next to hers, and someone, presumably A-Li, has scrounged up a bottle from somewhere for A-Yuan as well.

They sit and eat and drink and for a moment she can pretend that everything is all right.

Eventually, she knows, it will be, even if it’s a version of all right she wouldn’t have recognized only a few years ago.

Chapter Text

The Nies continue to push their front towards Qishan, and as a result of their increasing success Wen Ruohan is forced to pull back troops towards his own stronghold of Nightless City. This in turn allows Jiang Cheng, Lan Xichen, and Jin Guangshan to push up into Wen territory as well, since the forces holding them in place have been weakened to support the front against the Nie. Jin Guangshan is being the same slimy rat she’s already come to know him as, and his attacks are always just a day or a week after the Wens have evacuated, while the Lans and Jiangs hit hard and fast to reduce the Wen numbers.

Either way, however, the four clans are close to linking up.

Jiang Cheng arrives one day flying in on Sandu, and it takes a moment for her to adjust from pleasure at seeing him again to the sudden shock of realizing just how he’s traveled here. She sees the same realization hit Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji at much the same moment.

He’s flying.

He has Sandu.

Didn’t he give it up at the indoctrination camp?

She watches as Wei Wuxian and Jiang Yanli mob their brother, hanging back in the second wave of greeters alongside the two Nies and Lan Wangji. Jiang Cheng tussles a little bit with his brother after pulling him into an embrace, then pulls out a pouch and shoves Suibian into his hands.

“I don’t expect you to carry it, but it belongs to you.” She doesn’t mean to eavesdrop but Jiang Cheng was never very good at being quiet. She thinks there’s a little bit of moisture in his voice when he adds “Father would have wanted you to have it.”

Wei Wuxian takes Suibian from his brother and slides it into the sash of his robes, and she thinks it’s possible there’s some moisture in his eyes as well, a thought confirmed by the way he emphatically shoves Jiang Cheng in the shoulder instead of saying thank you.

Jiang Cheng approaches Lan Wangji then, handing him Bichen with a bow, and Lan Wangji unbends enough to thank him formally. Then he greets the Nies, bowing to Nie Mingjue and clasping Nie Huiasang on the shoulder, nods to her and Wen Ning, and heads back towards Wei Wuxian and Yanli, who are hovering in the direction of the tents. He throws an arms around Wei Wuxian and the two of them march off towards what she assumes is dinner in Wei Wuxian’s tent.

She’s trying to decide if she should feel put out by this minimal greeting when A-Li waves her and her brother over.

“Aren’t you coming?” she inquires, looking between the two of them. “A-Cheng said he had news for you from Lotus Pier, but he didn’t want to bother everyone else, and I told him you usually eat dinner with us anyway.” This is true, but Wen Qing had assumed it didn’t include the night her little brother came to visit. A-Li rolls her eyes and slips her arm through Wen Qing’s, drawing her along with her, with Wen Ning naturally tagging along. “Come on. I made enough soup for everyone.”

What can she do but follow?

The news just turns out to be routine updates on her uncles and aunts, who are apparently fitting in well in Yunmeng, and then the conversation turns to the war. Jiang Cheng tells the story of how he and Lan Xichen stormed the indoctrination camp in the middle of night (“though how anyone can tell in the murk of Qishan I don’t know. Nightless City my left foot”). Wei Wuxian reciprocates with stories about the Nie victories, with Yanli and even Wen Qing chiming in as needed. Wen Ning stays mostly silent, as usual, but she can tell her brother is enjoying the chance to socialize with no expectations.

After all, with Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian in the same room, who can get a word in edgewise?

Jiang Cheng only stays a day—he has to get back to his own troops—but his visit is the boost to morale they needed right before the war turns into a true slog.

Apparently Wen Ruohan has realized that if he is going to turn dead bodies into fierce corpse soldiers, the most efficient way to generate them is to turn the battles into nothing but butchery.

Nie Mingjue is stoic about it—“if the Wens want to be butchers now, the Nies have been doing it for generations”—but it doesn’t make the war more pleasant.

It does, however, exasperate Wei Wuxian.

And exasperating Wei Wuxian, it turns out, is a really bad idea for Wen Ruohan.

“I’m sick of it, Lan Zhan.” Even though she and Nie Huiasang are also in the room, of course Wei Wuxian only addresses Lan Wangji. “It’s awful, and horrible, and I’m sick of it.”

“Mn. Hm.”

Apparently Wei Wuxian can now translate Lan Wangji, since he seems to take this as a full sentence. “I know, I know! But I have a plan!” He suddenly seems to remember the rest of them are also in the room. “Brother Nie, Sister Qing, do you know of any slaughterhouses near our line of march?” He looks between them. “I’m not sure if we’re in Wen or Nie territory at this point, so I don’t know which of you to ask.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” Nie Huiasang waves his fan and then puts it down and looks at her. “Seriously, I don’t know, we’re definitely in Wen territory by now.”

She shrugs. “I’m not from Qishan, but I saw a slaughterhouse in the last town we went through. Why?”

“Will you show me? Since we’ve gotten so good at dealing with resentful animal energy over the last few weeks, I was thinking we might be able to turn the tables on Wen Ruohan. He’s been raising the dead unopposed for too long, don’t you think? A nice herd of fierce undead wild boar running through the Wen camps ought to do the trick.”

She ponders this. “How do you plan on doing that? You don’t cultivate the saber.”

“Neither does Wen Ruohan.”

“You also don’t have a Yin Iron.”

“I don’t think I need one. Just a focus. Suibian might work, but since I don’t have a golden core, I was thinking something simpler, lighter.”

“Musical cultivation.” Lan Wangji chimes in.

“Exactly.” He pulls out a small bamboo dizi. “I don’t have Lan Zhan’s skill with the guqin, but I am not without my own musical accomplishments, small as they may be.”

“Mn. Not small.”

“Lan Zhan! What have I told you about complimenting me? My poor heart can’t take it!” Wei Wuxian holds a hand up to his chest like he’s having a heart attack, and Wen Qing can tell a bout of ridiculousness is about to start if she doesn’t do something.

So she stands up and reaches out for Wei Wuxian’s wrist. “Let me see. I am your doctor, after all.”

“Ai, ai, ai, Wen Qing, I didn’t mean it!” Wei Wuxian skips away from her and behind Lan Wangji. “Save me from the needles, Lan Zhan! The neeeeeedles!”

“Mn.” Lan Wangji gives her a look that she thinks means something like “I will do this, even though we both know it’s silly”—she thinks she’s right about the second part, after prolonged exposure to the two of them together, but she’s definitely sure about the first part given that this is Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian—and stands up to shield Wei Wuxian from her.

“Fine.” She sits down again. “No needles. But if you actually want to go forward with this idea you will have to let me examine you. And let Lan Wangji play for you, every night. Because you don’t have a golden core, we have no way of knowing how the resentful energy will affect you, even if you can harness it. So if you’re going to play with things you shouldn’t, at least let us take care of you while you do it.”

Wei Wuxian flashes her a wide grin. “Of course, Sister Qing.” His lips start to curl up at the edges in a mischievous manner that she recognizes, so she decides it’s time for the big guns.

She turns to Lan Wangji. “Make sure he does it. It’s for his own good.”

“Mn.” He nods to her, and Wei Wuxian gives him an exaggerated look of betrayal.

“Lan Zhan! I said I would do it!”

“Mm. Is for Wei Ying’s good.” Lan Wangji nods to her again and sits down and Wei Wuxian flops down into his seat as well.

“Fine. I’ll do it. But you’ll show me to the slaughterhouse?”

He really is irrepressible, but at least they might be able to keep some of his ideas under a little control as long as Lan Wangji is on board.

Chapter Text

It’s fortunate, as Nie Huiasang points out, that it’s a Qishan Wen slaughterhouse in the end, and not a Qinghe Nie one, because the Qinghe Nie are well aware of the dangers of resentful energy around the killing of animals. Or, as Nie Huiasang sniffs as they approach the killing floor, “some sects know better than to let monsters pop up every time someone wants pork for dinner.” He’s given them a whole lecture along the way on how Nie cultivators come by and purify every slaughterhouse on a rotating schedule, in addition to the calming rituals that are done for the herds in advance and the restful talismans installed in the walls of the slaughterhouses and even on the handles and blades of the weapons wielded by the slaughterers. Some Nie cultivators apparently even come by the slaughterhouses on their own to cultivate the resentful energy from the worst cases, burying the resentment inside their sabers instead of letting it fester in the ground.

Wen Qing has to admit she is impressed. She knew the Nie came from butchers, but she hadn’t realized how much they’d kept to their roots.

If it had been the Wens who came from butchers, especially the Qishan Wen, she’s sure they would have shaken off the blood of the killing floor from themselves like dust off a blanket. But the Nie seem to keep their founder’s position close to their hearts. And if that means fewer monsters in the Nie territory—good on them.

In this particular case, however, it also means that here in Qishan there is actual resentful energy swirling around the slaughterhouse for Wei Wuxian to manipulate, which according to Nie Huiasang there would not be in a properly maintained Nie one—even if any was generated in the process, it would be hauled into a saber to be dealt with later.

Here in Qishan, it’s not a strong presence, not like it would be if it were actually haunted, but the way the shadows feel strange when you look away from them suggests there’s at least something available for Wei Wuxian to use.

Lan Wangji sets up his guqin, Wei Wuxian pulls out his dizi, and Wen Qing settles in on the other side of him, ready to intervene if necessary. Nie Huiasang hangs their lantern up and pulls out an unfinished fan and paints from somewhere to start filling the blank leaves in, waving an idle hand and telling them to “let me know when something happens.”

She suspects it’s an act, since a close examination of his “painting” reveals that no actual paint is being applied.

Wei Wuxian breathes deeply and starts to play.

At first she can’t tell anything is happening—well, anything other than good music, because Wei Wuxian turns out to be a really talented dizi player—but slowly, slowly the shadows start to coalesce into something different, something more.

Something worse.

It is slow enough, in fact, that at first she would have dismissed the moving shadows as tricks of the light, mere imaginations drawn from her knowledge of what Wei Wuxian is trying to do. But the slaughterhouse is dark; the people were all evacuated from this town after the Nie army came through, because the land where they grew their food was now an active battlefield, and the only light in the place comes from the calm, strong, steady lamp Nie Huiasang has hung above Wei Wuxian.

As it is powered by Nie Huiasang’s spiritual energy, it does not flicker, so the moving shadows are not from the light at all.

Gradually the shadows merge and join and solidify not into full opacity but something near it, and the forms of massive wild boar—ten, twenty, thirty, fifty—become distinguishable in the soft warmth of the spiritual lamp.

Then Wei Wuxian begins to walk. The three of them follow him, careful to stay within arm’s reach. Nie Huiasang takes the lantern and his fan and paints disappear into a pouch; Lan Wangji’s guqin is conjured out of sight; Wen Qing grips her needles harder.

The shadow boar follow the lilting sound of the dizi out into the street.

It is a long walk from the slaughterhouse to the front lines, but Wei Wuxian’s dizi does not falter, nor does his stride stumble or hesitate. His eyes begin to glow red, and Wen Qing touches one of his pulse points quickly to confirm how the resentful energy is flowing through him, but as yet it does not seem to have done any damage, and she worries what will happen if he lets go of his control right now. Perhaps it only will hurt him when it is settled, as it did for the Nies—but that die was already cast when he began to play, or at least when the animal corpses rose from the dead.

An hour later, still marching on at a calm steady pace, still accompanied by the fierce monsters captivated by the dizi, they reach the outskirts of the territory swept by the enemy sentries.

She knows from reports she’d looked over in the command tent with Nie Mingjue that the violence of the war has been worse for the Qishan Wen than for the Sunshot cultivators; that the competent and the skilled and the prepared among the Wen have been slaughtered along with their more useless brothers-in-arms and that (crucially) there are so few of them left now that the Wen armed camps are hardly worthy of the name, mere collections of bodies to throw into the fight and resurrect through the dark power of the Yin Iron.

But she was still not expecting them to come within sight of the campfires without being challenged.

And yet here they are, and the dizi’s melody changes from its luring, coaxing tone into something angrier, something harsh and vicious and somehow still beautiful but terrifying in its beauty, sending the monsters hurling into the camp. The not-quite-boar pour among the tents, crushing, smashing, goring, rending.

It takes less time than she would like to think to reduce an entire armed camp to smithereens.

Before she even truly realizes it, Wei Wuxian’s music has changed again, and she can recognize the notes of Rest, strange as it is to think of using resentful energy to play that song. Lan Wangji pulls out his guqin again and joins him, and then there is a silence as the two musicians apparently agree that the spirits have been quieted.

Wei Wuxian collapses onto Lan Wangji’s shoulder as she grabs his wrist.

As she thought, the full power of the resentful energy did not hit until his encounter with it ended.

But since there are no enemies left living here, they have the time for her to treat him; for Lan Wangji to play Cleansing, and Clarity, and Rest again; for Nie Huiasang to pull snacks out from a pouch she didn’t notice him packing and for them all to take an incongruous but badly needed tea break in the wreckage of their enemies.

The next time they do this—and she knows there will be a next time—she promises herself they will not let Wei Wuxian play for an hour straight, and there will be more snacks.

Chapter Text

Maybe everything would have been fine if they’d just had more slaughterhouses on the road.

But they don’t. In fact, if she thought the Wen cultivators left were competent enough to have thought of this, she’d have thought they intentionally started burning out the slaughterhouses along the way, so that they can’t be identified clearly enough for Wei Wuxian to use them.

But no.

It’s not that kind of an action.

They’re burning everything as they retreat, and the slaughterhouses are just casualties of war like everything else. If she had needed any confirmation that Wen Ruohan, her uncle, was an amoral piece of work, she’d have had it. She didn’t—the way he’s treated her and Wen Ning, or the way he raised his sons, either one would have been sufficient proof—but now she has it all the same.

The Wens are creating a devastation in their own lands as they retreat, and she is just so furious about it all the time she can’t even think.

She’s not a Qishan Wen. She’s Dafan Wen. These aren’t technically her people. But her teeth ache from the clenching of her jaw and she thinks for the first time she understands something of how Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian and A-Li felt about the burning of Lotus Pier. Not that she cared about any of Qishan the way they cared about their home. But, as she confides to A-Li after one particularly destroyed village too many, it’s all so senseless. She thought she knew what it was to hate her uncle before. He’s teaching her anew now.

She’s so, so glad she yielded up Yiling; so grateful Jiang Cheng got her people out; so happy that she has friends, almost a new chosen family, instead of being isolated the way Wen Ruohan wanted.

But she cannot help but feel the guilt that comes with being happy about that when Qishan is burning without the advancing armies lighting a single match.

The Jiangs are her rock during this time. They’re close enough to the Nightless City now that all the armies have come together, and she and A-Ning are constant presences in the Jiang tents, along with Lan Wangji. Nie Huiasang is there most nights as well, but he still goes back to his brother afterwards, while the rest of them stay up together.

Some nights she comes with him, because she knows he’s worried about Nie Mingjue and she hasn’t forgotten her promise to check in on him too. But Lan Xichen is usually there, and he’s playing Clarity for his sworn brother every night, and that plus the occasional purging of the resentful energy before it can hurt him seems to be working.

So most nights she’s with the Jiangs. It’s become a routine, and one she treasures. She’s grateful for it not just because she values having people to keep her sane, but also because it has given her new insight into why she found herself on a mountaintop pulling Wei Wuxian’s core out of his chest. She gets to see how he and Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli operate as a unit. She already knew Wei Wuxian was ridiculously self-sacrificing—she’d seen him throw himself in front of a Wen brand for Mianmian, and they’re not even particularly close friends—but now she understands, she thinks, a little more of just how much he truly is a Jiang, and not just their father’s ward.

And wouldn’t she have given her golden core for A-Ning, if only it could heal what ails him?

Well, no, she wouldn’t, because there’s no other healer in the world who could do the transplant correctly, so they’d both just die, but if there were? In a heartbeat. Or, more significantly, in two agonizing days of insane waking insensibility from pain, as Wei Wuxian had to do. It’s easy to think of it as an instantaneous decision, but it wasn’t. And she’s starting to see why he did it anyway.

She’s also beginning to see how Jiang Cheng is rising to the challenge of being worth it, even though Wei Wuxian would tell him and has told him that it isn’t about deserving. He’s ridiculously young to be a sect leader, but he’s holding his own, and she’s impressed at how his experience with both his own and then Wei Wuxian’s corelessness has led him to show real concern for the lives of the non-cultivators they’re encountering in the war.

She respects that possibly more than anything else he’s doing.

Being with the Jiangs, and with Lan Wangji, also means that she’s there to heal and soothe Wei Wuxian every time he uses the resentful energy of the animals against the Wens, and she’s surprised to discover that it doesn’t seem to be harming him as much as she expected. It turns out, she realizes, that because he doesn’t have a golden core his meridians don’t catch on the resentful energy as much either, and so it seems to slip out of him more easily. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t accumulate, or that Lan Wangji doesn’t have to play Clarity for him, but it does mean it’s not destroying him like she was afraid it would.

That’s good, not just because she cares about his well-being but because it turns out they’re going to need him for more than that.

The slaughterhouses are hard to identify, and the people of Qishan are more agrarian anyway, so there’s fewer and fewer resentful animals for him to manipulate. At the same time, they’re coming close to the battlefields of ancient days when Wen Mao and his associates swept into power on the strength of cultivation, and there are more and more human remains nearby.

Wen Ruohan isn’t shy about using them.

And finally, one day, neither is Wei Wuxian.

He’s under immense stress when it happens; the Wens have drawn a contingent of Lan cultivators, including Lan Xichen, into the kind of ambush that only exists in a horrible fevered nightmare, and they are watching it unfold from atop a hill overlooking the battle. The Wens retreated across a level plain and drew the Lans after them, only for it to turn out that the plain was an ancient graveyard, and the Yin Iron brings forth a horde of fierce corpses upon the rear of the Lan contingent.

Lan Xichen is suddenly fighting off three corpses at once and Lan Wangji is about to leap onto Bichen and sacrifice himself for his brother when Wei Wuxian’s hand wraps around his wrist and stops him.

Once Lan Wangji has stilled Wei Wuxian pulls out his dizi and begins to play, and Wen Qing watches in horrified fascination as the corpses stop and turn as one towards their position. For a terrible moment she thinks that this is it, that Wei Wuxian has merely drawn their attention and they’re all going to die right here and now, and then the corpses turn back, rush past the Lans, and fall upon the waiting Wens.

Wen Ruohan may have the Yin Iron, but Wei Wuxian is right there, and it seems that proximity is a key factor in their duel of demonic cultivation.

Once again, however, he collapses the instant the battle is done.

She and Lan Wangji insist that Wei Wuxian spends the following day flat on his back listening to Clarity and Inquiry and Rest over and over again with needles all over his body, and it seems to be working but she can’t help but wonder: how much is her friend going to have to harm himself to save those he cares about?

And how much is he going to do anyway, even if it isn’t necessary? Because Wei Wuxian is self-sacrificing—no one knows this better than her, except maybe Jiang Cheng—even, or perhaps especially, to a fault.

Chapter Text

She’s pretty sure Lan Wangji has taken to sitting on Wei Wuxian to stop him from overusing this new cultivation. She’s OK with this—who is she to kinkshame the two of them?—but whatever he’s doing is definitely necessary, and also working. Because while Wei Wuxian keeps suggesting he raise the dead, so far he’s only doing it when the fierce corpses are threatening to overwhelm their forces.

And she has to admit, while the resentful energy is most likely bad for him, being stabbed or bitten by a fierce corpse is even more definitely harmful.

He’s less cautious about using his dizi to raise dead animals, but the Nie cultivators have taken a very strong line with the other sects about not objecting to that, banding around him as if he were one of their own, and of course the remaining Jiangs look at him like he can do no wrong because he’s still their head disciple.

Well, the remaining Jiangs besides Jiang Cheng, but she’s pretty sure by now that everyone knows that Jiang Cheng shoving his brother in the shoulder and calling him a self-sabotaging idiot is his way of saying “I love you.”

She hopes that’s not his approach to romantic relationships too—not that it’s any of her business.

In addition to taking care of Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng (he’s fine—the transplant seems to have been entirely successful on his end, which is a relief), she has basically taken over the healing tents for all the major sects, which unfortunately brings her into consistent contact with Jin Guangshan. This is partly because of course she has to meet with all the sect leaders, but it’s also because the Jins are definitely the worst-prepared and least-strategically-minded sect of all of them. She thinks it’s because they’ve spent their entire lives being the richest and best-equipped sect, and also because the Jin sect is definitely the most aggressively hierarchical of them all. It’s not that they’re bad at their jobs, or poor fighters, but she suspects strongly that being promoted in Lanling means spending less time in the field, and that even those who do go in the field are used to paying others to do their work rather than just doing it. They’re all out of practice.

And that means injuries in the field, even when they don’t encounter the enemy. Soft-tissue injuries from hard landings off swords, for instance, don’t care if you’re landing in front of the enemy or a false alarm. And when they do encounter the enemy, they’re just a half-beat slow, which means even more injuries. With the healing tents run jointly, that means she’s seeing a lot more Jins than other sects. And that means a lot of Jin Guangshan.

She has never had a positive impression of him and that doesn’t change. If anything it intensifies. He keeps calling her to his tent to complain about pointless things (no, she’s not paying less attention to his cultivators, they just have stupider injuries so it’s easier for lesser doctors to treat them) and then making her wait. As if she didn’t have better things to do.

Of course, making her wait outside his tent also means giving her an opportunity to listen in on the conversations he’s having inside that tent.

The idiot.

He’s not blatantly committing treachery or anything; Jin Guangshan is nothing if not a weathervane and the wind is definitely blowing away from the Wens right now. But it lets her become very familiar with exactly how power-hungry and vain he is, and how all that ambition is zero-sum. He has no concept that when things get better for the cultivation world as a whole they can get better for the Jins too. He thinks only of his relative position among the sects, not about the world more broadly.

He’s hardly alone in that, but with Nie Mingjue, Lan Xichen, and Jiang Cheng as the other sect leaders he’s definitely the worst by so much that she doesn’t even feel right comparing them. His nephew, Jin Zixun, is just as bad and more of an idiot; his heir, Jin Zixuan, is just as much of an idiot but not quite so far gone. So of course that means Jin Guangshan spends more time with Jin Zixun than his own son.

Fool. Jin Zixuan will be leading the sect after his death; even if he’s more sympathetic to Jin Zixun’s idiocy he ought to be working more closely with his son. But then again Jin Guangshan is clearly the sort who doesn’t care about the world after he dies, or who doesn’t imagine he ever will die (though if there’s anyone less likely to cultivate to immortality, she hasn’t really seen it).

Still, she doesn’t say anything, not only because it won’t do anything but also because you don’t tell your enemies when they’re being idiots—and they’re definitely enemies, even if her uncle is the worse evil right now.

Jin Zixuan she has a shred of sympathy for now, having seen how his father is, but he still hasn’t managed to apologize to Yanli for being an idiot at Cloud Recesses (and in general) so she has no real time for him. A-Li is family now, she insists on it, so Wen Qing has joined her brothers in the protection squad for her feelings.

It’s a comfortable feeling, being part of something like that. A-Li has taken to making soup for the whole crowd, huge vats that can accommodate an ever-growing number of people for dinner: besides the Yunmeng trio and Wen Qing’s own little two-person family (plus A-Yuan, but he’s not soup-age yet), there’s of course Lan Wangji, who has taken her instructions to keep Wei Wuxian out of trouble as gospel writ that allows him to be next to his soulmate every day (and yes, he does describe him as such, without even a shiver of complaint from Wei Wuxian), and more often than not the two Nie brothers and even Lan Xichen. In fact, she’s starting to worry that Jin Guangshan will insist on being invited, because as it is he’s being functionally excluded from a meeting of the minds of the rest of the cultivation world.

He’d still be excluded, of course; it would just mean that Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue get less of A-Li’s soup.

Of course, it turns out A-Li has been sneaking out before their group dinners to deliver single bowls to Jin Zixuan, an effort which blows up in her face soon enough. Because she has the whole adopted family descending on her afterwards she’s been leaving the soup with a Jin servant, and apparently that servant has led Jin Zixuan to believe the soup was from her. Then one day the soup delivery is late, and Yanli is carrying it herself when Jin Zixuan is already back in his tent, and he starts yelling at her for taking credit for someone else’s work.

Wen Qing, Wei Wuxian, and Lan Wangji are all in hearing distance, and so they all rush to her defense; Lan Wangji’s hand on Wei Wuxian’s wrist (where it just happens to be “checking his qi” most of the time, with no one choosing to comment on it) slows him down just enough that Wen Qing is the first one on the scene, and she just grabs the bowl from Jin Zixuan’s hands after he’d picked it up.

“I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under, but half the camp has been eating what we all know is A-Li’s soup for weeks.” Half is an exaggeration overall, but in terms of the high-level cultivators it really isn’t. “If you don’t want this bowl, I’m happy to eat it myself.”

“Mn.” Lan Wangji grabs the spoon in the bowl and eats some, glaring at Jin Zixuan the whole time. “Definitely Lady Jiang’s.”

Wei Wuxian is still hopping mad, but having the two of them take his sister’s side has clearly left him without much to do except crouch beside his sister and ask “shijie, are you OK?”

“I’m fine, A-Xian,” insists Yanli, except she’s pushing tears away from the corner of her eyes and so Wen Qing can see she’s not actually OK.

“Young Master Jin.” She hands the bowl to Lan Wangji and bows to Jin Zixuan. “We will leave you to your evening. Given your inability to identify A-Li’s soup when she herself was carrying it, if you would like to make an appointment to have your eyes examined you are welcome to come visit me in the healing tents tomorrow.” She bows again and the four of them sweep off towards the Jiang tents, leaving Jin Zixuan with his jaw unflatteringly dropped behind them.

Chapter Text

The day after she sees a groveling and apologetic Jin Zixuan (“there is nothing wrong with my eyes, Lady Wen, but I am beginning to suspect there may be with my mind and tongue—have you an elixir for that?”) the incident is put out of her mind by the ridiculous plan Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen try to slide by her as if she weren’t paying attention.

“You want to go where?” She does not shriek. She never shrieks. She is a calm and competent cultivator, a healer and as such used to being a presence of stability in the hardest times. So she does not grasp Nie Mingjue by the front of his robes and haul him back into his seat or peer into Lan Xichen’s eyes as she had Jin Zixuan’s looking for milkiness. But it is a close-run thing.

“Lady Wen…” Lan Xichen starts, but his brother interrupts. Or, since Lans don’t interrupt, perhaps he knew that Lan Xichen had nothing more to say beyond her name, since there cannot possibly be any reasonable reason for the suggestion he has made.

“Brother.” Lan Wangji gives someone stinkeye on her behalf is a novel experience, and she can’t say it’s an unpleasant one. Maybe Wei Wuxian was onto something; having Lan Wangji as an ally is surprisingly useful—or perhaps the surprise is that it’s possible.

She takes advantage of the pause Lan Wangji has created to expand on her point. “I have been to the Nightless Realms recently, or at least more recently than any of you, and I don’t care what informant you think you have, Sect Leader Lan, or how sneaky you suppose yourself to be, Sect Leader Nie, this is folly. Unless your informant were Wen Ruohan himself, in which case why are we even fighting this war, even whoever it is who sits at his right hand will not be able to stop him from using the Yin Iron. And when he uses the Yin Iron he will be able to see the flicker of Baxia’s resentful energy and he will find you.” She whirls around to face Lan Xichen again. “And don’t think that you could do it instead of him. Even without Baxia’s signature, the wards around Wen Ruohan’s chamber used to ring an alarm when even Wen Xu entered. Not that that’s an issue anymore, but consider the larger point.”

Jiang Cheng crosses his arms and chimes in in her support. “She’s right, you know. And besides, why bother? We’re already winning.” He gestures to the map between them all, on which little figures of cultivators from a child’s playset (A-Yuan’s, actually, a gift from Nie Huiasang that has been repurposed until the kid doesn’t risk swallowing everything in range) indicate the relative positions of their and the enemy’s forces. “We’re going to shove all of this back into Wen Ruohan’s face in a week at the most; why risk this?”

“I…” Nie Mingjue is about to protest something when his brother’s hand on his arm stops him.

“Elder Brother.” Nie Huiasang waves his fan. “Let our friends help us. I know you could do this, whatever Sister Qing says, but do you have to? After all, this is a joint effort of all the clans.”

“Exactly!” Jin Guangshan puffs into the conversation and abruptly Wen Qing considers reconsidering the proposal, because she instinctively hates being on the same side as Jin Guangshan about anything. “Let us all get our share of the glory, Mingjue.” By which he means that he probably has several plans to steal the glory out from under the others in ways that would be impaired by Nie Mingjue doing it on his own, but she’ll take the point she guesses.

“I suppose we could table this idea in case the main assault fails,” Lan Xichen concedes, and from the way Nie Mingjue’s shoulders move at that she knows she’s won. She is a gracious winner, of course, gently coaxing Lan Xichen to share the information his source, whoever it is, had provided: even if they’re not sneaking in, knowing the locations of various patrols is very useful for the attack as well.

The planning goes well. They even manage to agree on an order of battle, a topic that has frequently produced serious disputes in the past because of Jin Guangshan’s unwillingness to cede pride of place to troops that can actually fight. Here, though, there are enough targets for everyone, and if the rest of them are all aware that the Jiang-Nie axis of approach will definitely be their breakthrough because of the presence of Wei Wuxian and Jin Guangshan isn’t, that’s his problem for later.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are huddled over the map with Jiang Cheng and Nie Huiasang, trying to figure out if there are any places where Wei Wuxian can productively find animals to raise—she has no idea, she didn’t live in Nightless City for long enough to know where they got their meat from, but Nie Huiasang has apparently read some very detailed history books that she’d love to get her hands on—while Lan Xichen, Nie Mingjue, and Jin Guangshan discuss the timing of the next day’s fight. Jin Zixuan is conspicuously absent as Jin Guangshan’s heir and head disciple, as is, she supposes, Wen Ning as the only other Wen cultivator besides her available. But Jin Zixuan is hopefully sitting in his tent figuring out how to say the words “I’m sorry” without following them up with “that you’re so pathetic” and Wen Ning has A-Yuan, so she supposes they’re both busy.

That night she gets up six times with A-Yuan, and the last time she runs into Wei Wuxian who is for some reason also awake. He follows her into the tent and offers her a talisman.

“Bottle warmer,” he says, and she slaps it onto the bottle of milk she’s about to give A-Yuan and smiles at him. It’s a tired smile, and she’s pretty sure it’s probably lopsided because again, six times in one night, but it’s genuine and she hopes he knows that. She doesn’t smile very often, so the people she does smile at had better notice.

“Ah, big sister.” He gives her a little side hug and she allows it, without even threatening him with her needles, which is how she knows she’s really tired. “I can take this one, OK? You go get some sleep.” He smiles down at her. “I know Jiang Cheng wouldn’t want me to let you exhaust yourself.”

“What business is it of his,” she tries to snap, but it comes out more curious than she’d like. “Anyway, shouldn’t you be asleep too?”

“Ah, ah, sister, don’t scold! I’ll have you know Lan Zhan made me go to bed at his ridiculously early Lan bedtime, and then get up at his ridiculously early Lan wakeup time.” Wen Qing looks at the sky and realizes that yes, it is probably already five. “And then the old fuddy-duddy started meditating, so here I am, free and available for baby-feeding.” He takes the bottle and A-Yuan from her with a practiced hand (he and Lan Wangji have been babysitting during the periods when Wen Qing and Lan Wangji have forced Wei Wuxian to take a day off here and there, so he is actually pretty used to it). “Now, you go get sleep so I can tell my little brother I didn’t let you exhaust yourself, and I’ll see to young master Wen here.” He shoos her out and it’s yet more evidence that she’s too exhausted for her own good that she goes.

And she doesn’t even get a straight answer about why he thinks Jiang Cheng would be so concerned—though her dreams in the two hours she steals of sleep before the day starts are all about purple lightning whizzing around Dafan Mountain.

Chapter Text

At the end of the day, she is the senior living member of the Wen clan, and that’s what she chooses to focus on. Her literally evil uncle is dead, his powers overthrown, and Wei Wuxian is not dead and currently in charge of figuring out how to destroy his Yin Iron. It’s a good day.

The fact that Jin Guangshan is also dead is a bonus.

The rest of the day? She tries not to think about the rest of the day, but it comes back to her in flashes nevertheless.

Jiang Cheng leading a charge intended only to distract Wen Ruohan’s bevy of fierce corpses, counting on Lan Wangji to keep Wei Wuxian alive.

Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen standing back to back as the last remaining Wen soldiers surrounded them, cutting them down by the dozen, only to have those same soldiers’ corpses rise and reach out for them.

Wei Wuxian’s dizi cutting across the battlefield, and the corpses turning outward and fighting their former allies, who fled before them in surprise and shock to see their leader’s tricks turned against him.

Lan Wangji cutting down dozens of soldiers as they streamed towards a barely cognizant Wei Wuxian.

From her own position high above most of the battle in a tower they had seized in the early fighting, she saw all of this and more.

But her strongest memories, the ones she wishes she could lose and cannot, are from the end of the battle and its aftermath.

Wei Wuxian’s advantage in the control of the fierce corpses had come entirely from proximity; Wen Ruohan was conjuring using the Yin Iron from his throne room, while Wei Wuxian was right there. The Yin Iron was strong, incredibly strong, but Wen Ruohan was not, she now realized, a particularly strong user of it. She shudders to think what Wei Wuxian, much as she loves him, would have been able to do in Wen Ruohan’s situation.

But that advantage of skill is nothing compared to the advantage of proximity, and so when Wen Ruohan comes out of the throne room, Yin Iron orbiting around his head and emitting a horrid black wind, the fierce corpses under Wei Wuxian’s control falter and then turn.

If Wei Wuxian had something more than the mere focus of the dizi, something to compete with the amplifying power of the Yin Iron, perhaps he could have stood against it even then. Perhaps he could have fought Wen Ruohan to something closer to a draw. As it is, he tries his best, but the corpses he was previously controlling drive towards him, ignoring all others, and even the best efforts of Lan Wangji and a desperate Jiang Cheng can only slow the inevitable as the entire battle whirls around Wei Wuxian like the eye of a massive storm.

She sees everything as if it were in slow motion, A-Ning by her side atop the tower, as Wen Ruohan moves inexorably down the steps of the central pavilion, the Yin Iron driving all before him. His attention is solely on Wei Wuxian; the fierce corpses that have no route towards where her friend stands are dropping like discarded puppets, as only one thought appears to fill her uncle’s mind: destroy the one who threatens his control. She sees someone trailing behind him down the steps, probably whoever attends on him in his chambers, and for a moment she thinks they might take advantage of his distraction to do something, but the thought is only a momentary one. They are either too far from him or, more likely, too loyal to do anything.

It does, however, give her an idea.

She nudges A-Ning in the shoulder.

And again.

“Sister?” He turns to her and she nods towards their uncle. He looks up and meets her eyes.

“Uncle is also a bad man.” It should be a question, but it is not. She nods anyway.

She thought she was proud of A-Ning in Yiling. No, she was proud. Her pride now does not diminish her pride then. And this is the one minute of the battle she does not regret remembering; she will be proud of this until they both are deep within the ground.

Because Wen Ning draws his bow, takes aim, and shoots their distracted uncle straight through the eye, just like Wei Wuxian had done to his second son.

She thinks up even until the last moment that surely Wen Ruohan will look up, will notice, will flinch even the least bit away and ruin the shot. She has no doubts of A-Ning’s skill as an archer, and the height of the tower means the shot is well within his range, but the odds are still massively against him, especially shooting at a cultivator the level of Wen Ruohan, corrupted as he may be by the Yin Iron.

But perhaps luck is with them, or perhaps it is the fact that three fierce corpses have finally gotten their hands on Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng, and Wei Wuxian, hands wrapped around their throats, that makes Wen Ruohan forget entirely the existence of the rest of the world, but the arrow slides in between the orbiting pieces of the Yin Iron and buries itself in Wen Ruohan’s brain, doing him the disservice of piercing an eye on the way through.

A second arrow, loosed shortly after the first, impales his heart before he tumbles and falls.

Her eyes flit back to her friends and she is beyond relieved to see the fierce corpses fallen and Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen stepping over their collapsed bodies to retrieve their allies.

She doesn’t see any more because she is hugging A-Ning, and he is embracing her back, and she’s pretty sure she whispers something to him about how well he did but the details become fuzzy because of the overwhelming sense of freedom and relief.

Not just for the cultivation world, but for them. They’re free. Their uncle and all his hellish instruments of torture and death have no more hold on them.

She’s not sure she entirely comes to until much later, when she’s found her way to Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian, and Lan Wangji and is trying to figure out how best to triage their care. She could do this in her sleep, which is good because the release of her adrenaline rush is not dissimilar to sleep deprivation—and she should know because of course she has both going on at once right now.

Jiang Cheng will be fine. His new golden core is pulsing strong and clear and he’s only experienced a few bruises and cuts, typical of a battlefield and only a little worse because of that last wave of fierce corpse attacks. She would like to check further, but needs must, and she hands him off to a Jiang healer with strict instructions about being careful that he doesn’t overstrain himself with the power of his still-new golden core in his recovery.

Lan Wangji is similar, except it’s Lan Xichen she hands him to, and it feels presumptuous to do more than remind him that Lan Wangji is going to flip out if he comes to and no one tells him where Wei Wuxian is. Lan Xichen smiles down at her and she’s pretty sure they’re on the same page before he hauls his brother away.

Wei Wuxian is…cold. Not dead, but cold, and she’s never really noted the lack of a golden core in the same way before. He’s obviously overdone it in the assault, and being overwhelmed by Wen Ruohan’s own cultivation must have been a shock to the system. She is planning on keeping his care in her own hands, ignoring the Nie healer that Nie Huiasang is dragging up towards her until her eye is caught by movement near the corpse of Wen Ruohan.

A small cultivator she doesn’t recognize in Wen robes is talking to a taller cultivator in the distinctive golden robes of Lanling Jin, and as she watches one of them—she thinks in retrospect it was the Jin, but it might have been the Wen, or possibly both at once—reaches down and tries to pick up one of the pieces of the Yin Iron that have fallen to earth next to the body.

The next thing she remembers is a scream; not hers, but horrible and seemingly unending. A second, lower tone joins the first, weaving together into a horror she has never experienced before until they both shut off abruptly.

Whichever of them picked it up first, it’s clear that both cultivators have touched the Yin Iron. She’s seen what happens when that happens while the Iron is under Wen Ruohan’s power. Then the soul and body are rent apart and the shell that remains becomes under his control. Apparently without the organizing force of Wen Ruohan, the effect is…somehow worse.

The bodies of the two cultivators topple down in a pile atop Wen Ruohan, and the clang of the Yin Iron on the ground (again) is loud in the sudden silence.

It is only then that anyone else moves, and she shoves Wei Wuxian into Nie Huiasang’s arms and moves herself—after all, no one left alive knows as much about the effects of resentful energy or the Yin Iron as her, except maybe the unconscious man she just handed to their friend—meeting Nie Mingjue as they both push past the rubbernecking cultivators who have been drawn to the awful sound but are too cautious or afraid to actually approach.

They both recognize the Jin as Jin Guangshan, which is hardly a surprise.

Nie Mingjue nods sadly as he identifies the other as Meng Yao, who used to work for him in the Unclean Realms and who, he informs her, was Jin Guangshan’s bastard. She vaguely remembers him.

“I guess he thought this would be the way into his father’s good graces,” he mutters. “Poor fool.” He shakes his head. “I’d heard he’d taken up with Wen Ruohan, and he did kill the captain of my guard, but no one deserves to die like that. Especially not for a man like that.” He nudges Jin Guangshan with his foot.

She nods. She doesn’t have much emotion left for either of these dead men after all the others. They organize a group of Jins to carry the bodies away for burial and notify Jin Zixuan, a group of other cultivators Nie Mingjue trusts to keep watch on the Yin Iron so that no one else tries to touch it, and she wheedles a promise out of him that she, Nie Huiasang, Wei Wuxian, and Lan Wangji will get first crack at figuring out how to deal with it. “Mostly Wei Wuxian,” she admits, “but I thought you’d feel better if I reminded you that we have representatives of other sects looking in on him.”

“You thought right.” He nods to her. “Now, I suppose I’d better go find myself a Lan to play Inquiry and Clarity for me. Excuse me, Sect Leader Wen.” And with a quick bow, he too is gone, leaving her cursing in his wake.

Sect Leader Wen? Oh. Oh no.

This is definitely a day she’d much rather forget.

Chapter Text

It’ll be a dark day in the Nightless City when Wen Qing allows herself to become Sect Leader Wen. Sect leadership is a trap; she’s never wanted that power, and she isn’t even sure she trusts herself with it. So, no. It helps that the Wen clan and sect have a strong bias against female leaders (the only time in her life this has been a bonus) and it doesn’t hurt that she makes very clear to the very few stakeholders left in this decision that she will not be ignoring the sect. She just won’t be leading it.

That would be, as she takes real pleasure in conveying to them even as it worries her beyond belief, A-Ning’s job.

Not only is he the senior surviving male Wen (even if both of them are Dafan Wen, the butcheries of Wen Ruohan both in coming to the sect leadership and thereafter have left no real competitors left, and if there were any the war eliminated them) but there is also a strong tradition in the Wen sect and clan of succession by assassination, and there is a good two feet of evidence of that emerging from Wen Ruohan’s corpse.

So Sect Leader Wen Ning it is, with the support of the other sects rapidly making sure that even if any of the few survivors within the Nightless City would like to object, they don’t.

Nie Mingjue is easiest to convince; having acknowledged her, all it takes is a brief conversation in which she points out that her brother would be the more, ahem, traditional heir and he’s on board.

Lan Xichen is basically a secondary consequence of that, and he and Nie Mingjue formally swear brotherhood with Wen Ning on the steps of Nightless City to cement their alliance.

Jiang Cheng is probably pissed that he didn’t get invited to the brotherhood ceremony, but he punches A-Ning in the shoulder and tells him “next time maybe shoot a little sooner, idiot,” and for some reason it makes her melt a little bit inside? A-Ning is beaming at him, so apparently they’ve both learned to speak Jiang Cheng in the last few months, and this sounds to both of them like approval.

It probably helps in interpreting his meaning that he’s sitting down in the healing tent letting Wen Qing inspect his spiritual energy, hand wrapped around his wrist, and not objecting any more than usual. He and Lan Wangji are, for all practical purposes, recovered, and she’s pretty sure Jiang Cheng is just coming back to the healing tent for his own checkups to allow him an excuse to look in on Wei Wuxian without admitting he’s worried.

Lan Wangji needs no such excuse, and is sleeping by his guqin next to Wei Wuxian’s bed, playing every song he can conceive of to help his soulmate.

Jin Zixuan’s support of Wen Ning’s ascension is impeded only by the need to get himself formally installed as head of Lanling Jin after his father’s violent and uncanny demise. In fact, that takes long enough because of Jin Zixun being an ass and making him go through all the motions that Wen Ning ends up installed first.

Wei Wuxian…well, he’s technically conscious, but the resentful energy is taking a long time to cleanse, even with Lan Wangji playing as much as he physically can, so much that one night she has to sneak up behind him and stab needles in his neck to stop him from exhausting himself so far that he can’t keep going the next day.

In the morning when she removes them he simply nods at her and starts playing again, but she notices that he actually goes to sleep at a normal time that night, and the night after.

On the third day Wei Wuxian is markedly improved, and some traitor has snuck him talisman paper (she suspects Jiang Cheng or Nie Huiasang, since Lan Wangji would have just done it openly). So he spends the day drawing talismans inspired by what happened to him: one for detecting evil, another for focusing resentful energy more fully in a non-sentient spiritual tool, a third for shutting down the flow of resentful energy through a body.

He slips her the last one and makes her promise that if he ever becomes like Wen Ruohan she’ll slap it on him.

She suspects he had a similar conversation with Lan Wangji.

What she doesn’t know is whether he’s had the other conversation he ought to have with Lan Wangji, the one that starts with “soulmate” and goes through “constant physical contact” into “formal alliance between the Jiangs and Lans.” After all, with Jiang Cheng not part of the triune alliance, there’s a definite need to include the Jiangs somehow. And while no one actually thinks there will be trouble—she literally transplanted the man’s core, for heaven’s sake, there’s not much clearer evidence of trust in either direction—it would be good to have that formalized.

She suspects he has not had this conversation, because he still acts surprised every time he wakes up and Lan Wangji is there.

She tries to hint to Lan Wangji but he says something silly and laconic that suggests he doesn’t realize Wei Wuxian is into him too (she doesn’t bother to remember what it was, because she’s already wasted enough brain space on the question of when they’ll get together).

Idiots, the both of them.

At least it keeps Lan Wangji where she can check on him, although his possession of a golden core means he’s recovered much faster than Wei Wuxian.

She bumps into Jiang Yanli doing her daily soup round to the hospital and promises that yes, she’ll be there again for dinner. When she arrives at the Jiang tents it’s just her and Jiang Cheng for a little while, and they sit and chat about their respective plans for rebuilding their sects (she may be making A-Ning Sect Leader, but she’s not about to pretend she doesn’t have Ideas about the future). It’s nice, hearing him wax poetic about the lotus ponds, and she wishes she had that kind of attachment to the physical world of Qishan. But since she’s Dafan Wen, it’s actually going to be quite a sacrifice for her to move to the Nightless City. She envies Jiang Cheng a city he actually likes.

A-Ning slips into the tent and the three of them make plans to exchange labor and planning for their respective rebuilds; obviously local customs and styles will predominate in both places, but there is a solid core of needs for both sects that were either burned in the attack (Lotus Pier) or destroyed in the invasion (Nightless City). A-Ning makes the solid suggestion that to the extent they can the Wen should pay for it, as a public form of restitution, and Jiang Cheng concedes that the Dafan Wen have been good citizens in Yunmeng and that he’ll allow any who wish to resettle there to stay.

A-Li and a very hopeful looking Nie Huiasang join them then and the conversation turns to other matters, but Wen Qing feels the unfamiliar stirrings of hope in her chest after this.

It’s actually possible, she thinks, that everything could be all right in the end.

Chapter Text

During the next few days, Wei Wuxian grew markedly better, well enough that Wen Qing cleared him for light activity.

Knowing Wei Wuxian, she made sure that not only did he know that “light activity” meant nothing more than “allowed to get up and walk around a bit and talk to people” but that Lan Wangji knew as well, which made it much more likely that he would actually stick to it. Not that Lan Wangji was good at telling Wei Wuxian no, but he did care a lot more about his health than Wei Wuxian himself did, and was capable of telling him no if someone else had made it clear that telling him yes would endanger him.

Which it definitely would in this case.

So Wei Wuxian was actually mostly behaving. It probably helped that the most interesting thing available to do was categorized under “light activity,” namely inspecting the pieces of the Yin Iron where they had fallen and been isolated (no one daring to touch them after what happened to the Jins) and then theorizing about them, loudly, to anyone who would listen.

Since this primarily consisted of Lan Wangji, Wen Qing, and Nie Huiasang, with a side order of Jiang Yanli and Lan Xichen when they were available, Wei Wuxian was perfectly happy to do “light activity”—except when Jin Zixuan accompanied Yanli one time, but that was clearly more about the company and less about the restrictions on his activity. Although fisticuffs were explicitly banned.

Still, since they hadn’t actually had any major breakthroughs, it was a relief for Wen Qing to find herself on the fourth day once again sharing the Jiang tent with Jiang Cheng and no one else, since Yanli was serving Wei Wuxian and the rest of the dinner posse hadn’t shown up yet. Even A-Ning was doing something with his new sworn brothers, a point that Jiang Cheng was clearly aware of.

“Tell me, Wen Qing, how am I supposed to rebuild Lotus Pier and the Jiang sect when your brother took all the allies?” She’s pretty sure he’s teasing but with Jiang Cheng that comes out at the same volume and intensity as everything else. “What am I left with, allying with the Jins?” He shoots her a baleful look. “You’re probably going to tell me I should let my older sister marry the peacock, aren’t you?”

She reaches for another roll—A-Li has recently taken to baking in addition to soup-making, Wen Qing thinks from the stress of the war—and cracks it open. “Probably. If you want an alliance with the Jins, that’s probably the best way, unless you want to swear brotherhood with him yourself.”

“Ugh.” He grabs another roll himself. “I was hoping you’d have another one of your brilliant ideas that you can force me into.” He bites into the roll and raises an eyebrow at her, like a dare to disagree.

She’s not Wei Wuxian, but she still doesn’t back down from dares.

“Please.” She rolls her eyes. “That was entirely your brother’s brilliant idea. I just made it actually work.”

“So you’re saying if I just come up with a brilliant idea, you’ll make it work for me?”

“Good luck with that.” She snorts and he tries very hard to look angry and offended but she knows Jiang Cheng by now, and so she can see the tell: Zidian isn’t lit up.

“I’ll have you know I’m very good at coming up with brilliant ideas.” She snorts again. “I am!”

“Whatever you say, Sect Leader Jiang.” She eats the roll.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Not especially, no.”

“Fine. Meet me here tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“So I can show you a brilliant idea!” He briefly looks almost worried. “You’ll come?”

“Jiang Cheng, I eat here every night. I’m pretty sure A-Li would boil me in the soup if I skipped family dinner.” His eyebrows are still too tight and she sighs. “Yes. I’ll be here.”

“Good.” He sips his tea. “Not that I thought any different of course.”

“Of course.” She hides her smile in her own tea. “By the way, you really should do it.”

“Do what?”

“Let A-Li marry who she wants. Which happens to be Jin Zixuan. Which happens to be very politically convenient for you.”

“But what if he humiliates her again?” Jiang Cheng looks angry again, and this time Zidian is coming to life. “I’d have to kill him, and then A-Li would be mad and we’d have another sect war and it would be a whole thing.”

“Oh, don’t worry, that wouldn’t happen.” She sips the tea again. It’s actually pretty good; she thinks A-Li may have contacts in the supply train. “Wei Wuxian would kill him first, and then Lan Wangji would defend him, and it would be a totally different sect war.”

“Thanks for that. Now I have two worries about it.”

“Speaking of Lan Wangji…”

“Why are we speaking about Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian bounds into the tent and sits at the table across from her. “Hello Wen Qing, hello younger brother.”

“Who’s your younger brother?  I’m your sect leader now. And what are you doing here?” Jiang Cheng’s face is once again trying to lie to them all by looking angry when Wen Qing is pretty sure he’s delighted to see his brother up and about. “Yanli went to the healing tents with bowls for you and Lan Wangji.”

“Oh, I know! We ran into her and I convinced her to give Lan Zhan both bowls for him and his brother. They had some kind of family meeting thing, or else he’d be here too.” Wei Wuxian waves a hand vaguely in the air, then serves himself a roll and stuffs it halfway into his mouth while continuing to talk. “She said she’d already brought Lan Xichen some, but I figure, more for Lan Zhan then. He’s never stopped talking about that time he got two bowls because Jin Zixuan was too silly to realize who made his soup.” He glances between the two of them who are staring at him in disbelief. “Oh, all right, he mentioned it twice since then. Twice.” Wen Qing and Jiang Cheng nod. For Lan Wangji, that is never shutting up about it. “Anyway, why were you talking about Lan Zhan?” He points at Wen Qing with a second roll. “C’mon, spill.”

She shrugs. “I was just going to tell your brother about how Lan Wangji could help him with a problem he’s been having.” She glances over at Jiang Cheng. “The alliances.”

“You want Jiang Cheng to swear brotherhood with Lan Wangji?” Wei Wuxian’s mouth drops open, giving them a bit more of a view of the remaining roll than she’d prefer. “I mean, I guess I see it? We do need allies, after all, and Lan Xichen’s already sworn with your brother and Nie Huiasang’s.” He shrugs. “And the Lans are good people to have on your side in a pinch.”

“I agree.” She smiles sweetly at him and he knows her well enough to look extremely alarmed, while Jiang Cheng appears to be enjoying his discomfiture. “But no, I wasn’t going to suggest Jiang Cheng swear brotherhood with your Lan Wangji. Well, not exactly.”

“He’s not my Lan Wangji!” Wei Wuxian protests, at the same time that Jiang Cheng asks the more important question “how ‘not exactly’?”

“Well, he’d be your brother…” She lets it sit for a moment and watches the awareness come up in Jiang Cheng’s eyes while Wei Wuxian still looks confused. “Well, brother-in-law.”

“Oh! You want him to marry Yanli! That’s good, much better than the peacock.” Wei Wuxian nods. “Lan Zhan deserves nothing less than the best, and sister deserves nothing less than the best, and they are the best, so they can marry each other! Sister Qing, you’re brilliant!”

“And you’re an idiot.” Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes and raises an eyebrow at her and she gestures forward, the universal signal for be my guest. “She’s not saying Yanli should marry him. She’s saying you should.”

“What?” They can probably hear Wei Wuxian all the way up Baoshan Sanren’s mountain, wherever that might actually be.

Chapter Text

Wen Qing is saved from being the one who has to explain the status of his own relationship to Wei Wuxian by the appearance of Jiang Yanli.

“Sister!” Both Yunmeng boys perk up, and Jiang Cheng takes advantage of Wei Wuxian’s immediate preening in front of their sister to complain to her. “Explain to Wei Wuxian that he’s in love with Lan Wangji!”

“Wait, what, hold on, in love?” Wei Wuxian wails. “I thought we were talking about a political marriage!”

“A-Xian, do you not want to marry Lan Wangji?” A-Li comes over and sits next to Wen Qing, sparing a glance for her brother as she starts to serve the soup that they have all let sit waiting for her to do the honors (there are some things you don’t mess with, and A-Li’s control of the soup is one of them). “He’ll be so disappointed, you know.”

“It’s not about what I want! It’s about…wait, disappointed?” Wei Wuxian sits upright for the first time Wen Qing has ever seen outside of the lectures at Cloud Recesses under Lan Qiren’s observant eye. “Lan Zhan doesn’t want to marry me! He could have his pick of all the girls; of everyone! Who wouldn’t want to marry him? Anybody would be lucky to have him!”

“We’re not talking about anybody, we’re talking about you.” Jiang Cheng takes his bowl from his sister and blows across it. “Do you want to marry Lan Wangji?”

“Since when is this even an option?” Wei Wuxian pouts. “I don’t see why you’re springing this on me out of nowhere, asking like it’s even possible. Lan Zhan would have to want to marry me, first. Lans only love once in their lives, you know. What if I ruin his chance at true love?” He’s being overly dramatic, of course, but Wen Qing notes that for all his apparent hysterics he’s still perfectly capable of sucking in an entire bowl of soup around the words. “I couldn’t do that to Lan Zhan. So there’s no point in asking me if I want to marry Lan Zhan when there’s no way Lan Zhan would want to marry me.”

“Oh?” Wen Qing is singularly unimpressed, but also unwilling to waste her time eating soup with conversation—unlike Wei Wuxian, she only has so many more bowls of Yanli’s soup before they go their separate ways, and she can’t enjoy them as fully if she’s talking. “What if I told you he did?”

“How would you know?” Wei Wuxian looks at her oddly. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure Lan Zhan doesn’t like anyone like that. Not yet. He’s waiting for his one true love, I think. But if he did like someone like that, it definitely wouldn’t be me.” He gestures broadly. “I mean, I’m pretty sure he hated me when we first met. Sure, we’re friends now, but if he were going to love someone, don’t you think it would be someone more like him? The most refined, the most disciplined, the most beautiful?”

“Tell me, Wei Wuxian, do you know the significance of a Lan headband?” Wen Qing has finished the soup—she wasn’t quite able to properly savor it, but close enough—and while she has only a little time for Wei Wuxian’s ridiculousness it’s better to nip things in the bud.

“Uh? It signifies restraint?” Wei Wuxian has somehow convinced his sister to give him another bowl of soup and is powering through it the same as the first.

“Did you actually read any of the rules when you were copying them out or did you just zone out?” Jiang Cheng spits. “Come on, Wei Wuxian.”

“A-Cheng, be nice,” Yanli chides. “A-Qing, why do you ask?”

“I think Wei Wuxian knows perfectly well why.” Wen Qing shoots him a look and receives a complete blank in return, which means that it’s possible this particular memory has fallen into the black hole that is Wei Wuxian’s brain. “Jiang Cheng, you know what I’m talking about, right?”

“You mean the time my shameless brother fell out of a hole to nowhere on top of Lan Wangji with his headband tied around their wrists? I do.” Jiang Cheng joins her in staring at Wei Wuxian, and Yanli puts her hand over her mouth.

“A-Cheng, A-Xian, you never told me Young Master Lan put his headband around your wrist!”

“The Yin Iron kind of made everything else seem unimportant, sister. And besides, he only did it to protect me from Lan Yi’s murder guqin! I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

“What all the fuss…” Jiang Cheng is about to explode at his brother so Wen Qing intervenes.

“Wei Wuxian, the Lan headband is the symbol of their restraint and purity. Only parents, children, and spouses may touch it.” Wen Qing sighs. “It’s somewhere in the thousands, I think, in the Lan set of rules.”

“Parents, children, and…”

“Spouses, yes.” Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes. “Now do you see why we think that Lan Wangji might, just might, be interested in you?”

“But he only did it to stop me from getting killed by the murder guqin!”

“I’m pretty sure Lan Wangji wouldn’t lift a finger to stop me from getting killed by a murder guqin, whatever that is, much less let me touch his headband.” Jiang Cheng observes.

“But he only did it because I asked him to!”

“You asked him to, A-Xian?” Wen Qing thinks Yanli is only able to get a word in edgewise because Jiang Cheng is turning the color of his purple robes. “And he said yes?”

“Well, he didn’t exactly say yes, he just did it, and then I almost touched the guqin and Lan Yi showed up and greeted us and told us about the Yin Iron.” Wei Wuxian delivers this without breathing, or as far as Wen Qing can tell taking in any air at all since he’s still drinking soup.

“Wait, she greeted you? As in, you exchanged bows?” Jiang Cheng has returned to the realm of the speaking. Wen Qing is enjoying herself now; this is better than a sparring match.

“Uh, we bowed to her, I guess? It was only polite. What’s your point?”

“Wei Wuxian!” Jiang Cheng stands up and slaps the table. “Are you telling me you got half-married to Lan Wangji over a year ago, and you’re still sitting here telling me he doesn’t have any interest in you?”

“Uh…I guess? It’s really only one-third married. Or maybe two-thirds? I can’t remember if we bowed to each other, now that you mention it.” Wei Wuxian’s mouth is clearly outpacing his brain, as usual, because he only seems to hear his own words a few moments after he speaks them. “Wait, I don’t mean…”

“Ridiculous.” Wen Qing has been waiting a long time to get a rise out of Wei Wuxian with that word, and it works. “Seriously, I think this meal is the longest you two have been apart in the past three months, and you’re wondering if he’s interested in you?” She rolls her eyes. “Besides, think about it this way: for all your protesting that Lan Wangji deserves the best, how would you feel if he were actually getting married to this imagined paragon of yours? If they’d found the auspicious day and arranged the match and all that was left was buying red robes and actually bowing to each other?”

“I’d…” Wei Wuxian is clearly about to say he’d be fine with it, but instead his mouth twists in a more honest version of the pout he so often directs at her or his other adopted sister. “I suppose I’d be fine. If Lan Zhan were really in love, how could I not?”

“Idiot.” Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes and A-Li scolds him with a soft “A-Cheng! Be nice.”

“I am being nice! I’m not frogmarching this idiot over to the Lan tents right now and making Lan Wangji take responsibility,” Jiang Cheng protests.
“Responsibility for what?” Lan Wangji sticks his head into the tent, three empty bowls in hand. “Your bowls, Lady Jiang.”

“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian bounds up and then, noticing how Wen Qing and Jiang Yanli share a look, or possibly just hearing Jiang Cheng snort, moderates his behavior just a smidge, only putting a hand on the other man’s arm instead of embracing him. “I, uh, didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Missed Wei Ying.” Lan Wangji hands Yanli the bowls and wraps his other hand around Wei Wuxian’s wrist.

“Ah, Lan Zhan, you can’t just say that sort of thing! Next thing you know, these crazy people will be trying to marry you off to me, if you’re not careful.”

“Not.” Lan Wangji sits down next to where Wei Wuxian was sitting.

“No, I’m serious, they really will!” Wei Wuxian argues, but Lan Wangji shakes his head.
“No. Not careful.”

“What are you trying to say, Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian seems oddly hesitant.

“Would like to marry Wei Ying.” Lan Wangji looks over at Jiang Cheng. “If that is acceptable.” He inclines his head.

“I told you!” Jiang Cheng slaps the table again for emphasis. “Yes, Second Young Master Lan, my brother would be more than happy to marry you, once he gets over himself.”

“Mm.” Lan Wangji nods. “Good.”

“Good? Lan Zhan, are you saying you actually…” for the first time in her life, Wen Qing sees Wei Wuxian completely without words.
“Congratulations, A-Xian, Second Young Master Lan.” Yanli inclines her head and smiles broadly, and Wen Qing finds herself smiling too.

“Yes, congratulations, you two. Now, Wei Wuxian, I think you’ve been out of the healing tents long enough. Lan Wangji, if you would help me lead him back? He’s had a big day.”

Chapter Text

Wen Qing spends the next day having to dodge around Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji: New Engaged Couple. Apparently discovering that each of their sentiments about the other were reciprocated, rather than ignored or even merely tolerated, unlocked something in each of them that she had no real desire to be present for, or even to know was happening.

Unfortunately for her, it also apparently unlocked whatever was blocking Wei Wuxian’s intellectual creativity, and he spent every waking moment that wasn’t spent focused entirely on Lan Wangji and what he might do with, to, or for him coming up with ideas about how they might destroy or otherwise denature the Yin Iron.

And for this, Wen Qing’s presence was necessary. Not that she was the one having the ideas, but that she was the one on hand to remind Wei Wuxian he didn’t have a golden core and make sure that whatever he came up with wasn’t going to kill him, Lan Wangji, or the entire population of the world.

All three options came up.

All three options were shot down.

Wei Wuxian’s pouting was, apparently, a turn-on for Lan Wangji, which was something else she filed in the category of “things I do not need to know about but now apparently do.”

But Wei Wuxian was, thankfully, not entirely made of pouts. Instead, he was actually fairly focused, for him. And that focus was on figuring out what could undo or disarm the Yin Iron.

“It can’t be done alone.” He points at Lan Wangji and Wen Qing as he says this, as if either of them had suggested it could. “Lan Yi proved that; she did her best, and she did it for centuries, but if even as powerful a cultivator as her couldn’t do it alone, none of us will be able to either.”

“Mm.” Lan Wangji shook his head. “Not alone.”

“So, if it’s not doable alone, I think we should go the other route: get as many people involved as we can.” Wei Wuxian gets up and starts pacing. “Not directly involved; we don’t want people touching it, if what happened to Jin Guangshan is any indication. But involved somehow. How do we affect the iron but never touch it?”

“Music?” Wen Qing raises an eyebrow as she makes the obvious suggestion. “That’s how you controlled resentful energy before, and it’s how the Lans have been doing magic at a distance for generations.”

“Right!” Wei Wuxian nods at her like he’s Lan Qiren and she’s just given the correct answer. She’s pretty sure it’s intended as a mockery, but she realizes she actually could see Wei Wuxian teaching a class at some point. “Music. So we get a lot of musical cultivators all around a circle around it, and…do what?”

“Cleansing?” Lan Wangji suggests.

“No.” Wen Qing shakes her head. “If it were that simple, Lan Yi could have done it, over all those centuries you said she was stuck in the cave.”

“Sadly, I think Sister Qing is right. But only partly right!” Wei Wuxian consoles his betrothed, who doesn’t look to Wen Qing like he actually needs consoling, but is definitely willing to accept it nonetheless. “We should warm up the Iron with Cleansing, so it’s prepared for the next step.”

“And what is the next step?” Wen Qing asks, since he’s clearly waiting for someone to ask.

“Implosion!” Wei Wuxian exclaims triumphantly. “There’s nothing we have that’s strong enough to destroy the Yin Iron, except the Yin Iron itself. So we make it implode.”

“Mn. How?” Lan Wangji gets to the heart of it, as usual.

“Well, we don’t have anything that can destroy the Yin Iron, but we know for a fact that musical cultivators like Lan Yi can contain it. Add some talismans around it for good measure and we can set it up so that when the Yin Iron tries to generate power it will strike up against the containment, hit the talismans, and rebound upon itself. Which should tear it apart.”

“Should?” Wen Qing remembers she’s in charge of making sure ‘will destroy everything’ isn’t a possible side effect and interjects.

“90%?” Wei Wuxian pleads. “If we have enough cultivators, and good enough talismans, and if I can get someone else to put in a pulse of really strong spiritual energy to give it a good kick in the pants…”

“Me.” Lan Wangji doesn’t quite interrupt, because Wen Qing is pretty sure Wei Wuxian was done talking even if his sentence hadn’t actually, you know, ended, but it’s a close-run thing.

“No, no, Lan Zhan, I need you organizing the musicians! You’re the only one I trust to get the melodies and the timing right. In fact, we’ll probably need all our Lans on the front lines…maybe Jiang Cheng can do it?”

“Hmph.” Wen Qing recognizes this as Lan Wangji’s “we will talk about this later” sniff. “Why do you need it?”

“I think that hitting the Yin Iron with it will cause the Yin Iron to react, which should start the process. I’ve also planned an array outside of the talisman line, which should activate if resentful energy overwhelms the talismans and help to shut it all down. So you see, it’s really very safe.” He bats his eyes at Wen Qing who rolls her own.

“OK, let me see the diagrams.” He pulls out a sheaf of sloppily written notes and the three of them go through it piece by piece, tweaking a talisman here and adjusting the distance of the cultivators playing the containing songs there. When they’re finally happy with it Wen Qing has to concede that he’s probably done as good a job as anyone can do of designing something that might actually work to destroy the Yin Iron.

“One more thing.” He raises a finger. “Even if we make it implode, there’s going to be a lot of resentful energy released.”

Wen Qing nods. There really will; the Yin Iron has been absorbing it for centuries at this point, and if it is destroyed that energy will have to go somewhere. “It’s going to make this part of Qishan have some very fruitful night hunts for the next few years.”

“Exactly.” Wei Wuxian nods. “I suggest we get our brothers to agree to have intersect night hunts around here for the next, say, five years, to train up the juniors and put down this resentful energy for good.”

Wen Qing nods. “I know A-Ning will be happy to ask for help; do you think your brothers will offer it? And Nie Mingjue and Jin Zixuan as well?”

“Brother will.” Lan Wangji nods to her. “And if brother does, Nie Mingjue will too.”

“I suppose they are A-Ning’s sworn brothers now.” It’s strange for her to think of her brother having allies other than her—even if it is a very good thing.

“And I don’t think you really need to ask about Jiang Cheng.” Wei Wuxian grins at her and she feels an urge to roll her eyes, but also a non-medically-concerning quickening of her pulse. Wei Wuxian seems very certain that Jiang Cheng will want to help her, personally; she wishes she could trust his instincts and not her own in these circumstances, but she has just received the world’s largest confirmation that Wei Wuxian has no idea what people in love look like, given how he’s treated the whole thing with Lan Wangji. “And the peacock will do it so he isn’t left out.” A fair point; if four of the five sects are coordinating, it behooves the fifth to act as well.

“Mn.” Lan Wangji nods, and Wen Qing supposes that it all does make sense.

If only she were more certain that it wasn’t going to literally blow up in their faces—but then again, when has that ever stopped Wei Wuxian?

Chapter Text

She spends almost all of the day figuring out the flaws in Wei Wuxian’s plan and how to fix them (the short answer being “get as many other people involved as possible, so that he can’t try to do it all himself, and neither can you, Lan Wangji, stop encouraging him,” the long answer being a series of endless meetings with various people that barely leaves her any time for her own duties in the healing tents). In fact, she spends so much of it doing that that she almost entirely forgets about Jiang Cheng’s request that she meet him at dinner to discuss some kind of brilliant idea.

Almost, but not quite, because she actually gets a reminder of it when she and her research team (read: cats she is somehow responsible for herding) meet with him in the late afternoon to ask him to issue the crucial pulse of spiritual energy for Wei Wuxian’s plan to work. This was actually the last meeting they went to, because it took all of the other meeting times for Wei Wuxian and her to convince Lan Wangji that no, he could not lead the guqin players, take point on feeding spiritual energy into the array, and produce the killing blow.

“It has to be someone who isn’t spending any of their spiritual energy on anything else, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian had finally argued as they left their meeting with Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue (who were spending a lot of time together recently as Lan Xichen played Clarity for Nie Mingjue every night) and walked towards the Jiang tents. “You know I love you, but it can’t all be you. I gave Jiang Cheng my core, after all; maybe now he can give me back just a little of the spiritual energy in it.”

She’s pretty sure Lan Wangji didn’t hear anything after “you know I love you,” but at least it got him to agree.

Jiang Cheng proves exactly as easy to convince as Wei Wuxian had predicted, blustering about how of course he would and why would Wei Wuxian think anything else and generally sounding adorably like a puffed up bird defending its nest. Apparently Lan Wangji isn’t the only one concerned with looking helpful and useful and important in Wei Wuxian’s eyes.

But it’s not Wei Wuxian’s wrist that Jiang Cheng grabs as they’ve leaving—Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji being so tied up in each other’s eyes that they don’t even notice—but hers, and the sensation of his touch on her wrist demands so much of her attention that she almost doesn’t notice he’s speaking to her.

It’s Jiang Cheng, though, so it’s not like even that could stop her from hearing him. For all that she has found that she enjoys his company, now that she’s learned to read his expression and tone for what it really means, she can’t deny he lives life with the volume turned up.

“Lady Wen! I mean, Wen Qing. Would you…do you mind if we have that talk we were going to have now?” He’s as loud as usual but uncharacteristically polite, and she finds herself worrying what could have made him subdued in this way. He tugs on her hand, lightly, and she instinctively flips the hold so that now she’s got him in her grip instead of the other way around, and flashes of another exchange of holds—at a nameless teahouse on the road where she’d insulted him on behalf of the Qishan Wen as an excuse to warn him of his brother—flutter through her mind.

Was that flirting?

Was this?

Does she want it to be?

She realizes she’s still holding his wrist and drops it, nodding her head and re-entering the tent. It’s probably technically inappropriate for her to be alone in Jiang Cheng’s tent with him right now, but they’ve spent enough time alone in other places—even in other  tents, like Jiang Yanli’s at dinner last night—that it doesn’t seem unusual or uncomfortable to be sharing a space with him one-on-one.

She sits, at his gesture, and they regard each other for a moment before she cocks an eyebrow.

“The idea?”

“Oh. Yes!” He sits up straighter. “So, I’m going to swear brotherhood with Nie Huiasang, and with Wei Wuxian as well assuming I can pry him away from Lan Wangji long enough to ask him about it.” She doesn’t comment on the fact that he could ask him in front of Lan Wangji, since she knows there’s something in that relationship between Jiang Cheng and his ever-so-slightly-older brother that would preclude asking something like that in front of someone else, especially someone like Lan Wangji. She’s not sure why he’s sharing this with her, in fact; unless this is his so-called brilliant idea?

“OK?” She hopes it isn’t, because while it’s a good idea, it’s hardly brilliant, more obvious, and besides he’d asked if she’d help him with a brilliant idea if he had one, and this doesn’t seem to require her help at all. Unless he’s asking if she’ll distract Lan Wangji for him?  “That seems…wise.”

“Thank you!” He visibly perks up. “So, uh…” Apparently whatever strength he got from the praise is not enough to activate his tongue any further, and she decides to take pity on him for once.

“I think it’s a good idea. Do you need my help with it?”

“No!” He waves a hand. “Huaisang agreed, and I’ll just ambush Wei Wuxian after dinner in his tent or something.” She refrains from pointing out that that is not a guarantee that he’ll be free of the presence of Lan Wangji, judging that a sore topic even if she knows Jiang Cheng is glad that his brother has finally stopped pining and decided to marry the Second Jade of Lan. “No, I need your help with something different.” He taps the table between them for a moment and then…” “Tea?”

“You need my help with tea?”

“No! Do you want any, though? I can pour.”

“Uh, sure?” She’s not sure why Jiang Cheng is pouring her tea, but if it will help him spit out whatever it is he wants to say, she could drink gallons.

“Good, good.” He pours tea for them both, careful in a way she’s never seen him before, controlled in a way that she supposes he must be to make a good sect leader but that he never seems to show in public. “So. I’m going to swear brotherhood, as I said, with Nie Huiasang, as well as with my actual brother—Huiasang insisted, something about needing to make sure that he gets both of our help, as if he wouldn’t already—and my brother is marrying a Lan and my sister…well, she’s not marrying a Jin yet, because the peacock is going to need to make it worth my while and grovel when he finally comes to his senses, but you know Yanli—when her heart is set on something I don’t think she’s ever going to lose, and for some reason she wants him.” His fingers clench a bit on the teacup. “And if I need to let Wei Wuxian punch him in the face again to make her get what she wants, I’ll do it.”

“Admirable.” She cocks an eyebrow at him and he smiles, and she’s not sure she’s seen this particular smile before, it’s wide, almost a grin, wide enough to remind her that this man is brothers with Wei Wuxian, whatever their biology. It makes her want to smile back, so instead she takes a sip of tea.

“Anyway.” He sips his tea too, and the smile disappears too quickly for her liking. “So eventually I’m going to be allied to all the major sects except the Wens.”

“I guess you spoke too soon about not having allies,” she teases, and he raises a hand to acknowledge a hit.

“But I was thinking…” he fiddles with the teacup in his hands again, and now his eyes don’t meet hers across the little table. “Wouldn’t it be better to be allied with all four other sects?” He rushes on before she can ask him what he means. “For your brother as well: he’s sworn with the Nies and the Lans, but wouldn’t it be better to have another ally in the Jiangs?” He sputters for a moment. “Not that I’m not eternally grateful for what you and your brother did for me and my family! You have to know we’d stand by you without any further formal ties! But…wouldn’t it be better to have those formal ties?”

“I suppose it would.” She thinks she knows where this is going—there aren’t any other senior inner clan members left among the Jiangs, and Wen Ning is definitely not marrying A-Li—but there are still some options: it’s possible he’s suggesting she and A-Li swear as sisters, after all. Which wouldn’t be that far off from how they’ve been treating each other at all. This is Jiang Cheng; as she’s just established, he’s definitely Wei Wuxian’s brother. So it’s probably best not to assume that the most logical or reasonable explanation is the real one. This is probably not a marriage proposal, even if she’d like it to be. So the sworn sisters thing probably makes the next most sense; after all, he started this conversation talking about sworn brothers.

She’s almost entirely convinced herself of this when he continues. “Then, Wen Qing—Lady Wen—do you think you might be willing to marry into the Jiang sect?” He finally looks up at her and meets her eyes. “Marry me, I mean. Would you be willing to marry me?”

Ah.

So not sworn sisters, then.

Chapter Text

She’s deeply ashamed, looking back on it, that her reaction is the same as Wei Wuxian’s was.

“What?”

Unlike Wei Wuxian, however, she is capable of recovering somewhat more quickly. Certainly she recovers before Jiang Cheng can do more than grimace, although that grimace alone tells her several things: that he’s disappointed, that he’s angry (she thinks it’s the particular grimace that means he’s angry at himself), and that he’s internalizing her reaction as a rejection.

Which it emphatically is not.

Rather, it’s just surprising to hear something she’s just realized she really, really wants offered to her for what seem to be the wrong reasons.

On the other hand, she’s just heard Jiang Cheng talk through why he’ll let his sister marry a man he hates but she loves, and just yesterday he agreed to arrange the marriage of his brother to a man he also hates but he loves, and so she’s pretty sure that for all his talk of political marriage, and for all his siblings’ marriages (and possible marriages) are politically advantageous, Jiang Cheng fully believes in love matches.

So she has to ask if this might be like the other two.

Unfortunately, the way this comes out is: “Jiang Cheng, do you hate me or do you love me?”

Her mouth is definitely her enemy, or maybe it’s her tongue. To be fair, she wanted to ask if this was like his approval of the marriages of Lan Wangji and Jin Zixuan: that is, if he hates the person his family is marrying into, but also if the member of his family marrying loves them.

This is complicated by the fact that he is both parties in the equation.

“I…” She’s not sure she’s ever seen Jiang Cheng’s face this red. “I don’t hate you. Why are you asking me that? Why would I hate you?”

Apparently he’s latched onto the easier part of the question to answer, but she can’t deny it’s at least a little bit of a relief to know he isn’t lumping her in with Jin Zixuan and Lan Wangji as someone he hates but is worth the pain.

“I don’t know, maybe because you’re offering to marry me like you’d sell a loaf of bread?” She reaches over and flicks him on the nose, then freezes: she’s never touched him like this before, intimately and easily, even if it is in jest. But the way he’s so awkward about this reminded her for a moment of A-Ning. Not that she thinks about Jiang Cheng the way she thinks about A-Ning, heavens no, but just in the way he was so clearly stuck in his own head and not reacting to the real emotions of those around him. And with A-Ning she alternately scares and teases him out of it, so her instincts had taken over.

And she really doesn’t want to scare Jiang Cheng right now.

Although she may have: he’s staring at her finger the same way she is and she realizes the silence has gotten a little too long. She decides to push on into it instead of letting it settle—letting things settle has never been her preference—and so she tries again.

“I mean, as long as you’re not treating me like Jin Zixuan…”

“Never.” Jiang Cheng shakes his head vehemently.

“Or Lan Wangji.”

“Oh god no.” He looks disgusted. “You have facial expressions.”

“So why are you offering me less than they get from you?” She uses the finger she’d flicked him with and jabs him in the chest, and yes, both of them are definitely more comfortable with that kind of contact thank you very much.

“What? How am I offering you less? Are you suggesting I’m less than….”

She cuts him off before he can finish that particular sentence. “If you ever dare suggest I think you’re lesser than your siblings again, I will stab you, do you understand?” She is not interested in flattering Jiang Cheng’s inferiority complex, especially when it’s clearly undeserved. She does, however, offer him a sop to his clearly Jiang-typical inability to accept a compliment (his brother and sister both being the same way). “Although I agree with the general consensus that A-Li is the best person on the planet.”

“She really is.” Jiang Cheng agrees. “But you didn’t answer me. How am I offering you less?”

She sighs. She’s already asked him once in this conversation if he loves her, and he ignored it. How many times before she seems desperate?

“You offered Lan Wangji—and you’re considering offering Jin Zixuan—a marriage to someone who loves them.” She doesn’t dare voice the implication, lest he ignore it again.

But thank whatever gods there are, he doesn’t—or at least, he doesn’t seem to. “How am I offering you any less?” He slams both hands on the table. “What kind of idiotic…”

“Oh, I guess you do love me, if you’re willing to call me an idiot to my face.” She phrases it as a joke, but it occurs to her that it might not be; she’s seen how Jiang Cheng talks to Wei Wuxian.

“Of course I love you, you impossible person. I proposed marriage, didn’t I?”

“You proposed a political alliance.”

“Is it my fault it’s happens to be politically convenient as well? Was I not supposed to fall in love with you because you happen to be the sister of the Wen Sect Leader? If it helps, you weren’t that when I fell in love, OK?” Jiang Cheng seems to realize he’s currently berating her about how he’s in love with her, and sits down awkwardly. “So. Yes. Uh, that.”

He’s really cute when he’s flustered, she thinks. Convenient that she seems to be able to do it at will—that will be really useful in spending the rest of their lives together.

Speaking of which, she really ought to put him out of his misery.

“In that case, I accept.” She nods her head regally at him. “I’d say we should get married first, except if we don’t make Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji lock that down they’ll end up eloping and not telling anyone.” She waves a hand. “A-Li and Jin Zixuan can wait until after he grovels properly.”

“Wait, you accept? Really?” Jiang Cheng seems dazed.

“Of course I do. I love you, after all.” She smiles at him. “Now, are we going to go get soup or not? I don’t want to miss family dinner, not now that it’s actually going to be family dinner.”

“You realize there's going to be family dinner for the rest of our lives, right?” Jiang Cheng grumbles, but he stands up and joins her at the entrance to the tent.

“Yes, but someday A-Li is going to marry out, and then the soup won’t be as good.” She steps in front of him before he can precede her out of the tent. “But there is one thing I need to do first.”

She reaches up, pulls his head down, and kisses him.

They end up late for dinner anyway.

It’s worth it.

Chapter Text

Being late to dinner is worth it because kissing Jiang Cheng turns out to be very nice indeed (who knew that all that aggression could turn into passion so easily? Well, she does now, and she is going to make very certain no one else ever does thank you very much). But it is also worth it because it meant they get to make An Entrance, and while Wen Qing is generally a very private person, she has no compunction about admitting that watching Wei Wuxian do an actual spit-take with his sister’s soup at the sight of her and his brother walking in hand in hand will always rank as one of the funniest moments of her life.

To be sure, he recovers fairly quickly, and congratulates them both on “figuring it out” as if he were a font of all wisdom, but the instantaneous reaction remains close to her heart.

Everyone is actually very sweet and congratulatory, and when Jiang Cheng lets go of her hand long enough to bow to A-Ning and formally ask his permission to court and marry his sister, she almost tears up. She doesn’t tear up, because she’s saving that particular experience for her wedding day and maybe someday A-Ning’s and A-Yuan’s, but she’s aware of the option and it pleases her.

A-Ning grants it, of course, flustered in his usual adorable style, and she hugs him very tight as he offers his congratulations.

A-Li offers hers too, and then shoos them into seats, because as she’s learned over these months for Jiang Yanli there is no firmer declaration of love and approval than feeding people.

After dinner Wei Wuxian theatrically declares that he will walk her back to her tent, thank you very much Jiang Cheng, and she only has time to exchange exasperated looks with her betrothed before their meddling brother whisks her away.

“Is this the part where you give me a shovel talk?” she asks as they duck out of the tent.

“What do you think I am, crazy?” Wei Wuxian nudges her with his shoulder and it’s a sign of how happy—not just that, she’s been happy before, but also content, which she hasn’t been for years—she feels that she doesn’t shove him away. “Even with my resentful cultivation, if I tried to bury you I’d just end up six feet deep myself. No, this is where I say, very nicely and respectfully, please be good to my brother.” He stops and faces her, which causes her to stop too. “Sister Qing! I just realized, this means you’ll actually be Sister Qing!”

“Yes.” She smiles at him. “I had realized that, little brother.” She starts walking again, dragging him along by the force of her motion though they do not touch. “And trust me with Jiang Cheng.”

“I already did once.” Wei Wuxian’s voice is light but she can tell he’s forcing it. “Marrying him is nothing, compared to that.”

“It isn’t. But thank you.”

“You’re right, it isn’t, but you know I trust you.” She isn’t looking at him, but she can tell he’s looking away from her anyway. “I wouldn’t entrust Jiang Cheng to anyone else.”

“Good. Please don’t.”

“I won’t.” His voice gets unusually serious again. “Did I ever say thank you? I’m not sure I did. Thank you, Sister Qing, for what you did for me and Jiang Cheng.”

“You’re welcome.” She’s not one to mess around with stupid phrases like think nothing of it, because he ought to think about it—and never, ever do it again, not that he can. “Just so long as you know that it was stupid and dangerous and I never should have agreed to it.”

Apparently Wei Wuxian can read her as well as she can read him and Jiang Cheng (which should be a terrifying thought but isn’t) because all he does is hum like Lan Wangji and say “I know. We love you too.”

“Shut up.” This time she nudges him. “Little brothers should know how to quit when they’re ahead.”

“Good luck teaching Jiang Cheng that.”

“He’s not my little brother.” She sniffs. “I think you’ll find A-Ning knows it very well.”

“No doubt.” He grins. “We need to find him a wife! Or a husband, if that’s what he’d prefer. Someone, anyway. It’s no fair that we get to have all the fun.”

“I don’t think A-Ning has ever wanted that.” She shakes her head. “But then again, I don’t think he ever wanted to be sect leader either, so who knows what the future holds?”

“Right now, it holds a big implosion and two weddings.”

They reach her tent and she comes to a stop. “Speaking of the big implosion, I’ll see you tomorrow? We have some preparations to make for your big day. Well, your first big day.”

“Ooh, yes. Can I be there when you tell the peacock that we don’t need his help at all in destroying the Yin Iron and the Jin sect should go kick rocks?”

“I am not planning to tell him that, so no.” She cuffs him lightly on the shoulder. “Besides, we need there to be Jin clan cultivators involved somehow, so that all the sects have a hand in it. I was planning to have them draw the array.”

“But Jin Zixuan won’t have to do that personally, right? I just don’t want to see his big ugly flat face when I’m getting ready.” He pouts like he does towards Yanli and she can suddenly see why her future sister-in-law struggles to deny him anything. Not that she’s going to show that to him, of course.

“I’ll do my best to make sure he sends some people instead.” By telling him to take care of A-Li while her brothers are off doing the dangerous thing they’ve both agreed to take close personal part of, giving them yet another chance to maybe do something about this ridiculous thing that’s grown up between them, but Wei Wuxian doesn’t need to know that. “But you can’t antagonize them just because they’re Jin.”

“Oooh, see if they’ll send Mianmian. I always got along with Mianmian.”

Wen Qing shakes her head. “Incorrigible.”

“Hah. You and Lan Zhan should trade notes. I don’t think he’s called me that one yet.” Wei Wuxian gives her a cheeky grin and starts to leave, throwing a last comment back over his shoulder. “Good night! Sweet dreams of Jiang Cheng!”

She scoffs. “Shut up. Enjoy Lan Wangji going to bed in five minutes and getting you up at five in the morning.”

“I will!” He always has to have the last word.

Just this once, she’ll let him. After all, she does plan on having some very sweet dreams of Jiang Cheng, now that she knows he’s going to be all hers.

Chapter Text

The Ritual, as they’ve decided to call the imploding of the Yin Iron, falls into place remarkably quickly. They’d already laid the groundwork the day before, and she knows intellectually that it’s important to do it as soon as possible, given both the need to protect the people from the dangers of the Yin Iron (both generally in terms of its destructive power as a resentful artifact of great potency and specifically for anyone who touches it as witnessed by the Jins) and the urgency of doing it before the clans and sects scatter to the four winds. But it’s still a marvel to her how rapidly everything slots into place.

The Lans and Nies of course send large contingents: musical cultivators to contain and purge the resentful energy on the one hand, saber-bearing soldiers to cut down any stray tendrils of resentful energy that might make a break for it on the other. The two sects have become more and more used to working together as the campaign has gone, so it’s no surprise to see them fall into alternating places in a wide circle around the site of the Iron pieces. Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue serve as the clasp of the necklace of cultivators, standing side by side next to the steps up towards the Nightless City which Wen Ruohan had descended before A-Ning shot him in the eye.

Jiang cultivators bring in loads of talisman paper—of course the Jiangs are responsible for the talismans, having been taught either alongside or by the greatest talismanic cultivator in the world, Wei Wuxian—and Jiang Cheng supervises as they pound in stakes in a small circle around the Yin Iron pieces, then nail the talismans to the stakes and, at a signal she can’t see, activate them all simultaneously, giving a vaguely reddish glow to the entire proceedings that reminds her eerily of her uncle.

Jiang Cheng himself stays next to the circle of stakes, chatting with Wei Wuxian and a silent Lan Wangji as the latter prepares his own guqin, set on a raised dais constructed for the occasion so that all the Lans can see him and take their cues from his playing.

The rest of the Jiangs retreat through the doubled line of Lans and Nies, replaced as they do so by gold-robed Jins who begin to trace the shape of the backup contain array under the careful supervision of, yes, Mianmian, who banters with Wei Wuxian as he comments on the precise shaping of his own design.

This morning she had had a brief meeting with Jin Zixuan, who was almost pathetically eager to take her suggestion that he let his best disciple take care of the array while he stayed back and watched over Jiang Yanli.

Fortunately, A-Li hadn’t even blinked when Wen Qing had showed up with the Jin sect leader in tow, merely bowing as appropriate and looking her questions with her eyes.

Wen Qing, having become very used to non-verbal communication after years of being A-Ning’s sister, honed with months now of dealing with Lan Wangji and befriending A-Li herself, had done her best to convey “good luck, he seems penitent, I’ll stab him to death for you if necessary afterwards if not,” and she thought it got through because A-Li brightened and smiled at Jin Zixuan after that.

He was still goggling and looking for his words when she bowed and took her leave. But the brief shovel talk she’d given him on the way over (basically consisting of the general idea that she was giving him one more chance to figure out what he wanted and if he didn’t do that she was going to give his carcass to A-Li to put in the soup) seemed to have done its job, because the last thing she heard as she strode out towards the Ritual preparations was “Lady Jiang, I’m so sorry.”

Enough about him. It’s almost time for the Wen part of this Ritual, and she doesn’t want to miss it. Her role is simple enough: monitoring Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng to make sure the latter doesn’t get overwhelmed with resentful energy and the latter doesn’t receive any dangerous backlash from using his spiritual energy to trigger the reaction, and then making sure neither of them dies if they do. There are not really any remaining Wen cultivators not imprisoned other than A-Ning, so he too has a singular role, what Wei Wuxian has nicknamed the Sunshot: he will shoot an arrow high up in the air as a signal for everything to get underway.

Other minor sect members interspersed with the Nies protecting Lans (the sects are not of equal size) and thus everyone is represented.

The Jins retreat in their turn and everyone’s eyes turn to Wen Ning, Sect Leader Wen, and she’s just so proud of him when he doesn’t buckle or retreat under the pressure of all those gazes.

Instead he looks to Wei Wuxian, gets the emphatic thumbs up that of course Wei Wuxian thinks is sufficiently formal for a moment like this, and draws and looses the arrow in a high arc with a single smooth motion.

Her brother really is a good archer.

Before she can do more than register the release of the arrow, let alone track its flight, Lan Wangji’s fingers are moving on his guqin and Jiang Cheng arm comes up in preparation to send a bolt of energy into the fragments of the Yin Iron. She reaches forward and wraps her fingers around his other wrist, ostensibly to start checking his spiritual energy but also for a moment of support.

His fingers tighten around her wrist in turn and she knows the feeling is appreciated.

Then he hurls a blast of energy into the fragments, and everything goes to hell.

The day, bright and cold like the best of midwinter, darkens in an instant. Or perhaps it only seems that way because her attention is focused so wholly on the space in which the fragments’ energy is contained. The resentful energy swirls up so quickly it is almost impossible to remember it wasn’t there a moment ago; the dome effect the talismans create means that it resembles nothing more than a dark egg filled with mist, but it is much more terrifying than that mundane description would make it seem. If this egg were to hatch, she knows, it would be no mere chicken or even vulture that would emerge; it would be a demon dragon, black as  the space between the stars and capable of swallowing the sun whole.

It is for the best, then, that it not hatch.

The rhythms of the Lan instruments (mostly guqin, like Lan Wangji, but also a smattering of other instruments, especially a single insistent xiao that she knows without looking is Lan Xichen) blend into a singular roar in her ears, and she is grateful for the grounding of Jiang Cheng’s pulse and spiritual energy under her fingers.

She wraps her other hand lightly around Wei Wuxian’s neck, feeling the pulse point at the base of his throat as he lifts his dizi to his lips. She cannot hold his wrist, as he needs both hands to play, but she can sense the throb of resentful energy within him through this point just as well. There are no dizis among the Lan cultivators—not that they do not practice the instrument, but it was decided early on in the planning that having more than one dizi on the field might confuse things too much. The lilting melody he plays corresponds to a  sort of swirling within the blackness of the egg, and she can feel a prickling in her skin like the moment before a thunderstorm.

A tendril of blackness darts past one talisman post with a clatter as the post itself breaks apart, and she can feel rather than hear the array hum into life as resentful energy touches it for the first time. More tendrils push past the gap in the talisman line, but Wei Wuxian seems to have anticipated this, because his own music is already changing, and the tendrils are swirling back towards the egg instead of pushing on into the array or (heaven help them) beyond.

The Lan music is having an effect, she registers vaguely, as the blackness of the ends of the tendrils turns blue: first navy and then trending towards the lighter shades as the tendrils waft away.

But it seems the Yin Iron reacts to danger to itself, because where the tendrils have wafted away come larger and darker arms of resentful energy, until what was an egg is now a massive spider, body composed of the remaining talisman-dome but with eight or so giant legs spreading out across the array.

“Again, Jiang Cheng!” Wei Wuxian shouts to be heard over the roar of both music and resentful energy, and in the moment he takes his mouth off the dizi the energy surges forth so that the legs of the spider become an almost flat disc rather than distinct lines, accompanied by more popping of talisman posts.

Jiang Cheng nods and fires a second bolt of energy into the morass.

The effect is instantaneous, as if the Yin Iron were offended that someone is trying to treat it with spiritual energy. A massive wave of blackness pours out of the center of the circle, the last talisman posts give way, and the roil of resentment rolls outwards in what seems like an unstoppable wave.

Wen Qing doesn’t brace herself for impact, but it takes an effort of will grounded in the feeling of Jiang Cheng’s and Wei Wuxian’s pulses under her fingers to stay upright.

The wave crests as it hits the edges of the array, and Mianmian’s people must have done good work, because when it strikes against the edges it recoils upon itself.

And just like that, what was a wave of blackness headed outward becomes a wave of clear air headed inward, and when it reaches the center there is a mighty crack, the air shimmers, and then is still.

As if that were a cue, Lan Wangji and the other Lans put down their instruments, and the silence is deafening.

Wei Wuxian scampers forward, and she, Jiang Cheng, and Lan Wangji are drawn in by their unwillingness to let him face his own potential death alone.

When they reach the point where the Yin Iron fragments were, there is only some black dust strewn along the ground. When Wei Wuxian kicks it, it blows away into the wind.

And suddenly she’s hugging Jiang Cheng and he’s whirling her around in a circle, and yes, everyone can see them, and she usually hates public displays of affection but right now she really, really doesn’t care.

Chapter Text

It is not particularly surprising to her when Jin Zixuan is there for dinner.

It is surprising to Wei Wuxian, although Lan Wangji’s presence seems to hold him back a little, and she’s pretty sure it would be surprising to Jiang Cheng if she hadn’t take the opportunity of the walk back from the Ritual to fill him in on the situation. He had bristled at first when she’d told him she’d done it without checking with him first, but that was just Jiang Cheng. Who would he be if he didn’t bristle at things? He calmed down quickly enough and grumbled that it was a good idea, and it would give the two of them a chance to clear the air.

The air has, apparently, been very cleared: Yanli serves Jin Zixuan last, but her eyes are on him the entire time and he manages by dint of what Wen Qing thinks must be a lot of effort not to say anything that makes either of her brothers erupt during the whole meal.

And they aren’t even silent like the Lans either.

After dinner A-Li corners her to talk about how it went, and she casts one longing look at Jiang Cheng (really, all she wanted was one evening to make out with her future husband without anyone interrupting, was that too much to ask?) and lets herself be caught.

It’s the least she can do for her only sister, after all—and while she’s hardly interested in what she would have called stereotypical feminine pursuits she is definitely A-Li’s best hope as a confidante about Jin Zixuan, or anyone really, given her possession of two such protective brothers.

Apparently Jin Zixuan had been awkward for about an hour, which wasn’t surprising at all to anyone, even A-Li, but when she’d just gone about her day with him hanging around he’d started helping. He’d washed dishes, chopped onions, and beaten rugs without complaint. He’d even helped make poultices and then apply them though (as A-Li confides with what sounds alarmingly like a giggle) she hadn’t actually trusted him to find the right ingredients so she’d basically spoon-fed them to him. He’d given spiritual energy to convalescents without making a squawk about touching people, let alone sick and injured people who would get blood and pus all over his nice Jin robes.

Somewhere in there he’d gotten up the courage to cough awkwardly (did he do anything any other way?) and apologize for how he’d behaved at Cloud Recesses.

And apparently once he’d started apologizing he hadn’t been able to stop. Slights she didn’t even remember (though her brothers probably did) had come pouring out of him, moments that didn’t even necessarily deserve an apology, like when he’d had a chance to do nice things for her and biffed them by merely behaving normally. If awkwardly.

That had definitely helped, A-Li whispers, but what really did the trick, and got him the dinner invitation, was that he’d acknowledged that spending the day with her had been Wen Qing’s idea but said he’d appreciated the suggestion because, quote, “he wasn’t sure it would have been welcome, and so he hadn’t offered before.”

Then he’d turned as red as his vermilion dot and asked if maybe she might consider starting over from the beginning—not, he’d hastened to add, with an arranged marriage from birth, but just as…people. Who might like each other—and when she’d agreed, he’d actually bowed and introduced himself! And then asked if it would be too forward of him to call on her sometime!

She’d laughed—as she does now, retelling it to Wen Qing—and insisted he call on her for dinner that night.

Well, Wen Qing thinks, as long as she is happy. Wen Qing herself wouldn’t marry someone like Jin Zixuan for all the gold in Carp Tower, and she is nowhere near as convinced as Jiang Yanli that he has as many redeeming qualities as she thought to cover up his awkwardness and arrogance, but she wants A-Li to be happy, and she is positively beaming, so it can’t be a bad thing.

And besides, if he does screw it up, she is pretty sure that between her, Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian, and the other in-laws they are quickly accumulating, they can end him without anyone being the wiser, Sect Leader Jin or no.

That is a comforting thought, which lets her relax and smile and listen to A-Li ramble on about how happy she is until it is far past time for bed. A-Li catches her yawning and offers up half of her bed so that Wen Qing won’t have to wander back while exhausted, and Wen Qing is so sleepy she actually takes her up on it.

It isn’t the Jiang bed she’d have preferred to be in, but whispering and giggling with A-Li as they settle in for the night is pretty good too. It makes her nostalgic for back when she lived with her parents among the Dafan Wen, before Wen Ruohan recognized her skills, and she used to have sleepovers with the other little girls in their village.

On that peaceful note, she slips into slumber, and sleeps the entire night through.

The next morning she hauls herself awake in an unfamiliar bed, thanks Yanli for the lovely evening, and hustles her way across the camp to start her daily routines. Just because they’ve destroyed the Yin Iron and resolved most of the intersect conflict through marriage doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty for her to do. At her insistence, Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng check in at various times throughout the day so that she can check on their resentful and spiritual energy levels, respectively, and she manages to squeeze in a good five minutes of making out with Jiang Cheng before another crisis in the healing tents demands her attention. They’re both fine—Wei Wuxian needs to eat more so that he has enough energy of the non-magical kind to recover better, and Jiang Cheng should stop scowling just because they got interrupted (though it’s kind of sweet)—and she’s relieved to realize that she can probably stop checking in on them.

Well, checking in on their cultivation. They’re still her fiancé and her best friend, so she’s going to keep checking in on them. But they’re probably out of the danger zone in terms of magical issues, and that’s a relief.

The day is, overall, almost distressingly normal, and it’s no real surprise when the sect leaders meet up and decide that they’ll be moving out of the camps in short order (which means a week or so—no need to rush if there isn’t a war on).

She almost can’t believe it’s really over. Not that the world will go back to the status quo from before the Sunshot Campaign; she wouldn’t even want that. But still—the cultivators will flow back to their sects, the sect leaders will take up the reins of their own more local problems, and things will go back to something like routine.

Well, in a little bit. She still has a couple weddings to plan.

Chapter Text

It is a very, very busy week. It's like life realized the Sunshot campaign was over and decided to hand her all the things she hadn't had time to pick up over the last several months at once.

The swearing of the brotherhood between Nie Huaisang, Wei Wuxian, and her own Jiang Cheng does not take long, and it’s a nice moment. They do it in conscious imitation of the sworn brotherhood between her own brother and the Nie and Lan sect leaders, in the same space at the same time of day, and cutting out all that planning is a godsend.

Especially because the next day they have to have a wedding.

She’d thought she was joking when she told Jiang Cheng their wedding would have to come after Wei Wuxian’s to Lan Wangji because those two would elope if given enough opportunity. It turns out she was entirely correct. It’s not, for once, Wei Wuxian’s fault: someone (she suspects Jin Zixun, the rat) switched Lan Wangji’s glass of tea for wine at the formal banquet celebrating the brotherhood and by the time anyone noticed he’d drunk it, fallen asleep, and woken back up.

The first thing he does when he wakes up is grab Wei Wuxian and head for the table where his brother is talking to Jiang Cheng, then start bowing.

Fortunately she is also at that table, and paying attention to their approach. She’s out of her seat and grabbing their hands before Lan Wangji can line them up for the second bow. Her motion jolts Lan Xichen out of his confusion.

“Wangji.”

“Brother.”

The Lans proceed to have one of those frustrating conversations where no one else can tell what they’re saying, and in the end Lan Xichen nods.

“Tomorrow.”

Lan Wangji drags Wei Wuxian away (“Aiii, Lan Zhan, we’re already engaged, if you wanted to get married so badly you could just say so!”) and Lan Xichen turns back to Jiang Cheng.

“Apparently, we have a wedding tomorrow.”

“What?” Jiang Cheng slaps his forehead. “I’m going to kill them.”

“Please don’t. It would be most inconvenient.” But Lan Xichen is definitely smiling.

They spend the rest of the day negotiating terms. The trickiest question is where the newly married couple will live; Jiang Cheng wins this negotiation by the simple expedient of pointing out that someone has to be head disciple of Yunmeng Jiang, and after their losses at the sack of Lotus Pier it really can’t be anyone but Wei Wuxian. The Lans lost a lot of things when Cloud Recesses burned, but not disciples, and so Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji will be living at Lotus Pier—though he does concede that frequent trips to Cloud Recesses are not only reasonable but necessary.

It doesn’t hurt that Wei Wuxian will be able to teach the Jiang sect disciples about a new form of cultivation, though neither Jiang Cheng nor Wen Qing make that explicit to Lan Xichen.

They probably don’t have to—and it’s not like the Lan sect would accept that form of cultivation anyway.

The wedding itself is as simple as any wedding of two major sects attended by all the major cultivators in the known world can be, which is to say that it’s very fraught with meaning but the actual procedures are simple enough. It’s almost painful to watch how happy Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are, or it would be if Wen Qing weren’t planning her own wedding in the back of her mind as she watches. Not that she’s not enjoying the moment—two of her favorite people are getting married, she’s actually smiling, they should feel honored—but she can’t help but think through how she would do things slightly differently.

She gets a chance almost immediately, because Nie Mingjue points out (on A-Ning’s behalf—his sworn brothers very quickly realized what she’s always known, which is that A-Ning has opinions but is not ever good at putting them forward forcefully enough) that the Wen and Jiang sects will have a lot of rebuilding to do, and if they delay their wedding at all they’ll basically have to delay it for months.

So the week ends up having two weddings in it, her own as well as her best friend’s.

She barely remembers her own wedding day—it’s like the storming of Nightless City, all flashes of emotion and memory, nothing coherent, but for the opposite reason. She’s not terrified; she’s overjoyed.

She remembers dressing in red, as she usually does, only this red is different and she could never put her finger on exactly the difference except it exists and she’s so hyperaware of the microscopic difference in shade and decoration that she can’t focus on anything else.

She does not remember when she first sees Jiang Cheng in his robes, but she remembers focusing on little details about his face as they bow: the way his lips keep twitching upwards like he wants to grin and is forcing himself to look solemn and noble; the way his eyes keep sliding over to her when he thinks she isn’t looking (the joke is on him—she is always looking); the way his ass looks as he bows to A-Ning.

She likes those memories.

She remembers her wedding night, and the discovery that she is  entirely correct that Jiang Cheng’s obsessive need for self-control and his leashed temper do indeed transmogrify into something very dear and very pleasurable in the bedroom.

And after that she remembers more and more: how it feels to wake up every day not as Wen Qing, doctor and senior member of the Wen sect, but as Wen Qing, still doctor but lady of the Jiang sect. How her husband collaborates with her on decisions (“I’m not my father. We’re not living separate lives”) and lets—no, makes—her take over his correspondence (“my calligraphy was always awful anyway, and half the time I tell them to go jump in the lotus pond; I trust you to do better”).

This of course means that she’s the one who has to read the letter, a week after they return to Lotus Pier, from Sect Leader Jin.

It’s not really a surprise that he’s asking permission to court Yanli formally.

It’s more of a surprise when the first boatload of gifts arrive—and she literally means a boatload.

She’s kind of exhausted when the second, third, and fourth boatloads arrive. Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian are almost apoplectic.

But hey—at least he’s trying, if in a very very Jin way.

And the way A-Li looks at each boat like it’s Jin Zixuan himself personally hanging the moon and stickpinning the stars—well, she and Jiang Cheng agree it makes it worth it.

And Lan Wangji is there, at least, to make sure Wei Wuxian doesn’t do anything too dumb about it.

Speaking of Wei Wuxian, it’s a really good thing they brought Lan Wangji back with them because for the first three days he had to be dragged out of bed to go train the disciples. He kept grumbling about how he didn’t have a golden core, and he couldn’t properly train anyone without a golden core, and why wouldn’t anyone listen to him.

If it had been up to her and Jiang Cheng, he’d have been slapped upside the head and told to screw it back on straight, because he’d proven during the war that he could do anything anyone else could do with a golden core. She knows that probably wouldn’t have been the right approach, but it would have been what both of them would have done by default. It’s just who they are. Tough love, a belief in Wei Wuxian’s own resilience, and frustration with his antics are things they hold in common.

Lan Wangji, by contrast, carefully coaxes his husband into the training ground each day and takes over the class himself, and by the fourth day Wei Wuxian has moved from kibitzing Lan Wangji’s own teaching to leading the class himself.

Lan Wangji waits until Wei Wuxian is not looking to shoot her a glance that can only be described as smug.

And you know what? He’s earned it.

A month in, and Wei Wuxian is doing his job admirably as head disciple—setting tasks for the juniors, organizing the teaching of those too young to even be considered juniors, and leading night hunts—while also teaching a specialized class to a few especially skilled juniors (and Lan Wangji) on the use of resentful energy.

Oh yes, the Jiang sect is going to be a force to be reckoned with. Jiang Cheng is already planning a lecture series (designed not to conflict with the Lan lectures, because that would be unutterably rude). She’s pretty sure the Nies are insisting on it, in fact.

She’s…happy?

It’s a nice feeling, after all this time, to realize that happiness is not only an option, but could come to be her default state.

Chapter Text

Unlike her own wedding, Wen Qing can remember every detail of Jiang Yanli’s wedding to Jin Zixuan.

Of course, she had almost two years to plan it with the active involvement (she might even say interference) of her husband and his brother, who had apparently sworn to give their sister the world’s most lavish and impressive wedding.

She and A-Li managed eventually to bargain them down to “best,” since A-Li didn’t actually want a lavish and impressive wedding, and there was enough difficulty getting her Jin of a husband-to-be to acknowledge that not every single item in the wedding needed to be gilded.

To be fair, if she were the one marrying A-Li, she would definitely also want to be staking her claim.

Of course, staking her claim to her actual husband was much easier, because by the time this wedding rolled around the two of them were already so much a part of each others’ lives that she it was less like staking a claim to stake and more like inviting others to view a property deed already enrolled in the local administrative offices.

Jiang Cheng was, to his surprise but not hers, a good husband. He once confided to her, while extremely drunk after one of the planning meetings for Jiang Yanli’s wedding went a little long, that his guidance for this was “just think of what my parents did and do the opposite.” She knows this isn’t actually true: she didn’t know Madam Yu or Jiang Fengmian that well, or at all, but she’s heard the stories and she knows there’s visible marks of both of them in Jiang Cheng, from the way he stands firmly for his principles to the kindness with which he treated—and treats—the Dafan Wen. But it’s an insight into her husband nonetheless, and one she treasures. He’s prickly and grumpy and still has a bit of an inferiority complex about his big brother Wei Wuxian, but he’s mellowed a lot now that they’ve been able to settle into the rhythms of actually running the sect and he’s realized that he can do things Wei Wuxian can’t, as well as vice-versa, and that not all of them (almost none of them) have to do with who has or doesn’t have a golden core.

She and Lan Wangji have struck up more of a friendship than she’d thought they would, back when she first met him in Cloud Recesses or even when she first saw him discover the truth of Wei Wuxian’s corelessness at Carp Tower. He’s never going to be her most effusive companion, but their mutual understanding of their spouses and particularly of Wei Wuxian has meant that they rub along well, and she knows who to go to if she needs someone cut down to size and can’t do it herself.

The two of them are on idiot duty during A-Li’s wedding, which mostly means making sure that the Jins who are too high-ranking to be excluded but who lost out in the power struggle Jin Zixuan initiated when he became Sect Leader and demoted or expelled the worst of his fathers’ retainers don’t cause trouble.

This mostly means Jin Zixun, but since Lan Wangji appears to take great pleasure in the idea of reintroducing him to the lotus lakes when (not if) he makes a scene, she’s graciously taken point on all the other, lesser problems.

Since it’s Lan Wangji, “taking great pleasure in the prospect of dunking Jin Zixun” means raising one eyebrow and jerking his head slightly towards the docks, but she knows what’s what.

The wedding goes on uninterrupted save for one stray splash towards the end that no one but her notices, and Yanli is utterly radiant. Wen Qing is not unaware of her own charms—if she were, Jiang Cheng would simply remind her—but she is certain on this day, in this moment, there is no one on earth more beautiful than Jiang Yanli, now Madam Jin, because she is so happy. The other Madam Jin, A-Li’s new mother-in-law, is more than happy to give up that particular title to her beloved daughter-in-law, and has been heard on more than one occasion to wonder aloud how it was that her son managed to right the ship and fix things with Yanli without her help.

She suspects that someone has blabbed about her role in it, because an anonymous basket of her favorite fruits appears at her door one night, and the basket is definitely expensive enough that it has to have been someone with more money than sense who bought it.

She watches at the party afterwards as little Wei Yuan runs circles around his various uncles: he’s only recently begun to walk, but being a Jiang in all but name means attempting the impossible, which apparently is running before he fully even has his feet under him. There had been some talk of her and Jiang Cheng adopting him, but the way he’d stuck like a burr to Wei Wuxian even before he could crawl had made that suggestion float away on the breeze unheard.

Anyway, she thinks, that’s unnecessary now: she didn’t get to be a doctor without being able to tell when another life was forming within someone, especially when that someone is her.

She’s only told Jiang Cheng so far, but it won’t be long now before they’re willing to make it public.

A-Ning and Lan Xichen will just have to fight it out to see who gets to have little A-Yuan as an heir; A-Ning has the inside track because he’s A-Yuan’s Ning-gege, but Smile-gege is doing his best to come up on the outside before the far turn.

And while they may not have named the child Lan Yuan, he still has a Lan as a father now, even if his original parents were Wens.

That night, lying in bed with Jiang Cheng and waiting for sleep to claim her, she feels a tug of—not worry, exactly, and not fear, precisely, but something like them. A feeling that if things had only been a little different, it all could have been so much worse.

She nudges her husband awake—not that he was really all that asleep, she self-justifies—and presses a kiss to his forehead. “Thank you.”

“For what? What the hell did I do now?” Even half-asleep Jiang Cheng is wary.

“For waking up.”

“You woke me up to thank me for waking up? What the…” She interrupts him.

“Not now. Back then. When I was doing the surgery.” She places a hand on his lower dantian and he instantly understands  her meaning, going still. “If you hadn’t woken up, I don’t know what would have happened. I probably would have gone along with Wei Wuxian’s plan to let you leave us without knowing what happened.”

“He really was planning to leave me in the dark, wasn’t he? That little idiot,” Jiang Cheng huffs. “Thank goodness that didn’t happen. Would we even be married now if I hadn’t woken up?”

“Exactly. So thank you for waking up.” She kisses him again. “And I’m sorry for operating on you without your consent.”

He rolls his eyes. “You know there’s no need for thank you and sorry between us, right?” A snort. “Except when I’ve just yelled at you for something stupid, because I’m just like that.”

“You don’t do that too much.” She cuddles up against Jiang Cheng and his arm comes around her, drawing her close. She pokes him in the side, just to break the moment a little. “But not too much isn’t never, and yes, when you do that you ought to say sorry.”

“Sorry!” He kisses her forehead. “There, I’ve said it for whenever the next time is.”

“Don’t think you get out of it that easily.” But she’s already too comfortable to scold properly, and the two of them fall asleep together, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Wen Qing is, indeed, happy.