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Wen Yuan’s powers had manifested early, when he was only five years old. He’d been playing with his auntie A-Qing and uncle A-Ning in the woods when a group of scary men in armor had leapt from the trees. A-Qing and A-Ning yelled a lot and said big scary words, words like ‘ambush’ and ‘protect A-Yuan’ and ‘fight’, and his sweet uncle A-Ning leapt into battle as A-Qing picked A-Yuan up, clutching him close as they watched A-Ning fight the bad men off, occasionally tossing her needles when some bad men got too close. A-Yuan clung to A-Qing’s robes, but he hadn’t truly been afraid. A-Ning was invincible, after all. He was the strongest fighter in the world and nothing ever kept him down, nothing could ever beat him because he was the strongest man in the world after A-Xian.
But A-Ning did go down under their blades, growling and struggling madly. A-Qing screamed, and A-Yuan felt his face go hot as he reached out for him, wailing A-Ning’s name as he desperately wished for time to stop, for the bad men to stop, for everything to stop.
And then, it did.
The world froze around him, A-Ning frozen on the ground with their blades inches from his chest, and A-Qing locked in a frozen shout of utter desperation. The bad men were suspended in various poses of aggression, their faces twisted with rage and hatred and it scared A-Yuan. Time had stopped, just as he wished, but he didn’t know how to make it start again. He clambered out of A-Qing’s arms, toddling over to A-Ning and shaking him, trying to get a response, but his uncle was locked in place, barely even budging, and no amount of crying would get anyone to move. He felt despair well in him, emotions too big for a body so little, and he felt like he would break any moment as he cast his eyes to the ground and wailed.
It was then that he noticed the little black bar that had appeared in his vision, hovering just below his line of sight. Sniffling, he wiped his eyes, staring curiously at the bar. It was pitch black, made of some material that A-Yuan couldn’t identify, and any attempt to touch it just resulted in his hands passing through it like air. Curiosity rising, he walked a few steps forward, only for the bar to move with him, as if fixed in place in front of him. He raised his hand, and startled when a simple brush appeared in it. He examined the brush, eyes wide and curious. The brush was made of the same strange black material as the bar, except for the tip, which was dotted with a pure white ink. He touched it, and the ink was indeed wet, but it didn’t come off onto his skin.
It took him an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the ink only worked on the bar, that it didn’t seem to exist to anything else. He quickly figured out that he could write words on the bar, and the bar would respond, but the words that appeared in response were strange. He wrote A-Ning’s name, and the words command not recognized appeared. He tried the same with A-Qing and A-Xian’s names, but got the same result. Even his own name got nothing. He changed tactics, trying to write things that would fix the world, like ‘move’ and ‘fix’ and ‘time’, but got only the same strange sentence each time.
It was then that he got an idea, glancing at A-Ning, who was still frozen in his vulnerable state. Even if time started again, he realized, these men would hurt A-Ning. He couldn’t let time move again until the bad men were gone. Shaking, heart pounding, he raised a hand and wrote a single word. A word he wasn’t supposed to know.
‘Kill’. The only word he knew that meant bad people went away, and instead of the strange sentence, the black bar vanished. As soon as it was gone, the world immediately resumed as if nothing had happened, A-Ning being slammed onto the ground by the bad men and A-Qing shouting his name desperately. The only difference was the bad men. When the world resumed, they all flopped over onto the ground in unison, limp and lifeless like one of his little rag dolls.
Dead.
As A-Qing picked him up with a look of utter confusion, asking shakily how he had gotten over there as A-Ning stared at the pile of dead men with utter bafflement, A-Yuan realized with a jolt of cold fear he was different from them, that something was wrong with him, and he couldn’t tell them at all lest they get mad. He couldn’t bear for them to be mad at him. He couldn’t bear it. So he kept his mouth shut and clung to A-Qing, shaking and crying and begging to go home.
They never suspected that the strange event was his doing.
—-
Lan Sizhui learned as he grew that he was powerful, that he absolutely had to keep his abilities a secret lest he be persecuted. He learned that the word ‘tgm’ made him invincible, but it could only be applied to him. He learned that ‘tcl’ made him like a specter, able to walk through walls and solid objects like the air. He could add items to his pack with a simple written command, he could make himself more powerful, he could create creatures and people from the very air, he could change the gender of people who were unhappy with theirs, he could make himself and others bigger or smaller.
He could kill people, individually or in large groups. He could take away people’s free will, making them stand vacantly or follow his lead with blank looks on their face. He could change them into animals, or objects, or even other people. All with just a simple command.
Lan Sizhui was terrified of his power, but more than that he was terrified of himself. If he was to slip, if he was to give in to temptation even for a moment, he could do something horrible, something unforgivable. He had the power to do some truly unethical things, and it scared him that he could potentially give in to the temptation one day. As a result, he never used his power, determined to go through life as a normal person as much as possible. He only used it for little things, like getting gifts for his friends or subtly bolstering Jingyi’s cultivation when he grew frustrated with his lack of progress.
He would have gone his entire life this way, too. Until the fateful night hunt that Sizhui would come to remember as one of the worst nights of his life.
It all happened so fast. One moment Jin Ling was raising his bow for a killing blow on their demonic quarry, and the next the air erupted with screams and the clashing of steel, Sect Leader Jiang shouting Jin Ling’s name with a terror that none of them had ever heard from the man, and Sizhui saw the arrow rocketing towards Jin Ling, saw how his friend wasn’t going to have enough time to dodge. His heart was in his throat as he charged forward in a desperate, vain attempt to reach him first, to push him out of the way of the killing blow.
Sect Leader Jiang got there first.
Sizhui watched with horror as the untouchable Sandu Shengshou threw himself between his nephew and the arrow, watched as his head snapped back as the foul thing embedded itself into his forehead, watched as he toppled backwards into a shocked Jin Ling’s arms, head lolling and eyes lifeless as they stared emptily at the sky, glassy and blank as the veil of death settled over them. Sizhui felt disconnected from his body as he watched the scene, his pounding heart and trembling limbs seeming to belong to someone else. He distantly heard Jingyi dealing with the remaining attackers, the sounds of battle fading, but he couldn’t make himself care for them in the face of this new tragedy.
“Sect... Leader...” he forced the words out through numb lips, and his hoarse voice seemed to snap Jin Ling out of the horrified daze he’d fallen into. He collapsed to his knees, clutching his uncle close and fumbling for a pulse, eyes wide and almost maddened as he called for his uncle, shaking him, pleading, begging for him to wake up. Sizhui wanted to move, to go to him, but he was locked in place, unable to make himself move, trapped by that unseeing gaze, the eyes void of any of their former lightning and fury. Sect Leader Jiang was lying dead in his nephew’s arms, and Sizhui had no idea what to do.
As if awoken by Jin Ling’s agonized pleas, Zidian began to glow softly, but any sliver of hope Sizhui had was dashed when the weapon slipped from Sect Leader Jiang’s unmoving wrist and snaked around Jin Ling’s, settling snugly into the bracer form it had favored with its former master. Sizhui saw the moment Jin Ling registered what this meant, the moment it really hit him that his beloved uncle was truly gone. Sizhui could only watch helplessly as his friend lost it, gathering his uncle’s body close and screaming, the sound one of utter desolation and torment that echoed through the woods, surely tearing Jin Ling’s throat as his face twisted with loss and despair. Sizhui hadn’t seen him break like this since that day on the docks when he refused to let go of his father’s sword, only this was far more heartbreaking, far more feral and anguished. Like his world was ending, and he was ending with it.
Sizhui couldn’t take it. He couldn’t take seeing Sect Leader Jiang dead, couldn’t take seeing what it did to Jin Ling, couldn’t take imagining how Wei Wuxian would react. Grieving, desperate, and barely aware of his own sobs, Sizhui did something he swore never to do again, and the world froze around him for the first time in years as he called for his power. The black bar blinked at him like an old friend, tempting him with its deceptively simple power, cajoling him with the promise of help, of erasing all the pain, of removing the death veil from Sect Leader Jiang’s eyes and wiping that horrible chasm of grief from Jin Ling’s face.
He took a deep breath, his hand trembling as he raised it, the strange brush trembling as he pressed it against the black surface, the white ink forming a simple word.
Resurrect
As soon as the word was written, the bar vanished and the world resumed, all sound and motion coming back in a cacophony of screams and sobs that nearly drowned out the gasping breath Sect Leader Jiang drew in. Sizhui let out a sob of pure relief as the arrow vanished like it had never existed, leaving his forehead blank and unmarked, no hint of the wound remaining. Sect Leader Jiang sat up with a shout, casting desperately around for his nephew and letting out a soft sound of distress as he laid eyes on his wrecked state.
“Gods, Jin Ling, what happened?” he demanded, taking Jin Ling’s stupefied face in his hands and examining him for any wounds, wiping his streaming tears with his thumbs, Jin Ling staring at him like he couldn’t believe it, like he thought he might have finally lost his mind, “Who made you cry? Are you hurt? What happened to y-“ he was cut off as Jin Ling let out a wrenching sound that must have been painful, gasping a plaintive cry of jiujiu as he threw himself into his uncle’s arms, hardly daring to hope but unwilling to let his uncle go again.
“It worked.” Sizhui whispered in a daze as Jin Ling wailed and clung desperately to him, burying his face into his chest and ruining his nice robes, clinging so tightly it must have hurt, “Gods, it worked...” His whisper drew the attention of Sect Leader Jiang, who turned his baffled eyes to him as he held his sobbing nephew close, stroking his back and rocking him slightly, letting him hold tightly to him like he never intended to let him go again.
“What did you do?” Sect Leader Jiang asked softly, and Sizhui felt a strange fuzziness in his head, the soft words and those enchanting eyes, alive and vibrant once again, compelling him to speak, to tell the truth, to make him happy. He would do anything for Sect Leader Jiang, after all.
He told them everything.
By the end of his tale, Sect Leader Jiang was looking at him with horror, shaken and trembling as he held his nephew, trying to register all he had been told. He looked upset. He looked scared. His eyes were conflicted and filled with emotion too tumultuous to be named.
Jin Ling watched Sizhui from his spot curled up in his uncle’s embrace, and his bloodshot eyes contained nothing but gratitude.