Work Text:
“Is this thing on? [long pause with static] Okay, I think it’s recording… [cough, stern voice] Welcome to the Cloud Recesses, the oldest standing keepers’ establishment, home to the first healer’s manual and the last flying sword, a zone so well-protected by ancient magic that it’s impenetrable by unsanctioned bacteria. Whether you are a hopeful accepted to a keeper fellowship, a visiting finder who is here to deliver a new and exciting artifact, or a—
[a string of giggles, followed by a full-on laugh]
“Sorry sorry, I can’t, I just can’t! There’s no way such upstanding people are listening to this! Who are you, listener? Poor thing, are you being punished with clearing out the lab’s shelves? Or maybe, hah, a finder who sneaked in and thought these tapes contained valuable secrets? If it’s that latter, sorry, that’s dumb—you’ll be better off seducing a dragon than stealing from the Lan keepers. Having dedicated months of my life to ruffling their feathers, even I know better than that!
“Okay, let’s see if I can reset this train… uhh right, whoever you are, congrats for making it to this grand old institute. I hope you have had all the celebrations in the world before you arrive! Here are two pieces of trivia: one, this place has thirty thousand rules, and two, its lesser-known name is The Place Where Pretty Keepers Discipline You, Constantly—not even in a fun way, but in the “punishments build characters” way and “rules are not a joke” way and “your sentence is doubled for asking” way and—
“My bad, listener, I’m getting ahead of myself! Let me start again: I am Wei Wuxian, proudly weirdo4weirdo, ACAB, anti-anti, and I was sent here by the Lotus Finders’ Troupe for, quote, a summer of interactive learning and trust-building among the artifacts circulation community. Well, the learning is interactive, if you count all the negative reinforcement as learning. If it’s not clear yet, dear listener, yes, I am making this tape as part of my detention. More precisely, I’m tasked with recording all ten volumes of One Thousand Years of Principles: A Cloud Recesses Keeper’s Oath. Why was I punished, you ask? Refer back to trivia number one: THIRTY THOUSAND rules, need I elabor—[a cough in the background]—what now Nie-xiong?
[an exchange of small whispers ensued]
“Listener, it completely slipped my mind that you might be Lan Zhan, who are dutifully verifying the completion of this task because you are, uh, the absolute beacon of upstanding-ness. May I recommend you to fast-forward to the end, take this tape out, and then turn to play Side B where you can listen to my fulfillment of the task! So, uh, do that now, and feel free to drop me a text afterward to review the soothing quality of my voice or something…
[a long empty silence followed]
“…Okay, my dear listener who is not a beautiful cold-blooded keeper-tyrant, glad to still have you on! I’ve already told you why I’m making a tape and what needs to be on this tape (seriously, skip Side B!), but Lan Zhan didn’t specifically forbid me from including anything else. So, let me create some value out of this tedious exercise, and give you some real talk about the Cloud Recesses! Highlights include the best spot to catch Lan-xiansheng in a nap, how to get technically drunk (hint: the Restoration Chamber’s transformation liquids), and my personal calculation for the maximum number of rules one can break in an hour…”
Stop. Rewind to the beginning. Stop.
Play.
❖
Lan Wangji was six when he watched his mother’s cremation.
All he remembers is a sparse pavilion enclosed by bamboo thickets, decorated with wreaths thinned and torn by gusts of wind. Behind him were the mumbled chants of a monk, and in front of him, Lan Qiren leaned against the coffin, smearing blood-red soot over her forehead. In the years that followed, the knowledge osmosed into his brain that his uncle was releasing her protection ward. Only with the clan’s cessation seal was her flesh allowed to burn.
He should have realized it then—when his uncle drew the seal, when his mother turned to ash, when he learned enough to conjure his first barrier out of magic. He should have realized then that their wards were useless when a release mechanism existed.
Instead, the epiphany is jolting through him now, thick and relentless and devastating, in a gale of pit-black smoke, as the Cloud Recesses go up in flame.
Lan Wangji descends from an old line of keepers, inheriting an immense obligation over relics as aged as a few thousand years. The Wen’s finders’ roots may date back equally far, but for a very long time, they have not truly discovered anything. There has not been any publication, announcement, or private safekeeping request; the Cloud Recesses’ relationship with them is practically non-existent.
In the lore poets will later sing of, this day will only be an inciting incident, the first card Qishan flips to exit an era of stealthy ambition. Tensions will climb up to new heights, and in a few moons, when a war breaks out in full swing on top of ruined vaults and keepers’ corpses, they will all agree that the Lan escaped relatively unscathed: only a handful casualties and three-quarters of their inventory evacuated in time.
In the moment, as qin strings bleed his fingers open and oil fumes smolder his skin, Lan Wangji can only think about the collapse of his entire world. He bites his lips and plays another melody, a trilling tune that forms a shield that feels as fragile as his heart. It is still doing its job: each incoming finder—no, raider, thief—gets slammed back into the courtyard’s wall, a distance barely safe enough away from the Vault.
It stands just a few arms’ lengths behind his back, its spiritual glow beading sweat down his spine. There is no wall or gate to conceal the relics it holds, but its enchantment keeps them reachable by nothing but the light. It is a true spectacle of keepers’ magic, a living example of the Lan’s underpinning philosophy.
As a keeper, he is supposed to protect it with his life.
But as feelings begin to leave his hands, surfacing in his mind is the plain building across the yard, burning bright.
“Next up on my list of cursed locations is the Collection Laboratory, where the incoming or outgoing artifacts are inventoried and sorted before leaving for their final destinations! Why is it cursed? Well, it’s full of the stuff that true fears are made of: …[gasp] spreadsheets, the PHYSICAL kinds.
“I wish I can tell you that I’ve never set foot in here, or that I don’t know the arrangement of its every atom. Unfortunately, the Lan do know their craft, and this sad lab is—fittingly—double-served as a detention chamber. Again, not the fun kind, unless you’re the type who finds thrill in being scowled at for hours by a hot, silent keeper (no judgment here if you do, we all have flaws!)
“Assuming that you’re like the rest of us, here are five cents for when you inevitably get in trouble: talk to your jailer, get to know them as a person, ask about their family, their taste in food, in girlfriends, in erotica, yadda yadda, just the usual drill, all the small talks you can whip out. Make yourself so much of a nuisance that they kick you OUT of punishment—now, that’s fun.”
Pain shoots his brain frozen as Wen Xu’s foot crushes the joints along his arm. His qin is lying on the ground in pieces. He grieves his last drop of magic during the ambient manic laugh of his enemy. How careless and arrogant was the Lan, gloats Wen Xu. How stupid, how soft-hearted. His ears absorb those haughty rants in bits and pieces: barriers with doors in the back, locks with decodable keys, keepers too cowardly to keep their access inaccessible. There is blood swirling in his eyes, in his spit. He digs his nails into the soil and tries not to inhale the floating embers, in his mind a mental countdown has started. Three, two—the flame is grazing through the final enchantment—one—and he watches all of Wen Xu’s self-satisfaction sublimes into rage as the illusion finally, finally shatters, a cloak of deception torn away from the location they have labeled the Vault, revealing nothing but empty air—
A sharp thud. He is knocked to the ground with a dizzying force, but his forebrain manages to register the success of their decoy. Xichen has had an hour’s head start, safe and sound with their most important treasures.
Their most important treasures, except for this compound, this courtyard, these roofs: the jade tiles that are hundreds of years old and the concrete monstrosities of their brutalist era. Except for their fields, which are on fire. Except for their gates guarding the edge of their land, the delineation between their power and the outside world.
Wei Ying invited him to Yunmeng, once. It was during a lab session and therefore carelessly worded, part of a stream of consciousness complete with eyes that did not even meet Lan Wangji’s. I think it would do you good, hanging out more with me, Wei Ying twirled a strand of hair and made a duck face. You’ll get to let loose, go on quests, solve mysteries, have all the fun finders do, even more so because you’re with the Troupe. It’ll become your favorite place, Lan Zhan, and you’ll stop misspending your youth on data entry.
He laughed and stretched over the table like a cat, startling Lan Wangji, whom until then had never thought about the concept of a favorite place.
Did he have a favorite place? A favorite thing?
The memory crawls like a thousand worms in his chest as he turns back to face the lab, broken magic fueling the flame to lick the sky gold.
❖
“Another water clock!” Wei Ying wailed, five minutes into afternoon detention. “This is the fifth one we got this week, and it’s so rusty it probably can’t tell the right half-day. Plus, there’s no space left on this spreadsheet—the, uh, Time-keeping Devices in the Second Century spreadsheet.” He tipped his chin over, contemplating. “That might be the most depressing sentence I’ve ever spoken.”
None of Lan Wangji’s eyelids battered. Birds were singing. The wind chimes were clanging pleasantly. “Hey, Lan Zhan…” He thought of uncle’s lecture this morning, all about propriety and conduct. “But seriously, Lan Zhan…” In all circumstances, a keeper must maintain a calm and dignified exterior—
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying’s voice rang suddenly by his ear, excising all thoughts of manners from his brain and he angrily, helplessly scowled back. “Look,” Wei Ying sat down next to him, a hand tugging on his shoulder, directing him towards the spreadsheet. “1529 rows in this category alone. Why is this even a category? The Cloud Recesses is not a clock museum, and I doubt a clock museum hoards this many useless antiques.” Wei Ying took a brief pause to chirp out his tongue, wetting the reddened skin of his lips. “Lan Zhan”—there was a thigh against his thigh now, and he averted his eyes after a dazed second—“have the Cloud Recesses ever thrown anything away?”
Wordlessly, Lan Wangji frowned.
Wei Ying gasped. “Wait, really? But—not everything is meant to be kept, right?” he said with gaping eyes, and Lan Wangji could not help counting the specks of swirling light within them.
“It is not about usefulness,” he replied, finally. “Our creations make us human, and their preservation is the preservation of our collective humanity.”
“But Lan Zhan, you can’t rank our humanity with a count of objects!” Wei Ying scanned the expanse of Lan Wangji’s workspace. “Like this,” he grabbed the closest object in triumph: a pink cassette recorder, painted with dots of plum flowers. “I have never used a cassette in my life and will never have a reason to! There are so many other more secure, portable, magical ways to store sound now! So instead of treating this recorder a less than glorified decor, we should just take it apart into useful components and recompose them, giving them a new, actually valuable life—”
“Who are you to determine values?” Lan Wangji snapped.
It stopped Wei Ying mid-rant, lips open, frozen. Lan Wangji took a breath, trying to ignore the wild, curling mess in his chest. “There are meanings, talents, and memories associated with an artifact. Throughout its lifetime, it accumulates more inherent values, and therefore more reasons to exist.”
“What about the cost accumulated to safekeep it?” Wei Ying challenged, a slight edge in his voice. “Or the opportunity cost? Surely at some point there is only diminishing return in keeping for the sake of keeping, or just letting this thing take up space—
Lan Wangji’s lips went tight. “This thing”—he glared at this bright, beautiful, stubborn fool, his teeth aching, trembling, consumed with a gnarling desire to—
—with a deep exhale, he pushed the tape recorder towards Wei Ying. “This thing,” he restated, “will be your task for the next two weeks.”
Wei Ying froze.
“The Analects of Keepology,” he said, “and One Thousand Years of Principles, volume one through ten. We have been working on improving our accessibility coverage. This is. A task. Of great necessity.”
Wei Ying’s blinked, jaw dropped with indignation, then shut, then dropped again. Finally, he collected the recorder and stomped away in speechless petulance.
Lan Wangji lowered his gaze. Safely behind his eyelashes, he let himself look, want, covet: long neck wound around by a slovenly ponytail, a lean shoulder disguising hard muscles, and a finder' arms that, even in a tantrum, managed to cradle preciously his mother’s recorder.
A week later, Wei Ying wheeled in a truckload of cardboard boxes and shoved them in his face.
“An Exceptionally Honest Guide To The Cloud Recesses, number of copies: a hundred,” Lan Wangji read aloud one of the boxes’ label.
“For accessibility!” Wei Ying pronounced. “Everyone in need should get a copy!” He clapped on the side of a box, a corner of his lips tipping up with delight. “Why the long face, Lan Zhan? Are you concerned about storage? For the record, I could have made all of them fit on a needle’s tip, but someone insisted that I learned a lesson about, uh, the usefulness of everything.”
Wei Ying was gloating. It was raining outside, but all that radiated from him was a sort of mischievous sunshine that was impossible to hide from. Lan Wangji pretended to examine a tape while soaking in Wei Ying’s self-satisfied luster, just for a second. Then, he stated, “Not everything is meant to be kept.”
“That’s what I said!” Wei Ying exclaimed. “Is that a concession? An acceptance of defeat? Holy fuck, did I persuade you? But that—wait!” He threw himself between Lan Wangji and the boxes. “Wait… no, Lan Zhan, you can’t throw these tapes away! This was so much work, all of my meanings, talents and memories accumulating in these tapes—you have to keep them forever now! Not only that, you need to listen to each of them from end to end, which is only fair—”
Lan Wangji turned away as Wei Ying kept pestering him from behind. A ghost of a smile lurked on the bow of his lips.
❖
Two weeks after their attack, Qishan let go of Lan Wangji—beaten, knees broken, but alive. His life for the rest of the Lan’s relics, as offered by Lan Xichen. It was a gambit that would have left each of their ancestors rolling in their grave, but for most of the weeks that followed, Lan Wangji was pumped with too much painkiller to care.
He begins to realize that he won’t have to as Xichen arrives to fetch him, now that he is back on his feet.
They drive as far as the mountain road allows, and then tread through the forest until they meet a cave. He takes a look at the ward and immediately blurts out, “Is this a vault, ge?”
His brother squeezes his hand and leads him inside, both of them climbing down a tunnel into the earth. Trailing after Xichen, two thoughts begin to coalesce in his head.
First, his brother, against all odds, found help. If this is a new vault, that means he must have salvaged at least a portion of their inventory—likely the rarest, most powerful, and most dangerous relics. Someone must have had created replicas of them, a feat of incredible depth of knowledge and mastery of details.
The tunnel ceiling lowers and lowers until both of them are crawling through barely a musty vent. The second thought hits him stark and dizzying as Xichen pulls him deep into the cave water, as he lets it soak through his shirt and steal the last of the earth’s warmth. By the other end of the tunnel, he surfaces with gasps and quivers and rolls his body onto a mossy floor. The chamber is pitch-black, but even in the muggy air, he can still sense the muted signature of his clan’s treasures.
He lies back, all senses of propriety and posture wrung out of his body. His arms pull up, covering his eyes.
“Wangji, I’m sorry.”
In the dark, his brother taps on his knee, crushing it all over again with the weight of sadness.
“Now, if you’re a person in the world and have been alive sometime in the past few hundred years, you must have known about the Vault. If you haven’t been to the Cloud Recesses, you would know that they talk a big game about it. Hearts have been shattered for it! Clans have been wrecked over it! I heard Jin Guangshan abstained from brothel ventures for a year after having witnessed it! You might have wondered whether any of that is true, or those were all overblown rumors.
“My answer for you listener? First off, get a life, why are you speculating about Jin Guangshan’s sex life, ew? But the hype is, however, accurate! And that comes from me, now an established Cloud Recesses critic, so you can be certain that it’s true. It’s truly beautiful! Majestic! One of the wonders of the world! While they really should turn security up a notch—that rigid commitment to “literal” transparency seriously goes like, hey here’s a nose, I’m just gonna step on it—it still makes for compelling spectacle!
“A hot take though? This is the top reason why their curfew is nonsensical! The best time to visit the Vault is after midnight—you need that blanket of the dark to really make out the relics’ glow. They are arranged in a spiral array and emit a kind of soft, delicate luminescence, and if the moon is out, they make a show of light and swirling shadows. It baffles me that some of these old things—swords and arrows, manuscripts and elixirs—used to be powerful enough to shake the world loose, when they’re so close by, harmless, looking pretty.
“And you can tell that they’re—treasured. Well-loved. I’m looking at a teacup right here—nothing too magical. Just a ceramic cup, with even a small chip near the opening. But its glaze is shiny, reflecting light, and I don’t think there’s any spiritual energy left in it, but it’s still glowing.
“That is the one thing that is really cool here, I think. The craft of keeping, maintaining, protecting. Making even the simplest object shine. I’ve been trained to become a finder my whole life, but being in this space can really make one wonder—”
For all of Wei Ying’s curfew-breaking and property-trespassing, he has never been to Lan Wangji’s quarter. What reason would he have to be there? He was just an exchange finder, a boy with a talent for trouble and a smile that blinded.
The Jingshi was not featured in his tape.
All Lan Wangji has left of it is ash and rubbles.
He should not have come back. With their wards gone and their towers torn down, the priorities of the Cloud Recesses’ keepers have shifted underground to the temporary vault. And yet, he finds himself shuffling his bad legs along scorched staircases and blasted corridors, following an impulse opaque to even himself. He reaches the last standing wall with the preaching voice of his uncle in his head. All keepers share the same weakness. He opens the door. The inability to ever let go.
Black, fine soot engulfs the floor tiles, layering over glass shards and wood splinters. He limps around the debris and re-orients himself, scanning furniture and what used to be a window, grasping for flash of recognition.
He finds it in the corner: a suspended space, surrounded by two pillars colliding into each other—a pyramid that protects mysteriously empty air. Empty, except for the spiritual trace of a barrier that only the best of keepers can detect.
He hobbles over with his heart lurching into his throat. He almost cannot breathe; his lung is clogged up, burst full with gratitude to his discipline that kept him vigilant, to the hours he spent training, to having been born as a—
With a touch, the illusion crumbles.
From mid-air falls open a box that used to be lacquered. He scrambles to hold it up; his fingers tremble against its burnt lid, its blackened lining.
Inside lays a disfigured plastic case. Its tape is half-spooled out, with melted strands fused together, like hand-pulled candies but smelling acrid. Gone is the blue sheen of new cassette, or the white label with sprawling handwriting that scribbled a careless title, a careless number. Nothing left of the tape he stole from the censure pile in a moment of weakness.
He leans back, holding himself very still.
Lan Wangji descends from an old line of keepers. He specializes in musical charms and fastidiously protects every belonging he possesses.
With Wei Ying’s tape, he played a concealment melody after every play, enclosing it with a sturdy ward until the next listen.
Lan Wangji glances at the destruction around him. Their wards are useless when a release mechanism exists. He touches his sleeves, feeling the spiritual threads that sew his mother’s recorder in.
On some levels of consciousness, he must have known. And yet.
Wei Ying’s words are just a teenager’s prank, a laundry list of absurd complaints about everything Lan Wangji grows up knowing and sprinkled with taunts designed only to rile him up. But the world in Wei Ying’s words is spirited and loud and teeming with colors. It is beautiful and arbitrary, filled with thousand-year-old antiques and everything else that is moving, that is alive. The world in Wei Ying’s words is not coated in cinders. It is not a cave to hide half-dead things that will never see the sun again.
His grip tightened around the cassette case. It is so small, a crushed treasure inside his palm.
What should he call himself now?
He cannot even keep such a fragile thing safe.
Clutching the tape against his chest, Lan Wangji feels grief like an ocean bleeding through his eyes.
❖
Insert tape in cartridge. Press close. Record.
“Hey Lan Zhan… well, I would be surprised if you’re actually Lan Zhan, but I would be even more surprised if it’s someone else and not you. Does it make sense? Maybe it doesn’t. It’s almost time for you to wake up here and the primetime for my brain activities is passing.
“Nevertheless, Lan Zhan, recording a tape is the worst! I cannot just edit the recording as I wish without re-recording a whole section. And everytime I re-record, the quality gets so much worse. If you are trying to teach me a lesson on forbearance, you must know that I have failed miserably. I will never touch a cassette tape ever again.
“That said, I hope you treasure this creation, which has taken all the last shred of patience I possess. It might have started out as a joke, but it ended up… very honest, Lan Zhan. Maybe a little too honest—I don’t think I can listen to it anymore. I don’t know why, either. Maybe it is really because of you. Do you know I like you very much, Lan Zhan? Just thinking of you listening to this, I just cannot help but—
“Haha, wow, the early morning light is really getting to me.”
“Wow, this is getting way too rambling and embarrassing. I don’t know if I can handle you listening to this. But also maybe you should know.”
“You know what? I just thought of the best idea. If I clone this tape a hundred times over without this segment, and just hide this master tape somewhere among those clones, maybe it will take you a long long time to listen to this message. Maybe we will have all grown up by that time. Maybe I will have become an exceptional finder instead of a Cloud Recesses trouble-maker. Maybe we will have become more—”
Stop. A gulp of breath.
Record.
“And that is it, listener. Thank you for your time, and please live your stay here at the Cloud Recesses to the fullest.”