Chapter Text
To be fair, no one in the surrounding areas had actually seen the monster. The juniors had simply been sent to investigate the odd occurrences in several nearby villages, all of which were surrounded by the same woods. It was a routine investigation, with an added benefit (at least according to Jin Ling) that one of the signs the villagers had reported was that the bugs had disappeared. Still, that wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary for investigations that the four juniors had been sent on without a senior disciple.
The plan was standard: enter the forest at dusk, find whatever was causing trouble, suppress the thing, go home after assuring the villagers that all was well. Step one went off without a hitch, though Ouyang Zizhen was yawning his head off but that was normal for the quartet’s night hunts. Finding the thing was, unfortunately, fairly straightforward. That was probably where their good luck ended. Whatever it was had cut a clear path through the forest, leaving deep impressions where it had tread. After a brief argument between Jin Ling and Lan Jingyi that Sizhui had to break up, the group followed the destruction deeper into the forest, hoping that they were following the beast and not heading in the opposite direction.
They nearly missed it; it blended in so well to the moonlight dappled forest. It looked like a giant hairy spider except 10 feet tall and nearly as broad. While definitely not as easy as planned, at that moment they thought they could still manage it. Then the spider turned. Jin Ling would remind them much later that spiders could in fact smell and they hadn’t been as quiet or as soft-footed as they should have been considering the spiderness of their enemy.
Lan Yuan had never heard a scream quite like what came out of the spider’s maw. The closest reference he had was when Fairy snuck up on Wei Ying one time and licked his hand and even that wasn’t close to what came out of the beast. All four of the juniors were frozen in a mixture of shock and fear and uncharacteristically, it was Zizhen who was the first to grab the others to get them moving away from the spider. Unfortunately, that meant that his back was the most exposed when a spray of bright pink goo sprayed towards the quartet. Whatever the substance was burning but they didn’t have time to pause, and they got scraped by tree branches and bark as they ran towards what they hoped was the edge of the forest. Sizhui tripped on a gnarled tree root at one point and while his leg hurt, the adrenaline kept him moving.
“Jin Ling, catch,” Sizhui threw his sword at his cousin to hold as they continued to run, the older disciple using his now empty hands to pull an item out from his robes, quickly activating it before throwing it up in the air. It flew itself above the treetops before exploding in a flurry of gold and red sparks.
“There!” Jingyi shouted, pointing at a crack in the rocks to their right. All four turned and dove into the crack which opened up beyond the rock face into a small but still decently sized cave. The juniors all collapsed on the floor, listening to the beast trying to get at them through the small opening.
“What did you just shoot off A-yuan?” Jin Ling questioned, kneeling next to his cousin to inspect his bleeding leg, “We’re too far way from any of our seniors for Lan signal flares to be effective.”
“A-Die made it for me,” Sizhui panted out, enough of the adrenaline wearing off that the pain was beginning to register, “he said if I ever set it off, him and Baba would come for me as fast as they can.”
The four descended into silence besides the occasional grunts of pain and the scuffling of the beast at the entrance. As the adrenaline bled from their bones, the pain of their wounds began to hit them and soon all four had slipped off into blissful unconsciousness.
The first thing that Lan Yuan registered as he awoke was that he was on something soft and warm light was filtering through his eyelids. He groaned as he opened his eyes, black and white blobs sitting on his bed slowly refocusing into the worried faces of his parents.
“There you are my little radish,” Wei Ying cooed as he helped the junior sit up. Sizhui rubbed his eyes as he scanned the room. Zizhen was resting on his chest in the bed next to him, drooling as he snored away while Jin Ling and Jingyi seemed to be engaging in a quiet debate over something that Sizhui couldn’t catch. His attention was drawn to the other figure sitting on his bed who was fussing over him and checking his temperature with the back of his hand.
“You came,” Sizhui murmured, leaning into Lan Zhan’s cool hand.
The head cultivator offered a strained smile, “Of course we came. You sent up the flare.”
The young cultivator leaned back to look at Wei Ying, “Your flare worked then.”
Wei Ying replied with a short laugh, “I guess it did baobei. We got there just in time.”
The head cultivator continued where his husband had left off, “You and the others did the right thing, we were able to get it contained enough that a night hunt is being organized to suppress it.”
The junior hung his head. He and the others thought they could do this on their own but they had failed miserably and now more senior cultivators were having to clean up their mess.
The young man’s chin was lifted so he was looking at Lan Wangji, “You couldn’t have expected any of that A-Yuan but you followed your training and all four of you are alive, even if you are a little worse for wear.”
The unease in Sizhui’s heart settled, and he finally let the healers poke and prod at him. His ankle was fractured, Zizhen had a fairly major burn on his back from getting the main focus of the venom, Jin Ling had some deep gashes across his torso from tree branches, and Jingyi had somehow managed a concussion and they all had cuts, bruises, and minor spider venom burns but the healers promised, with time and rest, they would be fine.
“I wondered why you chose a cave instead of going into the trees, but we found out the thing can climb up and climb high,” Wei Wuxian exclaimed as he helped settle Sizhui against his pillows.
“We didn’t know that,” the junior murmured as the medicines the healers gave him began to lull him back to dreamland.
“Sleep well little rabbit,” Lan Wangji whispered as he tucked a small stuffed animal next to his now sleeping son.