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Chapter Text

The boy is a menace.

Lan Qiren can’t deny it. He doesn’t want to deny it. Not only would it be against the rules listed so forcefully in stone on the wall of discipline to utter an untruth like that, but it would do violence to the testimony of his own eyes and ears to pretend, even for a moment, that he has not been utterly outraged and even distressed by what he has heard.

Yes, distressed. It is not merely a matter of unorthodox thought or ridiculously dangerous theorizing. That would be outrageous enough itself. But it is also an echo of the past, an echo he cannot help but hear even though no one else—even the smirking boy still standing in his class, the words barely out of his lips—remembers it. And that echo rends his heart.

He had known, of course, that Cangse Sanren’s son was Wei Changze son, was the first disciple of Yunmeng Jiang, was the Wei Ying, courtesy name Wuxian, who had just answered his question about proper treatment of a bloodyminded spirit so flippantly. And so he was not surprised to see the echo of her face when A-Zhan dragged a rulebreaker in on the first day (the first night) that visiting disciples were allowed into the Cloud Recesses.

But while he had been prepared for his face, he had not been prepared for his mind.

He had thought that someone raised from youth by Jiang Fengmian (no fool, but weaker than he should) and Yu Ziyuan (no tyrant, but no more flexible than she had to be) would not, could not be like the rogue cultivator-stroke-wandering genius he remembered.

But of course, Wei Changze had been just as bad, as soon as Cangse had had a chance to convince him he could be, and he had grown up in Lotus Pier too.

It was distressing to meet another mind that moved in diagonals, when cultivation was an orthogonal space.

And worst of all, because he reminded him of her, he reminded him of the worst thing she had ever done to him.

No, not shaving his beard. That had been mildly annoying, and frankly he thought it was unfair that it had come back scragglier than before, but it was nothing compared to how she had rearranged his worldview on the fly.

For Cangse Sanren was not just a genius cultivator because she thought differently than everyone else and had learned not from a sect but from the legendary immortal Baoshan Sanren. If all she had been was untamed, she would have merely been a frustration, as soon forgotten as she was out of the lectures and out of Qiren’s sight.

No, she was the one thing worse than someone who didn’t care about the rules.

She was someone who knew them all and could cite them, perfectly, in ways that somehow justified the ridiculous things she did.

And that was the true root of his distress. Seeing her son, hearing her son recite unorthodoxy in his own classroom, he could not help but think of the exact set of rules Cangse would have cited to demand he ought to listen, instead of doing what he wanted to do and throwing the book in his hand at the troublemaker’s head before banishing him to rewrite the entire Lan library worth of books as punishment.

“Be generous,” she undoubtedly would have begun, because she loved those big, expansive ones that didn’t mean nothing but also couldn’t possibly mean everything she wanted them to mean. Or could they? No, they couldn’t. But that was what made her so frustrating, wasn’t it?

“Do not be ill-mannered.” So no throwing the book at the boy, at least.

“Do not regret after offering.” Not that he’d actually offered Wei Wuxian anything, but she would probably have pointed out that if he wasn’t offering the boy a chance to fully discuss the question when he asked it then he was definitely not being generous, and might even be being ill-mannered by trying to embarrass him rather than effecting learning in the classroom. And so if he was truly offering the boy a chance to discuss the question, could he take that back, in good conscience?

Ugh, and if she said that, she would no doubt bring in “be careful with your words,” “do not take your own words lightly,” and “do not say one thing and mean another,” with a healthy dose of “do not be unreasonable” (as if she was ever reasonable!), “learning comes first,” and “do not give up on learning,” to boot!

Then she would probably have gotten even more pointed with him.

“Destroy the five poisons.” For all that Wei Wuxian was being infuriating, he had truly not expressed himself with great pride—or even ignorance, for while he was proposing a heterodox approach that could not be stomached, he did not seem unaware of that, merely questioning of why. Qiren himself, on the other hand, was certainly angry, and Cangse would have no doubt added proud (of the Lan lectures and his own knowledge) and perhaps ignorant (or at least willing to allow others to remain so, if he did not engage with the boy’s questions). And how could he destroy the five poisons, then, if he did not allow the conversation to continue out of his own anger and pride?

“Do not succumb to rage.” A more pointed version of the last. Worse, she would probably add “do not be haughty and complacent” as well.”

“Be peaceful when insulted.” Even if the boy’s outrageous notion was, well, an outrage and an insult to the proper way of doing things and thus to Qiren’s own teaching (pride, Cangse’s voice giggled in his ear), was it not his duty to be peaceful in the face of it?

And then she would no doubt have slapped him across the face—metaphorically, of course—with her three favorite rules to quote: “correct others by correcting yourself” (he could almost hear a faint “Qiren” in her voice after that one), “do not praise yourself and slander others,” and “do not jump to unfounded conclusions.”

As if it were an unfounded conclusion that resentment was inherently dangerous and therefore unusable!

But just as he had sputtered in the face of her when she was living and present in the flesh, he cannot help but hear her ghost when confronted again with a face, so like hers, once again saying ridiculous things in the classrooms of Cloud Recesses. And since her death meant that he could not argue with her except by going to Yiling and playing Inquiry (assuming she had not already reincarnated, which was unlikely anyway), he cannot win this argument.

“Come on then, Wei Wuxian.” He takes a deep breath and centers himself, consciously laying the book back on the table softly. “You say you have not come up with a method to avoid the backlash inherent in the resentment you proposed to control. Let us talk that through. What would be your first step, and why?”

Chapter Text

Of course, just like his mother, the boy does not know when to back down. He may not know how. He is, after all, not just his mother’s son (in so many ways—even the expression he makes when thinking on the spot is distressingly familiar), but his father’s as well, and both Wei men clearly took to hear the Jiang sect motto of attempting the impossible. And what could be more impossible than to explain, here in the main teaching hall of the Lan sect, how one would safely and morally secure resentful energy for possible use?

But impossible as it may be, there will be an attempt. He was sure of this from the moment he asked, but he becomes even more sure when he sees a light flicker into being in Wei Wuxian’s eyes, almost as if someone had lit a talisman between his ears.

“Thank you, Grandmaster.” He can recognize vamping when he sees it, but politeness is nothing to sneeze at, especially when one is violating every tenet of good cultivation practice, so he does not say anything. Besides, interrupting is also forbidden. “I think the best way to approach the question of how to control resentful energy…” the boy pauses. “To safely control it, I should say, is to consider how we already control the energies we use in day to day cultivation practice.” A good save, that, and, he must admit, a reasonable approach. Not only that, but one that suggests the boy is not entirely beyond saving. Perhaps mental-ghost-Cangse had a point when she insisted he should let the boy speak.

“I hope that I will not be considered too arrogant if I begin with the Jiang techniques, as I am naturally most familiar with them.” He doesn’t think Wei Wuxian means the humility he is practicing here; if anything, it is more vamping, the standard formulae of politeness letting his mouth move without committing his mind to anything yet. But again, there is no reason to say anything about it publicly, or to interrupt. The boy cannot be blamed for the fact that Qiren himself thinks the phrasing unlikely to be truly meant, since his thought is based only on remembered laughter and a similarity of facial expression from a woman long-dead.

Wei Wuxian goes into a surface-level explanation of Jiang techniques. Qiren knows that he is likely capable of more advanced thought in this vein; one does not become Madam Yu’s first disciple without real knowledge of the underlying principles of Jiang cultivation, especially if (as rumors that he knows to be true have it) Madam Yu personally hates one’s guts. But it is reasonable of him not to go into too much detail about his own sect’s secrets, especially when he concludes that Jiang techniques are not, in and of themselves, sufficient to safely handle resentment.

“After all,” he jokes, “if they were, I would have told Grandmaster that I already knew how to control it.”

A fair point, and a good reminder that the boy is not as brash or as thoughtless as he might initially seem. A wilder child might have asserted that he fully understood the technique. A more controlled one would (properly) have avoided the thought at all, or at least discarded it unheard, of course. But perhaps it is Cangse’s voice in his ear again that reminds him that he asked an open-ended question, and the boy has done nothing but work through the implications that he himself asked about.

While he is thinking this, Wei Wuxian works his way through the basics of Jin cultivation as well, though at a more superficial level. Unsurprising, that; thought the Jin and the Jiang are close, that closeness has primarily manifested itself in recent decades in the friendship of Madam Yu with Madam Jin, and it is emphatically unlikely that this has led to Wei Wuxian, specifically, gaining any further insight into Jin techniques than could be grasped from history books or personal observation at cultivation conferences and joint night hunts at the sect boundary. Any closer bonds would have been reserved for those Madam Yu wanted around her when she visited her friend—a list doubly unlikely to include her sect’s first disciple, given both her personal dislike of him and the fact that she brought her children with her and thus would have had to leave someone back home to take on the lead disciple role even if it had been entrusted to Jiang Wanyin or Jiang Yanli.

Nevertheless, there is nothing wrong with Wei Wuxian’s claims about Jin cultivation, even if they are superficial, and Qiren finds himself in agreement with the proposition that unless resentful energy is susceptible to gold, it is unlikely that the Jin cultivation patterns would be particular useful in dealing with it.

“Be polite, Wei Wuxian.” He may agree, but there is no need to encourage a dig at another sect’s wealth.

“My apologies, Grandmaster.” Notably, Wei Wuxian does not spare a glance for the Jin, but then Jin Zixuan does not look particularly insulted. Perhaps he has heard worse from the Jiang disciple before. There are rumors of bad blood there, related to the lack of movement towards an actual marriage between the engaged couple of Jin Zixuan and Jiang Yanli. In any case, if the Jins do not insist on it, Qiren will take the apology to him as sufficient.

Besides, he is somewhat distracted by the small smile on Wei Wuxian’s face now that he has summarily dealt with the cultivation practices of two of the five major sects. To his surprise, it does not remind him of Cangse Sanren, for all that Wei Wuxian’s face could be a liberal artist’s interpretation of hers. No, that smile is all Wei Changze, whose mischief never showed itself in large ways like his wife’s, but always in the kind of trick-of-the-light foolery that could not quite be attributed to him unless you watched him very carefully.

“That, of course, leaves us with three major sects, with due apologies to the others.” The boy bowed to the Yao disciples sitting beside him, seeming to include the other minor sects in that gesture. “The Wen, the Nie, and the Lan.” His smile widened into something more like Cangse’s as he bowed to the recently-arrived Wen Qing and Wen Ning, to Nie Huaisang, and then—to his surprise—not to Qiren himself but to A-Zhan. “Apologies to my fellow students and to our instructor.” Here was the bow to Qiren, surprisingly deep given the boy’s flippancy overall. “But without implying that any of your sects engage in such behavior, I believe that these three sect’s approaches might indeed help us think about how to control this kind of energy.”

Qiren is glad he is not holding the book now. He might have thrown it again.

“Explain yourself, Wei Wuxian.”

Chapter Text

The boy may have the ridiculousness combined with the brilliance of his mother (a terrible fate for anyone to submit to, Qiren thinks), but he evidently inherited at least a little bit of Wei Changze’s ability to avoid completely and totally insulting everyone around him. Perhaps that could be called diplomacy, as he would have in Changze, if it weren’t paired so totally with the entire Cangse Sanren of the boy. And it certainly hadn’t been inculcated by anyone still remaining at Lotus Pier. Jiang Fengmian was a reasonably adept sect leader, but he had never been particularly good at that specific set of skills—fortunately, he had rarely needed them. And Yu Ziyuan…suffice to say that she had great strengths, but not that.

So it was definitely Wei Changze’s blessing that stopped the boy from actually directly claiming that any of the major or minor sects actually dabbled in resentful cultivation. Instead, he focused on how their respective cultivation styles would lend themselves to preventing the damage of resentment, thus sidestepping the potential insult of linking them to heterodox methods. It was actually how Qiren himself would have approached the problem, had he been the kind of manic genius-stroke-fool who ever spent any time thinking about this kind of question ever.

Except apparently now.

Intriguingly, the boy must have done far more preparation in understanding the other sects he was about to spend these lectures with than he wanted anyone to think, because his reference for the Wen sect is not Wen Ruohan, who certain parties (the Nie sect, Qiren sighed internally, and Nie Mingjue specifically) have been muttering for years might actually consider using resentful energy. But mutters were one thing; saying it outright in a classroom in Cloud Recesses was another. That would have led to Wei Wuxian wishing Qiren had thrown the book at his head, because it would have prevented him from getting himself literally drawn and quartered in the Nightless City. And if he had said something like that, Qiren would have probably had to do more to him than that to prevent the Wen from bursting into the Cloud Recesses to do it.

But he didn’t.

No, his reference for the Wen sect is healing cultivation, and the potential it has to either prevent or reduce harm to a golden core and its associated meridians, which means that he knew who Wen Qing was, which means that he was much more informed about the Wen sect, and thus more put-together, than he was presenting himself as in the classroom.

Interesting.

Cangse Sanren had not been like that. She had come down the mountain in a flash of brilliance and she had never once cared to actually analyze or understand the complex interrelations of the cultivation sects. Oh, she had picked up some details about them in the way that a roaring flood might drag a whole tree along, but that no more made her a political thinker than it made the river a carpenter.

Wei Changze had been better at it, but there was no way that he had taught it to his son, given the age at which he had disappeared.

Nor was this Jiang Fengmian—for the simple reason that it didn’t have to be.

No, this was Yu Ziyuan’s influence, all the way through. Of course, Qiren thought; if he were anything but a Lan, he might have slapped himself on the forehead. Brilliance is one thing, but Yu Ziyuan would not tolerate anything less than perfect preparation from her head disciple, let alone one she disliked. Madam Yu was never diplomatic in her approach, but she was always aware of anything that she had any chance of knowing. And no doubt she had drilled the same into her head disciple.

Of course, some of it is probably Wei Wuxian himself, as he is clearly fascinated by cultivation theory, and his explanation of Wen healing suggests he might actually have been not just present but paying attention at the last cultivation conference held at Lotus Pier, which had focused on sharing medical techniques in the event of night-hunts gone wrong.

Hmm.

His explanation of how the Nie history as butchers must mean that they knew something about shrugging off animal resentment is an interesting continuation from the question Qiren himself had asked a few minutes ago. More importantly, Qiren notices Nie Huaisang’s fan fluttering as he spoke, which means that something has interested the notoriously unacademic young master. Most intriguing.

His explanation of Lan cultivation is the most interesting, however. Perhaps this is natural, because Qiren is himself most familiar with them and thus most skeptical of how this boy thought they might be used for heterodox applications. Apparently, A-Zhan has been thinking the same, because when Wei Wuxian reaches the Lan sect in his explanation, A-Zhan comes as close as Qiren has ever seen to violating the rules on interrupting, waiting for what is only vaguely plausibly a stop in the onrushing torrent of thoughts pouring out of the Jiang sect disciple.

“The Lan do not engage with resentful energy. It is harmful to body and soul. They that touch pitch will be defiled.” This is perhaps two more sentences than Qiren would have expected his nephew to be willing to speak on such a subject—combined with the near-interruption, that means Wangji is on edge. That bears looking at on its own, in addition to Wei Wuxian’s point.

To Qiren’s surprise, Wei Wuxian doesn’t seem bothered by the near-interruption, turning a giant smile towards A-Zhan.

“Exactly, Lan-er-gege!” Qiren’s eyebrow rise of their own accord. That was a more familiar term of address than he had expected in his classroom. “You can’t touch resentful energy without a potential problem. That’s why I think the Lan musical techniques are so important! You have to be able to affect the resentment without letting it affect you—just like your brother did when Jiang Cheng got interrupted at the presentation ceremony. He didn’t have to touch Jiang Cheng or Wen Chao—no one wants to touch Wen Chao—sorry Grandmaster—sorry Lady Wen, no insult meant to your sect or anything, but anyway, he didn’t need to touch them, he just needed to play the xiao. I bet you could do the same, couldn’t you? What do you play?”

“Guqin.”

Qiren is so shocked that his nephew actually answered the question that he almost loses the chance to redirect the conversation. Fortunately, Wei Wuxian also seems surprised, so he is able to slip in without interrupting anyone.

“Be that as it may—thank you, Young Master Wei, for your thoughts on this interesting subject.”

Chapter Text

The boy is oddly quiet after they return to the actual subject of the lectures, but at least he is paying attention, which he clearly had not been doing before. Perhaps indulging the spinning out of his ideas had actually been productive, then. And actually—he hates to admit it—but just like his mother’s had always been, this idea is something Qiren could not ignore, so it was probably good that he hadn’t just thrown the book at the boy and ended it there.

But it wasn’t going to end there, was it? Cangse’s ideas had never ended with one discussion, and he can see that the wheels are still turning behind the boy’s eyes even as he faces front…in fact, now that he thinks about it, he suspects that is why the boy is suddenly not fidgeting—all the energy that usually went into misbehavior and bad posture is now going into thinking more about the issue of resentful energy.

Qiren sighs—internally, he knows better than to show any weakness in front of a classroom of other sects’ disciples—and mentally waves goodbye to the critical edition of Lan Yi’s commentaries on the Poems of Lan An that he had previously been hoping to produce during the free study period that traditionally accompanied the lectures in the afternoons. It’s a shame, since he really think he’s on to something in terms of how Lan Yi had interpreted the language about mutual dedication in the later Lan An corpus and its relationship to her own tenure as a sect leader. But it can wait; neither Lan Yi nor Lan An’s poems are going anywhere.

“Finally.” It isn’t actually a complete sentence, but he pauses after it anyway because he knows that such a verbal flourish conveys to the students that he is saying something they actually need to listen to. Not that he doesn’t think they ought to listen to everything—he’s not up here to waste his breath, even if Nie Huaisang probably thinks so—but he’s well aware that attention can wander. He’s been teaching long enough, after all, that he’s probably taught some of these students’ parents, and certainly their attention used to wander. The new generation is not uniquely special in this way. So he pauses, and they perk up, and then he continues.

“In addition to our regular lectures, which will continue on as planned,” except that he’s going to try his best to get another elder or one of the senior disciples to lead the regular classes, because he only has so much available energy and thought during the day, and what he’s about to announce will sap it further (unlike the Lan Yi project, which was invigorating), “I am pleased to announce,” for a given value of pleasure—an extremely moderate one, but there is some pleasure in it, so there’s no reason that his inner Cangse should whisper “Lying is forbidden” at him, now is there “that we will also be having an advanced study group this year.”

Twitters spread amongst the assembled students, even among the Lans. Especially among the Lans, since they know that the year’s lectures are always planned meticulously in advance (as if there were another way of planning) and that this was conspicuously not on that plan. Even A-Zhan, who is not twittering because that would be an interruption, has raised an eyebrow in his equivalent of mild shock.

“This study group will be voluntary, of course, though I will be asking certain sects to contribute members to it.” He does not have to clear his throat, he does not, because there is nothing that bothers him about what he is about to say.

“Lying is forbidden, even to oneself, Qiren.” Unfortunately his inner Cangse has a point this time.

“As you may have guessed, the group will be examining the consequences of Young Master Wei’s theories about remediating the damages caused by resentful energies.” He does not rush into the next sentence; just as much as running is prohibited in Cloud Recesses, so he has thought that other inordinate speeds should be avoided even if they do not involve physical motion. But he does continue before the collective energy in the room can fully spring into life and drown him out with their response to that news. “It will not be a study group planning the use of those energies. However, Young Master Wei is correct that if something inherently harms all those who touch it, we have a duty as cultivators to ourselves and the mundane population to see how it might be controlled and corrected. To borrow Young Master Wei’s analogy, anyone caught planning floods will be removed from the study group with alacrity, but we may consider how dams, canals, and other forms of flood prevention might help save lives.”

He does not look at the boy while saying this. He expects he has no idea the degree to which his parents would be squealing with glee to hear Qiren not only establish this study group but adopt their son’s language around it. But he is a Lan; just as much as a Jiang must attempt the impossible, so he must uphold righteousness and protect the weak. That is what the rules are there for, and (much as it pains him to agree with Cangse even from beyond the grave) as long as the practice does not itself violate the rules, the larger rules she loved to quote mean that he must give it due consideration.

“Young Master Wei, I assume you would like to take part in this group.” At least it will keep the boy where he can see him, and keep him out of additional trouble while he is there. Maybe giving him a difficult issue to ponder will help channel some of those impulses he already recognizes from his mother too—resentful energy is not the only thing that can be treated like floodwaters, after all.

“Wangji, I expect to see you there as well.” His nephew is the most likely candidate to make sure that no one goes in the wrong direction in their research—and besides, it would probably do him good to see how the Lan principles can be upheld even in a difficult situation. A-Zhan had come far too close to interrupting earlier.

“Lady Wen, I assume that you or your brother would also like to take part, given Young Master Wei’s suggestion about your sect’s cultivation, but I understand if you have other priorities.” The young woman in question gives a regal nod that he assumes means she is planning to participate. On the one hand, he is hardly ecstatic about including the Wen in such a conversation; on the other, it will leave her less time to do whatever it is that she is really here for, given that there is no way Wen Ruohan hasn’t sent her for some double purpose.

“Young Master Nie…nominate someone from your sect to join us.” Nie Huaisang needs all the study time he can get to pass the course, but it would be a waste of an opportunity not to include the Nie. Which means…

“Young Master Jin, the same to you as well.” Jin Zixuan likely does not need that study time, but he also is the one of the major sect heirs who has looked least interested in what Wei Wuxian has to say. This may be because of the history between him and the boy in question, but for whatever reason it does not strike him as a good idea to invite Jin Zixuan himself into the group. “And of course, other disciples are welcome as long as they are prepared to engage in what I have already designated as advanced, in-depth study.” He gives the class the glare that he knows they all interpret as a threat of additional work or punishment, but which is actually just the look he’s practiced from meetings with the sect elders to try to end a pointless conversation early. He has had a lot of practice with it.

“See me after class if you wish to sign up. Otherwise, your time is your own until dinner. Use it wisely, and do not run.” This last is not shouted, because shouting is prohibited, but it is projected over the sudden sound of dozens of disciples standing up and making for the door.

Chapter Text

Making up an advanced study seminar on the fly is exactly as fun as it sounds, which is to say only a ridiculously foolish person would enjoy it. Which is probably why the boy is grinning so much at the first meeting, though to be fair he is not the one who has had to come up with a curriculum and discussion questions and lecture notes and (worst of all but absolutely necessary in this case) a secrecy array that means that whatever they discuss here can’t just be shared willy-nilly with the Wen Chaos and Jin Guangshans of the world. This is made doubly complicated by the fact that it has to go counter to the various carefully installed arrays and other subtle uses of directed spiritual energy that are designed to enhance the inclination to share thoughts and ideas from these lectures outside of the Cloud Recesses. After all, the whole point of the Lan lectures is to make sure that everyone has a common basis for their understanding of proper cultivation, proper moral discipline, and proper action. Since not everyone can come to the Cloud Recesses, even in the years when there is a lecture (some are too young, some too old, some have to be taking care of everything at home), every effort is taken to create effects that will (subtly, but increasingly) encourage the sharing of these ideas widely. This must not happen with this particular seminar, however, so he’s had to create new arrays that somehow isolate this discussion from all the others.

Oh heavens, he’s thinking in italics now. The only person he’s ever known who could speak…that is speak in italics was Cangse Sanren. He should have known that as soon as her son showed up he would have to deal with the blasted things again.

Anyway, the boy would probably enjoy it if he were the one making the arrays. He’s supposed to be some kind of talisman expert—not that he brags about it, at least not where any of the Lan informants have heard (yes, there are Lan informants; there’s a reason so many of the disciplines apply only on home turf, and not everywhere). After all, bragging around Madam Yu is a very poor idea when you’re in the particular situation in which Wei Wuxian consistently finds himself. Nor do the Jiangs go out of their way to advertise that they have a genius with talismans in their sect.

But that’s the thing about the cultivation world; it’s all interconnected. The Jiangs, prior to approximately three years ago, give or take, were not noted importers or producers of talisman paper. They made enough for themselves, so they did not have to buy from the Jin, as many minor sects did, but the sect was not dedicated to the production of talisman paper to the point where someone visiting Lotus Pier would notice it beyond the ordinary practice of any functioning sect.

However, when Qiren had been there for that last cultivation conference about medical cultivation, he had noticed the production facilities. It smelled like pulp: hemp pulp, wood pulp, the pulp of rags, they all had a common scent that hung in the air near the western lagoons of Lotus Pier. What had once, he vaguely remembered, been a brewery of some kind by the sect gates (not that he had partaken, but it was precisely because the Lan were teetotalers that he had noted its presence at all) had been transformed into a vast space for the shaping and drying of sheet, overseen by purple-clad disciples who made sure that the paper was within the requisite qualifications for use in cultivation.

The change was not because of anything Jiang Fengmian or Yu Ziyuan had begun to do themselves; those two were not innovators of anything but a particular fighting style (on Madam Yu’s part) and a particular dense approach towards marriage (on Jiang Fengmian’s). Not that Qiren’s family had a leg to stand on in any critiques of sect-leader marriages gone bad; it was simply that each family in the cultivation world seemed to have found their own unique way of making things go wrong, and Jiang Fengmian’s was folly. One could have made a whole curriculum on that topic, Qiren reflects, alongside his own brother’s impetuousness, Jin Guangshan’s unwillingness to acknowledge the concept of monogamy, the tragic ends of the two Madams Nie, and whatever Wen Ruohan had done with his wife after she bore him the requisite sons.

“Be generous.” Right. Cangse Sanren had had no right to make him write lines when she had been a visiting disciple, but apparently she did after death. He would copy Courtesy this evening before bed.

“Diligence was the root” as well, so he had better get that curriculum mapped out while he ate dinner in his rooms before the first meeting. Obviously, most of the advanced seminar was going to be discussion-based, and each of the participants would have to supply their own thoughts, experiences, and knowledge to the central issue, but that didn’t mean that he could skimp on the readings! After all, if he didn’t give them a solid grasp of why resentment wasn’t used, and how it harmed people, things might spin entirely out of control.

Hm…that is going to be tricky.

Technically, he is acting sect leader at the moment, so he could authorize anyone he wanted to access the materials he was currently thinking of. They are in the restricted section—some called it the forbidden section, but given that it wasn’t forbidden to him that felt ridiculous—but he could call them up in controlled circumstances like these.

But there are several reasons that that section was made restricted, and he has no desire for any other sect to actually know what was down there, let alone for representatives of every major sect to take a look for themselves.

Hmph.

Well, there was always…

He snorts to himself softly. Well, he had wanted to use Lan Yi’s work this year, even if not in this context. This isn’t how he’d imagined doing that, but needs must. Her Commentaries on Lan An weren’t restricted; people just didn’t read them all that often. But she did include certain notes on the existence of the Yin Iron, if not its operation.

And that means that he can use them to discuss Xue Chonghai, Wen Mao, Baoshan Sanren, and the rest.

Hah, Cangse would have laughed so hard to know that her master was finally on the curriculum at Cloud Recesses.

He jots down the page references for the relevant annotations, decides at the last minute to include the poems that they refer to as well, and finishes just in time to scarf down his food (no, not scarf—eat at an appropriate speed for the amount of time remaining, which simply happens to be less than usual).

Now. One hour today, likely more on later days. They can begin by drawing the secrecy array themselves. It will be stronger if it has all of their spiritual energy attached to it anyway; that way any attempt to break it will interact with the betrayer’s own spiritual energy in the array and strengthen the protection on the information they discuss. It’s good practice—as well as being the only way he’s going to get that array up in time anyway.

Chapter Text

The actual advanced study group is larger than he expected, once the students all trickle in. Because it’s the first day and because this wasn’t on the preliminary schedule, he doesn’t do more than raise a single eyebrow at the stragglers, though he notes to his surprise that the boy is not among them. No, Wei Wuxian was there seven minutes before the time the advanced study session was supposed to start, dragging his future sect leader along by the neck—not in a violent way, though of course if A-Zhan had ever dragged A-Huan that way he would have likely had him write out some lines of Conduct—and trailed (trailed) by A-Zhan.

For anyone to arrive before A-Zhan at any study event of any kind is already a surprise.

There are more surprises to come.

Nie Huaisang arrives, loudly protesting that he is not actually going to stay for the study session—he shivers theatrically in a way that suggests that Qiren was entirely correct that he would have nothing of major import to contribute to a deep academic discussion—and, more shockingly, bringing with him the small, smiling man that Qiren recognizes as the one usually trailing after Nie Mingjue when he visits the Unclean Realm. He’d noticed that Meng Yao was here in the presentation ceremony, but he’d assumed that the man was going back to Qinghe; his name was not on the visiting disciples list, though such documents are, unlike the Lan rules, not written in stone. But now that he thinks about it, isn’t Meng Yao fairly young? He may not be Young Master Nie, but he is certainly young and, given the responsibilities clearly placed on him by Nie Mingjue, presumably a master at least in effect if not in title.

And Nie Huaisang insists that no one in his entourage has made as a detailed a study of Nie saber cultivation as Meng Yao, for all that he does not—Qiren notes—bear a saber.

Hm. Interesting indeed.

He is still pondering the reason for this choice when the Jin sect representative enters, and he has to say that he is disappointed in Jin Zixuan. Not that he had expected the Jin heir to personally attend, but he had expected that he, like Nie Huaisang, would consider carefully who might be his sect’s best contributor to the discussion or representative in the room. Jin Zixun is not that. He does not know the boy well, but he has spent enough enforced time in the Jinlintai to know that he is much more likely to be found in a brothel or a wine-store than in any place of serious discernment—a trait he shares with his sect leader, which is why Qiren knows this. A family member, yes, but hardly an appropriate choice for a serious venue such as this, no matter how short notice the Jins had to choose. Very disappointing indeed.

To make matters worse, Jin Zixun then goes about getting himself kicked out of the study group, because he cannot apparently abide Nie Huaisang’s choice of representative. Qiren had of course heard the rumors that Sect Leader Jin had a bastard in the Nie (for all “gossip is forbidden,” one cannot actually stop others from talking to you if you want to get anything done at discussion conferences—it’s in the name), but he had not been certain which young man it was.

Now that he knows, he would be more willing to accede to Jin Zixun’s insistence that Meng Yao’s presence is intolerable to him if either of two conditions prevailed: one, if Jin Zixun had not made his request by screaming “GET OUT, YOU FILTH” in the other cultivator’s face while shoving aside a sect heir to do so, or two, if he had in any way actually addressed a request to Lan Qiren, Nie Huaisang, or anyone in any position to make that happen at all.

Perhaps, he considers, those are really just one condition: if he had actually been even the least modicum of polite or proper about such a request. It was perhaps understandable in some sense that the Jin did not like to be reminded of their sect leader’s weaknesses, and that as his representatives they might object to the formal favoring of his bastard. But such requests should be phrased politely, calmly, and with an understanding that this was not Lanling.

As opposed to what happened.

He did, ultimately, end up expelling Jin Zixun from the meeting group, and it wasn’t, of course, Cangse’s fault. But he couldn’t unthink the “do not be supercilious,” “arrogance is prohibited,” “do not be ill-mannered,” “do not succumb to rage,” “do not use coarse language,” and “do not sow discord” that he just knew she would be chanting in the background of the scene if she had been there.

In fact, he rather thought her son was doing something of the sort, if the way that A-Zhan looked taken aback not at the ridiculous antics of Jin Zixun but at something Wei Wuxian had just said was any indication.

But before he can lay down that law, Nie Huaisang manages to give him a third surprise, rapping the Jin boy’s knuckles with his fan and asking, in the most bored possible voice, if he is done yet.

That is actually enough to get Jin Zixun to stop yelling, gawping instead at Nie Huaisang, who flutters his fan and continues on to point out that if he is done, then he (Nie Huaisang) can get back to the painting he was unfortunately forced to stop work on in order to escort Meng Yao here, but that if he’s not done then he (Nie Huaisang, again) will have to stay in order to make sure that his brother’s factotum (a word that Qiren is unhappily certain Jin Zixun does not understand, much less process) is ready to participate in the study group.

This sets Jin Zixun off again, which leads to his expulsion from the group on the grounds that he’s clearly not there to study.

He huffs off and Qiren makes a mental note to suggest that the Jin send another representative, and to draft a letter to Nie Mingjue suggesting that he personally arrive because otherwise the Jin are going to make a stink. It’s what they do, after all.

Wen Qing and Wen Ning slip into their seats in the wake of Jin Zixun’s noisy departure and Nie Huaisang’s quieter one, as do a couple of his own Lan disciples and, to his surprise, two more Jiangs, who make a beeline for their head disciple and sect heir.

These are the ones who receive his eyebrow, though Wei Wuxian apparently thinks it’s for him, and makes one of those silly “who me?” faces when there really is no need.

The first session is entirely devoted to the kinds of introductions, small bonding activities, and basic planning that are requisite to a good collective effervescence of the kind he would like to invoke in this group, and then it is dinner time.

His final surprise is that A-Zhan does not stay behind to go to dinner with him, but trails out with the Wei boy, listening to him and Jiang Wanyin say silly things to each other.

Hm.

That will be worth keeping an eye on indeed.

Chapter Text

From the next meeting on, they get down to business. To his surprise, the Jin sect does not give up on participating after he ejected Jin Zixun; instead, a young woman who he’s already identified as promising from her answers in the ordinary lessons, Luo Qingyang, bows to him exactly on time as the seminar starts.

She doesn’t seem to particularly care that Meng Yao is there. If anything, she’s more concerned about the Jiang boys, with whom she seems to have some kind of history, if the boisterous way that Wei Wuxian calls her “Mianmian!” is any indication.

Qiren barely has to glance at his nephew to realize that he’s gone still in the same way he used to do when the less sensitive elders would ruffle his hair as a little boy.

Perhaps he should be keeping a more attentive eye on A-Zhan than he had originally thought.

But once they actually start discussing cultivation theory, there is no time for anyone to get offended, insult anyone else, or glare too hard in any particular direction.

Because for the first time since he started teaching in the lecture series—far too young, he now realizes; there was no reason he should have been an instructor when Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze came through, given that they were his age-mates, but he supposes that he wouldn’t have gotten anything out of sitting through the lectures someone else gave anyway—he has a classroom where everyone is thinking.

Not that he doesn’t try to encourage thought in his other classes, though he’s sure, based on the way that Wei Wuxian keeps rolling his eyes when he thinks he isn’t looking, that some would challenge that characterization. But in those classes the idea is to get everyone thinking along with the rules, precepts, and central concepts of the Lan sect. To get them to comprehend the why of the rules as well as the mere existence of them, and to consider why those rules got carved into the rock and not others.

It's an important step towards asking his students to think for themselves. And yes, it does presuppose that the Lan precepts are correct, that the Lan rules are just, that the Lan conception of how cultivation works is fundamental to the truth they can all feel pulsing inside their golden cores. But that is because he believes this to be so. And if a cultivator—like say (for no particular reason) Wei Wuxian or any of his relatives—should think otherwise, then he has no objection as long as they have fully comprehended what it is that they object to, what they are rejecting, and why.

After all, there are more sects than one, and he must acknowledge that it is not like the other sects who do not follow the Lan precepts are failures. There are even those, like Cangse, whose methods of cultivation do not follow those of any sect. And he would never claim, even in private, even in his heart of hearts, that their ways do not work and that their truths about cultivation are wrong.

It would be worse, he thinks, to imagine that whatever killed Cange and Changze was able to overcome them because they were wrong about cultivation. To think that if they had just been Lans like him they would have lived. Because if that is true, then he has failed them by failing to convince them of that. If that is true, his lectures are responsible, at least in part, for their deaths.

Far better to admit that Cangse’s independent ideals and Changze’s Jiang training were just as valid, and to believe that if they had been like the Lans—or if he had been there with them—then they—and he—would be just as dead.

So he does not lecture on the Lan style to make the claim that only Lan concepts matter. He lectures in the Lan style to make everyone think about why they do what they do and why he does what he does and how the two can both be true at the same time.

And if it happens to make an idiot like Jin Zixun realize that he is impeding his own cultivation by violating the precepts about proper behavior, that is just a pleasant side benefit.

It has not, as of yet, done that, but he can hope.

But for all that he asks his students to think along with him and the Lan rules in his lectures, he is still aware that that kind of thought is inherently somewhat limited. Not that it is insufficient, but that it does, inherently, demand that his students follow the paths laid out before them before deciding whether to skip across the grass. It asks them to think as others have thought, to recapitulate, to reassess, to reconsider, but always within the paradigm of existing knowledge.

This is a vital skill and one he has neither shame about teaching nor any desire to abandon. To the contrary. He will defend the importance of this approach to the death, if he ever found anyone else who felt as violently about teaching philosophies as he does.

Well, anyone who did and wasn’t teasing, because Cangse had offered to duel him over it, but he was and remains fairly certain that was intended as a joke.

But still, there is something different about a series of lectures about a predefined and generally understood topic, even when interspersed with discussion and other approaches, and a study group on a new and undefined issue like this.

And while he has done his best to give them some structure, something to build off and push against and think along with, he is nevertheless just about as unfamiliar as his students are with the core mystery here.

And that, he is beginning to realize, is exciting.

The first thought he has is that Cangse can never find out, followed by the chill of remembering again, a decade after he first found out, that she is and remains gone.

Though he thinks that if she were not, it would be just like this to have her in class. Because for all there are a lot of people in the room, there are really only a few who have multiple things to say about each topic that they touch on.

And the most vocal of all is Wei Wuxian.

To his shock, A-Zhan is perhaps the second or third most frequent speaker. And while at first all of his comments are somewhat dismissive, by the end of the third session he is just as committed to free inquiry as the other boy.

Qiren finds himself, for one of the few times in his life, sorry that there is a ban on alcohol in the Cloud Recesses.

As Wei Changze had told him one time after watching him spar verbally with Cangse Sanren for over an hour: “Sometimes, my friend, you just need a drink.”

Chapter Text

At first, he manages to keep the seminar focused on what he thinks will be the most useful elements: first, thinking about how resentful energy can be released, dissipated, or otherwise disposed of so as to not harm those who come into contact with it (whether or not they are doing something so ridiculous as to attempt to control it) and second, doing his best to convince the boy that resentment is dangerous and should not be controlled at all.

He should have realized that this was counterproductive, if he had really been thinking.

After all, there had been nothing that Cangse had been more inclined to do than that thing which she was told point blank she ought not to do. Running away with Wei Changze was only the most publicly known of these instances; his own particular example was that she had shaved his beard off the night after he’d told her he would never lose his beard. Not that he’d specifically uttered the words “do not shave me,” but the implication had been there, and the reaction had been, in retrospect, fairly predictable.

As is Wei Wuxian’s.

Oh, the boy does not actually challenge him again the way that he’d done on the first day, but then again Qiren himself does not fall into the trap of challenging Wei Wuxian that way either. There are no “prove it” moments in this class, no claims that there is no way that he could possibly do something. Everything is couched very carefully in the language of “how could we” or “why would we”—and yes, the “we” is deliberate. The last thing he wants is to create another Xue Chonghai, another mad genius who thinks the cultivation world is against him.

But despite the lack of explicit challenge, he can still feel Wei Wuxian pushing against the boundaries, taking questions a half step further than Qiren would like, feeling out the rest of the group in terms of what they would be willing to think or do.

And somehow A-Zhan is right there with him.

To his shock, so is A-Huan: after the first week A-Huan had simply started showing up to their meetings, telling him that A-Zhan said it was interesting. He could understand that A-Zhan actually expressing a specific positive emotion in words was enough to intrigue A-Huan. It would have intrigued him if he had not already borne witness to what was going on in the classroom. But that does not make it less concerning when it turns out that A-Huan is just as willing as A-Zhan to consider Young Master Wei’s ideas (as he always calls him), though not, he thinks, for the same reason.

A-Zhan is clearly interested in Wei Wuxian, though whether it is attraction or simply the first time A-Zhan has actually made a friend is not entirely clear. A-Huan, on the other hand, seems more interested in the growing groupthink around the table—the way that this new approach to cultivation theory is bringing together people across sects and across levels of cultivation society. A-Huan has always been a uniter and a builder of consensus, and he seems encouraged by the way that everyone in the seminar is thinking as one.

In some cases, that has meant surprising results. He cannot be the only one surprised when Wen Qing actually gets involved in the nature of the seminar, not merely sitting along and watching carefully with her intelligent, attentive eyes but truly contributing to a question that Wei Wuxian (of course) has raised about whether it is possible to circulate spiritual energy in order in parallel with the use of resentment to avoid damaging one’s meridians. Her answer is overly technical—he can’t be sure if it was on purpose or not—but he, at least, can follow it, and it seems that Wei Wuxian can as well, if the way they shoot responses back and forth afterwards is any indication.

Jiang Cheng, he notes, also seems to have followed his first disciple’s questions of Lady Wen, because he asks a follow-up later in the same session that draws on the third level of debate between the two about the degree of damage sustained by ongoing versus momentary use of resentment.

Likewise, even Meng Yao himself seems surprised when the young man answers one of A-Huan’s questions about how much resentment remains in a tool that has been used to channel it with what Qiren is fairly certain is supposed to be a Nie sect secret. Now, it isn’t, on its own, much of anything—just an anecdote about the founding times of the Nie sect and a detail about how a butcher cleaned his tools—but he can see that he is not the only one around the table who can connect the dots to wonder whether that means that the Nie sect’s cultivation still connects to resentment in any way.

The only one who is not surprised is Wen Qing, and he remembers briefly that Wen Ruohan is suspected of having sabotaged the late Nie sect leader’s saber. Perhaps there is some truth in the idea that the Wen know something about the use, if not the cultivation, of resentment after all.

He suspects that Meng Yao had a purpose in this particular revelation, however, because the result of it is that the young man is pulled into repeated conversations with A-Huan, A-Zhan, Jiang Cheng, Wen Qing and, at the heart of every conversation, Wei Wuxian in such a way that he, who had begun the seminar at the margins of the room, is now seated much closer to the center.

Most students do not move during a class, Qiren knows, so this is notable on its own.

The fact that it stems from a specific choice, or at least a specific statement, from Meng Yao makes it doubly so.

There are a few students who falter in the class; to his embarrassment, most of them are Lans, who simply cannot keep up with the flexibility of thought that the seminar is demanding of them. He reminds each of them privately that “do not give up on your studies” is on the wall for a reason, and he does notice improvement thereafter. Fortunately, his nephews are doing well enough that no shame accumulates to the sect. Indeed, all the sects seem well represented; even Luo Qingyang, despite clearly being her own sect’s second choice for the seminar, has cogent and well-thought comments when the opportunity arises.

But it is obviously Wei Wuxian who is driving the seminar, in addition to Qiren himself, as is only fair given that it was his thoughts that inspired its existence in the first place. He pushes and probes and finds little pockets of space in which it seems, at least on the surface, that one can engage with resentment and not turn aside into evil. He is very careful to point this out, just as his mother used to be whenever she skirted the edges of the rules: “do not associate with evil” and “stay on the righteous path” are more likely to come out of his mouth than Qiren’s at this point, and yet the seminar as a whole meanders rapidly away from merely considering how to avoid damage from resentment and towards how to channel its damages away from oneself and towards…something.

What they are being channeled towards is not yet defined, but Wei Wuxian’s initial answers to his question provide one clear possibility: if resentment can be made to harm someone other than the cultivator, perhaps it can be used to solve vexing problems on a night hunt.

All of this would be dangerous enough, but then Qiren realizes that he has made a grave mistake.

He had assumed that none of the students would read Lan Yi’s commentaries beyond the parts he assigned, but assumptions are a source of error. And it turns out that Wei Wuxian, at least, has read far more than he expected him to.

And he has theories.

Chapter Text

It turns out that Wei Wuxian is a very skilled interpreter of literature.

Qiren isn’t sure quite why he’s surprised. He himself had pointed out on that first day that Wei Wuxian is an educated young man from one of the major sects, and that certain abilities and knowledge are expected of such a person. How had he forgotten that one of those skills was literacy—and not the barebones literacy of the ability to decipher chickenscratch but the elevated literacy that made a true gentleman, with all the aspirations to poetic aptitude that accompanied it.

So of course he is able to decipher Lan Yi’s own decoding of Lan An’s poetic voice and identify the elements in her own analysis that strongly suggest she had more than passing familiarity with resentful energy—both its containment and its effects.

Well. That much he had assumed that someone would figure out, though he had, in all honesty assumed that it would be A-Zhan who first put the pieces together, given his familiarity both with Lan An’s initial poetry and with the Lan traditions of interpreting it (though in retrospect that was the whole reason he had been planning to bring forth an edition of Lan Yi’s commentary—she was actually far outside the mainstream of traditional interpretation of this particular set of works). He put this syllabus together carefully, given the time allowed, and he didn’t just include Lan Yi on because her work is connected to his own current academic interests. He put it on precisely so that someone would note the references to resentment in her work.

But the boy has done more than merely notice that. He has noticed that she not only speaks about how to treat resentment—something many of that generation were familiar with, given the horrific work of quelling the deadly results of Xue Chonghai’s work—but makes oblique reference to something that serves as a sink of resentment.

In other words, though the boy does not know of what he speaks, he has discovered the traces of the Yin Iron.

Now, the Yin Iron is not, or was not, or whatever tense should be used for something that no doubt still technically exists but should not be in the physical possession of anyone, a tool for the actual control of resentment—at least not as Xue Chonghai used it. It was a sink, an attractor, a drawer-out of resentment and a collector of it into a single, concentrated resource. But Xue Chonghai had not done what Wei Wuxian is considering; he had never taken the further step of actively controlling the resentment, merely unleashing it in certain situations and allowing it to take its own course.

That had been enough, of course, to make an ordinary tortoise into the Xuanwu of Slaughter; to turn the dead into nearly-living puppets and make them dance to a destructive tune; to bring the wrath and the horror and the disgust of the entire cultivation world down upon his head, in the end.

But even with his puppets, nothing in the records suggested that Xue Chonghai had had true control. If he had asked a puppet to do something constructive—to build a house, or plant a garden, or sell radishes in the market—there was no indication that it would have obeyed anything but the destructive urges that the Yin Iron had absorbed.

Of course, since he had never tried, there could be no evidence either way, but that also meant that even the Yin Iron could not answer the question Wei Wuxian had posed, of whether such a thing was possible.

But now that Wei Wuxian has found out about the existence of the Yin Iron, Qiren finds that he cannot lie to him. Not by commission, obviously—Lans do not lie—but not by omission either. So he finds himself telling the group (behind yet another layer of silencing talismans) the story of the Yin Iron, and of its destruction—not its obliteration or elimination, for none were powerful enough to do so, but of its being smashed to bits and the bits warded and suppressed by those who could.

And by those who could not.

It only dawns on him as he tells the story that Baoshan Sanren, who figures heavily in Lan Yi’s anecdotal explanations of her readings of certain passages of Lan An, anecdotes that illustrate not only the text of the poems but the history that Qiren is now explaining, was Cangse’s master, and therefore the boy’s grandmaster, or perhaps simply his grandmother.

No wonder he read so deeply and so far.

No, that is not a surprise.

What is a surprise is that there is one member of his attentive audience who does not seem at all ruffled by the news that there is an object so powerful that it took all five sects acting together to take down its creator, a cursed device so terrible that it nearly laid low the whole cultivation world.

Indeed, he would feel much more comfortable in his own skin if Wen Qing had even so much as blinked while he spoke.

He is not the only one who notices, which saves him the need to call her out for it, because Wei Wuxian is evidently even more observant than he usually lets them see.

“Qing-jie” like his mother, the boy has an excessive tendency towards over-familiarity with those he likes, and for some inexplicable reason has already chosen Wen Qing as one object of that affection—likely something to do with Wen Qionglin, who Qiren has seen him teaching to shoot in their remaining scraps of free time, “tell us what you know.”

Qiren notices the glare that A-Zhan sends towards Wen Qing, and realizes it likely has nothing at all to do with the revelation that she may be aware of the Yin Iron already.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Wei Wuxian.” Wen Qing’s voice is clipped and precise.

Wei Wuxian reacts by rolling his eyes and elbowing Jiang Cheng, who rolls his eyes in his turn—it would be comical if the temperature in the room didn’t feel like it had dropped another ten degrees—pulls out one of those Yunmeng talisman papers that Qiren had been thinking about a few weeks ago, and quickly draws something on it. After a nod from his head disciple, he feeds it a touch of spiritual energy and a net of red lines crisscrosses the room, settling in place as each touches the wall and then disappearing. Qiren recognizes it as yet another silencing talisman, though not one he recognizes.

A talisman expert in Yunmeng indeed—and clearly a teacher as well as an inventor.

“If Wei Wuxian says you do, you do.” The instant trust between the two Yunmeng young masters reminds him of his nephews. “And I’ve warded the room a third time, so it’s not like anything is going to get out of here anyway.”

“Qing-jie!” Wei Wuxian makes what Qiren cannot help but recognize as his mother’s puppy-dog eyes at Wen Qing. “Come on, we’re all here to learn, aren’t we?”

“Wei Ying is right.” Qiren suspects that A-Zhan has spoken more to get Wei Wuxian’s attention back to himself than from any more developed thought, but he nevertheless weighs in. “If you have pertinent information, it should be shared. And no one will betray your trust. Uncle has said so.”

Wen Qing reminds him briefly of the Yunmeng duo as she rolls her eyes in her turn, but then she sighs.

“Fine.”

Chapter Text

“Now, unlike some people, I am not going to give away any sect secrets.” Wen Qing glares at Wei Wuxian, although Qiren gets the strong sense that she’s less annoyed than she’d like him to believe. Maybe it’s having raised A-Zhan, whose default is to glare at anything that draws his interest at all, or maybe it’s having watched both Wen Qing and Jiang Cheng do their best to pretend they don’t like Wei Wuxian while also doing everything he asks of them, but either way he's pretty confident in his read of her. Though she has survived at Wen Ruohan’s court for years, so perhaps she’s better at lying than he thinks. “But I might suggest, if anyone was interested, that a glance at line 137 of the commentary on ‘The Lament of the Crane’ might perhaps be relevant.”

The section of commentary in question was actually on his syllabus; the poem is about longing and loss and in this particular part of the poem the lover is lamenting how he wanders aimlessly in the absence of his beloved. Lan Yi’s commentary glosses that aimlessness as, among other things, “like a fierce corpse emptied,” which he had thought poetic.

Apparently it is not.

Wei Wuxian, naturally, is the first one to actually find the reference, though Qiren himself has the passage memorized. “So you’re saying that the resentment from the Yin Iron…fills the fierce corpses it creates? And that without it they wander aimlessly?”

“I’m not saying anything of the kind.” Wen Qing ruins this by following it up. “But you could, perhaps, interpret it that way. And certainly it might be possible to combine that reference with Grandmaster Lan’s stories to suggest that the use of the Yin Iron is less a matter of active control and more of giving direction to the undirected malice of a fierce corpse. Hypothetically.”

A-Huan clears his throat next to Qiren. “And would it be possible that a part of the Yin Iron might also have this property. Equally hypothetically?”

“I’m not sure the passage would sustain that interpretation, but it might be a reasonable one, yes.” Wen Qing taps her fingers by her scroll.

“Mm.” A-Zhan nods. “That would correspond to the commentary on line 3 of ‘A View of Sunset.’”

“Brilliant, Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian leans over the table with a goofily large grin on his face, and Qiren notices the tips of his nephew’s ears pink. “So you’re suggesting that ‘division may weaken, but not remove, the power to do harm” is about the Yin Iron too?

“Mn.” A-Zhan nods again.

“Would that imply that the next line is about the Yin Iron as well?” Luo Qingyang blinks as A-Zhan turns his stare on her. “The poem doesn’t pick up the comparison of division with later union, but she does, after all.”

“Ooh, nice, Mianmian.” Wei Wuxian grins again, but before A-Zhan can fully tense next to Qiren, the boy has turned back to his nephew. “Lan Zhan, can you check the rest of the poem for that metaphor? I’m sure your eyes can find things the rest of us can’t.” He winks, for no reason that Qiren can tell, but it is enough to set A-Zhan’s ears burning again.

“So, if we’re reading this stuff as a metaphor for the Yin Iron, which I’m not entirely sure holds together, but alright, then does that mean that Lan Yi wrote this after she sealed herself away with the broken pieces?” Jiang Cheng interjects. “Does that mean she kept in contact with the sect afterwards?”

It’s a good point, and not one that Qiren had expected him to point out. “Yes; she went into seclusion with the piece, but our sect’s seclusion allows for letters and writings to be exchanged. I believe she sent this out after requesting her copy of Lan An to be sent in to her.”

“Is she still alive?” This from Wei Wuxian. When the rest of them turn to him in skepticism he raises both hands in front of himself. “I’m just asking! She was friends with Baoshan Sanren, everyone knows she’s immortal, so it’s not impossible!”

“She linked herself voluntarily to a shard of the Yin Iron.” A-Huan’s voice is dry. “I doubt she retained the purity of spiritual energy requisite to cultivate towards immortality. Or the strength, given the effort required to subdue even a shard.”

“Or, and just hear me out, or that kind of battle back and forth with resentment was exactly the kind of sparring necessary to keep her in fighting trim! Jiang Cheng and I always get better after we fight!” Wei Wuxian nudges his sect heir, who shoves him back, though not hard enough to put him off balance, Qiren notes. “Maybe Lan Yi just needed the competition with the Yin Iron to grow strong enough to stay with us!”

“I would not hold your breath for volume two of the commentaries, Wei Wuxian,” Qiren huffs, but he has to admit that he hadn’t really considered even the possibility that Lan Yi might be considered to be sparring with the Yin Iron.

“No, Grandmaster.” He grins cheekily at him. “But wouldn’t it be amazing if we did?”

That, Qiren cannot disagree with.

“Anyway,” the boy continues, “isn’t that one of the things we’re looking to achieve with this seminar? If we could figure out a way to heal from resentment, you actually could use the Yin Iron as an adversary to strengthen your core—not that I’m suggesting you should!” He raises three fingers by his forehead. “‘Reject the crooked road,’ I always say! But…” and here a glint of Cangse slips back into his face with the same expression she always had when she wielded the rules against him “doesn’t rejection imply that you approached the crooked road close enough to know that it was crooked?”

“Wei Wuxian…” he groans.

“I’m just saying! You can’t ‘resist evil’ if you don’t know what it is! And anyway, who’s to say that resentment is evil? Volcanos do a lot of damage, but they’re not technically evil, are they…” and with that the seminar devolves into the kind of metaphysical considerations that are (Qiren believes) fundamentally important, but also fundamentally unanswerable.

Chapter Text

It is obvious, Qiren realizes after pondering it on the free day that the students are given to let them do the various bonding activities that young people who do not spend much time together during their everyday lives engage in (which is the secondary purpose of bringing all the various sects’ young cultivators together every so often at Cloud Recesses, in addition to the actual learning that takes place), that Wen Qing is here because Wen Ruohan is interested in Lan Yi’s piece of the Yin Iron.

If Wen Qing had not been in the seminar, and he had not had the chance to observe her closely with her brother and with the rest of the class—with Wei Wuxian in particular, he must admit—he would have been much more worried about that than he is. If he had known this in a vacuum, he would have panicked, or the next best thing, and perhaps started tracking her movements or some other sort of overreaction.

But now that he knows something of her, and of her understanding of resentment and the Yin Iron itself, he believes that there is a more promising strategy.

This is the strategy of diversion by assistance, or perhaps overwhelming with help.

If Wen Qing is tasked with finding the Yin Iron locked away by Lan Yi’s spirit, that means that Wen Ruohan is aware it is in and around Cloud Recesses, and it is highly unlikely that he will stop at one, relatively minor, piece of espionage.

So if that is the case, it is better to flood the zone with different people looking for the Yin Iron, rather than one lonely Wen cultivator.

After all, that makes it much less likely that Wen Qing could actually do what Wen Ruohan wants and find, acquire, and expropriate the piece—while at the same time making a perfect excuse for why she could not, since a reasonable portion of the entire class of visiting disciples are all looking for it together.

All of this is why their next meeting is replaced by a field trip to the back hills, where Qiren assembles his seminar group and has them all participate—with informed consent—in a ritual that binds the hearer not to reveal the sect secrets of the Gusu Lan (it is one Lan Yi herself invented, amusingly enough—the punishment is an ever-escalating din of off-key music in the head of anyone who violates it without permission of the sect leader).

They are of course also protected by silencing talismans; while they will not be able to tell anyone about what he is going to tell them, he doesn’t want some nosy parker of a spy or some random disciple splashing about in the streams of the back hills to be able to hear what he has to say either.

Then he tells them all the part about Lan Yi that he had not previously revealed. Specifically, he lets them know that Lan Yi sealed herself into the back hills somewhere with the Yin Iron shard, but that part of the rituals she used to do so involved changing all the pathways, caves, and forests of the back hills so that no one knew exactly where she was—and because everything was altered at once, no one could find out simply by looking in all the places that they already knew and using process of elimination.

It had been a massively complex and detailed piece of work, and while Lan Yi herself had been at the core of it, and been doing the additional work necessary to also shield, bind, and suppress the Yin Iron shard itself, there had been dozens of other Lan cultivators working from outside who had poured their spiritual energy into the talismans, arrays, and other accoutrements required for such a massive spell.

All so that no one could ever find the Yin Iron again.

But now there were whispers on the wind—and in their classroom—that the Yin Iron might be emerging again, and like called to like. Not only that, but there was some suspicion that Lan Yi’s wards might be leaking—a slight uptick in local resentment, possibly nothing to worry about but possibly incredibly dangerous.

So now they were going to go looking for it. Not to find it or retrieve it, but to see if it could be found at all. After all, they were working on how cultivators could effectively and safely interact with resentful energy, and while their debates and discussions were invaluable there was an undeniable need for a practicum. After all, the Lan precepts were not passive. One had to “perform acts of chivalry,” “shoulder the weight of morality,” “make sure to act virtuously.” Virtue, and learning, and wisdom, were all active behaviors, and they would need not only to understand them but to practice them.

He sounded like Cangse to himself as he said it, because these had always been her arguments whenever they clashed: that one had to do as well as know, to be as well as understand, to act as well as think. He could even hear an echo of his sister-in-law, the one time she had spoken to him of what had happened to her: “have courage and knowledge, brother-in-law,” she had said sadly—she had been beyond anger at that point, he thinks. “Knowledge is nothing without courage, and courage unproven without action.”

He still wonders sometimes what she knew that led to what she did—and whether his brother knew it too.

But whether or not he sounds like the two most important women in his adult life, none of the disciples seem to notice or to care. And he thinks that it is better to sound like them than to flinch from the moral world that they have shown him just because it came from them. He must shoulder the weight of morality himself, after all, not just lead others to do it.

His students flow across the back hills at his word, and he sits back on a rock and closes his eyes. If anyone asks, he can tell them he is sensing the energy on the wind, to see if it is corroded with resentment—and it will not be a lie. But it will also not be the whole truth. The weight of morality is heavy when it includes being honest about the things he failed to tell his friend or his sister-in-law in their lifetimes. He can let it weigh him down to the rock for the moment, since he is, after all, still doing something useful.

And he is, because he does sense something on the wind after all. He feels a flare of resentful energy exactly at the moment when the cry goes up: “Grandmaster! Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian have disappeared!”

Chapter Text

After it is all over, Qiren can admit, in the privacy of his own head, that they would probably never have found Lan Yi’s cave if the boys hadn’t stumbled into it. Conversely, if somehow the boys had been sucked down into the cave when there wasn’t an entire class of hyperactive hyperintelligent young cultivators looking for the very place that they were drawn to, they might have taken much longer to find them, or had to wait until the place spat them out in the same way that it drew them in.

But since neither of those things happened, something rather amazing does instead.

By focusing their attention on the quadrant of the back hills where A-Zhan and Wei Wuxian disappeared, they are able to make much better use of their efforts, especially those like actively searching out with spiritual energy (as opposed to passively waiting to detect with a talisman or array) that can only be done for short periods of time, or in small areas.

Jiang Cheng in particular proves more capable than his reputation would have indicated prior to this, using an innovative talisman-and-spiritual-energy technique that clearly connects to Wei Wuxian but is too practiced to be entirely cribbed from his first disciple.

He is not the only one who notices, either; A-Huan has made common cause with the Jiang sect heir, possibly due to their equal anguish at the disappearance of A-Zhan and Wei Wuxian (for complementary and equally obvious reasons) and Qiren can see him casting approving glances at the younger man’s impressive efforts.

Seeing Jiang Cheng like this makes him wonder about the intelligence that had been coming out of Yunmeng (not rumors, per se, because rumors, in addition to being forbidden, weren’t deliberately produced by careful effort on the part of what was definitely never going to be officially called a spy service. But similar in effect). Everyone said that the first disciple of Yunmeng Jiang was infinitely more talented than the sect heir, and that this caused tensions in the sect. Everyone said that Jiang Cheng, while more skilled as a cultivator than his older sister, could not hold a candle to Wei Wuxian. Everyone said these things.

But were they true?

Oh, to be sure, Wei Wuxian, like his mother before him, was brilliant, and unique, and therefore in a certain sense could be said to overshadow anyone with whom he might be compared. But was he truly that much stronger, that much more skilled, than Jiang Cheng? Or was it simply that because he thought in oblique ways he could achieve things that were harder in the direct way?

Jiang Cheng, Qiren is realizing, is not a genius like Wei Wuxian, but his cultivation is quite high enough that if Yunmeng Jiang had never adopted Cangse Sanren’s son it would still have one of the most impressive young men of the generation to represent it.

It reminds him in a way of Wei Changze, rather than Cangse. Ridiculous, in a sense, because Jiang Cheng is the sect heir; in that sense, he is the Jiang Fengmian of his generation, not the Wei Changze. But when Changze was here, Qiren had noticed that he, for all he was not the celebrated future master of Lotus Pier, could do basically anything that was asked of him, and all without weakening or complaining.

Jiang Cheng complains more than enough, but never about what he is actually doing—just about Wei Wuxian.

And he often finds his way to his own solutions, even if they are not as impressively, undeniably genius as his first disciple’s.

As now, for instance: it is Jiang Cheng, rather than A-Huan, who notices that there are short bursts of spiritual energy (not resentment, as they all expected, but spiritual energy—and Qiren notes that Jiang Cheng seems to be the only one who was looking for both) coming in staccato pattern from a certain part of the hill.

It is Jiang Cheng, focusing on that particular space, identifies the low thrum of resentment that (he concludes, and Qiren agrees) suggests this may be near to where the Yin Iron is kept. The intensity of the resentment is so low that Qiren almost wonders how the boy feels it, though to be fair it is regular and consistent enough that once identified it is undeniably present.

And it is Jiang Cheng who audaciously bangs on the side of the cliff itself for Wei Wuxian to “open up, you idiot, and help us all find you.”

Qiren does not in any way expect this to work, so it is rather a shock when the cliff wall becomes suddenly transparent—no, not even that, simply vanishes—and reveals A-Zhan and Wei Wuxian sitting face to face with someone who every thing he thinks he knows about Lan sect history suggests cannot be but definitely also at the same time is Lan Yi.

It is only after a few heartbeats that he realizes that they are also holding hands, with A-Zhan’s headband wrapped around Wei Wuxian’s wrist.

A-Zhan notices him noticing and his ears turn entirely red.

Fortunately for all of their peace of mind, Lan Yi decides to explain to her new audience (himself, Jiang Cheng, A-Huan—no one else followed Jiang Cheng quite as closely as they did and so no one else has quite gotten up the hill yet) exactly what is going on.

This is sufficiently important that Qiren decides to wait until later to bring up the fact that his nephew apparently just got engaged, if not fully handfasted, on a school trip.

Lan Yi deposits the Yin Iron in front of the boys, and they bicker goodnaturedly about who will take custody of it until A-Zhan simply scoops it up. She then seems as if she wants to fade away out of existence, but Qiren has not spent the last several years poring over this woman’s writings to just let his primary source disappear out of the realm of existence.

Two carefully prepared arrays (well, one carefully prepared array and one slapdash one drawn by Wei Wuxian, which irritatingly enough seems to actually be drawing power more efficiently than the one Qiren does himself) later, and there is a system in place that allows Lan Yi’s spiritual cognition—since she is definitely not present in the body anymore—to take power donated by any cultivator who chooses to donate into what is functionally a battery and use it to extend her existence.

There is also a door, so that they can come in and out—and so can she, as long as she does not wander too far from her anchor point.

After all, she is no longer protecting the Yin Iron, so there is no need to wall her off from the sect any longer.

And Qiren has her permission to bring the Commentaries on Lan An and discover exactly what she meant by her gloss on “Morning Mist Over Empty Woods.”

He feels as giddy as a schoolboy, and he can hardly wait for the chance to talk to her.

But he will wait, not just because the class period is over, but also because he has a nephew’s wedding to plan.

He can hardly argue the value of a link with Yunmeng Jiang given the impression its two primary disciples have already made in their short stay.

Oh, and on top of all that, he now has a piece of the Yin Iron to deal with.

The seminar is rapidly becoming a full-on practicum.

Chapter Text

There is no way he can actually allow his students to experiment with the Yin Iron, especially not when he strongly suspects that one of them, namely Wen Qing, may be under orders from her sect leader to acquire the very thing.

But he can allow them to experiment with the resentful energy that emanates from the Yin Iron, as long as they are shielded in the Mingshi from actually interacting with the object itself.

It’s a narrow distinction, but an important one. He already knows that the Yin Iron piece is going to need to leave Cloud Recesses, likely in A-Zhan’s keeping (and therefore in Wei Wuxian’s as well, since Lan Yi seems determined to see the two of them work on it together. He’s beginning to suspect from talking to her that there may be more to that connection to Baoshan Sanren than he thought from the sources. The, uh, written sources that is). He has called Jiang Fengmian here to negotiate a formal marriage process to replace A-Zhan’s overzealous handfasting—and as an excuse to discuss the Yin Iron and what exactly they will do when it ventures forth, as it is already tugging to do.

Until it does leave the Cloud Recesses, it is warded thrice over by the strongest cultivators in the sect, and watched over at all times by a rotating schema of disciples, always in the Mingshi, which has its own wards that should be sufficient to contain anything that it conjures up.

But the Yin Iron is powerful, now that it is awakening from the slumber Lan Yi induced all those generations ago, and so it has the effect of conjuring what might almost be called a miasma of resentment around it, even despite the Mingshi’s wards.

This is what he allows his students to work with.

He has noticed that Meng Yao is never the first to come up with any observation during the seminar, but frequently the third or fourth to boost good ideas—and that when he does, he usually attributes more to the original speaker than they actually said, cloaking his own contributions in another’s wisdom.

In an ordinary class, with an ordinary student (though given the way he thinks, Meng Yao’s study is anything but ordinary), he would take the boy aside and tell him to have more confidence, to speak up more, to own his ideas and his innovations, to speak first.

He does not think that a lack of confidence is actually Meng Yao’s problem.

Part of it is clearly a personal reticence that has been brought about by the circumstances of his birth and upbringing. Qiren hasn’t actually investigated his young student, but he has asked A-Huan what Nie Mingjue has had to say about him, and he has been able to fill in a picture of a young man whose bastardy has been made by others to be his defining feature—and one who, when he tried to claim his parentage, was rudely rejected in a manner that itself must have left scars on his psyche if not his body. Likely both.

So it is understandable that someone whose experience of getting the attention of cultivation gentry has been mostly violent and negative would develop instincts that allow him to shy away.

However, that is not the whole story, as Qiren guesses it. He sees the direction as well as the method of Meng Yao’s comments, and he has noticed that he has a lot to say about human resentment, but almost nothing about animal resentment. And given his skill at directing the conversation in the way he wants it to go without seeming to, the result has been that they have spent a lot of time considering human resentment and almost none discussing animal or other resentments that generate resentful energy.

And yet while some of the most powerful sources of resentful energy that a cultivator might encounter are human-derived, most cultivators will encounter more animal-derived resentment than anything else, simply because of the huge numbers of animals in the world and the ways that human activity impinges on them. There is also the fact that so many cultivators receive soul-calming rituals, making it more difficult for their soul’s resentment to force itself into a dangerous form even if they did feel it in death, which again means that while human resentment is dangerous, ignoring animal resentment is also dangerous.

The resentful energy that the Yin Iron either exudes or summons is fairly neutral; a mix of all kinds of resentment, and given the prohibitions on killing all things in the Cloud Recesses, it is not (as many places might be) drawing in large amounts of resentment from the killing fields of butchers.

Which makes it all the more interesting that Meng Yao suddenly has a lot to say, and all of it still couched in the assumption that this resentment is human in origin.

He will have to check in on his suspicions later. Right now, Meng Yao’s points are too good to reward with anything but considerate attention. But if he is right, a meeting with Nie Huaisang may be closer to his future than he had thought.

So far, the most interesting discovery any of them have made is, of course, due to Wei Wuxian. He has found that certain Lan sect songs will act almost like brushes, pushing the resentment away from the Mingshi. At first, Qiren was suspicious that the boy, like his mother before him, might have snuck into the library and started reading things he wasn’t supposed to. But then he realizes that no, “diligence is the root” in this case: the boy has simply been observing the behavior of the resentful energy anytime anyone plays a song in his hearing. And since the Lan training grounds are not far away, and the Lan train fully with both sword and instrument on those training grounds, and many Lan cultivators use the free time this seminar takes up to practice, he has had ample time to observe how their battle songs interact with resentful energy without prying any further than he is allowed.

The fact that he seems to have memorized the Lan battle songs along the way is really just Cangse all over again.

But the fact that he has apparently been working with A-Zhan on an idea for how to create a sucking effect, rather than a pushing effect, with the resentful energy is all him. And it is, Qiren must grudgingly admit, exactly the sort of idea that the seminar is supposed to produce.

Except that he was really, really hoping it wouldn’t.

Time for him to copy another set of lines. Teaching under false pretenses is a violation of several rules, and he doesn’t even need Cangse Sanren to tell him that.

Chapter Text

He does not need Cangse Sanren to tell him he needs to write even more lines after he yells at Wei Wuxian for an hour straight the next day. And to apologize to the boy, embarrassing as that is.

Even though he thinks he’s right to have done it, he did promise that the seminar would be a safe space for inquiry, and yelling is not only against the Lan rules itself but also violates that trust.

But the boy was sucking resentment out of the air and into himself.

Dangerous.

Foolish.

Inconsiderate to all those who value his wellbeing and safety, a number that Qiren is horrified to find himself among, not only on A-Zhan’s account (though his nephew’s fiancé is of course valuable to him for that reason) and not merely on his mother’s and father’s, but on his own.

It makes it worse that the boy’s only real reaction to being yelled at for being “as much of a fool as your mother, and just as self-sacrificing” is to ask for more stories about his mother.

As if Jiang Fengmian hasn’t been telling him.

As if Yu Ziyuan has yelled at him so many times he barely notices Qiren.

Come to think of it, both of these are probably true, and it gives him pause. He apologizes to the boy, in person, without A-Zhan to give the impression that he is only apologizing for his nephew’s sake. He brings him one of the letters Cangse and Changze sent him, the one announcing the birth of their son. He sits with him as he cries, tells him about losing his beard to the menace that was Cangse Sanren, and only indulges himself once in asking the boy to be “more careful with resentful energy when we still don’t know how best to heal it.”

He hopes it takes.

Having written all of Courtesy out the previous day, he is ready to resume teaching on the morrow.

But first he needs to talk to Nie Huaisang.

This is difficult.

First, it is difficult because of the array that they use for the class, which makes it physically unpleasant to discuss the results or content of the class with those outside it. Ironically, others can do so with his permission, as the instructor, but since he had built the array on a base that was designed to avoid loopholes, giving himself permission did not work to dispel its effects. Fortunately, asking A-Huan had worked its way around that, since apparently their combined role in the sect counted as permission from the Lan sect.

Second, it is difficult because it is Nie Huaisang, whom he has known since he was a little child and is not actually used to treating as an adult with the full authority of the Nie sect behind him instead of a rather annoying child underfoot when Nie Mingjue visited A-Huan. He realized this was unfair (“do not be haughty,” “do not ignore others,” “do not insult people,” and that eternal “be generous”). But that didn’t mean it isn’t his immediate instinct.

Third, it is difficult because it is a difficult thing to ask, but there are so many different Lan rules that speak to working through that kind of difficulty that he doesn’t even need his inner Cangse to speak of it in order to push through that.

“Young Master Nie.” He’s not sure whether it’s the mode of address or simply the fact that he’s addressing him at all outside of the classroom, but Nie Huaisang jumps out of his chair, falls flat on his back, and then slowly peers up at him from the floor over the low table at which he was seated.

“Grandmaster Lan!” He scrambles up to his feet and bows. “What can I do for you? Did I sleep through lecture? I’m pretty sure I didn’t sleep through lecture. Meng Yao always gets me up for the lectures and his elbows are very sharp so I’m sure I didn’t sleep through lecture.”

“You did not sleep through lecture.” He raises an eyebrow until Nie Huaisang flushes slightly and invites him to sit. “I am here to ask you a sensitive question that you have every right to refuse.”

Now Nie Huaisang looks worried, when before he’d looked startled. “What, Grandmaster?”

He sends out a silencing talisman on the room and bows, not as shallowly as he would to Nie Huaisang personally but at the depth he ought when asking another sect to reveal something important—as if Nie Huaisang is the formal representative of his sect, and not just the senior disciple there. “I ask you to either permit Meng Yao to speak freely about the Nie cultivation techniques with our seminar, or to address the seminar personally to discuss matters that he cannot.”

“Oh, but I’m sure A-Yao is being perfectly honest!” The omnipresent fan is suddenly in front of Nie Huaisang’s face, and Qiren is fairly certain that the expression it is hiding is more cunning than Nie Huaisang wants him to realize he is. “I told him to be honest, and I’m sure he would follow my instructions.”

“I expect he’s being perfectly honest.” Actually, Qiren isn’t certain of it, but he does expect it, as he expects it of every student, though not every student lives up to the expectation. Therefore he has not lied. “But he certainly is not being perfectly forthcoming. And I have reason to believe that there are certain elements of the Nie cultivation techniques that he has not mentioned that are likely to be extremely valuable to our consideration of resentful energy.”

The fan continues to dance. “I’m sure I don’t know.”

“I’m quite sure you do.” He smiles, just a crack. It is always a pleasant discovery to find out that one of his students is quite intelligent, even if not in class, even if it’s someone like Nie Huaisang who is deliberately hiding it. “Tell me, Nie Huaisang…would you like to know what your Wei-xiong is up to?”

Nie Huaisang blinks. “Probably?” he hedges.

“I have a suspicion that it might be of interest to you that he has developed a talisman that allows one to withdraw resentful energy from a certain space. At the moment, he has only used to endanger himself and others, but I have reason to believe it might be useful in other contexts in the future.” He rises and nods to Nie Huaisang. “If this is perhaps of interest to any Nie cultivators, I invite yourself or Meng Yao to inform us at the next meeting of our seminar.”

Nie Huaisang sets the fan down, rises, and bows.

“Then I suppose I will see you then, Grandmaster.”

Chapter Text

When Nie Huaisang makes an entrance as sect heir, there is something very different about how he goes about it than when he does so as a guest disciple. It’s nothing concrete that Qiren could point to, but his back is just a bit straighter, his fan is just a bit less aimless, his eyes are just a bit more focused. And certainly no one could have imagined the Nie Huaisang who hides birds in his robes in class and is best known for being yelled at, loudly, by his brother and sect leader for not practicing with his saber would walk into the seminar and immediately slam that same saber down on the table in the middle of the room.

He does do it fifteen minutes late, which is the one part of this that most sounds like the Nie Huaisang that Qiren knows.

“This is a Nie saber.” Huaisang is still holding a fan in his off hand and gestures with it, not wildly as he is wont to do in Qiren’s experience, but pointedly and directly, mostly at Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, with a fair amount of A-Zhan and A-Huan as well. “I asked A-Yao to join this seminar because he understands our cultivation, but of course he doesn’t wield one yet. I may not be the best student that Da-ge has ever had, but I do.” He wheels on Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng. “Even if I don’t like to, I do.”

Wei Wuxian elbows Jiang Cheng in the ribs. The Jiang heir rolls his eyes. “We know, Nie-xiong.”

“Good.” Nie Huaisang nods. “Now, I don’t know exactly what you want to know about these, because some people don’t like sharing the results of their investigations with their friends. But A-Yao suggested that this might be worth my time, and Grandmaster Lan asked me to come, so I’m here. What do you want to know?”

Unsurprisingly it’s Wei Wuxian who recovers from this unwonted boldness first. “Uh…do the Nie sabers use resentment in their cultivation?”

“Obviously, Wei-xiong.” Nie Huaisang snaps his fan open and flutters it to cover what is definitely an eye-roll. “I would not have put off my bird-watching trip in Caiyi if there wasn’t a point to this.”

“But…then why was Grandmaster Lan frustrated when I told him we could use resentful energy in class the first day?”

“Because he didn’t know.” Nie Huaisang flutters the fan and bows lightly to Qiren. “I’m assuming he had suspicions, but he didn’t have confirmation, and unlike some people Grandmaster doesn’t go around throwing out opinions half-cocked.”

“So…” Wei Wuxian drums his fingers on the table. “It’s like I said then? Related to the butcher thing?”

“Wei-xiong, stop wasting my time with things you’ve already figured out. There’s a particularly interesting pheasant that someone saw near Biling Lake that I’m missing for this.”

“Animal or human?” A-Zhan does not interrupt, but he does enter the conversation abruptly.

“Butchers, Lan-xiong, butchers.” Nie Huaisang snaps the fan shut. “Animal. Well, lots of yao too. But animal.”

“And your cores can take…” Jiang Cheng stops himself and blinks. “Oh shit, your father.”

“Yes, Oh Shit My Father, exactly.” Nie Huaisang taps the saber on the table. “Why do you think I don’t use this thing?”

“Oh, Nie-xiong, I’m sorry.” Wei Wuxian sounds like he means it.

“Don’t be sorry. Help.” Nie Huaisang finally sits down. “A-Yao and Grandmaster both suggested that you had something that might help with an accumulation of resentful energy in one place. I’m here to suggest that if you do, the Nie sect might be rather interested in finding out more about that.”

“Well, it’s hardly finished…” Wei Wuxian splutters to a halt.

“Mn. Needs refinement. Still useful.” A-Zhan nods once. “Nie Huaisang should join us. Saber might be useful.”

“It’s about balance.” Wen Qing’s voice rings out with a definite certainty that makes Qiren want to shudder. “The sabers and the core are in balance. If one of them goes out of balance with the other, qi deviation is the most likely result.” She folds her hands. “Also the most pleasant, which is saying something.”

“Your uncle murdered my father.” Nie Huaisang states it as a fact, and Wen Qing nods.

“He did.” She keeps her hands where Nie Huaisang can see them, but gestures to the saber on the table. “I’ve studied golden cores extensively, and I think I know how.” She nods to him again. “I also think I know how to prevent it from happening again.”

“Qing-jie!” Wei Wuxian gapes at her. “An actual definitive statement about what you know? Who are you and what you have done with Wen Qing?”

“It wasn’t definitive.” The idiot is unspoken, but implied, so Qiren can’t criticize her for violating any of the precepts, though if he wanted to he could no doubt find at least a few that applied.

“Idiot.” Jiang Cheng’s is spoken, but Qiren has also seen the Jiangs interact before, so he doesn’t invoke punishment for that either, although there’s no doubt that earlier in the term he might have done just that.

“Still, Lady Wen’s contribution is, no doubt, welcome.” A-Huan smiles at them all. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Huaisang, Lady Wen. I’m sure Mingjue will be glad to know there may be a solution.”

“But not a permanent one, I’m guessing.” Nie Huaisang raises an eyebrow at Wen Qing behind his fan. “You’re suggesting a defense against tampering, aren’t you, not a fix for the problem of resentful energy in the saber in the first place, right, Lady Wen?”

“Correct.”

“So we’re back where we were.” Jiang Cheng smacks his first disciple on the shoulder. “Stop being quiet and share with the class, Wei Wuxian.”

“Fine, fine!” Wei Wuxian pushes his sect heir away, rises, and bows to Nie Huaisang. “If you let me look at this, Nie-xiong, I think I might have an idea.”

Nie Huaisang sighs. “Finally. I thought you’d never ask.”

Chapter Text

Qiren did not expect to discover anything new about cultivation this year, at least not from his students. It is a truism, of course, that “students teach you as much as you teach them,” but he has always thought that this is true more in the sense that you learn about people and about yourself and about the way the world works: valuable lessons, but not ones that have to do with the same kind of knowledge being exchanged in the other direction. It is true, he freely admits, but true in that way, usually. But this year it is true in a more literal, textbook way: he will have to change how he teaches cultivation based on this year’s classes.

He can already hear Cangse Sanren dancing and singing out the disciplines about being humble, grateful, and open to others (a favorite theme of hers in life) in his head.

To be fair (and he is supposed to be fair, to himself as well as to others), he had readjusted some of his assumptions after his initial encounter with her manic genius of a son, and the formation of the seminar on resentful energy. Since his lectures did not focus on resentment in any definable way, it had automatically become more likely that he would learn something, anything about resentful energy than that he would learn about orthodox cultivation, the subject of the main lectures.

But now with Nie Huaisang’s surprising openness about his saber, he is learning a great deal about the Nie techniques, and they are also creating a great deal of uncertainty for him about the others sects’ techniques as well.

After all, he can hardly call the Nie “unorthodox” since they have been an established great sect for generations, and he can hardly assume that all sects cultivate in the way that he has previously assumed now that he is learning so much about the Nie approach. And watching everyone in the seminar—bar Wen Qing, who appears to have at least enough sensibility not to insist that she, a Wen, be permitted to interact with Nie Huaisang’s saber after what happened to Nie Huaisang’s father via his own saber because of her own uncle—poke around with the flow of energy in the saber with Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang has brought a great deal of insight into both the Nie techniques and, by comparison, the others.

The Jiang…well, he’d always told Wei Changze that he didn’t understand how such a madhouse of a place could be even vaguely functional (despite his understanding that Changze was entirely dependable, it wasn’t a lie as long as he couched it, accurately, as I don’t understand how they would ever function without you). Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng are nestled next to Nie Huaisang on either side, jostling each other over his shoulders as he bends over the saber to demonstrate in response to their questions, and he can see and hear their back and forth but sometimes it might as well be in another language—one he might have met someone else who speaks but definitely does not himself. It’s almost as if there weren’t a stable base to their method of cultivation, as foreign to his own approach as the rivers of Lotus Pier are from the mountains of Cloud Recesses.

It is perhaps a mistake to judge the Jin methods on Luo Qingyang, who, while extremely competent, is not an inner disciple bearing the family name. But from what he can tell of the questions she occasionally lobs at the central trio by the saber, her awareness seems focused on power dynamics: how and when can Nie Huaisang tell his saber to do something, when does it resist or not, can someone else do the same—and how is that prevented? He can’t be sure if this is a true reflection of the Jin of Carp Tower and their endless infighting, but it seems possible.

Wen Qing’s cultivation is not on display, since she has intentionally stepped out, but he did hear her discourse on how to protect a Nie saber from interference, and her emphasis on certain elements of core-tool interaction is insightful in a way he had not realized the Wen approach could be.

He is of course familiar with A-Zhan and A-Huan’s cultivation methods, having taught them from the cradle. But even these are revealed in new ways by their interaction with the saber. He isn’t sure that he’d been aware—no, he’s sure that he hadn’t been aware—that A-Zhan and A-Huan had such differences in their approaches. They are both cautious, as they should be, letting Nie Huaisang explain what he’s doing before speculating (unlike a certain Young Master Wei). But where A-Huan is interested in the question of why each thing is necessary to the cultivation style, A-Zhan is most focused on the effect that the cultivation has on the cultivator. This latter is a question Nie Huaisang dodges, because he claims not to have enough experience of active cultivation of the saber, which leads to something Qiren isn’t sure he’d seen previously in the seminar: A-Zhan involved in a conversation that does not include Wei Wuxian.

He's talking to Wen Qing very seriously (even for A-Zhan) about the effect of this form of cultivation on temperament.

Well, it’s a short period of novelty, because Wei Wuxian slides into that conversation anyway, but it’s definitely worth thinking about.

And of course he’s learning rather a lot about the Nie cultivation techniques—that goes without saying—and he’s quite concerned about some of what he’s learned. He’s beginning to suspect that some of the changes that Nie Huaisang has described have long-lasting effects not just on the cultivator but on the saber, and that would be alarming. There are only hints so far, but if what he’s suspecting is true, he can understand why Nie Huaisang would be so willing to be open about this in the relatively safe space of the seminar. Nie sabers would not be resentful themselves, of course, but their thirst for resentment might have similar effects, without being as easily slaked or quenched.

Concerning.

All of these—even the knowledge that A-Huan and A-Zhan have their particular differences of focus—can and will inform his future teaching. None of it besides the Nie is actually transformational, but each is an extension and a clarification of the distinctions between sects that he already teaches, and will affect how he considers the baseline cultivation theory that he teaches.

One must “organize work properly,” after all. Proper organization for teaching relies on understanding the perspectives and approaches of those being taught, as well as a comprehensive knowledge of the material (which he does not flatter himself to say he already has). This year is shaping up to be one of the most productive, as well as one of the most frustrating, of his career.

Chapter Text

Qiren has always been a true academic. It was in many ways the greatest tragedy of his young life that his brother made the choices he made: not that Qiren would ever center his own needs and feelings over those of family and sect, or make himself the protagonist of a story that has always been clearly about xiongzhang and saozi (not to mention a dead elder and two might-as-well-be-orphaned nephews). He was not murdered or driven to murder (no matter how good the reason). He did not marry—out of panic, out of desperation, out of need, out of anything. Perhaps the closest parallel would be that, like saozi, he ended up with two children he had never expected to have, though unlike her he actually got to raise them.

And that was not how he’d imagined his life going—not that the heavens care what mortals plan, but that doesn’t mean that one can avoid making plans anyway. He had always wanted to burrow himself into the library and only come out when he had something to announce or discuss with others—or to teach, which he has always thought would be an integral part of his role in the sect and therefore his life. It is good that even when charged with running the sect in his brother’s seclusion, his ambiguous status as something other than the full-fledged sect leader has been something he can take advantage of to still maintain a teaching and research schedule.

So while his life has taken many turns he would never have predicted—not that he would undo the creation of the jewels of his life, his beloved nephews—he has always harbored a desire to push the boundaries of cultivation research, to find out things unknown and share the knowledge with others.

Or, as Cangse Sanren would have pointed out (and she would not have been wrong): to make sure everyone remembers his name.

Well, he will not have to write out Humility, because while he will have a chance to share new knowledge with the world, it will not be his discovery.

It will, of course, be Wei Wuxian’s.

Of course, it will be Nie Huaisang’s too, and Meng Yao’s, and perhaps Jiang Cheng’s and A-Zhan’s if anyone digs into the details. It may be A-Huan’s victory, as a sign of the cooperation between sects that seems to be his truest desire as a future sect leader. Depending on how things go in the future, it will also be Wen Qing’s—or her involvement will be entirely erased. Which way it goes will, of course, depend on whether the war that seems likely to come over the horizon leaves space for a tale of cooperation between the Wen and the Nie, or not.

Here is how he sees it happen:

Wen Qing never speaks to Nie Huaisang directly, not after that first meeting. She is huddled with A-Zhan, with Jiang Cheng, most of all with Wei Wuxian. He thinks she speaks to Meng Yao once, but it’s possible he is mistaken about that.

She also talks to him, because of course he is moving between all the groups that form, making sure that no one is off task, that everyone is learning, that this seminar is a seminar and not just free time in another form. And what she has to say is fascinating. He remembers the medical cultivation conference at Lotus Pier, and he is…admittedly unsurprised that Wen Qing was not the head of the Wen delegation for that particular event.

He thinks that that lack of surprise itself is an indication of how much this seminar has already increased his distrust of Wen Ruohan.

She had been there, of course, but she’d only spoken in the open discussion of common injuries, not in the more advanced breakout sessions where the various sects were supposed to contribute their particular forms of knowledge. And from what she was speaking of now, she could have led her own forum on the damages of resentful energy.

He wonders whether any of that comes from taking care of her uncle.

Correction: he wonders whether any of it comes from anything else, though she never once says a word about Wen Ruohan.

From what she says, Wei Wuxian goes back to Nie Huaisang and Meng Yao, as representatives of the Nie sect, and discusses how the Nie sabers work, and what effects they have on animals, resentful creatures—and their wielders.

When he is busy talking to Wen Qing, Jiang Cheng slides firmly into that slot, bent over the saber with the two Nie cultivators.

As for A-Zhan, he rarely says anything, but Wei Wuxian flits past him every time he switches group, and there seems to be a notable increase in his insight after he does, even though A-Zhan rarely responds with more than a word.

But it is Wei Wuxian who makes Nie Huaisang admit that the Nie cultivators are actively harmed by their blades, with or without Wen Ruohan’s intervention; Wei Wuxian who figures out not just how to prevent tampering with a saber (thanks to Wen Qing for that) but how that tampering is related to the way that the damage is caused in the first place (it has to do with the way that the spiritual energy of the cultivator draws on the resentful energy that the blade has accumulated and is drawn on in return); and it is Wei Wuxian whose insight brings the breakthrough that makes all the difference.

His solution is deceptively simple. Nie Huaisang has admitted that not only are the Nie directly harmed by their saber’s resentment, but the sabers also develop a thirst of their own, one that can only be sated by ever further use—and they imprint on their wielder.

What Wei Wuxian invents attacks the first and the last issue, while leaving the sabers themselves untouched. He sketches two sets of talismans, one a cover for the hilt and pommel of the blade and the other to be integrated into the sheath. The former is, for lack of a better term, a filter: it takes in the resentful energy from the blade and the spiritual energy from the cultivator and translates between them. It is fiendishly complex, and no one but Wei Wuxian could possibly have thought to combine those details with that figure and connect them like that, but the basic idea is remarkably simple. In theory it can be customized to allow others than the original wielder to use the blade, though it might not work with those sabers that are already imprinted on their wielders as is.

The sheath is even simpler: it circulates the resentment that the saber itself gives off and allows the saber to reintegrate it, preventing it from affecting anyone else.

These are small concepts, but complex execution—and if they work as it seems they should, then Qiren has achieved his highest goal, even though his name will never be attached to it.

Chapter Text

The next day brings a sect leader to his door.

Now, he had not exactly forgotten that he had in fact invited three different sect leaders to make their way to the Cloud Recesses this term. He would hardly have survived all these years as acting sect leader of Gusu Lan if he had been so absent-minded as that. But after Jin Guangshan wrote back a self-important letter describing the many reasons that Jin Zixun should not be punished but in fact encouraged for having done what he did in the seminar (what he did never actually making a direct appearance) and Qiren himself should be ashamed to be taking the position he was taking (what that position was never making an actual appearance either), he has, correctly, assumed that the Jin sect leader would never darken his door.

He is somewhat more surprised that Jiang Fengmian has not arrived, given the letters he sent relating to A-Zhan’s and Wei Wuxian’s engagement, but perhaps it takes more time than he had previously considered to arrange a proper delegation for a marriage alliance. Or perhaps A-Zhan’s overeagerness offended the Jiangs, though he cannot imagine that they had planned a better marriage for their first disciple than his nephew.

Ridiculous.

Still, Jiang Fengmian is not the sect leader at the gates of the Cloud Recesses.

No, that would be Nie Mingjue.

He did invite the Nie sect leader, back when he thought that he and Jin Guangshan should work out their differences about Meng Yao’s placement in the seminar. But since that was weeks ago, he assumed that nothing would come of it.

Though, now that he thinks about it, he hadn’t heard from Nie Mingjue, which should have been a sign that he would see him, since the Nie sect leader was a very direct man.

“Good to see you, Grandmaster.” Direct did not mean impolite, of course. “Has there been any additional trouble with my disciples?”

“No, I would not say so.” Qiren gestures and Nie Mingjue falls into step with him as they walk through Cloud Recesses towards the pavilion where they hold significant meetings with other sects—which is to say, this is a path that Nie Mingjue could probably walk entirely on his own, given the number of times he has been here, but it would inexcusably rude not to formally show him the way, or for Nie Mingjue himself to insist on making his way alone through another sect’s home.

“I note that Meng Yao has not yet returned to the Unclean Realm,” Nie Mingjue says as they walk together. “Should I take that to mean that the Jin have removed their objection to his presence in the seminar?”

“I am not sure.” If he were addressing another sect leader, Qiren might have added something like “to be honest,” but Nie Mingjue is a direct man and he knows that the Lan disciplines forbid lying, so there is no need. “Sect Leader Jin seems more to have decided it is not worth his while to think about.”

“And the Jin here?” Nie Mingjue does not bristle, but Qiren gets the impression that he might have bristled if there had been any Jin actually in sight.

“Jin Zixuan simply appointed a different representative to the seminar. Jin Zixun has…not been consulted further.”

“Hm.” Nie Mingjue is not A-Zhan, so the single syllable is not quite weighted with all the meaning that it might have been, but it still seems deeper than it would normally deserve.

“I will say that Young Master Meng has been a valuable contributor to our class discussions. As has Young Master Nie.”

“Huaisang?” Nie Mingjue actually stops walking. “I thought he’d appointed Meng Yao to that seminar so that he wouldn’t have to go himself. You’re telling me Huaisang is voluntarily going to additional class, on top of what he’s required to do?”

“Indeed.” Qiren starts walking again so that Nie Mingjue will too. He’s always liked the Nie sect leader, who is one of A-Huan’s closest friends and has been from boyhood. Perhaps that’s why he allows himself a little indulgence in what he says. “And doing very well, too. I am strongly beginning to suspect that your brother is much smarter than he prefers to let on to either of us. All that fan-fluttering may be a distraction.”

“Hm.” This is a calmer mutter, though still contemplative. “As long as he passes your classes and he’s keeping up with his saber training, he can do what he likes.”

“Ah. About that.” Qiren had sent runners (well, rapid-walkers, given the rules of Cloud Recesses) when he found out that Nie Mingjue was at the gates, sending for both the Nie guest disciples and certain of his students. “He’s actually been quite involved with the saber, though perhaps not in the way that you might be expecting…”

“Da-ge! Da-ge! Da-ge!” Nie Huaisang bursts out of the pavilion, dragging Meng Yao by the wrist.

However, neither Nie Mingjue nor Qiren have any attention to spare for that, because of what is curled into Nie Huaisang’s other hand: namely, his saber, rather than a fan.

Isn’t that a two-handed weapon, Qiren wonders to himself. Yet more evidence that Nie Huaisang has definitely been sandbagging us all.

“Huaisang! What have I told you about saber safety?”

“I don’t know, da-ge, I really don’t know!” Nie Huaisang plows to a stop in front of his brother and releases Meng Yao’s wrist to pull out a fan with that hand. “But look!”

He thrusts his saber towards Nie Mingjue’s face, though clearly with no intention to do harm because it is pommel-first.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” Nie Mingjue neatly disarms his brother—not that Qiren thinks there is any resistance from the younger Nie—and gives it a once-over. “What have you done to this? It feels…odd.”

“It is odd!” Nie Huaisang makes grabby hands, and Qiren is fairly certain that neither he nor Nie Mingjue have ever seen Nie Huaisang asking to hold his saber. “Look what Wei-xiong did!” When his brother gives him back the saber with a skeptical look, Nie Huaisang takes a couple steps back and does something Qiren has definitely never seen outside of the seminar room: he goes into a Nie stance and moves through the first few steps of the basic saber sequence. Then he raises an expectant eyebrow towards his brother.

“Da-ge! Did you see?” He does the sequence again.

“The flare at the hilt?” Nie Mingjue frowns. “What is it?”

“It’s Wei-xiong’s talisman! It purifies the energy! The resentment doesn’t get transmitted across the barrier, but I can still use it!” Nie Huaisang bounces on the balls of his feet. “Da-ge, it’s safe to use.”

Nie Mingjue’s face goes through a couple of emotions that Qiren is not sure he’s ever seen before and therefore cannot identify, and settles on a wry humor that looks very much like deflection.

“Oh? Then there’s absolutely no reason you can’t do your training exercises, is there?”

“But da-ge…”

Chapter Text

Nie Mingjue is ensconced with his disciples, Wei Wuxian and his shidi, Qiren’s own nephews, and a few others from the seminar (notably not including Wen Qing, which he thinks is a wise choice) debating over the follow-up steps to prove whether this solution will work for sabers more attached to their wielders, and will survive the wear and tear of true Nie saber cultivation over a sufficient period, when a second sect leader arrives in Cloud Recesses.

This time, instead of a few personal attendants, the sect leader comes attended by what seems like an entire delegation. Not to mention his wife.

Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan stride side by side up the mountain at the head of what almost seems like it ought to be enough to be the whole Jiang sect (though he knows it isn’t; he’s been to Lotus Pier).

“Sect Leader Jiang. Madam Yu.” He bows the appropriate amount. “This is a surprise.”

“I don’t see why it should be.” Yu Ziyuan has never been his favorite person at the best of times, and this does not endear her to him further. “When your nephew decided to be a fool, you should have expected us.”

Be peaceful when insulted.

“Of course, Madam Yu. May I show you to your guest quarters? While we are currently hosting the guest lectures, as I’m sure you’re aware, I have no doubt we can find accommodation for your party.” Somewhere, he thinks with a mental sigh. It’s not a lie if he intends to make it true.

“Do not bother yourself. I’m sure we won’t be here long enough for it to matter.

Do not succumb to rage.

“My lady…” Jiang Fengmian has never known what to do with Yu Ziyuan, anymore than Qiren has, though he didn’t marry the woman. “We have rooms booked in Caiyi Town,” he explains to Qiren as she sweeps past into Cloud Recesses towards…

Towards the pavilion that is currently occupied by the Nie, discussing sect secrets that have already spread further than is probably ideal. Anyway, the gall of that woman, to presume to lead him anywhere in his own home!

Do not use coarse language.

“Ah, Madam Yu, given the matters that I’m sure we have to discuss, I was thinking that we might best meet over here.” He leads them towards a different pavilion, one that is associated more with the inner family than with formal sect business. “I presume you have read my letter?”

“You presume quite a lot, Lan Qiren.” Yu Ziyuan, he remembers, has never thought of him as her favorite person either. He would blame it on his friendship with Cangse and Changze, except it was definitely true before any of that old business occurred. “Or rather, your sect does. What if we had already planned a match for our first disciple?”

“Had you?” A-Huan does not interrupt, per se, because she had finished asking her question, but it was definitely not intended to be asked of him. “Because if so, I apologize on my brother’s behalf, but we had certainly heard nothing of it from your children, or your first disciple.”

“No, no, we had not.” Jiang Fengmian finally decides to contribute to the conversation. “But you can see how it might have come as a surprise to us.”

“At least it has the benefit of ensuring there are no rumors about you tying him to either of our children,” Yu Ziyuan spits, and Qiren simultaneously wishes he were anywhere else and realizes (he thinks) why exactly the Jiang sect did not just send a nice acknowledgement of his letter by messenger. There are clearly…internal disagreements that he does not need to privy to that are playing a part in this response, part over the top (how many Jiang disciples are trooping into the pavilion) and part insultingly understated (again, where was his letter?).

“Oh, but I’m sure no one could imagine you would marry Jiang Wanyin within the sect,” A-Huan says, soothingly, “and of course Lady Jiang is already engaged to Young Master Jin.” He bows to them both. “We are very cognizant of the honor that you do the Lan by entertaining my brother’s suit.”

Yu Ziyuan snorts. “I’m sure you are.” She gestures impatiently at the disciples behind her. “And of course we are more than happy to accept Gusu Lan’s interest in an alliance and a match between your second young master and our first disciple.”

The disciple behind her steps up and offers him…finally…a letter scroll. He unrolls it, and notes the offered terms for the marriage before nodding shortly. “We will, of course, need to iron out the details, but Gusu Lan is definitely interested.” He gestures to the table. “Perhaps we could sit and discuss it, while I send for your children and disciples? I am certain you would like to see them after traveling so far to join us today.”

Yu Ziyuan looks like she’s going to snort again, but Jiang Fengmian intercepts her. “Thank you. We would be more than happy to discuss details with you at your convenience.” He smiles, but it is not a true smile, like Qiren saw on his face when he used to joke with Changze. “And of course, we can easily return on the next day if there should be any difficulties encountered along the way.”

Qiren nods, and orders refreshments to be sent to the Jiangs while he hurries—he does not run, Cangse—over to the other pavilion.

He has assumed, correctly as it happens, that A-Huan’s presence in the other pavilion means that the Jiang-Wei contingent has been informed as well of the Jiang sect’s arrival. However, that does not mean that he does not have hostly duties towards Nie Mingjue. However, he finds the other sect leader more than accommodating.

“Don’t worry about it, Grandmaster.” Nie Mingjue shrugs. “I’m imposing on your seminar anyway. If you need the room, I’ll even bunk with Huaisang tonight.”

“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary, as the Jiangs will be staying in Caiyi.” He bows, though, an idea forming in his head. “However, there is a favor you could do for me, if you didn’t mind…”

And that is how Nie Mingjue ends up leading his seminar the next day, while he negotiates details of the marriage ties between A-Zhan and that boy.

He has never sympathized more with Cangse than after spending eight hours pounding out a compromise about Wei Wuxian’s ongoing duties to Lotus Pier with Yu Ziyuan. His head aches, he needs more caffeine in his tea, and he’s slightly worried that he might have promised Yu Ziyuan his favorite jade arm brace as part of the negotiations.

But they’re done, so they have that going for them.

Also, A-Zhan is smiling, so if he’s right about the brace, it’s a small cost.

Yu Ziyuan, for all that she seems to disdain Wei Wuxian in every way possible, has driven a very hard bargain—and given A-Zhan’s impulsive and therefore technically quite insulting behavior, he has not been able to dismiss her concerns outright. Wei Wuxian (and therefore A-Zhan) will spend several months a year in Lotus Pier, and while there will be a great deal of individual treasures and even bulk goods heading to Cloud Recesses as part of this arrangement, the actual concessions are primarily on their side (he is already not looking forward to explaining to a couple of the richer Caiyi merchants why they no longer have exclusive selling rights to silver in the town).

But A-Zhan is happy, and, well, Wei Wuxian is a genius. Nine months of having him available to design talismans, go on night hunts, teach seminars…that is worth three months of sparing A-Zhan to their new allies.

Especially when they’re the three cold months, when nothing happens in Gusu anyway.

Chapter Text

It turns out that those Jiang disciples, while probably intended to serve as intimidation for him or some such nonsense, have also come to carry the large number of betrothal gifts that the Jiang brought by boat. After the documents are signed, Qiren has to spend quite a deal of time with A-Zhan and Wei Wuxian and the rest of the Jiang sect going over these, accepting them formally, and checking them against the list agreed to in the treaty.

Presumptuous of Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Fengmian it may have been to assume he would agree to the terms they requested, but he supposes that it was even more presumptuous of his own nephew to rush their engagement through non-formal channels.

Hopefully that will be the last difficulty that A-Zhan’s impulses will produce for him, but he knows his nephew (and now his nephew-in-law) and he doubts it very much.

But finally they are gone and Cloud Recesses is left in peace—or at least relative peace, given that Wei Wuxian is still here and Nie Mingjue has left several of his attendants with instructions to work with the seminar to help develop the protections for the Nie sect further (and with a promise of trade accommodations that far exceed what they have just granted the Jiang, in gratitude for the discovery).

However, despite the presence of the Nie cultivators, it is not the talismanic approach to resentment that seizes his seminar’s attention in the coming days.

He is not sure exactly when A-Zhan and Wei Wuxian had the time to start playing duets on the dizi and guqin, given how much of their time has been taken up with family matters and marriage negotiations. But of course, he was never sure where Cangse got the time in the day for all the nonsense that she got up to either, and A-Zhan has always been subtly good at getting his way without mentioning how or why to anyone, so he isn’t actually surprised per se.

What he is surprised by, at least until he thinks more about it, is that their duets have gone beyond the typical romantic music of teens caught in a burst of emotion (he himself had been the author of some ridiculous musical doggerel as a teenager, which is better forgotten for all around). There is certainly a great deal of that, including a song that he is told has the embarrassingly transparent title of “Forgetting Envies,” which has an annoying tendency to get stuck in his head when he hears them play it over and over and over in the back hills (and in their rooms, which are not sufficiently soundproofed, and everywhere else). But, perhaps because of Jiang Yanli, Jiang Cheng, and A-Huan’s simultaneous agreement that the two affianced cultivators are not to be allowed to be alone together anymore (or at least, no more than they can sneak out for without being caught, which he only knows about because A-Zhan still submits himself for punishment afterwards), they have actually spent a lot of time playing other music as well.

Specifically, Lan sect cultivation music, as supervised by A-Huan (who argues that after all, Lan Yi has already accepted Wei Wuxian as a sect member by handfasting), and some experimental cultivation music of their own, as supervised by both A-Huan and the Jiang siblings.

This latter category has, apparently, born fruit. And as such, the seminar has moved on from a purely talisman-based approach to considering the musical attack on resentment. This is a concept, of course, that Wei Wuxian has suggested before, in that first day’s lecture, but that no one has actually had the time to work on during the course of the class, until now.

Now, Qiren is stuck with the world’s worst jam session, as Wei Wuxian and A-Zhan’s first stab at a musical approach to resentment gets tuned and retuned and tinkered with simultaneously by a dozen or more musical efforts by cultivators of wildly varying skill, from Nie Huaisang and Meng Yao, whose work would not be out of place in a formal presentation of the six arts to poor Luo Qingyang, who can read music perfectly but has evidently not learned to play any instrument (which says more, in Qiren’s opinion, about the Jin sect training than about her).

Qiren puts his foot down at this.

Starting the next day, they have organized lessons, with clear discussion of the intended effect of the music and the logic behind each note.

And with deliberate demonstrations by competent players.

He thinks he catches Luo Qingyang sending a prayer of thanks up to the heavens for this, but he doesn’t comment on it. It is forbidden to embarrass others unnecessarily after all.

Wei Wuxian explains the logic behind his initial brainstorm thusly: Clarity, Cleansing, and most of the rest of the Lan music that A-Zhan and A-Huan have showed him all work by using the cultivator’s spiritual energy to overwhelm, replace, or otherwise overwrite the resentment of the spirit. Even Inquiry, which allows the spirit to respond, demands that it do so through the power of the cultivator’s own energy, which is why only strong cultivators can master the skill and its power of forcing the spirit to speak truth. Rest, on the other hand, brings the spirit’s own desires into play, lulling it into desiring to rest. This is why it is one of the less consistently effective compositions, because it relies on changing the spirit’s mind; a spirit that will not wish to rest cannot be quelled by it, and requires Cleansing or something more.

To Wei Wuxian, this is a feature, not a bug.

If Rest draws on the spirit’s own desires, then it can be the root of a composition that directs those desires for the cultivator’s own ends, rather than changing them to suit the cultivator (as Rest intends to). If so, then the cultivator can remain just as unaffected as one playing Rest is (after all, Lan musicians playing Rest are not themselves dispelled), while the resentful energy of the spirit is repurposed to a helpful effect.

And since Rest is the core of the work, the finale of the composition returns the spirit to Rest, having expended its resentful energy already on the task the cultivator set, and therefore being weakened such that it cannot actually resist the urge to Rest.

This last touch, he initially thinks, must be A-Zhan’s, with its neat and efficient tying of the problem into a circle. But he finds out that it is actually Wei Wuxian who proposed that the composition hybridize with Rest, because he wishes the spirit to benefit from his use of it, by being able to pass on into the next reincarnation cycle.

That certainly puts a new spin on the boy’s answer on that first day.

He has issues with some of the note choices, and certainly the composition is unfinished and (if used before it is ready) extremely dangerous. But the idea is interesting and not fundamentally heterodox.

It is worth considering.

And if admitting that means he hears ghostly laughter at the edge of his hearing that happens to remind him of two friends he will never see again, well, he is hardly going to complain.

Chapter Text

Nie Mingjue’s lecture, which he wasn’t able to attend because that was the whole point of having Nie Mingjue cover for him with the advanced study group, appears to have greatly improved the performance of certain members of the group. In some cases, it may simply be that they have received permission from their sect leader to be actively more helpful: Meng Yao is certainly more open about being the one to contribute to the conversation than he was before, though he still has a tendency to do so through others’ words. In others, he suspects that it is a similar impulse but from the opposite direction: Wen Qing is more open, and he doubts this is because of any permissions from her sect leader. Rather, he believes that she now sees helping openly as beneficial to her ultimate goal of protecting her family.

Probably because Nie Mingjue, when he left the Cloud Recesses, was smiling, despite having just taught a class that included Wens.

That joy is infectious—and he has reason to believe that it may have led Nie Mingjue to make some statements about tolerance for Wen who are not Wen Ruohan, though he hasn’t gotten any of his students to go explicitly on the record about that.

Regardless, they all latch onto the musical cultivation angle with renewed enthusiasm, and he’s amazed at the results.

Not that he’s ignoring his regular duties, no matter how interesting this group has become. He still gives his ordinary lectures, and if anything he thinks they’re going better than before. Some of the students now in the advanced group (Nie Huaisang, most notably) have stopped pretending that they don’t care about their cultivation, and that always helps the mood of the room. Others have been overheard (not intentionally, so it is not gossip) mentioning to their friends that they never thought Old Man Lan would be flexible enough to even have a seminar on resentful energy, and that the very fact there was such a thing made them feel more committed to the Lan Sect Lectures. And of course, there’s also the simple fact that he thinks this year is more filled with brilliant cultivators and inquiring minds than most of his classes.

He’s not just thinking about Wei Wuxian and A-Zhan when he thinks that, either, though he’s fairly certain that both of them are among the top students he or any other Lan teacher has ever had the pleasure of instructing. They are very different students, but even before they were joined at the hip as fiancés, they each drove the other to a higher plane of learning, and as long as they remain committed to doing the work their very brilliance draws others in to seeing the work as valuable.

He wonders if he and Cangse could have been like this—not the relationship, he had never desired like Jiang Fengmian had to move her eyes off Changze, but the sheer intellectual back-and-forth—if they’d had the chance. Of course, they hadn’t, because he’d been the instructor even back then, and he hadn’t been fully willing to acknowledge that he could be friends with someone like that until far too late in the term. But he wonders, and when he remembers to he shares those memories that make him wonder with Wei Wuxian, who seems to absorb knowledge of either of his parents like a particularly overeager sponge.

But it isn’t just the two of them.

Perhaps most notably, given what he knew about the students coming in, the two Jiang siblings (perhaps he should say the other two Jiang siblings, given his observations of Wei Wuxian and his martial siblings) are much stronger at cultivation theory than he had suspected they would be. Jiang Cheng, of course, is in the advanced study seminar along with his brother, and making his own mark there. Some of this is because he and Wei Wuxian work well together: he’s still ahead even of A-Zhan at translating Wei Wuxian’s brilliant offhand thoughts into words the rest of them can understand, and far ahead of anyone but Wei Wuxian himself at making them work, rather than staying as brilliant thoughts. But he is not just a translator for his brother; he has definite ideas himself, and Qiren is not the only one who’s noticed: he’s seen A-Huan, Nie Huaisang, and even some of the Jiang disciples crowd around Jiang Cheng even before they go to Wei Wuxian for certain kinds of problems that he sets them to.

Jiang Yanli is not in the advanced seminar, and honestly if she were he thinks it would be too dominated by Jiangs, because while her brothers are brilliant and fiery and ostentatiously capable, she is the backbone that lets the body of the Jiangs articulate. After the initial purely lecture elements of the course, he gives a lot of group work: cultivators night hunt together, sect politics happen together, almost every valuable project happens by coming together, and so he assigns both sect-by-sect group work and intersect projects.

Jiang Yanli never presents her group’s project.

Jiang Yanli’s group always gets full marks.

He hasn’t missed these details, but he knows who has: Jin Zixuan. Because there is no way that the spoiled Jin sect heir would look down and even occasionally insult on his “shy” “quiet” “weak” fiancée if he realized that shy only meant undemanding of the spotlight, quiet only meant that she didn’t need to raise her voice to command the room, and weak only meant that she thought before she acted.

Or if he would, Qiren thinks, he’s hardly going to make a decent sect leader, let alone one in the snakepit of Carp Tower.

But that is not his problem. It’s just something he’s noticed: that for all the Jin wealth, none of the inner Jin family members that he’s ever taught has been able to understand its nature: “Do not build wealth by using others, for this wealth won’t last.”

In any case, he sometimes wonders if the advanced seminar would be even more potent with her presence, but he tells himself “do not be greedy.” The students have already achieved far more than he could ever have imagined.

And not all of it is Wei Wuxian’s work, either. The talismans are, and the musical cultivation is, but bringing them together?

That is all Jiang Cheng. Jiang Wanyin, perhaps he should say, because for all that the Jiang heir is persistently informal, discoveries like this deserve the trappings as well as the reality of respect.

It is Jiang Cheng who comes up with a way to use the talismans to play the music. Of course, it comes up in a typically Jiang informal way. Wei Wuxian and the part of the group that has gravitated towards him are trying to figure out some way to effectively use resentful energies as a passive defense: to protect the weak or the unprepared from an attack without having to have a skilled cultivator who knows how to use resentment present to play.

Wei Wuxian has been trying to figure out if he could conjure up a resentful spirit and then bind it to play music that controls other spirits when Jiang Wanyin reaches over and smacks his brother in the back of the head. Before Qiren or even A-Zhan can criticize him for it, he drops his bomb: “idiot, just leave a talisman that plays the music you need to play, and have them activate that with normal spiritual energy.”

Wei Wuxian gets halfway through his usual insincere complaining ritual about his brother when he stops and starts scribbling madly.

Within five minutes, he and Jiang Wanyin have created a talisman that will, when activated, play a song that will compel resentful spirits to tear each other apart to quell their respective resentments.

It will require extremely careful testing, but it’s a ridiculous leap forward nonetheless.

Qiren will be lucky if he can keep any of his old lectures intact, he realizes. This advanced seminar is quickly developing a whole new cultivation style that is going to revolutionize everything.

Chapter Text

But of course, Wei Wuxian cannot and does not let his shidi overshadow him. Not that it’s an explicit contest—or if it is, Qiren thinks with a sigh, it’s one of those undeclared contests that goes so far back into the elemental psyches of the competitors that no one can remember when it began, like “humanity against natural disasters,” “Jin Guangshan against decency,” or “Cangse Sanren against Lan Qiren’s peace of mind.” But wherever Jiang Cheng is, Wei Wuxian is striving to excel him, and wherever Wei Wuxian is, Jiang Cheng is trying to do the same. Perhaps this is what it is to “attempt the impossible.” And if so, he is once more grateful that he was born a Lan and not a Jiang—and that his nephews never succumbed to this kind of puerile sibling rivalry.

That said, the achievements that it generates are, he must admit (albeit grudgingly) impressive. After all, the only way to outdo attempting the impossible is by achieving it.

He would already have labeled Jiang Cheng’s innovation on Wei Wuxian’s concepts impossible, but that would have left him no word for what Wei Wuxian has just dropped in his lap.

“It’s simple!” Of course it is. Everything Wei Wuxian and his mother ever did was simple to them, and it was always perplexing to each of them that no one else thought so.

“It’ll work!” Of course it will, because the world is set up to give him apoplexy, and leave his nephews triply orphaned (though apparently the world is also determined to give both of them Jiang sect disciples’ shoulders to cry on, if the way that A-Huan has started hanging around Jiang Cheng is any indication).

“It will help!” And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Because for all he finds the very concept of using resentful energy distressing, and has even before the seminar began, he cannot deny the simple helpfulness of all of this: the way it will make the lives not just of future immortals like he’s beginning to suspect Wei Wuxian is, not just of cultivators like himself, but of even ordinary people easier. And so he cannot condemn it, even though he would like to.

The idea itself is a logical extension—if you can call any of this madness logical—of Jiang Cheng’s own extension of Wei Wuxian’s original ideas. It’s so Jiang it might as well wear purple and run breathlessly across the fields of Cloud Recesses with no respect for decorum.

Jiang Cheng has proven that, in certain circumstances, you can use activated talismans to play automated music that will cause resentful creatures to destroy each other. This alone, while insanely dangerous in the wrong hands or if a single curlicue goes out of line in the talisman, will save thousands of lives if properly implemented.

Wei Wuxian has figured out a way to make the resentful energy that the creatures themselves give off power the talismans.

Automatically.

Without a single cultivator doing anything other than writing the initial talismans.

It has a great deal in common, he realizes as Wei Wuxian walks them all through the details, with the wards that Lan Yi designed to contain the Yin Iron, and that makes sense: that too relied on twisting resentment against itself, so that the Iron would remain suppressed long after it should have freed itself. But while those wards required topping off with spiritual energy in order to be sufficiently strong to quell the resentment they fed off, these do not.

In fact, Wei Wuxian has already demonstrated their effectiveness on the miasma of resentful energy still swirling outside the Mingshi—which reminds him that soon he is going to have to send someone (A-Zhan and Wei Wuxian, undoubtedly) to take that cursed object out of the Cloud Recesses entirely.

Perhaps it will be safer with these talismans available, because the resentment that the Mingshi puts out has been radically reduced after Wei Wuxian made it attack itself—and that is without an actual physical being filled with resentment to act on.

If there were fierce corpses involved, he suspects, they would torn each other apart in an instant, meaning…

Meaning no one would have to fight them.

Meaning night hunting would become a cleanup effort against overwhelming forces of resentment, or ones that appeared in unusual or unexpected places, and not a constant drumbeat of obligation merely to break even against the anger that the world perpetually produces.

Meaning cultivators could cultivate, not just to become weapons against the darkness at the edges of one’s vision but to become the best, truest, highest versions of themselves.

It is a tempting vision.

No, it is not a temptation (one must resist temptation). It is a goal.

It is, as Lan Yi patiently explains to him one evening as they pore over Lan An’s poetry and her commentary (and he doesn’t even try to pretend that getting to talk to her instead of just reading her work isn’t one of the greatest blessings of his life), the culmination of what Lan An wanted for his beloved, and for his sect.

They test it rigorously.

Almost as if the universe bent itself to Wei Wuxian’s will in precisely the way that it has not bent itself to Qiren’s, they have a perfect opportunity to test it in the real world just as soon as the theoretical testing has reached its limit: a waterborne abyss appears in Biling Lake, where there is no good reason for there to be a waterborne abyss.

He packs the whole seminar along to defeat it. They proceed carefully, by steps: first, the talismans; then, the music; then, finally, the musical talismans of both kinds.

Each works.

First, they bat aside the water ghouls that spawn from the abyss’s energy.

Then, they destroy its tendrils.

Finally, his Twin Jades and the two Jiang disciples (he has heard Jiang Cheng jokingly call them the Twin Prides of Yunmeng, and he supposes he will have to use that name himself once the world gets used to them) set up a trap with the automated talismans and the rest of the class drives the abyss into it.

The thing tears itself apart, and by the end there is nothing but a few minor piece of flotsam to put to Rest.

He even looks the other way when the boys buy wine in Caiyi Town on the way back.

Well, as long as they don’t drink it in Cloud Recesses.

There are still limits, even for geniuses.

Chapter Text

Despite any and all accusations that might be levied now or in the future, he does not hate Meng Yao.

It is just: there needs to be someone chaperoning A-Zhan and Wei Wuxian when they go seeking the other parts of the Yin Iron, and that person has to be a representative of one of the major sects, and that person also has to be a member of the advanced seminar so that they actually understand what is going on, and frankly that pool is rather small.

Jiang Cheng and A-Huan might have been options except both of them are a little too close to the issue—and besides, they are probably his best bet (if Lans bet) for a continuation of the seminar’s discoveries in the absence of his two best students.

The Jin are out: Luo Qingyang would likely have done just fine, but Jin Zixuan can’t be trusted not to put his foot in his mouth if she is absent from Cloud Recesses for too long, and besides, despite the cutsleeve nature of the engagement there would be too many eyebrows if he sends a woman as chaperone to two men. People are slow and stodgy (for once he agrees with his inner Cangse on this) but they also are what they are. One must work with the situation as it is, not as one wants it to be. And since she was the only Jin…

He does not trust Nie Huaisang not to hare off and go look at art or capture birds or something without ever bothering to chaperone.

He isn’t putting either Wen Qing or Wen Qionglin in that position, not where Wen Ruohan can look at them outside Cloud Recesses.

And while he might have appointed any minor Jiang, Lan, or Nie disciple, why should he when there is an eminently more intelligent and skilled candidate right there?

Not that he is going to tell Meng Yao that, not directly at least. He doubts that the Nie disciple is in a position to accept the compliment as legitimate, and he does not need someone like that to distrust him.

So instead, he points out that they anticipate that the quest will, at some point, take them to Qinghe, and there needs to be someone who can make sure they get there through all the Nie passwords and sentries. And besides, Nie Mingjue has mentioned that he wants his assistant back, so…

It works. And it’s all true: he wouldn’t lie. It’s not even a real lie by omission, because these are good and sufficient reasons to have sent Meng Yao.

Only…now he’s sitting at home (well, in the reading nook with Lan Yi, but that’s like a second home by now anyway) and worrying.

Because for all the good and sufficient reasons why Meng Yao is the right person, he’s still one person. And for all that A-Zhan and Cangse’s boy are brilliant, powerful cultivators (and Meng Yao is brilliant if not powerful), they’re still three people.

And Wen Ruohan has a lot more than three people working for him.

And a lot of them are the kind of people unlikely to have any compunction about making there be three fewer people in the cultivation world.

Lan Yi was—is—a good sect leader, and she gives good advice. In this particular case, the advice is to focus on what he can control, not what he can’t. She adds to that a somewhat tart observation that they’re already gone, so there’s not much point in worrying about it.

He thinks she and Cangse would have gotten along, if there were any way that Cangse stumbling across that same cave wouldn’t have been an utter disaster in its own right, not least because what foolish Lan would have handed her a headband?

She’d probably have stolen one off a rabbit.

Anyway, the advice is good and he takes it as best he can.

Just because Wei Wuxian isn’t there anymore, and the Yin Iron has started off on a trip across the cultivation world, doesn’t mean that the advanced seminar has to end. Nie Huaisang gives that argument the old college try, of course, but he doesn’t get much support from his peers (which is gratifying) and Qiren thinks his heart isn’t really in it either—he’s seen Nie Huaisang when he really really doesn’t want to do something, and it’s much more annoying than this.

Not that this is not annoying.

They continue their investigations into the nature of resentful energy and how it might be affected without giving one’s own nature over to it. They read through Lan Yi, and Lan An, and Wen Mao, and even (as he catches Jiang Cheng muttering to Nie Huaisang one day, but doesn’t punish him because he was the one eavesdropping), “some authors who aren’t older than Caiyi Town.”

And a marvelous thing happens.

The seminar continues to make progress. Without Wei Wuxian overshadowing everything, and A-Zhan echoing every thought he has, the seminar takes a different bent. Wen Qing speaks up more—perhaps also influenced by the fact that the die is cast, and the Yin Iron has left Cloud Recesses already—and Jiang Cheng and A-Huan start speaking more, and somehow Jiang Cheng gets Nie Huaisang to concentrate, for once, and…

Honestly, it’s nice.

Wei Wuxian, as it turns out, had particular ideas about how resentful energy works, and how it ought to work, and what might be done with it. Innovative ideas, heretical ideas, brilliant ideas, call them what you will, but they had also served as the constraints and founding conditions of much of the conversation in the seminar heretofore.

Now they branch out into different directions.

Wen Qing speculates about tattoos that might draw out resentful energy, or stop it from embedding itself in the first place—and Nie Huaisang draws them, idly, as if it were nothing at all.

Jiang Cheng suggests an array that could be hewn into the rock at the bottom of a lake to prevent a waterborne abyss from ever forming, and coincidentally (or not so coincidentally, given the Jiang interest in dams and sluices) dissipate the resentful energy that it would otherwise collect by doing useful work in the nearby town.

A-Huan, he notices with a resigned sigh, is absolutely captivated by this idea, and its inventor, though the Jiang sect heir clearly has no idea that Lan Xichen is expressing anything but mild approval.

Heavens, he had better not be forced into another marriage negotiation with that awful woman.

A-Huan had better keep his ribbons to himself.

Chapter Text

While the advanced seminar is certainly still making progress without A-Zhan and Wei Wuxian, it is still noticeable that he has more time for other things in their absence. Or perhaps not actually more time, but more available space in his head, certainly. And that means that he has more time to pay attention to the sorts of things that he probably should have been paying attention to the whole time: cultivation world politics.

Ugh. He hates them with a passion, even though he knows Cangse would just be dancing around him chanting “love all beings” if a) she knew what he was thinking and b) she were still alive. He can deal with sect politics in the sense of figuring out how to balance and manage the guest disciples, because he can contextualize that for himself as teaching, and at worst as dealing with the parents of students (which is annoying, but a necessary annoyance). He cannot deal with it in the abstract, which is a real flaw in himself, he knows, since he has been acting as Lan Sect Leader in fact if not in title for most of his adult life.

So he likes to live in the little bubble of his guest lectures while he can, only to return to thinking about the sects outside of the guest disciples when he absolutely has to.

Unfortunately, it seems, he absolutely has to now, because as soon as he becomes aware of the sect politics he’s been setting aside during this year’s lectures, he realizes that he has sent A-Zhan, Wei Wuxian, and Meng Yao out into a maelstrom.

He knew when it happened, of course, that the waterborne abyss was almost certainly unnaturally produced in Biling Lake, and he had his suspicions even then that it was Wen Ruohan’s doing in some way. But now he is reading reports from various sects and their contacts in the merchant world that suggest that it was not merely produced by the Wen but moved downriver, stage by stage: there are reports of transient water ghouls all the way to the point where the minor sects and towns would no longer report to Gusu but to Qishan.

He has no doubt that if he had access to the reports, and if anyone would dare to complain to Wen Ruohan, he would find them through Qishan as well.

Even as it is, it’s a terrifying distance to consider, though it has the benefit of suggesting rather strongly, in light of his seminar’s findings, that Wen Ruohan was using the Yin Iron to push it downriver, but that he therefore has no Yin Iron closer than his own sect.

Though knowing Wen Ruohan even at arms length as he does, he wouldn’t have expected the man to let any out of his clutches anyway.

But there is more than this one incident, or series of incidents, to concern him. Resentment as a whole seems to be surging everywhere; ghosts walk out of their graves when nothing major has disturbed them, fierce corpses rampage where there should be no such thing, and there are reports of twisted animals that have not been seen in generations, and refuse to die without encountering the strongest weapons in their arsenals.

He wonders if he has been willingly ignorant (“destroy the five poisons,” whisper Cangse and Changze in his ears, though no one else can hear them). He wonders if he has simply been too lax, or too complacent (“do not be haughty and complacent,” they add). He wonders…

No, he knows that it is at least partly his duty to do something about this.

And so he changes the seminar again.

It is not that he becomes less open to strange suggestions, or less willing to let the conversation flow where it will. That too would be its own haughtiness, after the seminar has taught him so much as well.

But he does insist that they focus their efforts not just on theoretical measures but on trying to test the practical elements more deeply: in turning what they have discovered from interesting to useful, and from suggestive to safe.

He wonders how many Lan ancestors would curse him for his sudden turn from theory to practice; fortunately, he has at least one semi-living ancestor to reassure him that she, for one, would rather like it if the sect continued to exist despite the threat of Wen Ruohan.

He notices two students in particular who take to this new direction like a river to its natural course: Jiang Cheng, whose thoughts already tend in this direction, and Wen Qing, who seems almost insulted by the idea that Jiang Cheng could outdo her in the practical elimination of resentment from a body.

He cannot, of course, because her needles allow her to more precisely target problems of the flesh and spirit—but only in individuals.

At scale, Jiang Cheng’s imagination puts them all to shame. He grumps about it and deflects praise and insists that it’s just years of making sure Wei Wuxian didn’t accidentally blow up Lotus Pier (again, he says, which raises some questions Qiren does not yet have answers to), but there is no denying from Qiren’s perspective that the Jiang heir simply thinks in systems and scales that differ from his classmates. Even A-Huan, who is being raised to run a sect as well, cannot anticipate Jiang Cheng’s thoughts, only follow apace; even Qiren himself, who has been actively running a sect for years, finds little to correct or question.

Thank everything that’s good that they already have a marriage alliance negotiated with the Jiang, for they will be a formidable opponent when this generation comes of age.

The seminar’s innovations eventually become practical enough that he and A-Huan bring them to the elders for incorporation in the wards of Cloud Recesses. The wards are mighty already, of course, but he cannot forget that Wei Wuxian broke through them on the first night of the classes—even if he has warmed to the boy, that suggests that a determined foe could do the same with effort even if they lacked Wei Wuxian’s innate brilliance.

And besides, the wards were always designed to keep resentment in (because of Lan Yi) rather than focused on keeping them out, with the assumption that the cultivators within could defeat whatever came.

They do not get everything they want. Lan traditions do not change so easily. But a few anchor stones for arrays and some inscribed talismans at the gates are better than nothing.

How much better they will find out mere days later, when Wen Xu comes calling and neglects, for some reason, to knock.

Chapter Text

The wards have been strengthened, not just with the addition of the protections against resentful energy, and so Wen Xu’s first assault dents them but does not get through. Qiren will reflect later that it is clear that Wen Chao was doing double duty when he dropped off Wen Qing and Wen Ning, because the attack almost certainly would have broken through their earlier wards, and was targeted at what had been one of the first weaknesses they had sealed up when revising the wards.

However, Wen Chao also had swept out of Cloud Recesses that same day, so his information is out of date.

It suggests also that Wen Qing and Wen Ning are not, in fact, betraying them, which he is glad to know, but is not, at the time, his primary concern.

The alarms go off, and he and the rest of the Lan disciples who are tasked with the defense of the Cloud Recesses (which is most of them, but there are always specialists who would only be called on if those wards were breached) assemble in the courtyard.

He wonders why they are here now—not why they are here at all, that much is obvious, but why now, when the guest disciples are still in residence. Later he will learn that it was a combination of reasons, but with two standing out: the lack of any response to the waterborne abyss, which Wen Ruohan had apparently expected to do much more damage, and Wen Xu’s suspicion that Wen Qing’s reports had become too minimal to be counted on.

Whatever the reason, the wards have held, but they will not hold for long, he thinks, because Wen Xu has actually brought an army, while Cloud Recesses (for all its wards and protections) is not a fortress.

He supposes he should have paid more attention to those like Nie Mingjue who were muttering about standing armies and an overly militaristic attitude among the Wen, but he had genuinely believed that they were exaggerating. Clearly not.

The guest disciples are milling about, and the Jiang sect heir (of course it is Jiang Wanyin) seeks him out, offering to assist in the defense of the Cloud Recesses.

He cannot decide whether to accept or not. On the one hand, this attack does endanger them all, and he has no great trust that Wen Xu will truly discriminate white robes with a little lotus motif from white robes that are Lan, and as they are outnumbered he could likely use the help. On the other, this is not truly their fight, and perhaps bringing all the other sects into a direct fight with the Wen will actually backfire, as the other sects may well resent their best and brightest being thrown into battle when they were supposed to be safe in Gusu.

That would be the Wen’s fault, in the end, but that does not make it good politics.

He is saved from answering, however, by a massive stroke of good luck.

Now, in ordinary circumstances, this would actually have been horrid luck, because before their recent revisions of the wards they would have been almost entirely defenseless against the massive pulse of resentful energy that shoves itself against the wards and the swarm of fierce corpses who clamber in its wake.

He wants to curse himself for neglecting the sign of that one fierce-corpsified cultivator that A-Zhan brought in on the first day of the lectures. In his defense, he has had a few things to think about since then. However, it was still a sign that whatever power it was (he is now fairly certain it is Wen Ruohan’s use of the Yin Iron) could conjure up resentful forces even here—even at such a distance.

That, or Wen Ruohan has entrusted Yin Iron to his son, but he cannot imagine that such a paranoid power-hungry man would do so: what would stop Wen Xu from turning it on him, or trying to?

Or perhaps he was also self-assured to the point of a different kind of madness.

In any case, rather than a second conventional assault, the Wen’s second act is to use resentment, and if there was one thing that the new Lan wards were ready for, it was resentful energy.

They flare bright blue, surrounding Cloud Recesses in a light show that might have been entertaining if he had time to think about it. The wards redirect the energy back out, into the fierce corpses, and they turn on each other in their anger—and on the Wen soldiers, because Wen Xu has positioned his corpses directly in front of his soldiers, and when the fierce corpses turn on each other the soldiers panic and quite reasonably assume that they were turning on them as well.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because while the music of the wards is making the fierce corpses attack resentment, they also still have their innate resentful wish to harm that which has harmed them.

It becomes a screaming melee outside of Cloud Recesses. The Wen are disciplined, but having their own horrors turn on them cracks that façade. Qiren sees Wen Xu himself stride into the battle to try to rally his men—or at least, that is what he assumes he was trying to do—only to be cut down by one of his own soldiers, flailing at the first thing that touches him.

Even so, Wen Xu could have, would have survived if he had not stumbled into a fierce corpse, which sinks its teeth into the wound and…

Well, the less Qiren thinks about that the better.

He does end up accepting Jiang Wanyin’s offer of assistance, but it is only to clean up the dead and desecrated after it is all over.

Not a single Wen except Wen Qing and Wen Qionglin has set foot in Cloud Recesses that night.

He is not sure whether any walked away, either.

Wen Xu did not. Wen Qing identifies his body, and they give him and as many Wen cultivators as they can separate and identify from the carnage the best treatment that they can.

They may have come to attack, but it is still hard to see human beings in that state.

“Do not kill within Cloud Recesses.”

It is bittersweet to see exactly how that came to be achieved.

Chapter Text

As might be expected, such a major attack, with such substantial results, has consequences.

First of all, all the guest disciples are sent home. They are only a few weeks from the end of the term, anyway, and as word of the attack spreads (gossip may not be allowed, but there is no way to stop everyone from speaking about something like this, and it probably falls under news and not gossip, Qiren supposes) and the various sects start panicking about the fact that the Wen were so foolhardy as to attack another major sect, the withdrawals quickly become so many that they might as well make it an official policy.

Besides, they have to prepare themselves.

Qiren tries to “be generous,” but he has to suspect that a great deal of the concerns that are being voiced by the minor sects and by the Jin are not actually about the danger of the Wen but rather the audacity of the Lan to actually resist. There has been more than a taste of “why didn’t you just let him in” in some of the missives, mixed with a great deal of “you endangered my son/cousin/random disciple by fighting with the Wen” as if it were not the Wen themselves who attacked. Without warning. At night.

It is only because he is being generous to these sect leaders (as well as his own self-disciple of course) that he does not shriek out that Wen Ruohan is the one they should be referring these complaints to, and he would himself be quite willing do so at the point of a sword.

At least the other two major sects are reasonable.

He is not surprised that Nie Mingjue supports them, instantly and fully. Even if they had not been actively providing a service that might allow Nie Mingjue and the rest of his sect to not die of qi deviation before their time, he knows that Nie Mingjue would have taken any opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who would oppose Wen Ruohan. And to be fair to the Nie sect leader, the same would be true even if he had not been spoiling for a fight with the Wen since his own father’s death—Nie Mingjue has a strong sense of right and wrong, and besides he and A-Huan have been friends for years.

The Jiangs, he had not expected to be so forthcoming with support. Jiang Fengmian is a notably cautious sect leader, and Yu Ziyuan is…Yu Ziyuan. He is still finding little loopholes in the marriage contract that he can’t believe he let her get through.

But precisely because of that marriage contract, the Jiang are outraged on their behalf: they just announced an alliance with the Lan, and it is deeply offensive to them that Wen Ruohan has dared to attack their ally in the immediate aftermath. The Jiang are not the Wen, so self-important that they believe squinting at the sun is an insult to their sun sigil; nor the Jin, so puffed up that they look for slights to take offense at in order to throw their weight and money around; nor the Nie, who do not seek offense but hold it deep in their hearts when it comes; nor even the Lan who, Qiren must admit, have a very strict worldview at times and have a related tendency to find offense when that worldview is challenged even by those who are not bound by their own rules.

It is possible he would not recognize this had Cangse not shouted it in his face (in coarser language, of course) more than once.

But the Jiangs are none of these. They have their faults, of course. He has met Wei Wuxian, for all that the boy has grown on him immensely, and Wei Wuxian is the head disciple of Yunmeng Jiang, the greatest arbiter behind Yu Ziyuan of proper conduct, good behavior, and rightful Jiang-ness. So naturally they have faults. But the Jiang are not quick to seize on offense and wear it like a second skin, or even a cloak around the shoulders. Nor do they hold grudges deeply in their hearts, though they do often require the offense to be made whole before forgiving, and if it cannot be then the grudge may well linger. The Jiang are believers in fair play: that there are rules (though these rules are not carved into the living rock, which has always made Qiren wonder how they are supposed to know what they are—a point he used to raise with Changze, who assured him that they still all knew) and that those who do not play by the rules should be punished.

One of those rules is that major sects do not attack major sects.

Another is that major sects respect the alliances between major sects, both those they are a party to and those with whom they interact.

Wen Ruohan has broken both, so it is perhaps not a surprise after all that Jiang Fengmian sends word that Yunmeng stands with Gusu.

But while it is inarguable that the attack on Cloud Recesses was an act of war, the beat towards further open violence that Qiren expected—that everyone expected—does not come.

Or at least not as openly as he had thought it would.

Wen Ruohan does not apologize. That could be a full sentence itself. More specifically, Wen Ruohan does not apologize for the attack on Cloud Recesses. However, he does issue an announcement (not a private letter, like he ought, but an announcement to all sects) that his son had exceeded his authority by attacking Cloud Recesses rather than merely demanding entry.

This is patently absurd, since Qiren knows now that Wen Xu was not carrying Yin Iron (he was rather thoroughly searched) and therefore the pulse of resentful energy had to have come from Qishan directly.

But it is Wen Ruohan’s official line, and he uses it to announce a new initiative. It seems that what Wen Xu was supposedly intended to do was to invite the young masters of the Lan sect to join him and his brother in Qishan for a youth conference, where all the sect heirs and young sect leaders and so on could meet to discuss the work of the cultivation world in isolation from the older generation.

And now he asks—no, demands—that the sects send their heirs to him anyway. In fact, he piously intones in words so slimy they make Qiren want to wash his hands after reading, it is all the more important that they send their heirs to meet with his new heir, Wen Chao, because he does not want any further misunderstandings between his sons and the other sects.

Ridiculous.

But Qiren is not sure whether he can convince enough other sects of this before all their children are merely hostages in whatever mad game Wen Ruohan has decided to play next.

Chapter Text

The one good thing about Wen Ruohan’s ridiculous demands is that it does bring him the first word of A-Zhan and Wei Wuxian that he’s had in weeks. They have apparently made it to the Unclean Realm, because Nie Mingjue’s message declaring that he will not be sending Nie Huaisang to Qishan mentions them. Evidently they—and Meng Yao, in his capacity as a Nie disciple and with the official sanction he was given along with the other two to use and discuss their techniques as necessary on their mission, thus evading the discomfort of the secrecy arrays—have been assisting Qinghe Nie in strengthening their own protections against resentful energies. Qiren knows that this will not be the same as the work that Jiang Cheng, A-Huan, and Wen Qing had come up with in Gusu, but he is sure it will help.

A second letter enclosed in the first, from A-Zhan this time, mentions that Wei Wuxian has some ideas about purifying the Nie saber tombs, but that they will wait for Qiren to negotiate the details of how such knowledge will be applied.

He wonders idly what A-Zhan had to promise Wei Wuxian to stop him from simply running towards the saber tombs, talismans in hand.

More importantly, at least to him if not to Nie Mingjue, A-Zhan’s letter reveals that they have a second piece of the Yin Iron. Evidently a miscreant named Xue Chengmei, going informally by Xue Yang—most likely, he suspects, a distant descendant of Xue Chonghai—was carrying one when they came across him in the north. A-Zhan notes drily that they found him in the midst of trying to massacre the Yueyang Chang sect, apprehending him only because of the pull of the Yin Iron and Wei Wuxian’s nose for trouble.

Well, that is not the phrasing A-Zhan uses, but Qiren can read between the lines.

Evidently he had planned to draw in resentful creatures to massacre the sect in their bed, but Wei Wuxian was able to reverse the talismans and turn them into strengthened wards, putting the Yueyang Chang sect in their debt.

They left Xue Yang’s punishment up to that sect, and he has, apparently, been executed.

It is probably the just thing to do, and definitely the formally correct choice, though Qiren does wonder what knowledge has been lost with his life.

Oh well. They will manage, and those who plot murder should not be saved simply to satisfy his curiosity.

A-Zhan also writes that Wei Wuxian has come up with more advanced shielding for the Yin Iron, protecting both pieces, they hope, from the scrying that Wen Ruohan might do in turn.

The refusal of Qinghe Nie to send its heir to Qishan, along with Qiren’s refusal to send either A-Huan or A-Zhan, produce a similar effect in Yunmeng Jiang: or perhaps Jiang Fengmian has finally learned to listen to his children occasionally, for Qiren has no doubt that Young Master Jiang is not fooled by Wen Ruohan’s words. He and his sister were there at the massacre, after all.

But it more likely that Jiang Fengmian, or Yu Ziyuan, have simply decided that their alliance with Gusu Lan is strong enough, or important enough, to justify this.

In any case, that makes three major sects that are defying Qishan Wen—and while he learns that Jin Guangshan still sent his son, and most of the minor sects not intimately connected with the three remaining major sects did as well, that is still a major change in sect politics. It has been many years since as many as two major sects defied what the Wen wanted, which he realizes now is probably contributory to the current overall state of affairs.

Well, there is no time one can make a change except in the present.

He meets with A-Huan, A-Zhan, and Wei Wuxian, after the latter two return to Gusu with their two pieces of Yin Iron. They are fairly certain, they tell him, that the other pieces are in Qishan, which does not come as much of a surprise. He is glad that they did not actually make their way into Qishan, as he’s sure that Wei Wuxian planned to.

Well, he’s glad of it until he learns what has happened at the so-called youth conference.

Apparently Wen Chao, now the sect heir, had led the assembled youths on a night hunt as part of the ‘festivities’ surrounding the conference. This in and of itself would not have been unusual or particularly notable at all, because these kinds of intersect events often include night hunts, except that only Wen Chao came back. Qishan Wen has officially declared that their sect heir showed great bravery and cunning in saving even himself from the massive beast that was found in the mountain where the night hunt was held, but Qiren has his doubts.

Mostly because while the Wen provide ample evidence that the night hunt was justified—that there was some kind of beast in the mountains and it needed to be excised—they provide almost none that Wen Chao actually vanquished it.

This leads to a certain amount of reasonable suspicion that either it killed everyone in the night hunt party and Wen Chao ran for his miserable life, or that they never encountered the beast at all and Wen Chao simply murdered a large group of sect heirs.

Qiren is not sure which option he should think if he is to “be generous,” and he’s not sure it matters all that much. Wen Ruohan has just thrown a great number of sects into chaos all at once, with the barest pretense at a justifiable explanation.

He has, however, also miscalculated, because Jin Zixuan was among the cultivators reported dead, and Jin Guangshan has no other heir. Rumors fly (not that Qiren listens to them, but the people he has professionally detailed to sift rumors do) that he is scouring the cultivation world for his bastards. Nie Mingjue even reports a messenger coming to the Unclean Realm, which is quite an about face given what the Jin sect has been saying somewhat openly about Meng Yao for years.

Speaking of which, Jin Zixun is currently sect heir of Lanling Jin, which is an unpleasant thought in and of itself.

But while Jin Guangshan is doing whatever he is doing, he is also extremely angry at Wen Ruohan, since his is the only major sect without an immediate blood heir now, and it is all Wen Ruohan’s (son’s) fault.

And that is an opportunity for the rest of them.

It is A-Huan’s idea, or at least Qiren thinks so, to formally offer to send in a multi-sect force to recover the bodies of the lost sect heirs. He later learns that A-Huan and Jiang Wanyin came up with the idea together, in the letters they have been exchanging; either way, it is quickly taken up not only by the Jiang and Lan but by the Nie, the Jin, and the various minor sects whose heirs lie dead in Qishan.

Faced with this, even Wen Ruohan allows it, though Qiren is certain that he thinks of it more as an opportunity to bring them into his own territory and possibly do something additionally awful than as a real gesture of intersect trust.

This impression is increased when Wen Chao begs off of joining them due to his injuries. Wen Qing somehow ends up as the Wen representative in the group, with Wen Qionglin by her side—evidently Wen Xu’s death has made Wen Ruohan leery of sacrificing too many of his immediate heirs, which makes sense given Wen Chao’s general level of competence and hygenie.

When they arrive, even Qiren can feel the resentment flowing from the main cave entrance, which has been sealed off.

Hardly the behavior one would expect if Wen Chao had indeed slain the beast within, whatever it is.

Wen Qing directs them to set up camp there, regardless. She graciously permits the other sects’ forces to search for alternate entrances, while her own soldiers work slowly to reopen the cave. Qiren suspects that she is keeping the Wen cultivators busy, so that whatever her classmates might do to the resentful energy is kept as secret as possible.

Or maybe they’re all going to get killed. Wen Qing plays her cards carefully, he knows.

It is the Jiangs—Wei Wuxian, reunited with his shidi, Jiang Wanyin—who find the secondary little cave that leads down into the lair.

It is A-Zhan and A-Huan who make sure that they don’t do something foolish like try to go in alone.

Instead, they prepared carefully, sketching out arrays, drawing talismans, and carving out the entrance so that more than one can enter at a time.

Then they go in.

Qiren himself is not at the fore, and by the time he makes it in it is clear that Wen Chao has lied beyond all lies—because whatever he slew, if anything, was not the massive beast that is still snapping at cultivators flying on their swords around it, an improvised barrier of talismans penning it in place by drawing on the very resentment that swirls around it. This, he suspects, is Wei Wuxian’s doing.

The array that is being hastily drawn up on floating anchors around that talisman barrier, however, has Jiang Wanyin written all over it.

A-Zhan’s guqin thrums through the cavern, intertwining with A-Huan’s xiao and the instruments of other Lan cultivators as they send chords of power that distract and bother the creature, which he instantly recognizes at the Xuanwu of Slaughter.

No wonder Wen Chao assumed everyone was going to die, both times.

Qiren quickly conjures his own guqin and joins them.

“Done!” Jiang Wanyin shouts, and in the next moment A-Zhan’s guqin sends out a different burst, one that breaks down the talisman barrier and frees the Xuanwu—and its resentful energy.

That energy is then immediately channeled by the array that Jiang Wanyin has completed, which begins to chime and hum in the recognizable notes of one of the protective wards they prepared in Gusu. Qiren, his nephews, and the rest of the Lans join their power to it, and the Xuanwu responds, turning on itself and gnawing huge gaps in its own hide that the other cultivators take advantage of with ranged attacks.

One of them—Qiren is never sure quite who—finds the creature’s heart. Or perhaps it is several, all at once or in sequence, because such a creature never falls easily.

Whatever the cause, the Xuanwu totters and falls, though resentful energy continues to pour out of its gaping wounds for some time.

Chapter Text

The Xuanwu’s demise reveals two previously unknown truths.

First and most obvious, though not Qiren’s own personal primary focus, is the existence of further resentment emanating from the corpse. A-Huan takes command of that situation, to the extent that anyone can stop Wei Wuxian from leaping forward and grabbing at it like his mother going for the last piece the one time that someone in the kitchens had accidentally spilled excessive amounts of spice into the tofu.

She had probably exceeded her three bowls that day, he now realizes, but the chaos she had created around it meant that no one had actually counted. And she’d given at least half her pieces to Changze, so maybe she hadn’t after all.

This time, instead of intolerably hot bean curd, the prize is a sword—or at least, what wanted to look like a sword. It is spinning in the array, like it was trying to attack itself, which makes some suspect that it was at least partly alive (though there was nothing in the array that necessary required the resentful energy to connect to a spirit to direct it to attack resentment).

His beloved students…no, his beloved graduates of his seminar have that contained, which means he can turn his attention to the second major revelation.

This is what lies behind the Xuanwu’s now-dead bulk.

The Xuanwu cave, now that they are not actively fighting for their lives, seems fairly simple. It is basically a giant single chamber containing a lake. If the entrance that they forced from the narrow cavern is set at zero degrees, a sandy beach with a cliff wall that (he suspects) leads up towards the main, blocked entrance is almost 180 degrees from it, on the opposite side of the circle.

The dead Xuanwu is roughly halfway around the circle, 90 degrees.

But much more interesting than the generally circular shape are the little spurs off the main circle that line the sides of the larger chamber. Most of these are like the cavern they have taken, though he does not think they reach up to the surface—there is not enough airflow, not enough waterflow, nothing else that would suggest that they could provide relief from the trap that this chamber clearly is for anyone foolish enough to enter.

Idly, he wonders if Wen Chao actually ever came down the cliff, or he just forced his servants and the other sect heirs to, like the coward he clearly is.

He will get his answer to that later, when they sift through the bodies at the base of the cliff, where there is clear proof of a fight between the visiting sect heirs and Wen soldiers. Wen Zhuliu’s body lies next to a crumpled rope, a bit from the Xuanwu suggesting that none of the sect heirs were actually able to stop him—but that he died protecting his own sect heir who fled up the rope, then cut it. Whether he did so before or after Wen Zhuliu fell is, of course, impossible to tell.

But even that can wait, because there is something more important for Qiren to deal with.

Most of the little cavelets on the sides of the main chamber are narrow, their entrances thin and rocky with stalactites jabbing down towards anyone who might dare to clamber into them. Qiren suspects that they are natural, but that the chamber is not—it is too circular for that.

One of the spurs, however, is not narrow, but blocked, much like the main entrance of the cave itself. It does not look like a natural rockfall; rather, it looks like someone had heaved every single thing they could into the mouth of this particular spur: flotsam and jetsam from the lake, rock and gravel from the floor of the cave, even (to Qiren’s disgust) what seems to be a dead body (fortunately, it turns out to be just several bundles of clothes, likely stripped from dead bodies but much less likely to produce a fierce corpse).

He strides over, gesturing for several Lan cultivators to accompany him, and gets to work on undoing the barrier.

At first he hears nothing, but quickly there are sounds like someone is reinforcing the barrier from the inside. He does not shout (excessive noise is forbidden) but he has been lecturing for decades now, and he knows how to project—not to mention that the acoustics of the cave put bass into the echo of his voice.

“The Xuanwu is dead. We are here to get you out.”

The scrabbling from inside pauses and then intensifies, but now it is clearly the sound of someone or someones trying to get out.

He and those helping him work from the other end and then, at last, a final rock falls out and the barrier crumbles.

It is better than he had dared hope. Not only Jin Zixuan and Luo Qingyang, but over a dozen other sect heirs and their attendants are squeezed into the small space. They stink, they are gaunt, and he suspects that they will all want to be as far away from another human being as they can for as long as they can, but they are alive.

It turns out that when they found themselves sacrificed first to the Xuanwu and then to Wen Chao’s pride and cowardice, Luo Qingyang had noticed that there was another beachlet on this side, and suspected that it might lead to a larger space that the Xuanwu’s head could not fully get inside. Jin Zixuan had used his authority as the only heir to a major sect to urge the others into the space and they had barricaded it as Qiren had seen.

They had not expected to survive, but it was better than being eaten at the moment. And besides—even if Wen Chao was a coward, surely Wen Ruohan would wish to eliminate such a beast, and someone would come back.

Not everyone survived—some of them tried to clamber up the ropes that Wen Chao then ordered cut, others were caught by the Xuanwu before they could find safety. But enough of them are alive that Jin Zixuan ends up very red in the face with what Qiren thinks is embarrassment when he is hailed for saving their lives.

Luo Qingyang does not get the same acclaim, of course, though Qiren makes sure to include her in his congratulations. He is all the more alarmed when she collapses as soon as they try to move the trapped cultivators out, and a Wen brand is revealed on her neck. Apparently Wen Chao’s paramour had meant it to go on her face, but she had twisted away at the last second.

Now that they have found the sect heirs who were left for dead, there is no doubt in any of their minds.

This is already war.

Chapter Text

Wen Chao truly must be a fool, Qiren thinks. Not because he left the sect heirs to die; that was a bad idea, but it was a reasonable assumption that the Xuanwu would finish them off. That just made Wen Chao a terrible person, but not a fool. No, he is a fool because he clearly lied to his father, as well as to the cultivation world, about what happened in that cave. Perhaps it was what he had to do to justify to Wen Ruohan why his Core-Melting Hand was dead; perhaps it was his desperate attempt to puff up his own reputation with his father, who had always thought less of him, very publicly, than he did of his other, now dead, son; or perhaps it was the arrogance of being his father’s only living son that made him think he was indispensable and it didn’t matter much what he did.

But he had clearly lied to Wen Ruohan, because Qiren thinks there is absolutely no way that Wen Ruohan would have allowed what amounts to a whole army of other sect cultivators this far into Qishan—especially if they were going to find evidence not of the valiant fight that Wen Chao had claimed it to be, where the other sect heirs had fought valiantly and he had only triumphed at the last moment, but of the cowardice of Wen Chao in abandoning the others to die and not even succeeding in achieving that.

True, they are accompanied by a Wen army. But that Wen army is at least temporarily in service to Wen Qing, and that makes a difference.

Not that he expected Wen Qing to turn on her uncle. Public defiance of Wen Ruohan is a risk, and Wen Qing does not embrace risk.

But she does let them bring her army in to clear the site, after the Xuanwu was dead and the other sect heirs saved. And she brings the army in past the sect heirs who are being bundled out. And she makes them linger there while the Lan sect cultivators are playing Inquiry for the dead at the base of the cliff—most of whom are Wen sect cultivators expressing their anger at being abandoned by their own sect heir in his flight.

Now, Wen Ruohan’s power is not to be underestimated, and his grip on his people through fear and sect loyalty is not insignificant. But Qiren does not think he is mistaking the grim faces on the Wen cultivators, nor the way they pale and then grow angry as soul after soul cries out its charges against Wen Chao.

Not that he doesn’t help with that himself. The Wen cultivators do not speak the language of the instruments of Inquiry—but to provide extra hands he has asked other sect cultivators to act as scribes for the Lans performing the ritual, and therefore the Lans do and must report the statements of the dead out loud so all can hear.

It is not a pleasant recital.

Wen Qing never explicitly tells him that she will aid them against her uncle. He is not sure, actually, if she will. But does not suggest that the other cultivators should leave. In fact, even though her army is supposed to be clearing the site, she suggests, seemingly off-hand, that perhaps it would be appropriate for the families of the newly-found cultivators to join them here, and that she would not turn down additional assistance from the various sects in quelling the resentment in the cave—this despite the fact that, because of the array, there is actually a very low level of remaining resentment.

This is as close as he suspects she would ever come to an invitation to plan their attack on Nightless City from right here, and he does not turn it down.

He is already present, along with A-Huan, of course, and Qinghe Nie is close enough that a single messenger brings Sect Leader Nie in less than a day. Jin Guangshan oozes his way northwest surprisingly quickly as well—Qiren suspects that the glowering presence of Madam Jin and the murderous glares she shoots her husband as she pats her son over for injuries has something to do with that—and so does Yu Ziyuan, Jiang Fengmian in tow.

It does not take long at all for them to come to agreement, even Jin Guangshan: Wen Ruohan must fall.

Nor does it surprise him, in the end, when Wen Qing walks into the tent immediately after this decision has been made (he strongly suspects Wei Wuxian has tipped her off) and offers herself up as a potential new Sect Leader Wen.

Even Nie Mingjue has to agree that this would be an acceptable alternative to destroying the Wen wholesale, and even Jin Guangshan cannot effectively disagree that she would make a better one than the current sect leader. The latter still does his best to insinuate something to that effect due to her gender, but Madam Jin hits him with her fan almost as quickly as Cangse would have, though she does not follow up with the kick to the sensitive region that Qiren suspects his old friend would have brought to bear next. Not that he wouldn’t have deserved it, Qiren thinks privately.

He does not think this constitutes judging Jin Guangshan behind his back, since unfortunately he has to look at his leering face.

The Jin are, surprisingly, one of the better-represented sects as they start their march north; he again suspects the influence of Madam Jin, who is clearly uninterested in anything or anyone threatening her darling boy again. Or perhaps a few days with Jin Zixun as an heir have had a clarifying effect for Jin Guangshan after all.

And while there are ample Lans and Nies and Jiangs, and even some of the minor sects are there in strength, it is noteworthy that the single largest cohort are actually in the red of the Wen sect themselves.

Perhaps learning their sect heir and his father had abandoned their fellows to die did it.

Perhaps Wen Qing is simply that convincing.

Or perhaps the real power came from seeing that every other sect in the entire cultivation world had come together for this, and this gave them license to do what they had wanted to do all along.

Either way, Qiren rather hopes they will not get confused which red-robed cultivators are on which side.

Chapter Text

The march on Nightless City is not as difficult as he had expected it to be, most likely because the Wen, or at least Wen Ruohan, had not expected an attack to be launched from inside the borders of Qishan—or if did, they no doubt had expected that the very army which is marching beside them under Wen Qing would assist in the defense.

This speaks to more trust in others than Qiren would have expected from Wen Ruohan, but then Wen Qing tells them that she suspects there are two whole armies on the borders of Qinghe Nie and Yunmeng Jiang, respectively, so perhaps the Wen were simply in a more aggressive posture than they had realized, the active war of conquest more advanced, not merely towards Cloud Recesses but towards its allies.

Those armies, however, are out of the picture now; they could make it back, but they would need to fly so hard on their swords to make it back that their spiritual energy would be exhausted and they would be easy pickings. That doesn’t mean they won’t make an appearance, but it does mean that the rear screen is smaller than it might otherwise be on such a march.

And there’s a good chance they won’t even be called in time, both because of the distance and time involved and because Wen Ruohan is arrogant like that.

And after all, Wen Ruohan has a secret weapon up his sleeve.

Or so he thinks.

They have just crossed into the traditional territory of the Qishan Wen when the first fierce corpses rise up to fight them. Qiren knows this is the traditional boundary, though in his lifetime it has never been the actual border; Qishan Wen was once a sect, like Gusu Lan, that was more concerned with the purity of its spirit than with the size of its borders, and so was fairly contained in the northwest. However, for whatever reason—some like Nie Mingjue would undoubtedly say ambition, arrogance, greed, and a combination of all three, a more sympathetic observer might point to the need for someone to take responsibility for night-hunting in the areas that used to lie between Qishan and its nearer neighbors—it had started a series of expansions after the death of Wen Mao. First, and least problematically, it had filled the power vacuum around it, seeding little sub-sects where necessary to allow the people of the northwest access to trained cultivators. This is where Wen Qing’s branch in Dafan had come from, though they had intermarried repeatedly with the Qishan Wen across the years (she herself being the niece of the current sect leader, after all).

Then, Qishan Wen had begun euphemistically assisting minor sects in the areas they coveted, then formally overtaking them, then absorbing them entirely. All of it had been under the power of Qishan Wen, and so all of it had been called Qishan, though it had not originally held that name.

But now they were in Qishan proper, Old Qishan that was, and he could feel Wen Ruohan’s power wax as the land itself recognized his claim on it.

There is something simultaneously appropriate and deeply troubling about the idea that the corpses Wen Ruohan raises against them are from this part of Qishan. On the one hand, it truly is his land, and they are his honored dead, so it is a just thing for them to defend their people and their land.

On the other, he is desecrating the corpses of his own people, his own ancestors or those of his living disciples and the people living under his care, to raise this force through evil methods.

Yes, evil (and we do not associate with evil). Wei Wuxian might have convinced him that not all resentful cultivation is fundamentally wrong, but this…this turns his stomach. It is a violent act upon the honored dead, and it compels them to become mindless forces of viciousness. He does not know what it might do to their ability to enter the reincarnation cycle and he does not want to think about it.

But he does know what to do about it.

The fierce corpses are fearsome, to any ordinary cultivator. They do not die to the strike of a sword or a saber; horrifically as can be, they will lurch onward without limbs and vital organs, perhaps without a head, until they can no longer move their dead muscles at all.

To cultivators who know how to manipulate resentment safely, they are merely horrific because of their treatment of the dead.

When the first corpses lurch towards them, there is momentary panic—and then A-Huan moves forward, Liebing in his hands instead of Shuoyue, and begins the music that turns the corpses upon each other.

The other Lans up and down the line take up the music, with the occasional Jiang and Nie—and even Luo Qingyang, he notices, keeping time with a drum.

The attack is repulsed, with no deaths and few casualties of any kind on their side.

The next meeting of the sect leaders focuses on how Wen Ruohan is likely to react—and what their next step is, once he does.

He is not shocked to learn that Wuxian and A-Zhan have developed further themes of the music, with slightly different effects.

He is shocked, at least comparatively, that one of these themes allows for the resentful energy to flow out of the corpses entirely, bringing them back to a state of rest. Apparently this is derived from the work that Wuxian has been doing for the Nie in preparation to work on their saber tombs; by diffusing the resentment directly, rather than using it violently, it is intended to make the process safer—as long as there is a resentment sink that can take the resentment, to later use it to tear itself apart at a safe distance.

This is the role he envisions for the Yin Iron, and Qiren must grudgingly agree that it seems almost ideal for the purpose.

Honestly, his greatest fear is that it is too ideal: that putting resentment into the Yin Iron will produce exactly the problems it caused in the time of Xue Chonghai.

But that is a problem for later—though he will make sure they do deal with it later, and not leave it like a discarded piece of talisman paper on the floor, as Wuxian is all too fond of doing (just like his mother, he tells him, though Wuxian seems to find that more moving than reproving).

At least A-Zhan, like he used to be, is becoming used to picking that paper up.

Chapter Text

Old Qishan is not actually that large, so the march on Nightless City in the face of minimal resistance other than fierce corpses is not very long. It isn’t easy, because Wen Ruohan is clearly thinking about ways of evading their talismans and songs against his resentment—and the Yin Iron is definitely a tool that helps him do that—but it is a short hard slog instead of a long one.

He shudders to think what this would have been like if they had started at the new borders of the Qishan Wen, and if they had had to fight their way through the armies—let alone if they had not had the talismans that Wuxian invented.

And yes, his inner Cangse is definitely smug that listening to her (and therefore listening to her son) made such a difference.

“Be generous,” he wants to mutter back, except that everyone else around him would think he was either insane or talking to them. It was definitely not his first instinct to listen to Wuxian, but he thinks he deserves at least a little credit for what he did after he did listen.

A-Huan and Nie Mingjue take charge of the strategic planning, though Jin Guangshan tries his best to horn in on the conversations. Fortunately, Yu Ziyuan seems to have taken his insult to Madam Jin by leaving her son for dead as an insult to her as well (which only makes sense, given that he believes they are close friends, and their children are engaged) and spends most of her time giving Jin Guangshan a hard time, thus allowing the other two sect leaders to take charge.

Yes, two sect leaders. Relatively few messages have made their way into Qishan during this time—there is the small issue of two armies in the way—but one of them has informed Qiren that his elder brother has finally passed away in his seclusion. Qiren cannot deny that it is a sorrow to hear it but also a relief. He has not seen Qingheng-jun for years. Initially, his brother had allowed him to visit occasionally during seclusion, but since the boys’ mother (he does not truly think of her as his brother’s wife, though she was undoubtedly his sister-in-law) passed, he had shut himself up entirely, save for those who brought him food and washed his clothes and bedding. It was one of those who found him. Qiren tells the boys, and takes the rare indulgence of giving them each a hug. He does not expect them to mourn substantially, if he himself does not, but he owes them the space to do so if they choose.

He knows that Wuxian is there for A-Zhan, anyway. He is not certain about A-Huan, though he rather suspects Jiang Wanyin of hanging around the Lan part of the encampment more than usual.

Speaking of the Jiang, the less said about Jiang Fengmian’s involvement, the better. The man does not see the value of his son’s contributions; no ,worse, he actively devalues them, as if the fact that a suggestion came from Jiang Wanyin inherently made him skeptical of it. He shows no such bias against Wuxian, even though their ideas frequently come in pairs—Qiren wonders how the Twin Prides developed their ability to work together so well given how little support they receive from either parent. Yu Ziyuan has a well-known bias against Wuxian, so that is no surprise, though he had expected more support from her of Jiang Wanyin. Still, distracting Jin Guangshan so that A-Huan can implement her son’s advice is, he must admit, some help.

On the topic of the Jin, Meng Yao is also frequently present at their council meetings, as Nie Mingjue’s primary tactical advisor, and that perhaps also contributes to Jin Guangshan’s absence. Like his nephew before him, he had done his level best to get Meng Yao removed, but Nie Mingjue had refused to budge, pointing out that he was not there in any relation to Jin Guangshan at all—and that Jin Guangshan himself had asked for his service when he thought Jin Zixuan was dead.

Jin Zixuan’s surprising willingness to talk to Meng Yao may also have contributed to Jin Guangshan’s utter rout on the issue; apparently Luo Qingyang has nothing but good things to say about the bastard Jin, and had had plenty of time to discuss it when speculating about who might take his place if they died in the Xuanwu cave. Also, the fact that Meng Yao had not immediately jumped to take his place has apparently made a major impression on Young Master Jin, which speaks, in Qiren’s opinion, to his greater flexibility of mind (in a good way) than his father’s (which was always only in bad ones).

As a result of all the politicking and strategizing that goes on—which Qiren absents himself from as much as possible, now that his nephew is taking up the mantle of Sect Leader, though of course he continues to support A-Huan as much as needed or wished—they find themselves at the gates of Nightless City at almost the same pace that they might have made had they been making the trip as merchants in the days before the war.

Wen Ruohan, Qiren thinks, truly does not understand the steps that they have all taken towards understanding resentful energy. He still thinks of his Yin Iron as a critical advantage, not realizing that his reliance on it has actually transformed into a major disadvantage. Wen Qing has not been quiet about her desire to return the Wen to a less militaristic, more orthodox path; the only living soldiers they have encountered have consistently defected to her banner. And the reliance on resentment is not only a disadvantage for Wen Ruohan with living cultivators—he has still not fully acclimated to the degree to which his undead fierce corpses are a blunted weapon. The most significant injury that the Lan cultivators have been undergoing is bleeding fingers from overuse of the guqin; he believes that the Jiang have sent raiding parties not to villages but to stands of bamboo to make sure their supply of flutes is kept up. But as long as they can keep playing the right music, the fierce corpses are a highly surmountable obstacle.

But the main reason that he knows Wen Ruohan has not realized the full significance of the situation is that he allows them a day occupying the defile immediately outside of Nightless City to prepare, rather than striking immediately. He probably imagines that he is creating a sense of might and dread, because of the intense setting and the threat of the undead.

But practically? He is just letting Jiang Wanyin, Wuxian, and the rest of the seminar graduates draw the world’s most detailed array against resentful energy right at the gates of his own palace.

Chapter Text

They have not, previously, used the arrays very frequently against Wen Ruohan. Oh, to be sure, there were the arrays built into the wards at Cloud Recesses, which foiled Wen Xu’s assault and led to his death, but first of all, Qiren thinks, Wen Ruohan wasn’t actually physically present to see what happened then, and second of all it was rather a while ago as these things go (though in reflection it was only a matter of months). So relative to all the other things they have been doing, they haven’t done all that much with arrays.

Talismans, yes. So many talismans. Qiren thinks that if A-Huan ever does get around to ever actually expressing his increasingly obvious interest in Jiang Wanyin, and if that interest is reciprocated, and therefore he ever has to negotiate a second marriage contract with the holy terror that is Yu Ziyuan, he will insist on some of those additional talisman papers that Yunmeng Jiang has been producing as part of the agreement. He can fully understand exactly how that became a priority for the Jiang sect, now that he’s worked with Wuxian for a few months. Several years of exposure would undoubtedly increase the effect. Will increase it, he supposes, given that Wuxian is now his nephew-in-law.

But that aside, they have certainly used talismans aplenty in fighting off Wen Ruohan’s waves of fierce corpses. Even the Lan and Nie, who tend to fight with other techniques by preference, have become substantially more familiar with the ways in which talismans can substitute in for or supplement their cultivation. And the Jiang, of course, are more than familiar with the approach already and have embraced it. The Jin, on the other hand, seem to mostly be ignoring this new technique, except for a few who are willing to listen to Luo Qingyang—though since that group includes Jin Zixuan, he suspects that in time it will affect their cultivation as well.

The minor sects have embraced it with a fervor, since it offers an opportunity to multiply the power of small groups of weaker cultivators immensely and bears the imprimatur of a great sect to boot.

Musical cultivation has also greatly assisted their efforts, of course. A-Huan has been effectively moving their Lan cultivators around to ensure that there are always trained cultivators prepared to play whatever is necessary to counter the resentment, and while they have not formally trained any cultivators from other sects in proprietary Lan musical cultivation techniques they have not been shy about letting anyone who wants to learn Wuxian’s closely related music do so. Most of the sects have been less enthusiastic about this element, because spiritually-infused music is not easy and many of them do not train for it, but the intersection between music and talismans has received much more attention. Rightfully so, he thinks. Learning Lan cultivation techniques is difficult and requires deep attention to the attunement between the cultivator and the instrument used as a spiritual tool. Using it carefully to deflect or defend against resentful energy is a delicate process requiring great attention and care. “Diligence is the root,” after all, and while he would never claim that other sects are incapable of diligence, they certainly do not orient to it the way that he does.

Wuxian’s and Jiang Wanyin’s talismanic music uses the resentment of whatever is attacking as a blunt instrument, instead. No wonder the sects gravitate towards it.

He will always think that the Lan cultivation techniques are worth it, but he can understand that others will disagree. He can already hear Cangse laughing and telling him that “if there’s an easy way to do it that’s just as good, why intentionally do it the hard way,” and Changze reminding him that there is nothing wrong with something going right. So yes, he understands the idea of why people might be drawn to it. And besides, he’s not interested in teaching all the rest of them his own sect’s techniques, so this is convenient.

The arrays, though…

They haven’t used the arrays much on this march, because arrays are almost always defensive: someone has to move towards them, which means they are rarely useful on the attack unless you can prepare the ground beforehand.

And here and now, they can and they do.

When Wen Ruohan releases the hordes of fierce corpses on the second day—more than they had ever encountered before, enough that Qiren wonders where they even came from, if there is anyone living in Nightless City or indeed the nearby regions of Qishan. They had thought the people had fled before them, but there are now more horrific possibilities to consider—they are ready. This array is not quite the ones that they included in their wards; it is more advanced than that, drawing on both what the rest of the seminar invented in Wuxian’s absence and what he and A-Zhan did on their own.

When the first fierce corpses reach the newly-inscribed gates, they simply fall flat on their faces.

So do the second, and the third, until there are corpses piled up at the entrance to the Nightless City hip-deep and more.

The array has simply sucked them dry, pouring their resentment into the Yin Iron but allowing their souls to continue on into the proper cycles of reincarnation, cleansed and free.

It is truly a wonder, and Qiren thinks they might need to incorporate something similar into coffins and caskets, especially for those who did not receive a soul-calming ceremony in their youths.

The Yin Iron itself, or rather the two pieces and the near-sword, is orbiting around Wuxian now, humming with power.

He will never know if it was the defeat of his corpse army or the lure of the charged power of the Yin Iron shards that draws Wen Ruohan out, but something does.

They can feel it, a shift in the wind, in the mood of what should be a battle but has not yet become one.

He is still not sure there are other living people in the Nightless City, but there is one for sure: Wen Ruohan stands before them on the steps of his palace, his own Yin Iron circling around his hand, and laughs.

Chapter Text

The laugh echoes out across the plaza, and Qiren can feel the resentful energy surging up to meet the Yin Iron around Wen Ruohan’s hand. Perhaps it is the sheer power of the resentment; perhaps it is the experience from the seminar; either way, he feels more attuned to the resentment, more aware of its lurking power and the speed with which it flows to Wen Ruohan’s bidding, than he has ever been before. He has of course sensed resentful beings before; spiritual energy reacts to resentful energy, which is a large portion of how Wuxian’s theories manage to work. So he has been on night-hunts where he felt the prickling on the back of his neck, the hairs rising even when there was no breeze. But this is different. This is like looking out on an avalanche and realizing that because you can see the breaking wave of snow above you, there is no shelter you can find, no speed at which you can run, to avoid being swept away. This is the moment of sheer terror when a grasping hand cannot break the surface of the water and the murk pulls you down to fill your lungs with water; the instant when you see the sword slide between your ribs without, yet, feeling the pain that comes with it.

They are floating on their swords above the piles of corpses at the gates of the Nightless City compound itself, and yet they might as well be back in Gusu for all the hope he has of stopping whatever Wen Ruohan is doing.

And then the sound of a dizi squeals across the trailing edge of Wen Ruohan’s laughter, and the feeling of desperation fades as quickly as it came.

A guqin joins the dizi, and he does not have to look over to see A-Zhan standing besides Wuxian. He lands in the courtyard, the motion completing as if it had never felt paused in the moment of Wen Ruohan’s laughter, and pulls out his own spiritual instrument. Next to him A-Huan’s xiao enters the music and he feels rather than sees the rest of the Lans join in.

His eyes do not move from Wen Ruohan. It is as if they cannot; as if the paralysis that held his body and soul for a moment has shrunk down to only his eye sockets, his eyeballs, which remain trained on the Wen sect leader, whose hair is flying in a breeze that does not exist for the rest of them—or perhaps is generated by the twin pieces of the Yin Iron still orbiting his hand.

He does not need to look to play, of course. What kind of Lan would he be if he did? He was able to play when Cangse would put her hands over his eyes back at Cloud Recesses; when she had dared Changze to hide his sheet music; when his eyes had been filled with tears after hearing of their fate. He can play while his focus is elsewhere, even if these songs are somewhat new.

It is no challenge at all, for him or his sect.

They follow Wuxian’s lead, even as the song changes, warps away from the songs they have played before. A Lan knows music; they can all harmonize even as Wuxian’s melody line swoops and sweeps and his own Yin Iron floats up to orbit around his head, then higher.

It is only right to let Wen Ruohan know what he is facing, after all. “Do not use a concealed weapon.”

The world seems to shrink down to this: one courtyard, barely enough space to run through a proper set of sword forms for this many cultivators, though musical cultivation takes much less space. One Wen Ruohan; a few dozen Lan cultivators; Wuxian. He wonders for a moment where the other sects are—behind him?—but the music demands its fill of his attention and whatever effect is forcing his eyes to Wen Ruohan will not allow him to look around. It does not matter anyway. He is sure that if they cannot overcome the resentment Wen Ruohan is trying to break over their heads, the other sects will be as doomed as they.

The music crescendos, and he and the other Lans follow Wuxian’s improvisation. Oddly, he finds he has no doubts about the boy’s playing; whatever path he has chosen for all of them, he has full certainty it will be the right one, or at least the best of a bad set of options if it should come to that. His nephew-in-law-to-be has earned that, he thinks. He might seem reckless, but there is a well of careful thought and planning that he conceals beneath that apparent impulsiveness. Yes, he acts in the moment, but he spends the moments he is not acting observing, noting, thinking.

He cannot think of anyone better suited to find the right notes for this music in this moment.

As the music rises, so too does the resentment swelling around both sets of Yin Iron shards, until the air is dark with it. He can still see Wen Ruohan, only Wen Ruohan, and he wonders for a moment if this is what a stroke or a heart attack feels like, as the darkness floods his vision, which narrows to the single point of the Wen sect leader.

Then, when it feels as if he can play no more, give no more, and the world is going to turn totally black any moment, something sweeps into the picture, faster than he can fully process.

In the next moment several things happen, as if in slow motion.

His vision clears, and he can move his head.

As he does, his eyes follow Wen Ruohan as he falls insensible to the flagstones of the plaza at the bottom of the steps, the Yin Iron clattering to the ground beside him.

Then they sweep up to the top of the steps, where Wen Qing stands, holding a bloody sword.

And finally, his head snaps around as he sees motion from the corner of his eye, and sees A-Xian swoon into A-Zhan’s arms.

Chapter Text

He later discovers that what felt like such a long, extended period of improvisational music had, for the other sects, been but a few heartbeats at most.

It had been, apparently, the primary effect of A-Xian’s music: using the power that resentment had to make time linger and to cause the heart and the mind to focus in on a single moment, endlessly repeated and yet microscopically focuses on a single thought.

It is, it turns out, why he swooned. His body is unharmed, and his spiritual energy unmuddied, just as Qiren’s own is, just as the rest of the Lan contingent’s is. A-Xian and Wen Ruohan, had been the linchpins of the spell, however, and the two of them had been utterly frozen and consumed in the moment. The effect Qiren had felt was merely an overflow or a side effect of being involved in the music; for A-Xian and Wen Ruohan, it had been as if time had stopped for that instant.

A body is not designed for time to stop on it, and so when the spell snapped A-Xian’s had decided that the right response to heal itself was unconsciousness.

Apparently Wen Ruohan’s might have done the same, but Wen Qing had simply walked over and thrust her sword into his heart, without even wasting a drop of her spiritual energy on the deed, and so his body had greater problems to deal with. Ones that a few healing songs and a good dose of needles were not going to solve.

A-Xian, however, bounces back almost immediately. They aren’t even done cleaning up the corpses from the plaza by the time he is up and talking, and Qiren thinks it is only the fact that A-Zhan is the one playing for him that makes him stay in bed at all.

They do have a chaperone, of course; a very grumpy, soon-to-be sect leader chaperone whose needles are embedded in A-Xian’s skin and who will not countenance any hanky-panky not because it is premarital but because “I have better things to do than watch you suck each other’s faces, thank you very much.”

Wen Qing scares him, sometimes, but not in the way that her uncle did, and he thinks she will make a very good sect leader Wen when they have the time to actually have the installation ceremony.

He, of course, is not responsible for A-Xian or A-Zhan, except in his capacity as uncle. In fact, his primary responsibility is actually related to a different change in sect leaders: strange as it is to say in the wake of what should be the climactic act of this or any other age, his duties have entirely moved on from what is being called the “Sunshot Campaign” for some silly poetic reason about having brought down the Wen sun (despite the fact that there will still be a Wen sect afterwards, and a powerful one if his understanding of Wen Qing is anything to go by) to the question of how to plan his other nephew’s formal ascension.

Or perhaps that is not actually as distinct an issue from the Sunshot Campaign has he had thought, he realizes when Wen Qing slams into his tent with a proposal for a joint ascension ceremony with A-Huan.

“We could use the formal announcement of support,” she says in her blunt way, “before Jin Guangshan gets any ideas about carving up Qishan because of his sect’s stellar contributions to the war effort.”

He has a feeling she’s quoting.

“Obviously you would have your own ceremonies back in Gusu,” she continues, “but I believe a formal acknowledgement of both handovers could strengthen the authority of any choices that your nephew might need to make in advance of that.”

He nods. She’s not wrong, and he can see her point about cutting Jin Guangshan off at the knees.

And that is how Qiren gets roped into planning both sect leader ascensions at the same time.

He should have known better. But, well, “do not regret after offering,” and “do not take your words lightly.”

At least because neither sect has formally acknowledged elders available for the ceremony—the Lan elders, himself aside, are in Gusu, and he has rather a strong suspicion that the Qishan Wen elders were recently buried in the graves provided for the fierce corpses A-Xian helped them purify—the actual ceremony isn’t too hard to put together.

And it does keep him well away from seeing things he’d have to comment on in A-Xian’s room.

Hmph. Much like he used to take the longer, more visible route along to Changze’s room when he needed the other’s opinion about something, making as much noise as he could so that the two of them could be some semblance of decent and orderly when he arrived, he has adopted a minor cough whenever he approaches either his nephew’s or his nephew-in-law-to-be’s rooms. It is not a lie, he tells himself, merely a preview of how he would react if he saw again what he saw the one time he failed to do it. Mere chronological imprecision, not a falsehood at all.

They do, of course, have discussions about what to do in Qishan in the aftermath of the war, but these are greatly eased by the fact that the two armies on the border, after rushing back to Nightless City only to find a fiat accompli, have first sworn their loyalty to the new regime and then been formally disbanded as armies and encouraged rather strongly to resettle the land instead of (as A-Xian put it, fortunately not to their faces) acting like pointless parasites on it.

There remains the issue of the Yin Iron. All five pieces are together again, and while the wardings that they put on parts of it before are stopping it from reassembling itself, it clearly wishes to.

And so that is the topic of the last, infuriating conference that Qiren is dragged to the day before the ascension ceremonies.

Chapter Text

“It seems simple enough to me. Five pieces of Yin Iron; five major sects.” Jin Guangshan is, Qiren is fairly certain, repeating himself. This conference is ridiculous enough as it is without hearing it more than once. “Or are the Lan and Wen sects proposing that the rest of us should allow them to hold this power over the rest of us without due compensation?”

It always comes back to money with the Jin.

Or perhaps this is simply Jin Guangshan’s way of compensating for the fact that his sect did not take the seminar seriously, first sending an uninterested and boorish nepotism pick and then a fully competent cultivator who they decided not to respect?

Qiren is a little ashamed at how grateful he is that he is no longer the voice of the Lan sect, and therefore does not have to pretend to dignify Jin Guangshan’s remarks with respect. There are a lot of people he is supposed to respect: “the filial ones,” “elders,” even “oneself.” But other than the general Lan obligation to be respectful to the world at large, he has never once found a tenet that requires him to respect a slimeball like Jin Guangshan, who isn’t even older than him and certainly has never had a filial thought in his life.

A-Huan, however, has to deal with him, so Qiren will do his nephew the justice of not actively conveying that opinion, at least not now.

At least A-Huan is hardly alone. Nie Mingjue’s voice is next to be heard, and he points out (quite reasonably, Qiren thinks) that dividing the pieces up and letting whoever had them do whatever they wanted to do with them was exactly the sort of so-called solution that had been tried back in the days of Xue Chonghai, and that had led them to this precise state of affairs.

Well, he says it a little less politely, more like Cangse would have said it if she had been here. God, Qiren misses having people of his own generation he liked and respected. Yu Ziyuan he can at least respect, even if he dislikes her emphatically, and some of the minor sect leaders aren’t terrible—though none come to mind right now—but by and large he is simply tired of dealing with his own generation now that the ones worth his time are dead. And now that he isn’t required to by his own brother’s choices.

He retains just enough brotherly loyalty not to say ‘his own brother’s dereliction of duty.’

Maybe when he gets home he’ll just go join Lan Yi in the side of the mountain and talk poetry all day, assuming she doesn’t feel the same way about him by that time that he feels about his own contemporaries.

His eyes catch on unexpected movement. A-Xian and Jiang Wanyin have pulled Jiang Fengmian over towards Nie Mingjue, whispering furiously, while the next sect leader speaks (he thinks it is the young leader of Tingshan He). A-Zhan is, as usual, a white shadow at A-Xian’s side, and as he raises an eyebrow A-Huan walks over too. Nie Mingjue has pulled Meng Yao and Nie Huaisang over almost bodily, and when Wen Qing walks over to join them Qiren’s own curiosity gets the better of him and he goes too.

Of course that’s the same moment that Jin Guangshan interrupts the Tingshan He leader, his voice oozing out over the assembly. “Is there something you boys would like to share with the group?”

Qiren is uncertain whether he is more offended by the fact that Jin Guangshan has disrespected multiple other sect leaders with his phrasing, or by the fact that he’s acting as if this is his meeting, and not a meeting among equals where he is, while the wealthiest, far from the most important person present.

Though he supposes Jin Guangshan has never thought anyone else was more important than him.

To his surprise, it is not A-Xian who speaks, nor any of the sect leaders, but Jiang Wanyin, after receiving a rare nod from his father.

“Of course, Sect Leader Jin. If Sect Leader He would not mind yielding his time?” Jiang Wanyin has a snappish temper, but while Qiren has heard him yell many times he is also adept at the kind of aggressive use of politeness that A-Zhan has been known to use. Perhaps that is why he and A-Huan get along so well.

“Of course!” The Tingshan He leader seems surprised to be remembered. “What is it, Young Master Jiang?”

“We think we have a solution.” Jiang Wanyin doesn’t roll his eyes, but Qiren can see the way he wants to—and when did he get to know the Jiang heir so well? “Sect Leader Jin is right: no one or even two sects should have the power of the Yin Iron.” He does not leave Jin Guangshan a moment to preen. “So we will destroy it.”

“What?” Jin Guangshan asks the question that Qiren suspects is on everyone’s mind at the moment, and in the silence that falls after that question, Qiren’s own mind whirls.

What could they possibly intend? How could they think that they could achieve what even Lan Yi, Wen Mao, Baoshan Sanren never could?

And then it hits him. Even as Jiang Wanyin carefully explains it, his own thoughts race ahead of the words. The talismans that A-Xian invented to dispel the resentment of the saber tombs. The music that locks a target in a particular moment of time. The arrays that cause any escaping resentment to curl in on and consume itself. Even the lesser talismans that block and constrain the resentment. All of them, working together, could mean…

Given the right space, the right preparation, and the right timing…

“The Yin Iron can be purified,” Jiang Wanyin finishes. “And whatever reaction the energy may unleash can be contained, dispelled, and eliminated.” He nods at Qiren himself, to his great surprise. “We can end this, once and for all. Just like Grandmaster Lan taught us.”

Chapter Text

In the end, it’s frankly a little anticlimactic. Not that Qiren is complaining. After Jiang Wanyin’s little show, he ended up responsible for all his students again, which meant that he had to do all of that work on top of planning the double ascension ceremony. Not that he had been expecting to slack off—he personally takes the prohibition against “wallowing in luxury and pleasure” to not just mean actively not wallowing in those things but also to mean keeping himself busy when necessary—but he had had at least hoped to only have one substantial task in the last day they were planning to be in Gusu.

But no, now he has two, and everyone is so insistent that the Yin Iron be taken care of that they are somehow supposed to squeeze it in before the ascension ceremony, which means he has to violate his Lan bedtime rules and plan during the night.

He can almost hear Cangse laughing again, because she always insisted that there were certain rules that were more important, and therefore they shouldn’t all be cut into the rock in exactly the same font at exactly the same height—he remembers something like “really? Slouching is the same as killing, Qiren-ge?” coming out of her mouth on more than one occasion—and now once again he is proving that the rules about rising and sleeping are more like strong suggestions.

Fortunately, though of course recklessly, it turns out that the two Jiang boys have done far more of the planning of this than they should have before he even gets involved, so it is actually possible to have everything ready for the ritual by midday, with the ascension ceremony scheduled for that evening.

Part of the ritual involves carefully incising parts of the array that will activate into the Yin Iron itself. Apparently this is possible because while the Yin Iron can only be broken by massive spiritual or resentful energy applied at exactly the right (or wrong, depending on your perspective, he supposes) time in exactly the right/wrong way, it does not defend itself against merely being scratched, at least not by a spiritual tool.

To his utter shock, the person who spends all night doing this, carefully chipping away in perfect calligraphy on the tiny shards with the delicate end of a massive weapon, is Nie Huaisang.

But perhaps this should not have been a surprise. He has always noticed that Young Master Nie’s attention to the finer arts is equaled only by his indifference to formal learning and the saber techniques. Naturally he would be a fine calligrapher—and sculptor, if Qiren is guessing right—and of course he would be the one willing to use his spiritual weapon for a noble cause that nevertheless many would spurn as beneath their blades.

By midday, everything is in order, and he carefully double-checks all the elements with his students, one by one. And then, at his signal, the music begins, the cultivators begin pouring spiritual energy into the array, and A-Xian starts firing talismans one after another at the Yin Iron in its heart.

This time he is not playing, so he gets to experience the outside of the effect that he was subject to before: the Yin Iron should be vibrating, should be trying its best to break out or combine or whatever its malevolent semi-sentience would do in response to the massive assault breaking out on it through the array, but the music holds it fast, and the billows of resentment that ought to issue from it are slowed down so far as to almost be unnoticeable to any eye that was not straining to see it. Even the wind slows as it brushes through the center of the ritual, creating a slight vortex that almost threatens to whip dust up across one of the lines of the array, until one of A-Xian’s talismans seems to correct the flow.

That is the most drama that happens, though. All in all, it ends up being a fairly simple task, if any task requiring dozens of cultivators from every sect can be called simple (or at least drawing on them—he knows that a few strong cultivators alone could probably have provided the energy for the array, but agreed to Jiang Wanyin’s and A-Huan’s suggestion that they should use a little from every cultivator present, so that everyone was involved). As the music fades, everything seems to happen all at once, as time slips back into the center of the array and the resentful energy snaps out of the Yin Iron then seems to swallow itself up in a heartbeat before leaving behind five glowing pieces of lustrous metal that no longer hum with arcane energy.

If their calculations are correct, there is now nothing particularly special about the former Yin Iron—but to be safe, Wen Qing formally drops every piece, even the seeming sword, into the lava of the volcano beneath their feet, as witnesses from each sect formally record the act.

And so it is done. The Yin Iron is no more.

The ascension ceremony, too, goes off without a hitch. Jin Guangshan looks like he’s eaten a lemon throughout, but Qiren doesn’t really care about that, and he manages to get out the proper phrases about how the Jin sect looks forward to working with Wen Qing and Lan Xichen—not that it would really matter if he didn’t, as most sect ascensions don’t actually involve anyone from other sects, and so they would still be valid even if he had pouted and flounced away like it looks like he wants to.

He is so proud of A-Huan, standing up there and promising to do right and abide by the purpose and spirit of the Lan sect—even if he’s going to have to do all of this again in a week back in Gusu, it’s good to see his nephew acknowledged as who and what he was always meant to be.

It gets a little dusty in the Nightless City at that point.

Also, Qiren is crying because he is proud of his nephew. Lying isn’t just forbidden in the Cloud Recesses.

Wen Qing formally swears her oath to the assembled Wen cultivators, and begins her reign over the sect by announcing the appointment of a new set of elders—beginning with her own Popo, though Qiren is fairly sure the woman is barely a cultivator, if at all. Still, it is an impressive piece of filial piety, and it is not as if the elders of the sect are actually required to do much active cultivation. Popo Wen is hefting a young grandchild on her hip as she accepts the post, and Qiren thinks it is a nice image of the future of the Wen sect—or at least he does until she for some reason hands the child off to A-Xian to bow to her sect leader, and Qiren starts to think about grandchildren of his own, even if they will have to be adopted.

And they will have to be adopted, because apparently at some point in the manic scramble that was the planning of this ritual last night A-Huan and Jiang Wanyin finally talked to each other (or whatever else they did—he refuses to ask or find out), and the first person A-Huan rushes to after the ceremony is done is his beloved.

Well. He always knew A-Huan tended in that direction, both as a cutsleeve and particularly (in the last year) towards Jiang Wanyin.

He just hopes Yu Ziyuan doesn’t manage to somehow leave their next negotiation with the carved rules of Cloud Recesses in her qiankun pouch.

Chapter Text

It’s good to be back in Cloud Recesses.

A-Huan’s second, technically more significant, investiture goes well—not that Qiren was going to allow it to go badly—and Qiren finds himself freed of pretty much all of the sect leadership responsibilities that he has shouldered for the past two decades since his brother made the choices he made. Not quite all of them—A-Huan and the elders have apparently agreed that certain elements of intersect engagement will remain his responsibility, which more or less translates to “A-Huan doesn’t get to negotiate his own marriage”—but pretty much all of them.

Those negotiations go surprisingly well. Perhaps Yu Ziyuan feels that she already got everything she needed from the Lan last time, or perhaps she simply doesn’t feel the need to make Jiang Wanyin squirm the way she made A-Xian, or…who knows what goes through that woman’s mind. But they come to an agreement that he actually thinks is more on his side than hers: since A-Huan is sect leader, and Jiang Wanyin merely the heir, they will actually get more of Jiang Wanyin’s time in Cloud Recesses than he expected—though of course if he ever does ascend they will have to be apart rather more.

And he even gets some of that talisman paper thrown into the bargain.

Once that is over, he gets to plan two weddings for his two nephews: A-Huan is the eldest, and so should marry first, but he also has to get acclimated to actually running the sect, so they don’t formally announce their betrothal until after A-Xian and A-Zhan go through with their state marriage in front of everyone.

It’s very fancy. It also has almost no formal meaning in the Lan sect, because they were already promised, handfasted, and are clearly soulmates, so the sect would consider them together in any case, but it’s nice to make sure everyone else is aware.

A-Huan’s is more…everything. Even the red of the robes seems redder. But the grooms are just as in love, so again—nothing else really matters.

After that, he can actually relax. He has far more free time than he knows what to do with, but it is not like he is tempted to sit on his backside all day. Or rather, if he is going to do that, it will be with a book and a brush and paper and a chance to finally get to grips with the work he’s been putting off for those same two decades.

It isn’t as if this book on Lan Yi’s Commentaries is going to write itself.

Well, it sometimes feels like it does, because he now has direct access to the source, but he does remind himself repeatedly that Lan Yi’s word is not actually law in this: she wrote what she wrote, and even if her opinion has changed over time, that doesn’t mean he has to agree with her now.

“Harmony is the value,” after all, but that means he has an obligation not just to be harmonious to her current thoughts but to the words she wrote on the page, and to his own ideas about what the texts (both hers and Lan An’s) mean.

Fortunately, Lan Yi agrees with him on this. They spend hours most weeks chatting together in her little section of the Cold Cave, as the arrays they installed keep her spiritual cognition fed with energy and the cave’s own energies strengthen his cultivation too. At this rate he might live as long as she has.

He’ll be happy to, as long as he can see his nephews happy and his sect growing. And they are, and it is. He wonders sometimes if things might have been different if the war with the Wen had been longer, or bloodier—or if Wen Xu had broken in through the wards before the war even started.

He doesn’t like to linger on that too much.

He still teaches, of course. That was never actually part of his sect leadership duties; it was always the thing that he wanted to do. And as an elder, and the grandmaster of the school, he now has time to teach even more than he had been before, even if the lectures are not always going on. He teaches the occasional visiting disciple, and of course the Lan sect students themselves, and it is fulfilling. And each time that the guest disciples arrive, he is sure to give that first lecture himself, to the assembled Lans, Nies, Jins, Jiangs, and Wens, as well as all the minor sects and even the rogue cultivators who manage to wrangle an invitation. They make a habit of being open-handed with those invitations, now—after all, Cangse Sanren’s son became part of two major sects, so it’s not like the rogue cultivators can’t become part of the system.

There is one element of teaching he has given up, of course. Though he will always be proud of his graduates in the advanced resentful energy seminar that first year, there is no real excuse for him to teach it again. After all, he has a nephew-in-law who knows far more about it than he does. A-Xian can teach the seminar—he’s part of the Lan sect now, after all—and if Qiren happens to take the time when he (as head of the school) discusses curriculum with his new teacher to reminisce frequently about his own time teaching a certain Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze (and perhaps several more anecdotes about times that had nothing whatsoever to do with teaching), well, that’s what family is for.

He's glad to see A-Xian finding an outlet for his intellect that isn’t just wandering like his mother, anyway. And even if he weren’t trying to find space for his nephew-in-law in Cloud Recesses, and in the sect, he would still want A-Xian teaching this particular class. The Lan sect believes firmly that the most qualified person should teach each class, and there is only one choice for that. Because while Qiren may be Grandmaster Lan, even he would acknowledge that there is only one Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation.