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Chapter Text

She burns to ash.

That is the one thing she, Wen Qing, is certain of. Before anything else happens, before anything else can happen, she burns. She can’t actually be certain that she burnt all the way to ashes, because there’s a certain point at which even the most vigorous golden core (and she doesn’t have even the most vigorous golden core she’s ever had physical contact with) and the strongest spiritual cognition (ditto, though less physically) cannot maintain a connection with the body that used to be theirs, and so while she can see no reason that her body would not have continued combusting into ash, she cannot be entirely certain.

She is certain that she burned, though. You don’t forget something like that. No one does, but especially not someone like her. Because, burning-to-ash aside (and you could perhaps be forgiven if you did not put it aside, but she would ask you to for the sake of this point, if she hadn’t learned from other parts in her life that asking for things was often asking for trouble), Wen Qing is a survivor. And survivors don’t forget things that threaten to kill them—much less things that actually do. Even things they walked voluntarily into, like this.

She is certain that she burned, because she knows exactly why she burned. She burned because she and all her people, even A-Ning and Popo and Uncle Four (not quite all her people, A-Yuan was tucked into a little tree limb, but all her adult people, all the people who are old enough and mature enough to make their own choices, yes even A-Ning for all he’s her younger brother) let themselves be burned—or rather, let whatever was going to happen when they turned themselves in to the cultivating world happen, which was burning.

Because if they burned, perhaps, just perhaps, enough of the bloodlust would be sated that Wei Wuxian would not. That A-Yuan, tucked into his little tree, would not. That someone could survive this, because all of them could see that without some sacrifice, no one would.

She burned, and she is only slightly less incandescent now.

Because she burned, she chose to let herself burn, and now someone or something has undone her sacrifice.

She burned, and then she woke up.

**

She wakes up not bound to a stake outside Carp Tower, not in the slightly-scrubbed-but-still-haunted mess that is the Burial Mounds, not on the streets where she lived for months frantically seeking A-Ning and the rest of her family, not in the various prisons (Jin, Wen, who knows or cares) she had been in before that, not in the Yiling Supervisory Office or even her uncle’s terrifying palace in the Nightless City where she had (has?) spent most of her life desperately trying to use her unequaled medical skill to keep herself and A-Ning simultaneously enough out of her Uncle’s mind not be killed and enough in his mind that he wouldn’t let Wen Chao or Wen Xu do anything to or with them. No, she wakes up, impossibly enough, in the Cloud Recesses.

Perhaps, she thinks for one hysterical moment, she is simply in the land of things-that-burn. The Wen—her clan—had burned Cloud Recesses, after all, only a few years before she burned herself. Perhaps there is some special afterlife for those things that evil people have put to the flame, some waystation before reincarnation that allows them to become whole again.

It’s a nice enough thought that at first she lets go of the anger, lets go of the sense that her sacrifice was wasted. Perhaps, she lets herself think, this is not an undoing or a rejection of her sacrifice, but a recognition of it by some celestial being more powerful than she knows, or by the universe itself. Perhaps she and the old Cloud Recesses are somehow bound together for a fleeting moment and then she will be able to move forward into a new life where she exists, but is no longer Wen Qing.

Then the day starts, and she knows what day this is, and the anger returns, hotter than ever, hotter even than the fire that burned her to ash.

This is the day she spent wandering the Back Hills of the Cloud Recesses looking for a vanished Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian (and, by the way, technically fulfilling her Uncle’s demand that she poke her nose where she wasn’t allowed in order to look for Yin Iron fragments). But it’s also, she knows, the day that her idiotic beloved adopted brother-slash-protector, the man she and her family had literally just died for, first encountered the Yin Iron himself, in an impossible cave beneath (parallel to?) those hills.

No, he never told her that, not intentionally, but the man babbled: in his restless sleeps in the Burial Mounds, where she was not quite far enough away those first few nights not to hear him; in pain the many, many times she stitched him up there when he insisted on trying to cleanse the Burial Mounds without a golden core to help him heal when the various entities residing there resented it; and most of all in the two days of conscious pain when she’d pulled the golden core out of him with her own hands and put it into his brother and sect leader. No, he hadn’t made the Seal yet then, but he’d said enough about Yin Iron and horrifying sword-like things that spoke in his head that she’d been able to make a lot more sense of what would otherwise have sounded like complete ravings during his night terrors in the Burial Mounds.

So yes, she’d pieced some things together.

To wit: the Stygian Tiger Seal was, in some way, bound up with the Yin Iron. No surprise there, she supposed, though it was surprising that he had been able to master it in ways that her Uncle had never done.

To wit: Wei Wuxian was in love with Lan Wangji, though he didn’t know it himself. This was also no surprise, on either side, though his ravings had made it clear before she’d even seen Hanguang-jun come to their little village carrying her cousin.

To wit: Wei Wuxian’s soul had been inextricably entwined with both Lan Wangji and the Yin Iron since at least their time at the Cloud Recesses, which meant since at least this day.

She has a horrible idea that she knows what happened.

The only question left is this: has only she traveled back in time, or has her family?

And yes, that very much includes the question of whether the Wei Wuxian who is about to tumble out of a seemingly blank cliff face entangled with the Lan ribbon of one Lan Wangji is the one who she considers her brother, the manic ball of trauma and ridiculousness who calls her Qing-jie, or not.

She walks to the cliff face and sits there, waiting. There’s no time like the present to find out.

Chapter Text

While she waits—she had forgotten just how far she and everyone else had searched, last time, because this time she knew where they’d be coming out—she thinks.

What does she, Wen Qing, want in this second chance at a life?

She can identify two things, and they are not in conflict.

First, she wants to save the people she intends to save. Whatever dark magic Wei Wuxian wrought that brought her back—and she will call it dark magic, thank you very much, even if she doesn’t usually append that type of judgment to resentful cultivation, given how it had kept her and hers alive, but this is different in scale and scope—she refuses to let it prevent her from saving his life. Ideally she won’t have to sacrifice hers for it, but the intention remains, with a good side helping of “you asshole you don’t get to tell me how to die.” The list is longer than him, of course. A-Ning, as always. A-Yuan, even if he isn’t born yet, assuming he ever is now, because he deserves better. Popo, even though she’d yell at her for putting “an old woman” on a list like this over younger people—or perhaps because of it. As much of the rest of her family as possible, though she’s bitterly aware from the last war how many of them could die and have her still be grateful because some managed to survive at all.

Herself, if possible, but beneath the rest of them.

Second, she wants revenge. Revenge on Uncle Ruohan for trying to destroy the world, and for holding A-Ning and the rest of her family over her head for most of her life. Revenge on Jin Guangshan for things he hasn’t even done yet but that didn’t surprise her one iota at the time. Those two will do for now—there will likely be downstream effects, and if she happens to off her uncle’s heirs or that repellent little shit Xue Yang, she’s not going to weep, but it really is about those two men who think they are above everything and everyone else.

Convenient, then, that if she could get rid of them she thinks that the other task would become much easier.

Honestly, she could accomplish most of it by letting things go the same way they went last time, only figuring out some way to kill Jin Guangshan. She wouldn’t prefer that—she did lose a lot of cousins after all, and not all of them were worthless slime like Wen Chao—but it could work.

Except…

Add a third wish: now that she knows that the procedure works, and has satisfied her intellectual curiosity, she never wants to hold another human being’s golden core in her hands and keep a friend awake for two days of excruciating torture to transplant it into another person.

She knows this isn’t how odds work, but she can’t help but feel that if it was a 50-50 proposition and she’s done it once, it would be courting disaster to try it again. And besides…the itching at the back of her mind about whether it would work isn’t there anymore. She’s done it. She can face the fact that nonconsensual surgery is not on her menu anymore without regret.

Add to that the fact that Wei Wuxian, currently on her “do not let die” list, is the kind of intensely self-sacrificing person who asked her to do that surgery in the first place, and she’s going to have to do something about the fall of Lotus Pier. Or at least Wen Zhuliu’s presence there. Because even if she refuses to do the surgery, he’s going to do something self-destructive in the wake of that disaster, and she can’t let that happen, not when she knows where it might lead.

So a more active role it is, then. At least once she knows who she’s dealing with—this would all be much easier if Wei Wuxian came back with her, but there’s no way of knowing except this waiting.

She has just finished thinking this when Jiang Cheng rounds the corner of the woods and then bang, there Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are, on the ground in front of her, as if there were a doorway in the impenetrable rockface.

She takes two steps forward as they roll on the ground and grabs Wei Wuxian by the ear.

“What the hell do you think you’ve been doing, Wei Wuxian?”

She knows this is the moment of truth. Her Wei Wuxian is familiar with her brand of family feeling—she suspects from the way Jiang Cheng is bristling behind her that he is familiar for multiple reasons—and this is practically a dance between the two of them by now, where she growls and he evades. Besides, he’ll know the past just as well as her, bad memories and all (there’s no way he doesn’t remember Lan Wangji and that cold cave, witness his mumblings while out of it), and he’ll know this isn’t how it went, so he’ll recognize her.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t.

“Wen Qing? What are you doing here? Jiang Cheng?” This Wei Wuxian, definitely the young man she went to Cloud Recesses with and not the one she huddled in Demon Subduing Cave with over the body of her brother, splutters and hauls Lan Wangji to his feet as he rises, hands still tangled in the Lan ribbon. “Where are we?”

“Where are you? Where have you been, more like it!” Jiang Cheng shoulders up next to her, as if offended that she took his initial yelling from him. “It’s been a whole day, where were you and Lan Wangji this whole time?”

Wei Wuxian goes to scratch his head, only his hands are still tied to Lan Wangji’s.

In this moment, two thoughts go through Wen Qing’s head in immediate succession.

The first is the Lan rule that Lan Qiren had made them memorize about who is allowed to touch headband ribbons.

The second is that if she’s going to save Wei Wuxian’s life and stop the massacre at Lotus Pier, they’re going to need a lot more formal alliances this time around.

She’s always thought of A-Ning as the prankster in the family—that’s definitely something her two younger brothers, the biological one and the unknown-to-him adopted one, have in common, something they bonded over in a past life—but perhaps she has more if it in her than she thought, because before Wei Wuxian can extricate himself, she speaks.

“Why, Lan Wangji, isn’t that your headband? Are you and Wei Wuxian married, or did you just adopt him?”

Chapter Text

She enjoys the way that Wei Wuxian’s eyes bug out of his head, and the fact that this distracts everyone from the fact that she was just sitting there, right at the spot where the boys fell out of the cliff. She doesn’t actually come along to see the aftermath, because it’s not her sect that’s directly involved, but she fancies that she can hear Lan Qiren yelling from where she and A-Ning spend the afternoon.

He’s practicing his archery, now that they’ve found Wei Wuxian, and she finds that she doesn’t mind nearly as much as she’d expected she would that he’s not her A-Ning (well, the A-Ning who went through everything with her; this and all other potential versions of A-Ning are still her A-Ning, because you don’t stop being a big sister just because you traveled through time and your brother didn’t). Actually, it’s a strange relief to realize just how much of her brother Wei Wuxian had managed to bring back from the brink of death (or, she suspects, just beyond); other than the physical features and the lack of superhuman strength, this A-Ning is just like she remembers, and that is a blessing she could never have contemplated before. She had spent so long wondering if her memories were just wishful thinking, if A-Ning had actually come back wrong and she simply couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. Knowing now that it truly was him, that her memories of A-Ning weren’t false, weren’t the desperate imaginings of someone who truly wanted to see her brother and not the Ghost General that everyone else believed him to be, makes her almost dizzy with joy.

Perhaps that is why she is content to simply sit and watch him shoot water droplets off the waterfall, not interrupting him to make him go study or asking him why he was out here, like she used to do. Because she doesn’t wonder, not now; now that she’s seen what A-Ning would do with the power to protect them, now that she’s seen what he did for Wei Wuxian even without that power, now that she’s seen the aftermath of him killing Jin Zixuan, she recognizes why he’s out here practicing the one martial skill he’s good at even though it’s not like Wen Ruohan is ever going to let him use it for real.

Perhaps she should be doing the same. After all, A-Ning may recognize that there’s a war coming, and he may have that urge to defend those he cares about, but she knows that war is coming, and she has literally died once already to try to do the same. She’s never been a martial cultivator, and she won’t start now, but neither is A-Ning, and yet here he is.

Archery isn’t true martial cultivation, after all, even though a cultivator’s skills are useful for it. Balance, breath, timing, strength—all of these are attributes of a good cultivator and a good archer, but there is relatively little use of actual spiritual energy, if any, in the discipline. That is why Wei Wuxian, in a past life, could still shoot without his golden core. And it is why A-Ning, for all his difficulties with martial cultivation, is a better shot than their cousins.

She’s seen the same with talisman work, she thinks. Wei Wuxian is a genius at it—was a genius in their past life, yes, but she recalls fits and starts of it already here in the classes at Cloud Recesses, from his bothering Lan Wangji with papermen to the little doodles of talismans he puts in the corners of papers while he thinks no one is watching.

She is always watching, because she has been a spy for her uncle. Not that she reported anything back to him about that, but she was always vigilant. She has had to be ever since she and A-Ning were summoned back to the Nightless City to serve their uncle—or she was summoned to serve, and he was summoned as a hostage—and you don’t lose that skill even when you are out of the immediate eye of your tormentor. She remembers Wei Wuxian’s talismans from the lake, too; no talisman paper, just the rapid motion of hands and the seemingly impossibly strong effects they produced. And from Dafan Mountain, when he put them inside a gilded cage that even her possessed relatives could not break down with only a few gestures. And of course from all their work together on A-Ning’s not-corpse before it became A-Ning again. Most of those talismans are still burned on the inside of her retinas if she closes her eyes, given how many hours she spent staring at them.

She is not a martial cultivator, but she is observant, and she remembers things. Perhaps it would be worthwhile for her, like A-Ning, to practice something that could help protect her beyond the range of her needles and her wit.

And if she plays her cards right, she has no doubt she can draw Wei Wuxian’s interest by doing so, and perhaps forge that friendship earlier, and in ways that don’t require anyone or their siblings to die or lose their cores. He always loved talking cultivation theory, after all, and she expects he’ll be just as fascinated with his own talismans when they come from her fingers and brush as when they came from his originally—perhaps more so, since he has always discounted his own genius far too much.

But enough of this. That is for the future. Right now, she will enjoy her time with A-Ning, and wait to find out exactly how much trouble Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji will have gotten in for disappearing and coming back something very much like engaged.

And since there is ample paper in the Cloud Recesses (what a luxury, she thinks involuntarily, after the struggles to buy it in Yiling), perhaps she will start writing down what she remembers, in case something significant comes up.

Chapter Text

The more she thinks about it, the more she becomes aware that she is going to have to commit treason, or something quite like it. This is not necessarily a new thought for her; she had worked her best to trick herself into not thinking it in Uncle Ruohan’s presence in her past life, but she had ultimately acted on it, at least in his definition, when she had helped the Jiang remnants (helped Wei Wuxian, helped Jiang Cheng, helped Jiang Yanli), and she had been imprisoned for it. In prison she had only thought it more militantly, since if the Wen sect was going to kill her and her family there was no more point in being loyal to it.

Now she knows that the Wen sect itself will not necessarily do that—but that the war that the Wen sect is going to insist on will. And she has no illusions that she can turn Uncle Ruohan from his intended course this time any more than she could last time. And that means her options are pretty much limited to varieties of treason.

Given this, it is not a hard decision to tell the Lans about the Yin Iron. After all, she is fairly certain that they already know—not only because there was Yin Iron in the Back Hills of Cloud Recesses, but because Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian will have found it—but she does not know exactly what they know about it, and combining information seems valuable to her.

She debates for a while what entry point to use to introduce the topic: should she address Grandmaster Lan? Lan Xichen? Lan Wangji? She knows that the sect leader is in seclusion, so he is definitely out, but she wavers for a little bit about the other options before committing to the obvious option that she was always most likely to use: Wei Wuxian.

She corners him one day when he is talking to A-Ning about something that probably wasn’t very consequential since she doesn’t recall him ever confiding in A-Ning at Cloud Recesses.

“You need to know about the Yin Iron,” she says, matter-of-factly. With Wei Wuxian, as with anyone prone to flights of genius and lateral mental leaps, you needed to get on topic fast and stay there, or he’d wander off into some intellectual garden of his own that was probably brilliant but wasn’t the point. “My Uncle sent me to look for it. I can help.”

Of course Wei Wuxian and A-Ning both squawk and flail and act as if this is the greatest and most terrible secret that no one should be talking about—which it probably would be to her as well, if this wasn’t the second time she’d lived it. After all, she hadn’t told Wei Wuxian, or A-Ning, about their mission in any great detail (in the latter case) or at all (in the former) the first time around. But she knows she’s working against a clock here—how long did it take Wei Wuxian to punch Jin Zixuan and get kicked out of Cloud Recesses last time? How long did it take Uncle Ruohan to burn the place down?—and she does know how secrecy worked out last time, so she takes the plunge and ignores the flapping limbs of her little brothers as they act like the chickens she wishes they had had in the Burial Mounds.

“I’m going to assume you have the one I was sent for already—well, you and Lan Wangji—but you should know that Wen Chao is going for another one, and Xue Yang for a third.” She briefly explains both those missions, since she was there for her uncle ordering his other minions about, and then elaborates slightly on her description of Xue Yang, since they haven’t met him in this reality yet. “I think Wen Chao is closer on the trail of his” he had gotten back with it before she had returned from classes,  first time, so that seemed likely “so you should go after him first.”

She ignores Wei Wuxian’s attempt to protest that he isn’t doing anything of the sort and clicks her tongue at him. “My cousin will try to track you with a dire owl; it’s hard to hurt, because it draws on the surrounding resentment in the air. Talismans are probably more useful than arrows.” She turns to smile at A-Ning. “Not that arrows can’t work, but you’d have to hit the true center, whereas a talisman just needs to affect the resentment aura.” She turns back to Wei Wuxian. “Musical cultivation might work too. Make sure Lan Wangji brings his guqin.” She hesitates, then continues. “Do you have a dizi here?”

“How do you know I play the dizi?” Wei Wuxian throws back, and she can’t help but laugh. Ironically, this is one thing she doesn’t need her foreknowledge to anticipate, as A-Ning quickly confirms.

“Uh…Young Master Wei, you were talking about how you wanted to play the dizi to accompany Second Young Master Lan just last week.”

“Oh. Uh. I guess I was.” He blushes redder than their robes, and she doesn’t resist the urge to roll her eyes at him. Lovestruck, the pair of them, though at least this time they appear to be aware of it—she didn’t stick around for the conversation, but she knows, as everyone seems to know, that Jiang Fengmian is coming to visit Cloud Recesses to discuss something about the situation between the two boys, and she has no doubt of what that situation might be given the way the two of them look at each other and the fact that Lan Wangji had dinner at the Burial Mounds. Not that he’s done that in this reality, but that doesn’t make it less obvious to her.

She’s not surprised when Wei Wuxian redirects the conversation back to the Yin Iron—he may not have loved to talk about serious things, but he always did prefer to talk about them more than his own feelings—and even less surprised when the next day she gets a visit from Lan Xichen and Lan Qiren, both itching in their very prim and proper Lan way to ask her more about what she’s up to and why.

It’s not the world’s most comfortable conversation, but she expected it when she went to Wei Wuxian. And it’s worlds more comfortable than the last conversation she had in their presence—the one that ended with her burning at Carp Tower, while the oh-so-stoic Lans looked on.

She’s willing to limit her revenge to Jin Guangshan, but she hasn’t forgotten any of the faces she saw in that crowd, and she doubts she ever will.

Chapter Text

It’s when she’s planning the details of her treason with the Lans that it hits her: Meng Yao.

She’s going to have to do something about Meng Yao.

She really would like to minimize the number of people she directly kills or advocates for killing—she is a doctor, after all, and while she’s not actually ministering to any of these people except sometimes Uncle Ruohan, it still goes against the grain—so while she is fully aware that Jin Guangyao was the one who administered the camps, alongside Jin Zixun, she’d really like to just chalk it all up to Jin Guangshan and make sure he goes away.

Jin Zixun is an idiot and a blowhard and if she deals with Jin Guangshan he won’t be a problem because he has neither a backbone nor a plan of his own. She certainly wouldn’t mind his death, since he’s in many ways the one responsible for A-Ning’s death last time, but she also assumes it will take care of itself once his uncle isn’t defending him. Jin Guangyao, however, she knows has a brain, because she worked with him when he was working with Uncle Ruohan, and she knows he has a backbone too, if the kind that is just as flexible as the sword he prefers. He might be an issue even if his father dies. He certainly might be an issue if he stays with Uncle Ruohan, even if he was the one who finally killed him.

So it’s better if he stays Meng Yao—and if he stays with the Nie.

She’s not entirely certain how he came to leave them in the first place, since she was pretty busy when it happened, but she remembers it had something to do with Xue Yang, which means this is probably a two birds, one stone kind of situation.

After all, she can justify why she knows that Xue Yang is a problem without reference to whatever timey-wimey thing has happened to her; it is much harder to do the same with Meng Yao, trusted advisor to Nie Mingjue.

So she puts a little extra effort into mentioning that Xue Yang has a tendency to escape from traps and prisons, and suggesting that perhaps he ought to be more of a shot-on-sight kind of maniac than the kind who gets locked up. She isn’t sure if it makes any difference to the Lans, but maybe she’s planted a seed? Or maybe she’ll have to get her hands dirty herself.

Jiang Fengmian arrives a few days before the lantern ceremony, and to her surprise this time he brings Madam Yu with him. Wen Qing has always wanted to admire Madam Yu—there were a few blinks of the eye in the past timeline where she’d daydreamed about her as a mother-in-law, and she certainly has to respect anyone who can marry a sect leader and keep their identity, not to mention anyone Wen Zhuliu has expressed actual fear of in her hearing—but she also has done surgery on Wei Wuxian and she knows where the scars on his back came from. Some of them, anyway. So it’s a disappointment but not a surprise to see them actually interact.

Never meet your heroes, she supposes.

At least it appears that marrying the Second Jade of Lan is the sort of thing that Yu Ziyuan thinks of as good trouble for Wei Wuxian to have gotten into, for all that she still lashes out at him as if it is trouble. She calls him shameless and asks whether he was trying to bring the Jiang sect into disrepute, but she also acknowledges that whatever happened in the Cold Cave it is a good thing for the Jiang to have an alliance with the Lan. Lan Wangji appears to have finally found enough of his vocal cords working to express that he is indeed interested in this match, so the Lan have committed to it even though Wen Qing still thinks Grandmaster Lan would rather burn his hand than shake Wei Wuxian’s—and she thinks that her own contribution about the Yin Iron is at least paving the way for the Grandmaster to acknowledge that alliances are good right now, even if they involve untamable free spirits who natter on about subjects they shouldn’t.

Perhaps because her parents are present, Jin Zixuan does not horribly insult his fiancée this time around, so at least Wen Qing doesn’t have to pretend to care about his facial injuries because Wei Wuxian doesn’t punch him. He does still leave the Cloud Recesses, but this time it’s with his betrothed, on an actual quest, and not just coincidentally going the same way and ending up together.

And this time she’s much more deliberate about hanging out with the Jiang siblings who are left behind. She had done it a little last time, simply (she told herself) because there was no one else interesting left in Cloud Recesses, but now she has “avoid the fall of Lotus Pier” on her to-do list, and she figures it wouldn’t hurt to actually know something about the place.

Also, Jiang Cheng may not have given her a comb in this reality, but he’s still cute, and Jiang Yanli is the only other high-ranking woman here, so they have things to talk about.

And A-Ning needs someone to keep training him in archery now that Wei Wuxian has left, and she doesn’t think Jin Zixuan is likely to help. Lan Xichen might, but she always heard that the Jiangs were the best at it anyway. She might have heard that from Wei Wuxian, who has always had his own biases, but that doesn’t stop her from roping his younger brother into teaching hers about hitting moving targets.

She gets her comb again, earlier this time, and this time she’s going to have to think very hard about exactly what it would mean to live with Yu Ziyuan. Because if there is no fall of Lotus Pier, it is possible that Jiang Cheng can actually protect her people—but if there is no fall of Lotus Pier, Yu Ziyuan is going to be alive, and have something to say about it.

Well, it’s better than a year in the Burial Mounds a kick in the teeth, she supposes.

Chapter Text

All too soon, time passes and it becomes her turn to put her plan into action. She has already heard that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji beat Wen Chao to the piece of the Yin Iron he’d picked up first in her original timeline, and she had hopes that they would also do something about Xue Yang. But if she was truly to save her own people and stop this war, she couldn’t do it from the Cloud Recesses—and besides, the year of study was ending anyway, so they would have to leave.

Wen Chao comes to collect her, and she goes willingly.

He is grumpier than last time, and he hadn’t been a ray of sunshine then. He tries to pick fights, and when that doesn’t work he tries to use her to trap Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji just like he had last time—only this time they aren’t where he expected them to be, because he is late (because he didn’t have the Yin Iron and he’d wasted time looking for it).

Uncle Ruohan is livid when they came back empty-handed and late, and fortunately he knows the measure of his younger son and so the blame falls on Wen Chao and not on her.

Not that that had always stopped Uncle Ruohan before, but then her cousin is an easy man to be angry at, even for his father. Perhaps especially for his father, given everything.

She slips back into the rhythm of the Nightless City and its infirmary, with only a few changes. She spends a little more time in the library and her Uncle’s office—since she is in charge of trying to balance Uncle Ruohan’s qi as he experiments with Yin Iron, she has a good excuse—and if she discretely pockets a few letters from Jin Guangshan, well, Uncle Ruohan was never the most organized correspondence keeper in the world, and she makes sure to jot down notes on the back of the paper as if she’d thought it was blank at first, in case anyone finds it on her person, where she keeps it even when she sleeps.

You can’t be too careful in the Nightless City, after all. She knows that from the first time.

She hears rumors swirling: Wen Xu has arrived at the Unclean Realms to find Xue Yang’s body hanging from the ramparts, after Nie Mingjue had executed him for some kind of massacre in Yueyang; Nie Mingjue and Wen Xu have fought, and Meng Yao has sliced Wen Xu’s hamstring from behind; perhaps because of the lingering injury, Wen Xu’s attack on Cloud Recesses has been repulsed.

Well, this last she knows to be a false reason, or at least not all of it; it is far more likely to be because she and Wei Wuxian had shown the Lans just how ridiculously easy it was to break through their wards, and urged them to strengthen the seals even if war was not coming.

But regardless, her elder cousin has now failed, twice, and her Uncle is growing wroth. And then it is on to the indoctrination camp, again headed by her even more worthless cousin and again just a needless provocation of the other sects, especially given the failures at the Unclean Realm and Cloud Recesses. Last time she had tried to stay as out of it as possible, only doing necessary medical work and scolding A-Ning when he helped Wei Wuxian.

This time she swipes the key to the room where the disciples’ swords are kept when Wen Chao is drunk one night (he is drunk every night) and slips it to A-Ning in the morning. No one ever paid any attention to him in either life when they weren’t bullying him anyway; they definitely don’t notice that he has a few extra pouches strapped to a donkey as they head out towards what she knows will be the cave with the Xuanwu of Slaughter.

Of course, Wen Chao is incompetent enough that he still doesn’t notice when she and A-Ning pass the swords back out the night before they entered the cave.

It is a pleasure to insert a needle into Wen Zhuliu’s neck from behind just as Wei Wuxian grabs Wen Chao in the cave, just enough to immobilize him. And is it her fault that when he shakes it off and leaps to save Wen Chao he just happens to get bitten in half by a legendary monster? Or that it happens to take her useless cousin as a palate cleanser after?

She wasn’t the one who’d planned the outing, after all. The “guest” disciples fly out of the cave on their swords, and they barricade the entrance—both entrances, because Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian, and Jiang Cheng saw the maple leaves again and she knows that they are important evidence that you can get out both ways.

Someone will probably have to deal with the Xuanwu of Slaughter later, but that sword, the future Stygian Tiger Seal, is going to stay right where it is and has been for the moment, thank you very much. She doesn’t intend to lose an adopted brother to madness anytime soon.

And besides…she is the one responsible for making sure that Uncle Ruohan’s qi stays balanced once he hears of yet another incredible failure by his sons.

They may not need that seal at all.

Of course, it turns out that Wen Ruohan, when he feels cornered, will strike. Perhaps the qi deviation that he seems determined to bring on himself is contributing. But even with no Wen Chao, even with no Wen Zhuliu, the man starts a war. He doesn’t do it by burning Lotus Pier—he doesn’t have the excuse, since Wen Qing has very carefully announced that Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu bravely sacrificed themselves to protect that guest disciples, and doesn’t name any particular disciple at all, so even though he knows it has to be a lie because he knows his son he has no particular focus for his rage and simply assumes that Wen Chao got arrogant, which is not far from the truth. Instead, he sends Wen Xu back to the Unclean Realm, demanding the establishment of a supervisory office in recompense for his injured leg.

Wen Qing isn’t there to see her cousin’s head bounce on the ground; she’s taken the initiative to set up the Yiling Supervisory Office, which just so happens to be staffed with all the Dafan Wen she can find.

If Uncle Ruohan asks, she’ll just point out that everyone else has a distressing tendency to turn up dead.

And without Wen Chao, that means she’s also the deputy in charge of preparing for the assault on Lotus Pier once her uncle does come up with an excuse.

She doesn’t put a lot of effort into that, though. She hates waste.

Chapter Text

It is inevitable, she thinks, that when she takes over Yiling she will go…there.

The Burial Mounds dominate the city, not geographically (the river does that) and not physically (for all that they are mounds, and are on a mountain, it would be perfectly possible to go about one’s day without seeing them—she had before) but psychically. Even when she lived here before, people thought about them often; now that she is who she is, with the experiences she’s had, she cannot walk a foot in the city without thinking of them. At least she isn’t A-Ning or Wei Wuxian, who would have had to battle memories of selling their radishes here. She didn’t come to the city that much, or really ever, when they lived in the Burial Mounds. Perhaps if they’d lived and thrived and she could have started offering her services again as a doctor—but that didn’t happen.

Of course, she has another set of memories, memories of doing exactly this Yiling Supervisory Office, though under different circumstances. Back then Uncle Ruohan had had both his sons, and there had been a clear split between administrative duties (Wen Qing, govern Yiling!) and martial ones (Wen Chao, destroy Lotus Pier!). Now they don’t have enough central family members to do both, and Wen Mao’s precept that the clan must be centered on the family holds enough weight that she is given both tasks. Again, she isn’t putting much effort into actually trying to conquer Lotus Pier, and he did give her a subordinate general to lead the actual troops, but it’s a sign of her uncle’s desperation that she’s even supposed to oversee the operation. And it means that her memories of running the office aren’t as useful as they might be, though she does manage to avoid a couple of problems she encountered last time (she knows exactly which of the outbuildings is most susceptible to flooding when it rains).

But it is the memories of the Burial Mounds that make up the majority of her baggage with Yiling, even more than climbing the hill on the other side of the city to alter the innards of the last two male Jiang disciples (though that’s a close second). She avoids that hill like it’s haunted, and for her it is; but the actually haunted Burial Mounds draw her in.

She knows that Wei Wuxian hasn’t been thrown in yet (another reason to be glad Wen Chao is turtle food) and that he hasn’t put up his wards, but she climbs the mountain anyway, because she can’t not.

She’s absolutely shocked at what she finds.

Oh, there is still resentment, and resentment aplenty. You still wouldn’t want to be thrown in here with a bleeding stomach wound and no golden core, just from the desolation alone, let alone the resentment.

But there’s less than there should be. So much less. It’s better than it was when she was here last, in her other life, and that’s not just because she had a good meal last night instead of endless watered-down radish soup.

It’s strongest nearest Yiling, and as she pushes through that veil of resentment it lessens, almost as if something had exploded in the center of the Burial Mounds themselves, right where their settlement had been, and wiped out the resentment in the main part of the Mounds, leaving a ring around the settlement site that never will be in this reality if she can help it.

The thought makes her blood run cold and her brain run hot.

This has to be the result of…whatever it was that Wei Wuxian did that brought her back.

It has to be. It’s too neat, too closely centered on the Demon Subduing Cave itself and the blood pool within it, as she verifies as she walks with increasing dread and decreasing sensing of resentful energy all the way to the spot where she still remembers sitting and staring at A-Ning’s not-quite-dead body for all those weeks.

It has to be the Stygian Tiger Seal. Whatever he did with it, however he did it, that crazy man she calls (in her head, if not in this life) her other brother broke the Burial Mounds to bring her back.

Why only her? Well, she’s not Wei Wuxian, she has no idea. She’s not even sure he meant to, or knew what he was doing. The only thing she can imagine is that he started shoving resentment into it until it broke, and somehow it reached back in time and traded her (still no idea why her) for a whole heap of resentful energy.

But whatever he did, it’s here now. Or rather, it’s not here. It’s not like she would recommend raising a child here, even now, but a good sect of cultivators could cleanse the place over time in a reasonable manner, without dedicating too much effort.

The Burial Mounds are safer than Nightless City is right now, and she can only laugh.

She wanders through spaces that used to be nothing but deadly, places she knows Wei Wuxian had to put up extra barriers or divert angry spirits away from their settlement, and she finds only the roots of resentment, not the tendrils of energy that she was used to in the old days that would be in her future if she weren’t actively changing it. When she comes back to Yiling, she swears some of her family to secrecy and sets them to burying the bodies on the mountain, under A-Ning’s supervision. No need to let old wounds fester again. If Wei Wuxian’s sacrifice or whatever he did purged the lingering resentment even as it pushed her back in time, she will make sure that it doesn’t come back.

Maybe Yiling can become the kind of place people want to raise their children, instead of the kind of place where she and her family had to hide A-Yuan from the Jin. Maybe it can become somewhere orthodox cultivators are frequently seen, rather than the half-denied responsibility of both the Jiang and Wen on the border that it was before she was sent here to set up shop.

It would be nice to think that, at least, since she’s moved her whole family here. Again.

Chapter Text

She settles in to Yiling, not enough to be comfortable (she’ll never be comfortable until…well, at least until her uncle and Jin Guangshan are not part of this world, but she’s not sure that would do it either) but enough to have everyone she cares most about there and convince the people of Yiling that she’s not planning to feed them to the Burial Mounds. They don’t seem to have realized that the Mounds are safer than they were; her impression is that no one but her and now her family is foolish enough to push past that initial annular zone of resentment, and honestly she can’t blame them. Generational trauma around the Mounds would certainly discourage her from going there too if she hadn’t had a fresh start (or if she hadn’t had most of her family murdered in a Jin labor camp).

She attends the birth of her cousin Zhan-er’s son—she hasn’t stopped being a doctor just because she’s supposed to be supervising the Yiling Office, and family gets her best treatment anyway—but somehow it’s not until the mother names her child that it hits her.

This is A-Yuan. She hadn’t been able to be there for the birth last time, and she’d almost lost track of who A-Yuan’s actual parents were, since Zhan-er had died in childbirth (a fate she has now avoided) and her husband in Wen Chao’s army, which is now her garrison force.

But it’s undoubtedly him, which means they’re all here, everyone she got Wei Wuxian to save last time. They’re all still (or newly) alive.

It’s time for the next phase of her plan.

Honestly, she hadn’t been sure what to do other than to gather them close around her and refuse to actually attack Lotus Pier. She’d known that she had to avoid the awful end of the war, when according to those who hadn’t been imprisoned like her there had been more dead than living in Nightless City, and those in prison (like her) had outnumbered those still serving her uncle. She hadn’t been there for the worst of the horrors, just as she hadn’t been there when A-Ning was nearly murdered by the Jin, but it’s not a case of out of sight out of mind. Rather the opposite: because she didn’t see it, the horror of it lives in her, unprocessed in some way because it confirmed all her worst fears at once. And it lives only in her, since it literally hasn’t happened yet.

It won’t, if she can help it.

But she didn’t know her next step, not in certainty, until the Burial Mounds yielded up their secret to her. She has explained as much as she can to A-Ning without admitting that she lived another life; it’s not that she doesn’t trust him with the knowledge, but that’s something better never said aloud. She’s told him the Mounds called to her, which is true, and that she found them more cleansed than imaginable, which is also true. She just hasn’t shared any of her suspicions beyond that.

But now that he and his teams have been clearing the Mounds, she’s presented with a new possibility: Yiling as a home not because she has no other choice, but because she chooses it.

And that sparks an idea she isn’t willing to speak into the world yet, but one that she needs to start laying the groundwork for as soon as possible if it’s to become anything other than a casualty of her uncle’s war.

Fortunately the great campaign has not yet started; Wen Xu’s failed attacks on both Cloud Recesses and the Unclean Realm have arguably begun the war, but their utter failure, and his death at Nie Mingjue’s hands, have created a kind of false veneer of peace over the situation, because no one is moving in either direction. It had been the destruction of the Yao and Jiang sects that had truly kicked the Sunshot Campaign into full gear last time, because without at least three of the other major sects involved no one had been willing to actually call out Uncle Ruohan’s war for what it was, or to fight back.

But those are her troops now, the ones who made those attacks, and they’re busy fortifying Yiling.

The situation is driving Uncle Ruohan mad—well, madder—because he has become the same as he was last time, this thing of greed and desire for conquest that is hardly recognizable as the highly skilled cultivator who she first met as a child, let alone the one her parents spoke to her of from their own youth. His missives from the Nightless City are becoming increasingly unhinged, if that were possible, and while she would never diagnose a patient she hasn’t seen recently enough to gauge, her knowledge of how close he came to qi deviation last time would make her suspect that one more good push could put him over, if it came as enough of a surprise.

And that is exactly why she goes to visit Lotus Pier.

Not that she wants Uncle Ruohan to hear about the visit—not yet any rate. In fact, she suspects that it would help cushion the later blow she’s trying to set up if he knew she was here. But she leaves A-Ning in charge of Yiling in her absence—normally she’d be terrified to do that, but there is enough of her family in enough high-level positions there that she’s not nearly leaving him alone—and takes Popo with her. She has a feeling she’s going to need her, or at least someone older than she looks, to make what she’s about to propose seem like anything other than the folly of youth.

But she’s died once already, and she refuses to fear anything in this life but the loss of her family again. Not Uncle Ruohan, not Jin Guangshan, and not making an offer to the Jiangs that might get her laughed out of the room if she doesn’t do it right.

Chapter Text

She was not there when…Wang Lingjiao, was it? Wen Chao’s mistress, at any rate, came to Lotus Pier that first time. She wasn’t there when Wen Zhuliu and Wen Chao and his men breached the defenses and killed the defenders, when Jiang Fengmian’s and Yu Ziyuan’s bodies were displayed for all to see. She wasn’t there when Jiang Cheng was captured and marched back, when his golden core was burned out by the Core Melting Hand and he was beaten to within an inch of his life. She wasn’t there when A-Ning (foolishly, desperately) poisoned the entire garrison and snuck out the bodies of the dead master and mistress of Lotus Pier and their still-living heir and brought them to Wei Wuxian.

But she heard. She heard from Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian as they spoke to each other while she treated their brother (they were too gone with grief to care, though not so far gone as to detail too much directly to her). She heard from A-Ning, most of all, when he shamedfacedly but righteously demanded her help and she made explaining what had happened a criterion for it. And she read the reports Wen Chao filed, before her own arrest, because once you know that you’ve become bound up in something like that you can’t afford to ignore it.

And because she knows about it, but also went back in time, she is the only one burdened by this knowledge as once again a Wen emissary requests entry at Lotus Pier.

This time, things are different. This time, she has come not with an invading army but with a small cadre of family. This time, she passes by Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng leading archery practice and does not scream about the kites they use or murder one of their shidis. Instead she greets them courteously and compliments the child (and he is only a child) who made the shot she just saw, telling him that her own brother is an archer taught by their shixiong as well.

This time the audience the Wen delegation is granted with Yu Ziyuan has Jiang Fengmian there as well, because he is not halfway up the river with Sect Leader Yao near dying in his arms. And since she does not demand that Wei Wuxian get whipped, he doesn’t.

Thankfully. She’s not sure how she would have reacted to seeing that, honestly, and it’s good for all of them that she doesn’t have to.

She raises her chin as she addresses the two leaders of the Jiang sect and reminds herself that this is hardly the least appreciative audience she has ever addressed. She walked into Carp Tower and surrendered herself and her people; this is nothing in comparison.

She has begged on the streets until Wei Wuxian found her, or she him, and she has starved in the Burial Mounds afterwards until a few small radishes made themselves known in the soil. Today she is well-fed and clad in formal robes of the Wen sect.

So even though she is aware that what she is about to propose is an act of massive chutzpah, bordering on hubris—she will do it, because even if they laugh her out of the room she will not have to go back to the past that will never be their future.

She proposes an alliance. The Yiling Wen with the Yunmeng Jiang, against the Qishan Wen.

She listens to Yu Ziyuan question the existence of this sect she has never heard of and does not tremble, does not quake. She explains, quite calmly, the existence of the Dafan Wen and their reasons for relocation. She admits that they have never stood as a distinct sect from the Qishan Wen, being a cadet and intermarried branch, but declares their intention to break away. And when Yu Ziyuan questions what the benefit of such an alliance would be to the Jiang, she does not hesitate.

First, she mentions the coming war. When Jiang Fengmian demurs that war is not inevitable, she shows him the latest missive from her uncle, with its direct demand that she move on Lotus Pier as soon as possible.

Second, when Yu Ziyuan suggests that they could just kill her here and now to avoid that, she points out that she is the one holding back the Wen, not the one threatening them. When Yu Ziyuan scoffs that they will defeat anything that is thrown at them anyway, she brings up the Yin Iron, and her uncle’s willingness to use it.

Wei Wuxian starts in the background, but Jiang Cheng slaps a hand over his mouth before he can interrupt her.

Finally, she plays her trump card, one that she wouldn’t say that she has truly earned except that no one living now can speak against it.

When Jiang Fengmian suggests, as kindly as he can, that there is no indication that her sect is powerful enough for the Jiang to ally with, even if they wish her the best against her uncle, she brings up the Burial Mounds.

She invites them to come to Yiling, if they doubt her, and see whether she speaks the truth about whether her sect is purifying the Mounds, and how far they have progressed. On the condition that if her assertion proves true, they will join her in alliance.

Yu Ziyuan holds eye contact with her, as if expecting her to fold, then slowly nods. They have a deal.

It is only because she is a surgeon, she thinks, that her hands do not shake as she bows her assent.

It is arranged with the kind of alarming speed that reminds her that other sects have actual servants who can do things for them, rather than coconspirators who are always looking to stab each other in the back, that they will all leave tomorrow for Yiling to verify her claims. She and her delegation are put up in guest quarters for the night; she considers it a good sign that they are quite close to the main pavilions.

In fact, they are close enough that Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng come by after the formal meeting is over—she will never be sure if they snuck out or if they simply wandered over, given the lax way that things are done in informal matters among the Jiang.

It is good to see them again. Wei Wuxian she is glad to see because she has missed having someone do their best impression of a complete idiot while somehow throwing out the smartest ideas that she’s ever heard (some of his theories, which she refuses to confirm or deny, about how they cleansed the Mounds remind her intensely of what he did the first time). Also, she missed him. It’s hard to tell someone with no memory of it that you used to bicker companionably over the fire most nights, but it’s true, and she misses it.

It is good to see Jiang Cheng because she likes and respects him, because it is absolutely hilarious to see him react to Wei Wuxian, and because his very presence next to Wei Wuxian is a reminder that she hasn’t completely messed things up this time. Yet.

Jiang Yanli joins them after a little while and she is reminded that at Cloud Recesses, both times, she quite liked this young woman. It truly is a shame that she is going to marry into the Jin, though perhaps that might be better if Wen Qing can find some way to off Jin Guangshan sooner rather than later.

The presence of the three Yunmeng siblings is almost enough to allow her to forget the stakes of tomorrow’s visit.

If the Burial Mounds have somehow restored themselves in her absence, she is going to be very cross with them indeed.

Chapter Text

Of course, nothing so ridiculous as the Burial Mounds restoring themselves has happened. She is cagy with the Jiangs about exactly what they have done to create this situation; she tells herself, and them, that this is because it is a sect secret—though she does make sure to mention in Yu Ziyuan’s hearing that is an extension of a theory she believes is attributable to Wei Wuxian.

She does not specify further, though Wei Wuxian himself starts pestering her afterwards about what it was that he came up with that could do something like that.

Fortunately, even without details the Jiangs are impressed. Jiang Fengmian compliments her on the work she is doing to make sure that the bodies on the Mounds are reburied, so that the resentment does not return. Unfortunately she can see that turning in Wei Wuxian’s mind as he ponders how it could have been done, since she’s not sure he’d connected the dots before that they eliminated the resentment and not its causes.

Well, he’s definitely noticed now, and anyway her hope is that she will make it unnecessary for him to go down the path that lead him to figuring it all out in the first place anyway (not that she’s entirely sure what he did in the end).

To her surprise, she also gets some time nearly alone with Jiang Cheng while Jiang Fengmian takes Wei Wuxian off for something she didn’t quite catch and Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Yanli are otherwise occupied with members of her sect. It’s…nice. It’s not like they talk a lot, or anything particularly meaningful—they’re in her headquarters, which she has deliberately put in a different building than last time, so that means that people are coming and going and they’re not alone-alone—but she enjoys the energy that he brings into the room, especially the whole not-lingering-in-her-rooms-dying-of-core-disruption vibe to the whole proceedings. But even without the direct contrast to last time she was with him in this office (even if not this physical room), it’s nice. People give her less bullshit when he’s glaring at them, for instance, even if, this being a Wen headquarters, he doesn’t actually have any authority for that.

And while it’s not as if many of the people in the Yiling Supervisory Office give her bullshit anymore, one of the people who came by was the Mayor of Yiling, who stills tries sometimes. She thinks it’s a side effect of political life, and not his fault, but it’s still annoying, and it happened less because of Jiang Cheng.

In the end, the Jiang agree to the alliance. More importantly, she thinks, they listen to her when she says she wants to make the announcement as big as possible. The reason they accept is that it will make it hard for Uncle Ruohan to stop it if everyone knows about it all at once. The reason she doesn’t fully give, though she thinks some of them suspect, is that if it’s done right she thinks it might trigger his qi deviation finally.

But in order to make it that big, it needs to be public—and the best way of making things public is to do things where people can see them.

In other words, calling a conference.

They arrange to have the Jiangs invite the other sects to a conference at Lotus Pier. They will not specify the reason; everyone will assume it is about the growing tensions in the cultivation world (read: Uncle Ruohan trying to conquer everyone).

It will actually be an opportunity to announce their son’s engagement to the head of the new Yiling Wen sect.

She is honestly surprised that they’re willing to let her marry him, if she’s honest. She’s not sure if it’s a sign of Yu Ziyuan’s approval of her or her disbelief that her son will actually marry someone—or perhaps, if she’s generous, the fact that Jiang Cheng actually seems to like her, and Yu Ziyuan would prefer that her son not live out the very public drama that has been the gossip about her own marriage.

Either way, she’s not going to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. And it does explain why she was allowed time alone with Jiang Cheng—though she would definitely like some time actually alone with him at some point in the future as well.

Wei Wuxian is typically gobsmacked that anyone would actually want to marry his shidi, though he phrases it as disbelief that someone would want to spend time with him which makes her want to smack him upside the head and point out that he spends most of his time with Jiang Cheng.

So she does, minus the smacking, and for once she gets to see him speechless for a moment before he starts sputtering about how it’s different.

She just raises an eyebrow and lets him think about how it might be different and then he’s beet red and hiding behind Yanli and she never actually got to have this in her past life but somehow she thinks she missed it anyway. It’s enough like the time at the Burial Mounds, and enough like she used to idly wish for in that time, that she’s definitely riding a wave of nostalgia about it even though it’s totally new at the same time.

Also, she then gets to remind him that he’s engaged, and that causes him to turn red again and seriously, how did people in her other life think that this man was a terrifying demon monster?

Oh, right, the demonic cultivation. But still.

The Jiangs return to Lotus Pier to call their conference, and she squares her shoulders and gets to work making sure that by the time they proclaim the breakaway sect it will be a reality. She stares down the generals who are supposed to be responsible for the troops that she’s going to need to be the martial core of her sect (she’d rather they could just all be doctors, but in this current environment someone needs to teach sword forms) and that works for most of them. One of them is insistent that Wen Ruohan is the only proper authority for the Wen sect, but she starts quoting the teachings of Wen Mao at him until even he agrees.

It reminds her of Wei Wuxian at the first time they fought the Xuanwu, and she wants to cry.

But she doesn’t, because this is too important. They start building new buildings in the Burial Mounds—where else would you put a sect in Yiling?—and with actual timber and carpenters and suchlike it goes much better than the last time.

Now she just needs to survive whatever her uncle decides to do once he hears about her treason.

Chapter Text

It is harder than she expected to stand again before an assembly of all the sects. The last time she did this, they killed her, after all. This time she has at least maneuvered one sect into her corner, and a stronger sect than it was the last time. Jiang Cheng had rebuilt Yunmeng Jiang, she knew—Wei Wuxian had tried to pretend a lack of interest, but he hadn’t been very good at it—but last time it had hardly had the time to be rebuilt to the level that it stands at now, and it stands behind her.

She thinks that she has chosen well; if she had to choose any of these sects that killed her last time to be by her side in this second life, the Jiangs seem by far the best bet. Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Fengmian were already dead themselves by then, Wei Wuxian is Wei Wuxian, and even the other two Jiangs were among those she holds least culpable for what happened. Jiang Yanli was a nursing mother, and a grieving widow, but for all that Jin Guangshan used her name to issue his punishment she was not present; and Jiang Cheng was at least honest with her, back before, about his own ability to save her and her people. She’d given him back his comb because he couldn’t promise to protect them all; this time she plans to keep it, because she will not let it come to that again.

She’s still not sure any of the rest of them besides the Jiang gave her death a second thought.

And then there’s her uncle—dead in the past, hopefully soon dead in the present, but certainly no less likely to have killed her in either reality than anyone else. If Jiang Cheng hadn’t taken her out of her own sect’s prison, she’s not sure what she would have done; probably starved to death in the cells.

Oddly, all this morbid thought helps calm her down, and she makes her entrance exactly as planned, just as Jiang Fengmian announces that one purpose of this meeting is to declare the engagement of his son to the leader of a neighboring sect.

There isn’t even enough time for whispers to start up about who it might be before another set of whispers start up when people recognize her.

That’s helped by her uncle, whose flair for the dramatic has not been lessened by prolonged exposure to Yin Iron.

“You!” He stands, hair swirling in a wind that, properly, ought not to exist; even though the pavilions at Lotus Pier are open to the lakes, the air has been hot and sticky, with no major breeze to break the humidity. She, of course, knows that this is the effect of resentful energy pulling towards him, though she’s not sure the others do. He twirls towards Jiang Fengmian with a sneer. “I’m afraid you’ve been cozened, Sect Leader Jiang. This is no sect leader; this is merely my errant niece, who has apparently forgotten her place.”

“Not all, Uncle,” she replies coolly. “It has simply become time for the Yiling Wen to claim their rightful place among the sects, independent of our relatives in Qishan.”

“Unfilial child!” He growls at her, and if she did not know what she knows about how the future played out once before perhaps this would in fact trouble her; he has been a terrible influence on her life, and used A-Ning against her again and again, but he is her uncle, and her (imminently-former) sect leader, and the main adult male of her family. But she does know, and so she doesn’t give him the pleasure of a response. He scoffs. “What have you or any of your people in Yiling done to warrant such a position besides twiddle your thumbs and play house with the locals?”

The wind whipping around his head in the absence of a true breeze has intensified. She opens her mouth to answer, but Yu Ziyuan beats her to it. Almost yawning, as if it were a commonly known point of fact, she interjects: “why, the Yiling Wen have cleansed the Burial Mounds as proof of their independent ability to maintain their territory. Surely, if they were of your sect, Ruohan, you would be aware of this?”

“What?” As she had hoped, her uncle is too angry to think about his words. “Child, what ridiculous nonsense are you claiming now?”

“It is not a claim.” Jiang Fengmian’s mild voice rings out over the assembly—the Jiangs evidently have some concept of acoustics in their pavilions that means he has been placed at the exact right point never to have to shout—and injects a calm into the proceedings that Wen Qing hopes does not actually work on her uncle. “I have seen it myself.”

“Lies. All lies.” No, Uncle Ruohan is not calm at all. “You have brought me here to lie to my face and tell me that this little fool of a child has somehow established a new sect, as if I did not know every action she took, every move she made during her entire life? This is a conspiracy against me! Do not imagine I do not see it!”

Sect Leader Yao is not one of Wen Qing’s favorite people. It’s not that she has a particular problem with him—he’s simply emblematic of all the problems with the cultivation world that led to the situation where she died the first time. He’s one of the followers who followed Jin Guangshan’s declaration that she and hers must die—but then so are so man people. But she has a newfound respect for the man’s bravery, if nothing else, as he dares to stand and speak at this juncture.

“Ah, but you don’t, do you? Know what she did, I mean. It seems she’s purged the Burial Mounds without you!”

Sect Leader Ouyang is never too far behind his friend, in condemning her in her past life or in speaking out of turn in this one. “I say if a sect can do that, they’re a sect, no matter where they came from.”

A chorus of agreement goes around the pavilion, loudest from those who live closest to the Mounds and their influence. As she had guessed, the threat of the Burial Mounds—well-known, familiar, hardly a point of political contention—is a bigger concern to many of the minor sects than the threat of the Wen—recent, politically charged, not something you want to admit out loud.

It works predictably upon her uncle, in that black tendrils start to appear where the wind had been around his head.

“Fools. All of you. Fools and conspirators.”

Nie Mingjue stands. She does not like Nie Mingjue, but like Jiang Cheng in her past life he was at least never particularly hypocritical about what he thought of her or her people, and he did not directly torture or kill them. And he is just as blunt now. “It seems to me that Sect Leader Wen Ruohan does not in fact have anything to say against what Sect Leader Jiang, Madam Yu, and Sect Leader Wen Qing have presented to this conference. And if the Jiang want to marry their son to the Yiling Wen, it’s no business of the Nie. Let’s congratulate the boy get on with other business.”

“Other business?” Uncle Ruohan’s eyes have started to glow; this is the point where if she were still his doctor Wen Qing would probably stick a needle somewhere important, but she is not and so she does not. He snarls at Nie Mingjue and then starts, as if only now realizing who has spoken, as if his anger and the malign influence of resentful energy have clouded his senses that much.

And if Nie Mingue hates the Wen, Wen Ruohan returns the favor towards the Nie, doubly so since Nie Mingjue killed his heir. He gives a strangled shout and takes a half step towards NIe Mingjue before falling to his knees, and then, ungainly, to the floor.

Chapter Text

There is no doubt in Wen Qing’s mind that her uncle is, in fact, finally undergoing the qi deviation that has been threatening to overwhelm him since before he’d called her to the Nightless City to act as his doctor the first time. She knows there are healers in Lotus Pier—she herself is a healer—and no matter how awful the person a healer’s first instinct is always to try to, well, heal them.

Fortunately for her desire to see her uncle pass from this world instead of helping him, Wen Ruohan’s qi deviation is a little different from other people’s.

Most people, after all, do not channel huge amounts of resentment through their bodies with the aid of the Yin Iron. Most people have not been using their qi to tamp down on not just the effects of resentment on the body and soul (corrosive) but also on the actual presence of resentful energy in their own medians (actively toxic). It is the difference, she supposes, between an acid and a poison; if you can wash the acid off, the body stops being attacked, but poison once ingested needs an active antidote or it will continue on to kill the patient. Or perhaps even more, the difference between either of those and an infection, which grows and breeds inside the host until it destroys them, unless it is treated.

Uncle Ruohan had been being treated, of course, by her and by other doctors. But to press on the analogy further, his continued use of the Yin Iron and his continued playing with resentment are like continuing to drink spoiled milk while insisting that your doctors heal each infection. Eventually you’re going to lose the battle against constantly inviting the disease in.

A qi deviation, after all, is among other things a loss of control by the cultivator over their own qi, and over its proper circulation in their meridians. But for Wen Ruohan his qi is not merely the medium of his spiritual power and the source of his wellbeing in general; it is and has been specifically the only internal barrier (as opposed to Wen Qing’s needles or other doctors’ herbal remedies) to the overtaking of his meridians by the resentful energy coursing down them.

Perhaps the wisest version of him in another world might have lessened his use of the energy: in general, for his own health; in this specific case, because he keeps losing his attempted attacks on other sects and therefore should be de-escalating rather than escalating his aggression; or just as a precaution before going into the territory of another sect that does not have healers specifically trained to treat his particular trouble. But Uncle Ruohan, learned as he is and mighty as he may be, has never truly been the kind of wise that non-cultivators refer to as commonsensical.

And so, with his qi deviation come the horrors.

Black smoke issues from every orifice, concentrating around his nose and mouth. It swirls and intensifies as he groans, and lashes out in tendrils to strike at cultivators if they get too close—including any healer foolhardy enough to try to help the greatest cultivator of his generation.

For Wen Qing, it is like all her nightmares over the past two lives all come to be at once: worries about this happening to Uncle Ruohan when she had actually been caring for him as his doctor; worries about A-Ning after what Wei Wuxian did for him in his former life, and the concern that the fierce corpse might be overwhelmed by the energy harnessed to keep his soul and body together; worries about Wei Wuxian, without a core, working with the same energy.

Ironically, she thinks as she stands, frozen, before the twisting body of her uncle (no one else has moved either; she cannot tell if time has simply ceased to tick for them as it has for her, or if they are genuinely at a loss), Wei Wuxian was more protected from this result than Uncle Ruohan (A-Ning, of course, had the benefit of Wei Wuxian’s own talismans to help). Without a golden core at all, Wei Wuxian’s control over the Stygian Tiger Seal and the resentful energy it helped him wield was entirely a matter of skill in demonic cultivation. While Uncle Ruohan used his spiritual cultivation to suppress the effects of using resentful energy (not fully effectually) and relied nearly exclusively on brute force manipulation of resentment through the power of his qi, magnified by the interaction with Yin Iron, Wei Wuxian was the actual grandmaster of demonic cultivation, figuring out how to manipulate and control it on its own terms. In another life, of course; this Wei Wuxian has his golden core, and will continue to do so if she has anything to say about it—nor does she wish to tempt him towards demonic cultivation in any form.

But the difference is instructive, because while Wei Wuwian was of course tormented and pained by his demonic cultivation—she saw brutal evidence of it in the Burial Mounds—it was not, primarily, hosted in his body, trapped in his meridians with his qi.

But Uncle Ruohan’s was, though it is no longer as he writhes in the throes of qi deviation, and the cloud of darkness around him is spreading further…until it touches the water at the edge of the pavilion, and stains the water black as well.

An alarm sounds in Lotus Pier, and that seems to snap everyone out of the stupor that has taken hold ever since Wen Ruohan fell. The Lans pull out musical instruments as if from nowhere, and Cleansing rings out across the pavilion. Wei Wuxian begins tossing talisman after talisman at the body of Wen Ruohan, and once she figures out what he’s drawing in the air Wen Qing joins him—he’s just trying to contain the resentment where it is so that the Lans can drain it, not control it.

And not save her uncle.

She is fairly certain it is too late for that; that it was too late the moment that his qi slipped out of his control. She has seen springs before in her life. No coil of metal was ever wound as tight as her former sect leader, and the release of the spiritual energy containing his resentment was always going to doom him.

She merely hopes for all their sakes that his actual death comes after they have managed to dispel the resentment filling the room, or else they are likely to have a fierce corpse on their hands, spirit-calming ceremonies or not. This is a very bad death—not that she has a lot of sympathy—and one might argue that her uncle has spent most of his life undoing any calming of his spirit that might have been done as a child.

Chapter Text

The alarm that brought everyone out of their stupor turns out to have been the result of the triggering of an array built into the defenses of Lotus Pier, one intended to warn the inhabitants against excessive buildup of resentful energy in the water that surrounds and interpenetrates the complex. As Wen Qing will later learn from an adorably serious Jiang Cheng and a typically interrupting Wei Wuxian, there is a real issue in Yunmeng with bodies entering the river (anything from drownings to dumping of bodies to animals dragging themselves to the water in their death throes) and then being disturbed weeks, months, or years later by a change in the current or an object tumbling into the water in its turn—then festering and producing any of a variety of waterborne resentful spirits.

It is rarer that the resentment is directly injected into the environment from a dying sect leader, but she supposes there is a first time for everything.

Unfortunately, resentful energy is sticky, clingy, and likes to accumulate where more of it already is. In this way one might say that the resentment flowing out of her uncle is like a swarm of bees, looking for a new hive in all directions but happy to coalesce together again once a space is identified.

And while the Jiang undoubtedly cleanse the river as often as possible, everyone who attended the Lan lectures and heard Grandmaster Lan quiz Wei Wuxian while he mouthed off can remember that anything can cultivate into a resentful spirit if properly motivated.

Knowing this intellectually is quite different from watching a giant fish creature suddenly boil up out of the river, channeling the resentment from her uncle to grow, its former smooth skin bulging and warping as it transforms before their very eyes.

The Jiang not being entirely fools, there is warding on the pavilion, which Wen Qing discovers when the creature literally strikes whatever the barrier is, setting off a series of red and blue sparks. But while she is comfortably ensconced in the middle of the pavilion where she was formerly facing down her uncle, not all the cultivators are, and it turns out that many of them are jumpier than her as well.

The Jin in particular are brighter in their clothing than in their minds (she’d admit to a substantial bias here, but she’s not going to apologize for it) and several of them scatter when the fish creature attacks, even though the single safest place for them is clearly inside the warded pavilion.

It would be smarter, honestly, to stay anywhere that the Jiang have built up, since they clearly haven’t been losing dozens of cultivators to fish every year or the rest of the cultivation world would have heard. The narrow pathways between pavilions are presumably shielded as well; the main barracks and family quarters even more so. But some foolish Jins (and to be fair possibly members of other sects; she thinks she sees at least one Lan) take to the air instead, and the air is, of course, the one place that isn’t warded because the assumption is that anyone who can fly is capable of taking care of themselves.

Evidently an oversight on the part of the Jiangs, since none of these cultivators seem to have taken flight to attack the [YAO]. They’ve merely panicked. To be fair to them, perhaps they also wishes to get away from the twitching body of Wen Ruohan, still outputting black smoke, but regardless of the cause of the panic, panic it is.

And fish, or at least this fish it turns out, can jump.

It only takes a few gulps before the panic turns into an even more frantic flight (in every sense of the word), and Wen Qing almost wants to laugh at the way these cultivators have lost all cool in the face of an enemy they are specifically trained to fight.

Evidence for this emerges in the form of arrows clattering off the scales of the fish—and more importantly, arrows that do not clatter off but lodge in its belly, mouth, and eyes.

Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, it turns out, do not merely train their shidis to shoot kites, and it is not idle exercise to keep them busy. Wei Wuxian is still throwing talismans at Uncle Rouhan, his intricate barrier growing with Wen Qing’s own assistance, but Jiang Cheng and a group of Jiang disciples have taken up position with their bows—and as far as Wen Qing can tell while still frantically throwing talismans, the only thing stopping them from taking down the fish is their care to avoid hitting the other cultivators in the air. She sees Jiang Cheng spring up onto Sandu with a huff of annoyance and a sudden bolt of worry courses through her.

She tells herself it’s just that if he dies the alliance she’s worked so hard on will be broken, and also that she knows what happens to Wei Wuxian when he thinks he’s lost Jiang Cheng. But she is not ready to see his death either.

Fortunately, such a worry is only momentary. The fish leaps up towards him and he fires three arrows in quick succession down its gullet, then fires a talisman down there for good measure (he is Wei Wuxian’s shidi, after all). She’s not able to give it her full attention while still doing her own part, but she thinks it’s some kind of fire talisman, so at the very least the fish is likely to get a rather bad case of heartburn.

Then he slides back off Sandu, slinging the bow back across his back as he does, lands in the water, and catches the sword just in time to slice all the way up the gills of the creature as it finishes its leaps, mouth closing on nothing instead of on Jiang cultivator. The blood it oozes is a color she doesn’t expect, but it does not appear to bother Jiang Cheng, who with the help of his shidis quickly finishes the thing off.

Uncle Ruohan’s body is now contained within a complex structure built out of her and Wei Wuxian’s talismans, and the Lan music is having some effect as he appears to have stopped smoking.

He has also stopped moving.

She wonders if that can actually mean what she hopes it means.

And if it does, she wonders exactly what is going to happen to Qishan Wen—and to her own future, since without the Sunshot Campaign her knowledge of what is going to happen will quickly dwindle into nothing.

Chapter Text

Wen Ruohan is dead. There’s no other way to say it. Besides the qi deviation itself, whatever she and Wei Wuxian had done to trap the resentment in with him while the Lan purged it had allowed it to eat away at him from the inside. She would feel bad about that, except that she knows (literally knows) what it looked like when he was allowed to vent that resentment on the rest of the world instead.

In the aftermath, the discussion conference doesn’t really have much more to do. She receives congratulations from a variety of sect leaders—the establishment of the Yiling Wen is taken as a done deal now that the only person to object has died spouting black smoke, and her marriage to Jiang Cheng is apparently going forward too.

She’s glad. Not just because he is attractive and surprisingly funny now that she can watch him bicker with Wei Wuxian and not immediately always be reminded of their fight (which Wei Wuxian insisted was staged, but which left him with a very real hole in his stomach she had to fix) or see him use his core and not always immediately think of having her hands inside his and Wei Wuxian’s torsos. Of course she still does think of these things, but it’s not all the time anymore and it does make marrying him more attractive.

So does the alliance, which she knows the Jiang may not need much now that her uncle is not a living threat, but which she still needs desperately. Fortunately the public announcement of it means that it would be incredibly awkward for the Jiang to drop her like a hot potato (or a hot radish, she thinks with a glance at her no-longer-future) even though she suspects they would not agree to it in the current circumstances.

She ought, she thinks, to feel sadder about her uncle’s fate, except she doesn’t just remember the Burial Mounds. She remember him imprisoning her, but more than that she remembers the Nightless City afterwards. She knows that people called her family the Wen Remnants when they were in the Burial Mounds, and that was apt. Some of this was because of the Jin, and she has not forgotten that Jin Guangshan is on her list just after Uncle Ruohan (Jin Zixun is currently in the Lotus Pier infirmary missing a hand to a giant fish creature, so while he may not be dead she does rather feel that at least some justice has been done there). People like A-Ning were killed directly; others were worked to death; others disappeared and she heard horrible rumors.

But there were not that many of them left. She had spent months looking for A-Ning, and the second-worst thing besides not finding him had been not finding nearly as many Wen survivors as their ought to be. No wonder the other sects had been willing to let the Jin take over the confinement of the Wen—there had hardly been enough of them left to parcel out even if they’d wanted to. Some of these had been war deaths, of course, both from war itself and the attendant famines and diseases—but these shouldn’t have killed off the cultivators of the Wen sect so quickly, given the power of their golden cores.

No, that had been Wen Ruohan, brutalizing his own people. He had, in the end, been using them up like candles, demanding more and more of fewer and fewer people until they worked themselves to death, or he used them to test some new element of his fierce corpses as a punishment, or banished them to the front lines in a death sentence of its own. Or he’d simply executed them for not keeping up with his impossible demands. It had been like using resentful energy had made him forget what orthodox cultivators could do, and like having the Yin Iron and its further stores of power had made him forget the limits. Perhaps that is why Meng Yao rose as fast and as far as he did before sliding a sword into her uncle’s back; there were simply not enough Wen cultivators left alive to do his bidding.

So yes, the Jin had been awful, and the other sects had allowed it, but Wen Ruohan had started it.

And now he never would.

Except now the rumors swirling out of Qishan make it sound like he had done it anyway. There are reports of corpses running rampant, the dead rising and the undead appearing stronger than they ought. And there is no sect leader in Qishan—no clear heir to Wen Ruohan. The contenders are fighting each other instead of the threats to the people, and no clear winner has emerged. She certainly will not take the position, nor allow A-Ning to; never living in Nightless City again would be too soon for her even if she cultivates to immortality in this new life.

But in the weeks following her uncle’s death it becomes clear that something has to be done. The trickle of refugees out of Qishan starts only days after his death, and becomes a flood all too quickly. The rumors build and build and finally a second discussion conference has to be called.

This time in Carp Tower.

The bile rises in her throat as she mounts the steps again, this time not as suppliant but as the head of a sect and (she is assured) a valued part of planning the solution to the problems coming out of Qishan.

She cannot make her body believe it, and she is grateful that she has arrived at the same time as several other sects, so she does not have to make small talk with Jin Guangshan as he greets those attending one by one.

Fortunately, the topic of this conference is direct and to the point: the need for intervention in Qishan and the joint responsibility of the sects in the absence of the power of the Qishan Wen.

It seems a Sunshot Campaign will be necessary in this world as well, albeit one with a supposedly humanitarian goal and (ironically) with Jin Guangshan as front and center as he would have liked everyone to imagine he was in the first one, the slime.

No doubt he expects to face few foes and reap great rewards.

Well, she has some ideas about what might stop that, starting with the letters she still has that detail exactly which of his neighbors territories Jin Guangshan contemplated ‘supervising’ if her uncle had succeeded, papers that her uncle will no longer be able to notice missing from his desk.

Papers that should be very interesting to use when they work out the spoils from this campaign, too.

Chapter Text

Jin Guangshan is a snake and an asshole, but he’s also not always wrong. This is unfortunate, because Wen Qing would really like to be able to simply discount anything and everything that comes out of his misbegotten mouth (or perhaps that is the wrong term, since he’s famous for his bastards; perhaps misbegetting would be the right one).

But he’s not wrong that something needs to be done about Qishan.

She has probably the most comprehensive set of reports about the people of Qishan, not from anything formal but from the informal connections that her Yiling Wen sect of course still has with their many relatives to the northwest. But the reports that other sects, notably the Nie and, yes, the Jin, have received about the situation in terms of night hunting are more ominous. The people of Qishan are in difficulty because of the many fierce beasts and spirits roaming the land, but they were actually quite good at hiding from the beast at the door before; everyone has a lot of practice at keeping their heads down and not doing anything too interesting because of Wen Ruohan’s tyranny, and it has served them well to keep casualties down now that the main sect is not doing its duty.

But, as she had worried it might (though not enough not to do it) the qi deviation that Wen Ruohan died from also undid a number of the wards and other barriers he had set up in his life to contain some of the things that he was contemplating harnessing for his own use. He was that kind of solipsistic maniac; in her prior life no one had really noticed because the war had caused its own destruction and many of the things he’d been containing had been unleashed upon the Sunshot Campaign deliberately, so there had been less of an effect on his death. But fierce corpses are roaming Qishan in large numbers, uncontrolled by the Yin Iron or his mad personality, and she suspects greater horrors, like the Xuanwu, will follow in their wake.

So Jin Guangshan is right about the problem.

He’s just an asshole about the solution, which to him appears to be the Jin simply taking over most of Qishan, with a minor sop here and there to sects that directly border on places he’s not interested in and what looks very much like a bribe to the Nie in terms of territory given to them.

She’s glad that Meng Yao is sitting over in the Nie camp looking disgruntled (and surprised that Nie Mingjue decided to bring him, and that he decided to come, but that’s not her problem right now) and not advising his father; she doesn’t know anything about how things actually went down in her first life when he was Jin Guangyao in terms of Jin sect politics, but she knows from seeing him work in the Wen that his bribe would be much less obvious and his division of Qishan much more fair-looking, without actually advantaging the Jin any less.

He’s a subtle man and a hard one, whereas Jin Guangshan is neither of those things, though she thinks there’s a con man in there somewhere underneath the flab, and his eyes look harder than his body.

Jin Guangshan makes a big speech about the need for stability and continuity in the cultivation world, one which clearly implies that he is that stability and continuity. Then they start getting down to brass tacks. It’s clear that no one (including her, though she’s not sure they know that) wants to give the Yiling Wen much of the old Qishan territory, though as the conversation winds on Yu Ziyuan notes with some asperity that even if they are a distinct sect they are still neighbors with Qishan, and that does make them a useful tool (her words) in controlling the situation.

She also points out that now that the Jiang do not directly border Qishan Wen themselves, they will of course assist their allies in Yiling to administer any necessary territory in Qishan, which makes it clear why she’d bother to exert herself in that direction at all.

Wen Qing isn’t sure she wants to be a client state of the Jiang, but she’s also not sure there was any world in which “new sect and ally” didn’t mean that, and she’s much happier as that than as a pile of ash.

The Lans have been quiet, and then Lan Xichen stands to speak.

He points out calmly that Qishan Wen is not here to make a case for itself, and suggests that they ought to make a reconnaissance into the Wen territory together in order to discover the true nature of the situation. He suggests that rather than dividing up the territory of Qishan Wen for administration (read: conquest, Wen Qing thinks with a snort she conceals in her sleeve), they divide it up for reconnaissance, and reconvene at a second conference in a month’s time to discuss what they have found.

“After all,” he points out calmly, “it may be that parts of the Wen territory, like the new Yiling Wen, are ready to administer themselves. And while it is a great tragedy to see the fall of a major sect as we have seen in Qishan, perhaps we will see the re-emergence of some of the minor sects that formerly occupied that territory.”

The minor sects in attendance are quick to pick up what he is putting down, adding their voices to the idea that the major sects should not be so concerned with immediately taking territory that could go to the creation of more small sects (she suspects that they actually want to enlarge themselves, but the point remains).

She cautiously adds her voice to this proposal as well. After all, she thinks, anything that delays the expansion of the Jin sect is a good thing. And, she adds to everyone present, perhaps they should do something about the Xuanwu of Slaughter together to kick off this reconnaissance of the Qishan Wen lands.

She can tell that the reminder of what is in Qishan that someone might not want to be responsible for has hit home for some of them when they agree.

Ultimately, the timeline is slightly delayed. It is determined that they will move on the Xuanwu of Slaughter in a month, and then spend another month exploring Qishan in detail, before meeting again two months later in the Cloud Recesses.

It is, after all, only fair that Lan Xichen should have to host the result of his own proposal, Jiang Fengmian points out. And if that happens to mean that it will not be on Jin turf, well, Wen Qing is perfectly fine with that.

Chapter Text

The second discussion conference is grimmer than the first, because it turns out that the situation in Qishan is a lot worse than anyone thought. Ironically, this is not as much a problem for Wen Qing as she might have thought it would be, because one of the main reasons that things have gone so bad is that so few Wen are left in Qishan, and even fewer civilians. They have been migrating, a great number of them to Yiling, where she has begun (with Jiang help) a large-scale building program. As such, civilian and even cultivator deaths in Qishan have been lower than might have been expected given the spread of monsters in the area.

There are fewer of those now, of course, since the main cultivation sects have done their reconnaissance in force through the region, and one monster in particular is dead. The Xuanwu of Slaughter had near broken out of its prison by the time they all came back to it, but a creature that just Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji alone could kill (even if they were fueled by absolute desperation) was no match for the entire cultivation world hunting it for sport. Between Jiang arrows and Lan chord assassination it never stood at chance, and she was sure the Jin and the NIe contributed in some way too.

The Yiling Wen contributed primarily by making sure that the cultivators who decided to get too close before everyone realized that actually ranged weapons were their friends in this fight didn’t lose their limbs or their lives, but also through Wen Qing’s quiet words with Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian (well, quiet on her and Lan Wangji’s parts at least) where she recommended chord assassination to the Lan as specifically deadly to the Xuanwu, disclaiming the source of her knowledge.

A-Ning also did his best with his bow, and she was very proud that one of his arrows was definitely in the creature’s eye when it fell.

They found a piece of abominable metal in the creature’s stomach—she was still uncertain if it was a piece of Yin Iron itself, or simply so steeped in resentment from the creature’s victims that an ordinary sword had become just as bad—and after several people almost came to blows over it (assuming that it was Yin Iron) it was agreed that they would decide its fate at this conference as well.

Jin Guangshan is still oily and ingratiating even when he is not the host, and it sets her teeth on edge. He’s making the same play for land that he made last time, and demanding the metal as well; she’s not even sure what his logic is or why he wants it other than that for some people ‘leaking vast amounts of resentful energy’ is the same as ‘powerful’ and he has never been anything but greedy for power. Of course most people would argue that it meant ‘should be purified’ but while the Lans are making that case there seems to be a perhaps unsurprising lack of agreement among the sects on that point.

She lets him argue for a while, and actually tunes out the ebb and flow of the conference as she prepares herself once again to present something volatile to a discussion conference. It hasn’t been a disaster the last two times she’s spoken, but she will never, she thinks, be able to do so without thinking about the day of her first death.

The thing is: two months of delay has been enough time for her to cross-reference the demands that Lanling Jin is making now with the requests that had been made of her Uncle. Of course, they’re different—it’s Qishan Wen that has fallen, and not its neighbors—but there are distinct similarities between the two. Specifically, there are evidently certain industries that Jin Guangshan would like to see Lanling Jin get better acquainted with, because the areas of Qishan that he wishes to oversee are specialized in them just as the areas he’d requested from Uncle Ruohan had been.

Finally, she sees her moment. Jin Guangshan has just insulted the sect leader of a minor sect from the Nie-Wen border (she isn’t particularly bothered to remember the man’s name or even his sect). The insult is technically subtle enough, or perhaps she should say just not obvious enough, that given the massive difference in power between their sects the minor sect leader is probably going to have to let it go. But this happens to be one of the sects whose territories the Jin had asked for from Uncle Ruohan, and so she makes her move just as Jin Guangshan is pretending to laugh off the insulting meaning while actually (of course) repeating it.

“I’m sure Sect Leader Jin is simply jealous,” she comments, quirking an eyebrow up as if inviting the other sect leaders to join her in turning the tables on who is being laughed at. “After all, he is so desperate for Lanling to enter into the textile industry.”

“What are you insinuating?” Jin Guangshan scoffs. He’s never been very good at just ignoring anyone, least of all her. And although in her past life she would have much preferred that he had, in this one that will do nicely.

“Nothing, nothing at all. I just noticed that the sect you’ve insulted happens to control a major dye industry, just like the one you’ve suggested your disciples should take over in Qishan.” She points at the map spread out in the front of the room and takes the moment to occupy more of the floor space so that heads turn as she walks. “And yesterday you sniped at the Chang sect, whose felt production mirrors this other area of Qishan—which you’ve also suggested you might ‘supervise.’” She pulls out the letters from her sleeve. “Now, reasonable people might differ on this. Maybe some might think that you just don’t want the competition for your hoped-for economic expansion in Qishan. But personally I think differently.” She smiles at him and receives a ridiculous smirk back. “Specifically, I don’t think you care at all about the territory in Qishan; you just care about the industries. Because back when you were negotiating with Wen Ruohan, instead of with us, you weren’t looking to protect the interests of Qishan textile workers. You were looking to take over the very territories of the sects you now insult.”

She hands the papers to Grandmaster Lan before Jin Guangshan can do more than swell slightly, like a bemused frog. “I simply do not see why we ought to hand over territory in Qishan to you just because you failed to benefit from my uncle’s attempt to kill us all.”

Chapter Text

The uproar is rather satisfying, especially as Grandmaster Lan (who she always believed was just a bit of a troll—there was no way someone could be so bothered by Wei Wuxian without having just enough of that kind of personality buried deep down in them to recognize the potential disrespect, even if Grandmaster Lan would never actually weaponized that kind of disrespect himself) carefully examines the documents and declares them genuine and slowly and as calmly as he could while Jin Guangshan grew redder and redder. They then have to go through three different sects’ talismans designed to verify the legitimacy of written documentation (and who knew that the sects were all wasting their effort reinventing the wheel on that point?) before anything can go forward.

And then Jin Guangshan has the audacity to claim that even if they were legitimate none of it matters, which produces fresh outcries from the affected sects (or potentially affected, she should say, since this never came to pass) and by the time that is done they have thoroughly derailed any chance of the Jin proposal ever being implemented.

It isn’t the death she owes him, but it is a good start to discomfiting Jin Guangshan.

Then he has the further chutzpah to declare that the Jin will take on the responsibility of the resentful sword “to prove their good intentions and disperse these spurious allegations,” which is nonsense on multiple fronts. She has no doubt that whatever he thinks he is going to do with it, suppressing it is not on the menu.

Fortunately, his credit seems to have run out with even his allies, as not even Sect Leader Qin will back him on this, and it is agreed by all that there will be a joint project of the sects to work to purify this piece of metal as a practice for attempting to do the same to the Yin Iron fragments. They do not necessarily have a lot of hope of succeeding in this, after Lan Yi failed, but she appreciates the thought and certainly it is good to have the thing that she’s pretty sure turned into the Stygian Tiger Seal not actively in anyone’s hands.

She wonders if it was this resentful the first time around—or worse. Did whatever happened with the Burial Mounds affect it too? She does not in any way make any attempt to involve herself in the controversy around it—not only has she said enough by now, but also while she may not be Qishan Wen anymore the name Wen is still not a great one to associate with using resentful energy after the revelations about her uncle.

One thing she does know is that Wei Wuxian must have been both mad and desperate to use this thing the first time around (and she’s pretty sure it was this thing; what else could he have used to make the Seal? And he definitely had opportunity, since last time she didn’t drag the entire cultivation world in to see and fight the Xuanwu).

She hopes to never let him get to that point in this life. It probably helps to have him marrying off to Lan Wangji soon; she’s pretty sure she’s read that relationship right in this life based on both lives, and the fact that Wei Wuxian has avoided saying anything about it in front of Madam Yu as much as he can even in Cloud Recesses suggests to her that he is worried it will be taken away from him, rather than worried he’ll have to go through with it.

Lan Wangji of course is stony-faced as ever but he is almost always looking at Wei Wuxian, and the look on his face to the extent she can decipher it is exactly as it was in the Burial Mounds last life, on that one day that he came for dinner and left well after Lan bedtime (and A-Yuan’s, except they hadn’t had the heart to make him go to bed with Rich-gege still visiting). She’s fairly certain she made the right call pushing those two together faster.

Speaking of getting people together, Jin Guangshan, fresh off multiple rounds of diplomatic reverses, seems intent on reversing them by planning a date for the wedding of Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan. It almost comes as a surprise to Wen Qing that they’re still engaged; she’d remembered the breaking of the engagement last time but forgotten that this did not happen this time around because Wei Wuxian didn’t punch Jin Zixuan.

She remembers Wei Wuxian saying that his sister loved the peacock in the last life (and she knows who the peacock is) so it’s probably all right. Certainly nothing in this life is indicating to her that Jiang Yanli doesn’t want this, and she’s gotten much closer to her in this life than she did last time, so she suspects that Wei Wuxian in her past life was correct. A-Ning had said that she was glowing when she came to show Wei Wuxian her wedding robes last time, so there’s no reason she shouldn’t be again.

Well, no reason except the choice of father-in-law that comes with it.

She wonders if Jin Guangshan realizes that he is no longer the dominant partner in the marriage alliance. Although the Jin are still by far the richest sect, it is the Jiang who are at the center of the ring of alliances this time, including Wei Wuxian’s engagement and Jiang Cheng’s, and given that Meng Yao has never been naturalized. And Nie Mingjue seems increasingly disgusted by Jin Guanghsan—a phenomenon she was not able to observe last time and therefore does not know if it is a change.

Still, no matter who benefits more, the marriage was always on the table and the Jiangs are not willing to cut that tie, so Jin Guangshan gets his (or his son’s) wedding date.

Wen Qing decides that that makes an excellent timing reference for when she will find a way to kill him. After all, it wouldn’t do to delay Yanli’s wedding for a mourning period, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with making her a mourner for her father-in-law after the fact.

Chapter Text

It turns out that, perhaps unsurprisingly, disposing of the kind of concentrated resentment present in the Xuanwu sword is hardly the sort of thing that can be done in an afternoon. Instead, the sects end up creating almost an academy to study this kind of intensified resentment—though an academy is certainly too formalized a term and implies too much of a consistent presence and consistent location. Perhaps better to think of a committee, though that in turn has its own difficulties; there has never truly been a multi-sect effort of this kind, and so they do not have a term for it. The group responsible for it is made up of representatives from the major and minor sects—no sect leaders, but plenty of first disciples and other up and coming people with an interest in large-scale decontamination of this kind. Wen Qing appoints one of her cousins who did not survive the war last time; she has far more cultivators to choose from this time around, but it remains difficult to trust those who she did not go through the experience with last time, except those she already knew.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are of course on the committee, and she has no doubt that they will end up running it—certainly she has told her cousin to take her cues from Wei Wuxian on this, and she suspects that no one will have the willpower to do otherwise once Wei Wuxian really gets hooked on an issue.

Certainly not with Lan Wangji there to glare at anyone who tries to cross him.

She trusts that having enough other people around, especially Lan Wangji, and not needing to defeat an enemy at war will restrain whatever urges led Wei Wuxian to the Stygian Tiger Seal, though she will certainly take time to make sure as things go along that they are not progressing in that direction.

In the meantime she has a sect to run, and a great deal of Qishan to be responsible for on top of that. That keeps her busier than she would like, though less busy than desperately trying to make people survive on a diet of only radishes. But it does make very plain to her that she will need to leave this sect in good hands when she marries out. Obviously she expects a very long engagement with Jiang Cheng; not only does the Jin Zixuan-Jiang Yanli marriage have priority, and show no progress towards actual nuptials as yet, but so does the Wei Wuxian-Lan Wangji marriage chronologically, even if Wei Wuxian is not technically a brother in the family. And besides, the engagement serves most of both sects’ political needs, so even if she likes Jiang Cheng and wouldn’t mind actually being married to him, there’s no hurry.

But someday, she must anticipate, they will actually marry, and someone will need to take over Yiling Wen if it is not merely folded into Yunmeng Jiang—and she would prefer it not be. That person almost certainly will have to be A-Ning, for a whole host of reasons including but not limited to the fact that the only other even potential cultivator that was with them in the Burial Mounds (and therefore qualified by her super-secret criteria to succeed her) is A-Yuan, and she does not anticipate that long an engagement (nor does she relish explaining why she skipped everyone in the generation above him).

And A-Ning, her beloved brother, is not actually really qualified to lead a sect, even by the very lax standards by which she is (and by which Jin Guangshan is, on a different spectrum). She can start to fix that by training him, and by getting Jiang Cheng to do so by the by, but that will not, she anticipates, be enough.

No, A-Ning is going to need to get married, and to someone who will be a competent administrator but also not a complete snake.

That counts out most people she encounters in the cultivation world. And there are so few really well-trained and decent female cultivators out there that she nearly despairs.

The cultivation world really ought to wake up to the existence of its women.

There are a handful of people who check all the necessary boxes: daughters of minor sects, basically, since the major sects are limited to…Jiang Yanli. There is no necessity for A-Ning to marry anyone of high birth, of course, but if the purpose is to give her brother someone competent at sect administration, the lineal organization of most sects means that lower-ranking women are infinitely less likely to have received any of the proper training. And while she has no objection to A-Ning marrying a man, the sons are hardly thicker on the ground among the major sects, and the sons of minor sects are no more interesting than their daughters.

Wen Qing supposes some people might think she is being rather crass or underromantic about her brother’s marriage, but she is not some people. A-Ning has never expressed a preference to her, in either life, though she’s aware that he has in both been somewhat hero-worshiping of Wei Wuxian (but that option is definitely foreclosed, even if a second Jiang marriage were advantageous) but also she certainly finds a marriage of convenience a better option than turning her brother into a fierce corpse again, or abandoning him to the wider world. Besides, he is lovable enough himself that she cannot imagine anyone who might marry him not eventually caring for her brother—and he is loving enough that she imagines it would go both ways.

She has a short list, and she decides that she will use the time before Jiang Yanli someday gets married to…audition candidates, though not quite as crassly as that sounds. But certainly her new sect needs to make connections, so no one will object if she happens to visit a large number of other minor sects. And if she happens to bring A-Ning along and see who he might work well with, that is merely a convenient side effect.

Chapter Text

Jiang Yanli’s wedding is coming up, and Wen Qing has been more involved in the planning of it than she would ever have anticipated. Not because she is actually an authority on any such thing. She has not been married in any life, and while she is certainly quite familiar with wearing red, it has always been the red of the Wen sects and not the red of marriage.

But Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian have apparently decided that when they cannot agree on things about their sister’s wedding, she is the arbiter they are willing to accept, and so she finds herself called upon all too frequently.

Of course, she is not so foolish as to rely upon her own judgment in these affairs, but it is a wonderful excuse to get closer to Jiang Yanli and her parents and then do her best to translate Yanli’s wishes into her brother’s eagerness.

She also has had to become at least more familiar with those on Jin Zixuan’s side as a result, though “closer” is not the word she would use to characterize her feelings about all of them. Luo Qingyang is perfectly acceptable, and would definitely head her list of people to marry A-Ning if she did not feel like the Jin would simply not consider that marrying a servant counted at all for intersect alliance (not to mention that she would feel a tiny bit bad about murdering the head of a sect she was technically allied to and she has no desire to feel at all bad about finding a way to murder Jin Guangshan). Jin Zixun, single-handed as he now is, has not acquired any particular redeeming qualities as a result of his disability but is still disappointingly involved in Jin Zixuan’s side of the negotiations. And the less said about Jin Guangshan himself the better.

Except: hanging around the side of these more detailed marriage negotiations, the ones that actually seek to nail down the specifics of day, time, event, invitees, and so on, means that she gets a sort of indirect knowledge of Jin Guangshan’s habits. She learns that he leaves the negotiation table early most days, through Jiang Cheng’s complaints, and that he is suspected of doing so to go to brothels, through the way that he and Wei Wuxian deliberately talk around it.

Wen Qing has very little shame. She has a lot of awareness that her appearance and reputation matter in the cultivation world, don’t get her wrong, but she has also begged in the streets and eaten trash, and she is not above doing so again if it will achieve her ends. Finding her way covertly into a brothel without being noticed is hardly a trouble in comparison. Luxury, even. And well…she is a doctor. A very good doctor. And brothels are not the sort of places that very good doctors tend to like to be associated with, which makes her help both appreciated and valuable.

The madam has no interest in being involved in murdering a major sect leader—she doesn’t have to ask and so she doesn’t—but she also lets certain facts fall from her lips about certain visitors as she comes to trust this doctor more, and one key piece of information is about the women who are in need of different medical assistance because they have small children, or even older ones.

And she can put things together, including who the parent is of some of them.

Add that to Meng Yao, and she begins a different kind of search across the cultivation world and its sleazy underbelly. It is not necessarily her greatest strength, but once you are looking for them the bastards of Jin Guangshan appear almost everywhere you look.

Some of them, like little Mo Xuanyu, are quite small.

Others are much larger.

And the thing is…once you start looking,they don’t stop coming up.

And once you start looking very carefully (and Wen Qing is always very careful) you start to see patterns.

Some of the bastards, of course, are the product of various semi-to-non-consensual encounters. These are actually less predictable than the others; Jin Guangshan is an asshole who loves power, and the use of sexual activity to project and display that power can come up under almost any circumstances and with almost any woman. He really is awful.

But many of them are the result of prostitution or seduction of lower-class women in desperate straits; obviously also an expression of power, but one that tends to be more thought-out and produce a clearer pattern. Specifically, a clearer pattern in terms of what Jin Guangshan is looking for in a woman with whom he might become intimate in a financially-connected way, especially those whom he might be intimate with over an extended period (as he evidently was with Meng Shi).

And that is, of course, a weakness. One that can be exploited.

Especially by someone who can predict where Jin Guangshan is going to be traveling frequently, and therefore where he might be likely to go to the brothels.

One madam might not be willing to be involved in the murder of a sect leader. But someone will. Someone is, for the right incentives, which mostly involve long-lingering drugs that will not create an obvious link to the place of origin, enough money, and sufficient information about why exactly this person might be worth killing.

She can’t give her real reason for the last, of course, but all this information on bastards has also produced the information about how he treats his bastards and their mothers. The brothel madams are not necessarily all sympathetic, but not all of them are not either.

It takes quite a bit of time to set it up, but then again Jin Guangshan is also making the actual marriage timing take quite a bit of time too, so it’s really his fault that she has enough time.

She knows poisons. She’s not a poisoner herself, not before, but one side effect of being the personal physician of a tyrant is knowing an awful lot about the kinds of poisons people might use to kill one. And there are a few that take weeks to show signs unless someone is actively looking for them. And the signs the particular poison she chooses show are the kinds that also look like venereal disease, which she cynically believes are likely to go a bit more unnoticed in Jin Guangshan than anything else might.

And the brothel is Laoling—a place she has excuses to visit because of the minor sect business that she has to carry out with the Qin sect, and that Jin Guangshan is in often because that sect is one of his closest allies. Jin Guangshan’s tea is spiked, three weeks in a row, and that is enough. They stop giving him more, which should hopefully confuse the issue if someone investigates.

Now she only needs to see if he and his physicians will realize he’s been poisoned in time. If so, it will be easy enough to stop—but if not, it becomes increasingly difficult and then impossible.

She rather hopes for that option.

Chapter Text

Jiang Yanli’s wedding is lovely, even if it is to a Jin. Fortunately the wedding couple wears red, so even though Wen Qing knows that she’s going to eventually see Yanli in that awful shade of yellow-gold that still haunts some of her nightmares, she doesn’t have to do that yet. And Jin Zixuan was not the primary architect of any of her problems in her past life—she does not count “being the one that A-Ning and Wei Wuxian killed” as his fault, since she rather doubts he intended that—and so as long as he is not dressed like his father she can separate the two. He doesn’t really look all that much like Jin Guangshan anyway, though she thinks that’s more a matter of dissipation on the father’s end than a lack of resemblance on the son’s.

He does look like Meng Yao, but there’s a notable height difference that helps with that. And besides, she’s decided to let Meng Yao stay where he is, so why not do the same with Jin Zixuan?

Yanli is so desperately happy, is the thing. Even if Jiang Cheng is still muttering to her about minor details that she really doesn’t think ruined the wedding even for him, she can’t get past the fact that, awful as the Jin are, Yanli seems happy to be marrying. She knows that some of the reconciliation between her and Jin Zixuan last time happened during the Sunshot Campaign, but she didn’t really know the details. She knows more of the details this time, but can’t compare: something to do with the situation around the hunt for the Xuanwu and Jin Zixuan realizing that rather a lot of other cultivators were making eyes at his intended when she walked around the camp, which obviously couldn’t have been true last time. Of course, this time they also didn’t break the engagement, so…things are different.

She suspects that Yanli is just as happy this time as last time—or happier, since Wei Wuxian isn’t in Yiling for this wedding but right here in Lanling.

Jin Guangshan looks mildly dyspeptic, which fits with where his poison should be progressing. He eats heartily at the feast, though, which implies that either he and his physicians have not identified the toxin or he is ignoring their instructions for at least the duration of the wedding. One of the key elements in protecting oneself from this particular poison’s effects is to eat a simple diet low in fat; Jin Guangshan is definitely not doing that.

If he keeps eating like a pig, his death may come sooner than expected, but it should still be far enough both from the wedding itself and from the introduction of the poison to his system that Wen Qing’s dual goals of not ruining the wedding day and not getting caught should be possible.

She eats heartily herself at the expense of the Jin—she suspects she’s eating more food in one day than the Jin gave her family at the work camp overall—and makes her way home to Yiling to wait afterwards for news.

Not that she actually sits and twiddles her thumbs. There are disciple trainings to set up (Yiling Wen is developing a reputation for healing arts that she wishes to continue after she marries out). There are a wide variety of general sect tasks to take care of and to establish traditions for that are not the same as her uncle’s dysfunctional systems in Qishan. And there are ongoing intersect issues to address, from monitoring the progress from afar of the resentful sword committee and figuring out who might marry A-Ning to negotiating in more detail the trade and night hunt responsibilities between her sect and their new neighbors.

So it’s certainly not as if she is bored in Yiling, or out of it (since her various responsibilities keep drawing her out of town, particularly to Lotus Pier). She finds it vaguely amusing that she has become so much a part of the cultivation world this time around: she who was first always hidden from it by Uncle Ruohan’s unwillingness to let he rout of his grasp and then rudely thrust out of it in the aftermath of the war. She has tea with Yu Ziyuan, who probably couldn’t have picked her out of a lineup in her last life while they were both still kicking, and who will now be her mother-in-law in due course; she compares notes with Lan Xichen on the efficacy of certain Lan musical techniques for healing, sitting in a pavilion that she realizes was destroyed by her sect during her last life; she is consulted by Sect Leader Ouyang on his wife’s difficult pregnancy with their fourth child, something that would have been impossible in  either version of her prior life because Wen Ruohan did not share physicians and no one came to the Burial Mounds for help.

All in all, it is an odd life, but not an unpleasant one. And it is made substantially more pleasant when the news spreads first that Jin Guangshan has gone into seclusion—which cannot be anything other than a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, given his predilections—and then only a few weeks later that Jin Zixuan is now the leader of the Lanling Jin sect.

It’s not sudden, not to her. She knew it was coming; made sure it would come about, in fact. And she has not lost touch with her new network of contacts, either, so she was already aware that his visits to the brothels of Lanling had dropped off substantially, and thus that he was already failing. But it brings with it an intense satisfaction—he has received no more than his due in her eyes—and a deep feeling of disorientation.

Who is she if she is not a vessel for her vengeance?

And what is her new life, now that it is (in some sense at least) free of the old?

Chapter Text

Wei Wuxian’s wedding is, of course, not as extensively ostentatious as Jiang Yanli’s was.

There are several good and sufficient reasons for this, all of which Wen Qing is well aware of. First, of course, he is marrying into the Lan sect and not the Jin, and with that comes a great deal of restraint in decoration, celebration, and elaboration. Fewer things are made of gold; fewer yet are gilded, made to look gold without actually being gold; and still fewer are simply colored gold without the metallic appearance. All of this makes things substantially less gaudy and, Wen Qing believes, less gauche as well.

This does not mean that there is not a lot of money being spent on this wedding. It is the wedding not just of Wei Wuxian but of Lan Wangji, Second Jade of Lan, after all, and the Lan are not going to do anything to allow this event to be overshadowed. They aren’t the Jin, but they are a proud sect anyway, and the fact that their pride does not manifest in gold does not mean that it does not manifest in expense. The Lan tend towards silver and jade, both of which are present in abundance, but what Wen Qing cannot help but notice is the sheer quality of the fabrics and embroidery used in the ceremony and its adjacent activities. As someone who has made due with rags where she could get them and worse than rags when she could not, who has priced out the cheapest fabrics possible in Yiling to exchange the meager takings of the radish harvest for in order to make sure that A-Yuan and Popo and the rest of them would have a barrier between themselves and the cold, she is not sure she can fully fathom the cost of some of this cloth—and simple as it looks, the dye job required to make it pure snowy white and remain so (even if some talisman or other cultivation practice is used to assist) would increase that cost multiple times. Of course, most of the cloth used today is red, for the wedding, and blue tones, because white is a bad omen on a wedding day, but even those hues are expensive to keep clean.

So the wedding is expensive, even if not as visually stunning (in both the good and bad sense) as the Jin wedding. Of course, the existence of that Jin wedding is also a reason that the Lan put so much expense into theirs, since they refuse to be shown up by another sect marrying a Jiang disciple. But that is also part of why the wedding is not quite as ostentatious: the Jiang are careful to make sure that the wedding of Wei Wuxian does not overshadow that of Jiang Yanli.

This in turn splits itself into two explanations: first, Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng (and she imagines Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Fengmian) have not spent quite as long planning this wedding or imagining exactly what it would look like (and how much they would make the Jin pay for it). So there is a natural degree to which the long-looked-for marriage of the only daughter of the Jiang is a triumph beyond all other triumphs for the eye.

The other side, she suspects, is that the Jiang sect (read, in this case, Yu Ziyuan, even though she has mellowed somewhat since Wei Wuxian is marrying out and therefore no longer threatening the primacy of Jiang Cheng inside the sect in her eyes) is mildly but actively resisting allowing the wedding to be so large, overwhelming, or impressive as the Jin-Jiang wedding the prior year. There are fewer pushes from the Jiang side to make things fancier or more flowery, and so they do not happen.

Wen Qing doesn’t mind any of this so much. Wei Wuxian deserves the world of course, because he literally gave hers back to her. But he also hates a fuss being made about him (though he loves one being made about Lan Wangji, to be fair). And he would hate even more having that fuss made about him exceed the one made over his shijie.

But more importantly from her perspective, he gets this, and she gets to see it. He could be dressed in the rags they all wore in the Burial Mounds, and she would be happy to see him actually admit his feelings for Lan Wangji and marry the man who he was clearly obsessed with in both lives. She would have to add whoever had put him in those rags to her now-depleted hit list, because Wei Wuxian also deserves respect and honor fitting his abilities and his sense of justice, but she would still be happy at the wedding. His joy is infectious, and it would be so even if he were not the person that he is, naturally spreading his own happiness around, because she has had to live this twice just to see it. She cannot help but see the day that Lan Wangji came to dinner at the Burial Mounds haunting the wedding feast, but it is a joyful haunting, like the day her brother was returned to her as a fierce corpse (which was of course the same day, a day which will never happen now because he has not died in the first place). Every sip of tea, every morsel of food, every glimpse of Wei Wuxian beaming at Lan Wangji and Lan Wangji for once in his life visibly happy as well, if a small tilt of the mouth could be called visible happiness, which it could in his case—each of them reminds her of a meal with nothing in the pot but water and a soup that could barely be called radish-adjacent, and with that same joy radiating from her adoptive little brother but suppressed because he didn’t feel he had the right to feel it.

She is glad that Jiang Cheng is visibly crying when she goes to talk to him after the toasts are done, because it makes the tears in her own eyes seem like a sympathetic response, rather than (she suspects) simply deriving from the same source. It is not every day that one sees their brother married, even if she knows that for both of them this relation to Wei Wuxian is complicated (in his case through the complex of trauma and odd family relations that constitutes the Jiangs, in hers by the dual echoes of a life twice lived). She hopes of course to see it again, with A-Ning, but that too will be a complicated day, given the history that no one but her knows.

So she is glad to have the excuse to cry in public, because that is also something that the Wen Qing of the past could not do. Even begging Wei Wuxian to save her brother and her family, she could not cry, because tears were weakness.

Perhaps that is something that she can have in this new life; perhaps this new life is one in which, although she knows herself and prefers to be strong, she does not have to be so every moment as a matter of life and death.

Speaking of death, she is glad to see Jin Zixuan sitting in the seat of the Jin sect leader, Jiang Yanli by his side and Madam Jin, his mother, on his other. Wei Wuxian is married, Jin Zixuan is alive, and Jin Guangshan is dead: a more total reversal of the situation the day she died herself could not be imagined, and she is so very glad of it.

Chapter Text

The political landscape of the cultivation world is slowly—well, somewhat slowly—morphing out of recognizability for her, and she is delighted. The Jin, Jiang, and Lan are close allies! The Lan and Nie remain close, because of the longstanding friendship between Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue (she even knew about this before her death last time, that is how well-known it is). The Wen are a non-existent husk, or rather the Qishan Wen are, and she has no compunction whatsoever about the fact that that Yiling Wen are not a great sect. She has never valued being a Wen for being a member of a great sect; she has only valued it as being part of her family. That is the lesson that she herself took from the writings of Wen Mao: not that the Wen sect should be run as a family because it will make them great, but that if the Wen family approaches things in the right way towards one another and their place in the cultivation world, that will make them great.

Or, to put it a bit more bluntly, the Wen sect is organized on family lines not because that will make them powerful, but because a family cares for each other in the right way.

She has always believed this, even if it is not her uncle’s understanding of the foundational texts of Qishan Wen, and she continues to believe it now.

She simply believes that sometimes that family can be chosen as well as bred. After all, husbands and wives (or husbands and husbands or wives and wives) choose each other, and no one thinks to exclude them. So if she has chosen the Jiang younger generation as her family (starting with Wei Wuxian but by now folding over to Young Madam Jin and Jiang Cheng) that makes them no less hers.

And it makes the woman A-Ning is going to marry theirs as well.

One side effect of her somewhat new spy network among the brothels is that she has a much better sense of exactly how wide the bastardy of Jin Guangshan’s children spreads, and she has been using her connection to Yanli to suggest to Jin Zixuan that he might benefit from bringing in some of those bastards out of the cold. One need only point out how much the Nie have benefited from Meng Yao’s continued presence to consider that the children of Jin Guangshan are not inherently tainted by their parenthood (and if she is honest, being Jin Guangshan’s child is more of a curse than being the son of any woman ever born, no matter her station and life circumstances). Add to that the fact that all the other major sects are built at the moment around sibling groups, chosen or born (even with Wei Wuxian married out, no one believes that he is anything other than Jiang Cheng’s closest confidante), and that Jin Zixuan could use some people loyal to him in his sect of vipers, the opportunity seems almost too good to be true. Of course, technically those bastard siblings could be used to threaten his position—but that’s the beauty of co-opting them by welcoming them in. Instead of threats (someone could always go out and find another descendant of Jin Guangshan as a figurehead for an internal sect revolt) they become allies.

She hates that she can think this way, but she’s read the histories of what her uncle did to the minor sects that the Qishan Wen swallowed, and that kind of thing would be a mere drop in the bucket.

Anyway, some of the bastards aren’t exactly threats in anyone’s eyes: little seven-year-old Mo Xuanyu is only too happy to get away from his overbearing cousin, and there are a series of little boys and girls around Lanling who are quietly slid into the sect rolls. In all honesty, there are enough of them that it will be hard for the Jin disciples to bully them for it, even if they wanted to, because if they all join up they’ll be a solid minority of the sect youth.

Somewhere along the line, they start picking up intelligence about higher-ranking bastards, though. Bastards who don’t know they’re bastards.

The opposite of Meng Yao, in a way: people born to higher estate and going through life painfully unaware of their parentage, instead of born to low estate and constantly tormented by it.

She spares another moment to be glad that Meng Yao has found a high place that doesn’t require the toadying to his father that she saw in his past life—or the murder of her family. He is of course the first recognized bastard once Jin Zixuan starts his program, but he remains with the Nie because recognition is not the same as rank, and Jin Guangshan is not around to dangle that particular apple before him.

Qin Su, on the other hand, is a shock to hear about.

She’s not sure exactly how the information gets into her network. Madam Qin is of course hardly a brothel-keeper or a frequenter of them. Perhaps it is one of her maids, or a jealous woman who noticed Jin Guangshan (of all people to be jealous over) boasting or swaggering about it. But the information is solid, and once you look for it you can see it in Qin Su’s face.

There is no need, of course, to out her. She is not in need; the resources of the Jin sect exceed that of the Qin sect, but the post of daughter to the sect leader in the latter is still better-provided-for than bastard sister of the sect leader in the other. And as far as she can tell, Qin Su seems loved.

It does make her think that it might be a kindness to ensure that whoever she does marry is definitively not one of Jin Guangshan’s bastards. In fact, she seems to remember that she married Jin Guangyao in the last life, which…is troubling in this one.

And Qin Su does happen to already have been one of her top candidates for A-Ning’s hand…

This will be something she will have to think about.

Chapter Text

A-Ning and Qin Su get along very well, which is a blessing and no mistake. There is certainly something odd about having her beloved little brother marrying a child of Jin Guangshan, of all people, but it wasn’t as if Jin Guangshan himself had personally been trawling the work camps and torturing them to death. In other words, it wasn’t the face or the bloodline that was the problem; it was the yellow uniforms (gold, but she has never felt like giving the Jin the respect of accepting their terms for colors) and the cavalier-verging-on-murderous attitude towards the humanity of others. Qin Su doesn’t share either of those, so watching her and A-Ning actually get along is not a mixed blessing, merely a joy.

A-Ning is taking over more of the day-to-day running of the sect; she never really taught him medicine, because while he was a good assistant he had no desire to be the diagnosing physician, but this he takes to like a duck to water. Apparently the same skills that had led him to be the one she trusted with the money in the Burial Mounds translate to being good with the sect’s finances, and the fact that he’s soft-spoken means that people are surprised when it turns out he has a very strong sense of self. After all, he didn’t even leave his body when he was supposed to last time, and he managed to survive the Dancing Fairy in both lives—a damaged spiritual cognition is one thing, but most victims, especially at his age, would have died or gone catatonic.

Her A-Ning is a very strong man, it turns out, even without the transformation to a fierce corpse that made him physically so in the other life.

And Qin Su seems to see that. She’s not defaulting to the nurturing role that society so often expects of women; neither is she as forceful as Wen Qing knows herself to be. Instead, she and A-Ning seem to complement each other, and that makes Wen Qing quite happy to see.

She herself is spending more time at Lotus Pier to get to know the slightly-less-traumatized version of her fiancé that she is going to marry this time around, and to navigate his parents, who she never really knew in either life before. Yu Ziyuan is much easier to take now that she is not passing judgment directly on Wei Wuxian in Wen Qing’s presence, and Jiang Cheng’s blossoming into the man she is highly aware he is capable of becoming is helping with the concern she’d had about how Madam Yu treated him.

Of course, Jiang Cheng is not the Sandu Shengshou she remembers from the Sunshot Campaign and his rare visits to Yiling in the prior life. He has not gone through that extreme of a transformation, and he has not had that much responsibility thrust on him or that much violent war to endure. He also doesn’t have Wei Wuxian’s core.

Neither of these matters as much as she’d been afraid they would. Jiang Fengmian is not a good parent and neither is Yu Ziyuan (not that Wen Qing knows much about good parenting; her own died far too young and Uncle Rouhan is no one’s image of a good role model for that particular function). But precisely because Jiang Fengmian is a bit too laissez faire about things, he actually creates a space that Jiang Cheng is able to fill, especially now that Wei Wuxian has married out. Someone has to train the disciples and organize the duty rota and assign the disciples to night hunts. She assumes that Yu Ziyuan had been doing most of that, with Wei Wuxian as head disciple filling in—but perhaps Yu Ziyuan was doing it to stop Wei Wuxian from having too much influence, because she has certainly let Jiang Cheng take the reins since the Sunshot that wasn’t. And just as she knows he did when his parents were dead, Jiang Cheng has managed this spectacularly well.

She knows because she’s been learning to do the same things for the Yiling Wen, and then teaching it to A-Ning, and she’s relied on Jiang Cheng more than she’d like to admit to figure out how best to do these things, things she’d never had to deal with before.

And he’s really, truly helpful. And she likes spending time with him. And he’s patient with A-Ning, which is a must not just for A-Ning’s partner but for hers as well.

Also, she knows based on the monologues that each of them have at various points unleashed in her presence that his core is weaker than Wei Wuxian’s was, but she is fairly certain by now that this was magnified in both their minds by the ridiculous criticisms that Yu Ziyuan exposed them both to when Wei Wuxian was in the sect. It certainly doesn’t seem reflected in the way that Jiang Cheng uses his core, which is as impressive as she’s ever seen (and again, she’s literally held Wei Wuxian’s at about this age in her hands and put it in Jiang Cheng). He may not be Wei Wuxian, but she wonders if anyone who hadn’t grown up with Wei Wuxian would notice a difference.

Not that power is her primary concern with her future husband. But it’s nice to know that shoving Wei Wuxian’s core into that body hadn’t been additionally traumatic from overloading the meridians as well as all the other trauma involved in the surgery last time. She’d made a cursory examination to that effect last time, of course, but without a functioning core she’d had difficulty being entirely certain and then of course once he was in surgery there hadn’t been time to do much more than try to fix the damage, without much time to think about how much it might hurt him after.

She doesn’t love having hurt the man she’s going to marry so much in the prior life, but of course he’d been a sect leader when the sects had collectively decided to kill her and her family so it’s not like past-Jiang-Cheng doesn’t have sins to balance. She’s already worked through deciding that isn’t enough to stop her marrying him, or liking him, or even maybe someday loving him. But it’s nice to be able to forgive herself as well.

Chapter Text

A-Ning’s wedding comes before her own, not because she does not want to marry Jiang Cheng or because the Jiang sect is trying to find a way out of their engagement (both rumors that her intelligence network brings her way) but because she feels a need to be there negotiating for A-Ning along with Popo and their uncles. If she were to leave the sect in his hands first, her position would be stranger in that room—and also, negotiating for A-Ning as future sect leader changes the demands that the Qin can make, even if everyone in the room knows that he is assuredly going to take that position sooner rather than later.

It also means that she can make sure that the Yiling Wen sect does right by her little brother. He is self-effacing in some ways, her A-Ning. Not in ways that she thinks will make him a bad sect leader; he will advocate for friends, family, and sect tirelessly and in his own quiet way quite ruthlessly. She still remembers (though no one else does or ever will) the way that he just…showed up having poisoned their cousin and his entourage and extricated the Jiangs from Lotus Pier, assuming she would help. No, there is a steel in her A-Ning that she would never deny—but it is not self-directed, and never has been. That is why she thinks Qin Su will be a good advocate for him. But it is also why she needs to make sure this wedding is up to the standard that her A-Ning deserves, even if he doesn’t think he does.

Red is already one of their colors, of course, but there is something different about seeing A-Ning in the red that is his wedding colors. She had literally given up all hope of ever seeing this, in her other existence. Who would marry a fierce corpse? Before that, who would marry a slave of the Jin? Before that, would Uncle Ruohan actually let either of them marry, with its implicit division of loyalty?

But here? She gets this. He gets this, even though he does not feel the change the way that she does (she knows he was aware of the limits Uncle Ruohan placed on them, but the others never existed in this world). It moves her to tears, and she is grateful that Jiang Cheng happens to angle himself while they are talking so that no one else sees them fall (even if he does it under the cover of yelling at Wei Wuxian for some imagined slight she can’t even listen to). It’s good to see Wei Wuxian there too, not with the family as her heart would have him but crowding up into A-Ning’s space anyway; the two of them are too close even in this world for him to keep his distance, and there is none of the trauma around their bond that would make Wei Wuxian do the thing she knows he is willing to do (did to Jiang Cheng) where he pulls away precisely because of their closeness.

It is truly one of her happiest days.

But it makes her mournful too, as it only confirms that the family she knew on the Burial Mounds, while still alive (something she clings to fiercely) is also changing in ways it will never come back from, and no one else knows it. Wei Wuxian is already married out, into Cloud Recesses (Jiang Cheng is still quite salty about this, even though she knows that he also is very happy for his brother). Now A-Ning is marrying in, bringing someone else into the sect who will be—who is supposed to be—closer to him than the rest of them. And she herself will marry out soon.

In the days afterwards she finds herself wandering the Burial Mounds, lost in thought. It has been a long time since the Mounds held terror for her in either life. She still is not certain what happened to purify them, or how it relates to her own transport through time, except for her certainty that it had to center on the one person (A-Yuan excepted) that they left there, and the powerful artifact he held. She has resigned herself to not knowing; she has no desire to let anyone know she is living a second life, unless someone actually asks (she has a short list of people she wouldn’t lie to about it, basically consisting of those who were in the Burial Mounds with her, Yanli because she died, and Jiang Cheng because she already lied to him about something extremely important once). And she is not the kind of researcher in the right field to figure it out herself.

She knows that if she handed the problem over to Wei Wuxian, or to the committee that he’s leading that’s looking into the resentful sword from the Xuanwu of Slaughter (in Cloud Recesses, no less; Lan Qiren is probably dyspeptic, and the fact that he’s not quit the sect in a huff is a sign of how much the world has changed from the one she left in her death) they would probably be able to at least confirm her basic intuitions about the event, or disprove them. But she is not inclined to, for two reasons.

First, she would have to explain that other world, and she does not want to invoke its existence into this one out loud. She thinks with it, because it is deep within her bones, but she would not like it to become real in the way it would if she has to expose it to the light of day and the sound of her voice. Not to mention the difficulty if people thought she was insane.

Second, she does not want anyone, even Wei Wuxian (perhaps in her own way especially Wei Wuxian) to know that something like the Stygian Tiger Seal is even possible. In this world, her uncle died and no one was ever required to defeat him one on one with a power like the Seal. It should remain that way, and she will do whatever she can to ensure that she and only she knows of the possibility that it coupld exist. The knowledge will die with her whenever that is, and the world will be better for it.

The Burial Mounds are a place that is being slowly decorrupted. There are even plans to open cultivation school buildings in and around it as it becomes safer. And as she turns her back on it and walks back towards Yiling, she feels freer than she has since Uncle Ruohan first called her and A-Ning from Dafan to Qishan after the death of their parents.

Chapter Text

There is something that feels, for her, like she has come full circle in her new life, in the fact that she is marrying Jiang Cheng. On the one hand, he apparently carried a comb for her on his person so long and so automatically (in another life) that he had it on him when Lotus Pier fell—and she kept the same comb long past the point at which doing so was even vaguely reasonable. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had feelings for him in the other life, in other words, or at that he hadn’t for her. But in that life she’d also had her hands inside his body in the least sexy way possible, and lied to him about it; he’d told her point blank that he couldn’t protect her people, and then proven it; he had come to the Burial Mounds and it hadn’t changed his mind.

She could understand why; that was the awful thing, at the time. She wasn’t the most empathetic person in the world, but she could understand cold hard calculations like that like it was her own mind thinking.

In this life, he’d been nothing but supportive; she really couldn’t complain, and she didn’t want to. If anything, it really confirmed what he’d said the first time around: he couldn’t promise to protect her people, so he didn’t.

Not that he didn’t want to, or that he wanted them dead (though she had no doubt he’d said plenty of things about ‘Wen-dogs’—but that was the name she shared with the people who burned Lotus Pier, killed his parents, and crippled him, in that life). That he couldn’t, and he wouldn’t promise what he couldn’t do.

She respected that. She understood it, in many ways, more than she would ever understand Wei Wuxian, for all that she owed him. She loved them both, in very different ways; Wei Wuxian was and always would be her brother, a person she trusted and believed in.

Jiang Cheng was the person she could rely on in a very different way. She could trust him to be honest with her in a way that Wei Wuxian literally could not comprehend (she trusted Wei Wuxian with the life of her family, but not to tell her if something was bothering him). She could trust him to defend his people to the death—and she was his people now, and her family was his people now both because they were marrying and because the Yiling Wen and the Yunmeng Jiang were becoming the closest of allies through it. She had noticed that about the Jiang, all of them in her generation—they might have odd definitions of who was theirs, and they might be ridiculous about it, but if you were, you were.

And she had no doubt in this life that for Jiang Cheng, she was.

She liked him. She genuinely did, and does, not that that had ended up mattering in the last life and not that she wouldn’t have used the potential for a marriage to save her people in this life if she hadn’t. She can see arguing with him over the dinner table for years to come, and she can see working together to strengthen Yunmeng Jiang for that whole time as well.

After all, no one in the world can have the faith that she has that her husband can run the Yunmeng Jiang sect, and run it well.  No one else has the lived experience of Jiang Cheng taking a sect made up of a few people who weren’t at home and rebuilding it to the status of a major sect in the midst of a war, all while younger than any other sect leader. This will never happen in this world, and she is grateful of it, but it grounds her ability to speak honestly about her respect for the capabilities of the man she is marrying in a truth that no one can deny and that she knows will serve her well into the future. Jiang Cheng is the kind of person who is sensitive to being devalued, to being thought lesser than. It’s an enraging side effect of his upbringing. But she can look him in the eye and tell him she believes in him and no one can doubt her.

At the same time, she knows he respects her. She knows this not because of anything that the old Jiang Cheng did in her other life, but because this Jiang Cheng has shown it to her time and again. He grumbles to her, mutters to her, lets her see him as himself, and not as the glass façade that his insecurities sometimes make him show to the outside world, jagged wherever he feels broken. She’s pretty sure that he likes her, just as she likes him, and while she’s also hopeful that they’re getting towards love, she hasn’t had someone actually like her for her in a long time, if ever.

She grumbled to him too, and she doesn’t feel the need to sugarcoat her annoyances or put on a strong demeanor in his presence—and she’s not sure there’s ever been anyone she was that honest with. Not in the Burial Mounds, when she was all too often the one who had to stay strong when Wei Wuxian went into a funk or someone got sick and everyone panicked. Not in Yiling, where she’s been the sect leader until now. And not growing up with A-Ning because she always tried to shield him from the worst parts of living with their uncle. Not necessarily effectively—she knows now that A-Ning saw and heard much more than she’d tried to let him—but she did try.

And if that is where this new life takes her—if her second chance results in her having someone, one person that she can just be around—that’s enough, she decides.

Only when Jiang Cheng looks at her in red (and honestly, he’s seen her in red before, she’s a Wen) and she looks at him in it too (and that’s much more unusual), she doesn’t think in terms of liking, and being herself, and it being enough.

She thinks finally.

And she’s not a young, naïve woman. She doesn’t think this marriage needs to be about love, or feelings, or anything other than that they need to be married to protect her and her family and to ensure the north flank of Yunmeng Jiang. But if this isn’t love, she’s not sure exactly what is.

She burns, looking at Jiang Cheng, and this time it’s entirely metaphorical.