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Lan Wangji–Lan Zhan–dies, and Sizhui–A-Yuan–dies, and Wei Wuxian breaks.
But, as he has at so many points in his life when he’s broken, he at least breaks productively.
He doesn’t bargain. He doesn’t deny. He doesn’t grieve.
He’s done all that before, with other family torn away from him, killed, slaughtered, burned alive. Been there, done that.
He doesn’t ‘descend into madness’.
No, Wei Wuxian plunges head-first into insanity.
It isn’t a slow, creeping slide, like it had been in his first life, in those final days in the Burial Mounds. Where he’d been delirious and half-mad, scribbling vaguely-remembered ideas in a fevered frenzy of escapism.
(It was precisely one of those manic episodes that had led to the creation of the soul-sacrificing ritual.)
He's gone so far past that foggy, scattered space that he can’t even see it anymore. The world isn’t hazy and distant, it is, instead, so dazzlingly clear that it’s nearly blinding. It is crystalline, his view of the world from this place.
He knows exactly what he wants to do and he knows exactly what he has to do to achieve it.
There are no more limiters now.
Wei Wuxian is done, and he thinks maybe that it’s time to show the world exactly why they should have left him the fuck alone right from the very start.
The first stop is the Back Mountains of Cloud Recesses.
His voice is a whip crack of sound. “Stand up.”
“Go away,” Lan Xichen tells him.
Not very convincing, he has to say. Begging and threatening the world to leave him alone has never worked for Wei Wuxian; begging and threatening Wei Wuxian to leave him alone is not going to work for Lan Xichen.
Wei Wuxian is stubborn that way. (He’s stubborn in a lot of ways. And despite all the times he’s shown that, the world still hasn’t quite caught on to exactly how much yet.
(But it will. Oh, it will.)
“Lan Xichen,” he warns, “Stand up.”
Lan Xichen, curled in and limp like an unwatered flower, dares raise his head as if it weighs too heavy on his neck, casts him a shallow glare that wouldn’t have impressed even a fifteen-year-old Wei Wuxian, and turns his back on him again.
“Lan Huan, stand the fuck up!” The eyes that look at him, two shades off gold and twice as painful for it, are wide and startled and kindle a ruthless fury in his chest. “For once in your fucking life, stand for something.”
“What is left for me to stand for?”
For a moment, he considers turning around and walking out now. Doing this alone and adding just one or two more sins onto the pile in the process.
But.
One chance. He can afford that. One more time, he can be the stupid, forgiving, trusting Wei Ying.
Just once more.
“What would you give,” he asks, “to undo your worst mistakes?”
“Anything,” Lan Xichen answers immediately.
Wei Wuxian, for once, does not speak. He watches, judgment and earned doubt in his eyes. Zewu-jun has been weighed, he has been measured, and he has already before been found wanting.
He can’t be found wanting in this.
“Wei Wuxian, anything.” But he still doesn’t move, doesn’t talk. It’s the wrong answer. It’s not enough. Eyes wild, burning into his, Lan Xichen whispers, “Everything.”
“Mark your words, Zewu-jun.” Because that’s exactly what he’s asking for.
“Do you need more blood?” The question is asked simply. Coldly, callously, as if it is a thing to pick up on the way home from market. As if, at a word, Gusu Lan’s First Jade will go out right now and bring back a couple of screaming and bleeding bodies if he asks for it.
Anything. Everything.
The thought almost makes Wei Wuxian laugh.
“Yes and no,” he answers, making another stroke. “I do need more blood. A lot more. Unfortunately, it has to be my blood, which is why I have you here, to get me food and water. If I could do this with any old blood, or even any cultivator’s blood, rest assured, I’d have left a trail of bodies from here to Gusu and never hesitated.” He smiles up at Zewu-jun before going back to the array, in its most nascent form, sketched out in charcoal with only the first few dozen lines of thousands laid out in blood so far. But he will get there.
It’s so massive that from this angle, on his knees, he can’t see the far side of the array where he kneels.
Well, this itself is still conservative. Ambitious. But even in the sprawling ground of the Burial Mounds, there’s only so much space to work with.
Thus: all the blood.
As huge as it is, it would need to be two or three times bigger still if he were to try drawing it in something like cinnabar.
If Lan Huan feels hurt or offended at the knowledge that Wei Wuxian brought him along because it’s convenient and helpful, and not because he’s something necessary or indispensable, he doesn’t show it.
What he does do is hold out his wrist, and Wei Wuxian looks up at his eyes. They do not waver. “My golden core is nearly as strong as Wangji’s and my blood is powerful.”
“This is demonic cultivation, Zewu-jun.”
“Blood magic usually is.”
When caramel eyes still don’t waver, he pours a cup from the water gourd he’d filled at the Blood Pool and holds it out for Lan Huan. “Drink.” He could say that a too-pure golden core could mess with his very dark array. He could say how he needs the blood to be connected to the Burial Mounds like his is. Wei Wuxian could explain and say a great many things.
He says none of them.
Lan Huan takes the cup from his hand without hesitation and throws it back like hard liquor.
His disdain for all the terrible choices Gusu Lan’s First Jade has made over the years doesn’t miraculously disappear, doesn’t shrink at all, but he does respect him just a tiny little bit more.
Wei Wuxian reaches out and cuts the man’s wrist in response.
Maybe, he muses, laying down the last strokes nearly two years to the day he’d laid the first, the Great Sects were almost right about my wicked plans for world destruction.
That is the idea, here, after all, isn’t it?
Does it still count as a bull’s-eye if the arrow is shot and landed two decades before the target is even made and affixed?
The trials of these last two years have made him maudlin and philosophical, evidently.
It’s ironic–funny—laughable–how goddamn healthy he is right now. Anemic, maybe–always–and still–always–a bit too far on the thin side, but healthy. He eats plenty–has to eat plenty, to restore all the blood he uses–sleeps early, and no one can accuse him of not drinking enough water or getting exercise.
He's done better caring for himself for Lan Zhan when his love is dead than he ever managed while he was alive. He cannot even promise to take care of himself better as a contingency upon this whole thing, because he is already doing so. (What, then, can he promise Lan Zhan\Fate\the spirits in return if this crazy thing works? What does he have left to give if not even good behavior?)
Funny.
He sits back and observes the array with a critical eye.
If this problem could be solved with just a few cultivator bodies, he’d have littered the roads and hills with them. He recalls telling Lan Huan something to that effect, early on in this process.
He'd been serious then and he’s serious now.
Alas, this endeavor isn’t something a few corpses can help with.
Truly, where is the world’s sense of equivalent exchange? If a life for a life had worked to bring back the most feared cultivator in the Jianghu, why should it be different for Lan Zhan and A-Yuan?
(But that’s not quite true, is it? The true cost of his return had been not one life, but five. The cost to secure A-Yuan’s, fifty-three. The cost for Lan Zhan’s, thirty-three whip marks. Exactly what is this shitty economy?)
Clipping a bit of cloth to sew back together piecemeal after it’s torn asunder thirteen years after the fact is one thing, but unweaving a vast tapestry to spool the threads of fate back onto their spindles in an attempt to weave a new design with one’s own grubby fingers is very much a different task entirely.
Such a thing–such an incredibly vast, massive undertaking–cannot possibly come at so low a cost as a few cultivators—their blood or their lives or their souls entire.
How many sacrifices must it take, to undo time? To wind back the very hands of fate itself?
One? Two? A dozen? A hundred? How many? How many could they willingly convince? How many more could they forcefully take? These two desperate men, one Orthodox cultivator and the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation?
A few? A lot? Many—manymanymany.
But enough?
Doubtful.
Not enough energy, not enough souls, not enough lives, out there spread across the whole of the Great and Lesser sects. Not enough souls alive today.
But.
Wei Wuxian, the Yiling Patriarch, doesn’t only have access to the souls alive today, does he?
One-thousand years, the Burial Mounds have stood. One-thousand years, people have been throwing other humans into these mountains. And all the way back at the very beginning of those one-thousand years, a whole entire war—a war between immortals and celestials.
All of them, here, beneath his feet, waiting. Waiting for one-thousand-and-two years and two men with a desperate hope and a bloody array.
They don’t have to wait much longer.
There’s a long, double-hand’s length, thin needle sticking out of Wei Wuxian’s chest, as he leans over his completed array. Sharp and strong enough to pierce through his sternum, it pulses in measured beats. A long, thin, silver needle that slowly beads with bright, vivid, arterial carmine, lazily rolling down to drip off the end, the final component in all this.
Heart’s-blood, fresh and living. For a heart’s wish.
He looks up to see Lan Huan on the opposite side of the array. “What would you do? What would you give?” he asks now, as he’d asked then.
And almost-gold eyes don’t waver now, as they hadn’t wavered then. “Anything. Everything.”
“Everything,” Wei Wuxian confirms.
Everything to lose. Everything to gain.
Together, golden qi and resentful energy, orthodox and heretical, they press their fingers to the lines below them, and activate the array.
With a riotous flash of black and gold and red and blue, the world stops, and then the world comes undone.
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