Chapter Text
The last thing Jiang Cheng remembered was seeing it before Jin Ling did.
No sound. No warning. Just a fierce corpse moving out of the pitch dark at the wrong angle, too fast, and Jin Ling's attention elsewhere. A split second where Jiang Cheng's body made the decision before his mind did.
It had always been like that with Jin Ling.
He remembered stepping in front of him. The impact. The feeling going out of his legs and the ground coming up fast and Jin Ling's voice saying his name with something cracked open in it that Jiang Cheng had never heard before.
Then nothing.
The first thing he registered was that he wasn't dead.
He wasn't sure if that was good news.
He lay still and took stock the way he had learned to after bad night hunts; methodical, checking his extremities first. Fingers. Present. Toes. Present. However, the ache of a body that had taken damage was surprisingly absent. He remembered the impact clearly. He remembered the ground. He did not remember getting up from the fall, and yet here he was, lying on a bed with nothing hurting, which was not how bodies worked.
He opened his eyes.
Ceiling. Dark wood beams. A paper lantern hanging slightly off center.
He stared at it.
Something about it nagged at him. The particular hang of the lantern. The water stain near the left corner. His eyes moved over both and waited for his brain to catch up.
Nothing came. He had no idea where he was.
He pushed himself upright.
Bad idea. The world tilted sharply and he grabbed the edge of the bed and held on until it leveled out. When it did he looked down at his hands in his lap and stopped.
He turned them over slowly. The calluses were wrong. Not gone but reduced, softer, in different places. He ran his thumb across his left palm, then his right, then across his knuckles one by one. The scar along his left knuckle from four years ago was gone. The one on his right wrist from the corpse puppet incident three winters back was gone. His hands looked like they belonged to someone who had been training for a few years but hadn't faced real adversity.
But what was worse was the bare skin at the base of his right index finger.
Zidian wasn't there.
What the fuck.
He pinched the back of his hand hard enough to leave a mark. Pain registered cleanly. Awake then. Definitely awake. He shut his eyes, meditating to analyze his golden core the way he had ten thousand times before and found it.
There.
But smaller than it should be. The size and density of it was wrong. Years wrong. It felt like his core had when he was…
He looked up at the room.
The water stain near the left corner. A wardrobe chock-full of purple sitting flush against the far wall of the room. A stack of cultivation manuals on the desk in an order he recognized as his own. The spare wooden practice sword leaning against the wall by the door. The window he had stared out of so many times as a child he could have drawn the view from memory.
Oh no.
He stood too fast and grabbed the bedpost. The floor was too close. His reach was shorter than it should be. He crossed to the bronze mirror on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else and looked at his reflection.
Fifteen.
He stared at his own face for a long moment.
"What the actual fuck," he said out loud.
His voice came out too high. Too young. He cleared his throat. Same result.
He pressed his palms flat against the mirror's surface and looked himself in the eyes. Rounder jaw. Narrow shoulders. Skin smooth and unmarked in ways it hadn't been in fifteen years. His golden core sat in his chest at the size of a fifteen year old's cultivation because it was a fifteen year old's cultivation because he was apparently fifteen years old.
He must of qi deviated. That was the only explanation. Something had gone wrong on the night hunt and now he was having the most detailed hallucination of his life and standing in his childhood bedroom at Lotus Pier.
He pinched himself again. Harder.
Pain. Still young in the mirror.
"Okay," he said to his reflection.
His reflection had nothing helpful to add.
He needed air. Fast.
He left without looking in the mirror again. The corridor moved under his feet on autopilot. Left at the end of the hall, through the side door that stuck in the frame. He put his shoulder into it and stepped outside.
The boardwalk extended out over the water ahead of him. He walked its length without thinking and stopped at the dock at the end where the lake opened up on all sides.
The sun was just clearing the lake, low and gold. The lake was completely still. The lotus beds started just past the dock and ran outward in every direction, pink and white and dense, more of them than he had managed to hold onto in memory. The smell hit him before anything else did. Thick and sweet and specific to Lotus Pier in a way that no rebuilt version had ever quite replicated.
The pier was waking up around him. Water sloshed softly against the dock supports. The training equipment groaning in the brisk morning wind. Doors opening somewhere, footsteps, voices calling out. All of it exactly as it had been. All of it exactly as it had burned.
His left hand moved without permission, index finger and thumb pressing together.
Nothing.
He dropped his hand and looked out at the lotus beds and tried to think.
Footsteps echoed on the boardwalk behind him, unhurried. He turned.
A disciple he recognized rounded the corner with a fishing net over one shoulder, already heading for the far dock. He Zhibo, broad shouldered, moving with the ease of someone who trusted every plank of this pier under his feet. He caught sight of Jiang Cheng and slowed slightly.
"Jiang-gongzi! You're up early." Zhibo gave him a brief once-over. "Gongzi, are you okay?"
"How old am I," Jiang Cheng said.
Zhibo blinked. "...What?"
“How old am I,” Jiang Cheng asserted. He needed to know.
“...You’re fifteen? Gongzi, are you truly all right?”
"Yes. Thank you."
Zhibo looked at him for one more second with the expression of concern. He adjusted the net on his shoulder. "Okay. Don't stay out too long, it's cold." He continued past toward the far dock without breaking stride. "See you at practice."
He rounded the corner and was gone.
Jiang Cheng turned back to the water.
Fifteen. That was the confirmation he needed.
He was really in the past.
He looked out at Lotus Pier, at the white walls and the dark wood and the water catching the morning light, and the thought arrived plainly: it was standing right now. In two years it would burn. He knew which month, which day the wretched Wen Clan would descend upon his home. He had spent long enough reconstructing the timeline of the destruction.
If he was here, could he stop it?
And if Lotus Pier was standing, then his parents were here too. His mother and father were somewhere in this compound right now, alive, going about their morning.
Jiejie. If Lotus Pier didn't burn the way it did, if he could position things differently, she didn't have to die at Nightless City. Jin Zixuan didn't have to die either. Which meant Jin Ling would grow up with both of his parents, would never have needed Jiang Cheng to be anything other than an uncle, would never have grown up carrying losses at such a tender age.
And Wei Wuxian. His bull-headed, self-sacrificing, arrogant brother. If things were to change, maybe Wei Wuxian didn't have to defect into demonic cultivation and—
He stopped himself before he could spiral any more.
His thumb pressed against his forefinger. Found nothing. Right. He was really here.
"A-Cheng."
He turned.
Jiang Yanli came down the boardwalk from the main house, still in her morning robes, hair not yet pinned in her signature updo. She reached him and put her hand against his forehead before he could say anything, palm cool against his skin.
"You still feel warm." Her brows knitted together. "You should be inside."
He couldn't speak. Jiang Yanli—his dead sister— was standing in front of him. Eighteen years old and alive, her gentle countenance marred with worry. He had spent years trying to hold that expression in memory, with thirteen years eroding his recollection of her.
"I'm fine," he said. His voice came out wrong. Tears threatened to pour at the corner of his eyes.
"A-Cheng, you fell in the lake and came up with a fever," she said, with a stubbornness that had always made her harder to argue with than their mother. "In fact, you still have a temperature. You are not just ‘fine’."
"Jiejie—"
"A-Cheng,” she chastised.
He closed his mouth.
"Aiya, it’s Jiang Cheng!"
Wei Wuxian came around the corner from the main house path, robes already disheveled at this hour, racing towards him with the energy of someone who had been waiting since yesterday to deliver urgent news.
"Good thing I found both of you here, I was starting to feel left out. But Jiang Cheng, do you remember? You fell in the lake. In front of everyone, both of your feet were off the ground, in the air!" He paused for dramatic effect. "... Y’know, there were so many witnesses. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone from Lanling saw it!"
"Wei Wuxian.
"The splash alone—"
"Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Cheng gritted out.
"Aww, is Chengcheng already annoyed with me?"
Jiang Cheng looked at him. Sixteen, loud, entirely himself. Grinning with the lopsided smile that had been irritating Jiang Cheng since they were children.
In two years, Wei Wuxian would also watch these docks burn. He would end up somewhere deep in the Burial Mounds, becoming the Yiling Patriarch, dying in a siege led by Jiang Cheng himself. But right now he was standing here, cultivation intact, solely focused about how his sibling embarrassed himself by falling into a lake.
"Shut up," Jiang Cheng said icily.
Wei Wuxian opened his mouth to retort.
"Now, before I push you into the lake."
He closed it. Then, two seconds later: "Shijie, the fever made him so meaner. You need to fix him before we leave for Gusu, he cannot be like this for three months—"
"A-Xian, don’t bully A-Cheng too much. He’s not feeling well. And A-Cheng, come inside," Jiang Yanli said to Jiang Cheng, with the tone that ringed with finality. "I’ll make you some lotus and pork rib soup."
Jiang Cheng looked at her. Then out at the lake, the lotus beds, the far shore in the morning mist.
Fifteen years old. One week before Cloud Recesses. Two years before his world would collapse and burn. But he was blessed (or cursed?) with the opportunity to change it.
He turned and followed his sister inside.
On his second day in the past, his fever had finally broken.
Jiang Yanli had made sure of it personally, appearing at his door that first evening with a bowl of lotus and pork rib soup as promised and an expression that signified she was not leaving until he finished it.
Not that he needed to be told. He greedily drank the soup, savoring the taste he had missed for nearly two decades. He would have finished ten bowls if she'd asked, as he sat across from her in his bedroom while she watched him eat.
She didn't push. She never pushed. She just watched him with an attentiveness usually only reserved when she was learning something new.
"You seem different," she said finally, when the bowl was empty.
Jiang Cheng froze, before hastily replying: "Maybe Wei Wuxian was right that I hit my head too hard."
"A-Cheng."
He looked up. She was watching him with an expression he recognized, patient and kind yet certain.
"I'm fine, Jiejie," he said. "I promise."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached over and took the empty bowl from his hands and stood and said, "Get some sleep. You’ll need to rest up before three months of A-Xian’s antics." She quietly slipped out the room, before whispering: “Goodnight, A-Cheng.”
“Goodnight, Jiejie.” She smiled at his response before softly shutting the door behind her.
Unfortunately, Jiang Cheng did not fall asleep. He lay in the dark and listened to Lotus Pier settle around him, the sounds of it so familiar they bypassed his thoughts entirely. Water. Wind. The distant creak of the docks. He stared at the ceiling and thought about the coming two years and did not close his eyes until well past midnight.
On the third day, there was a dinner celebrating Jiang Fengmian’s return from Qinghe Nie.
Dinner at Lotus Pier happened at a long table in the main hall, with family at one end and senior disciples at the other. It had always been loud, where people were comfortable enough to talk over each other and share anecdotes.
Jiang Cheng sat in his usual seat and ate and said very little, which was not unusual enough to draw comment.
His father sat at the head of the table. Jiang Fengmian looked the way he had in Jiang Cheng's earliest memories, before the war had worn the specifics away and left only a vague impression. Calmer than his mother. More distant. A personality of someone whose attention was always slightly elsewhere, even when he was looking directly at you.
Jiang Cheng watched him help Wei Wuxian get more rice without being asked, the gesture automatic and ready. Across the table Wei Wuxian said something that made Jiang Yanli laugh and Jiang Fengmian smile, even earning a dramatic eye roll from his mother. Jiang Cheng watched his father's expression and felt something old and heavy move through him and settle.
He had spent a long time being angry about that smile. The ease of it, how he showed it to everyone at the table except him.
He picked up his chopsticks and kept eating.
There was nothing to say about it now that would change anything. His father was his father. He watched him for the rest of the meal with the detached awareness of someone who had already done his grieving. Rather, Jiang Cheng’s clarity allowed him to feel somewhat lighter.
When dinner was beginning to wind down, his father caught his eye briefly across the table.
"A-Cheng," he called, his voice a deep timbre. "How is your cultivation coming along?"
"Fine," Jiang Cheng replied. "Thank you for asking."
His father nodded, already looking away to Wei Wuxian’s next spiel on new cultivation techniques. Jiang Cheng looked down at his bowl.
It was enough. It had to be.
It was Wei Wuxian's idea to go into the city.
"We leave in three days," he said, appearing in Jiang Cheng's doorway with the energy of a toddler that has eaten too much tanghulu. "We should enjoy ourselves while we still can. Three months in Cloud Recesses, Jiang Cheng. Three months of rules and bland food and Lan disciples looking at us like we've personally offended their ancestors."
"You definitely will have. Don’t project your own lack of discipline onto me."
"The morning has just started and you’re already so bitter,” Wei Wuxian sighed. "Anyways, you should come with me. The market is bustling today!"
“Nope. What stupid thing are you planning on doing?”
“Jiang Cheng, you still owe me from when I saved your ass from being caught by Madam Yu. The least you could do is come with me,” Wei Wuxian whined. “I know you want to come.”
Jiang Cheng let out a reluctant groan. “Fine.” He hadn’t gone with him in the original past, but he could spare time to check out Lotus Pier.
Wei Wuxian let out a whoop before quickly dragging his brother out of Lotus Pier’s front gate before sprinting off to the market.
The market ran along the main canal through the city, loud and crowded. It smelled of fish, fried dough, and a combination of river water and heat that Jiang Cheng has grown to associate with Yunmeng. Stalls packed in close, vendors calling out, and children running between the legs of adults. He had not been here, the original market, in over twenty years.
He walked through it and kept his face carefully neutral.
Wei Wuxian had already found trouble by the time Jiang Cheng caught up to him. He was standing in front of a stall holding a small rabbit trinket. The vendor, a man in his forties, was loudly insisting that the price couldn't be bargained down, much to Wei Wuxian’s displeasure. Wei Wuxian responded, claiming that the price was robbery, causing a small crowd to gather around the growing dispute.
"Jiang Cheng would tell you the same thing," Wei Wuxian declared, spotting him and immediately pulling his arm to Wei Wuxian’s side. "Jiang Cheng, tell him."
"Don't bring me into this,” Jiang Cheng hissed.
"What he’s trying to say is that he agrees completely. With him as the heir to the Yunmeng Jiang Sect, and I as the future deputy leader, we have a responsibility to the people of this city and frankly this price is—"
The vendor grabbed Wei Wuxian by the collar.
It happened fast. Wei Wuxian's hands came up to protect himself and Jiang Cheng stepped in without thinking, catching the vendor's wrist before a punch was swung. The vendor looked at Jiang Cheng's expression and made a decision to let go.
“Shushu, I apologize, we didn’t mean to argue with you. Here,” Jiang Cheng stated quickly, pulling out two gold coins out of his wallet, paying double the original price for the knickknack. “This is for the trinket.”
The vendor nodded, appeased with the price the heir paid. “Thank you for being sensible, Jiang-gongzi. However, I would suggest that you control your ‘future deputy leader’.”
The vendor stalked off, resulting in the crowd dispersing rapidly once recognizing the dispute was resolved. Wei Wuxian straightened his collar, still unsatisfied with paying an exorbitant price for the little object.
"Jiang Cheng, why did you listen to that guy so quickly? I bet if you let me speak longer, I would’ve convinced him to lower the price.”
"Convinced him? You would have gotten a fucking punch into your face. Maybe I should’ve let you get hit so when you arrived at Cloud Recesses, you would have a story to tell of your idiocy.”
“Aiya, Jiang Cheng, you’re evil. I bet all the girls would still fawn over me, though,” Wei Wuxian laughed, draping an arm over his grumpy sibling.
Jiang Cheng glared at his smirking brother. He couldn’t wait until this moron would realize he’s a cutsleeve.
“Wei Wuxian, if you say another word I’m going to beat you up enough that no one will ever fawn over you.”
That shut him up quickly.
On the fifth day, Yu Ziyuan found out what had happened in the market.
She did not raise her voice immediately. That was always the worst sign. She stood in the main courtyard with her arms folded and her expression perfectly still and looked at both of them, as if trying to dissect them up close.
Then she started.
She addressed Wei Wuxian first, clipped and cold, cataloguing exactly what had gone wrong and why it reflected poorly on the sect and what she expected from a senior disciple representing Yunmeng Jiang. Wei Wuxian took it with his head bowed and his jaw tight, which was the smartest thing he could do in Yu Ziyuan's presence.
Then she dismissed him.
Wei Wuxian went. He shot Jiang Cheng a look over his shoulder on the way out that communicated a sincere apology before scurrying out of the courtyard.
His mother turned to him and the temperature of the courtyard became even more frigid.
She was thorough. She always had been. She went through the situation methodically, the embarrassment to the sect, the poor judgment, the expectation that he of all people should know better than to follow Wei Wuxian, that his father's indulgence of that boy was one thing but Jiang Cheng had no excuse, that he had a legacy to uphold and a reputation that could not afford to be tarnished.
Jiang Cheng stood and listened.
He didn't bristle. He didn't clench his jaw or reach for a retort or count the seconds until he could leave. He just stood in the courtyard in the afternoon light and listened to his mother's voice, sharp and carrying a harshness that expressed her vicious form of love.
However, in two years, his mother would give Jiang Cheng Zidian, which currently sat on her index finger, and hug him as if he was fragile. She whispered her affection and pride for her son, leaving him internally conflicted with his mother’s tough love and protectiveness before she left to defend her home against the Wens.
"Yes, A-Niang," he said, when she paused.
She stopped.
It was brief, barely a hesitation, but he caught it. She had expected retaliation. The absence of it moved through her expression like a ripple and disappeared.
She looked at him for a moment longer. "A-Cheng, go practice your forms. You've wasted enough time already."
He went.
The sparring happened two days before they left. In the early morning, the training ground was empty except for the two of them.
It started the way it always had between them, easy and familiar, the rhythm of two people who had been fighting alongside each other long enough that the movements seemed to be in conversation. Wei Wuxian was fast, creative, and impulsive. Jiang Cheng was methodical and precise, but now with an additional fifteen years of refinement.
He forgot, for approximately four exchanges, to hold back.
After one strong block and a brutal blow into the stomach, Wei Wuxian had stumbled, ending with him falling onto the ground.
"Are you okay?" Jiang Cheng exclaimed, not realizing the other boy would fall so suddenly. He was so immersed in sparring that he didn’t register that he was hitting Wei Wuxian with full force.
Wei Wuxian looked at him with his head tilted slightly, the expression he wore when something had caught his attention but his brain hadn't finished processing yet. "When did you get like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like—" He gestured vaguely at Jiang Cheng. "That."
"Did I hit you so hard that you aren’t able to talk properly?" Jiang Cheng scoffed, returning back into position. "Come on, get up."
Wei Wuxian slowly moved, pushing himself off the dusty ground. He was still staring, his mind computing. Then he shook it off and grinned. "Okay. Don't cry when I win."
He didn't win. Jiang Cheng made sure it was close enough that the result felt like luck rather than a gap of fifteen years, which required considerably more effort than simply beating him would have.
Afterward they sat on the edge of the training ground and Wei Wuxian complained about losing with the cheerful energy of someone who wasn't bothered at all, while Jiang Cheng said nothing and watched the morning light move across the lake.
Wei Wuxian glanced at him sideways. "Jiang Cheng, you know you’ve been weird lately."
"I hit my head."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it's what happened."
Wei Wuxian looked at him for another moment. Then he flopped his back into the dirt and stared up at the sky and moved on, since that was what Wei Wuxian did. He noticed things and continued his day because the next thing was always more interesting than sitting with something unanswered.
Jiang Cheng looked at him lying there in the dirt and felt something get caught in his throat.
"Get up," he said. "You look ridiculous. And you’re getting dirty."
Wei Wuxian beamed at the sky. "Let me enjoy my loss in peace."
The night before they left, Jiang Cheng couldn't sleep.
He gave up around the second hour staring at the ceiling and went outside, following the boardwalk to the small pavilion that sat over the water on the eastern side of the pier. It was cold. The lake was dark and still, most lotuses closed in the darkness, just shapes at the edge of the lantern light.
He sat and looked at the water.
Two years. He had two years from this point. Tomorrow, he would be at Cloud Recesses, and then back at Lotus Pier with roughly a year and a half before the Wens came. It was his time to make choices that would hopefully change the horrible future coming for him and his family.
He couldn't stop the Wen clan. They would come because they wanted to and no amount of preparation would make Yunmeng Jiang strong enough to hold them off alone. But he could change what they found when they arrived. He could make sure certain people weren't where they were supposed to be.
His thumb pressed against his index. Nothing there.
Lotus Pier would burn. He made himself think it plainly, without flinching. It might burn regardless of what he did. But Jiang Yanli had been at Meishan Yu the first time, which meant she could be at Meishan Yu again. Out of reach. Safe.
Then he could figure out maybe a way to protect his parents. Jin Zixuan was also a problem, and Wei Wuxian’s demonic cultivation, and—
Footsteps on the boardwalk. He knew who it was by the cadence of the steps.
Jiang Yanli settled onto the bench beside him without asking, placing a lantern on the table in front of them. She pulled her outer robe tighter against the cold, gazing out at the water for a moment.
"You couldn't sleep," she remarked.
"I was thinking."
"About Cloud Recesses?"
"Among other things."
She nodded. The lantern light shifted across the water. A night bird called somewhere on the far shore and went quiet.
"Are you alright, A-Cheng?" Not the way she had asked on the dock with her hand against his forehead. She spoke it plain and direct, like the way she asked things when she wanted the real answer.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at him. He diverted his gaze to the water.
"Jiejie," he started, and then didn't know how to finish it. There was nothing he could say that wasn't everything he couldn't say, and it filled his chest and sat there with no way out.
She put her arms around him.
Simple as that. She just leaned over and held him the way she had when they were small and he went completely still. His throat closed. He sat in the cold with her arms around him and the dark lake in front of them. Although nothing was said, no words were needed to express themselves.
He did not cry. He came close enough but he held it back, breathing through it slowly until it passed.
"I'll be fine," he murmured. His voice came out steadier than he expected.
She didn't let go immediately. When she finally did, she sat back and looked at him with a sweet smile that knew he wasn't telling her everything but was going to let him lie.
"I know you will," she said. "You always are."
They sat until the frosty cold drove them inside. She said goodnight in the corridor near their rooms and he went to his room and lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling.
Tomorrow, Cloud Recesses.
Two years before all of it.
He closed his eyes and for the first time since waking up on this side of his life, he slept peacefully.
Lan Huan woke up quietly and on time.
Even in seclusion, Lan Huan rose and went to bed like clockwork. It was a habit so ingrained into him that he couldn’t stop it.
This morning, he stared at his room, the Hanshi, with the slant of early morning light through the paper screens that he had woken up to his entire life. Seclusion had destroyed his schedule. Even with him getting up so early, he was just as capable as laying in his bed until the sun was high in the sky.
However, today he sat up.
Something was off.
He looked around the room slowly. Everything in its place, the desk, the shelves, the neatly folded spare robes. But the painting on the far wall was wrong. It was a landscape he painted during his childhood, following the passing of his mother. He had long replaced it years ago.
Was he hallucinating?
Suddenly, the Hanshi’s door slid open.
"Xichen." Lan Qiren stood in the doorway, robes immaculate, expression carrying the mild exasperation of someone who had been waiting longer than he preferred. He looked…younger? "You were expected at the morning discussion. Are you unwell?"
"Forgive me, Uncle." Lan Huan rose smoothly, quickly adjusting his robes. "I lost track of time."
Lan Qiren looked at him for a moment, then turned. "Come. We have much to arrange before the guest disciples arrive from the other sects. Wangji also needs to prepare, since he’s partaking this time."
Lan Huan nodded haltingly.
Guest disciples. Cloud Recesses only hosted them every few years, bringing the cultivation world's brightest students together to study under his uncle. If Wangji was participating this time, that meant he was fifteen, which meant Lan Huan himself was seventeen.
What is going on?