Chapter Text
"You cannot go on like this."
Jiang Cheng works his jaw, settling his robes back to the proper place. Mei Guizhou purses her lips at him, looking for all the world more like a scolding grandmother than she does a respectable healer. And that is what she is, the greatest healer he'd been able to get his greedy hands on after, of course, Wen Qing herself.
There's a tension in her shoulders that hasn't vanished once for the past three months.
If Jiang Cheng didn't know better, he might almost think she was scared for him—but no, great and wise and intelligent as Mei Guizhou is, she also has little interest in being friendly with her patients. Apathy was her best friend as much as anger was Jiang Cheng's.
Her worries were only for the fate of a clan without an heir, burdened by a dying leader. That, too, was another thing they held in common.
His silence lingers long enough that she steps back with an aggressive huff, spinning around to her table of wonders where a handful of bloodied magnolia petals lay. A new flower to add to to the ever growing garden in his lungs.
"I'm being serious," Guizhou grumbles. "To think you've battled these things—" at this, she gestures sweepingly to the petals, voice dripping with a kind of venom only a doctor who has met their match can produce, "since you were just a child… zongzhu, your body is tired."
"I am well aware," comes his dull reply.
Guizhou shakes her head. "No, I don't think you are." She turns back to him, meeting his gaze evenly. Unease prickles at Jiang Cheng's neck. "What you're experiencing, it's—it's unprecedented." She takes a moment to run her hands through her hair, which has begun falling out of its bun. She sucks on her lip with a sharp hiss, tugging at her scalp.
"Mortals die within weeks of developing even one plant," she explains lowly, as if Jiang Cheng hasn't heard this tale a million times before. "Cultivators can survive only because of the privilege of a golden core, but there has only been records of a person growing one flower, for one person. You…"
"Mei-daifu," Jiang Cheng interrupts. Guizhou stills, looking at him. Whatever she sees, she must not like, for her face closes off like an icy storm. "I will begin the necessary preparations. Thank you for your assistance."
There are few truths in the world that Jiang Cheng knows and accepts as certain and undeniable.
Firstly, his nephew will succeed.
Secondly, his clan will flourish.
Thirdly—loving is easy. It is only that he's difficult to love.
This is no one's fault but his own, of course. Jiang Cheng is not ignorant to his own short-comings. He's aggressive and angry, needlessly cautious to the point of paranoia, emotionally unavailable yet clingy and in need of constant reassurance. Anybody would find a person like him difficult to care about. Jiang Cheng does not blame the people around him for it.
Still, he cannot help the way it clings to him, their indifference, their hatred. It plants seeds in his lungs that bloom with a flourish, nurtured by his blood and his unrequited love.
If he were a stronger man, perhaps he would have had them cut out, but the mere thought of no longer loving the people with whom his garden blooms for curdles like sour milk in his stomach.
The first of them had come the evening Wei Wuxian—still only Wei Ying, back then—arrived at Lotus Pier, small and scrappy and pathetic. Cradled so close and protectively in Jiang Fengmian's arms in a way Jiang Cheng had never been, it was as if he had been worth more than any thing else in the world, more than gold and jewels and Jiang Cheng himself. Wei Wuxian had looked simply radiant with his budding delight. The tickle in Jiang Cheng's throat had begun almost immediately.
It progressed to a rough cough within hours. No one else seemed to notice.
He can remember that night, lost away from home after having chased Wei Wuxian off he hadn't meant to, he was just so angry, why did he have to lose his only friends for this random child? There's been a sort of pressure in his chest all day, weighing like stones, like the grief of a realisation not yet actualised.
Jiang Cheng had—tripped, or stumbled, or something. One minute upright, the next on his hands and knees, fingers digging into the damp leaflitter on the ground as he coughed and coughed and coughed.
Whatever it was, it was large.
It caught in his throat, stretching from wall to wall across his airway. For a horrible, terrifying moment, Jiang Cheng could not breathe. His hands were on his throat before he was even aware of it, sharp nails digging gouges into the soft skin. He had gagged, stomach lurching, too breathless to cough, eyes watering—and then—
There was a petal on the ground.
Under the pale light of the moon, it had been hard to make out any details. It was pinkish-purple, maybe, flushed dark at the tip. He'd stared at it dizzily for several long seconds before he plucked it from the ground, rubbing it between his fingers. It was silky. For some reason, that had made him nauseous.
A lotus? had been his first thought, turning it over, followed quickly by, no, just a water lily. Just a pale imitation.
Oddly, and perhaps very rudely, he had found himself thinking of his father. Jiang Fengmian's patient smiles reserved only for perfect strangers and the new child he'd dragged into the house, and never for Jiang Cheng himself. His ambitions—or lack thereof—and his exhausting dance with Yu Ziyuan, somehow never saying what needed to be said.
Then, the second realisation of the night: oh, I must've been cursed.
There had been the thought to go to the healer—to present the petal, wet with saliva and streaked with blood, to plead please, someone help me—but a larger, louder part of him had been tired. Mostly, he hadn't wanted to be a bother. It was only a petal, he'd rationalised, swaying where he stood and he pulled himself to his feet. He wasn't actively dying. All the healers were asleep.
He could go in the morning.
He'd left that first petal there, unwilling to hold onto it with the way his heart rabbited and stomach clenched every time he looked at it. When Jiang Yanli had found him, she had been met with skinned knees and an oddly haunted look to his eyes.
He never did go to the healers—but then again, the flowers never did end up killing him.
Until now, of course, but it wasn't exactly his choice to clue Mei Guizhou in on his weakness anyway.
Jiang Cheng shakes away the memories. Best not to linger on such thoughts, he tells himself, sliding open the door to his study. He has better things to do than wallow like a child, after all.
He has a clan's future to ensure.
Things progress rather quickly after that.
He appoints his second in command—a woman who took the name Jiang after he'd found her and taken her in some twelve years ago, when the state of her family life had her turning her attention to demonic cultivation as a mere seven-year-old—as his successor. He knows the moment the news reaches her ears because she storms into his office to scream herself hoarse at him, and then ugly-cries like a small child and serves him honeyed tea for his aching throat.
He lets her. The small poppies blooming in his chest give her the right.
She will be a wonderful sect leader, he knows. He only wishes he weren't throwing her to the wolves without his guidence, but consols himself with the thought that at least amonst the most powerful clans, the most disgusting of the men have been dealth with. His nephew will not look down upon her for her gender—not when she has spent years beating his ass in close-combat duels—and he doubts Wei Wuxian, Nie Huaisang, or the Lan brothers will, either. They're all good like that.
He commands his spiders to guard and guide her in his stead anyway.
Mei Guizhou, two weeks later, demands he be placed on light duties only and has him moved into a small building out of the way of the hum and bustle of Lotus Pier. It's a fine enough place, he supposes, with a bed big enough to sprawl out on in one room, and a small kitchen and dining area in the other. Placed by the lake, he even has his own small pier and a private view to the blooming lotuses. By all accounts, it's nice.
Neither of them dare utter the words hospice care, but that is what it is. This is not how he thought he'd die.
Jiang Cheng does not take visitors. As far as the rest of the world knows, he has gone into seclusion.
All is as it should be.
Their sect leader is a fool.
That is the consensus of the four women sitting together, pretending to be calmly sipping tea and not as though they are discussing what could, quite reasonably, be considered treason.
"—there is a cure," Mei Guizhou is telling the others. "Technically, there's several."
"Then why hasn't he used it," Jiang Yuqing grumbles into her tea.
Mei Guizhou's face does something odd, twisting between a grimace and contemplation. "Well," she begins, ticking them off on her fingeres, "the first way for the flowers to die is if the person he loves dies, too." The other three cringe. "The second way would be surgically, which Jiang-zongzhu refuses because it will remove his ability to love those people with the flowers, but it's remarkable understudied regardless—for obvious reasons—and quite dangerous, as cutting open anyone's lungs would be. And, of course, he could always be assured that the people he loves love him back, but that requires knowing who he growing flowers for and getting the dumbass to actually listen to them and believe them."
Yu Minghua sighs. "So basically," she concludes, "we're fucked." Beside her, Yu Xi'an groans.
Still pouting, Jiang Yuqing considers it all. "What if," she licks her lips, "we could buy him some extra time?"
"How are we meant to do that?" Yu Xi'an wonders.
Jiang Yuqing shrugs. "Well, the newest flower came when Zewu-jun went into seclusion—"
"Abandoned everyone," Yu Minghua coughs.
"Went into seclusion," Jiang Yuqing corrects her, side-eyeing the other woman. "He's definitely got flowers for the xiao-gongzhu, too. We just have to work out who the rest of the garden is."
Mei Guizhou raises an eyebrow so high her forehead wrinkles like an old crone's. "The young master would be most unimpressed to hear you calling him that," she chides, but she is unable to restrain the amusement in her voice. To think that this is the same woman known for her startling indifference and icy demeanour. Jiang Yuqing waves her off, snickering.
"How does that even happen, anyway?" Yu Minghua complains.
"Which part?"
"Thinking your own nephew, who you raised and who blatantly and openly worships the ground you walk on, doesn't love you."
Mei Guizhou shakes her head. "You three are too young to know, but the Jiang family was wrought with tension. It would be no surprise at all to know Jiang-zongzhu was never actually loved by his father, and given how many flowers he has—and all the flowers I suspect he used to have for people now dead—is it really all that surprising that he thinks so?"
"Still," Yu Minghua protests, before she purses her lips and gives up.
"Well," Yu Xi'an says, "in any case, I suppose we have a sect leader to contact and some people to hunt down." She turns her attention to Mei Guizhou, smiling easily. "Would you mind sharing your notes and showing us those flowers you've squirrelled away? I think it's about time we force Jiang-zongzhu to face the truth."
Mei Guizhou gives a wolfish smile. "Of course," she agrees.
It is, after all, not yet too late to save their foolish sect leader—and if going behind his back is what it takes, then that is a betrayal the four of them are willing to commit.