Chapter Text
The most exciting thing to happen to the Ji Sect that year was that they fished a man out of a river.
Alright, well, they didn't fish him out, exactly. Two of the sect members were going down to the river to fish and thought they'd come across a corpse.
This would have been a rare, but not unheard-of occurrence. The river they fished in was a nameless tributary that mostly flowed through underground caverns. The currents were so quick and violent in the few places the river surfaced, that even cultivators could be swallowed into the underground caverns before they got their wits about them.
And cultivators had! Because the river spring was somewhere up in some spirit-rich mountains where cultivators often went in seclusion. It was inevitable, as Ji-Zhangmen liked to point out. Some proportion of cultivators were always going to be poor unlucky dumbasses.
This was probably part of the reason Ji-Zhangmen never allowed any of her sect members to go cultivate up in the mountains, though the more likely reason was that none really had the potential, inclination or ambition to do so anyway. Mostly they contented themselves with fishing the spirit-rich bounty that the river waters brought down from the mountains sometimes, which suited their aspirations to base level adequacy much better. Who needed that kind of headache anyway??
But that morning, as two of the sect members arrived at the river, bickering over whose turn it was to untangle the nets, they both fell quiet as they spotted the unmoving body in the silt.
Then they began bickering about which one of them should go and turn over the corpse. Naturally, they had to check if it was anyone they or the sect knew; there was a small but not insignificant chance the corpse was one of their martial siblings, having fallen in drunk into the water after indulging too much.
As they approached, the corpse's garb indicated he must have been a cultivator, which did light a bit more enthusiasm in the two sect members. Cultivator corpses usually had better loot on them, not that any member of the sect would ever stoop to something as dissolute as looting, we promise, Ji-Zhangmen!
Needless to say, when they finally turned the body over and the supposedly dead man grabbed onto the wrist of the nearest sect member touching him, there was a very unbecoming shriek of utter terror that echoed through the valley.
The man was unconscious again by the time they'd dragged him all the way back to the Ji Sect's compound, and into the healing pavilion where Auntie Mei mostly worked alone nowadays. Auntie Mei was more herbalist than cultivator, but she was adequate enough at her job, especially since she could, at any time, draft all the helpers she pleased among the sect members. Even, if necessary, the Sect Leader herself.
Ji Ran would have come anyway just to check on what her sect members had dragged back home, but as it happened, she was also the only one with the qi reserves for the spiritual transfer that the patient sorely needed.
"How do you think he survived?" Ji Ran asked as she stared into the pale but still beautiful face of the strange man. She held his wrist as she transferred spiritual power, even as the man's own qi pathways seemed to accept it only capriciously. She tried to keep the flow steady, but there was still something uneven about the experience, like trying to balance on a raft while it was unexpectedly tilting this way or that.
"Some qi technique, most likely," Auntie Mei said, though Ji Ran might have figured that out herself. "Must have used all he had just to keep breathing underwater, though how he also avoided getting smashed into every rock along the way is the better question."
"Might have been two qi techniques," Ji Ran suspected.
"Both at the same time? Well, certainly would account for how he's nearly sent himself into a qi deviation," Auntie Mei remarked.
"But he lived!"
"Yes, well." Auntie Mei glanced down at the man, who'd so far been her most model patient this year just for the fact that he hadn't given her any backtalk while unconscious. "He's lived so far. Let us not get too excited until we actually see him open his eyes."
If Auntie Mei seemed more pessimistic in this case, it wasn't like she was entirely wrong.
The man fell into a fever even as his qi reserves recovered, and though he did open his eyes a few times, he never seemed more coherent for it. They managed to give him some water and a bit of congee whenever he was awake enough to swallow, but never really managed to get so much as a name out of him.
For the next few weeks, as Auntie Mei was constantly grinding up antipyretics, she also took advantage of the nosiness of the sect members to draft them into helping with the patient. By now, everyone had heard about the unexpected flotsam now recuperating in the healing pavilion, and every time one of them was brave enough to poke their heads in, Auntie Mei would put them to work helping around the sick room. Mostly this involved mopping up his sweat and pressing cold compresses to his face, but occasionally it also involved brushing out the tangles from his hair, or if one was particularly unlucky, trying to feed him a bowl of medicine. That last task was especially onerous, because despite not being coherent enough to put two words together, the patient was still lively enough to bite and did so eloquently in order to express his opinions on the bitter medicine.
A few weeks passed like this. Auntie Mei didn't seem particularly optimistic about the man's chances of survival, but one quiet summer day, the heat in his body abated on its own, and when he raised his head, his eyes were clear.
They never did learn the man's name. Disastrously, it seemed the fever, or the qi deviation, or some combination of both had erased it even from his own memory, though he had tried to hide it at first the way wild animals tried to hide their injuries.
The first conversation Ji Ran tried having with him was hilariously circular because of this, as Ji Ran and the man both presumed the other must surely know his name, and both tried to extract it from the other. As they both realized the situation, they decided to chalk up the entire embarrassing interlude to the patient still being disoriented after his long fever.
Unfortunately, this also revealed he knew absolutely nothing about himself. An inspection of the tattered remnants of his robes did not reveal anything either. A couple of qiankun pouches must have been sewn into the sleeves of his middle robe at some point, but one sleeve was ripped clean from the shoulder, and the other sleeve showed only the tattered stitches where a qiankun pouch would have once been. The river currents were no joke.
The outer robe was in even more dire straits. It had once been a pale green, or a greenish yellow, but other than that it had been reduced to rags and scraps, emphasizing all the more how impressive it was that the man's body hadn't been likewise reduced to a pulp. Ji Ran knew, though she did not mention, that it wasn't always full corpses that washed on the river shores near the sect. The fish usually ate anything that managed to wash any farther downstream anyway.
If the man belonged to a sect, it was hard to say from the remnants of his belongings alone. Ji Ran and the man inspected the spread out rags on his bed, but if there'd been any pendants or tokens, or any weapons for that matter, they'd ended up in a different part of the river. A small dagger and a few talismans had been hidden in his boots, but the dagger had no markings, and the talismans had washed out almost completely in the water. Upon inspecting them, the man concluded they were fairly generic anyway.
"I might not have been part of any major sect," the man pointed out.
"I suppose chances are higher that you were a rogue cultivator," Ji Ran agreed. "Maybe part of a minor sect?"
She had transferred enough spiritual energy over the weeks to get closely acquainted with his meridians, and other than the traces of old damage (traces of old bone breakages that, in Ji Ran's words, made it looked as though he'd gotten the shit beat out of him regularly as a kid), there was something a bit choppy about his cultivation base that suggested to Ji Ran he might have been self-taught at first: indications that he'd started late and made some errors in setting his foundation, as though he hadn't had proper guidance.
Ji Ran recognized it, because Ji Sect had taken such disciples in before; orphans or runaways who fell into cultivation not because of any inherent aspiration, but because it gave them somewhere to go, even if that somewhere was a no-name backwater sect.
The man remained quiet as Ji Ran spoke about his own body, perhaps perturbed to be learning about himself from a different person, or maybe internally trying to weigh the information, to determine how true it felt.
"But you have a fantastic spiritual root," she added quickly, after what she felt was much too long time talking in an uncomplimentary fashion, "and it looks like you managed to get to mid-core formation despite all... that." She gestured vaguely. "That takes hard work and plenty of drive. You don't get that far on luck alone."
"If I'd been part of a sect," the man said slowly, "they might have sent someone to look for me."
"Maybe, but they'd probably be looking in the wrong place," Ji Ran said, before starting to explain how he'd ended up here. He took the news that he might have disappeared hundreds of li from here quite well, but it seemed more like he didn't truly believe anyone would look for him anyway.
"This discussion is academic if I recover my memory soon," he murmured.
"Well, sure. But I'll send out a few feelers, just in case any sect we know of is missing someone by your description. We'd definitely miss you if you were one of ours," she added the last comment casually, but the man startled, like it was a shocking thing to hear.
But he didn't understand! For weeks, Ji Ran had had to put up with the tittering, and the blushing, and the comments about the man being pretty as a flower, aiyah, Ji-Zhangmen, you must convince him to stay, you have so many unmarried sect members to think of! Where in the valley would we find a beauty like him?
Meanwhile, Ji Ran seemed the only one to be actually thinking of those poor unmarried sect members, and how their hearts would break once the man recovered his memories and left, or worse, recovered his memories and recalled a spouse. And then who would have to put up with the weeping and moaning, and drying the tears of all the heartbroken maidens and bachelors? Ji Ran would! Because she was apparently everyone's long-suffering jiejie!
And heavens forbid anyone in the sect actually plucked that flower, because the jealousy would be unbearable to live with.
No, no, no! He had to get his memories back, and as soon as possible.
But he did not get his memories back.
He still could not recall so much as his name, and so, at the suggestion of some suspiciously giggly sect members, he'd been given the personal name Furong as a placeholder. He later also accepted the surname Ji, which was the privilege extended to all disciples to came to the sect without a family name of their own, though Ji Ran had been surprised that he accepted it, when she had assumed he would see his place here as temporary.
Maybe he did truly believe he was a rogue cultivator and, expecting that he did not have a place of his own with any other sect, chose to stay with Ji Sect even if he recalled everything. But mostly, she suspected the surname came with some amount of reassurance for him.
As soon as he was allowed out of bed, Ji Furong's hands found a practice sword. Ji Ran was there to see him go through the basic sword forms, body still shaky and weak on that first day, and she was also the one to bully him back to bed before Auntie Mei could start muttering complaints. But the next day, Ji Furong went back to his practice, in a tucked away side garden of the healing pavilion, and Ji Ran returned to keep an eye on him and make sure he did not strain himself.
She watched, day by day, as he gained more confidence in his motions. Like seeing a flower bloom into its glory, she witnessed slow, shaky movements turn into graceful, practiced sword drills. His body recalled what his mind did not, but maybe falling into familiar motions would help jog something loose. Auntie Mei warned him not to strain himself before he built his stamina back up, but the old woman was constantly prescribing fresh air and exercise for all manner of ailments anyway, and she seemed please that one of her patients was, for once, not ignoring her.
After a while, Ji Furong took to practicing in a small, barren little courtyard behind the healing pavilion, which offered more open space. In the sect's more prosperous days, this had been a patient dormitory for long-term treatment. Nowadays, it had mostly gone into disuse, its once manicured peony bushes now wilted away and neglected.
That courtyard probably saw more traffic during Ji Furong's daily sword drills than it had the past decade, because the entirety of Ji Sect seemed to crawl out of the woodwork to watch. Some were being subtle about it, like the younger cultivators who found themselves sitting on a nearby roof, right where they could coincidentally peer down right into the courtyard. Others took the brazen route, like the shimei who strolled in every day with a bag of melon seeds and sat on the bench in the courtyard openly watching Ji Furong like he was putting on a show. Ji Furong ignored them all with such high-handed dignity, that this only encouraged half a dozen other rubber-neckers to watch him just as openly.
Ji Ran could understand this interest perfectly. Ji Sect was not what it once used to be. Currently they boasted three dozen cultivators, only about two thirds of which Ji Ran trusted to consistently know which end of the sword was the hilt, and about a dozen non-cultivators, mostly just a smattering of family members related to this or that cultivator. The Ji Sect couldn't even really afford hiring servants, and buying slaves ran against the few moral principles that Ji Ran was actually sincere about, so the greatest battle Ji Ran waged every day was chore division rather than mission assignment (though assigning missions to this patchwork group was also a separate kind of headache on its own). So Ji Furong, whose skill level Ji Ran assessed to be above average even if one scored on the same scale as the more godlike cultivators, seemed very impressive to this crowd.
Ji Sect had not always been such a collection of scrapings from the bottom of the barrel as Ji Ran had inherited. But Ji Ran's father, Ji Feng, the previous sect leader, had not even considered her his heir when he'd been alive. He'd had some set ideas about women and their place in the cultivation world, and so he'd always wanted his personal disciple to inherit.
The personal disciple had been of a similar mindset to Ji Ran's father in many aspects, but had outstripped him in ambition, and so, after a series of terrible rows between the men, the disciple had broken off to found his own sect--taking about every cultivator with even a thimble's worth of talent when he left. Ji Feng had raged, had recriminated, had gone on great long rants about filial piety and the lack thereof, but in the end had done little else about the secession crisis other than drinking himself into a stupor for three months straight. After that, Ji Feng proceeded to get himself eaten by a plant monster while he laid himself down by the side of the road to sleep off a hangover. And so Ji Ran inherited.
Usually, when a sect leader died, it could be a period of upheaval for a small enough sect. Anyone discontent but only following out of personal loyalty to the sect leader might leave for greener fields. But by that point, anyone who would have left during such a transition had already been poached when the wayward disciple left, so anyone left was generally too weak or unambitious to seriously want or be able to strike out on their own.
Ji Ran was undoubtedly the best cultivator the sect could offer, a clear three heads above the rest, and she still was impressed with Ji Furong's skill. So the sundry members of the sect could only be triply impressed by him, and made no effort to hide the way they gaped at him as though he was an immortal master descended from the very heavens to show them how it was done.
Ji Furong seemed perturbed by the attention he was getting, but took it as some kind of added challenge to ignore it. If Ji Ran thought it bothered him too much, she might have chased away the slack-jawed masses, but she could also see some amount of pride in his movements, whenever he flicked the tip of his sword with a tiny little flourish that only she might have noticed.
By the second week of Ji Furong's forcibly public practice sessions, Auntie Mei had declared him recovered enough to be ejected from her healing pavilion.
Ji Ran set him up in the bachelor's dormitory. There were only about a dozen or so men in a building set up to house at least a hundred, because these days the Ji Sect's compound had an excess of available space.
Ji Furong initially took the offered bed gracefully, though he picked the one furthest away from any other occupants. She just thought he slept best with a wall against the back, but then she ran into Ji Furong one night meditating in one of the few little well-kept gardens, and discovered he slept poorly in the dormitory.
"They swore to me up and down that none of them snore," Ji Ran muttered.
"It's not... just... that," Ji Furong said, and then frowned as though he wasn't sure himself what the issue was. "I think I am... unaccustomed to sharing space."
To Ji Ran, this made sense if he was a rogue cultivator more used to being by himself. But to Ji Furong, it felt less about that, and more visceral in a way he couldn't exactly define. He would not have used the word 'fear', but it did feel deeply ingrained in his bones, and no amount of forcing himself to relax ever made him less than hyper-aware of the others' presence in the same room, and that vigilance chased away any sleep.
Still, it wasn't like they lacked for space, so Ji Ran opened up one of the small courtyards which had gone without occupants since the secession. It was dusty, and the furniture was rickety and run down, but Ji Furong looked around like it was a gift too expensive to accept.
"I will repay this," Ji Furong promised quietly as he stood in the middle of the dark, dusty room.
Ji Ran, who was of a shameless disposition, did not even pretend to refuse or demure as a good host might.
"Good, because I've been thinking," she said, and began explaining in detail exactly what she wanted.
Ji Furong listened and nodded, and did not even have to specify that he agreed, as it was self-evident he would do as she asked exactly.
Ji Ran had no illusions about the quality of cultivators under her roof. She couldn't afford any illusions because keeping them all fed and clothed was expensive enough.
Still, cultivators were the ones meant to bring in money to a sect! On paper, there was no reason they shouldn't have the advantage in this respect. They were the only sect in the region. But it seemed any rogue cultivator who decided to stroll through this valley would snatch up any potential missions before Ji Sect could. Unfair, Ji Ran thought. Unfortunately, potentially her fault.
It was just, well, her father's attitude didn't come from nothing. He'd been a real man's man, the kind of hardcore chauvinist who made everyone from the village headsmen to the governor nod their heads and go 'yes, trust that man to swing a sword about!'. Nowadays, the face of the sect was Ji Ran, who was not only a woman, but kind of an insufferable one on top. It wasn't that nobody trusted her to swing a sword, is that they couldn't count on her also keeping her mouth shut when she did. And the kind of men that Ji Feng had easily charmed were also the ones who commiserated with him about daughters only being fit for shutting up and getting quickly married off.
And Ji Ran, for all her personal flaws, really was the face of the sect. If there was a monster rampaging through the valley, who was she going to send from the sect? Xiao Ping, the feckless acne-ridden fifteen-year-old who ended up in the healing pavilion twice after dropping his sword on his foot? No! She was going to go herself, because she didn't want people to die!
A lot of the work the Ji Sect did these days was, it had to be said, more preventive than heroic. They rarely waited until monsters had already become a problem before tackling them. Perhaps it was bad sportsmanship to smash the eggs of Devouring Acid Vultures in the nest, but they went and culled the flocks every spring regardless. Maybe it wasn't exactly impressive to burn out the nests of Giant Death-Orb Weaving Spiders when they hibernated each winter, but regardless, the Ji Sect did so, and snatched any of the valuable cobwebs they could get their hands on to book. And yes, they did fish in the river regularly, because by the time the Blood Guppies got to their neck of the woods, they were still preceding the stage of their life when they developed a hunger for human flesh, and did the people downstream ever seem grateful for not being devoured by the fish?
Nobody in the cultivating world was likely to be impressed by the constant, dedicated service of the Ji Sect. But Ji Ran didn't quite have the cheek to let one or two of these problems go out of control just so Ji Sect could sweep in and prove why they were needed. Ji Feng had been of a different inclination. He'd more often sent his cultivators far afield to garner glory for the sect, and overlooked things closer to his courtyard, because he believed that weeds ought to be left to grow once in a while just remind everyone why they paid for gardeners. That was partly why he'd always seemed more impressive to all and sundry, but conversely, it was also why he'd been eaten up whole by a Dandelion Demon just fifty paces from the Ji Sect's front door. Truly an object lesson in cause and consequence.
The big issue was, of course, that even as Ji Ran tried running her sect, she was also constantly having to go far afield, picking up any missions she could find for even adequate pay. There were few others in the sect she could trust to do likewise: Zhou Wenhong, who'd fallen into something of a right-hand woman position by dint of bare adequacy, or Ji Yiyi, one of Ji Ran's cousins who'd remained with the sect out of sheer laziness. The pickings were even more slim if Ji Ran had to count which of the men she could rely on, because while plenty of competent female cultivators had been left behind by Ji Feng's shithead disciple, he had certainly gone to the effort to take every man smart enough to even put his shoes on the correct feet in the morning.
All this running around that Ji Ran had to do to keep the sect financially solvent was cutting into a lot of the time she would have otherwise spent actually training up cultivators or dealing with matters of internal administration. Alright, so maybe she hadn't been left with prime material, but you can keep pigs alive on slop just as well as fresh cabbage, was Ji Ran's opinion. If she could spare some time to whip them into shape, she was sure she could have made at minimum mediocre cultivators out of them all. Mediocrity was good enough! That was its very definition! They weren't competing with the four major sects here, they just needed people to do good enough work that it would actually bring in some money!
That was where Ji Furong came in. Ji Ran decided, and he agreed. If he could take on the task of training some of the Ji cultivators, maybe even taking on a few nighthunts himself, that would already improve Ji Sect's situation by leaps and bounds.
After witnessing his awe-inspiring practice sessions, it was easy enough for Ji Ran to gather nearly every cultivator in the sect for Ji Furong's lessons. A few showed up out of actual dutifulness, of course: Zhou Wenhong was always looking to improve on her skills, and the sect's youngest disciples, Xiao Ping and Lingling, had to be there if they wanted to pretend they had even the least bit of face. The rest of the attendees, Ji Ran would have defined as inveterate gawkers, more drawn in by Ji Furong's pretty face. You didn't see beauties like this in the valley, usually.
Of course, while they had seen Ji Furong practice on his own, they hardly knew what to expect from him as a teacher. Ji Ran was sure more than one person wanted to vomit blood when they realized, this guy was a ruthless drill master! A heartless instructor, unmoved by tears! The laid back masses of Ji Sect was not prepared for their lazy summer day to be overtaken by the thunderclouds of Ji Furong's fierce temper as a teacher. 'You're holding a sword, not a chicken neck! Grip properly! Stop slouching, what's this pathetic posture? ...What are you doing now, I told you to straighten up, not bend all the way in the other direction! You're going to kill someone with that swing, and if we're lucky it's going to be yourself!'
Ji Ran almost laughed at the frightened faces of grown cultivators on the brink of tears as Ji Furong verbally tore them apart for every bad stance or clumsy movement. When Ji Ran instructed, she could be plenty sharp-tongued herself, but it didn't always take, because they all knew her as soft-hearted beneath it all. So Ji Furong fell upon them like a divine punishment.
To better deal with the inconsistent skill levels of the Ji cultivators, Ji Furong separated them roughly into three groups. Zhou Wenhong and Ji Yiyi came out in the more advanced group, as Ji Ran expected, but a handful of people received merciless blows to their pride as they were sectioned off along with the two disciples.
"We shall have to start you all over again with the basics," Ji Furong had told them. When instructing, his pretty face actually took on a threatening sharpness, and that at least cut off any protest the cultivators might have thought to make.
Naturally, by the next day, it proved a bit more difficult to gather people for lessons, but they learned very quickly that they either showed up on time or Ji Furong would hunt them down, and they discovered the hunt down to be a marginally more frightening experience than just showing up and putting up with his regular sharp tongue.
By the end of the week, two of the cultivators in the bottom group had gathered their things and left the sect entirely. Ji Ran tried not to mourn their absence too much, knowing that they'd contributed nothing more to the sect than two more mouths to feed.
"A sect leader should know when to cut out the dead weight," Ji Furong had said more cynically.
Ji Ran, at that time, diplomatically did not inform Ji Furong that in a sense, everyone left at the Ji Sect now had been deemed, in some way, as dead weight. That conversation would come later.
For now, Ji Furong settled on not only carving his own place at the sect, but making himself indispensable. His martial instructions had become a daily fixture, starting early in the morning. He then led meditation, and in the afternoons, he also proceeded to tutor in calligraphy and literature any Ji sect members he could snatch up for class, which was not limited to just the cultivators. The Ji Sect library was somewhat pathetic, but they did have, in Ji Furong's words, 'the bare minimum'.
It was another interesting side of Ji Furong that nobody had known to anticipate. Wherever he'd been, whatever he'd been doing with his life, he'd obviously managed to obtain for himself a comprehensive scholarly education. Ji Ran, like most sect members, knew enough of her letters to get by without embarrassment, but Ji Furong had a depth and breadth of knowledge that felt impressive. She was struck once again with the odd feeling that someone, somewhere, had to be missing this talented individual, but whatever information she'd tried to garner from passing merchants and rogue cultivator gossip had offered no clues she could proceed on.
At one point, she did sent Zhou Wenhong off to the mountain, to find the river mouth where Ji Furong might have fallen in and try to see if there was anything they could glean from that alone. But Zhou Wenhong went, and picked through the desolate mountainside, and even interrogated a couple of ill-tempered hermits, yet returned with no answers at all.
Even if there was nothing to report, Ji Ran did tell Ji Furong about that short interlude, if only to explain the otherwise diligent Zhou Wenhong's absence from his classes, and he had merely quietly nodded in response, as if he hadn't expected anyone to be looking for him anyway.
This topic was put aside in favor of discussing the purchase of more ink and paper, and obtaining more money for the purchase thereof. Ji Furong decided to go on nighthunts (by himself, in spite of Ji Ran trying to hoist the disciples on him). Truly this was a solitary man, but she did have practical considerations of her own.
The thing was that Ji Ran noticed he was somewhat harsher than necessary to his students. He seemed to not really know how to offer praise or encouragement, and worse yet, seemed to see defiance where Ji Ran didn't. Well, what defiance? As if any of her pack of feckless third-rate cultivators had the spine in them for something like defiance!
This all came to a head when she walked in on one of his sword drills to see that he had reduced both Xiao Ping and Lingling to tears. Xiao Ping, she could understand--for a teenage boy, he was exceedingly sensitive, and cried more than all the women in the sect combined. But Lingling was made of sterner stuff usually, so Ji Ran knew it was time to step in before Ji Furong managed to send someone into a qi deviation by strength of his sheer disapproval.
Ji Furong's shoulders were mulishly stiff when she took him aside for a talk, like he expected some kind of humiliating scolding instead of a reasonable conversation. Was this one of the ingrained reflexes from his past? Perhaps, she suggested, there was a mismatch in expectations here. Sure, it'd been fun at first to see the sect members scared a bit, and forcibly acquainted with how far they fell short of the bare minimum, but what Ji Ran wanted from this exercise was improvement, not for the sect members to be beaten down with their own ignorance as club.
"Look," Ji Ran said, "I think maybe you're teaching like this because it's the way you were taught. Hard to say, since you wouldn't be able to remember anyway. But that's not going to work anyone who's any less of a genius than you. And I mean this with great love and respect, but nobody in this sect is going to turn out to be a genius." She might have been laying it on a bit thick, but sure, the gap in skills was such that Ji Furong might as well have been a genius. Privately, Ji Ran just thought he might have been an unusually hard worker.
Ji Furong's lip twitched, the way it always did when Ji Ran said said something pathetically fond about her sect members but phrased like a criticism.
"How about I give you lessons?" she added cheerfully.
Ji Furong stared for a moment before asking, "Lessons on what?" Which, fair. Just the other day he'd had to correct the way she held a brush.
"On how to become everyone's favorite teacher!"
"I'm the only teacher in the sect."
"And the fact that you're still not the favorite shows there's room for improvement."
The thing was, there was a great chasm between knowing things, being good at certain skills, and knowing how to teach that to others. Ji Ran had been taking over instructions of new disciples since she'd been twelve, before becoming sect leader had eaten into all of her time. She had a good grasp of what worked for some people and what didn't, and how to spot when students were learning and when they weren't.
"Don't just say 'you did that poorly'--" she began to explain.
"I'm not going to coddle anyone," Ji Furong said bluntly.
Ji Ran swatted at his arm to silence him. "Let me finish! Don't just say what they did poorly! Point out to something they did well and go, 'that was good. Next you need to work on this other thing'. And point out when they do something better than they were doing it before, so that they know which direction their skills are heading."
Ji Furong took in all of Ji Ran's advice with pressed lips and a doubtful expression, but when she joined him for the next class, she watched as he stumbled his way through pointing out that Xiao Ping was actually holding his sword better now, and why this way of doing it was better than how he was doing it before. Ji Ran was grinning wildly when Ji Furong glanced over at her, and he turned away again with a silent but implied huff.
"You got the basics down!" Ji Ran encouraged him after class. "Next you can work on making it sound a bit more natural. Maybe look less like you want to die when complimenting someone."
"Fuck off," was Ji Furong's eloquent, scholarly reply to this.
But Ji Ran's advice must have caught on, because the general anxious cloud that seemed to hang over Ji Furong's classes dispelled little by little every day. Even the meditation sessions seemed more successful, when the students had to put less effort into relaxing after class. People were actually, surprisingly, showing up of their own volition.
It was late autumn by the time Ji Ran thought that Ji Furong was properly settled in. The sect members were, by this point, neither as enraptured by his appearance as they'd been in the beginning, nor as terrified of his temper as they'd been later. He was a man who would never really be without his sharp edges, but he seemed to settle into his role as Ji-laoshi with something resembling contentment, if not outright happiness.
Before winter came, he even agreed to lead a nighthunt--actually having other people join him!--and the successful combatants returned with a monster hide that would fetch enough money for new winter cloaks, as well as bones that would keep Auntie Mei mortar and pestle busy until spring.
So, in light of this success, the winter was given over to more nighthunts, as some monsters emerged only during this season, while others hibernated. By this point, Ji Furong's sword classes dwindled only because he could trust most of the cultivators to continue good practice on their own, so he mostly only instructed the disciples and the remedial. The scholarly classes also took something of a back seat, as the days grew much shorter and the sect could not necessarily afford to keep many lamps or candles burning.
The nighthunts became almost a necessity for dealing with the boredom of winter, but at some point, Ji Furong acquired a guqin from somewhere. He wouldn't say from where, but Zhou Wenhong explained that the last time they'd been on the road together, returning from a nighthunt, the inn had been full, so they took a room at the local brothel. In an unusually mellow mood, Ji Furong had treated everyone to drink, food, and a few entertainers.
Ji Ran tried not to wince too much at the expense, especially since it seems it came from Ji Furong's personal funds, which he did more to earn than anyone else in the sect, but Zhou Wenhong ignored the pinched expression and proceeded with the story.
Ji Furong had given one of the musicians a long and thoughtful look, before politely asking to see her instrument. He proceeded, then, to pluck out a beautiful little melody on the qin which had even the other musicians give him over-awed looks. Then, in spite of the fact that Ji Furong had been the one to put his money down for entertainment, he proceeded to play for the rest of the night, to the increased cheer and enjoyment of his companions.
"As expected of Ji-laoshi," the cultivators had remarked, before proceeding to relay the story of how Ji Furong had come to their sect to the listening ears of the brothel workers.
Ji Ran did nothing to disguise her wince this time, and Zhou Wenhong shrugged, but what were they going to do about it now? The gossip had likely circled the jianghu three times by this point, and there was no putting this particular cat back into the bag.
At any rate, that was not the point of the story. The point was, Ji Furong had discovered he was also quite musically talented.
"Ah, so he bought himself a qin," Ji Ran concluded.
"No," Zhou Wenhong said, shuffling her feet. "I bought it. I talked to a merchant in town, and he gave me a good deal."
That cautious little Zhou Wenhong had given away her money so freely must have meant it was a good deal indeed, because Ji Ran had a sense such instruments were quite expensive. Ji Ran tried not to think desperately of how many supplies that money could have bought for the sect--it was an old instinct, still deeply ingrained, but they were doing well these days.
They could afford food and clothing and medicine, in the spring they might even afford to bring in builders to repair the worst ravages that lack of maintenance had wrought on the sect compound, and if Ji Furong's calculations were right, they could even afford ink and scrolls, and talisman paper soon. The sect members actually had the skill to pull their weight these days, and go on nighthunts and missions further afield than Ji Ran had once trusted them to go. These days, Ji Ran could even afford to stay back at the sect for longer! ...This meant a lot of boring work, but she preferred being bored to being constantly, unrelentingly anxious, so it was still an improvement overall.
And anyway, she didn't entirely regret the expense by the time she actually heard Ji Furong play.
They were in the dining hall after the evening meal, warming themselves with woodfire and plum wine both, when Ji Furong took out the qin and began playing. Nearly all sect members were gathered in the hall, but the normally rowdy atmosphere subsided into an awed, breathless silence as Ji Furong played.
In the lull between two songs, as Ji Furong was trying to choose or remember some new composition to paly, Ji Ran heard one of the sect members sigh indolently,
"Aaah, Furong-shige really is talented!"
So they had apparently moved on from laoshi to shige now, Ji Ran thought. Well, why not. As long as everyone got along.