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Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng wakes up screaming, the taste of ashes and blood gathering in his bile as the breeze swung the bells of mourning hanging from the half-burned beams.

It's nothing new, it shouldn't be, but... .

"Jiang-Zhongzhu!"

Mu Shui entered his room with his sword drawn.

Wait.

Mu Shui had died in the war and Lotus Pier hadn't been on fire since...since...

Since the end of the SunShot Campaign.

Meanwhile the man had approached, unaware of his leader's confucion, he just wanted to make sure he was okay. Zidian reacted, a purple spark burst , making the poor man jump backwards.

"Zh. . .Zhongzhu?"

"What day is?"

"How?" asked the man without understanding.

Finally Jiang Chen focused on man. He was just as he remembered him; tall and thin but with arms and legs as strong as any person who grew up swimming in the rivers and lakes of Yumeng, a white lock brided  in one of his black  braids and a scar from the cheekbone to his chin whizzing through the corner of his lips like lightning. He remembered very vividly that face half sunk in a pool of blood and mud, the deathly veiled eyes staring back at him.

Oh. ..he realized with apathetic resignation. It must be a conscious dream again.

A strong core in life risked creating a powerful corpse in death if the appropriate rituals were not followed. And then there were the conscious dreams, which were only a less terrible consequence of a qi deviation if one was not careful about one's physical and spiritual health.

Jiang Cheng clicked his tongue. There were many rituals that were meant to prevent them, but in some cases, when exhaustion reached the body, the golden core would force its propietary to sleep, creating a relaxing scenario   and forcing the body and mind to relax. Jiang Cheng had come to know them intimately.

It would have been very nice if there was no risk of being in a coma.

Suddenly he realized that the silence was getting embarrassingly long. 

Dream or not, he had to answer or the illusion would break. He took a deep breath. "What day is it?" he asked again with Zidian still sizzling at his finger. The man looked cautiously at the spiritual weapon and then again at his Leader, but answered without question. 

"Where is my sister?" he asked again. Even though it was a dream, even though he would dissolve in a bloodbath, he wanted to see her smile at him as if nothing had happened.

The man's shoulders relaxed almost imperceptibly and JiangCheng knows what it sees; a boy who calls his sister like a child calls his mother after a nightmare.

In the reality, Jiang Cheng would never let anyone see him like this, not in a million years.

But it was only a dream and Jiang Cheng intended to take advantage of every second

"Jiang-Guniang is finishing the preparations for the funeral ceremony, shall I go get her?"

The young Leader nodded, humming in acknowledgement. He remembered that evening, his sister had let him sleep and completed the preparations of funeral ceremony with much more grace and efficiency than he had. He dimissed the man, he would be looking for his sister himself in a moment, there was really no hurry.

After all, it was just a dream, he had all the time he wanted.

His subordinate finally left the room, not before casting a worried glance at the young man. Jiang Cheng didn't care, the conscious dreams tended to copy mannerisms and attitudes taken directly from the memories of the dreamer, they were very realistic.

And dangerous.

Many cultivators had got lost in dreams like that, abandoning reality, someone learned to manipulate them to make them more perfect than a reality they didn't want. Some died, their bodies wasting day after day while trapped in their own mind. They had lost many people like that during the war and Jiang Cheng didn't want to add his name to the list, not with a Sect to lead and a nephew to raise.

Not even the sweetest dreams would convince him to abandon Jin Ling.

It was in the middle of those thoughts that the door to his room opened wide again, a voice he hadn't heard for years came along with the breeze.

"Cheng, Cheng~" Wei WuXian entered singing his name as if he still had the right, a crooked smile on his skinny face. "Uncle Mu told me you are in a bad mood, don't you. . .” 

Jiang Cheng was not listening to him. Why was he in her dream? He had never seen this Wei WuXian in his dreams.

How dare he dared to show himself as if nothing had happened?!  

Yanli is cold, Jie was never cold, her hands are always warm, like her soup, like. . .

He grabbed the man by the lapel of his clothes while he was still babbling nonsense but he didn't have Sandu at hand, but he could, he could... .

Yanli was dead, her blood had cooled in a pool at his feet.

"Whaa! Jiang Cheng what... .!”

His sister had died to protect him, and he had made everything useless by turning himself  in rotting flesh into the stomach of some corpse!

In the Koi Tower, a child cried, calling for someone who could no longer answer.  

He could have strangled him! Yes! Finish the work begun after the fall of Lotus Pier!

Wei WuXian's nails snak painfully in his arms. "Jiang Cheng stop! What the fuck is wrong with you!" 

A flute, an embroidered ribbon and two empty rooms that no one would occupy anymore was all that remained, along with the splinters he had procured to sculpt two commemorative tablets. 

One sat next to his parents' in the Ancestral Hall, the other had destroyed it.

There was no need for a tablet for someone that he would come back.

Because there was no way that that annoyance had really died. Disasters last a thousand years after all.

Right?

"Don't you dare leave!" was a desperate thing, came out of wherever he had locked up what he hadn't said the last time.

"Huh?" Wei WuXian, the man who made the impossible possible, the Yiling Laozu, looked at him as if the madman between the two was Jiang Cheng. 

Perhaps he was. Only a mad would argue like that with the projection of a dream.

He wraps his arms around his brother and presses his face into the hollow of Wei WuXian's neck, inhaling the smell of lotus and cheap alcohol. Fuck, the precision with which he felt every single rib was enough to make him fear to break it.

"Don't you dare die," his voice sounded pathetic and suffocated even to his ears but fuck it, it was in his dream and he could do what he wanted.

Wei WuXian's arms surrounded him hesitantly, one hand on his back and one in the loose braid he used to sleep, in an embarrassing imitation of A-Jie's hugs. Jiang Cheng wanted to laugh, even that detail of the two of them, lousy at showing affection even if in polar opposite ways, was all too accurate.

"So it was that bad?" a question and a statement together, simple enough but enough to make his eyes burn out and reduce him to tears.

You have no idea. He would have liked to answer, but it was only a dream and so he just sank even more into his brother's embrace, the beating of his hear...

Wait.

He grabbed the other man by the shoulders and pulled him away from himself with a snap, unable to process what he had just heard, his head aching with how fast was thinking. As much as a conscious dream could be manipulated to visual perfection, there were things that couldn't be recreated, details that marked the difference between the dream and the reality that the dreamer clung on to to get out. They were infinitesimal but fundamental, like a flavor, a sound, like. . .

Like the heartbeat.

His first conscious dreams had reduced him to something sobbing and miserable because he had tried to embrace his family, seeking comfort in the heartbeat or the taste of soup.

Wei WuXian remained motionless in his grip for a moment before giggling. "What? Is Shidi finally awake?"

The bland attempt at humor only increased the youngster's confusion. Wei WuXian's dream projection  wasn't acting as if it were following a script, interacting with Jiang Cheng as if. . . 

As if he were real.

And he was so cold but so alive under Jiang Cheng's hands, something in the resentful energy that was only his brother's that made him feel safe.

But it couldn't be.

He grabbed his brother's wrists pushed by something that was definitely not hope. It couldn't be, he couldn't afford it, he didn't want to look for his heartbeat and wake up back in his bed.

Wei WuXian ripped his hands from his brother's with panic in his eyes and Jiang Cheng couldn't even gather enough sanity to worry about it or to notice that Wei Wuxian would never have looked at it like that.

But he ignored him, trying to grab him again and the other one slapped his hands away. It was then that he lost his patience and grabbed him by the neck with a grunt.

Lotus Pier was never silent, not with life swarming in the lakes even in winter under the ice and snow, and as time continued to flow out of the window, the two of them stood still in a disturbing replica of the fratricide that had almost worn off after their house had been burned to the ground.

Jiang Cheng looked his brother in the eye. He had frozen under his hand; not a sound, not a word, not even a call for help or a question about why. Waiting for Jiang Cheng to decide on his life as if it were the most normal thing in the world. 

In the end, that was Wei WuXian, even in dreams he could surprise him.

It would be so easy to press that point on the carotid that brought air to the body...

The poisonous thought made Jiang Cheng's stomach turn over in shame.

But that was neither the place nor the time to analyze it. He focused on what he was looking for, on what shouldn't be there.

Thump thump, thump thump, thump thump. The vein of his wrist was beating furiously under his fingers, betraying the apparent tranquility of his brother

He let his brother go as if he had burned himself. "You are alive."

"Shouldn't I be?" Now Wei WuXian seemed really worried, all humor evaporated like snow in the sun.

Vengeful spirits, vicious corpses, victims of murder and war, Y iling was soaked with their blood and resentment down to its roots, but the banners waving in the wavy air of resentful energy were not echoes of some distant battle, no, they belonged to the present.

The great sects once again united against the evil of the world.

"A-Cheng?" Wei WuXian brother took a step toward him and Jiang Cheng took a step back.

"Don't come closer!"

The Jin were the most numerous and clamoring for revenge for the death of their prince, the Nie butchered corpses as if he could really give justice to all the victims of the Yiling Laozu, the Lan Elders seemed anxious to get their hands on Wei WuXian to administer the justice they were famous for.

"Shidi," Wei WuXian had his hands in front of him as if to appease a rabid beast. "You need to calm down."

But the air didn't want to get into his lungs, the only thing he could do was gasp like a fish out of water with his limbs shaking unnecessarily.

And the Jiang?

The purple of the river was a force of barely twenty men.

But the Sandu Shengshou was in the lead.

Jiang Wanyin was going to avenge his sister.

Jiang Cheng's knees bent before he could reach the bed, her eyesight completely blurred by tears and lack of air, her ribs stuck in her lungs and Zidian crackling like a New Year's Eve firecracker on his finger.

He could barely hear his brother panicking over him. "Oh fuck! Jiang Cheng take a breath!" 

And Jiang Cheng had gone to save kill his brother.

The black finally swallowed him up, his brother's screams became a distant hum. And while Mu Shui rushed to help the two young men, something that was not meant to be heard by them croaked with a voice that no one in that world could have defined.

[Initialization completed, access done as Jiang Cheng.]

[Does the Ost wish to access the stored data?]

Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng was asleep, but not even sleep was indulgent with him. 

The mountains burned, the ancient knowledge reduced to ashes.

So begans that damn song. The ordinary people are frightened by spirits and corpses but when it comes to being morbid, human inventiveness rarely failed.

And so the ribbons waved in the wind of war.

The Lans were few, certainly less than he had expected, he had glimpsed Lan XiChen guiding his handful of his cultivators among the corpses that seemed not to want to finish. To Jiang Cheng, it seemed like an eternity had passed since they had covered each other's backs. 

But without sabers you can't win.

The beasts were sleeping, but they do not forget  the wrongs.

And so they roared until the earth shook.

He had heard Nie MingJiue barking orders, a single blow from Baxia and an empty circle was created around his feet, the fury of his men seemed to grow with the number of ferocious corpses. For  the justice, so he had heard, and Jiang Cheng had wanted to smash his skull in just for that.

But without gold you can't win.

The Sun asked for the keys to the golden gardens.

And the peony sparkled amidst in the blood.

The Jin were the most numerous, their uniforms glittered even in the midst of blood and mud. Surely they were the most motivated, all to avenge the death of their young master or just to get a trophy.

Jin GuangShan had made all that mess, but he wasn't the one who would pay for it. If the bastard hadn't hidden in the back, Jiang Cheng wasn't sure that Sandu wouldn't have accidentally slipped into his chest.

But without perseverance and a touch of madness, you can't win.

The fire burns on the lakes, only three lotus flowers remain.

And so it was that lightning struck the skies and the corpses came out of their graves.

The Jiang were a miserable force in comparison, the men who followed the Jiang-Zhongzhu were as young as their leader, but none of them had yet died that night, neither corpses nor resentful energy seemed to see the Jiang's purple.

But they still had to tear them down to pass and Jiang Wanyin was so angry. He hadn't even managed to fix A-Jie decently, her body was lying in the room she had shared with her husband not even a month ago.

Jin Ling was crying when he left.

Arrows, lightning, sabers and blood notes.

He will kill him.

The corpses dance on the graves of their murderers.

He will drag him to her Ancestral Hall and throw him at her family's feet as an offering and ask forgiveness from her sister for disrespecting her sacrifice.

All united against the Sun.

Their eyes meet.

Sandu and Zidian pulsate for bloodlust, the screams of his own men, the inhuman grunting of corpses, the fury of battle, it all boils down to just the two of them. Wei WuXian took his lips off the flute and stretched the instrument as if to defend himself between him and the man who was once his brother.

Who is still his brother.

Jiang Cheng blocks himself in his footsteps. The last time, they were together on the other side against Lan WangJi, never in a million years would he have imagined that that flute would be used against him. Jiang Cheng's throat shuts into a knot, his hot, dry eyes now void of tears.

Wei WuXian suddenly smiled at him. And in an instant he was again the boy he had protected from the dogs and to whom he had sung to after a nightmare, the boy who had got him in trouble countless times and had got him out just as many times.

The man who is his brother.

Chenqing falls into the mud and Jiang Cheng realizes with horror what the idiot wants to do.

The two parts of the tally are pulled out, the darkness bleeds from the metal like from a putrid wound.

"I am sorry."

Jiang Cheng runs to reach him, but he is not fast enough.

It is never enough.

Jiang Cheng wakes up, the acid taste of bile kneads his mouth, his eyes heavy from sleep. He cannot and does not want to open his eyes. He does not want to see his house empty house, the lack of everything that made it home echoing among the too-new aces.

Instead he regulates his breathing and waits. A-Ling was at Lotus Pier in those days and the Gods alone knew why he loved waking his poor uncle by jumping on his bed while he was still sleeping, but who was Jiang Cheng to deny something to his nephew?

Four, six, ten minutes, but nothing, his nephew didn't show up. Yet it was definitely time, his inner clock had long since synchronized with that of an excitable child who never seemed to run out of energy.

And then he felt it, or rather, he did not feel it.

Before the Wen during the day there was the coming and going of the disciples, servants and fishermen of the pier, at night it was the creaking of old boats or the perpetual lapping of water or the noise of nocturnal animals. And even afterwards, the silence was not really something that belonged to his home. But at that moment he could hear nothing but his breath that seemed to rumble into nothingness.

He opened his eyes on a white so pristine and dazzling that for a few seconds he thought he was in Gusu, but then he realized that it was not a room, but a space. It is standing, there are no walls, no boundaries, even the floor is more a feeling than something real. The only reason he doesn't panic is because he feels the familiar feeling of a conscious dream that keeps him anchored to reality. He can clearly feel his body lying on the bed, the feeling of the pillow under his head.

"Pfft. . .Ah, Ah, Ah," he laughs without being able to hold back. Is his head so messed up that his conscious dream space is broken?

It was at that moment that a strange voice rang in his ears as a slab of light appeared suspended before his eyes. It was purple, with pretty white lotus flowers printed on the corners like paper decorated of a fan.

[Negative, this System took the liberty of creating as neutral an environment as possible].

Jiang Cheng screams - a really, really unmanly scream - and falls on his backside without a sound or pain as would have happened in the reality.

"What the fuck! What the fuck are you?!" 

He tries to move away but the thing followed his field of vision as if it were attached to his eyes.

[Responding to Jiang-Zhongzhu, this System is in charge of assisting you]

Jiang Cheng's head was spinning, why was his head spinning in a dream? 

Okay Jiang Cheng, don't panic. He said to himself by sitting cross-legged in meditation while closing his eyes. You are a Zhongzhu, not a novice disciple, take it like a night hunt, a fucking, weird night hunt with a fucking weird beast.

Unfortunately, even though he could still avoid seeing it and still hear it, his voice echoed in his ears as if it were in his head.

[Taking into account the reaction of the Jiang-Zhongzhu, this System assumes that he does not know who this is. Is this correct?]

"Should I?" he asks with a calm that he does not have. An unspecified fucking entity has entered his head and he should also know what it is?

[This System has been assisting the Jiang Clan since before its origins, this System has come to the conclusion that your predecessor died before passing the cloak on to you. Is this correct?]

He gasps uselessly for an instant before deciding not to respond. There are spirits and even some monsters manage to take control of the body and mind of their victims by talking to them, but Jiang Cheng was not only very lucid, but he was very sure he could wake up when he wanted to, he still felt that thread connecting him to reality. But that thing seemed to have the power to manipulate the environment, it could be able to manipulate him to think he was awake when he was still asleep or worse, that thing was already going around with his body.

[I can assure you that this System has neither the power nor the interest to do so, it is only a support unit.]

Jiang Cheng scoffs. "Do you really expect me to believe you? Second; who the fuck gave you the right to spy on my thoughts?!"

[First: you are already in your thoughts, thinking here is the same as talking. Second: this System admits that it has never been in a similar situation, tradition dictates that the previous generation must explain to the next generation the existence of the System after the passage of Leadership or otherwise there are texts explaining the situation].

Jiang Cheng tried to remain stubbornly silent, trying not to think about anything, but he wasn't going anywhere. "Good luck then," he sniffed dismissively. "Lotus Pier's library has been burned, almost all texts are lost".

[This is highly inaccurate. Jiang Chi and his sisters created a second library where new books were recorded and added from time after  time.]

"What?" Jiang Cheng is breathless, is stupid and dangerous, but he can't really stop it at this point. 

"Can they be recovered?"

Another window opens in front of the one where the System speaks. It is a map, outlined in white and purple that shows a red dot flashing right in Yiling territory. He cursed loudly, that fucking place haunted him, had he insulted some vindictive spirit in a past life?

Considering his character is likely.

[ Affermative. If Jiang-Zhongzhu accept the help of this System he does not doubt that most of the artifacts can also be recovered].

Jiang Cheng thinks about it. He is not sure if he can get out of the dream safely, not without understanding something more about the thing in front of him.

And the only thing he can do at the moment is to ask.

"First I want to understand a couple of things. You've been with my family for centuries, right?"

[Correct]

"You could easily help me beat an entire army if you wanted to, right?"

[Zhongzhu hasn't unlocked the TACTICAL ONNISCENCE mode yet, but it is correct.]

"So why did the Wen managed to take down Lotus Pier?"

That was the question of the century. If his task was really to support his Clan and his Setta, why were his family and fellow disciples slaughtered with inhuman ease and cruelty? 

He metaphorically grasped the thread of his conscience. If the answer was not convincing or plausible he would go out and exorcise whatever he had the bad idea of nesting in his head.

[Jiang-Zhongzhu's father had no access. This System has been in the blood of the Jiang for centuries, but if before almost all family members had access to this System, permission for access has been drastically revoked over the centuries.]

"Why? If you are such a valuable resource, why deny access?"

Jiang Cheng unintentionally thinks of the Nie, their monstrously powerful sabers and their dead clan leaders too young generation after generation and feel the head is about to burst.

That was another possibility to consider. This thing, this System could really be a family inheritance, but not all inheritances were a gift.

[When we retrieve the family records, you will see that many branches of the Jiang family have disappeared because they destroyed each other or used the skills provided by this System improperly or out of greed. This System has entered into rest mode more and more often and for many generations at a time to prevent the disappearance of the Jiang Clan].

Makes a grimace. When he was a child he looked enviously at the other Clans, with their large families full of children growing up together as brothers and sisters while he only had his sister and cousins on his mother's side who he rarely saw despite the proximity of their territories. 

He doesn't need to retrieve the records, he knows what period he refers to, in the books was mentioned as 'The Suicidal Generation'. Entire families, generations and family branches killing their own flesh and blood for all sorts of reasons, in the end the main line of the Jiang Clan was barely a quarter of its origin and since then, their daughters or wives were unable to give more than two or three children before they died in childbirth or lost the ability to procreate. And even then, it was not certain that the children would survive their childhood or that they had a talent for cultivation. His sister was born too early and was rather slow in development, to the point that doctors and even her parents were convinced that she was retarded, after all there had already been other cases in both families. Jiang Cheng was born one month and two whole days later with the umbilical cord around his neck, and it was fairly well known that his father was always poised between life and death for his poor health when he was young.

Many whispered and blamed the bad Karma and greed and Jiang Cheng believed it very strongly for all the wrong and painful reasons. But this? This is crazy.

"When was the last time you had access before me and how many in my generation had it before they died?"

[Three generations ago and only three out of fifty people had access. In your generation counting you, only two out of five people are . .]

"Stop," he frowns. "You miscounted, there are only two people left with Jiang's blood, not . . ."

[Negative.] interrupts him in turn the System. [This System cannot detect them precisely because it has been in operation for too little time, but it clearly warns four other individuals with Jiang's blood besides the Jiang-Zhongzhu.]

Jiang Cheng stares at the screen in front of his eyes without really seeing it. Him. . .he doesn't know what to think, so many years believing that he would be the last bloody Jiang -it will definitely be like that because his blind dates fail one after the other and his nephew will soon be too big for get dirty continuously until he has to use the purple clothes - and then he discovers that there are four other relatives still alive, maybe they were even his disciples and he didn't even know it. They may not be cultivators and they may not be decent people but he wants to believe it anyway.

He thinks about it and he hears his mother's sharp voice calling him a gullible fool and his father's quiet disappointment for just thinking about it, but he thinks about it anyway and takes a deep breath. Somehow he feels pain but it's a good pain, as if his chest finally lifts up after being crushed.  But he wants to be happy, he wants to be happy that he is not the last Jiang, he wants. . .he wants. . .

He doesn't want to be so alone.

Even if it's not the Jiangs he wants, it's enough.

He's used to having to make do with it.

"One last question. Why did you mess up my dream before?"

[Messed up? This System has not touched the dreams of Jiang-Zhongzhu because the one before was not a dream].

§

Jiang Cheng for once opens his eyes with ease. It's almost dawn if he have to trust the slight glow filtering through the window.

And when he lowers his eyes he gasps. He shouldn't, he had prepared himself, he said that when he saw them again he would hold back his tears and find an excuse to hug them tight. 

But he sees Wei WuXian and Yanli, two figures in the semi-darkness sleeping on a chair next to his bed and he suffocates a hysterical laughter between his teeth. Yanli, even while sleeping, was sitting on the chair with her hands neatly folded in her lap, her back straight and her head slumped on her own shoulder with such grace that a Lan would take notes. Wei WuXian, being a total mess even while sleeping, was sitting hovering on the edge of the chair with his torso bent over the bed, his face hidden in his arms.

He had come back, he realized with a strange sense of dizziness. He had gone back in time, his parents were still dead and his house burned down to the roots but... .

They were alive.

He took a couple of deep breaths and then woke his brothers with the loudest yawn he could do without being ridiculous.

His sister blinked to focus while Wei WuXian got up with a snap, spitting out a lock of hair that had probably ended up in his mouth because he couldn't braid his hair to sleep like a normal person.

An embarrassing moment of silence passes and before Jiang Cheng can ask what they are doing there with the most innocent expression of his repertoire, Wei WuXian jumps on his bed with an anguished groan, holding him in his arms like an overly attached octopus.

"Jiang Chen!"

For a decidedly undernourished and still weak person, his brother was crushing him with not inconsiderable force. Jiang Cheng only becomes more confused when she looks at Yanli for explanations but she takes his free hand between his crying silently.

"Hem...what the hell is wrong with you? Has something happened?"

Wei WuXian detaches from him and it's almost like he wants to beat him up, as if he's the one who tends to make a trouble one after the other.

"Something happened?! Shijie did you hear that?! First he almost scares the hell out of us and then he wakes up fresh as a rose, as if he hadn't stopped breathing for five good minutes while he was in a qi deviation!"

Jiang Cheng knows that tone of voice, he sounds joking or mocking at best, but his brother -Gods, how nice it is not to have to correct himself - is terrified, his hands holding his shoulders are shaking while Yanli's are still but he's pretty sure he couldn't take his hand away even if he wanted to.

"A-Cheng," his sister slowly begins. "What do you remember?"

Jiang Cheng remains silent for a moment, wandering around the corners of the room with his gaze as if he were making a local mind.

At the end, he lies shamelessly when he answers, "I think I had a nightmare, then I fainted, at least I think."

"Do you remember what you were dreaming about?" she still asks, so kindly that Jiang Cheng wants to cry and tell her everything, but she cannot. The only clause the System had put in place was that he still wouldn't tell his family anything, at least not before the entity gained enough strength to give A-Jie access and prevent them from thinking he was crazy. He had been suspicious of the specificity of the explanation, but the System had kindly informed him that he had been in that situation an embarrassing number of times and he did not want to repeat the experience.

But if he continues to lie his sister will notice, she will not pressure on him, but will wait in a corner with the slightly mortified expression of when he thinks she is not reliable enough.

And Jiang Cheng will be damned if he allows his sister to think less of herself, so he opts for a half-truth.

"I'm in a cave," he begins hesitantly, as if he has to make an effort to remember. "I feel a stabbing pain in my stomach, as if someone was opening me with a knife and poking around in my bowels," he pauses and discovers that he doesn't have to pretend the discomfort he feels, he has never told anyone about those nightmares he cannot make sense of.  "I try to make him stop but I can't move, someone is holding me down."

It's then that he feels the slight hiccup in Wei WuXian's breath next to him, he's very light, he wouldn't even have noticed it if the other one wasn't practically sitting on him, but it's enough to be catalogued as a scared gasp.

But it does not give us too much weight, after all the story he is telling is not pleasant for anyone.

"Then, when I finally manage to open my eyes, I turn sideways and see a corpse."

He stops talking and tries with all his strength not to look at his brother, but it's all quite explanatory and also fits the reaction he had just woke up the first time.

"Oh. . .A-Cheng."

This is all the warning he receives before his sister gets up and comes to hug him, while Wei WuXian sinks his face into her neck. È . . . uncomfortable, at best and too tight, squashed between his brother and sister as when they were still too young to be able to look after the rules and everything is appropriate.

But he can feel them.

Thump thump, thump thump, thump thump

Thump thump, thump thump, thump thump, thump thump thump

Their heart beats in unison under his ears and for the first time in years he lets herself be held back, sinks his face into A-Jie's chest and hooks his brother for life with one arm.

The world out there is still at war, their home still has to be rebuilt and the other sects were waiting for his frist mistake for sink their teeth into the still fresh carcass of the Yunmeng Jiang, but fuck it all.

After all, it wasn't just a dream and he didn't have all the time he wanted.

But Jiang Cheng would take advantage of every second.

Chapter Text

The tranquility lasts until Jiang Cheng looks down on his hands and a snake's head rises to stare at him.

He pushes his sister and brother away with such a violent snap that he bumps into the headboard of the bed. The wood creaks as he waves his hand to shake the snake off.

Then that asshole Wei WuXian laughs -Jiang Cheng doesn't kick him down just because Yanli laughs too, but more politely- and realizes that no, a water viper had not rolled up around his wrist while he was sleeping.

It's Zidian.

For a moment Jiang Cheng is out of breath, the silver snake looks at him lazily blinking his eyelids a couple of times and then obediently returns to his wrist.

"What the hell. . .”

Wei WuXian is too busy trying not to die from laughing and so Yanli is the one who answers him: "You fainted remember? You had stopped breathing and you have had a qi deviation, and just when we thought you were going to suffocate, Zidian... how to say...”

"Electrocuted you!" interrupts Wei Ying with laughter still on his lips. "He started to shine like he was overloading and then Pooff! You started to breathe again and then it melted!"

"Melted?! How melted?! It's right here!"

"I know!" he gesticulated excitedly like a child with too much blood sugar pointing to a charred spot on the floor. "It literally turned into living silver, then it moved around your wrist and took that shape! It was fantastic!"

He looked closely at his newly reforged weapon. Once the silver ring had an amethyst embedded in the head of the snake that went around his index finger, but at that moment its overall shape was completely different; it resembled one of those bracelets attached to the rings that were worn far beyond Jianghu. The head of the snake on his finger protruded in the direction of his wrist and a chain, long enough to close the fist properly, started from the mouth of the animal to attach to the tail of the other while the coils rolled around his wrist in a wavy line.

The System screen appeared before his eyes and he had to refrain from cursing.

[CONGRATULATIONS!! CONGRATULATIONS!! CONGRATULATIONS!!! The important things should be said three times].

Could you kindly not do that again?

[Forgive me Jiang-Zhongzhu, this is annoying programming that starts automatically. Anyway: did you unlock the 'True Form of Zidian' want to view the stats?]

Not now.

He looked up only to find Yanli and Wei WuXian staring at him in apprehension. He frowned: he didn't stare at the void like an idiot, did he?

"What?"

"What?!" Wei WuXian seemed indignant. "Do you even have the courage to ask?!" he jumped out of bed, pulling him by the sleeve. "Let's go and try it right away!"

He tried to argue in vain: "But the ceremony. . .”

"I took the liberty of moving the funeral ceremony to sunset, the elders appreciated the return to tradition," and so saying Yanli took away any escape, laughing at Wei WuXian's antics as if nothing was wrong in the world.

And in that moment he sees it. Wei WuXian waits for him at the door, with one hand on the doorframe and sparkling eyes promising the same amount of trouble as his years and beyond.

That was Wei WuXian.

Not the Patriarch of Yiling who had returned to him after three terrifying months , not the shadow he had avoided everyone after the war or the grisly ghost he had met the last time he went to the Burial Mound.

No, that was Wei WuXian, Wei Ying.

His brother.

In another time, in a life that he does not know, this miracle did not happen, he let himself be consumed by anger and hatred in order not to drown in pain, and when his brother returned in his life and learned the truth he no longer knew how to feel, the anger now reduced to cold embers, the pain that had only increased without his knowledge and the hatred that had never been such.

No one had deigned to write the continue, but they both knew that they would never be the same as before, too much water had passed under the bridge to do so.

Even the current Jiang Cheng should hate him, he tried. He killed his brother-in-law, (it's a lie, he was framed blatantly and Jiang Cheng couldn't do anything) his sister (even bigger lie, he was attacked behind his back and Yanli acted by instinct, he would have done the same thing if only he was closer) and more than a thousand cultivators.

He left them for the Wen.

But it hasn't happened yet, A-Jie is here, he is still here, so fuck it all. He's already messing up time, might as well do it the way he wants to do it, right?

He's huffing and puffing, pretending a nuisance he can't feel: "You better not put yourself on Ziadian's trajectory."

Jiang Yanli takes leave of them with a promise of soup and they go to the training camp. The new disciples greet them as they pass by and for once the smile on Wei WuXian's face doesn't seem to scare them or maybe they were going too fast. Apparently his deviation of qi had made many people scare for life and the preparations for the funeral ceremony had been interrupted, so it was necessary to resume as soon as possible

They arrive at the training camps with the urgency of two kids who do not want to be late for training. By then it would have already been full of disciples engaged in their training routine under his mother's relentless eyes, but now the Jiang growers are almost all Jiang Cheng's age or older: growers who were stationed outside Lotus Pier, children who had lost their parents, husbands who had seen their children burn, and even mothers or sisters who had taken up the sword they had abandoned in a corner years ago to build a family. Many of them would never have been very strong in cultivation, they had passed the age but were determined to die if it would protect what was left of their home or even just to survive.

Jiang Cheng was proud of each and every one of them.

And in the meantime he tried not to think about all the orphans and refugees begging on his land or he would have another qi deviation.

Just because he has already faced it doesn't mean it is easier.

He doesn't have to warn Wei WuXian to move, the man steps aside and waits with what little patience he has with a nervous energy that makes him vibrate with excitement from head to foot.

It was something he had not seen for too long if you ask Jiang Cheng.

He starts small, sending a thread of qi to the weapon that buzzes reactively as he has always done. He thinks for a moment to ask the System for clarification, but immediately discards the idea. He hates to admit it, but Wei WuXian would be able to tell there's something strange just by looking at his face and at that moment he was watching him like an overly curious hawk or rabbit.

Activate Zidian and every time is like the first. Only instead of the handle, the head of the snake on his wrist slides into the palm of his hand and silence deafens the field. He can see out of the corner of his eye his men stopping under the porch petrified by the shock and his eyes fixed on their Capo Setta, his brother with his mouth open for the surprise.

The ring and chain sizzle with purple sparks, the snake's head protrudes from its grip as the old Zidian's handle would have done. But no other extension came out of its mouth, no reel of familiar herringbone cable pervaded by electricity, no.

It was a lightning bolt.

A real lightning bolt of pure purple energy unrolling like a leather whip at his feet.

"Fuck," Wei WuXian seemed breathless and Jiang Cheng was absolutely out of words. The whip was much thinner than it had been before and perhaps less intimidating, but something inside Jiang Cheng's core told him it could do much, much more harm.

System slowly began in his thoughts. Exactly how powerful was Zidian before?

[Responding to Jiang-Zhongzhu, Zidian first used only half of his full power.]

Jiang Cheng almost suffocated with his own saliva. Only half, only half of power and his mother was considered one of the most frightening growers of her generation and also of Jiang Cheng's generation with Zidian revered as a legendary weapon.

They spent that mid-morning testing Zidian's new power, range and above all developing a new sensitivity to the weapon.

It was fun.

And it was easy.

Too easy. Even the first few times he had used Zidian there had been an embarrassing amount of trial and error that had left him frustrated and tired, but in its new form he felt like he had managed to fit the piece of the puzzle right after trying all the wrong sides.

System, are you making things easier?

He had brought him back in the time, who knows what he was capable of.

[Negative. This System has no control over anything that has to do with or works through the golden core of Jiang-Zhonzhu or that of other people. The function has been permanently blocked with no possibility of restoration].

And Jiang Cheng did not even need to ask why. Qi deviations, shattered cores apparently out of nowhere or for insignificant mistakes of experienced cultivators or small children. To an outside eye the Suicidal Generation was simply a victim of bad Karma caused by some offense or their own bad actions. Jiang Cheng thought the same way, but knowing what he knew now and remembering what he had studied in family records, the overall picture was much more depressing and twisted. The recorded deaths were too convenient in timing and opportunity for one branch of the family or another or two too close deaths of two opposing families seemed like revenge for the former.

Now he understood better the apprehension of their teachers and his parents, who had nagged them not to stop paying attention when he and Wei WuXian were small and their golden cores were developing.

He took one look at his brother, who had kept himself aside instead of proposing a meeting as he had hoped, his side painfully empty and his eyes full of a request to which he would give no voice.

"Speak up, it looks like you're dying to."

"May I examine it?"

Jiang Cheng was so surprised by the request that he remained silent for one embarrassing second before answering: "Sure"

Since when Wei WuXian had been whipped by Zidian, he had never got too close to Jiang Cheng when he used it. At first he felt offended, as if he could really use on is brother.

He ignored the little voice that whispers: You did it, in that time line it had never happened and it will never happen if Jiang Cheng has a say.

But then he realized that his brother didn't do it on purpose when he asked him almost jokingly and he seemed completely unaware of it.

No surprise since it was Wei WuXian.

In the end, it was the same thing that happened to other growers in contact with Wei WuXian's resentful energy. Growers had a slightly more developed survival instinct than average, their cores and experience with deadly harmful things led them to develop countermeasures to protect themselves, and this was true even with stronger growers and spiritual relics.

As unconscious mechanisms to keep themselves away from something that has done a lot of harm.

Jiang Cheng did not know whether to feel worried or proud that he had not developed that particular adverse reaction to his brother's resentful energy.

But at that moment he didn't seem at all concerned as he took his wrist with two fingers and with the other hand he touched the energy cord rolled around Jiang Cheng's fingers. He didn't understand what he wanted to do until he felt the resentful energy penetrate his meridians, mapping the path of his qi that made Zidian work, the cold that penetrated his bones.

The look of Wei WuXian who scrutinized the weapon with a look reserved for his inventions or a talisman particularly difficult to draw.

He tried with all his strength not to ask what the fuck he was doing or why he did not use his spiritual energy. He knew that he could store a certain amount of resentful energy and use it within a certain limit, but what he was doing seemed absurd.

How not to bring Suibian.

But since he woke up they hadn't quarrelled yet, it would actually be more correct to say that Jiang Cheng was not pissed off one-way with Wei WuXian who either avoided his questions or locked himself in his room doing who knows what.

And he wanted to keep it that way as long as possible.

"Mhh ... The whip is thinner," he contemplatively began. "Normally it takes less qi to activate a weapon of this size, but the whip is made of pure qi, but you're using even less than the amount needed to activate the previous version of Zidian and . . .”

"Translated for normal people?"

"Awesome," Wei WuXian seemed again the overexcited kid who watched their blacksmiths while they worked. "Whoever built it not only managed to bridge the gap between the activation and the reaction of the weapon to the owner's qi, but also boosted it to an absurd level!"

They didn't have time to do anything else, Yanli called them for lunch. She had set up the small circular table overlooking the bridges over the water in the inner courtyards. It had almost all collapsed or burned and the few remaining lotus flowers were withering in the autumn cold, it was nothing like their main room but there was A-Jie's soup on the table.

And it was enough.

He had to hold back the tears when the first spoon came to his mouth. When A-Ling was old enough to eat solid food he tried to cook it for him, but it never tasted the same, it was never close enough.

He could never be enough.

This time, he promised himself. A-Ling will meet his parents.                                 

"Soooo," Wei WuXian bumps his shoulder with hers and Jiang Cheng tries not to think about how they sat close together, as if their parents could turn the corner and sit in the empity places in front of them.

"Since I have a short memory and Mr. Model Student has read all the books in the library, can you tell me if there is anything specific about Zidian?"

He says it as if he was just too lazy and the books were not burnt to ashes.

"Like what?"

"Whar Clan was really craft it? I remember there is much confusion about who the original owner was."

"There isn't much," he sent down another spoonful of soup. "Aside from the records of the Clans the diatribe for Zidian's claim and citing a blacksmith who is said to have trapped a lightning bolt, there is nothing really useful.

"That makes me think," a wrinkle appears between Yanli's delicate eyebrows. "First Aunt is still bothering you about..."

"To get Zidian back?" Jiang Cheng scoffs. "They can make up all the reasons they want, right now, they'll have to cut off my hand if they want it back."

The bracelet sizzled like it was nodding in agreement.

The dispute between Jiang and Yu for custody of Zidian was almost as old as the two clans. The Yu history books claim that he had always belonged to the founder of the clan, Yu YaoLi,  while other sources, too old to be authenticated with certainty, suggested that Jiang Chi was the original owner.

Many people had had to bite their tongues when his mother married and took Zidian away, her older sister had even challenged her for claim Zidian but...well there was a reason why they didn't visit their maternal relatives often.

Wei WuXian puffs, his eyes flash red. "As if they could get close enough to do it."

It's a threat and a promise together and Jiang Cheng will never admit to feeling his chest too tight to that statement. They finish their lunch without any more comments, too used to keeping quiet while their parents were arguing, they were not used to having too long conversations on topics that did not fade into embarrassing silences.

Jiang Cheng tries in vain to return to his office, in two weeks they have to return to the front line that has moved to the border with Meishan and has to reorganize an unspecified number of things because he also wants to pass through Yiling.

He does not want the secret library to be accidentally discovered and destroyed again, there is still a supervisory office there.

or is that what he would have done if only his family wouldn't try to get in his way in every way. In the end he snaps and threatens to break someone's legs if they don't let him work, but that doesn't seem to work either.

"Go back to bed," says Wei WuXian with that tone of of voice that seems to say I am the older brother, so do as I say.

Jiang Cheng is forced for principle to answer as the petulant brat who is: "Or?"

"Let's call Zhu NaiNai," answers Mu Shui, the traitor had hovered annoyingly over Jiang Cheng like the mother hen he was, if he wasn't used to the man's behavior from his first life he would have already ripped him apart with a glance and a sharp comment.

But in the end he ends gives in. Zhu NaiNai, as everyone calls her, has been Lotus Pier's Chief Medical Officer since his grandfather was young and is fucking terrifying. The woman and some of her disciples had survived the massacre and Jiang Cheng had found her when he returned for funeral services, still wrinkled as a plum and just as sour. She had no respect for the hierarchy and had no intention of treating him and Wei WuXian like more than brat because, according to her, she had treated too many peeled knees and childish disorders to be afraid of bot them.

Jiang Yanli asks him if he is okay once in an hour or so under the pretense of bringing him medicine or snacks, and when he finally manages to convince Mu Shui to bring the work to his rooms, Wei WuXian bursts in and pretends to help him.

And by help Wei WuXian intended to use any yawning or creaking of the floor to send Jiang Cheng back to sleep even though he was already hurrying his cards in bed like an invalid.

Everyone is so on him which is suffocating.

It wouldn't change that for anything in the world

Chapter Text

Even with all the Sects united and the resources they put together or the victories, the stalemate was exhausting and Qishan Wen seemed to remain a giant impossible to approach.

But with Wei WuXian they succeeded. Chenqing's notes freeze him to the bone and his weapons pulsate to exorcise evil, but the corpses of their enemies and allies dance like puppets to the will of man and win battle after battle.

A necessary evil, before then XiChen had wanted to believe that no evil was necessary.

Demonic cultivation, crooked path, deviant method, whatever one wanted to call it, what Wei WuXian was doing was neither right nor moral and Lan XiChen does not know how to feel.

But the mood rises, more cultivatros deserting from Wen Sect to join them, the Jiang Clan literally rises from the ashes like a lotus from the mud and his thoughts inevitably run to Jiang Wanyin.

XiChen had heard the voices, Sandu Shengshou and the Patriarch of Yiling slaughter Wen everywhere they went, always together like lightning and thunder with an army of fierce corpses in their wake. He also heard that the boy everyone expected to fail in his role fits in like a fish in water and some rumor calls him even more capable than his father or even his grandfather. His resumption is so fast and efficient that XiChen might be jealous if he wasn't too happy for the younger one.

But unfortunately he also heard what his brother said to him with worry in his eyes and heart broken by the rejection of Young Master Wei and XiChen really wants to break something.

Preferably Wei WuXian's head.

Are not thoughts he should leave simmering in his head, should not carelessly judge. Knowing both his brother and the object of his desires, it was very likely that there had been a big misunderstanding.

His brother does not speak and Wei WuXian may be a genius but he is definitely blind in many ways.

Dismisses the woman who brings them tea with a smile and return to the present conversation, the wind makes the fabric of the tent sway.

It will be a rainy spring.

"So Jiang-Zhongzhu thinks that what he is trying to find is in Yiling?"

The younger man in front of him drinks a sip of tea with a deliberately calculated pause, as if he had done it a million times. At first, Lan XiChen had been disorientated by the young man's change,  what he saw in front of him was no longer the boy he had glimpsed when his house was still intact, nor the hot-headed leader who almost obsessively craved the blood of his enemies he had met after Lotus Pier had been shot down.

His gaze fell not soo by chance on Zidian. The weapon was beautiful in its new form and ten times deadlier if he had to believe the exaggerated rumors around him.

"The main objective was to claim as many territories as possible before heading to the front line, but after the call to Langya the priorities became different. But then a few days ago I was told that in the Yiling Supervision Office there are some artifacts of my Clan, if I don't recovery them soon I'm afraid they may be lost forever," his words were accurate but the tone of his voice was as sharp as a poisoned knife.

Lan XiChen puts a conciliatory smile on his face and is not offended by the insinuation while a silence that is only slightly uncomfortable hovers in the air without the courage to reply. He had had to stifle too many fights because someone hadn't noticed that the treasure of his war booty belonged to another sect. He had even had to tell one of his disciples that no, that cultivation manual on the beasts with the emblem and property's stamps of Nie did not belong to them.

Unfortunately, Jin ZiXun sitting at his side seems to think differently and, before he can answer with something stupid, Lan XiChen asks, "What kind of artifacts are we talking about if I may ask? I wouldn't want someone to activate some defense mechanism by mistake."

"There is no such danger, they are mainly books and . . ."

"Jiang-Zhongzhu is asking Jin and Lan for help for a few books?" he interrupts Jin ZiXun with a sarcastic laugh. "Can we really afford to waste time like this with a war going on?"

Zidian hisses dangerously and Lan XiChen thinks: This guy wants to die. Now, if saying this to a person whose house has been torn apart when his own hasn't even been scratched is not a sign of stupidity, Lan Huan doesn't know what it is.

Not to mention the insult to books, Huan would want his brother here just to see Jin ZiXun shiver under Lan WangJi's gaze.

The men following Jin ZiXun are barely enough for a garrison and it's quite obvious that Jin GuangShan sent him there more to get him out of the way and pretend to help the Jiang Sect after his son made a bad impression by insulting Lady Jiang.

You can't really talk about help and Lan XiChen was there by chance.

"This Jiang apologizes," answers Jiang Cheng with condescension. "He didn't know that Jin Gongzi wanted to reach the front line so eagerly or else I would have ...Oh," he stops in the middle like if he only remembered something now. "I beg your forgiveness, I had forgotten your injury."

The two young men stare at each other for an embarrassing and tense second like two dogs aiming at the same bone and XiChen holds a sigh. He missed Meng Yao, surely he would resolve the whole conversation with a smile and a couple of well-targeted words.

Jin ZiXun's injury is an old story and young Jin had constantly complained that he couldn't fight on the front line or sayin malicious things about exhibitionist and boastful people. XiChen frankly didn't understand what's the point of faking an injury to escape the front line if he was constantly complaining.

When Jiang Wanyin finally brings his attention back to him, he looks like he's glad he no longer has to deal with the child in the room. And maybe Lan XiChen's smile was too wide, but he has the feeling that if he hadn't run into them while helping the evacuees to escape, it is very likely that Jiang Cheng would have already whipped Jin ZiXun.

Very different from his father, but much more refreshing if you ask Lan XiChen.

"As I was saying, I questioned a couple of servants who worked in the Office. There are too many Wen to supervise just one office or even the one branch of the family that lives there".

"Surely it's suspicious," he calmly replies. "They are probably using Yiling to guard war booty, perhaps there are treasures from seven others."

The man in purple nodded: "I was told that a week ago a new supervisor arrived with many wagons and armored boxes, they were in such a hurry to trasport them that even the people of the city had to help them, the man in question is Wen QiRu".

Lan XiChen remembered the man from the Discussion Conferences, a tall, lanky man with hands full of rings. He was one of Wen RuoHan's direct relatives and was often heard boasting about his cousin's high regard for him. Lan XiChen strongly doubts this, but the man is the Chief Treasurer of the Nightless City and was also known to be one of Wen RuoHan's best torturers in his free time.

The situation did not have to be good at the Nightless City to force a man like him to leave Qishan at such a time. However, he didn't know what's the point to come to take refuge in enemy territory. Since Jiang Wanyin had regained many territories, the Yunmeng's map resembled the cloak of a spotted horse, with many territories divided by both factions and ...

"It seems that ZewuJun has come to the same conclusion as me," Jiang Wanyin suddenly said, interrupting his thoughts.

Lan XiChen nodded thoughtfully. "Of all the outposts to hide in Yunmeng, why Yiling?"

Jiang Wanyin seemed quite pleased with the reasoning. "Yes why? Sure, hiding in plain sight may seem like a clever move, but Yiling is too far from Qishan and is a disadvantageous place for enemies and allies alike, not to mention the energy of the Burial Mound.

"Do you think they are hatching something?"

"Either that or they want to throw the artifacts to Yiling to prevent us from retrieving them when we win the war."

It's not  said that we will win, XiChen doesn't say it out loud, he likes too much the confidence with which Jiang-Zhongzhu said that sentence, it makes him feel as if he could really see the end of that ordeal, as if Karma wasn't something fickle ready to bring them down at any moment.

It seems that attempting the impossible is really a Jiang thing.

Jin ZiXun must feel cut off from the conversation because he suddenly says, "Or they hope that another Yiling Patriarch will come out of the Mound to help them!

He is joking, but Lan XiChen recognizes the insinuation in his voice.

"Get out of the Burial Mound?" he asks without understanding. Young Master Jin seemed to want to accuse someone of something, he just can't understand what he is referring to.

"ZewuJun doesn't know? Wen Chao threw Wei WuXian into the burial mounds and he came out three months later by cultivating the crooked path. . .”

Before he could finish talking, Jiang Wanyin burst out with a long laugh and Lan XiChen felt a chill run up his back and his hair stood on the back of his head. It was a joyless laugh, a dragon laugh to show how sharp his teeth are.

Jiang Wanyin replied, "Getting out of the Burial Mound alive is impossible, does Jin Gongzi believe everything he is told? Wen Chao boasted about many things, but not even half of his exploits were true. Must I remind you how he took credit for the killing of the Xuanwu of the Slaughter?"

"I thought the motto of the Jiang Sect was: Attempt the impossible," he says, and the lenient tone with which he says it makes Lan XiChen want to discipline him or shut his mouth with the spell of silence.

"Oh," says Jiang Wanyin, with a sweet, deadly tone that reminded Lan XiChen of Yu ZiYuan. "And isn't the motto of the Jin Sect: Illuminate the path of the lost with vermilion light? It doesn't seem to me that any of you are walking around with a lantern in your hand."

Lan XiChen does not laugh, he does not, definitely not, but he has a very difficult time adjusting his facial expression. Instead, he coughs discreetly and meddles in the conversation.

"As incredible as Wei Gongzi is, I doubt very much that someone is really capable of leaving that place after being hunted down and most likely injured.

Even with a strong core and practicing starvation, three months in a place like that would turn anyone into another ghost hovering over their bones.

Unless Wei WuXian has eaten corpses, he strongly doubts that this is true.

§

Jin ZiXun is idiotic enough to provoke a demonic cultivator without proof, but he doesn't have a face thick enough to contradict ZewuJun.

The man is a saint, there is no logical explanation how he can stand that arrogant brat and cannot help but mentally thank him for his intervention.

Wen Chao threw Wei WuXian into the Burial Mound and he came out three months later by cultivating the crooked path. . .

He doesn't want to know where the speech would go. Demonic cultivation is momentarily tolerated only because it is making them win the war, the last thing he needs is a new entry on the Patriarch of Yiling's list of misdeeds.

When you are hungry are willing to eat anything.

The sweet taste of the tea turns into gall on his tongue. Surviving on the Burial Mound for three months, the last time he interpreted it as something Wei WuXian had learned on the streets, another way he was better than him. Then it all went to shit and with in hindsight he had come to a chilling response.

If he had made that connection, so could the others.

He chases the thought away, only a little more relieved that even ZewuJun considers the story something absurd and returns with the mind to the present.

They stay planning for the whole day, and if Jiang Cheng uses the System's Tactical Omniscience mode more than necessary, well, only he knew it, by now he had stopped have scrupule. When he started, along with the victories came the praise of those who judged him an immature and really felt like a child caught doing something he shouldn't have. But he had stifled the shame and the sensation of his parents' judgmental eyes and went on, burning anyone who insinuated that his information was too accurate to be genuine or that he was even cooperating with those dogs.

ZewuJun's unexpected passive aggressive attitude and Nie MingJue's very, very vocal reprimands also helped.

Then when one fine day he found himself in a medical tent with a wrapped arm and his sister, his brother and a very, very alive Mu Shui with a freshly patched wound, who blamed him for being reckless, who realized.

They are winning the war.

Last time Jin GuangYao had been acclaimed as the spy who had risked his life to give ZewuJun Wen RuoHan's battle plans, but there was a limit to the valid information he could find and send, especially with Wen RuoHan who, according to rumors, was becoming increasingly paranoid. But with the Modalities provided by the System the information had no margin for error and coupled with the ability of warriors of the caliber of ChiFengZun and ZewuJun, the result was almost always, inevitably a victory and his brother who must not run out to support their numbers.

He think to Wei WuXian, less shadowy and less unstable but still far from healthy.

Think of the people he did not have to bury.

Think of his sister, heartbroken but with a happy future waiting to be lived until the end.

Think about all this and goes on.

Nothing else matters.

§

Not always the battles go in their favor.

Even with Meng Yao and the spy of Jiang-Zhongzhu sending information and battle plans whenever they can, Wen RuoHan did not become Zhongzhu because he is predictable.

But at the Yiling Supervision Office there is only one cultivator who has spent his whole life counting coins and polishing a sword that has never been used. Although the Wen outnumbered them were not prepared for an attack, they didn't even realize that Yiling was emptier than usual, whether it's because it's normal in that town or they were just being presumptuous, Lan XiChen doesn't know. He only knows that they win so easily that it is almost unfair and most of the credit goes to the man who had his back until a moment ago.

He watches from afar Jiang-Zhongzhu direct his men and even Jin, proud as they are, carry out his orders as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and wonders what happened to the guy he saw running after Wei WuXian and his spites.

It's a stupid question, because Lan XiChen knows it, he knows it better than anyone else out there. They are both orphans and with a house reduced to ashes, it would be almost funny to think of their similarities if they weren't in the middle of a war. He knows on a conscious level that like everyone else he has changed, he is less naive and more cynical than he was before, but Jiang Wanyin is different. The change has been too sudden, his shoulders have straightened up and his posture is different, more secure, more his own and less like he was trying to imitate his father, when he opens his mouth it seems like Yu Ziyuan's spirit was speaking with the voice of his son and the confidence of someone who has been sitting in the seat of Zhongzhu for years.

Some joked, others not so much, saying that Jiang-Zhongzhu is not Jiang-Zhongzhu at all, that some spirit has taken possession of his body after a disastrous detour of the qi.

If it weren't for Zidian shining around his owner's wrist, Lan XiChen doesn't know if he would consider rumors just a bunch of gossip.

Suddenly one of the subordinates approaches the man in purple and speaks directly to his ear. Lan XiChen recognized the man by sight - he would find it hard not to with the white braided lock of hair and the scar on his face that looks like lightning - during battles is always by his Leader's side and one step behind Jiang Wanyin and Wei WuXian off the battlefield. It's too far away to hear what they're saying to each other. Whatever it was, makes the youngest frown and they both go wherever the problem is.

It is at that moment that Lan Huan realizes how similar the two are. The youngest son of the Jiang had inherited his mother's features, but both men had the same slender and deceptively fragile build and the same grey streaked with blue in their eyes.

A distant relative perhaps? He knew that the blood Jiang were sadly few even before the war for reasons no one mentioned, but the bell that brought the man alive was that of an ordinary disciple without the amethyst petals on the youngest's bell.

His uncle drew his attention with a dry cough and Lan XiChen realized that he was probably staring and had not heard the man call him.

"Forgive me Shufu, I was a little distracted."

The man looks briefly at Jiang Wanyin walking away. "I see," he says, and Lan XiChen hears his ears on fire for some reason. It's rude to stare, but he hasn't done anything wrong, so why did he feel as if he were thirteen again and had to explain why Elder Lan Zu's clothes had colored in candy pink?

"The disciples have found many artifacts and treasures of many different Seven but...”

"Is something wrong?" he asks why his uncle would not come to him if it was nothing less important or dangerous.

The man seems thoughtful as he answers: "There is a cell in the prison that is completely sealed, even the lock is a complicated device, I have never seen anything like it in my life. But what worries me are the seals on the door."

"Are they evil suppression seals?" he asks, and an ugly thought creeps into Lan XiChen's head. Now that he thought about it more carefully, the bulk of Wen's forces seemed to have poured inside.

Almost as if they wanted to keep something inside. 

It made sense, something too dangerous to keep close but too precious to get rid of.

But his uncle shook his head with a frown: "They are suppress spiritual energy seals."

Lan XiChen was between confused and amazed. Was there a powerful cultivator locked up there?

He was guided by the elder to the prisons, the gray stones on the walls became darker and darker as they descended deeper and at each cell they passed, XiChen had to make a very great effort not to stop and look for some survivors among the corpses, he had already ordered his disciples to give a worthy accommodation to the dead and calm any restless spirit, they needed no more resentment to feed the Burial Mound.

When they arrive at the cell, there are two Lan disciples standing guard who seem terribly relieved when they see them coming, and Lan Huan can understand why. The door of the cell is massive, almost menacing, covered with seals of spiritual suppression with thick strips of reinforcing metal running along the glimmers, even the hinges are two fingers big and the lock is something he has never seen before. It is cut into a large block with large metal teeth that hook the wall like the bite of some beast and inside, protrude ivory cylinders. Lan XiChen it counts ten of them, each of which was engraved with a series of numbers that formed different combinations depending on how the cylinder was turned.

It certainly took a lot of effort and effort just to make it and get it there, but the main question remains: what were they trying to keep it locked up?

An artifact? A beast or a very dangerous prisoner?

A potential ally?

Or perhaps it was a corpse?

XiChen was particularly afraid of the last option. The corpse of a grower powerful enough to justify such security measures would be a problem on its own, and if the dried blood that crossed the doorway was an indication of violent death and torture then they had a big problem on their hands.

He broke the lock with a wave of qi, but had to appeal to the strength of his arms to pull the door and various fragments of the wall away. The door finally opens without a sound and Lan Huan's breath gets stuck as far as strong the smell of blood is.

Some kind of talisman system automatically lights the torches on the wall and the room lights up. Is cell is a prison and torture room together, can clearly see a table full of bloody instruments pushed into a corner.

And there is a person in the middle of the room.

It is a woman from what he can see and the way they had immobilized her was something that would be called barbaric would be reductive. She had her eyes blindfolded and her mouth blocked by a horse clamp, her arms were tightly wrapped by immortality cables and her wrists by handcuffs, the red rope passed through the links of the chains that held her up from the ground, her legs and ankles were in the same state with ropes and chains fixed to the floor. He felt his uncle wince behind him, he did not have to look to understand that his disciples were in a similar state.

He barely notices that the woman is still alive, he notices a small rise of the torso, slight but clearly there is still life in that body.

He steps forward, ignoring all the reasons why it might be dangerous, ignore his uncle's calls and cuts the ropes and chains with a Shuoyue's shot.

The first thing he notices when the woman is in his arms is not how young she actually looks or all the myriad signs and wounds he could see, but a small bell of clarity hanging from her waist, the purple tassel frayed and stained with dried blood.

But even if stained with blood, Huan could see clearly the little amethysts set in the bell shining in the torchlight.

§

The old residence where the Wen had established the Yiling Office was one of the oldest properties of his family but had ended up uninhabited for long time. The whole building had been in the typical Yunmeng style, with round courtyards and small decorative water channels full of flowers running through the structure. But now it had been stripped of anything that might even remember the Jiang Clan, they had spared nothing, not even the frames carved with wave patterns, the banners with the lotus emblem were used as rags and the channels were filled with earth.

And Jiang Cheng was pissed off. So much effort to recover only a few artifacts of his clan, no secret library and he had to watch at the umpteenth havoc those dogs have done to his land.

Oh and did he already say that Jin ZiXun was a pain in the ass?

[This System is terribly sorry. I feel the presence, but its precise position is blocked.]

It is useless to dwell on it, if it is here we will find it, at the moment we have more important things to think about.

[The library is also important] says the entity, probably reading again the thoughts it does not express.

"Are you sure it is one of the Wei WuXian's talismans for attract the resentful energy?" he chooses instead to ask Mu Shui who walks nervously beside him. The man had come to him with all the calm in the world, but the haste with which he was leading him to the inner courtyard saying quite the opposite.

"They are not in his writing, they can't accuse him of anything," the man said, giving voice to yet another concern added to Jiang Cheng's list. "But they are exactly like the ones your brother used to haunt the Offices."

When they arrive at their destination, the view that welcomes them is bizarre to say the least. Throughout the perimeter of the porch were hung wires full of talismans swinging in the breeze, the decorative channels were covered with the bloody earth of the Burial Mound. Jiang Cheng examines one of them, it is written in a messy way, as if someone was in a hurry to finish it, but they are definitely the ones his brother uses. The metal wires,he notice with disgust, are impregnated with dried and rusty blood, the whole place smells of metal and decomposition. The work as a whole is sloppy, nothing at the level of Yiling Laozu, but the resentful energy is so dense that it is almost visible, the air as wavy as that rising from the boiling ground in summer, too similar to that of the Burial Mounds for Jiang Cheng's taste.

He is almost tempted to screw everything up and burn the whole damn place down if it wasn't the stupidest thing to do when it comes to resentful energy because the damn thing is as flammable as a firework. He makes his way through the paper jungle, cutting the strings with his sword and when he finally gets to the other side he has to make an effort not to jerk.

Wen Ning. He thinks with a thrill when he sees what is clearly a fierce corpse covered with suppression talismans.

"Jiang-Zhongzhu. . . that is . . ."

"Stay back," he categorically orders Mu Shui and approaches, not before taking a couple of deep breaths. The guys who stood guard outside had already left to help the others with the cleanup, if that thing gets away before Sandu barks cut off its head and limbs, Mu Shui is the only one who can stop it from getting out and making a killing.

He walks slowly, Sandu unsheathed in one hand and Zidian sizzling and hissing on the other, the footsteps rumbling deaf on the gray tiles.

He's not Wen Ning, he can't be, he reminds himself, that man is still alive and breathing somewhere, he's not a corpse, he didn't kill his not yet brother-in-law, General Ghost doesn't exist.

Not yet, not now, not ever he has to repeat to himself otherwise he could plant a hysterical scene right there and it was not the case to scare Mu Shui, the Gods only knew that the poor man had already lost many years of life because of his bullshit.

He takes a moment to observe him; his black and torn clothes hung miserably from his shoulders, his arms were immobilized by chains fixed to the floor, a dark metal mask covered half his face and the rest of the face and neck were covered with a black cloth. There seems to be nothing really wrong except the whole damn situation and Jiang Cheng is ready to be a corpse in pieces.

The fucking thing chooses that moment to open his eyes.

"Jiang-Zhongzhu!" somehow Mu Shui got close, one hand on the sword and the other on a talisman.

But the corpse looks at Jiang Cheng and Jiang Cheng looks at the corpse.

"Ziyuan," slowly begins the corpse with a dead voice.

Jiang Cheng holds a breath.

"Kill me."

Chapter Text

The corpse's eyes were not as matt as those reanimated by his brother, they were more like Wen Ning's, lacking the colour he had had in life but the reason and intelligence behind them spoke of a consciousness that was still alive and intact. 

That was a ferocious sentient corpse.

And he had just mistaken it for his mother.

"Zi. . .ZiYuan," he stammered again, his voice a hoarse hiss. "Please, k . . .kill me."

He heard Mu Shui cursing loudly behind him. "What the fuck is that!"

Jiang Cheng couldn't really blame the man for losing his cool, when he had first seen Wen Ning he had had a similar reaction but a hundred times more pissed off. 

"A ferocious sentient corpse," he replied too quietly and failed to notice the way his subordinate looked at him. 

But it seems that someone up there is intent on making him lose all his remaining patience, for he catches a glimpse of a glint under the corpse's broad robe. 

He pulls back the lapel and an expletive rises at his throat.

"Those sons of bitches!"

Mu Shui finally approaches and Jiang Cheng hears him hold his breath. Amidst the brutal sun-shaped burn marks and other torture marks that dotted the corpse's torso, in correspondence with the heart, something was stuck, smoking with black resentful energyg. It was dented by the marks of the hammer that had tried to destroy it, the silver blackened by the fire of the forge in which they had evidently tried to melt it down. 

It was unrecognisable, but to their eyes it was clearly a bell of clarity.

The System chose that moment to speak and a now-familiar purple and white screen opened up before his eyes. [New mystery character unlocked.] 

[Real Name: Unknown.]

[Actual Name: Wu Ming.]

[Current Status: Fierce Sentient Corpse.]

[Sect: Jiang Clan]

[Equipment: Cursed Clarity Bell, Yin Iron Mask.]
  [Warnings: the character's memory is damaged and has a very high rate of resentful energy, handle with caution.]

"Those dogs have . . .have," Mu Shui can't complete the sentence and Jiang Cheng feels the blood rush to his head, Zidian pulses to the beat of his anger and is probably about to do the stupidest thing he's ever done in two lifetimes.

But fuck it.

He draws the attention of the corpse that had shifted to Mu Shui with a snap of his fingers.

"Listen to me, you understand me, right?"

The corpse turns its head towards him with unnerving slowness and nods even more slowly, but that's enough. 

"I'm going to release you," he says loud and clear, ignoring Mu Shui's protests. "But if you make a wrong move, if you try to run away or attack us, I will tear you apart. Clear?"

He shines Zidian to clarify the point and the corpse nods again.

"Not a good idea," Mu Shui tries to reason with him. "We don't know what the fuck we're dealing with!"

"And neither do they if they hope to get away with it!" he retorts snapping Zidian. The chains are destroyed and the talismans are set on fire under the static energy of the whip. 

The corpse's posture clearly becomes less rigid and the eyelids blink slowly, the dead eyes seeming to focus better on Jiang Cheng and his subordinate.

"Oh," he says, a slow astonishment tinging the monotone voice. "Don't . . . you're . . . her."

Jiang Cheng almost doesn't hear him because of the cloth in front of his mouth, but it's clear the corpse no longer believes he's standing in front of his mother.

"That's right. And now kindly explain to me who the fuck are you?" he bites the words one after another, he is rude and crude, but at that moment he has no patience or understanding to give, a single thought raging in his head.

How dare they! How dare they desecrate my people like this! Our heritage?!

The corpse takes a deep breath to speak, for rightly he is not breathing, and the sound is something hissing and dry like the creaking of old boats. But just at that moment he hears the door open and glimpses the white boots of a Lan popping out from under the strings of talismans.

O Gods! What the fuck has happened now?!

[Nothing good it seems.]

"Jiang-Zhongzhu?" he hesitantly calls  to the disciple trying to reach them.

"Don't advance any further!" the young Leader shouts at him. "There is a very dangerous array here, wait for me outside."

If the disciple is puzzled he does not show it and politely takes his leave. Only when he is sure that the door is closed does he turn again to the main problem.

He took a talisman of suppression and applied it to the corrupted bell. That particular version was not strong enough to stop him from moving but enough to conceal the resentful energy his body was engaged in. He welcomed the sensation of the resentful energy was retreated, at least relieving some of the pressure on his lower dantian and he wondered for the umpteenth time how Wei Ying managed the mammoth amount of energy he used on his corpses.

"I've never seen that talisman," Mu Shui didn't even seem surprised anymore or maybe too much just happened in one day.

"The benefits i being Wei WuXian's brother."

Wei Ying had invented that particular array to conceal resentful energy during ambushes, but it was too costly and had been shelved. But it was perfect if only one or two corpses needed to be concealed, and right now it served its purpose perfectly.

Jiang Cheng tried not to feel too irritated at how helpful Wei WuXian could be even when he wasn't present.

Somewhere on the way to the front line, Wei WuXian sneezed very violently.

He turned to the corpse again and said, "You and I will talk later."
Wu Ming meekly nodded and turned to Mu Shui to give orders, but the man preceded him before he even opened his mouth.

"I'll take him to Zhu NaiNai's tent as discreetly as possible and guard him while waiting for orders."

Jiang Cheng is almost tempted to apologize to the man for everything he is going through, but he only nods and walks out of the courtyard. The disciple waited politely for him and bows perfectly wen he sees him walk through the door.

"Forgive this disciple for being in a hurry, but ZewuJun urgently requires your presence in the medical tents."

Jiang Cheng follows the disciple through the corridors and meanwhile the System sounds an alarm so loud that it makes his ears ring.

[ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!]

What the fuck! You just can't help yourself, can you?!

[This System begs your pardon, unfortunately the notification settings are set without the possibility of deactivation. I just wanted to warn Jiang-Zhongzhu that the library's location is no longer concealed.]

Jiang Cheng almost laughs: Havens thank you! Finally some good news! And where is?

[He is currently with ZewuJun.]

What!?

§

XiChen wiped the blood from his sore nose with all the dignity he possessed at that moment, wondering how he had ended up there.

He tried to smile at the person on the other side of the tent, but the girl was still curled up in herself in the corner of the bunk, a pair of green eyes staring at him with distrust. She was young, her hair cut short because of the tangles that curled around her meagre face.

Yet it was all going quite well, the girl was not only miraculously alive, but once the spiritual restrictions were removed the wounds were healing at a rate that was miraculous even for a high level cultivator.

That was until the girl woke up and headbutted Lan XiChen in the face, and he couldn't even blame her for that. He had approached without caution a person who had been tortured for days, if not months.

The question was, why? What in that girl deserved so much effort from none other than one of the Palace of Fire  torturers?

And then there were all the security and suppression measures on the door and inside the cell. XiChen couldn't really convince himself that it was equal treatment for all prisoners, most of them were rebellious civilians and a few cultivators who had been caught defecting.

"Oh my . . . does this sound like the way to thank your saviour!?"

Physician Gu's shout startled the young woman who made herself even smaller on her bed if possible, spasmodically clutching the clarity bell in her hands. XiChen could see that the nerves of the man, a doctor from Karp Tower's inner circle, were heavily frayed, but he didn't feel it was appropriate to lash out at a patient like that.

"Don't worry doctor, it was my fault, I was too abrupt."

He dismissed the doctor as soon as possible after he had checked his nose. But when he was finally outside, leaving him alone with one of his disciples and the girl, an awkward silence fell over them very quickly.

XiChen decided to start again.

He stood up from his chair and bowed, his hands cupped and a smile that he hoped was reassuring.

"I'm sorry for scaring you Lady Jiang I am . . ."

"ZewuJun," a voice interrupted him from beyond the flaps of the tent. "Jiang-Zhongzhu is here."

"Please come in . . ."

Several things happened at once: Jiang Wanyin entered the tent with a familiar frown on his face, and before anyone could speak, their host got out of bed to run up to the man. But they discovered that although his wounds were almost healed, his body was still weak and his legs buckled under his weight. 

Before XiChen could even extend his arms, Jiang-Zhongzhu had already grabbed her firmly by the waist with one arm. The girl wrapped the young man in a tight embrace, tucking her face into the hollow in his neck as she burst into a sharp sob.

Jiang Wanyin blinked, his eyes out of focus as if he couldn't understand what the hell was going on, but even so he didn't let go of the girl as she cried louder and louder.

XiChen doesn't even have to explain why, Jiang Wanyin's eyes fell on the bell at the girl's waist as if they were attracted to it and his expression breaks.Lan XiChen enjoys the image of Jiang-Zhongzhu a little too much without the furrow between his eyebrows and eyes wide open. He liked that expression. He semed so young, as he should and not the tired expression he has seen too many times on his uncle's or Nie MingJue's face.

He very conveniently forgets that it is the same expression he sees when he looks in the mirror.

He and his disciples bow to the young Leader. "We'll let you two talk, I'm sure you have many things to say."

Jiang Wanyin nodded distractedly barely paying attention to him, but the only thing Lan Huan could do was smile as the young man led the newfound family member to sit on the bunk.

§

ZewuJun and his disciples come out and Jiang Cheng is sitting on a cot with a crying girl in his arms. 

And he doesn't know what to do. 

He's not good with crying people, he can't even handle himself when he's crying, let alone someone else.

He's about to pull away from her when she hears her speak with her face still sunk into his robes.

"You're here, you're really here," is the broken whisper of someone who has done nothing but scream in recent times and Jiang Cheng can't help but remember what he looked like after Wei WuXian had pulled him out of Wen Chao's hands.

He felt his stomach clench uncomfortably as he viewed the card that appeared earlier. 

[New mystery character unlocked.]

[Name: Jiang Lian]

[Degree of parentage: Cousin]

[Title: Mi Zhen Shengshou]

[Sect: Jiang Clan]

[Current Status: severely debilitated ]

[Warning: the subject is physically and mentally damaged, handle with care.]

Jiang Lian trembles in her grip, her shoulders are tiny, and Jiang Cheng who has been holding her, knows she is too light, the bandages and clothes seem to weigh more than she does. Another sob chokes in his shoulder, but it doesn't bother him too much, he has already dealt with a drooling infant, a couple of tears is nothing. 

He stroked her back trying to be comforting, but his cousin started to cry even harder and his grip tightened a little more on his clothes. He sighed, he longed for Yanli's presence more than ever, she would surely know what to do. 

He is so distracted that he doesn't notice the sharp nail until it presses on his jugular.

Don't let someone you don't know near your throat! he hears his mother's voice hissing in his head as he calls himself idiot.

Zidian hisses in warning, ready to snap, but the tip of the rusty contraption digs into his skin enough to hurt him.

"I suggest you stay put," Jiang Lian's voice was still hoarse and full of a desperation that Jiang Cheng knew too intimately not to recognize, but he didn't really care at the moment. He put his hands back on her waist as his heart pounded.

System, some help would be appreciated.

[No real homicidal intent detected, unable to activate security measures.]

Great, just his usual fucking luck.

"Now I'm going to ask you a couple of questions," she says, blatantly trying to keep his voice steady. "And if I like your answers, one day maybe we'll laugh about this over a cup of tea. Clear?"

Jiang Cheng swallowed, very clearly feeling the improvised weapon pressed to a specific spot in his throat. The girl's hand trembled slightly, Jiang Cheng knew that even if he managed to make a move with Zidian she could still drive the nail into his throat and there would be no amount of cultivation that could help him.

Fuck the System assessments, that nail pressed to his throat looked very dangerous at the moment.

"Am I clear?" she says again, pressing the rusty contraption against his skin even more.

First rule when you find yourself at a disadvantage: pretend to humour your enemy and take advantage.

"Good."

He heard her breathing hard through her nose, only more slightly relaxed than before but her guard still up.

"What was my mother's name?"

That was an easy one. "Jiang Yun," she replied. Aunty Yun had always been one of those heroines who seemed to be straight out of some novel and, since Yunmeng wasn't Gusu, gossip about her had become almost a local legend. Everyone knew Jiang's daughter who had run off with a blacksmith because she didn't want to marry the man Jiang Cheng's grandfather had chosen for her. 

"What had your father nicknamed her?"

"How the fuck should I . .”

"Answer!"

Jiang Cheng looked at the entrance to the tent, hoping that someone would rush in at the screams. But he quickly dismissed the idea; ZewuJun had probably ordered that no one disturb them.

Killed by the courtesy of Lan's First Jade, what a fucking understatement!

"Don't get distracted Jiang-Zhongzhu, my hand might slip," she says as she lightly slides the nail over his skin, he felt a trickle of warm blood flow over his cold skin.

Jiang Cheng represses a shiver and looks at her, the green eyes fixed in his were delirious, as if he had a fever.

At that moment, he remembers. It was a comment made in passing, his father hadn't even realised he had said it out loud until his wife gave him a sharp look.

"A pity none of them have green eyes like Hong Feng."

"Time's up. ."

 "Hong Feng!" Jiang Cheng almost shouted. "As Jiang Chi's sworn brother, he always said that if she could have a courtesy name, that would be it."

His father had never actually told him about her or any other family stories, no. Those were reserved for Wei WuXian, when the nightmares were so insistent that not even A-Li or Jiang Cheng's voice could put him to sleep.

That was their thing.

Jiang Cheng only knew them because of the gossip or because he was pretending to sleep.

And now they were going to save his ass.

He tried to suppress the bitter laughter that rose in his throat; it was not the case that his cousin was getting more nervous than she should.

"There's a secret in our family," Jiang Lian began, swallowing hard and Jiang Cheng felt the pressure of the nail strengthen. "Something that the previous generation passes on to the next when a new Leader sits on the Lotus Throne."

It wasn't a question, but the corner of Jiang Cheng's lips bent into an arrogant smirk. 

System, can you . .

[Transfer started minutes ago Jiang-Zhongzhu, just need to make contact to give the Ok]

"Say hello to Jiang Lian System."

The purple screen opened in front of the girl's face.

[Hello Jiang-ErGuniang.]

The nail fell tinkling to the ground.

Chapter Text

Jiang Lian looked at the screen for a good ten seconds before throwing her head back and laughing. It was a croaky sound and not at all graceful, and it reminded Jiang Cheng terribly of Wei WuXian, who when he laughed he did it all the way, until his cheeks hurt and he had to hold his stomach.

His cousin gasps, snorts, and squirms on the bunk for another minute before she catches her breath.

"So," she licks her lips. "How long have you been a transmigrator?"

"Ah?" 

At that same moment the System screen pops up in front of both of their faces.

[Assigned secret mission: Find the other blood of Jiangs to unlock the encrypted data. 1/3 found, 2 more to find]

Jiang Cheng would really like to say that he had lost the ability to surprise himself, but the System always somehow proves him wrong. In the days following his awakening, he had explored the System's functions, but there was a whole chunk of information that was blocked for both Jiang Cheng and the System itself.

"Oh fuck," exhaled Jiang Lian breathlessly. "You don't know."

She's looking at him with eyes as wide as a fawn's, and Jiang Cheng almost felt uncomfortable with the intensity of her gaze. The girl's abrupt change in attitude made him feel as if he had just witnessed a mental whiplash.

"Okay," Jiang Lian took a deep breath. "The first thing you need to know is . . ."

[Warning: User Jiang Lian is categorically forbidden from revealing any details regarding the information in her possession. Penalty: activating plot devices]

Jiang Cheng was even more confused than before. "What does that mean?"

"Oh . . . really?" Jiang Lian made an expression that Jiang Cheng classified as I'm about to bullshit.

Were they sure she was a Jiang and not a Wei?

"So, a transmigrator is . . ."

She couldn't even finish the sentence, Jiang Lian coughed up blood as if a sword had been stuck in her stomach, even his nose was bleeding with an alarming speed.

"System! What the fuck are you doing!?" he hissed, his voice full of acid as he handed the girl the first clean rag he found.

[It's not this System's fault!]

"Don't worry cousin, this happens when they spend almost a year rearranging your connotation, your insides and even your soul," she reassured him in a voice muffled by the rag she held in front of her mouth and nose.

She says it with a wave of  hand and a light voice, but Jiang Cheng is painfully aware of the bandages wrapped tightly around her limbs. He wanted to say something, anything, a kind word, even a silly joke to make her smile would do, but he was painfully unable to do so, his tongue felt heavy in his mouth.

A few days in the hands of that scum Wen Chao had seemed like years to him, the scars on his chest still burned with shame.

He couldn't imagine what she had gone through.

"Anyway, let's not digress, we have important things to talk about," she said, as if the rag in her hands wasn't completely soaked in blood.

But this was more practical, easier, this he knew how to do. "In fact you have a lot of explaining to do, because . . .”

A commotion outside the tent interrupted him mid-sentence, it sounded like someone was arguing.

"Jiang-Zhonzhu! Jiang-Zhongzhu please!" called the desperate voice from a woman, and Jiang Cheng could hear the voices of his men ordering her to move away. But not even time to get up to go check on her when the dusty and mangled figure of a woman stumbled into the tent followed by his men.

"Zhongzhu, we're sorry we don't . . ."

"Jiang-Zhongzhu please help us!" cried the woman prostrated herself with her forehead touching the dead ground. "You must help us, I beg you!"

He stopped his subordinates who seemed ready to kick her out at the first command with a wave of his hand. The woman seemed to cower even more as his gaze landed on her, the sobs shaking her frail body becoming even louder.

"Well, didn't you have something to say?"

The woman mumbled something, but whether it was because of the sobs or the position she was in, no one understood a single word.

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes. ''Where are we, at the Imperial Court!? Raise your head and speak clearly, I don't have all day!"

The woman looked up tremblingly. Her face was young under the dirt and cheeks hollowed by hunger, perhaps a few years older than his sister, she had a bloody cut on her cheekbone that looked like the work of a whip and her eyes were red and liquid from crying.

"Since . . since the new supervisor of the Office had arrived people have been disappearing without a trace or locked up in dungeons, no . . . we didn't know where they dumped the bodies until this morning," she sniffs noisily. "They're in a mass grave behind the back walls, the ones closest to the Burial Mounds, we were going to retrieve them but they're covering the grave, of . . .they say it would be too wasteful and dangerous to burn them!" tears streaked her dirt-stained face again, she looked like a screaming ghost. "You must help us! There are the bodies of my brother and my parents, I don't. . . not."

"Who," he asked with Zidian's lightning sparking between his fingers. "Who are they?"

"Not . . .don't know what clan they belong to, they're dressed in gold."

"Fucking Jin," one of his men cursed not too subtly as the other's face had whitened as the tale progressed.

On the other hand Jiang Cheng was about to burst out, Zidian's head hissed menacingly as if he was preparing to strike.

"Oh poor dear," Jiang Lian who had remained silent until then suddenly intervened. She bent over the woman as if she hadn't lost a considerable amount of blood and made her stand up, the contrast between the two almost grotesque. They were both meager, but even a poor girl from Yiling looked healthier than his cousin and Jiang Cheng wished for the umpteenth time that his sister was there. By then Jiang Lian would have eaten a whole pot of soup and would be safe and comfortable in her bed and not consoling another woman.

But unfortunately they had other things to do.

"Ru Wei, gather as many men as you can and join us, Zhang Yue, you come with me."

Both men straightened up at attention, one saluting him and hurrying to carry out the order while the other prepared to follow him.

"Hey Jiang Cheng," Jiang Lian called out to him and Jiang Cheng turned to look at her with an arched eyebrow. The girl was sobbing on his shoulder as she rubbed her back.

"What?"

His cousin looked at his face and smiled, her teeth were stained pink, their outlines reddened. She looked like a tiger that just finished a meal.

"Kick those jins for me too."

Jiang Cheng huffed out a laugh as he walked out, not before hearing Jiang Lian trying to console the woman.

"Don't worry, now my cousin will fix everything."

Jiang Cheng almost stopped in his tracks again. His face suddenly became too hot, he wanted to throw a whole bucket of water on his head. Not because of what she had said, but because of the absolute confidence dripping from those words, as if she was sure that Jiang Cheng would really do it.

How could she so blindly trust someone she had met for not even an hour?

[This System would like to ask Jiang-Zhongzhu the same question, but if I may express my opinion, you Jiangs have always been a bit reckless.]

You mean foolish.

[That was implied.]

§

Jin WuRui was the last of four living children and his name meant lucky fifth. Fifth because his first brother died in his mother's womb and also because even his father, who had preferred to try to drown him, would not have given him the number of death in the name. Lucky because when they actually tried to drown him in the river, a woman who was swimming in it caught him the moment a servant threw him into the water. 

And growing up it hadn't gotten any better, from motherless child he had become the motherless boy, then the silent man who had accompanied his father and brothers to war and finally, the expendable pawn to be sent on dangerous expeditions. 

Frankly, he found the whole conflict a waste and its end more frightening than its beginning.

They would win, but the wives, the children, the brothers who bore the Wen name and had nothing to do with the war, what would become of them?

The Wen Sect would fall, but who would sit in its place?

No one had been dealing with monsters and ghosts for over a year, what condition were ordinary people in?

What was the point of being a cultivator if not to defend people who couldn't do it themselves?

And with that in mind he does something that in none of his twenty years of life had he ever allowed himself to do. The shovel falls to the dust at the same time that the rumble of thunder crashes down on them. He says something and they all wince as if they've been stung. He has expressed the thoughts of most of his comrades, but no one agrees with him, perhaps out of fear, perhaps because they have never heard him speak aloud.

But he has spoken the truth.

"What?" chokes his father, the whip hanging by his side was still stained with the blood of the girl his father had chased away just now. 

"I said no," he says again more firmly. "We are not vultures or murderers coming to dump bodies without honors, we are cultivators and it is our duty to take care of these bodies."

His father looks at him for a few seconds blinking, more than he's looked at him in his entire life and sneers as if it's all a very funny joke.

"Go back to your seat and I'll pretend I didn't hear you."

And so saying, he makes to turn around and pays no more attention to him. Jin WuRui has long passed the stage of wanting his father's attention, but the pain is an old wound that won't decide to heal.

"No."

His father is forced to turn around, forced to walk back to his son with the air of a charging bull. He knows what he's doing-he's seen him do it before- he wants him to back off, like an animal facing a predator.

But Jin WuRui doesn't back down, and his father gets so close to him that he could feel his breath on his face.

"If you are so anxious then do it yourself," he says, an ominous whisper in his voice. "But if you do, don't consider yourself my son or a Jin anymore, do you understand me?"

Jin WuRui remains in stubborn silence as his stomach seems to drop between his ankles and the ground misses beneath his feet. 
He wants to laugh.

When have I ever really been a Jin?

When have I ever been your son?

"This son understands."

And so saying, he took off the golden robe with the peony emblem, dropped it, and stomped it with his heel for good measure. 

All while looking his father in the eye. 

He hears someone gasp in shock, someone comment in a low voice about how stupid he is, but to Jin . . . no, now it's just WuRui, rolling up his sleeves and standing poised on the edge of the pit. The smell was unbearable, some were decomposing others were clearly one step away from turning into vicious corpses.

WuRui doesn't get to take another step.

The whip wrapped itself around his neck and yanked him back. 

He ended up with his back in the dust, the air escaping his lungs all at once.

For an agonizing moment the only thing heard were the boy's choked gasps for air.

The first shot whistled along with the thunder.

WuRui screamed even though he had no breath left in his body as the whip slammed into him again.

One blow, one pop.

"Do you really think a few harsh words give you the right to disobey me!"

Another blow, another snap.

More blood.

More screaming.

"What! You have nothing more to say?!"

The boy tries to get up, but his body barely allows him to curl up on himself.  Another blow on his defenseless back and WuRui screamed, his voice becoming a blade ripping through his throat.

Another pop, more screaming.

"If you're so eager to help useless dead civilians, you'll soon join them!"

In the end, he doesn't even have the strength to scream, even the blows become a sting in the background.

WuRui was going to die that day. They would have thrown his body into the pit along with those hundreds of others and no one but Yiling would have known.

Just a name on the epitaph of the soldiers who hadn't even left their bones behind.

No one would remember him.

No one would mourn him.

And as he lay with his face half sunk in the dust, a dazzling flash exploded, ripping through the darkness of the black sky.

The next moment, thunder rumbled.

WuRui thought it was strange.

Since when was lightnings purple?

Chapter Text

The Wen had rendered the entire structure useless, XiChen notes with some discomfort as he writes up a damage report. All of the supplies had been rendered useless or burned along with some of the building's quarters, and many of the complex's decorative canals had been filled with earth by the Tumuli. Almost all of the corpses they had found in the dungeons were filled with resentful energy and signs of torture, not to mention the pavilion  with an array he didn't understand the meaning of and filled whit talismans to attract evil , too similar to Wei WuXian's for Lan XiChen's comfort. It would take time to purify the place, assuming the nearby Burial Mounds did not swallow  the land and everything on it in its cursed territory.

He should have talked with Jiang Zhongzhu

He briefly thought about going to the Jiang tents himself, but he couldn't even put down his brush that Jin ZiXun stumbled into his tent with a pale face.

"ZewuJun you must help me!" he implored trying to catch his breath. "Jiang Wanyin has gone mad! He's trying to kill my lieutenant!"

§

Jiang Cheng was angry. A preset mode of his character, as System had said more than once.

"Useless civilians?" he asked pressing his foot to the man's wounded wrist and the other to his chest. Zidian's bite bled even more under Jiang Cheng's foot and the man gasped beneath him as one of his men carried the dying boy to the doctor.

"What did you say?" he asked mockingly. "I can't hear you."

The man's face was red from the effort of breathing through the pain, and Jin GuangCui looked too much like his cousin Jin GuangShan for not to be satisfactory. But the only thing Jiang Cheng could hear at that moment was the blood rushing loudly in his ears and the stench of the mass grave just ahead.

That Office had also been stormed by the Jin the first time, but that entire area had been burned and swallowed by the Burial Mounds before the war even ended. Until then, he had never understood how it had been possible in such a short time, the citizens had not even pressed charges out of fear.

His people had been tortured, humiliated and their souls damned.

And he didn't even know it.

§

It was a storm of lightning. There was no rain weighing down his robes, no, just thunder and lightning darting through the sky swollen with black clouds. 

It sounded like a warning.

Lan XiChen was worried. When they had passed the cultivator in purple carrying a boy reduced to a bloody mess by what was clearly a whip, Lan XiChen hoped with all his heart that the poor fellow would survive and that Jiang Wanyin hadn't done anything foolish. After all, even if he had been insulted, the public murder of an ally would not be forgiven.

But when they arrive, the sight that greets them makes them gasp. The Jiang cultivators pointed their swords at the Jin's throat and in the centre of the circle the slender figure of Jiang Wanyin towered over Lieutenant Jin, one foot on his chest and one on the wrist that had clearly been grasped tightly by Zidian. A few inches from the man's hand lay a blood-soaked discipline whip.

Jiang Wanyin had his back to them, he was ranting as the man choked underneath him.

"''Those are my people! They have been humiliated and tortured to death and you bastards want to . . .”

"Jiang Wanyin what do you think you're doing?!" the sharp shouts of Jin ZiXun interrupted the young man. "You attack . . .”

"Jiang-Zhongzhu," Lan Huan interrupted him as he slowly approached. "Please calm down."

The boy turned his head sharply towards them and Lan XiChen feels his hair stand up on the nape of his neck

Jiang Wanyin's eyes had turned purple, crakling like a lightning was swimming in his irises. He had seen this happen before during battles, glimpsed the glow that matched Zidian's out of the corner of his eye, but this was definitely something else. The colour was so saturated and vibrant that it made the boy's eyes look larger than normal.

Lan Xichen forgets how to breathe for a moment.

"Calm down?!" he hissed  indignantly, getting off the man's body finally breathing again. He approached with great hawks and felt Jin ZiXun jerk behind him as Jiang Wanyin grabbed him by the arm and dragged him away.

Jiang Wanyin pushed him forward with a  shove, Lan XiChen almost fell into the pit. 

What he sees makes his blood run cold in his veins.

''Look! And tell me again that I should calm down!"

He stifled a gag of vomit that rose from his throat. Lan XiChen was accustomed to the smell and sight of death; he had watched friends, relatives suffocate in their own blood, buried in a shallow grave with no name because there wasn't enough time or the tortured bodies of prisoners of war like the ones he had found in the dungeons. The corpses in that pit were of old men, women and children, men who had probably held nothing resembling a sword, the marks of torture and sun-shaped burns battering their bodies.

He looked at the shovels abandoned on the ground, at the piles of earth that partially filled the pit, and understood.

§

"Jiang-Zhongzhu, may I ask one of your men to go to the camp and call my disciples?"

Lan XiChen hadn't turned around, his voice was so light and quiet that Jiang Cheng felt like slapping him. 

"Do as you wish," he replied drily as he issued orders. They would have to hurry, if it rained as he feared, the mud would make the pit dangerous as well as making it impossible to retrieve the corpses.

Lan XiChen was giving orders to summon all the Rest and Cleanliness capable Lan cultivators they could muster when Jin ZiXun started braying worse than a donkey again.

"ZewuJun! What's the meaning of this!?" he was still helping his lieutenant stand up. "Jiang-Zhongzhu just . . .”

"Shut up."

Jin ZiXun's mouth closed as if sealed by a spell of silence as an unnatural calm muffled all sound, no one daring to breathe too loudly for fear of having ZewuJun's gaze on them.
 
"What you tried to do," he said, speaking slowly. "It is not worthy of any cultivator who calls himself a cultivator, let alone a human. And you expect me to discipline Jiang-Zhongzhu?"

Lan XiChen's expression was icy, it almost seemed as if HanguangJun was there among them. He hadn't moved a single muscle, but they could all feel that feeling of danger telling their feet to run. As he spoke his hands were clenched into fists so tight that the knuckles were white a large vein stood out on their backs.
Jiang Cheng swallowed dryly a couple of times as a shiver raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He felt as if he had to apologize for some reason and the other man wasn't even looking at him.

[It's good to see that Lan Yu's temperament has not yet disappeared.]

What are you talking about?

[That's a story for another time.]

"You are unfair ZewuJun!" shouted Jin GuangCui in a loud voice. "Curbing unnecessary danger is dishonourable but using corpses in battle isn't?!" the man sneered. "ZewuJun . . . aren't you being a bit hypocritical?"

"What?!" roared Jiang Cheng uncovering his teeth as a chorus of voices rose indignantly. "Say you want to die, I'll be very happy to oblige!"

Zidian's head was ready to slide into his palm but ZewuJun appeased him with a wave of his hand, he didn't seem the least bit touched by the insult.

"If you were not so heedless," he began calmly. "You would know that the Jiang Clan does not leave corpses corrupted by resentful energy without a proper burial, let alone leave them in a grave near a known Tumulus pervaded by resentful energy."

He spoke with the same steel tinged indignation as Lan Qiren's voice when he was dealing with yet another piece of bullshit from some particularly ignorant idiot. But he was still graceful, still composed while no one could find a single word against him and Jiang Cheng didn't know what to think. 

Certainly not because he was happy that someone had noticed.

There had been many who had pointed out the general problem of corpses, but the matter had been put aside until they had found themselves at the end of the war with an exorbitant amount of ferocious corpses and monsters but few cultivators who could deal with them. Some smaller sects had either disbanded or been incorporated into larger sects because they could no longer manage their territories.

Jiang Cheng tried not to think too much about the fact that the Jiang Clan had almost come to that end.

Now Jiang Cheng had given orders to lay the overly damaged corpses to rest whenever they could along with the fallen soldiers after a battle, even making arrangements with Lan Qiren and their musicians if necessary. Many had been the voices that had judged it to be an unnecessary waste of time and resources, but the memories of that other timeline were too fresh in Jiang Cheng's mind to forget that those same people, Jin GuangShan at the head of them all, had added that issue to Wei WuXian's list of wrongdoings that Jiang Cheng had a moral duty to remedy.

When he had pointed it out, he had been judged naive, and when he had not, he had been accused of negligence.

But now ZewuJun had spoken and no one had anything to say in reply. 

Jiang Cheng huffed and crossed his arms. 

Right like a dragon among men, he thought, trying not to resent himself like a brat.

"Let's start collecting the bodies," he ordered rolling up his sleeves. "We'll take them to a safe distance and burn them."

His disciples immediately set to work, Lan only really moving after a graceful nod of Lan's head XiChen and Jin for a moment didn't seem to know what to do without a sword at their throats. 

When all the pyres had begun to burn and the spirits laid to rest, the tears of the family members had yet to stop, and it was so late that dawn had broken through the still-black clouds of bad weather that had yet to drop a single drop of water. Jiang Cheng gave thanks for the small mercies.

And Lan XiChen was still angry.

Jiang Cheng had seen him hovering on the periphery of his vision , his white robes practically immaculate in the red and grey of death, how he did it Jiang Cheng had yet to discover, like some kind of deity, lighting up the light in the empty eyes of the people around him.

A true lighthouse in the midst of the storm.

But no matter how untouchable he appeared he was still angry, Jiang Cheng could tell for sure even though empathy was not one of his qualities. He could see it in the slightly stiff line of his lips and the posture that wasn't as fluid as his usual or the livid grip he was still holding his Xiao with.

[I actually detect high levels of stress in both Jiang-zhongzhu and ZewuJun. This system advises both of them to rest.]

"I'll only rest when I'm dead," he murmurs at the same time as Lan XiChen approaches with a slight smile and his good intentions written all over his face.

"No," he says even before the man can open his mouth.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm not leaving until those pyres stop burning. So, Lan-Zhongzhu go crumble a mountain with your fist or whatever you Lan do when you feel like strangling someone," he blurts with more venom than he should and no diplomacy. He's dirty, tired and with a million other things to do and the last thing he needed was to be treated like a child in need of rest.

§

Lan XiChen didn't know how to react for a moment.

Was he that blatant in his anger?

"Actually, I wanted to ask Jiang-Zhongzhu how Jiang-ErGuniang was doing," he chooses to reply instead, not taking the jibe personally. It actually lets him know that Jiang Wanyin is on the edge. But he is still very pleased with the boy's embarrassment when he realises the tone he had used.

"She's fine," he replies reluctantly. "As fine as someone in her situation can be."

He smiled, more sincerely this time. "I'm glad to hear it."
The conversation died there. They both watched the pyres burn, the flames rising into the black clouds, crackling from the resentful energy that had begun to absorb the corpses.

"Curbing unnecessary danger is dishonourable but using corpses in battle is not?!"

The words repeated in his head like a mantra. Was what they were allowing Wei WuXian to do right? No, it wasn't, not even close to what he considered right, and to make matters worse, the new path Wei WuXian had invented was giving justification to incidents like that.

What was the point of winning a war if even a cultivator wasn't fulfilling his duty, his reason for being?

"ZewuJun . . aren't you a bit of a hypocrite?"

Was he?

He definitely felt that way.

Chapter Text

Wei WuXian did not like silence.

If Jiang Cheng had been there, he would have rolled his eyes and said something about the understatement of the century while Yanli would have smiled and joked about it.

He loved Lotus Pier, loved the noise of the lake's nightlife, the constant lapping of water against wood. Even a quiet place like Cloud Recesses wasn't really quiet.

Silence had made him uncomfortable since he was a child, it was too similar to the tense feeling that came after one of Uncle Jiang and Madam Yu's fights or when he was waiting for his parents to come back from a hunt. But he'd never really understood that unease until he'd been thrown into the Burial Mounds.

Death.

That's what he associated it with. The stillness, the end of everything, those endless moments of pure silence that hovered in the Mounds during endless nights.

The silence that hadn't stopped when his parents hadn't returned.

Jiang Cheng's silence after the destruction of Lotus Pier.

Even now, in the midst of war, he preferred to set up his tent where the bustle of people was continuous near the hotbeds and the servants' and doctors' tents, where he could hear the chatter of people around the bonfire.

As at that moment.

"He may be a good leader, but Jiang-Zhongzhu is creepy."

"Yeah, he almost looks like he can kill you with his gaze sometimes."

"Surely arrogance isn't the only thing he inherited from the Violet Spider."

"You could say that, a boy his age shouldn't act like that."

His hand froze, clutching the brush in his hand, wishing it would break as it once would have under the force of his hands, but the only result was a smear of ink spreading across the paper, inevitably ruining the stroke of the talisman. He scornfully discarded the stained paper.

What do they demand? And above all, how dare they?

Maybe we should teach them a lesson, a persuasive whisper lapped at the darkest corners of his mind, but Wei WuXian ignored it with a deep breath, picked up another talisman paper and began to trace the strokes with more fervour than before. The Yin Tiger Tally in those circles wasn't giving him a break despite barely using it once.

"I mean," resumed the voice outside the tent. "The best warriors and strategists of our generation can't break through the defences of a defended fort armed to the teeth but he can?"

His hand clenched the brush until it creaked, another stain expanded on the paper.

Another breath.

He picked up another paper and started again.

The tally hissed.

Calm down, he told himself. People have simply realised at last that their shidi is far more competent than they gave him credit for.

More than Wei WuXian himself actually gave him credit for. Food allocation, shelter, army management, scouting, budget and military supply management, intelligence gathering, spying -when exactly did Jiang Cheng have time for that one wonders- weapons development, strategic advice: Jiang Cheng had gathered all that and more, with such naturalness that Nie MingJue himself had been stunned and Master Qiren had looked at him from the other side of the strategy table as if he didn't recognise him. Everyone who thought they could take advantage of their situation had had to contend with a Sect Leader, not a kid trying to be one.

And that had worried Wei WuXian to no end. In private his shidi had strange moments where he seemed to be muttering to himself, not even nagging him to carry a sword anymore or looking at him and Shijie as if they were about to disappear at any moment or even as if he didn't remember they were there in the first place.

As if he didn't expect to see them there at his side.

And to make matters worse the idiot was wearing himself out, they had even had an argument over it.

"You almost fainted."

"Fainted or not, I have to get this done by tomorrow," and so saying he picked up the brush again, fully intending to get back to work. Wei WuXian snatched the brush from his hand again, splashing drops of ink everywhere.

"Wei WuXian! What the fuck do you want?!" he shouted, throwing him a furious look, Zidian's lightning following the twinkle in his eyes.

"Let you rest!"

Jiang Cheng ran a hand over his eyes, looking terribly tired. "I've already told you . . . these plans are for tomorrow . . ."

"Then delegate them to me!" interrupted Wei WuXian grabbing the papers. "What's the use of having a right arm if you don't use it!"

He spoke as if he had not escaped from such duties in the past, too caught up in his paranoia of being discovered and the resentful energy that reduced his thoughts to smoke. But Jiang Cheng didn't even open his mouth to argue, looking at him as if seeing him for the first time.

"Oh . . ."

"Yes, oh," he mouthed at him without the slightest trace of sarcasm. "And now go to sleep."

"Are you sure you . . ."

Wei WuXian puffed away a lock of hair from his face with irritation. "Yes shidi, I'm fine and no, resentful energy doesn't give me too much trouble at the moment.

It was a lie as big as a house, but Jiang Cheng was buying it for once. “'Okay . . . just don't forget to . . ."

He chased him away with a fluttering hand. "To double-check your math, I know, we learned that together, remember?"he said, pushing him toward his bunk. "Now sleep."

He almost laughed at the memory. Almost was the key word. Even with duties divided and Shijie finally safe in LanLing, Jiang Cheng was still burning the midnight oil, as if the war could end tomorrow.

Now he had more duties now than he had before and his head was clearer than it had been in months, but it wasn't as if they needed a whole army of corpses these days, not with how well the war was going.

He felt almost useless at times.

His thoughts were interrupted by yet another drunken voice outside the tent. "Right?! Doesn't that sound strange? Also, how is it possible that only he and that other demon were saved?" Wei WuXian clearly heard the slamming of a jug of alcohol and then, "Who knows what they promised those dogs to free them, maybe . . ."

Wei WuXian did not hear what came next, he barely registered the splinters of the broken brush sticking in his hand as the resentful energy growled like a caged tiger at the talismans he had placed in his tent.

Let's teach them a lesson!

Yes! How dare they?!

He's our little brother! What do they know?

Yes! Let's kill them, make them tear out each other's eyes and tongues!

Yes! Let's... . .

Wei WuXian took his head in his trembling hands, trying to calm the whispers that flooded his mind, once again urging on the worst parts of him. But there was no spiritual energy in his dantian, only a gaping void where darkness clung.

Let's make them bleed!

Just like those dogs!

Make them beg for mercy!

My Laozu!

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: ~ error]

Please, not again, Wei WuXian begged through the pain as the strange halos of solid light flickered in front of his eyelids again.

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: ~ error identified: excess energy resentful].

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: Purify? (Yes) (No)]

"Shut up," he hissed, trying to catch his breath, unaware of the commotion outside his tent, barely recognizing the voice of the old Fang Ran shouting.

"How dare you, you idiots!" his voice was hoarse from the years, but he could still make his ears ring from how loud it was. The man had barely retired a year before the Lotus Pier massacre, but he had returned, once again carrying his sword in the Jiang's service along with those of his young nephews.

A voice muttered drunkenly. "Look old man, calm down."

"Calm down?" hissed Fang Ran indignantly. "Apologize at once you brat! The one you insulted is my Sect Leader!"

Wei WuXian couldn't fully appreciate the elderly cultivator's intervention, his head was liquefying. That damn thing wouldn't stop flashing even under his tightly closed eyelids, croaking the same thing again and again straight into his ears.

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: Purify? (Yes) (No)]

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: Warning, failure to select will activate pilot mode.]

"Damn it! Shut up!" his shouts had silenced the voices outside, but he really didn't have the strength to care.

A hesitant voice called out to him. "W. . .Wei-Gongzi?"

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: Purification initialization activated.]

"Young Master Wei, are you alright?"

 Unfortunately, Wei Ying was too busy stifling a groan as his flaming meridians tried to act out of instinct again, this time totally out of his control, but the only thing he got was feeling like he had ice in his veins burning like a fire.

He tried to get up, but his soft legs buckled under his weight. He barely felt his knees hit the ground, sinking his forehead into the dust as he dug his fingers into his scalp as if he wanted to split his skull open.

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: ~ error]

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: Purification initialization failed.]

He finally managed to breathe, his gasps the only thing heard until Fang Ran's silhouette cast a shadow behind the curtain flaps.

"Wei-Gongzi, I'm coming in."

 "Don't come in," his voice sounded hoarse even to his ears that were still ringing with white noise.

"I . . . I'm fine."

He stood up on his shaky legs, clinging to the edge of the table like a drunk as his voice croaked.

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: ~ error identified: requirements for requesting assistance have not been met].

[SYSTEM-Sur. MODE: 1/3 requirements met, still two to go.]

Wei WuXian groaned as he slumped down in the squeaky chair. He wish was drunk, at least he would have a fucking reason to feel like he was going to puke his guts out.

It was silent outside now, nothing but the crackle of fire and the unpleasant pressure of resentful energy hovering in the air. He put away the talismanic papers with trembling hands and threw away the stained one, picking up a small, rickety notebook.

He ran a hand through his hair, going over his notes as if he hadn't done this a thousand times before, as if he hadn't explored every possible option.

He wasn't a Yao. The tally was filled with too much resentful energy and the residual spirits were too many and too chaotic to aggregate and form a single consciousness, but they were too few to aggregate and form a Mo. At the same time, however, a Mo could explain the hallucinations while a Yao could explain his strange concept of 'helping'.

"Damn it," he hissed as he slumped his head on the notebook.

It was at that moment he saw him.

He'd made sketches of that . . . whatever it was, hallucination, floating phrases and all, even the lotus-flower squiggles at the corners. He'd done it every time that thing showed up, hoping it might give him a different detail.

It hadn't.

Until that moment.

He looked at the line that said requirements met 0\3 which had turned into requirements met 1\3.

"What the fuck is going on?"