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Chapter Text

The Wen refugees are not entirely self-sufficient. Human contact and economic exchange of some kind is necessary, even for those isolated and in hiding. Even for people who live cheek by jowl with the hungry dead.

Wen Ning listens to Qing-jie explain, and what he’d already understood in theory about the first days at the Burial Mounds, he comes to know in meticulous numerical fact.

They had had to start digging unused soil for new crops, on nigh-barren ground, in the middle of the year, with old and weary and injured workers. There had been no prospect of breaking even, just in terms of the amount of food energy harvested, per day of eating necessary to do the work. No hope of having enough healthy and varied food to regain lost weight and restore health; no concept of a surplus or a seed crop left over.

In order to get the seeds and plant-sets, the hoes and spades and buckets and baskets, to even start – and the food to carry them until they could harvest something – Wen Qing had organized who and how and when each person would take on each task; had made them ready to systematically beg, borrow, and steal.

Before Hanguang-jun came to visit, before Wen Ning woke up, there hadn’t been money, exactly; or rather, the little money there was had long since run out. There had been trades made with the Yiling villagers, vegetable seeds and cuttings pleaded for, unattended utensils filched. And there had been hunting and gathering, mostly beyond the limits of the Burial Mounds proper, where the prey animals were still few and the plants still unhealthy but they at least weren’t as likely to attack back; but it was too inefficient, really. A resentment-tinged downward spiral of getting something back for their efforts, but not enough.

Wei Wuxian had had some emergency rations in his qiankun sleeves, that they’d used on the trip. He had carried the spending money of a senior disciple of a major sect, and had sold off his costly robes piecemeal despite the worry of unwanted recognition and suspicion; in Yiling market, those funds bought some rice and millet, pickled cabbage and dry beans, salt and cooking oil, all basic bland foods that would keep for a while. Meanwhile, before planting the crops that will be the most nourishing in the long term, they begin with the ones that will be the quickest to harvest, and the least likely to concentrate resentful energy in roots, stems, or leaves.

One day Wei Wuxian had purchased potato eyes instead of radish seeds, but Wen Qing, accusing him of bad judgment, dwells more on the part where he'd done that while bleeding from an untreated stab wound. From context, Wen Ning figures out that that was the day of the duel he can't remember, in which he'd apparently been wielded to break Sect Leader Jiang's arm.

Eventually, Wei Wuxian made some marketable talismans too, but that took longer; between him running out of the remnants of the resources of a prominent sect member and him coming up with something new, there was a gap.

In that lacuna, it was all up to the Wen refugees themselves. To whatever they could improvise. To what they’d carried with them, sewn into hidden seams and knotted inside inner sleeves. And to what they’d carried in their hearts and mind, these ones who perhaps by chance had lived while others hadn't, that enabled them to successfully scavenge, and scrounge, and choose to survive.

Wen Qing was the owl-eyed bookkeeper keeping watch over all their inventories, and the leader exhorting them to make wise use of them, without despairing. She’d pulled off the nigh-impossible, getting them this far.

The Jin guards had done a terrible job of searching anyone. Wen Ning remembered; he’d been awake, alive, for that part. He'd seen more than Qing-jie had, even. Felt more, back when he could still feel.

The narrowing net of restrictions on Wen cultivators and their relatives, the confinement to tiny territories and specific villages, the badges on clothing and the mandatory self-criticism sessions, the random abusive drafts for work parties, the confiscation of first weapons and cultivation items and then other valuables; those, they'd faced together before Qing-jie had been ordered away; but the camps were different. The camps were still worse. The Jin guards everywhere, all the time, watching contemptuously.

The Jins had used a cultivator’s sense of spiritual energy to strip away weapons and tools, any garments with embroidered talismans and definitely any qiankun pouches or pockets, and then they’d basically not bothered with more. People forced to walk long distances empty handed and qi-sealed couldn’t carry a lot, and there was no real use for any hidden valuables while they were in the camps.

Any guard who could be bribed had no motivation to stay that way; any fellow prisoner probably had nothing to offer worth trading or thieving. Though usage rights in good shoes had been the medium of currency for favor exchanges in the camp at Qiongqi Path for awhile, until there were enough dead people that the discarded clothing stashed in a leaky warehouse started to pile up.

Therefore, treasures, and keepsakes, and secret stashes of coin meant to buy a better life…sometimes stayed hidden. The elderly had the best luck; they’d had better ideas of how to hide things. And the people who did get strip searched thoroughly, if not thoughtfully, were the young women and a few of the prettier young men.

(Wen Ning had never thought he was especially pretty; but he'd been young, and healthy, and meek; that was enough.)

So there were some things. Not much. The Dafan Wen, like most of the other minor sub-sects, had never been rich. Very little real money. A grandmother’s necklace, a father’s seal ring. Things worth dying to keep, perhaps. But maybe not worth letting your neighbors and fellow-survivors starve over.

Qing-jie had worked miracles, getting these traumatized people to admit to their resources and share them in order to buy them all food in Yiling. She estimated that maybe a third of the stashes had been pooled, a third or more still kept hidden away still, a third or less somehow lost or bargained away during their flight to the Burial Mounds.

They’d spent those things piecemeal, along with offering for trade whatever they could come up with. Bone buttons carved by a mangled man who couldn’t really walk any more. Embroidered shawls made from the patchwork of two garments and the unraveled yarn of a third by an old auntie who wheezed too much to stay on her feet for long. Handfuls of herbs. Polished stones. A few, uneasily regarded, Burial Mounds gifts, the remnants of ancient armor and weapons. Not really enough to purchase sustenance, let alone prosperity; but they made it be enough.

In the beginning, Fourth Uncle took charge of selling off the horses, not that any of the merchants of Yiling could or would pay what such a number of good-quality steeds were worth. Alas, they got less for the best of them, sold last, once the purchasers compared notes and realized the sellers were desperate. Perhaps the local gentry will appreciate their good fortune, as the middlemen do their profits.

Or perhaps the few days of being soaked in the Burial Mound’s ambient resentment will sicken and kill the beasts after all, or a spark of lingering resentment will spur them to cultivate to yao within someone’s stables. Wei Wuxian slapped ghost-repelling talismans on humans and animals alike before they even saw the peaks of the Burial Mounds in the distance, but ultimately there’s nothing to be done about the tendency of non-sapient beings to attune themselves to their environment. The horses had to go anyway, and Wei Wuxian didn’t use his dizi to purify them first.

Later, they had tried keeping chickens, and they all died. Though the rooster became a yaoguai, an undead monster, in the process.

Somehow, they’d clawed their way into having successful vegetable gardens, the beginnings of grain crops, a regular rotation of hunters using slings and crude bows. An established routine of people walking the long weary way to the regular market in Yiling to sell produce and make swaps, and a list of who would go along to look for any temporary work that might be offered to someone too suspicious to actually hire.

When Wen Ning goes to market with a cartload of big, juicy white radishes, his peasant garb is the gifted raiment of victory.

Wen Ning is humbled by his kinfolk, both those actually born Dafan Wen and those thrown together with them. While he’d lingered in the liminal space of those dead but not gone, they’d journeyed a longer way than even the distance from Qishan to the Burial Mounds. They’d stopped being prisoners side by side, gone through being refugees together, and were approaching becoming a family united.

They are all Uncle and Aunt and Cousin now, whatever the degree of actual relationship. Nobody is left out.

Chapter Text

“Don’t use that wood!”

Wei Wuxian rushes over to where Sixth Uncle has just dumped a pile of branches near the old hearth from his first stay…here.

“It’s poisonous! The smoke will make you cough and choke—this much of it could kill you!”

“Don’t use anything with this kind of bark…or thorns like these…or the nice neat pieces you find under those trees…” Wei Wuxian sorts through the pile, muttering, until he scratches his hand. He puts it to his mouth with a cry, and Wen Qing slaps it away, her eyes blazing. He flinches, then offers his hand to her. She wipes the blood off with a cloth pulled from her sleeve, then begins bandaging the scrape.

“Don’t stick it in your mouth if it’s poison, Wei Wuxian,” she orders.

“Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah,” he says rapidly, shivering. “Just have people bring me the firewood to check as well as the fruit, for now? We’re lucky it’s not a hard freeze. There’s a fair amount of old fruit still on the livelier trees…”

“Nine-tenths of which you’ve told us is poisonous, even from species that would be safe elsewhere,” Wen Qing observes.

Wei Wuxian nods. “Yep! Found it out the hard way, sometimes.”

“We aren’t going to have enough for a single meal for everyone with what we can find today. We can ration by need for tonight, but will tomorrow be any better?”

“I think so…There’s a stream down the slopes…I passed it, when I broke the maze effect and left, but it looked like it could have fish; it’s outside the old wall. And it’s really not that far to Yiling; I have some money on me, we can buy…maybe a week’s worth of supplies? And then sell some stuff?”

Wen Qing nods. “We need to plant crops. A mix of things, ones that are easy to start and harvest quickly, and ones that have more balanced and concentrated nourishment. Otherwise, we can’t be here indefinitely.”

“We will. We will,” Wei Wuxian assures her.

He asks anxiously, “Everyone still has their talismans against the maze effect? And knows to just stick to the one path, for now? I’ll…I’ll draw up a map of some of the low-resentment areas between here and the entrance, so people know where else to go.”

“And if someone does get lost?”

Wei Wuxian grins, ghastly. “I guess I’ll go find them.”

Wen Qing tightens her mouth and looks down.

The unspoken question: “before it’s too late?”