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Chapter Text

Do not heed the wind penetrating the forest or the rain sounds on the leaves;
The weather doesn’t stop me from singing, just slows up my travels.
Having a bamboo cane and grass shoes
Are better than riding a horse, so why worry?
One straw coat is enough for the mists and rains throughout one’s life.

Adapted English lyrics, from Su Shi | Su Dongpo, "Stay Calm While The Wind Makes Waves," translation LAC Poetry and translation VOA News

Carefully, Wen Ning coils the braided straw he holds in his hands, picturing how it will bend and flex. This is more difficult than making a basket, but not too much moreso. Shoes. Grass shoes. Children’s shoes.

Wen Ning remembers not being able to make straw sandals for A-Yuan, a long time ago. Now he can make such shoes for another child.

Perhaps, if he is pleased with the result, Wen Ning will tell Sizhui, when he sees him next. His now-grown nephew listens in a way that makes it relatively easy to share some of the small things that give Wen Ning reason to smile. Sometimes, this extends to the things that Wen Ning would usually tuck aside in silence, out of the habit of avoiding boasting.

Sizhui will be glad to know that a child dwelling under the peaks of Cloud Recesses has had a need met. He'll be concerned to know that the little one will be looked after in other ways, too. He will want to access, on the child's behalf, the public resources that he knows exist, in theory. Anyone would be lucky to have an advocate so sincere, so humbly concerned, and so well-connected.

Wen Ning is glad that A-Yuan has been able to trust others. He appreciates, in a complicated and bittersweet way, that Lan Yuan was always able to find the help he needed when he needed it. He is, truly, grateful that Sizhui learned to value helpfulness and consideration, and to expect that they will matter. Over the course of Lan Sizhui's life thus far—a life which, despite the upheavals of his early childhood, has been largely peaceful for many years—the youngster's early-budding traits of gentleness, compassion, and loyalty have developed into lasting strengths.

Their Wen Yuan is a good boy, always.

Today Wen Ning has the components and tools he needs for a solid result. He will produce, not a hypothetical better future, but a simple hands-on solution to just one small problem, one specific issue that he has decided to find significant.

To make a pair of shoes by hand will not be a rough improvisation, entirely. He works with fibers and flexible materials frequently enough. But it is not a wholly familiar task, either. Inevitably, he will learn much in the process. He will make do.

Wen Ning isn’t scuffing up handfuls of grass as he goes, at least. Perhaps he could make something usable that way, with no plan or pattern or procedure in mind. But he wants to do this well, even though he barely knows how. That standard is difficult. And it is right. Wen Ning will use the best of what he has to give.

Wen Ning has plenty of straw, some of it already braided into rope. He has other materials, too.

Wen Ning does not have the living model for these shoes on hand. Neither does he own a form specifically for this purpose, as someone who routinely supplied sandals might have. And Wen Ning cannot use his own feet to measure, of course; not even approximately. It has been many years since his feet really needed protection from the elements, and even more years since than that since they could be called small.

Nonetheless, Wen Ning does know the exact size that he needs. He holds it in memory with the eye of someone accustomed to identifying acupoints, measuring with his own finger-joints, and observing the precise ratios between another person’s body parts. He sees all his patients, all those under his protection, with a deeply discerning eye. He does not forget what matters to him.

Wen Ning starts out by judging the placement of some wooden pegs to hold the tension on the cord as he works. One sharp blow of his hand suffices to sinks each of several pegs, just cut from a fresh branch, deep into the ground. Then Wen Ning lays out a cloth to keep his work tidy, right beside the pegs.

Wen Ning has some straw rope already started, but he will perhaps need to twist more as he goes, to have enough. Regardless, he will need to take care to hold tension on the cord to make it keep its shape as well as its placement. A braid will serve him better than a simple twist, he thinks. That part will be more like making a basket than what a professional who routinely makes shoes would be prepared to do with their fine yellow straw. So some thread will be helpful, for binding it together.

Water to dip the dried straw and make it flexible will be needed, too. Wen Ning practices bird calls, as he goes to fill the bucket; they are not actually more difficult than human speech.

Wen Ning has a place to work that is his own, nowadays, outside Caiyi. It is a place to stay, surely. But mostly, it is a place to put some significant subset of all the useful things he makes or finds. He has, now, the room to grow things, to have the extensive herb garden he always wanted. And there’s room to build additional storage if he needs it. It’s a pharmacopeia gone overgrown and wild, as much as it is a garden turned upside down and inside out. It’s where he has his small house, that is made more homelike rather than less by being a place where he rarely actually rests. Other places are a different kind of home for him, but this one is his.

So, he finds some of this and some of that, as Wei Wuxian would say, and Wen Qing would probably slap his ear for, once. Wen Ning has on hand a hank of strong hemp thread slicked with scale-insect wax, a worthy trade for his baskets of fruit and herbs from the forest. He owns, also, several good needles, a generous gift offered in a stolen moment, after he gave some quietly informal medical advice to a group of young wives sewing together in a shared courtyard—advice focusing on certain teas that can be brewed discreetly from common herbs to help with irregular and uncomfortable menstrual periods, or to bring on one that has been worrisomely delayed. The cloth that Wen Ning spreads out is a blanket of soft wool woven by an old woman whose arthritic hands benefit from his prescription for a warming balm. The knife that he used to cut branches came to Wen Ning from her son-in-law, a smith, after he treated a careless apprentice’s badly burned hand.

Everything Wen Ning has is a gift of sorts. Some are things he made, and the gift is the chance to make each one. Some are exchanges, item for item, task for task, value for value. And some of the things he owns come to him from open ended care, open handed generosity—things, and time, given to him with no expectation of equivalent return. That is precious to him—the hope, the belief, that Wen Ning will do his best, according to his own judgment—with all that he has, and all that he has become.

Wen Ning has already neatly braided a few body-lengths of grass cord, thinking to use it for tying up herb bundles. He can keep doing that until he has the length of straw rope that he needs.

So he does. Each task has its own rhythm. Each has a natural pause at the end, bridging into a new beginning.

Next, the base shape of each shoe. Wen Ning makes pairs of long back and forth loops for the lengthwise structure of each sole; makes forearm-length loops that will be pulled smaller when he completes the complex weave. Then, he creates neat shorter loops back and forth, tightly packed together, to fill in the form. He makes curves and knots that will functionally hold themselves in place. Even so, he also wraps each cord in thread, stitches it around and knots it tight, too. He can be doubly certain that the straw cords will hold by stitching around them with the strong thread.

Wen Ning fills in the bends and curves that make the not quite oval, not quite rectangular shape. Largely, it’s a matter of weaving back and forth, looping as he goes. Every couple of fingerwidths of progress, he has to stop and figure out how to switch things around somewhat. He needs to ensure that the shoes won’t have a weak seam, but will instead possess a distributed network of shared strength. It’s challenging to do it without accidentally weaving a pattern that will fall apart immediately, or losing the overall tension, or untwisting his rope in the process, or forgetting that he’s sewing as he goes in order to keep it all put together. He knows how to make something round or something square, but this is neither. He's seen shoes somewhat like this made, but he hasn't made his own. A cultivator of a great clan wears boots; a fierce corpse hardly notices going barefoot.

Still, bit by bit, the braided grass takes shape into the generous outline of a small footprint. Then Wen Ning repeats all his actions, in mirror match. Smaller by far than his boots, and proportionately wider in the toes, the results are fit only for a child’s foot. The two pieces he has made are functionally identical so far.

Wen Ning finishes each piece—each sole—with complex stitches all around the outer edge, tightening down on the straw. Between the tight weave and the tighter stitches, he’s pushing the coils of straw together hard, compressing the material in on itself without letting it bend out of shape, as if for a basket or mat meant to be watertight. The surfaces he had made, the two shapes that reflect each other, are thick and dense. These soles will become denser and tougher still when stepped on, as long as the overall shape is sound and the threads that hold them to their form and purpose do not fray.

Wen Ning considers soaking and hammering the soles, too. But he thinks that ordinary use will soon give them pounding enough.

In a departure from other sandals of either wood or straw that he has seen made, Wen Ning layers the base of each corded grass sole with extremely thin slats of bamboo running lengthwise.

If there are hopeful characters written on the slips of bamboo, infused with the smallest breath of something that cannot quite be called ordinary cultivation either spiritual or resentful, only Wen Ning will know it. Bamboo is for bringing both quick growth and lasting strength. He thinks it will work for that, anyway.

He writes characters on his wrist, as well. He smears some of them, with the difficulty in writing caused by having expended much of his capacity for dexterity already. Then he concentrates, and feels sensation return to his fingertips, before he goes on.

Wen Ning remembers to rinse out his ink brush, too.

Next Wen Ning uses braided straw again, making another complete layer for each shoe.

He is grateful, to know the use of different species, to be have been present for the harvest of rice and millet and wheat. He is glad, to have gathered up already these long stems, dry now but still flexible. He did well, stacking up the straw to keep it from mildewing. He might have used it for mulching tender plants, or if he needed to line a box bed for an injured small animal. Or to make something out of straw, as he is doing today.

As Wen Ning works, he reflects. He appreciates it when he finds himself thinking that the stems look good enough to serve their purpose. They are paling gold, but still flexible. They are neither living green nor yet gone to dust. They are small things, brought together and braided for strength. They come together bit by bit and are made useful, twisted up in tight little coils, shaped under patient hands.

Wen Ning makes one additional form for each foot, which he layers under the strengthening insert and the thick tough cushion of the inner sole, and sews in place to connect. Each of these new pieces is also a full sandal-sole shape, though not as thick as his first efforts.

This time, instead of making only the filled-in outline of soles, Wen Ning thinks seriously about straps to attach shoe to foot, as he should have from the start, probably. Instead, partway along, he incorporates several loops at each side of the part of the sole that will be under the arch of the foot. He does not work in a toe-strap and side-ties, as he might were he making grass shoes for an adult. Instead, Wen Ning brings the heel and toe up a little, rounding off the overall shape, without putting a strap in the middle to go between the big toe and the rest.

Then, to the loops sticking out at the sides of each shoe-in-progress, Wen Ning attaches a wide woven strap that will go over the arch of the foot. His logic, such as it is, is that by attaching the strap like this, all the rest of the shoe—except the very bottom, as yet unfinished, additional layer he thinks he might want to include—will anchor the upper portion.

Each of the two straps is made of two halves that connect—four pieces in all, two per foot—and that is also intentional.

The straps he makes are reasonably complex. A fairly simple wide curve would do for an adult foot, if made to measure. Easier still would be to hold the shoe on with the triangle formed by placing a loop between the big toe and the others, and tying everything else to that. But Wen Ning wants these sandals to be adjustable, without slipping, and yet without cutting between tender toes.

So Wen Ning makes wide straps, with fastenings to open and close them. Hopefully, they will let all the tiny toes together tuck underneath and peek out in front, without the flattish shoe falling off. He experiments with a series of loops, paired with round knots that serve as buttons, to make something that can be tightened to fit. He starts over twice, unraveling what he can salvage of the used grass and putting the rest aside for kindling. He is glad that he already long since cut all this grass and dried it into straw, and glad that earlier today he chose to braid up as much cord as he had, half-expecting to have extra left over.

Wen Ning knows enough to know that he doesn’t entirely know what he’s doing. Even still, he wants this to be some of his better work.

Eventually, Wen Ning is satisfied with the general shape of the sandals. They have thick insoles, strengthening inserts, a strong lower layer connected to the straps, and adjustable straps that will work for a while even if the wearer grows. Each shoe is sewn into a single whole piece, though the straps fasten and unfasten, and the strap sections could be taken off and replaced with a little trouble.

The shoes would be fully functional, at this point. In truth, just by virtue of having had a whole morning of an adult’s attention available to devote to making them, they are probably already the best shoes in the child’s household. Unless some adult, that Wen Ning has yet to meet, might, perhaps, own some shoes specifically for work. The child that they are intended for has likely never worn any kind of shoes.

Still, Wen Ning can make these grass shoes better, stronger, softer; more comfortable, and more protection, at once.

Chapter Text

From the mountaintop
they are much like a baby crying.

Most people drop their chopsticks
in fear of thunder and lightning.

If one can
move past the superficiality of fame
and where one lives
This trivial lightning and thunder [are] as petty
as the mountain’s deities.

Reordered lines from: Su Dongpo, "The Words of Daoist Tang, Tianwu Mountain", translation LAC Poetry

Still, Wen Ning can make these grass shoes better, stronger, softer; more comfortable, and more protection, at once.

So then, he’ll do that. Shoes can be made of grass or wood or cloth—or leather. And unexpected combinations of elements can sometimes work well.

Wen Ning already has some leather made from deer hide. He does not use rabbit hide, at all, though there are many rabbits around in the woods and watersides and gardens near Caiyi. This is a choice made in deference to the feelings of his dear Lans, in part. It is also a functional concession to the thin delicacy of such small skins, suited for other purposes than hard wear. Deer leather is stronger. Careful cutting lets him make of an entire hide, in the form of the small bits and pieces he generally needs, without much waste.

All of the unused leather that Wen Ning currently has on hand is from the same animal. It all proceeded from one swift death, and the slow careful butchering that followed. Both took place at his hands.

Wen Ning remembers this specific young buck deer. He had been one of a too-large population of overlapping herds and wandering individuals, the frequent culprits of raids on peasant gardens and farms near Caiyi. One of the buck's antlers was much smaller than the other, a distinctive trait that also suggested some underlying weakness. That deer was not the strongest or cleverest or fiercest young male of his species around. Still, he was beautiful, and graceful, and alive, until he was not.

Wen Ning was gravely aware of responsibility, though not regretful, when he touched the trail of red blood on the ground.

Now, Wen Ning cuts a piece of leather to match the bottom of each sandal sole.

In the absence of the future wearer's actual foot to use as a model, Wen Ning sets the two straw soles down on top of an unrolled section of unused leather. He can't put them quite side by side, because it's an oddly-shaped section of material, the remnant of a cured and tanned and soft-beaten hide that he's already cut pieces out of for various repairs. Wen Ning traces around each sole, reminding himself to allow some additional area to draw up around the side of the shoe when he covers the bottom.

Should he make insoles, also? No, he needs to restrain himself, or the modified straw sandals will end up as tall as a courtier's flowerpot shoes. A sturdy bottom outer sole for each sandal is already a significant addition.

The shape and size that Wen Ning slices out of the leather looks reasonable on the first try, thankfully. He duplicates it neatly, and manages to avoid slicing his fingers in the process.

Next, Wen Ning considers how best to stitch the leather in place, while he picks up his awl. It's awkwardly large, a salvaged second-hand item originally intended for harness work. His largest needle is too still small for piercing leather, and he doesn't own a set of leather punches.

Halfway through piercing the holes for sewing around the second piece of leather, Wen Ning decides to also use flexible glue to bond the leather to the woven grass base. He is thankful he thought of it before he started sewing again, at least. While he's not quite managing to do things in order, at least he doesn't have to undo any stitching. A true cobbler would do this more adeptly, would have more specialized tools, would have the sequence planned out better. Wen Ning isn't a specialist in anything, other than saving lives or ending them. But he makes do.

Wen Ning starts mixing glue as soon as he finishes the pattern of holes for the seams around the edges of each piece. Into the pot of glue-to-be, as Wen Ning heats it over a small fire and stirs with a stick, go various ingredients. He starts with some clean water that will mostly boil off by the time he gets the right consistency. Then he adds a scoop of valuable thick muck made from boiled-down bones and hooves and cartilage and skin scraps. Last, he measures out some lumps and dusty fragments of a useful tree resin. Rice paste or wheat paste alone wouldn’t last, for this.

As he works, Wen Ning thinks about bonding and binding. A strong enough means of attachment can be more durable than the original separate objects. He thinks about breaking, too. Sometimes something has to be ground into dust, as with a mortar and pestle, or just broken up into chunks, before it will combine properly.

Wen Ning thinks about the limits of metaphor. A physical process can be utterly familiar, deeply necessary for human life, and still not offer an adequate model for the way that people need to interact. Wen Ning is not made of glue. He cannot boil all his decisions down to one substance, however sticky, in the way that he reduces this hot thick soup.

Traditions and ethical codes and figures of authority exist as guides, to be sure. Too, many circumstances are beyond any one person's control. Yet the impact of how each individual acts is also undeniable. A person can claim complete ownership over their actions, or blame them entirely on others, or try to find a path that threads in between those extremes. Sooner or later, in the darkness of grief or in the light of hope, choices have to be made.

Wen Ning has chosen not to run away from himself or his past any more; and to not blindly repeat his past missteps, either. The Ghost General has passage in the protectorates of all four Great Sects, nowadays, though often not without controversy. But in the vicinity of Caiyi, essentially nobody has the temerity to disapprove of Wen Ning’s presence. It is a meaningful mercy to not need to attempt to disguise himself for every public interaction. Still, ingrained memory, that logically should have faded long ago, sometimes sends him reaching for a straw hat.

Similarly, none of his neighbors will dare to object to Wen Ning hunting, even for ordinary prey. If the immense weight of the petty disapproval of Lan Wangji, or the capricious humor covering deadly wrath of Wei Wuxian, were not motivation enough to refrain, well—Wen Ning has won the outright fondness of many local grannies and gaffers.

Wen Ning is frightening, he knows, for reasons that include but go beyond his bone-pale face and visible black veins. He exists outside of the usual frameworks for rogue cultivators and organized sects, common folk and uncommon fighters, living exiles and undead monsters. Nonetheless, a place has been made for him, over time.

Wen Ning is brought back into society by the collective choices of the people he knows; those who treat him as a neighbor, a friend, a mentor, or a family member. He is woven into the fabric of existence by his own choice: to regard himself as a person. His actions toward others bear moral significance. He is more than the sum of his regrets.

A sufficiently degraded fierce corpse, sustained and driven wholly by resentment, is entirely incapable of rational thought. Such a revenant poses a danger that must be dealt with decisively. Yet it can be held blameless, in a sense, for any death that occurs at its hands. Any being that knows nothing except killing will, necessarily, kill. But Wen Ning, sentient fierce corpse, accepts that he cannot thus be absolved of his actions.

Wen Ning has saved lives, and he has taken them. His hands have blood on them, both due to external control against which he was helpless, and due to his own choices. Accordingly, Wen Ning thinks deeply, before raising his hand, even to an insect.

Hunting an animal is very different from killing a person; but it is killing, still. The intentional, rather than incidental, death—even of an animal that otherwise might have starved—can be considered cruel, or merciful, or simply necessary, depending on one’s perspective.

The disciplines of Gusu Lan sect do not permit the slaughter of animals or the consumption of meat within Cloud Recesses. Wen Ning has noticed, however, that even the highest-ranked inner disciples of Gusu Lan wear leather boots when they venture out to night-hunt.

Cultivators on night-hunts liberate, suppress, or eliminate—they kill—what they describe as the four great enemies of humankind.

When he hunted deer, Wen Ning defended his neighbors against a different enemy: hunger.

Wen Ning cannot feed everyone. Not even though, as the Ghost General, he is literally incapable of starving; not even though Wen Ning enjoys cooking for other people, even food he cannot actually eat.

Wen Ning can, however, notice one nearby family struggling with predictable problems. Wen Ning can take a deer and butcher it and give away the meat. He can mend a garden fence and provide replacement plants for ones eaten up by wildlife.

Wen Ning can commiserate about how his hands sometimes fail to cooperate and how strangers often look askance at him. He can listen, while someone tells him about their other symptoms and struggles, the ones he does not personally share. He can offer medically informed advice on a lingering cough—as a neighbor, as someone who understands something of what is and isn't a feasible treatment, rather than from the top-lofty perspective of a scholar-doctor who would tell someone who cooks for their family to avoid smoke. Wen Ning can remember to bring by, from time to time, healing herbs and cuttings of his own cultivation.

Wen Ning can, sometimes, save lives, whether from an outright attack or in a medical emergency. Wen Ning would rather, however, that the lives in question never reached such a precarious precipice as to unambiguously need saving. So, each day, Wen Ning attempts to redirect the course of events, well before a mere trickle of misfortune and resentment can become a flood.

Wen Ning pays attention, and looks for opportunities to change someone's circumstances for the better. He usually tries to help just one individual or household at a time. He offers some sort of small but relevant assistance, something within his skillset and without requiring his ongoing presence. He expects that he will often be refused without reason. He recognizes that, even when his aid is accepted, the ultimate outcome of such an effort necessarily remains in another person's hands. He is rarely remotely sure if he has succeeded.

In choosing what to do with the incidental labor of one pair of hands, in finding a way to pitch in without permanent attachment, in gambling on the possibility of doing occasional good, the stakes are not necessarily small, but there is no way to win or lose permanently. Whether to regard this as moral courage or moral cowardice is a question on which Wen Ning remains undecided. He knows, at least, that there is little overt recognition to be had for this sort of work; especially in comparison to a heroic intervention, a clear matter of life or death. Wen Ning prefers it that way.

The Great Sects claim that the awe in which they are held is their due because they are needed to protect people. Ordinary people can hunt animals for meat and other necessities. Ordinary people can take certain precautions to shield their homes from night creatures, too.

However, the most dangerous monsters truly cannot be defeated by the means available to a non-cultivator, a ‘mediocre’ person.

It is in part for this reason that the deadly-dangerous path of demonic cultivation has so quickly become so popular. A person who will not otherwise survive for long anyway has every motivation to become powerful now and pay the price later.

So, the work of a cultivator is essential, at times. But that statement is very much incomplete.

Wen Ning has night-hunted in company with Lan Sizhui and his fellow juniors, with Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, and with others. He has defeated a number of mighty foes, and heard the stories of more. But awe-inspiring beings of terrifying power, whether ghosts such as the Hook Hand or beasts such as the Xuanwu of Slaughter—or ten-souled walking corpses, such as the Ghost General himself, for that matter—are few and far between.

The relative rarity of strong monsters is common knowledge. Wen Ning, in talking to the juniors of several sects, guiding and guarding them, has been slightly surprised that it is not also common sense to take the next mental step.

The average resentful undead being of human origin is extremely weak. A trained cultivator can destroy six or seven such at once. For that matter, an ordinary person has, at least, a chance to disable the danger and escape. For a good chance of success, they need just a little knowledge of typical vulnerabilities, along with the presence of mind to fight back.

The majority of the miserable deaths that leave behind a ghost or ghoul are not caused by an extraordinary curse. Any death will do, if and only if sufficient resentful energy is present. Thus, the absence of haunting that follows an easeful expiration after long life, among loving family and attended by respectful rites. And the counterexample, Wen Ning himself: ignored and insulted, individually exploited and subjected to collective injustice, tormented with the pain of others and outright tortured himself, killed senselessly and left unburied, of course arose from the dead with immensely powerful resentment.

Murder is far from the only cause of undeath, though. It is commonly the case that an ugly, protracted, painful death results from a simple injury or illness; frequently, a preventable or treatable problem that goes neglected until too late. Similarly, most of the time, deep-seated resentment left over from life stems not from one dramatic event, but from a sustained pattern of misfortune mixed with mistreatment.

In the present world, there is an inexhaustible supply of dangerous undead and other resentful monsters, which cultivators risk their lives nightly to contain. And this reality stems from ordinary human suffering. The resentful dead originate from cruel sacrifices, on rare occasion; from war and plague and famine, often; and from the omnipresent reality of poverty and neglect, every single day.

Wen Ning is himself among the living dead. Yet he night-hunts regularly with cultivators of the highest level. It is fortunate that he has learned to appreciate irony. One of his most-practiced skills, a habit of mindfulness that help Wen Ning to stay himself, consists of turning seeping sour anger into spiteful humor and disgust into direct action.

Lesser undead are easily reduced to helplessness if one can counter their weaknesses instead of succumbing to their strengths. A hopping corpse cannot cross a high threshold. An incense-sucking ghost can be repelled by the strong sulfurous smell of garlic and onions mixed with asafoetida. An average water ghoul, though capable of swimming all around a network of waterways to hunt and kill, will nonetheless be confused enough to let itself dry out to dust, once chased or lured onto land, if the particular pond or inlet where it returns to rest has already been drained dry in its absence.

Wen Ning believes that nobody should have to be helpless, whether defending against human enemies or monstrous ones, or against sickness of the body or the mind. Thus, his meticulous lessons, offered as the opportunity presents itself to anyone who will listen, in how to choose incense and check thresholds, sweep out stale energies and place protective talismans. Wen Ning has been given much, and therefore gifts flow freely through his hands.

Wen Ning lived a life caught in between the wealth and prestige of a Great Sect that treated him like dirt, and the struggle of a hardscrabble mountain village of cousins who treated him like treasure. He hid his anger inside himself along with his pain. He fought for his Sect with healing, and betrayed his Sect by saving lives. He died hating the hypocritical cruelty of every single Great Sect. He came back to himself amid the musical cultivation of two people willing to place righteousness over Sect or survival. He found reasons to live and to love after he had already expired. He was overlooked as a peasant selling radishes at the same time as he became renowned as the terrifying Ghost General.

Wen Ning has night-hunted, and hunted ordinary prey, both. He understands that prestige motivates many renowned hunters, but he cringes from the idea of choosing what to kill based on his own pride. He wishes to continue to hone his skills, but that is not why he hunts.

Wen Ning is a skilled archer, though he has had to relearn how to use his bow. Wen Ning slew the deer in his neighbor’s garden with a single shot, made from a distance at which the browsing herd could neither see nor smell him.

In that moment, Wen Ning was wholly focused on his action and at peace with its necessity. Yet he was still aware of the many contradictions of his unlife. He loosed his arrow with a priceless bow that was the immensely expensive gift of a group of junior of multiple wealthy sects. His lone arrow, striking true between vertical rib-bones to pierce the heart of the buck, had been made by hand from foraged materials that cost him nothing but time. The buck deer that Wen Ning took down was a creature whose sharp hooves and strong kick were no more useful against the Ghost General than the teeth of a young rabbit. He made his kill as quick and sure as possible, yet it was not, of course, entirely painless. Wen Ning is a gardener and a hunter; a cultivator and a fierce corpse; a doctor serving others and a weapon in his own hands.

What is essential to Wen Ning, always, are the reasons why a particular death may aid the cause of preserving life.

Every piece of the animal, Wen Ning took care over using. He cannot eat the meat—he cannot eat any part of an animal already dead and gone, and he chooses not to take the blood of any living creature unwilling and in pain—but he has long since portioned the venison out to those who could benefit.

Bone and sinew, hoof and antler, hair and hide, he has used. Wen Ning does not need them, or need the things that he can make of them, in order to survive. But he hopes to be relied upon, in some small measure, by those who do have such needs.

Today, as he cuts out two smallish shapes of deerskin leather, as he pokes holes in it, as he paints glue on it and squeezes surfaces together, as he takes up his needle and thread again, Wen Ning binds himself into the world anew. He considers his human neighbors, old and new, near and distant. He appreciates the only neighbors around right now: the birds in the trees near his small house, the animals in the underbrush, the plants in his garden and the surrounding forest, the sun veiled with light clouds, and the wind bearing a hint of distant rain. Wen Ning is not lonely, as he works alone.

Wen Ning is by himself, being himself, with nobody else present for whom he might perform contentment. Wen Ning's face does not usually show spontaneous expression. Nonetheless, Wen Ning chooses to smile.

Chapter Text

"All I care about is the Way. I have found it in my craft, that is all. When I first butchered an ox, I saw nothing but ox meat. It took me three years to see the entire ox. Now I am able to engage the task with my entire spirit...following the natural contours, revealing cavities and leading the blade though openings, moving ever onward according to actual form, avoiding central arteries, tendons or ligaments, and never touching the bone. ... At the joints there are spaces and the blade has no thickness. Entering with no thickness where there is space, the blade may move where it will, there is plenty of room to move. Thus after nineteen years my blade is as sharp as the first day."

Selected lines from "The Butcher" or "Butcher Ting", a Taoist parable, this translation here

Wen Ning thinks about how he made the leather he is using, after having slain the deer. He recollects the long days intervening between first accepting the bounty of the forest, and now preparing to give part of it away. He connects this to other memories.

The appearance and properties of well-cured, well-cared-for leather are not at all like those of a chunk of skin and fur left alone to disintegrate. A fully tanned hide differs substantially, even, from rawhide that has simply been cleaned and scraped and shaped. Tanned leather does not rot and reek; does not soak up water and then dry stiff; does not disintegrate into slivers and shreds.

Leather’s luster, water resistance, smoothness, softness, flexibility, durability…all of it is the result of intentional and arduous work. Step by step must be enacted in succession; always without accidentally removing something necessary to the process itself or integral to its substrate, and thus ruining the workpiece.

Wen Ning, before he was the Ghost General, was a fervent wish, a damaged body, a swirl of dark smoke, a voice muttering and crying out, a heap of straw, a sister and a friend at his bedside, and a rustling forest of yellow leaves of talismans. He was in pieces; but with the clarity of desperate hope, those pieces came together into a transformed and mended whole.

For success in a complex process such as leather-making, not only just what the result should be, but also how the material being worked can be modified to achieve that result, matter. These are things that the worker has to know clearly, or else discover with great difficulty and risk.

The desired end needs to already exist, whole and shining, in the artisan’s mind, as the work begins. The intended outcome should be present in the process, right from the beginning, in order for the desired traits to be successfully imbued in the work-piece.

Yet that guiding goal must not interfere, either, with the active awareness of an artist. In the midst of things, a wise and crafty worker can understand and adapt to unexpected obstacles and opportunities both, as they arise.

In active use, even a single small leather vat had an emphatic stench. It reeked to the point that Wen Ning was grateful for his dulled senses.

Almost all of the many steps involved noxious liquids and compounds. But Wen Ning understood—he must understand—how to contain harsh substances, while something yet to be remade sits and soaks and changes.

He was mentally prepared to clean up, afterwards. He knew how to neutralize what had been used to its limit, and how to disperse the by-products without spreading illness, and how to ensure that the resulting burden on the earth would not be too much.

Wen Ning cannot decide what emotion he should feel, about dirty work with dead bodies.

So Wen Ning simply allows his feelings to come and go, as he watches. He appreciates it when he notices satisfaction, contentment, almost peace. He does not hold onto them, but sees them float by like clouds, as inherently temporary as the glorious light of sunrise or sunset. The little threads of niggling aggravation, that emerge and do not go away and itch at him, he weaves back into his purpose: to help others by being himself.

Wen Ning wonders if he should be surprised, that he is capable of this labor. He supposes that it is no more or less surprising, that his body can bend to his purposes, than that his mind and emotions can grasp them.

Wen Ning’s body is mostly able to move and bend, in roughly the same ways that a healthy and energetic young person can move. All of him is notably denser and less flexible than a living person’s equivalent parts, though. In particular, his skin, even in the areas that should be delicate, has an overall texture more like a calloused palm or heel, or a patch of scar tissue, than like ordinary skin. Heavy but well-maintained leather is not entirely dissimilar, either in hand-feel or in origin.

Wen Ning’s epidermis has not become not thicker or coarser-grained. It simply behaves differently than in the past because of the resentful energy that saturates it. Wen Ning’s skin is quite unlike untreated dead skin: hardened rawhide, crispy cooked skin of fish or fowl, desiccating peels of trimmed-off bits of cuticle or callus from a living person, or dried-out mummified surfaces of a long-gone dead body laid to rest.

Instead, the resentful energy embalms and preserves Wen Ning’s body, thus enabling his form to be neither rigidly rigor-stiff, nor liquescent with leaking corruption. Similarly, making leather involves soaking a prepared animal skin in a variety of substances, most of which somehow alter how it drapes and flexes.

Resentful energy is an exceptional preservative...and poison. When held together by the coherence of a lingering spirit’s single-minded imperative, resentful energy clings to some essential quality of that being, such as a semblance of its living form. Resentment retains gnawing regret and harbors unquenched anger. Resentment scavenges the remains of body and mind alike, finding means to endlessly act out that negativity. A sufficient accumulation of resentful energy can fully maintain any part of a dead person or organism (or, for that matter, of a sufficiently-altered living one); it keeps whatever is relevant to revenge. Then, it makes that partial fraction function as the seeming whole. In the process, the dark and dreadful energy tends to kill the small lives, insects and worms and tinier things, which would normally devour and decay the softer potions of a dead body. Resentment is better than salt at this kind of protective killing. It is far more toxic, as well.

Resentful energy enables the no-longer-living body at the core of a haunting to bend and flex, without snapping or tearing. A very high-level fierce corpse can move in almost any way that a living person could, and more beside. Wen Ning's body is endlessly strong and resilient. It requires extensive processing to achieve pliable strength against forces pulling in all directions...with a deerskin.

For leather-making, before the actual tanning can be done, it is necessary to scour away the traces of flesh. To accomplish that, Wen Ning initially scraped off everything he could readily remove without tearing the hide. Then, to kill off any ticks or maggots or traces of mildew remaining in the hide, he salted the hide for several days, adding more salt as liquid trickled out. When he judged that stage done, he rinsed the salt out again.

Salt, Wen Ning keeps on hand in quantity, for medical and also culinary purposes. He is mildly peeved by the dietary habits of the Lan juniors, who are the visitors that he most often feeds. They tend to prefer dried sea vegetables traded from the nearby coast, to a good salty bean or radish or cabbage pickle with some spice. Wen Ning is trying to convert them, little by little, to appreciating a more varied palate.

Wei Wuxian’s similar efforts, alas, have been counterproductive, half-convincing many of the ducklings—er, juniors—that absurdly spicy is the only other option than bland and bitter. At least Lan Jingyi is a reliable enthusiast of fried foods forbidden in the Cloud Recesses proper. Wen Ning cannot really taste his efforts as he cooks, but he’s gotten very good at judging doneness by eye. He’s rather proud of his collection of jars of pickles.

The recipe for pickling a hide instead—and all the other steps, too—came from a book that compares the medicinal uses of common earthly poisons to their uses in the production of household goods.

After cleaning off all the attached ends of tendon and shreds of membranes and loose hairs that he could, Wen Ning soaked the hide in the first of several baths of specialized substances. It’s amazing that the same liquid can be considered as a cleaning agent and as a form of filth.

Thankfully, Wen Ning had been able to exchange short-term labor in a stable for a large sealed bucket of concentrated and filtered fermented animal urine. It would have been…particularly challenging to try to figure out that part on his own. Water was easy; there is a good spring-fed well near his house. Clean water is not in short supply in this region, with its deep lakes, well-maintained canals, and clear mountain streams. Certain powdered minerals that Wen Ning also needed were another exchange, for foraged rhizomes of mountain ginger.

The resultant soaking vat was admittedly disgusting, but Wen Ning is the last person who would be squeamish at something that is merely messy, not cruel.

Wen Ning understands deliberate cruelty, having lived within the scope of the suffering it causes. He is fully aware, also, of the pain, physical and emotional, that can be dealt out without intent to harm, and even with the kindest of intentions. He understands that undergoing the latter can lead to the temptation to seek out the former, whether to inflict it or to endure it, or both.

Wen Ning knows that abuse makes it easiest to respond with abuse. He chooses to direct himself away from that outlet.

The hide soaked and soaked while Wen Ning worked in his garden and ran errands. He had to wring out the hide, after. Then he was able to scrape again, getting rid of the clinging hairs loosened by immersion, and washing the hide clean of traces of grease.

The process of removal brought him closer to his goal.

The resentful energy of the risen dead can encourage a bizarre kind of quasi-growth via subtraction: the loss of the substance that supports any function aside from a particular fearful form of attack, the gradual revision into a sort of sparse sculptural form, the erosion of living abilities and concerns. Wen Ning understands, now, the scope of Wei Wuxian’s genius in eventually bringing Wen Ning back as himself, far more than he did in the beginning. Wei Wuxian's breakthrough consisted, in part, of Wei Wuxian successfully progressively twisting the resentful energy that Wen Ning’s death left behind; and using that tension to bind it on itself, like the most delicate of threads and the heaviest of hawsers. Wei Wuxian had had a goal in mind, and bent everything around it.

Bodiless ghosts are essentially formless and inchoate. For the stronger ones, their resentful energy gives them predictable patterns of shapes and colors, at least. They are their energy, clinging together. Wen Ning analogizes this process to the surface tension of a water droplet pulling the liquid towards roundness. A ghost is innately pulled into the complex shape of a specific grudge or grievance. Organized around their ill-will, they are each granted the periodic emergence of particular features: a thorny vine, a strangling cloth, a weeping bloodshot eye, a set of claws.

Wen Ning had hands and feet. He has eyes and ears and nose and mouth. He has all the orifices and extremities he had in life. They are different—they become sharper around the edges sometimes, as his hair is a black tangle of wire, as his skin is an eerie pale shade—but he has them, and they move as he wills, mostly. Even the living cannot take that for granted.

Wei Wuxian convinced Wen Ning’s fierce resentment to follow the direction of remaking Wen Ning’s corpse into, not some particular kind of monster or haunting, but a mentally and physically mostly-intact Wen Ning. It’s the next thing to a true reincarnation, which tradition says is overseen by the divine. Accordingly, Wen Ning is unsurprised that this feat was labeled abomination.

Wei Wuxian’s work was inherently incomplete, however, without Wen Ning beginning to mindfully make himself. In the decisive moment, in the grip of music combining elements of lingering command and final release, Wen Ning called out for his friend, and reached for his sister, and looked to his family: that defined him.

Wen Ning knows that he is bound to resentment in the forms of anger and grief, fighting and killing, joined to the overriding need to protect. He regretted being unable to protect others, or himself, in life. Now, such events and emotions naturally make him faster and stronger: capable of intercepting an arrow or lifting an immense boulder. Wen Ning has still chosen to build on other traits than his brute strength, even if they come less naturally.

As he lingered in the Burial Mounds, Wen Ning chose to make himself more and more a creature of loyalty, protection, and kindness. As he dwells near Caiyi, Wen Ning remakes himself, yet again. He determines himself to be one who cares for others even when he is not of the same kind as them.

After the cautious steps needed to fully clean and soften the hide, Wen Ning rinsed out pale fibrous skin, already partially preserved by the sparing use of what could otherwise disintegrate it. He could see and handle something soft and flexible that was finally starting to look like leather, only dead-white.

Wen Ning is almost colorless, these days. His eyes have a hint of color, generally; but never quite as vivid a shade as when he was alive. The black of his hair and eyebrows and lashes, of his veins visibly running with resentment, is very much like soot. When he was alive, it had a browner, warmer hue. The unnatural white of his skin reminds him of the very light grayish white of the ashes of a completely combusted and cooled campfire. He cannot flush or grow red in the face. People who care for Wen Ning have occasionally spoken to him of pearls and crow feathers; and Wen Ning found himself thinking of a bent quill, a discarded shell.

Wen Ning felt himself seen, at last, when Lan Wangji spoke to him of the burnt pine trees in the hills around Cloud Recesses. Wen Ning can listen long enough for Lan Wangji to frame an extensive thought, in his characteristic careful, artful, succinct phrases. It took time, but Wen Ning heard Lan Wangji explain how glad he was, that the choice had been made to keep those stricken sheltering trunks—to allow the skeletons of trees to stand their lonely watch indefinitely; to not cut them down in favor of something newer and greener and less fraught with memory; to let their black and white jagged forms rise up against the sky as for long as they will, then fall to rest to enrich the ground, in their own unknown time.

Long long long ago, Wen Ning’s body soaked in resentment while he lay broken in a ditch full of corpses under the rain. Then someone took him out, unfinished. Wei Wuxian summoned him back—still incomplete, still dripping wet, still sopping with overflowing foulness.

Wen Ning was called, and so he set in motion all of the remaining Wens’ temporary salvation and their near-destruction, both, by killing the Jin guards that stood in their way. Wen Ning does not know, not really know, what that night was like. For all intents and purposes, despite his patchy partial memories, he wasn’t there. A thing that had been him, that was going to be him again but differently, was there, instead.

More recently, Wen Ning again suffered from being spiked through and through, but in a different manner. He was mentally and emotionally broken, again. He survived, in a sense. After, he began the too-familiar process of looking for his pieces.

Wen Ning was, once again, aided in putting himself back together. He was helped, over and over, with a level of loyalty that Wen Ning can still barely believe anyone would think he deserves. He is attempting to accept that he does not have to deserve love in order to receive it.

Leather takes so many steps to make, and feels so repetitive, and will not stop smelling bad as it marinates. Soak and wring out and soak the hide anew; change out what it’s immersed in, and change it again. Always water, so much water, and the products of the earth; wood, fire, air, and smoke; wet and dry, heat and cooling, light and dark.

The inner bark and young twigs of oak and walnut gave Wen Ning most of the needed substances, already combined, for processing skin into leather. He can often gather just what he needs in the forest. He could break a whole tree if he needed to, to take it home and strip it apart.

Wen Ning is strong, and he has tried to become less afraid of that. Wen Ning does not fear fire or ice, pain or pressure; but he fears losing himself. If it were not for Wei Wuxian’s efforts at allowing Wen Ning access to lifelike sensory experiences, Wen Ning thinks he would have forgotten by now what it is like to feel a foot flexing mid-step before the knee and ankle click with strain, or a hand reach out and sense the texture of a surface before pushing against it with pressure.

Wen Ning’s ability to weave and braid and twine and sew is dependent on a certain level of dexterity, which talismans allow him. Much more of it is visually driven for him, though, than the work of a living weaver who can chatter and glance aside and let their hands carry on with the work by feel. He does it anyway. Wen Ning has determined that doing the things he wanted to do, while alive, but doing them in his own distinctive way…is a way to keep himself together, and not a form of falling apart.

Wen Ning has a tiny bit of childish glee over the fact that nobody can or will stop him from climbing trees, nowadays. He’s unlikely to actually break if he falls, and if he does, he can walk it off and let his resentful energy drag him back together. Nobody knows that the Ghost General sometimes perches in the top of an enormous oak to watch the sunrise.

The next step in treating the deerskin was, of course, another soak to take out something added in, and yet another to add in something else. This was the vinegary, tannic brine, at last. With nearly everything unusable fully removed from the hide, it could finally be turned into something useful—almost.

When Wen Ning finally reached the stage of putting the leather-to-be into the tanning bath, the hide was beginning to feel to Wen Ning like one of those patients whose real illness is their fear of every minor symptom, and who accordingly presents with one complaint of minor imbalance after another.

Wen Ning resisted the temptation to give the aggravating deerskin a nickname, wary of the potential to start an otherwise inert item on the pathway toward cultivating a germ of spirit awareness. Inanimate objects usually require at least a century to cultivate true awareness, but even a small spark of resentment can do—Wen Ning is extremely aware of this—tremendous mischief. He disciplined himself to see the whole of his work in progress, rather than just the stubborn object at its center; to view the back and forth of it as a wave-rhythm of continued labor, not a mountain to climb and conquer.

While the leather soaked in its final sustained immersion, Wen Ning considered his own dead skin and flesh, in comparison.

Wen Ning’s skin is always cool to the touch, according to what others have sensed and said. Wen Ning’s assorted brief experiences of sharing Wei Wuxian’s senses concur; the surface of Wen Ning’s body is routinely close to the ambient temperature but just a shade chillier. To Wen Ning’s own perceptions, his body temperature is neutral, as inward experience or under the touch of his hand.

Many things are utterly neutral; for all that Wen Ning can feel of them. He has, and uses, temporary talismans to enhance his senses, sometimes. Even with them, the quality of sensation is still different than what living memory expects. Wen Ning touches the world at a remove. Still, he finds beauty in it.

Many people see finished clothing, perhaps with fanciful decorations, or even functional fine tools, set aside to await their purpose. Then they call them pretty, handsome, well-balanced. Wen Ning agrees, but he also thinks that the process of manufacture is beautiful.

It is also messy. Wen Ning takes a lot of baths.

Each major step of tanning is a days-long process that thankfully requires only periodic tending, with up to a shichen of active work in between stages.

Wen Ning accomplished lots of other things, in the meantime. Wen Ning can concentrate on one activity at a time, but there is always something else going on in the background. He thinks this is an inherent trait of the living world: the small lives of predator and prey scampering about; the green grass growing under months of spring rain and dying back to its roots in the fall; the gossip of people meeting and splitting apart, making families and quarrels, bearing children and growing old. To ignore this, whether the one doing the ignoring was undead or fully-living in body, would be its own small death. Mindfulness is not blanking out the awareness of continual busy goings-on, but accepting their presence. Wen Ning does not try to detach entirely—that would be fatal, in his particular circumstances—but he is selective about what he lets himself grab onto and turn over and over in his mind.

In the tanning vat, the color changed bit by bit, until Wen Ning thought the process complete. Then he mixed the last bath, neutralizing the tanning agents, making the liquid dripping from the leather almost as harmless as water to touch. At last Wen Ning took out a fully-tanned wet hide.

Next was stretching the hide out to air-dry, with sweet smoke wafting all around as Wen Ning set up the wooden drying rack. The smudge of smoke was, in this case, not primarily to preserve the hide—though that is part of another method—but to keep off insects.

As the leather dried and cured, it was necessary to repeatedly stretch and pull and pound it soft. Part of the process of making leather is extensively stretching and tugging and beating on the hide so it can move in all directions. This prevents it from shrinking and curling up on itself.

The actual amount of substrate doesn’t change, except by removing sections or layers. Wen Ning has never attempted to split apart the layers of a skin—that’s different from skinning the hide off the animal, different again from removing the hair—but he’s vaguely aware that this is a necessary step for preparing some leather goods, such as suede or parchment. The size of a piece of leather can seem to change quite a lot between when it is wet and when it is dry. Sometimes, this can be helpful in molding something into a fixed shape.

Wen Ning, instead, tried, within the limits of the tanning process he understood, to make something almost as soft and potentially multi-purpose as heavy cloth. That took a ten-day of some significant portion of time each day.

Always, to make something whole and new, one must attend to time, and its careful measurement, whether considered in heartbeats or in whole years. Wen Ning took time to emerge from his chrysalis of talismans. Wen Ning needed time to accept his changes after they unfurled to him. Wei Wuxian is forgetful of time. Back in their Burial Mounds day, one of Wen Ning’s typical tasks was to remind him.

More recently, they seem to have misplaced some years. But they all have the years yet ahead of them, now.

Sanding and rubbing the deerskin leather utterly smooth was the final step. Wen Ning owns for now, and does not fearing losing, because he knows how to make them, his baskets and buckets. Wen Ning did not make his knives and chisels and the like, but he sharpens and tends them as reverently as swords. He supplied himself with a selection of rounded river stones as additional tools. He obtained ochre and fat to burnish the hide, too.

Wen Ning possesses a sizable, substantially thick wooden table, which he put together from large sections of tree-trunk, then planed and sanded and polished to a finish barely rougher than silk. Three men together could not easily lift that table, but Wen Ning frequently moves it outdoors and back indoors as suits him. The very last touches to the deerskin were done by Wen Ning sitting cross-legged on a grass mat that he wove himself, perched atop the table he also made, with the leather draped over his lap.

Then at last the hide was tanned. A dead thing was transformed into something new, after long effort. Wen Ning’s laborious project, woven in between every other task he took on for about a month all told, became a smooth soft shining material.

The leather awaited a need for use, suspended from the rafters of a simple storage shed, with sprigs of dried herbs, for a fresh smell and an absence of moths, dangling all around. The end of winter passed by and budded into spring.

Today, Wen Ning left scratch marks on a piece of scrap wood laid out to protect his wooden table, when he cut out two pieces of leather with the precise point of a sharp knife. The accumulated marks on the wood verge on becoming characters in some unknown angular script. The irregular line of the piece of leftover leather fascinated him.

Before putting it away, before picking up what he actually needed, before piercing and stitching the sandal soles, Wen Ning laid the leftover piece along his forearm to look. He traced the scalloped curve of it with his eyes. He examined the edges of the layers of treated skin. He noted the flexible thickness of leather permeated with preservative agents. He discovered the vanishing shimmer of oil, well worked in, reappearing under the light of the sun.

This is not a new thing, that Wen Ning finds it easy to pause, to hold himself still, to lose himself in reverent admiration of what others would call discards. This is a way in which past and present Wen Ning remain in harmony.

Wen Ning, as a sentient fierce corpse, doesn’t suffer from the compression of blood vessels or nerves; he can sit and work for shichen after shichen of a day, and grow no stiffer. However, if he allows himself to detach mentally, his body wanders outside the scope of his conscious attention, and his ability to move in a lifelike manner attenuates. He is aware that he is at risk of that, today, though the straw and leather and thread in his hands anchor him.

When Wen Ning was first revived his physical abilities were patchy and instinctual. The fierce corpse within him knew how to attack and devour, but not how to plan. The soul fragments held together by the gossamer chains of a summons willingly obeyed could only yearn and reach out, not grow and change. His basic nature is similar to that of a ghost of frustrated rage and chilling sorrow and unfair loss…and love for family.

With his restored cognition, though, and his memories of being a person, Wen Ning was equipped to be more than just a body in motion. Wen Ning had to think through how to simply exist, over and over. It was difficult, and required preparation, just to make basic choices; to speak and act coherently; to move away rather than towards the temptation of simply flowing downhill, like water or blood, to the low ground of constant meaningless thrashing violence.

In the process of managing his mind, Wen Ning also came to understand how the resentful energy within him moves and pools and clings, like and unlike spiritual qi. He eventually learned how to consciously accelerate the circulation of resentful energy within himself to enhance his abilities, without having to be utterly overcome by rage and hunger.

Wen Ning has become capable of a kind of cultivation: the self-cultivation of someone who can never again have a golden core, but whose days may yet be bright as sunshine, and whose nights are a kind shade of darkness.

A usable piece of leather has been so exhaustively processed, so thoroughly transformed, compared to a fresh bloody animal hide, that it might almost be said to be a different substance altogether.

Yet no other raw material will do, to produce a fabric with the properties of a well-tanned skin or fur. Imitations lack the qualities of the real thing in one regard or another.

Finished leather is not just the hide that was there to begin with. It is not only the product of the laborious and painstaking treatment it undergoes. It is both.

The Ghost General is not a random fierce corpse with strengthened resentment. He is not young Wen Qionglin as he was when he was alive. He has been remade, over and over. He has made himself. He is Wen Ning, undead person; he is both.

Chapter Text

How many years have we had bright moonlight?
Holding a wine cup, I ask the clear sky...
I want to ride a chariot drawn by four horses, to go upward on the winds
But I fear their towers and palaces made of fine jade
And so high up in the sky, I couldn’t endure the freezing cold
So: get up, dance and play with the moon shadows.

This feels the same as if I were living among them!
Shifting moonlight in the bright red pavilion,
low enough to enter the screen door.
So bright, no sleep is possible.
Shouldn’t have resentment.

Why are we so far away, while the moon is so round?
People always have sadness and joy, separate and unite.
The moon has periods of being hidden, being revealed, being less than full...
Yet from the beginning, people have wanted a long life
And from a thousand li away, shared it with the Moon Maiden.

Selected and lightly edited lines from "Song Remnant of River Sounds" by Su Shi | Su Dongpo, translation LAC Poetry

Wen Ning holds weeks of his work, on and off, in his hands, when he forms and glues on the leather soles of the sandals he is making.

The added labor is worth it, to him. He has an unusual capacity for persistent exertion. Little of it is needed, for Wen Ning to meet his own meager requirements.

So much work, for each small piece of leather. But with it, the grass shoes will last so much longer.

Wen Ning spends some space of time, some movement of the sun across the sky, some number of uncounted kè of the sundial, simply gazing at the sandals in his hands.

Wen Ning turns the flexible objects over and over, looking closely at their contours. He examines the structure he has created, which becomes more than the straightforward sum of the simplest steps required, by being organized so that the knots and stitches form a greater whole. He searches for color (desaturated), scent (faint), density (solid, but bendable), texture (smooth?). He finds life-energies and death-energies and the energy of intent (these shoes know that they are to be worn).

Wen Ning is not so much thinking about the shoes, as he is perceiving them. This outwardly passive observation...actually prepares the rich earth in which fruitful thoughts can later sprout. Unlike Lan Wangji, Wen Ning does not drive himself forward with relentless logic and burning faith. Unlike Wei Wuxian, Wen Ning does not suffer the continual bombardment of reckless inspiration. Wen Ning merely waits, and opens a space, and sees what will grow.

The soles, tightly wound straw rope backed with leather, are very sturdy. The adjustable straps made of the same straw were reasonably clever, Wen Ning thinks. He briefly wonders if it would have been more efficient to sew on some spare buttons, or even some rings and lacing like the ones for an archer's bracers. He accepts that he did not do that. Not all construction is perfect. Flawed methods and materials can produce valid results, sometimes.

Wen Ning tests himself: is what he has done so far, what he is meaning to do, within the bounds of what is acceptable? The tiny hidden talismans offer no curse or compulsion. They make no specific demands in the interests of blessing without asking. They merely supply a thin thread of well-wishing, that will be warmed to life each time the shoes are worn until they begin to wear out.

The overall appearance of the two sandals is neat and tidy. They are good and humble things.

There is a beauty in the confluence of these different streams of craft. Wen Ning’s workflow was inefficient, in a pleasant way. He directed the timing and sequence of his actions into bending around his individual habits and preferences and ideas, rather than hewing to the requirements of profit or performance. As Wen Ning joined different materials, the techniques of different disciplines, the paths of different histories, necessarily intersected. The skills he has learned, and the tools he has used, come from the labor and innovation of others, both recent and long-ago; waves washing up on his shore. From here, the endless rushing flow continues, far beyond him.

Sunlight on water, free and merry laughter of dear ones. Sunlight on wheat-gold straw and rich brown leather, gift and offering. Sunlight on bare hands, still and calm, gray approaching translucence. Bright. Bright. So bright.

Wen Ning shakes his head side to side, as if shaking off the urge to sleep. He deliberately draws in a breath of shifting leaves and drifting clouds; a shimmer of shadow.

Wen Ning busies his mind about some small matters of prioritizing and managing materials. He decides that, next time, he will let someone else tan the hide of any prey he takes for that purpose. Stalking and shooting a deer is well within his capacities, of course. He has proven, now, that he can take care of the resultant hide, at need. Too, sewing with finished leather is doable, certainly. But making leather...well, it's not the matter of a shichen, like making a simple mat or basket from the plant materials on hand.

If Wen Ning is going to brew up kettles and vats, fan the fire with a bamboo fan, and sniff at a bubbling vessel for the correct horrific stench...then he should probably be making medicines. He can produce the ordinary necessities that take just a bit of specialized work: salves and tinctures and ointments and teas and preserves and pills; medications for minor ills that may keep them from becoming major. These are common things, that almost everyone needs eventually, but not everyone can make, or would know how to prepare safely. Then there are the rare remedies, as well; the potent cures documented by Wen doctors in times past. For most of those, Wen Ning is the only person resident near Caiyi capable of providing. Others carry their own skills and stories; this one is his, for now.

Not everyone can do every kind of work, Wen Ning concludes. Not even a sentient fierce corpse who never needs to sleep. Every little manufactured object has a complex history. Unless he were to entirely stop having a social presence, forgo having a house of his own and an outfit of clothes on his body, and become a naked forest wraith...Wen Ning cannot make absolutely everything he uses. No, not even if he were to eventually learn to make a basic version of every type of thing that he uses often—he still can't do all the work all the time; not well, and not efficiently, and not in useful quantities.

Everything is interesting, every object is potentially valuable, and every person has a past. It is overwhelming, and agonizing, and alluring—this world full of life. Alas for his avid mind, his wide-open eyes, his tender heart...that even his tireless body cannot be everywhere at once.

The local tanners will probably be open to an exchange. They can likely use some of his medical knowledge regarding the substances with which they work. Or, perhaps, they might need a well-chosen word or two in some other acquaintance’s ear. Workers in such a foul-smelling and poorly-regarded trade are not especially well treated, anywhere. Tales of exemplary butchers and tanners often merely serve to illustrate the general suspicion by carving out exceptions.

In this vicinity, the disciples of Gusu Lan Sect—for all their high-minded stated intent of even-handed generosity in serving their people—often set a rather poor example, when it comes to the compassionate treatment of people whose hygiene is frequently imperfect and whose problems could be considered karmic. Wei Wuxian is working on the juniors with his outrageous and illuminating perspectives, Wen Ning knows. Lan Wangji is trying in his quiet way, too. Wen Ning...does what he can.

So, when it comes to professional tanners, Wen Ning thinks that is wisest for him to respect their skills; and in return, to help them with his own different abilities. Yes, Wen Ning is glad to be able to tan leather if he needs or wants to do so. He doesn’t need to, though. Exchange is available and also essential. Without further exercising that particular skill, Wen Ning is still an extensively educated and experienced doctor, despite the highly unusual interruptions to him acquiring and maintaining his qualifications. The practice of medicine, in some form, is where his best contributions to society can likely be made.

In the end, Wen Ning has to decide for himself what is enough. He is more than his starving relentless wanting. He can choose which desires to act on, and which consequences to bear. Over time, Wen Ning has found that the hunger of curiosity, at least, can be well satisfied by what he incidentally learns, in the process of acting on the intention of kindness.

Wen Ning can find numerous ways to be a helpful neighbor. And, of course, Wen Ning is also a guide and guardian of people on journeys through darkness and liminal light. He protects, in particular, those transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Likewise, he watches over those moving from life to death.

Children do many kinds of work, with ordinary life being the way it is. But Wen Ning thinks—he wants to believe—that their freely-chosen playing and learning and living is important, as well as their obedient listening. After all, Wen Ning would not be here today if he had not wanted to learn archery, even when discouraged.

Small feet need to find their own paths; and will, whenever they are allowed to wander.

It will be good, Wen Ning thinks, to equip them with some protection, as they go.

Chapter Text

Come back with me now, and who cannot dispel all past mistakes? Awake everyday before you do more harm. Dew has yet to dry.

In front of my house are happy, noisy children. Lament, old chrysanthemums covered with weeds. Already the new pine trees, planted five years ago, are old, dark and cracked; just like me.

Clouds come and go as they wish. Tired birds naturally know when to return. Today I forgot myself, and simultaneously forgot society.

Sometimes I walk the rugged and emerald green foothills. Deep and quiet small creeks emerge. Spring water trickles and flows into a dark ravine. Flourishing trees and grasses grow wild and thick.

People in rural seclusion...Their lives are near their limits. I think about how much longer this body of mine can remain a part of this world. I don’t feel myself very magnificent. To be rich and wealthy is not my ideal.

I just know I want to be close to water; and look into the distant mountains.

Selected and heavily edited lines from "Simple Whistle Sounds Everywhere", by Su Shi | Su Dongpo, translation LAC Poetry.

Then Wen Ning considers scrapes and blisters, mud and rain, scratchy plants and sharp stones. He frowns.

Wen Ning rises to gather additional materials. He pulls out the pegs from the earth as he goes, putting them down with the pile of semi-useful potential kindling. He shakes out the wool blanket, and drapes it over the side of the wooden table to air, with a couple of round river rocks as weights. He puts a few tools away. Rummaging in his house produces additional thread and some small sections of cloth as well.

Wen Ning has a very good organizational system; and too many things for it to fully work. He gives his work-pieces away as fast as he can finish making them, and always seems to start several more. He has concluded that this may be an effect of his intentional stubborn desire to remains attached to the world. Wen Ning nowadays likes to be able to make things, and give them to people. He doesn’t mind giving things up—he’s not greedy—but he always finds something new and unfinished to care about, in which he sees potential.

Wen Ning pads the straps of the sandals at the arch, first. All he needs for that is a scrap of cloth meant for making bandages, and some careful sewing. That will prevent some wear and rubbing, especially as the sandals get broken in. Wen Ning hopes the child will wear the shoes often enough for that to happen quickly.

A child who owns no shoes probably doesn’t own socks to wear inside them, either. Wen Ning examines the inside of the soles extremely closely to make sure there are no sharp straws poking loose. He doesn’t find anything that he can’t readily tuck in and stitch to stay put. When he was this age, were A-Yuan's socks knitted, in the imported fashion, or sewn together? Did he even wear socks? Surely he did. They were so careful.

Will the crisscrossing seams of the insoles be too much, Wen Ning wonders, well aware that he’s taking this to the point of being a bit unhinged. Children can have such tender toes. But this child is used to running around barefoot in all weather. Whether the little one can bear to wear the shoes won’t likely be determined by a bit of mostly-flat texture under a calloused heel. Wen Ning himself can’t even feel the lines between the fibers of the straw rope. Not that he can feel much, with the talismans starting to wear off, but—

They really are good sandals. And yet—and yet—

Nonetheless, Wen Ning asks himself whether any sandals are enough. He answers himself: that they are surely better than nothing but not sufficient. Wen Ning throws caution and precedent aside, in favor of caring.

Wen Ning has more cloth than he really requires by far, after all. His first impulse, as usual, is that he doesn’t really need the sleeves of his own robe. It's not as if he'll get cold, after all. He could easily cut off a piece of that fine fabric, and hardly miss it.

Wen Ning is grateful for the good clothing he has nowadays, though. The colors and patterns feel like his own, not anyone else's. The tailoring is loose, suitable for him to take in or tuck aside, not likely to pull tight and rip with careless motion. The materials are good quality. All this, because people who care for him have paid for him to have nice things, only because they want him to have them. There would be at least as much guilt in carelessly damaging such garments, as there is in having such an embarrassment of riches.

Wen Ning refrains, ultimately, from taking apart one of his own garments. He convinces himself by musing that he does not want a child in need of shoes to be marked by something obviously out of place. Instead, he gets out a large piece of coarse cloth, of a very simple weave, meant for wrapping slings and the like.

Wen Ning enjoys making cloth more than making leather. Small threads and small needles are…difficult. But he works with fibers that are easy to spin, and large yarns, and simple patterns. Also, he uses mostly bold colors, when he can. He likes to match red with blue, yellow with green, black with gray with white.

Wen Ning understands why making cloth, making clothing, especially at home rather than in a large business of weavers and dyers, is widely considered a woman’s task. Cloth requires precision and long effort. Cloth is also flexible and patient, in its way. It will wait, a little while, for someone who needs to also cook and clean and tend and soothe and manage and assist and carry the living and bear up under the weight of their needs.

To Wen Ning, such work could suit a warrior as well. Both childcare and battle-readiness require being able to drop things on a moment’s notice and pick them up again later, after all. At the very least, soldiers should be able to mend their own gear, Wen Ning thinks. They should also be able to go get their own wine. He’s still just a little annoyed about that.

Wen Ning has opinions, sometimes. And he will act on them.

When it comes to most arguments about the rightful roles of men and women, or the respective value of the hearth and the sword, Wen Ning declines to take sides.

Wen Ning learns from those who will teach him, regardless of their name, their attire, their sex. Or Wen Ning looks at examples and tries to duplicate them on his own. Wen Ning has the time, now, to make many mistakes, and patiently unravel them back to the beginning.

Wen Ning weaves cloth from thread with a simple back loom, and spins thread from fiber with a drop spindle, and pounds out fiber on stones, and rets reeds for fiber in a basket in a small pond, and cuts reeds selectively in the patchwork of woodlands, groves, and meadows that have all become unspoken additions to the garden he tends. Wen Ning does not count the time it takes. He has the luxury of few needs, fewer questions asked, and almost unlimited amounts of later. When he is not with others, traveling by their sides or staying in their homes, enjoying the excitement of their lives or tempering terrible threats, Wen Ning can be here, where it is quiet, and he can make things.

Wen Ning enjoys this work, and does not care to hand it off, and does not have any kind of quota for his production. He is not remotely dependent on his ability to produce clothing in order to have clothing, given the people with whom he associates. He is aware that this is a great luxury.

So, Wen Ning has some rectangular lengths of common cloth already available. He has soft yellow-beige, deep orangey-red, minty gray-green, warm rusty brown, each with simple narrow stripes of some contrasting hue. All are colorful, but not in the way of rare and costly dyes. A sling can be a scarf can be a sash can be a table-runner can be a pouch can be a sling again, after all. So it’s better to make something both attractive and useful. The bands of cloth are not finely woven, but they have been washed and beaten soft. This will do.

Wen Ning decides on a somewhat strange plan for going forward, one without clear precedent of which he is aware. He sews cloth neatly around the overall shape of the shoe, shaping it loosely like a foot by gathering it with carefully-placed stitches, attaching it all around the edge of the sole. He leaves the soles of the shoes exposed on the bottom. He puts one layer of cloth around the strap, and one under it. In essence, he has incorporated a very lightweight cloth shoe, or a thick sock, both inside and attached to the sandal. The cloth is not tightly shaped to the foot, like a properly sewn shoe, but he thinks it will serve. He is working at the limits of even his precise memory for anatomy, now. It’s good that he wants a loose flexible fit.

Wen Ning finishes each cloth shoe upper with a loose gather, and adds a double drawstring at each ankle. He threads it with round cord, strung with chunky wooden pull-beads, something that a child’s fingers will be able to grip.

The cloth won’t last as well as the rest of the shoe, but it can more easily be replaced, or removed altogether. The tops, at the ankles, can be undone entirely. With them unfastened, a foot can easily slip in and out of the sandal. The fit of the strap across the arch can be adjusted, still, by reaching into a gap between the layers of cloth. The soles are a bit big for the child he means to wear them, intentionally. So, the woven grass strap with its knotted buttons, now covered in cloth, is the only true constraint on the size of the upper portion of the shoe, still.

They are hardly straw sandals, when he finishes. Instead, built around the braided grass soles backed with leather, the sturdy shape of them, are soft cloth shoes.

Shoes, real shoes, made from basic materials with his hands. They will be gentle on the foot, but the bones of them are strong and flexible. They will withstand work and play both, and cushion the impact of small feet running. Wen Ning’s efforts are experimental to some extent but every part was thought-through with care.

Wen Ning has confidence that he has matched sufficiently the required small measurements. He has, clear in his mind, the image of the blistered bleeding foot that he held in his hand, just yesterday. What he has made will work to protect the childish callouses, the hardening soles and still-soft skin, that he wiped clean while he whispered away tears.

These shoes are not something Wen Ning could have made entirely alone, even though nobody has watched him make them. Not only the reason to make something that he can give away, but the capacity to make it, came to him from his interaction with others.

Without Wen Ning, the child would go barefoot. Without the barefoot children of the world, there would be nobody like Wen Ning. A-Yuan's older sister never outgrew this size of shoes.

Chapter Text

After ten years we are on opposite sides of life and death
What is between you and me is boundless and vast.
I do not have to try; the memories of you come naturally.
...
Dust covers my face, and it is in my hair like frost...
Night arrives. In a dream I suddenly go back to our hometown...
We look at each other without words.
...
I expect every year to have to deal with this heart-breaking time.
Bright moonlit night on the short pine trees along the ridge,
near me and also near your grave.

Selected and lightly edited lines from Su Shi | Su Dongpo, "Remembering You In a Dream", translation LAC Poetry

Humanity is being part of the people, even in seeming isolation. To be part of life is to carry grief along with hope; to choose the pain and the joy, together. Wen Ning has gathered up the skills and products of a township, along with the harvest and wisdom of the surrounding woodland, to craft a single pair of shoes today.

But there will be another observation tomorrow, another unspoken want and danger. Then Wen Ning will turn to what he has already. He will look through the humble wealth of his well-organized small stores; the produce and trade of his small garden, along with the li upon li of formally-unclaimed land that he has learned to know by heart. Wen Ning will find—he hopes—that he is ready, or almost ready, to make something new that someone else needs and did not ask for.

Or, if he has reason to do so, on anyone’s behalf, Wen Ning will gather up his courage in both hands, along with the unflinching faith of a heart that no longer beats; and he will ask someone else to help him, too.

They are well made, Wen Ning thinks, when he is done making the shoes. The last stitches and tugs of cord take the longest. He looks at them, as he rests his numb hands on his thighs. His fingers have exhausted the talisman he used to give them just enough sensitivity for small stitches. The sun has reached its zenith, and pitches down. Still bright, but leaning towards sunset, and a world of something like rest.

He may have done better than he knows, Wen Ning thinks, examining the shoes. Maybe there is an unseen flaw, an unknown error, and they will break sooner than he hopes. But, then, maybe they will not wear down so soon. Maybe the shoes will last long enough to be handed down to another younger child, in a year or so. It could be that he has done enough to help one child today, and then to help another child tomorrow.

Let it be so, Wen Ning thinks—almost in prayer, yet without the intention of surrender. Let there be another, and another, who will not squash feet in mud infested with invisibly tiny worms, or drive a heel down on a sharp thorn to make a festering puncture, or pierce the tender place between toes on a poison-furred resentful caterpillar, or burn the arch of the foot walking on a misplaced coal from the hearth. Or fall down crying amid a crowd of strangers, blistered sore from the weariness of walking far from home. Let it be enough for that.

He thinks that this idea, this possibility, seems like an additional healing, without ever touching or seeing the patient who might benefit. Many children have befriended him, to his endless bemusement. But even the ones who hide from his grim face, Wen Ning would like to protect from the world. If he saves enough lives he never knows about, he will not know that the scales have balanced and tilted, that he is a better doctor than killer.

He does not need to know. It is not for his own satisfaction or peace that he makes child-sized grass shoes.

With the shoes in hand, Wen Ning walks to the forest shrine of an unnamed god. He travels along a creek path that leads further away from Caiyi than his cottage without ascending towards Cloud Recesses. In a dark grove of pines, Wen Ning finds a ceremonial gate almost entirely covered in vines, and a building of old gray stone with carvings softened by moss.

There is an altar within the shrine. It is generally laden with fresh flowers and fruit in season, as it has been for generations. There is no priest in residence and there has not been in any living individual’s memory. Local families in need of traditions that bring good fortune have longer memories than that, though. They will teach newcomers by example, if they are willing to learn. Wen Ning sweeps the shrine at times, now. In recent years, there has been little else out of order besides the litter of leaves and twigs.

Also, the shrine smells of sandalwood incense, lit once each day by a Lan junior making the shichen-long trip down the mountain, as an assigned task. Wen Ning thinks that this is excessive, but he understands the impulse behind that observance. There are many people that he thinks of every day, too.

It is true that the rooms behind this particular shrine have not sheltered a priest, as such, in a long time. But at one time, Lan Wangji healed Wen Ning, here, after a night of resentment gone shatteringly wrong. Here, Wen Ning was given something unexpected and extraordinary. Here, he reconciled portions of his past with the present care of Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian both. Therefore, here, Wen Ning chooses to give.

Wen Ning had spoken at some length, yesterday, with the older sibling of the little one with the blistered foot, after giving requested medical aid. He asked the youth to find a certain flower; and to bring it to this shrine, on this day, at this shichen.

The flower that Wen Ning named is a red-blossoming weed that comes up after fire. It is almost out of season, now, but it can be found, with diligence. Wen Ning will not rely solely on that request, of course. If he needs to think of another way to deliver this gift, ill-omened and well-intended, then he will.

As he waits and watches the path, however, Wen Ning thinks that he has faith in the determination of the youth who called to him—called his name, his title, his half-stolen and half-shared blessing, Wen-daifu—across the market square in Caiyi, without hesitation. There was courage and quick wit there, to choose who to trust at once, when the little one sat down in the street, crying.

Outside the shrine, under the great pines that block most rain, are small stone tables. In carving style, these tables exactly mimic the altar within the shrine. In the nature of the burdens placed upon these tables, they are an inverse of sorts, a match as a hand is a match to a foot.

Outside the shrine, it is known that people can offer, not to the god, but to each other. There people can leave things that they do not require, and take away what they need. The things sacrificed on the altar within are considered to have been taken up in offering, even as their physical remains crumble. These things outside are considered the blessings of the forest god, made freely available, and if openly taken away, there are no questions asked as to where they came from.

Someone comes up the path, after all, when the fireflies are coming out. While the youth goes inside with a handful of red flowers, Wen Ning ghosts across the clearing. He sets the shoes down in a prominent spot. Then he melts back into the woods.

He sees the older child come out, and pause to look at the offering tables.

The scan of the available options is hesitant, uncomfortable, and reflexive. The youth looks as one does who knows that their needs are larger than can be considered convenient, and frequently awkward for those around them. Wen Ning feels a pang of sympathy.

Wen Ning sees the moment that the young person’s gaze snags on the shoes.

Wen Ning feels something very much like warmth, observing the way that the youth picks the shoes up and cradles them to a skinny chest.

Then Wen Ning is brought almost to tears—Wen Ning can cry again, now, on rare occasion—when he sees this brave bright child look thoughtful; and gaze around, searchingly, at the lengthening shadows of the woods; and without finding him, still, smile hesitantly and bow in wordless acknowledgement.

Wen Ning, despite his marked differences from most people, is more comfortable nowadays than he once was, in making conversation. But there are things that do not need to be said. There is a place for a comfortable silence, an understanding rather than an elision, a gap of grace.

In what is done without an excess of speech, one may hold, unspoken and understood, certain words: such as I am sorry and there is no need for apology; or, as now, I give this gladly and freely, and thank you.