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Chapter Text

“I want to take someone back to Gusu,” Lan Wangji said, staring off into the distance. “And…hide them somewhere.”

A pause.

“But…they are unwilling.”

Lan Qiren came to an abrupt halt.

He hadn’t meant to overhear that.

He wasn’t even supposed to be at Jinlin Tower right now, much less accidentally eavesdropping on his nephews having a private discussion. Lan Wangji was quiet by nature, introverted; he spoke rarely, and usually only to his brother – even with Lan Qiren, he tended more towards silence, although Lan Qiren sometimes flattered himself to think that it was a comfortable silence, a silence of mutual understanding, as comforting to Lan Wangji as it was to him.

But it was certain that Lan Wangji had not ever said such words as these to him before.

Perhaps those words would seem tepid and weak to any other ear. But to Lan Qiren, who knew better than most what life Lan Wangji had lived, what terrible secrets their clan had, the fears they all harbored as a result, each of them suspicious of their own hearts and yet wholly irresistibly subject to them…to him, those words were a blazing declaration of passion. Of a passion as great as a flood and just as destructive, for it would permit nothing to stand before it or get in its way.

Nothing, and no one.

Lan Qiren found that, without knowing it, he had lifted his hand to his mouth, pressing down tightly on his lips as if to contain the surge of bile that had risen up the back of his throat.

Take someone back. Hide them away.

They are unwilling.

Lan Qiren stumbled backwards, pressing his back against the wall, seeking stability. Against his will, a stream of images filled his mind like a torrent: his brother, his brother’s wife He Kexin, the distant look in his brother’s eyes as he chased fruitlessly after her, the blood that had so artfully splattered her cheek after her murder – the blood of their teacher, a relative to both his brother and himself, kin, meant to be honored and respected, not disdained – and then the aftermath, his brother making his bows with her before she had even washed that blood away, unclean, their entire marriage an abomination that could only be absolved by sacrifice, endless sacrifice, not only his brother’s, but his own. His life, his dreams, all sacrificed, all ruined, and for what?

All so that his brother could take someone back, hide them away, and never mind what He Kexin had to say about it, unwilling as she had been. She had been unwilling from the beginning and she had remained so, had remained unwilling all those years. He’d known it as no other had; she had been taking her grief, her anger, her unwillingness out on Lan Qiren and he couldn’t even complain, being as he was the only one she saw. They had both been trapped into a situation neither had wanted, unwilling prisoner and unwilling jailor –

He was going to be sick.

Lan Qiren was not supposed to be here in the first place. He had only come to Jinlin Tower on a whim; he was supposed to be resting. He had been very badly injured in the Wen attack on the Cloud Recesses, but despite that he had risen from his sickbed, determined to keep going – he’d devoted himself to maintaining his sect, whether in recovering what they could or keeping them together or leading them on the battlefield. He had done everything he could, given everything of himself to his sect the way he always had, and now that the war was over, he finally had time to properly recuperate. The sect elders, and Lan Xichen in his role as the new sect leader, had given him leave to enter voluntary seclusion, which would allow him time to center himself in peace and tranquility, to spend all his time in contemplation and music and reading, all manner of quiet joyful things that he couldn’t otherwise find the opportunity to do, beset as he was by the endless requirements of duty. Lan Qiren had packed up all he had needed and retreated, quite happily, to one of the seclusion houses.

He'd barely had the chance to finish settling down before there was a knock on the door.

Technically speaking, it hadn’t been anything worth disturbing his seclusion over, but Lan Qiren wouldn’t have missed it for the world – his favorite cousin, Lan Yueheng, and his wife had been expecting a very unexpected youngest child who had decided to make an equally unexpectedly early appearance into the world, coming a full month before he was due, a distinct contrast to all six of his much older siblings who had arrived on time or late. Poor Lan Yueheng had been terrified that that had meant something was wrong, as if his wife wasn’t already thoroughly practiced in the art of bearing healthy living children, and naturally Lan Qiren had rushed over at once to share his burdens and his worries, as well as to offer his assistance with this birth as he had with all the others.

That being said, once Lan Qiren had helped with the delivery (and nearly broken his hand in the process, as was traditional, with both Zhang Xin and Lan Yueheng clinging onto him like those legendary constricting snakes one read about in books, and only one of them with any real justification), he wasn’t exactly in the mood for quiet contemplation.

Perhaps more accurately, he generally used seclusion as unfettered time to do sustained work on music, and that wasn’t happening, not with fingers as bruised as his were now. Poor Lan Yueheng had been horrified when he’d realized the extent of the damage, even though it wasn’t his fault – it was Lan Qiren whose circulation was more impaired than it had been for those previous births, his health weaker and recuperation ability diminished. Lan Qiren had sought to assuage his cousin’s guilt (and escape his persistent apologies) by making up some excuse that he had a sudden desire to speak to his nephews, fleeing the Cloud Recesses and forcing Lan Yueheng to turn his attention back to little A-Shen, who in the future would be called Lan Jingyi if he lived long enough to earn that courtesy name, a little boy already loud enough to burst eardrums.

And so, because do not tell lies was a rule even if you only retroactively took action to make it true, Lan Qiren had come to Jinlin Tower.

He’d been searching for his nephews to let them know he had arrived, since obviously they had not reason to anticipate him, but before he’d had a chance to greet them, he’d heard –

Take someone back. Hide them away. They are unwilling.

In Lan Qiren’s ears, the words changed involuntarily to something else.

I will take her as my bride, his brother had once declared, eyes feverish and mad with passion that acknowledged and permitted no boundaries. She will live within the Cloud Recesses for the rest of her life as my wife, and I myself will enter seclusion to atone for my sin.

(I will take her, even though she is unwilling, and hide her away.)

How could Lan Wangji say such a thing?

How could he want such a thing?

Lan Qiren had tried, more than anything else, to raise his nephews to be upright and moral, to be righteous men who would know and obey their sect rules but to also think about them carefully, living up to the meaning rather than the mere word. He had been stern with them even when it had broken his heart, he had been meticulous in seeking to educate them, he had tried his utmost best to give them every advantage and assistance he could. He had wanted to teach them in such a way that would let them avoid their father’s terrible fate.

Had Lan Qiren so thoroughly failed in his task?

Had he really raised Lan Wangji to be the sort of person who would want…that? To be happy with the thought of imprisoning another person against their will, locking them away from sunlight and freedom, dying by inches every day, turning the serenity of the Cloud Recesses into a hellish abyss of dreary boredom?

Was their entire bloodline truly so cursed that nothing could impede them from walking in the steps of their forefathers, footstep by footstep straight to their doom?

Lan Qiren was going to be sick.

Not just metaphorically. He was a cultivator, his mental state and his health inescapably intertwined; his qi was rioting inside of him, his entire being rebelling against what he had inadvertently overheard in ways that went beyond mere emotional distress and risked becoming an actual threat to his life. He needed to sit somewhere peaceful and focus on stabilizing himself – he needed to breathe.

He needed to find Lan Wangji and shout at him until his voice was gone and his throat was bleeding, to grab his beloved nephew by the collar and shake some sense into him in a way he’d never done before, to grip and hold onto him tightly until his bruised fingers cracked, the bone shattering, enduring any type of pain if it only meant keeping Lan Wangji safe from his own worst instincts.

He needed to stop this from happening.

Lan Qiren coughed, and tasted blood on his tongue.

He spat it out, splattering the wall in front of him, blood on gold. His eyes fell upon it, the gold in the wall shining in the sunlight that came in through the windows, momentarily blinding him, and the brightness of it served as a potent reminder that there was nothing Lan Qiren could do about the situation at this exact moment in time.

They were in Jinlin Tower, Jin Guangshan’s territory – the man might be useless in all sorts of ways, but he was the king viper in a pit full of poisonous creatures; he had a slimy, slippery way of arranging things to make them go to his political advantage, provided only that he wasn’t too drunk to implement his own schemes. If Lan Qiren went to scold Lan Wangji now, as he wished, in this place where every whisper could be overheard…

No, he couldn’t do that.

His Lan sect was still weak, in need of rebuilding; Lan Xichen had already agreed to accept Jin sect money to complete projects already started. If Lan Qiren acted out now, making a fuss or being unreasonable, it would make Lan Xichen’s work of reclaiming their sect’s dignity and standing harder. His nephews still needed him to be strong.

Lan Wangji hadn’t taken anyone back yet.

There was still time.

Lan Qiren straightened up by force of will, reaching out to wipe away the blood before anyone else saw it. Once that was done, he stiffly turned on his heel and went back out of Jinlin Tower, intent on flying back to the Cloud Recesses at once. He should have found his way to the Lan sect quarters and meditated there, recuperating. He’d only just arrived on what was already an ill-advised venture, already tired and weakened; he was in no condition to fly, much less such a long distance as would be required to get home – there was every chance he’d fall off his sword like a child just learning the art. But staying would mean speaking with his nephews, with Lan Wangji who had confessed such a thing and Lan Xichen who had not dissuaded him, and Lan Qiren couldn’t do that.

Not here.

He couldn’t just pretend not to have heard what he had heard, and yet he could not say anything about it…no, staying would be intolerable. Lan Qiren was already used to giving more of himself than he had to spare. Pushing himself to fly back to the Cloud Recesses, especially if he made sure to take some reasonable stops along the way, was to his eyes just be more of the same. He would make it back home to the Cloud Recesses, back to the place he’d lived his whole life and given his whole life to, and he’d wait for his nephews to return from Jinlin Tower – by the time they got back, he’d have thought of what he wanted to say to them and how he wanted to say it, whether he would lecture them or scold them or merely plead with them not to make their father’s mistake.

At the Cloud Recesses, he would be backed by the full might of his sect, the authority of an elder. He would not need to worry about his nephews losing face or his sect being damaged; he would be free to speak his mind, at length, without impediment. His nephews would be in a place where they were accustomed to listening to him. They would listen to him.

Lan Wangji would listen to him.

Lan Qiren ignored the somewhat confused door guard at Jinlin Tower, who had welcomed him not long before, and got on his sword, flying away as quickly as he could. His mind was preoccupied with the thoughts of what he would do when he got home, the preparations he would make, what he would say, what he needed to do – he had to find out everything that had happened during the war, while Lan Wangji was away from his side. He hadn’t pressed too hard before, not wanting to cause either of his nephews pain; he’d trusted them. He’d believed in them, believed in himself, believed that he’d raised them well, that they wouldn’t make those most terrible of mistakes…the whole war, he’d cared for nothing but that they’d live and live well, and they had. Neither was injured, neither was mutilated, and if they had scars upon their souls, well, who didn’t in wartime? It would be cruel to press on those wounds by asking too many questions, so he hadn’t forced them to speak, only made sure they knew that he was available in the event that they wished to share their thoughts with him.

He’d deceived himself.

Lan Qiren had remembered to worry about the harm his nephews might face from the sword, but forgot to worry about the harm that could come from their own hearts. It was from their hearts that his family faced the greatest risk – their hearts, that would lead them inexorably down the path of destruction –

No.

Lan Qiren would not let Lan Wangji destroy himself the way his father had.

He would fix this. He had to. He had to.

He would speak with Lan Wangji, he’d explain…

Ah, but he was deceiving himself once more, wasn’t he?

Lan Wangji had barely listened to Lan Qiren’s admonitions when he was six, or at least he didn’t when he disagreed with them; merely getting him to stop biting people had been a struggle worthy of epic poetry. How much more stubborn would Lan Wangji be now, full grown, an adult, a man – not just that, but a man in love? And not just in love, but loving the way the Lan always did, blind and reckless and never-ending?

No, Lan Wangji wouldn’t listen.  

Just like his father hadn’t listened.

No – that was cruel, and incorrect. Lan Qiren’s brother had ignored Lan Qiren’s entreaties and advice because he had disdained him, their relationship as brothers so thin as to be nearly nonexistent, but Lan Wangji was different. Lan Wangji would listen. He would nod and he would promise to be obedient, because he loved his uncle. He might even be obedient, in his own way, but he wouldn’t…stop loving them, whoever it was.

He’d just love them quietly, distantly, but no less passionate for his silence.

And if something then happened –

I want to take them away, but they are unwilling.

Lan Qiren shuddered to think of it.

No, Lan Qiren had to act before anything that happened. He had to find out who it was that Lan Wangji loved so unstintingly. He had to figure out who it was, and –

He didn’t even remember falling.

Chapter Text

“I think he’s coming around,” a familiar voice was saying when Lan Qiren slowly returned to consciousness. “Are you really sure it’s necessary –”

“Are you doubting my competence, Sect Leader?”

“…of course not, Auntie Xinwei. Forgive me, Auntie Xinwei.”

Lan Qiren’s eyelids felt impossibly heavy, but he hastily gathered up the willpower to push them open immediately regardless – he recognized those voices, and no one in their right mind wanted to be the patient of Nie Xinwei, that vicious old curmudgeon. She was the close cousin and adopted sister of the Nie sect leader two times back, Nie Mingjue’s grandfather; her rank and (for the Nie main line) extraordinary old age having since made her all but untouchable within her sect, in the few times she was there rather than traveling around as she usually was, and her skill with a saber served the same purpose outside of it.

She was not noted for her talent for the medical arts, despite her enthusiasm for them.

Lan Qiren managed to open his eyes and promptly wheezed in alarm when he saw the especially long needle she was waving around enthusiastically, completely ignoring her grand-nephew’s earnest and thoroughly unsuccessful attempts to sneakily situate himself in between her and her would-be victim.

“See, he’s awake!” Nie Mingjue proclaimed, sounding deeply relieved. “Auntie Xinwei, there’s no need for anything more, I don’t think.”

Nie Xinwei scowled. “Is he? I still think –”

Lan Qiren managed to lift a hand and wave. It took all the strength he had and more, but it was worth it. That was a very long needle.

“Oh, damn, of course he is,” she growled. “Waking up now all on his own - ruining my fun, just like you always do..! Feh, fine, have it your way.”

She marched off with her nose in the air.

Nie Mingjue and Lan Qiren exhaled with relief at the same time.

“Sect Leader – ah, no, Teacher Lan,” Nie Mingjue said, turning back to him. He looked concerned. “Are you all right? You’d been unconscious for over a day, nearly two. What happened?”

It was a good question. Lan Qiren searched his memory – hide them away, bile, panic, flight –

Ah.

He’d actually fallen off his sword, then.

How horribly embarrassing. He’d allowed his frenzied desire to escape Jinlin Tower and awkward conversations with his nephews to overcome his good sense, despite all the rules that counseled being thoughtful and considerate. He’d known, hadn’t he, that he shouldn’t fly with his qi as disordered as it was, but he’d done it anyway. It was amazing that he hadn’t broken his neck in the process.

“How did you encounter me?” Lan Qiren asked instead of explaining. He couldn’t lose the sect face by admitting the truth, and Nie Mingjue was polite enough that he wouldn’t make a fuss if Lan Qiren obliquely declined to tell him. “Weren’t you at Jinlin Tower?”

Nie Mingjue shook his head in denial. “We were on our way there, but hadn’t yet arrived when we came across you,” he said, accepting the change in subject as gracefully as Lan Qiren had expected, and just as gracefully omitting to mention in what shape they’d found him. Lan Qiren hoped it hadn’t been anything too unsightly. “We were – ah – a little delayed –”

In other words, Nie Mingjue had had no desire to attend another showy Jin sect banquet and had been dragging his heels the whole way there. It wasn’t the most mature way to deal with it, but Lan Qiren could hardly hold it against Nie Mingjue, especially since his tardiness had ultimately turned out to be to Lan Qiren’s personal benefit. Given the timing, if Nie Mingjue hadn’t been so slow, he wouldn’t have been in the right place to find Lan Qiren after he’d fallen, and then where would Lan Qiren be?

Nie Mingjue explained what had happened: a scout of the Nie sect had spotted a flash of white and found Lan Qiren lying prone on the ground, his sword beside him – at least he hadn’t been stuck in a tree – and they had of course stopped at once to tend to him. Lan Qiren had been lucky in his fall, gaining any number of bruises and minor cuts but managing not to break either his neck or any bones; he was after all still a cultivator, and whatever the state of his meridians, he was still sturdier than a comparable mortal. The main thing that had been wrong with him had been his disordered qi, but in that, too, he had been lucky, with Nie Mingjue, who as a scion of the main Nie clan had considerable expertise in matters of unruly qi, providing aid in the first instance himself – he’d been greatly alarmed by Lan Qiren’s state, as might be expected, but after the initial aid there was really nothing to be done that would help more than simply allowing Lan Qiren to rest and heal.

Accordingly, once Lan Qiren had been stabilized, Nie Mingjue had left his sect in the mountains to guard Lan Qiren and gone on to Jinlin Tower by himself, knowing that his absence would be seen as a slight by Lanling Jin and would undoubtedly used against him no matter how good the reason behind it might be. He had attended a single dinner, and then hastily used an excuse to leave without talking any further to anyone, not even his newly minted sworn brothers.

Upon hearing that, Lan Qiren closed his eyes and suppressed a sigh.

To act in such a way, Nie Mingjue must have worried that giving away Lan Qiren’s presence and what had happened to him would foil something the Lan sect had planned – not an unreasonable conclusion, given that as far as anyone knew, Lan Qiren was supposed to be back at the Cloud Recesses. Poor Nie Mingjue! He was so ill-suited to politics. He was too straightforward to engage in schemes himself, and made for a poor co-conspirator, no matter how hard he tried to be obliging – even this one time where he genuinely tried to help, there wasn’t even a plot to actually protect!

“Were you flying out because of the incident?” Nie Mingjue asked.

Lan Qiren tore himself out of his musings. “Incident?” he asked, frowning. “What incident?”

The explanation that followed was rather extraordinary.

Apparently, at some point after (during?) the time Lan Qiren had left Jinlin Tower, there had been a rather heated confrontation: Wei Wuxian had seemingly allowed his demonic cultivation to go to his head, or so the rumors said – he’d marched right up and challenged Jin Zixun and Jin Guangshan in their own dining hall, demanding to know about the fate of some remaining Wen sect cultivators that the Jin sect had done something or another with; Lan Qiren thought he’d heard something about them being resettled under permanent guard or something, a display of mercy and righteousness on the part of the Jin, but perhaps not. Wei Wuxian had apparently followed up that stunt by going to the Qiongqi Path and murdering the guards the Jin sect had left to watch over the Wen sect, then spiriting the remaining sect members away to who-knew-where.

“My understanding is that they’ve gone to ground in the Yiling Burial Mounds,” Nie Mingjue concluded, and Lan Qiren shook his head, appalled at the very idea. It made sense, he supposed – a demonic cultivator would naturally be drawn to a place with powerful resentful energy – but normal cultivators, normal people…it couldn’t be very healthy. “Had you really not heard before you left? I’d thought that was why you were flying back in such a hurry, Teacher Lan, what with Wangji and all.”

Lan Qiren paused.

Nie Mingjue had been the overall general of the Sunshot Campaign. Along with being the master of Heijan, a general on the frontline, he had coordinated with all the other sect leaders to ensure that they were all acting as one, maximizing their effectiveness against the Wen sect – Lan Xichen, serving as a courier, had worked with him often.

Lan Wangi had as well.

At this point, one could argue that Nie Mingjue, who had also known both boys in their youth as well, was more familiar with Lan Wangji’s current siutation than Lan Qiren.

“What about Wangji?” he asked cautiously, suddenly alert. “What does he have to do with Wei Wuxian’s behavior?”

Nie Mingjue frowned, seeming puzzled. “Are they not on good terms? I’d heard rumors that they were at odds, and in truth they were always arguing, though I never thought it seemed especially malicious on Wangji’s side…strange. I thought I’d been proven right when Wangji spoke on Wei Wuxian’s behalf during the discussion after the incident.”

A chill ran down Lan Qiren’s spine. “He did?”

“Yes, several times. It was rather unexpected – you know best how Wangji is, always preferring silence. It’s not like him to engage in a battle of words, much less unprompted and on behalf of a man he’s said to despise.”

Said to despise…

Oh, Lan Qiren had been a fool through and through. The opposite of love was indifference, not dislike. Hatred was a seething emotion, full of passion – for their Lan sect, it wouldn’t be hard for that overwhelming ardor to be read the wrong way by those who were not familiar with their mannerisms.

And hadn’t Lan Wangji’s father, Lan Qiren’s brother, fallen for a murderer as well?

No. Lan Qiren refused to allow this to happen again. He refused.

Not again.

“– naturally we must act as righteousness demands,” Nie Mingjue was saying, having continued talking while Lan Qiren was lost in his thoughts. “Jiang Wanyin has said he will handle the matter, though I imagine it’ll take him a little while to get back to his sect and gather up his disciples, diminished as the Jiang sect still is…he’ll either have to force an apology from Wei Wuxian and make concessions, or else eject him from the sect, I think. Ah, it’s a pity – Sect Leader Jin put his back to the corner, implying all sorts of things, and some of them clearly untrue. A foul business.”

He shook his head.

“Really, it makes you wonder if there was something to those few that say that Wei Wuxian thought he was acting in pursuit of justice. Of course, I’d be more inclined to trust his judgment if he hadn’t gone haring off to slaughter cultivators on behalf of a bunch of murderous Wen-dogs, of all people –”

“I need to go,” Lan Qiren said abruptly.

Nie Mingjue blinked at him, then frowned when he realized Lan Qiren meant it. “You mean to travel now? As you are? But Teacher Lan, your health..!”

“It’s simply poor, chronically so, and I’ve already had nearly two days of rest to recover,” Lan Qiren said firmly. “Not to mention your sect’s kind assistance in stabilizing my qi after a near deviation, a subject in which your sect has no little amount of expertise. And of course for…ah…”

“Keeping Auntie Xinwei away from you?” Nie Mingjue suggested, looking wry – he knew what his battleax of a great-aunt was like. “If you’re sure, Teacher Lan. Can we at least provide you with an escort?”

“Your kind offer is appreciated, but I think it would be better if you did not.”

Nie Mingjue might be poor at scheming, but he had been attending discussion conferences alongside Lan Qiren for years and years; he knew what he should know, and he knew what he shouldn’t, either. His eyebrows shot straight up, but after a moment he nodded, signaling that he understood Lan Qiren’s meaning: that it would be better for his sect if the cultivation world were not aware that he had any inkling of what Lan Qiren meant to do, and that such a thing was easier to swear to if it were true.

Do not tell lies didn’t mean be an idiot, after all.

Nie Mingjue gave Lan Qiren face and did not ask another time if he was sure he wanted to go. Instead, he turned to practicalities and provided Lan Qiren with some elixirs to help keep his qi steady and some food to strengthen him as he went. He also, in the moment before Lan Qiren left the tent, looked into the air above his head and, seemingly aimlessly, said in a low voice, “If you need support, I will stand behind you.”

Lan Qiren felt a bit of warmth seep in through the cold shock that still enveloped him.

“Don’t make such promises before you know what you’re committing to,” he scolded, his voice equally quiet. “You could be pulled into all sorts of things, things you don’t want.”

Nie Mingjue shrugged carelessly. “I’m willing to gamble if the other player is you, Teacher Lan. Good luck.”

Lan Qiren set out once more.

This time he paid more attention to his flying, now that he was no longer in a blind panic, but the majority of his attention remained firmly turned inwards. The circumstances being what they were – it would have been better if he’d managed to intervene earlier, of course, but he hadn’t known enough at the time. He would need to tackle things as they were, not as he might wish they’d be.

Wei Wuxian…

Lan Qiren remembered him as an impulsive and arrogant boy, too prone to quick action and to thinking he was the only one who knew what was going on and what ought to be done, full of wild ideas about new things, up to and including unorthodox methods. It was really no wonder that out of all of Lan Qiren’s former students, he had been the one to develop a new cultivation technique…unfortunately it was demonic cultivation, but again, even that wasn’t too surprising given what Lan Qiren knew of him. But nothing of what Lan Qiren remembered suggested that he was fundamentally bad. On the contrary, his impression, however begrudging, had been that Wei Wuxian had always sought, in his own way, to do the right thing. Could demonic cultivation really have driven him mad so quickly?

It seemed unlikely.

Nie Mingjue had said that Jin Guangshan was using Wei Wuxian’s reckless actions to push Jiang Cheng into a corner. That meant two things: first, that the righteous Chifeng-zun did not necessarily believe that Wei Wuxian had acted wrongly, a significant statement in itself given the involvement of the Wen sect that Nie Mingjue hated like a raging fire, and secondly, that Jin Guangshan was probably not-so-subtly demanding recompense for the loss of his guards while cloaking himself in the mantle of justice – though given the Jiang sect’s current situation, he couldn’t possibly be trying for something like trade agreements or cultivation treasures; he’d be seen as bullying the weak. It wasn’t as if the Jiang sect even had any particularly fine treasures left to be forced to hand over…

Lan Qiren frowned, hand instinctively rising up to stroke his beard.

He recalled now that Lan Xichen had reported on Jin Guangshan making a few noises about Wei Wuxian being too young and impulsive to have sole custody over the Stygian Tiger Seal, though Lan Qiren had at the time dismissed such rumors as nonsense – of course the creator had the right to his creation; it wasn’t as though they were thieves that went to war over any given trinket. The Jiang sect would kick up a stink if anyone tried to steal one of their only mainstays out from under them, and every small sect, thinking of the sanctity of their own precious treasures, would support them…but that protection only applied if Wei Wuxian were part of the Jiang sect, which he might very well not be if he refused to apologize for his actions.

Which, knowing his character, was likely.

If Jiang Cheng couldn’t force Wei Wuxian to apologize, he could only expel him from his sect – no one could keep a disciple that would not listen under such circumstances. That would be deemed punishment enough, allowing Jiang Cheng to keep anyone from going after Wei Wuxian over the immediate matter, but it would leave Wei Wuxian defenseless in the face of any future controversy. Wei Wuxian was young and impulsive, arrogant and self-assured in his genius, and for all his many faults Jin Guangshan was both vicious and cunning, skilled in schemes; in seeking to protect his shixiong, Jiang Cheng would in fact be playing into his hands – worse, he’d know all the while that that was what was happening, and there would still be nothing he could do to stop it.

Wei Wuxian’s actions might be wrong and they might not be wrong, that judgment remained to be made, but they were certainly illicit, and Jin Guangshan was not wrong in calling for justice as a result of them. Any hope there might have been in finding an honorable way out of the dilemma had long been extinguished. Even if there had been some misconduct that had so incited Wei Wuxian, it was the word of the Jin sect against his, and there was no hope that Wei Wuxian could win or even match such a battle of reputations, tainted as he was by his unorthodox cultivation style and his insistence on continuing it even in times of peace.

In short, regardless of the facts, Wei Wuxian’s actions, or at least the way he had gone about them, were bad enough that anyone who stood up for him at this moment would have their honor tarnished alongside his. Normally, that would be Jiang Cheng, but Jiang Cheng was in a very precarious position at the moment. He was the sect leader of a sect that needed rebuilding; with only a single blood sister, of marriageable age and likely to be married out to secure an alliance as soon as possible, it was not going too far to say that Jiang Cheng’s face was the Jiang sect’s face. Even if he wanted to cast aside all other concerns and defend Wei Wuxian to the end, he couldn’t – to do so would disgrace his sect, throwing their reputation into the mud. His subsidiary sects and even his own disciples would turn away from him, their morale damaged, and start to seek other patrons, and once they went, it would turn into a chain reaction, one departure leading to another, a lack of funds, a lack of respect…

His barely revived sect would begin to collapse from the inside.

No, Jiang Cheng’s hands were very well tied. He really was backed into a corner.

But Lan Qiren…

Lan Qiren had a different set of considerations.

Chapter Text

Lan Qiren landed on the ground near the Yiling Burial Mounds, foul place that it was, and sheathed his sword, starting to walk up the mountain and looking around to see if he could spot any sign of life.

At first he wondered if he’d been mistaken – if the information Nie Mingjue had heard was wrong – but a few moments later he saw them.

They were a sorry looking lot. Old men and women, for the most part, and one old grandmother that was holding a small child in her arms; it was hardly the fearsome bunch of defeated Wen sect cultivators that Nie Mingjue’s recitation had made them out to be. Though Lan Qiren supposed that Nie Mingjue hadn’t seen them with his own eyes, which meant it was probably Jin Guangshan that had misrepresented the identity of those Wei Wuxian had sought to help. Furthermore, judging by their poor condition, it probably really had been a genuine attempt to help the miserable.

Not that it really mattered as much as it really should, given that their surname was Wen.

Some things were inevitably difficult. Lan Qiren prided himself on being equitable, but he knew that he would be a lot more sympathetic to the plight of a grandmother with a small child in arms if he didn’t so viscerally remember the sight of a similar grandmother and child, both clad all in white with a ribbon on their brows, being struck down by Wen sect swords without the slightest hint of remorse. Even assuming the best possible situation, these Wen sect members would have peacefully and without protest followed Wen Ruohan when he gambled to put himself and them on top of the world, obtaining the benefit of their surname without paying any of the costs; at worst, they had actively supported their sect in committing atrocities against so many others.

If the latter were the case, it would not be too much to demand that they pay with their lives, one and all, and the entirety of the Wen sect surname eradicated from the earth. Even in the case of the former, it was not outside of the boundaries of justice for them to pay with their lives for Wen Ruohan’s crimes, harsh justice as it might be – the rules Lan Qiren loved counselled mercy, but mercy was not always appropriate. Yet despite that, no such order of eradication had been issued, not even by Nie Mingjue or Jiang Cheng, who were the most wronged. In fact, Lan Qiren was quite certain that Lan Xichen had told him that Jin Guangyao, his new sworn brother, had advocated that the remaining Wen sect members be left alive, and Jin Guangshan had, with some additional pressure brought by Lan Xichen himself, agreed to resettle them, giving them the chance to continue to pursue a livelihood, albeit under guard…

Though – that had been what Jin Guangshan had said he’d done.

A few say that Wei Wuxian thought was acting in pursuit of justice, Nie Mingjue had said. And also: Lan Wangji spoke on his behalf.

Do not make assumptions about others. Do not be haughty and complacent.

Lan Qiren exhaled hard through his nose.

He did not want to deal with the Wen sect, visions of red-and-white robes setting his home alight still a regular feature of his nightmares. But still less did he like the idea of what might happen if no one stood up for Wei Wuxian and the Wen sect remnants he’d defended for inexplicable reasons – no one, that was, except Lan Wangji. Even if his nephew could be deterred from following through with such an act immediately, his heart had been given, given irrevocably, and he would not be able to stay away forever. Once he did, he would find his heart on Wei Wuxian’s side of the matter, not Jin Guangshan’s, and from there it followed that Lan Wangji would support Wei Wuxian, and with Wei Wuxian these remaining Wen. That meant that no matter what, the Lan sect would need to deal with this issue eventually.

Even if Wei Wuxian survived being expelled from the Jiang sect, even if he set up his own sect made up of himself and these few remaining Wen…ugh, would Lan Wangji one day maybe choose to move here? To this filthy pit of resentful energy, where the very dust beneath your feet was made of ashes and corpse dust?

If that was what it took, if it meant being with his beloved – yes, he would do it.

Unacceptable.

Still less acceptable was what might happen if Wei Wuxian were not able to protect himself. Would Lan Wangji stand up against all the world for his love, just as his father had? If Wei Wuxian made himself an enemy of all the cultivation world, such that even the Lan sect with all its authority might not be able to help, might not be able to hide away the crime the way they had for He Kexin…

Lan Qiren shook his head firmly to dispel his thoughts.

“Wei Wuxian,” he called, and the myriad of dusty, travel-worn figures in front of him abruptly noticed him, quailing away from him as if he were some vicious ghost. Perhaps the little boy even thought he was one, with his white robes shining and untainted by the mortal dirt like a true immortal. “Wei-gongzi, are you there?”

He was.

Wei Wuxian strode out from the center of the group of Wen sect remnants, one of the two figures that were young and hale – the other was a woman familiar to Lan Qiren from discussion conferences past, Wen Ruohan’s prized ward Wen Qing, though she hung back, glancing anxiously at the cave that they had all been standing in front of, acting as though they’d hidden something there that she did not wish for Lan Qiren to see. Hale was perhaps not the correct word for her, tired and worn as she was, and still less did it describe Wei Wuxian, who upon closer inspection looked wretched. Lan Qiren hadn’t seen him since before the war had started, though he’d heard rumors, and his true appearance was even worse than the rumors had made out. His eyes were red-rimmed, cheeks hollow, his teeth bared in vicious scowl…

Was this really the man to whom Lan Wangji had lost his heart?

(Did none of Lan Qiren’s family have the slightest iota of good taste?)

“You’re not welcome here,” Wei Wuxian said coldly. He was twirling a black dizi, the famous Chenqing, in his fingers in a threatening sort of manner. “Go back now, Teacher Lan.”

“So you still remember that I’m your teacher,” Lan Qiren returned stiffly, his eyes narrowing in annoyance involuntarily. He’d never approved of insolence or impertinence. “Did you bow to me for nothing? A teacher for day, a father for a lifetime.”

Wei Wuxian laughed coldly. “Propriety suggests reciprocity,” he said mockingly, citing the Lan sect rule with rather irritating perfection. “It’s impolite not to reciprocate, isn’t it? If you dare to threaten to kill me, I will give the same back to you!”

“I’m not here to try to kill you –” Lan Qiren started to say, but Wei Wuxian was already lifting Chenqing to his lips, clearly not willing to listen to reason.

Lan Qiren scowled and gestured, summoning out his sword and sending a beam of Xinfei’s sword energy right above Wei Wuxian’s head, hoping to do enough to disrupt the resentful energy Wei Wuxian was summoning with Chenqing while also seeking to make clear that if he’d meant to actually hit him, he would have.

His efforts were to no avail. The resentful energy was disrupted, but Wei Wuxian merely sidestepped and tried again, the ground rumbling as hands began to reach out from the earth – this was the Burial Mounds, the final resting place of thousands or even tens of thousands; for a demonic cultivator, it was a place of great power, while an orthodox cultivator like Lan Qiren was at a severe disadvantage. There was a reason Wei Wuxian had retreated here, to Yiling, rather than try to take the Wen remnants somewhere reasonable.

Finer cultivators than Lan Qiren had ever been had faced up to Wei Wuxian’s demonic cultivation on far more favorable terms and failed to survive, and he himself was already unwell – his fingers and body bruised, qi unsettled, his never-quite-healed injury sapping his strength. If he wanted to win this exchange, if he even wanted to survive, he would need, somehow, to be better than all those who had come before, or at minimum cleverer.

Luckily, Wei Wuxian had chosen to wield Chenqing.

Lan Qiren had lost many duels in his life – but never in music alone.

He summoned out his guqin while Wei Wuxian was still fending off his sword Xinfei, and settled his hands on the strings, beginning to play, ignoring his aching fingers. The tune was upbeat and quick-paced, summoning the wind like blades, and Wei Wuxian was forced into a different tune himself, high pitched and shrill, trying to overcome Lan Qiren’s summoning with his own by force and doing a good job of it, the sound of his flute oppressively powerful; accordingly, the moment he changed melodies, Lan Qiren did as well, his tune changing to slow and funereal, each note of the guqin heavy with ponderous spiritual energy.

The melody itself was simple, and immediately recognizable: a funeral song that the people of Yunmeng played to try to encourage the deceased’s spirit to visit on the seventh day following the death.

It was a highly inauspicious song when used outside of funerals, naturally, and was virtually never used in duels of musical cultivation, or for that matter in duels at all. It was a night-hunting song at best, given that its main effect was to serve as an imprecise and imperfect means of trying to get an enemy creature’s attention and summon them towards you, with the hope of luring them into a trap. But even for that purpose the song was unpopular; it was too wide-ranging, risking disturbing settled graves at the same time as it attracted any risen dead. Those unfortunate features rendered it one of the few orthodox cultivation songs that were classified as being ‘near’ demonic cultivation.

Wei Wuixan choked in surprise to hear Lan Qiren playing it – and then choked again, coughing.

Just as Lan Qiren had intended.

He had noted it himself earlier. The nearest corpses to him were not the corpses that even now were trying to rise from the earth at Wei Wuxian’s brutal command, but rather those that rested beneath their feet: the entire Burial Mounds was a graveyard, where every step left a trail of ash and bone in its wake and the ground beneath them was as seeped in resentful energy as any angry ghost. In combination with the wind Lan Qiren had summoned up earlier, the corpse dust that flew into the air in response to his song abruptly became a dust storm.

And a dizi, unlike a guqin, required breath to play.

(There was a reason Lan Qiren had insisted that Lan Xichen learn to master the guqin as well as the xiao, even when it had become clear his elder nephew’s heart lay with the latter instrument.)

It wouldn’t take long for someone of Wei Wuxian’s cultivation level to recover, of course, and once he did Lan Qiren would have no chance whatsoever. So he took advantage of the dust storm and Wei Wuxian’s coughing fit to walk straight up to him, using one hand to play Calm to reverse the effects of the dust storm before it could reach any of the Wen remnants, who looked skinny enough to be blown away by the relatively mild force of the wind, while lifting his free hand up into the air.

The moment he reached Wei Wuxian, he smacked him right upside the head.

Just the way Lan Qiren would any other recalcitrant student who dared to act so insolently.

“Are you done?” he demanded, waving his guqin back into his qiankun pouch, as Wei Wuxian stared at him, wide-eyed. “I am not here to kill you! Would I have come here by myself if that were my goal? Do I look like such a fool?”

Wei Wuxian looked dazed. Whether it was him just realizing that Lan Qiren’s presence here made no sense at all, or perhaps Lan Qiren’s tap on the head knocking all his brains off-kilter, he was at least no longer actively trying to attack Lan Qiren any longer – which was a relief. Lan Qiren wasn’t sure how much more he’d be able to take.

“Greetings to Sect Leader Lan,” Wen Qing said, taking the opportunity to step forward from the gaggle of Wen sect members. She saluted politely.

Lan Qiren waved it off, uncomfortable and unwilling to accept her salute. “I am no longer acting sect leader,” he said. “My nephew has taken the position, and is sect leader in truth.”

“Honored Teacher Lan,” she amended. “If you are not here to kill Wei-gongzi, then if you don’t mind me asking –why are you here?”

“To speak with him,” Lan Qiren said testily. “Unless he lost that ability along with what few wits he once possessed.”

“Hey!” Wei Wuxian protested.

“You have not covered yourself in glory as of late,” Lan Qiren informed him. “If you wish to be respected by others, act in way that inspires respect.”

Wei Wuxian’s eyes, which had gone back to looking almost normal for a moment, immediately narrowed. “Are you talking about the Jin sect guards?”

“Is the fact that you just attacked me without first determining my purpose insufficient?”

“Wei-gongzi,” Wen Qing said when Wei Wuxian looked as though he would have mulishly protested. “He has a point.”

She paused for a moment, then added, “He might…be here to help.”

She sounded rather dubious.

Lan Qiren huffed and shook out his sleeves. “Serve me tea,” he instructed Wei Wuxian, who looked minorly panicked at the thought. “We have matters to discuss.”

Chapter Text

After a highly concerned huddle, a fair bit of scurrying around, and a pointed observation that the definition of ‘tea’ could probably be construed very loosely under the circumstances that Lan Qiren addressed to a nearby tree as if (loudly) remarking to himself, tea was provided.

Lan Qiren chose for his own sake to pretend that the extremely sad-looking liquid had been produced from leaves smuggled from somewhere or another rather than scraped off the self-same (now suspiciously bare-looking) nearby tree. If things hadn’t been so fraught, he would have offered to pay to compensate them for it, but unfortunately the entire purpose of his asking for it had been to establish an appropriate host-guest relationship, which an offer to pay would have extinguished. As it was, Lan Qiren was, in a relatively short amount of time, seated on a rock in front of another rock, being served something that only vaguely resembled tea out of the roughest wooden cup (bowl? slightly indented branch?) he’d ever had the misfortune of handling.

At least the Wen remnants had the sense to withdraw to a distance to leave them some privacy after that.

“All right,” Wei Wuxian said, picking up his own cup of tea and looking at it like it was trying to kill him. Possibly it was – Lan Qiren had only barely touched it to his lips for form’s sake before being forced to hastily put it down. “You’ve gotten your tea, Teacher Lan; you’re officially our first guest. Now would you like to tell me the reason you’re here?”

“I am the elder here, and your teacher,” Lan Qiren reminded him. “I will ask the questions. Firstly: do you intend to apologize for your actions?”

Unsurprisingly, Wei Wuxian bristled. “To Lanling Jin? Most certainly not!”

“As I expected. Very well, do you understand what that means for you in regards to the Yunmeng Jiang sect?”

Wei Wuxian had started the conversation draped over his rock like a piece of discarded laundry, lounging like a sunbaked lizard, but he was now sitting up, his back painfully straight. 

“Why don’t you tell me?” he said flatly.

“I will only tell you what you must already know,” Lan Qiren said. “The Jiang sect doesn’t have the power to hold up the sky for you in its current state. Jiang Wanyin undoubtedly wishes to protect you, but doing so would lose his sect face at a time when he cannot afford it, and furthermore, Sect Leader Jin has already spread rumors that you do not respect his authority, forcing him into a corner when it comes to your behavior. If you will not apologize, you will no longer be able to be part of the Jiang sect.”

“I have already accepted that,” Wei Wuxian said stiffly. “I’m only going to drag him down anyway, doing what I do. It’ll be better for him and the Jiang sect to distance themselves from me and return to the wholly orthodox path.”

That confirmed Lan Qiren’s suspicion that Wei Wuxian had no intention of returning to the orthodox path in the future, despite the return to peace. “Even if doing so robs them of one of their most powerful disciples, and their sect leader of his right hand?”

Wei Wuxian pressed his lips together. “Even so. Jiang Cheng will be fine.”

Lan Qiren didn’t think Jiang Cheng would be inclined to agree, but it wasn’t like he’d have much choice in the matter. The poor man; trapped between Jin Guangshan and Wei Wuxian, each one more stubborn and prideful than the other, seemed an unpleasant place to be.

“If you are expelled from your sect, you will not see your shijie marry, if she marries who everyone expects she will, nor meet her children,” Lan Qiren said neutrally, and Wei Wuxian’s face lost color. “As someone cast out from the cultivation world, you will leave Jiang Wanyin without any support, in violation of your oath of loyalty to him and his sect, and you will put both yourself and the Wen that you have rescued into a bad position. Have you considered that? Without the protection of a sect, you will be vulnerable to the schemes of others.”

“Let them try!”

“As I did?” Lan Qiren asked waspishly, and Wei Wuxian spluttered, having clearly not expected the jab, even if they both knew who would have won the fight if Wei Wuxian had persisted even a few moments longer. “If your ultimate goal is to allow the Wen to live a few more months in poverty before being utterly eradicated when an army of cultivators attacks you over some invented pretext or another, by all means, continue as you are now.”

“I would be grateful to Teacher Lan if he were able to suggest some alternative,” Wei Wuxian said, nearly hissing, crossing his arms over his chest. “Or are you just here to scold me for no reason?”

Lan Qiren instinctively lifted up the cup of terrible tea to his lips to give himself a moment, then remembered he didn’t want to drink it, and put it down. He steeled himself regardless.

“Let us agree that the Jiang sect cannot hold you, and Jiang Wanyin lacks the strength to protect you,” he said. “And that anyone who associates their name with you will be shamed before the entire world.”

“Fine. We’re agreed. So what?”

Lan Qiren had not known what he was going to propose until only a little while before.

He had reviewed his options on his way here, and none of them had seemed especially appealing. His brother had married his murderess in order to save her, using his own good reputation to cover hers; for obvious reasons, that could not be the answer here – that was what he wished to prevent, for Wangji’s sake. A sworn brotherhood of some sort was equally out of the question; no one would have believed it, and the Venerated Triad’s own ceremony was too near a memory – it would have come across as an absurd parody, laughable as an obvious dodge, providing no real legitimacy. Lan Qiren had been at the end of his rope, trying to find a way to proceed, and he had very nearly despaired.

Luckily, Wei Wuxian had chosen to wield Chenqing, and in so doing had given Lan Qiren an idea.

“Become my personal disciple,” Lan Qiren said to Wei Wuxian, feeling the weight of what he said on his tongue, the bitter taste of it mixing in with the ash of the Burial Mounds. “And as your shifu, I will bear the shame of your actions for you.”

Wei Wuxian had been opening his mouth to say something rude, no doubt, except upon hearing Lan Qiren’s words he promptly forgot what he was going to say and just gaped at him.

“My qualifications are known to you,” Lan Qiren said, deciding to just carry on forward, hoping to get past this awful part of the conversation like an unstoppable battering ram. He’d never taken an actual personal disciple before, as opposed to a student, and it had been quite some years since he’d had to actually advertise his capabilities as a teacher rather than relying on his reputation to do it for him. He did not remember the experience especially fondly, but at least he had it to draw upon. “Naturally I will not try to teach you swordsmanship, which you have already mastered –”

And then abandoned in favor of demonic cultivation, of all things.

“– but I am highly skilled in musical cultivation, as you have seen. I could teach you a great deal in that respect, both in terms of utilization and other aspects such as composition and spell construction.”

He might not be able to help that much with the demonic aspects of what Wei Wuxian did, but music was music; the fact that Lan Qiren had been able to defeat, or at least stymie, Wei Wuxian in a musical duel earlier was evidence enough of that. Anyway, even if he couldn’t teach Wei Wuxian a single thing, that was very much not the point of the offer, as Wei Wuxian was surely intelligent enough to realize. Lan Qiren’s good reputation of so many years would be sufficient enough to be a reason to accept the arrangement – with music as a fig leaf to cover the absurdity of what he was proposing, he could serve as a shield against the world, providing the legitimacy and social backing necessary to keep Wei Wuxian and his little group safe.

“…why would you do that?” Wei Wuxian asked. His expression was blank with shock and confusion, seeming almost vacant with how little blood was left in his face. “Teacher Lan, if there’s some benefit you want of me, or even the Tiger Seal, that would be one thing, but taking me as your disciple will blacken your name forever!”

“You assume your reputation outweighs mine,” Lan Qiren said dryly, even though Wei Wuxian was probably right. Bad news travelled on swift wings before good had put the first step out the door. “At any rate, do not insult me. I do not want that disgusting artefact of yours in the slightest.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you not to be a pariah amongst the cultivation world,” Lan Qiren said, thinking of his nephew, his Wangji, his little A-Zhan with his too-big eyes and too-serious frown, his beloved second jade no less perfect than the first, imagining him withering away here in these terrible Burial Mounds for the sake of his beloved the way Lan Qiren’s tall and unshakable older brother had withered away in seclusion for his. “As my personal disciple, you will not need to foreswear the Jiang sect in order to survive this incident unscathed. My Lan sect is in a better position than yours. It will be able to protect me from the consequences of what has happened, given my status as an elder of the sect, and I will extend that protection to you, so that you will have me to rely on in the future, both now and in the future when the Jiang sect recovers enough to defend you without my assistance. Unlike Jiang Wanyin, I have dealt with Sect Leader Jin’s tricks for years; I know better how to manage his insinuations and implications. I will be able to protect you.”

In the face of this exceptional offer, Wei Wuixan looked…primarily skeptical.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “You understand, Teacher Lan, that I intend to continue to use demonic cultivation, right?”

“I’d already assumed you would.” It wasn’t as if Lan Qiren could offer him any incentive not to do it, if even the well-being of the Jiang sect was insufficient. Foreseeing Wei Wuxian’s next objection, he added, “And naturally, as your master, I would take responsibility for what you’ve done here as well. The Wen remnants would be granted farmland of their own near the Cloud Recesses, albeit under guard.”

“From what I understand, the Jin said something like that, too, but the Wens still ended up dying in droves in their work camps instead.”

Lan Qiren suppressed a sigh, thinking momentarily that life would have been easier if the Jin had simply demanded the Wen sect’s heads, with the children under the age of reason being appropriately adopted out…though given Wei Wuxian’s vehement defense of them now, that approach probably would have caused its own problems, and anyway such a dismissive and indifferent thought was unworthy and contrary to the rules. At any rate, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to believe Jin Guangshan had lied about such a basic thing, expecting that no one would ever check to see if he was living up to his own voluntarily made commitments.

But he, Lan Qiren, was not Jin Guangshan.

“Do not lie is a rule, at least for the Lan,” he said firmly. “I will personally guarantee that they will not be ill-treated, and will fulfil that promise to the fullest extent of my abilities.”

He could promise that much at least, even if it meant he had to scrape out every last copper coin he’d ever had in order to purchase the farmland for them himself, and then later defend them with his own sword.

Wei Wuxian seemed almost distressed not to be able to poke a hole in Lan Qiren’s generous offer.

“But…” He seemed to cast around. “What about Wen Ning?”

Lan Qiren arched his eyebrows in silent question.

He was taken to see an extremely rabid fierce corpse surrounded by talismans.

“I’m going to bring his consciousness back,” Wei Wuxian said defensively as Lan Qiren examined the set up from a reasonably safe distance. “He didn’t deserve what the Jin sect did to him.”

“Did he deserve what you did to him?” Lan Qiren asked with a frown, stroking his beard. “Even if you restore his consciousness, you’ve already stopped him from passing on peacefully.”

“I can’t change what I’ve done. I can only fix it.” Wei Wuxian moved one of the talismans, seemingly aimlessly. “I’m going to bring him back. If you’re not all right with that, I can’t accept your offer.”

Lan Qiren considered his family’s rules. He could think of quite a few that might apply, but in fairness, nothing actually ever said ‘don’t perform demonic experiments directed at restoring the consciousness of a fierce corpse’.

Of course, that was because no one had ever thought of it. The rules were meant to be lived up to as principles, not evaded with loopholes, obeyed to the spirit and not merely the letter…

Lan Qiren warred with himself for a moment, his love for his nephews against his love of the rules, but in the end there could only be one winner, and it was what he had expected all along.

“Have you considered mood stabilization in addition to manipulating his resentful energy into a cycle?” Lan Qiren asked, nodding at the talismans. “It’s very clever what you’ve done, replicating the sequence of cultivation within him to draw out the echoes of what he once was, but unlike spiritual energy, resentment is corrosive to the temperament. He might respond better if you introduced an element that would cleanse his mind and heart as the resentful energy flowed through him.”

Wei Wuxian was staring again, his jaw hanging slightly open like a fish.

Lan Qiren looked back at him defiantly. Even if the suggestion was nonsensical – he had a general understanding of talismans, same as any cultivator or perhaps a bit better given his role as a teacher, but he certainly didn’t understand demonic cultivation, and still less did he understand Wei Wuxian’s undoubtedly quixotic take on it – he trusted that his statement had made clear his position. No matter how Wei Wuxian tried to shock him or scare him, Lan Qiren was not going to be so easily deterred from the offer he had made.

“Tell me why,” Wei Wuxian finally said, pressing his hand to his forehead with a grimace as if to forestall a headache. “Tell me why. This is your reputation that you’re throwing into the dirt, going against the cultivation world and risking your own sect, and all for what, for a student you didn’t much like in the first place…? Teacher Lan, this is the rest of your life.”

The rest of your life.

That was far from the first time Lan Qiren had heard those words. Those very same words had been in the mouth of every friend of his that was true to him, from Lan Yueheng to Cangse Sanren to Lao Nie, when they had heard that his brother had permanently entered seclusion and Lan Qiren had been left to lead the Lan sect in his stead. Each and every one of them had known of his dreams to travel and make something of himself in the world; each and every one of them had been distressed on his behalf.

The rest of his life – that was what his sect had asked of him.

The rest of his life – his brother had taken it from not once, but twice, thrice over. He had made him Sect Leader Lan, and that was bad enough, but he had made him a parent, too, for Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji had had no one but Lan Qiren to raise them. And what was being a parent but another promise made for the rest of one’s life?

For Lan Qiren, the situation was brutally simple.

Lan Wangji had fallen in love with Wei Wuxian, and he would follow that love to wherever it led, no matter how dark or terrible the path – whether that path led him to evil or merely to despair, it didn’t matter. If there was something Lan Qiren could do to make that path easier for his nephew, if he could smooth his way, reduce his burden, then he would do it. He would do it, and do it gladly, no matter what the cost to himself.

The rest of his life?

He’d already given that away long ago.

“I am no longer sect leader of the Lan sect,” Lan Qiren said, choosing to elide the emotional in favor of the practical. “Taking on your shame will have no impact on my sect, but rather only on me personally. It can be dismissed as an elder’s folly, which must be respected due to filial piety – and I have my own reasons for wanting to make things easier for you than it could otherwise be. You are not wrong that I did not like you as a student, for although you are unquestionably a genius, you are also insolent and arrogant, impertinent and quite often annoying to be around. Despite all that, I am willing to make the offer. It is up to you if you wish to accept it.”

Wei Wuxian still looked uncertain. It was starting to be offensive.

But no – the rules said Do not be haughty and complacent. Lan Qiren’s offer was well meant and sincere, but it was not only the rest of his life that was at stake here; it was the rest of Wei Wuixan’s, too. A master and disciple relationship went both ways. If Lan Qiren had his good points, his talent at music and his good reputation and his ability to protect those Wei Wuxian wished to protect, he also had his bad points: he was a stern teacher, strict and overly rigid, with a foul temper; he would be a harsh master, for he did not know how else to be. He was overly literal in his interpretation of things, naturally lacking in sympathy or empathy for others, toneless and even boring in speech, pedantic and persnickety, dull. His health was poor, his cultivation damaged, and even his sect, with its orthodoxy and mild temperament, was not the sort to appeal to Wei Wuxian’s taste…

He was offering Wei Wuxian a way out of his current predicament, yes. But he shouldn’t flatter himself to think that refusal was impossible, or even unlikely. Wei Wuxian had his pride, after all, whether as a first-rate cultivator or as the inventor of his own path, however unorthodox – would he really accept a master now, at his age and stage of life?

“It’s not that I don’t see what you’re offering,” Wei Wuxian finally said, playing with the ragged edge of his sleeve. “When you weigh staying here on the Yiling Burial Mounds against farmland in Gusu, only an idiot would pick here. But…I have to ask…won’t you face opposition for doing this? From within your sect, I mean?”

“More than likely,” Lan Qiren said heavily. “But that is my business. I make the offer regardless.”

“But…even…”

“Even what?”

Wei Wuxian dawdled for a long moment, dragging his feet, and then finally blurted out: “But wouldn’t this make things awkward for Lan Zhan, since he hates me so much?”

Lan Qiren put his hand over his eyes in pain.

Chapter Text

“Wei Wuxian!”

Lan Qiren opened his eyes. He had been meditating, trying to stabilize his unstable qi further – rest and Nie Mingjue’s help had done what they could, but the damage he had suffered was quite real, and at this point, suppressing it was more a matter of willpower than of health. He had politely but firmly declined all offers by Wen Qing to examine him, no matter how avidly she looked at him with her doctor’s eyes, and it wasn’t even because her surname was Wen or because she’d once run a Supervisory Outpost designed to equip and supply the armies that slaughtered his family and sect members and students.

No, it was far simpler than that – until he had Wei Wuxian’s answer locked down, he could not afford to show weakness.

Lan Qiren stood carefully, stretching out the muscles that threatened to become locked up, nodded politely to the still unconscious corpse of Wen Ning, and headed out of the cave to greet Jiang Cheng, whose presence was impossible to hide.

Wei Wuxian had been calmed, or possibly cowed, by Lan Qiren’s offer – following his ridiculous suggestion regarding Lan Wangji, Lan Qiren had scolded him quite fiercely and for quite some time for taking serious matters lightly. Wei Wuxian had initially tried to protest that he’d been serious, but naturally that was absurd, so Lan Qiren ignored him. In the end, he’d insisted that he take the time to think the offer over in earnest, and Wei Wuxian had agreed. Admittedly, Lan Qiren suspected the agreement was mostly designed to get him to stop yelling, since Wei Wuxian hadn’t exactly spent a great deal of time in actual thought since then.

Though, interestingly, once he’d relaxed, Wei Wuxian had begun to act far more like the wild boy he’d been years before than the terrifying demonic cultivator he’d become. The cold arrogance and ruthless indifference he had displayed while attacking Lan Qiren was nowhere in sight as he mumbled his way through new thoughts on how to improve Wen Ning’s condition, nor when he got distracted in chasing little Wen Yuan from side to side, eventually catching him and tickling him triumphantly. Lan Qiren noted it to himself, and on the few instances Wei Wuxian had started reverting back to his demonic cultivator persona, he had made a point of interrupting in some way or another – saying something, throwing something at him, playing some short tune…as soon as Wei Wuxian was distracted, the darkness receded once more.

It was in full force now, though. Wei Wuxian’s face was cold as he regarded Jiang Cheng, even though all the world knew that they considered each other as close as blood brothers.

“- don’t need you to solve my problems,” he was saying, voice harsh, and Jiang Cheng looked fit to burst.

Lan Qiren could sympathize.

“Don’t you know what they’re saying about you?” Jiang Cheng demanded of Wei Wuxian. “About me? If you keep going like this –”

“He won’t,” Lan Qiren interjected, and had the pleasure of seeing two reactions: Jiang Cheng turning to gape at him, as shocked to see him there as he would have been if Lan Qiren had descended from the sky in the midst of a heavenly tribulation, and Wei Wuxian instinctively lifting up his hands to cover his head in anticipation of another smack.

(He’d deserved all the ones he’d gotten so far, every last one of them. Some of the things he said..!)

“Sect Leader Jiang,” Lan Qiren added, inclining his head politely, and Jiang Cheng’s manners took over before his conscious mind recovered, his mouth closing and his hands rising into a perfect salute.

“Teacher Lan,” Jiang Cheng said respectfully, and then paused, his brain clearly catching up. “What…are you doing here?”

“The same as you,” Lan Qiren said dryly. “Trying to fix matters before they have been broken irrevocably. I will tell you now, so that you do not waste time, that Wei Wuxian has already stated that he will not apologize, nor repent of his actions, and neither will he return the Wen to the Jin.”

“Wei Wuxian!” Jiang Cheng exclaimed, horrified, turning to stare at Wei Wuxian at once. “If you don’t, I won’t be able to protect you!”

“I know,” Wei Wuxian said, and having lost a little of the fearsome aura that so distanced him from the world as a result of Lan Qiren’s interruption, some true part of him leaked out: he looked only tired, and a little sad. “Ah, Jiang Cheng, it’s not like that, you know? I just – I can’t.”

“But –”

The moment passed, and the coldness returned. “Didn’t you hear me before? I don’t need you to protect me! If you just –”

“Naturally, if he will not apologize and you cannot force him to apologize, you will have both played into Sect Leader Jin’s trap,” Lan Qiren said mildly, keeping his voice low and steady and thereby attracting the attention of both men. “You will have no choice but to cast Wei Wuxian out of your sect, negotiating to ensure that that expulsion is sufficient to ensure his safety, but in doing so you will cut off his backing and leave him vulnerable to the next trick aimed at him.”

“So he should just apologize!” Jiang Cheng exclaimed, glaring, and Wei Wuxian crossed his arms over his chest and looked forbidding; he was clearly not going to bend. And Lan Qiren begrudgingly admitted that there was some justice to his position, for retreating now would leave the Wen to the questionable mercies of the cultivation world…the rules said Perform acts of chivalry, and Wei Wuxian certainly believed himself to have done that.

Perhaps he even had.

“There is another option,” Lan Qiren said. “I have offered to accept Wei Wuxian as my personal disciple.”

Jiang Cheng stared, jaw agape.

He looked exceptionally similar to Wei Wuxian when he did that, regardless of the lack of blood relation between them.

“Both of our sects have suffered greatly during the war,” Lan Qiren continued, deciding to ignore the reaction to give Jiang Cheng some time to recover. Jiang Cheng had been raised as the prospective leader of a Great Sect the way Wei Wuxian had not; he would understand an explanation focused on the political nuances of the situation far better than Wei Wuxian would. “But we are still Great Sects. With both the Lan and Jiang standing together, it will be difficult for the Jin sect to force through its demands. The Nie would support an investigation of the facts should we insist on one, at the very least.”

They’d support far more than that. Lan Qiren had all but told Nie Mingjue that he was going to do something to help Wei Wuxian, and Nie Mingjue had said he would back him, a promise made blindly and recklessly – Lan Qiren wouldn’t rely on it, of course, wanting to give Nie Mingjue all the opportunities he needed to back out. Unfortunately, he knew Nie Mingjue’s character too well to think he’d take advantage of them.

No, the Nie would support them for Lan Qiren’s sake, no matter how much Nie Mingjue hated the Wen sect.

And with three Great Sects aligned, there was little they could not do. Whether it was justice or injustice, power was power…

“But…your reputation, your personal reputation…” Jiang Cheng shook his head, clearly dismissing that argument even before he finished making. Lan Qiren approved; Jiang Cheng had clearly realized that Lan Qiren was well aware of the consequences of his current move, and yet had made the offer regardless. “Teacher Lan, I appreciate the magnitude of what you are offering, and I do not mean to question your motivations or impugn your kindness…”

He trailed off pointedly.

“You may proceed with your questions,” Lan Qiren said, already resigned. It was rather amusing how quickly Jiang Cheng could flip from being furious at Wei Wuxian to being fierce in his defense. “You would be doing your shixiong a disservice if you did not investigate as thoroughly as you can at this moment in time.”

“Then I’ll beg Teacher Lan’s forgiveness for my rudeness. Very well: if you take Wei Wuxian as your personal disciple, you will have authority over him. For what purpose do you want to use that authority?”

Lan Qiren hadn’t even thought of it from that angle. The Jiang sect clearly raised its young men with a great deal of imagination.

“I had not expected that he would have a great deal of respect for my authority, as he has never previously displayed any,” he said, a little puzzled, and was bemused still further when Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng exchanged glances as if he’d said something significant. “I’m already his teacher, and it’s not as if he listened to me before. Why should that change?”

“He doesn’t want the Tiger Seal,” Wei Wuxian said to Jiang Cheng. “Since it’s apparently a ‘disgusting artifact’. He doesn’t intend to force me to give up demonic cultivation, but neither does he seem to have any interest in demonic cultivation himself –”

“I most certainly do not!” Lan Qiren exclaimed, offended by the very suggestion. “Do not think that because I will not insist that you desist from it that I approve of the abominable cultivation path you have chosen.”

Another exchange of glances.

“He says that his sole motivation is to ensure that I am not rendered a pariah in the cultivation world,” Wei Wuxian said.

“That is my sole motivation,” Lan Qiren said with a huff.

“Those who are overly solicitous are hiding bad intentions,” Jiang Cheng said grimly. “Teacher Lan, your offer does you credit, but there’s no benefit in this for you. Your spotless reputation will be tarnished, your sect’s face affected. The only way that this scheme works without shaking your sect’s good relations with the Jin, which could affect the rebuilding of the Cloud Recesses, would be if you take all the responsibility for what you’re doing upon yourself – something your sect will no doubt object to internally, no matter what they say externally, and that, too, will cause you no end of difficulties! What could possibly be worth all that? If you don’t want Wei Wuxian’s power, and you don’t want to make him stop what he’s doing, then what do you want?”

Lan Qiren was stymied. It wasn’t as if he could say I want him not to be living in the Burial Mounds in the event that my nephew decides to pine from up close rather than at a distance – in fact, he had no intention of mentioning Lan Wangji at all. He certainly didn’t want to give Wei Wuxian the impression that he had no choice but to accept Lan Wangji’s suit in exchange for his life; nothing could be more repulsive to him. The entire purpose of this exercise was to prevent Wei Wuxian from becoming trapped in the mire of his own making the way He Kexin had.

Or, at least, to ensure that the only person trapped in the mire with him was Lan Qiren, not Lan Wangji.

Unfortunately, that left Lan Qiren with nothing to say in response to Jiang Cheng’s question, not really.

But for him, when there was nothing, there was always still the rules.

“The rules say, Uphold the value of justice,” he said, putting his hands behind his back, taking comfort in the formality of the pose. “They also say, Appreciate the good people. I have sought my entire life to live up to the demands of my sect’s rules. Despite our differences, I have reason to believe that Wei Wuxian is a good person. If he says that he had good reason to do what he did…I choose to believe him.”

Now they were both staring at him.

“Sect Leader Jin’s stratagems have forced you both into a corner,” Lan Qiren said. “No matter what choice you make, you will have played into his hands – stand together, and your Jiang sect will be disgraced; stand apart, and your Jiang sect loses one of its mainstays. I do not wish to see either of those happen, both as a fellow cultivator and teacher to you both, and as a former sect leader who is all too aware of the importance of a balance of power between the Great Sects.”

He shook his head.

“Yet these are your personal affairs,” he continued. “Despite our prior connection, in the end I am an outsider to you both, and as an outsider, there is nothing I can do. But if I take Wei Wuxian as my personal disciple, with the blessing of his sect leader, then I am no longer an outsider – I can be the one to take the blame of the world, not you, for a teacher is always blamed most for what his student does. In this manner, your Jiang sect’s face will be preserved, for you are not the ones that endorsed his actions, and yet Wei Wuxian will still be able to support you and strengthen you. As for me…foolish as my actions are, my sect will support me.”

The irony of what Lan Qiren was doing did not escape him.

The matter at issue was not so much who the world would blame for Wei Wuxian’s actions, but rather what they could do about that blame. The Jiang sect standing alone could not defend him – but the Lan sect, which was in better shape, could, and so it was the Lan sect that needed to be convinced to do so.

For so long Lan Qiren had hated his brother, who had wielded his marriage as a weapon, knowing that as soon as He Kexin became his wife, the sect could not touch her, bound as they were by society’s rules; more than that, the world could not touch her, because she had given up her identity in order to hide behind his. The sect had been forced to support him and cover for him, lest they lose face by admitting what had really happened and publicly concede that their prized Qingheng-jun had acted in such an unfilial manner. And now it was Lan Qiren who was using the norms of the cultivation world to his own advantage, knowing that the moment Wei Wuxian was his disciple, his sect would have to support him just as they had reluctantly supported his brother. After all, despite their horror at his actions, they had allowed Qingheng-jun to take in a murderess as his wife, even if Lan Qiren’s brother had paid the price for his rashness through his permanent seclusion.

Lan Qiren wondered, grimly, what price his sect would extract from him.

Still, that was his own business, not Wei Wuxian’s, who was at least at the moment still an outsider, and certainly not Jiang Cheng’s. Unlike Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng had been a good student, working hard and paying attention, generally well-behaved when he wasn’t being distracted, and Lan Qiren had always mourned what had happened to his family and his sect, the burdens Jiang Cheng had been forced to take on too early and too young. He had been impressed at what Jiang Cheng had managed to accomplish in rebuilding his sect out of nothing, binding people together with little more than determination and personal charisma of a different sort than Wei Wuxian but no less potent. He looked forward with great pleasure to see Lan Xichen work alongside Jiang Cheng and Nie Mingjue, proper sect leaders of the next generation – eventually to be joined by Jin Zixuan, who was maturing nicely into a proper young man, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

But in the end, Jiang Cheng was an outsider to Lan Qiren, and a junior, the two of them connected only by the weak bonds of a single season’s worth of lessons.

Lan Qiren did not need to explain himself to him.

“Teacher Lan, do you even like him?” Jiang Cheng asked.

“What does that matter?” Lan Qiren asked in return, feeling exasperated by a question he perceived as being utterly misdirected. First Wei Wuxian and now Jiang Cheng; why were they so focused on such an irrelevant aspect? “Obviously, if I were wholly free to choose, I would prefer to have someone like you, Sect Leader Jiang –”

“You would?!” Jiang Cheng blurted out. His eyes had gone round.

“As a student, you are superior to him in virtually every aspect,” Lan Qiren said, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone and yet Jiang Cheng stared at him as if he’d just said that the color of the sky was Jiang purple. “Wei Wuxian may be a genius, but he doesn’t want to learn or listen, he doesn’t respect authority, he doesn’t respect tradition or orthodoxy –”

“Before you got here, he said I was ‘insolent and arrogant, impertinent and annoying to be around’,” Wei Wuixan put in, his voice oddly gleeful despite the insult. “Teacher Lan, Jiang Cheng’s not like that, right?”

“Of course not. Jiang Wanyin was always hard-working and diligent, applying himself well and serious in his studies; he was a pleasure to have as a student,” Lan Qiren said, and did not entirely understand why his words made Wei Wuxian grin so hard or Jiang Cheng gape like a fish. “But he is not the one who requires the protection of a master.”

Normally, he’d think that explanation would be enough, seeing no need to explain himself to juniors. But if both Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng harbored such doubts – he chose to take that as a sign of how harsh the war had been for them, rather than a personal slight against his character – then their concerns would not be assuaged so easily.

Accordingly, Lan Qiren hesitated for a moment, then finally, reluctantly, added: “The reasons I have told you are accurate, though not complete. But I promise you that the other reasons I have are purely my own, and will have no impact upon either of you without your consent. They do not implicate the political considerations of the moment. That is all I will say on the subject; I ask that you respect my privacy beyond that.”

“Do not lie is a rule,” Wei Wuxian said to Jiang Cheng, and shrugged when Jiang Cheng, still mute with apparent shock, looked at him. “I think we can trust to his intentions, but I figured I’d wait on his offer to hear what you’d think.”

That loosened Jiang Cheng’s tongue, but only to say, “…I think that’s the most unbelievable thing you’ve said all day.”

Wei Wuxian rolled his eyes and jerked his head at Lan Qiren. “Teacher Lan said it’d be inappropriate for me to agree or disagree without my sect leader’s input, since the whole point of this is to give me an out that means that my actions won’t drag the Jiang sect down without cutting me off from doing things for you in the future.”

His tone was mocking, clearly quoting words that Lan Qiren had said in a lilting tone, but Jiang Cheng was already nodding.

“That’s more like you,” he said, then turned to Lan Qiren. “Teacher Lan, he’s never understood the concept of ‘appropriate’ or ‘authority’, and he’s always acted like he can make decisions on my behalf – on everyone’s behalf. He thinks he’s the smartest person in every room.”

“So what? I usually am!”

Jiang Cheng ignored him. “He’s a complete menace. Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

Wei Wuxian started as if he’d been stabbed with a pin. “Wait,” he said. “You’re agreeing?”

“I’m not happy about it,” Jiang Cheng said stiffly. “I don’t know what’s gotten into your head, going off and murdering Jin sect guards on behalf of a bunch of Wen-dogs, much less deciding that you’d rather protect them than – than stay by my side. But Teacher Lan has chosen to believe that you have a good reason, so I’ll believe it, too. He can protect you, I can’t, it’s as simple as that.”

Wei Wuxian looked lost. “Jiang Cheng, it’s not –”

He stopped.

Jiang Cheng waited for Wei Wuxian to explain, but he didn’t go on. Jiang Cheng pressed his lips together in obvious frustration.

“Our situations are different,” he said, his expression severe and voice harsh. “Even if both our sects were devastated by the Wen, Teacher Lan is right: he and I are not in the same position. Our Jiang sect has always been most closely allied with the Jin, who are the injured party, whereas the Lan have always been closer with the Nie. Moreover, just on a personal basis, I’m the sect leader, expected to think first of the sect and only second of everything else, whereas Teacher Lan has the advantage of being one of his sect’s elders – even if Zewu-jun objects in his heart, he’s bound by propriety to respect, defend, and support his uncle’s actions, and everyone will know that. No blame will fall upon Zewu-jun or his sect for providing that support; the entire burden, and blame, will fall only to Teacher Lan. In short, Teacher Lan’s plan is terrible, but it will work.”

“Terrible?” Lan Qiren asked, frowning. “In what way is it terrible?”

He’d thought it was quite a neat solution.

Jiang Cheng was looking at Wei Wuxian, and he didn’t turn away now, even as he spoke to Lan Qiren. “Because it will ruin you, Teacher Lan. You’ve done nothing to harm either of us, and yet for our benefit…listen, the best result of this is that people think that you’ve been ensorcelled or maybe blackmailed, or else that you’re a fool that let yourself get taken in by him. At the worst…”

“I am well aware of the harm that comes with a bad reputation,” Lan Qiren said.

“You know, Teacher Lan,” Jiang Cheng said. “But do you, Wei Wuxian? If Teacher Lan’s reputation is ruined, it’s not just a matter of hiding out for a while to let it pass over – most people don’t forgive so easily as you! He’ll have to stop teaching, or else lecture to an empty classroom because no one wants to send him their children. People would say cruel things about him behind his back, and shun his company in public. And that’s just the start of it! And all this, all this, just for the sake of a bunch of Wen-dogs that stood behind the people who murdered our sect, giving him nothing in return –”

“I would not say nothing,” Lan Qiren said, cutting Jiang Cheng off. He didn’t need a rendition of the parade of horribles that might take place if all went bad. He’d already reviewed them all in his own mind: ostracization, disdain, everything he did being misinterpreted, being ignored or even cast out…yet there wasn’t a single one of those consequences that he wasn’t happy to bear if it meant that Lan Wangji wouldn’t. “For instance, I understand Wei Wuxian to have some considerable talent in music, and that is an interest we share in common. Spare me your pity, Sect Leader Jiang, if for no other reason than it is premature, and speculative.”

Jiang Cheng looked abashed.

“If the consequences are as bad as all that, I’ll just refuse to do it,” Wei Wuxian said, looking between them both with a stubborn set to his jaw. “I don’t need to drag Teacher Lan down with me, just like I don’t need to drag the Jiang sect down with me. I can make it on my own.”

“You really can’t,” Jiang Cheng said, and he reached up to rub his face, looking suddenly exhausted. “Maybe for a few months, even a year, but Teacher Lan’s right, you’re already being schemed against, you and these Wen both, and that won’t stop just because I throw you out, no matter how hard I try to protect you. You took responsibility for them. You have to live up to that, you realize? They’re relying on you. That means doing things you don’t want to do if it’s for their sake – that’s what it means to be a leader. You can’t just avoid everyone forever...I mean, look at this place! What would any of you eat?”

“We could grow food!”

Lan Qiren looked down at the ground with significant skepticism. He’d only ever tended a garden as a hobby (and even then he was fairly sure that his cousin’s far more enthusiastic contributions and the gentle climate of Gusu has been the only things that had actually made anything grow), but corpse ash, resentful energy, and lifeless dirt in which nothing natural grew did not seem to be a promising place to start farming.

Jiang Cheng’s expression seemed to convey a similar level of disbelief.

Wei Wuxian grimaced, and glanced behind him at the distant figures of the Wen sect. Old men and women, a young child, and only Wen Qing a hale cultivator in her prime.

“Well, we could have,” he said mulishly, but then seemed to give in, glancing over at Lan Qiren. “But only if it were our last option, and it’s not, apparently. You’re right, Jiang Cheng. I took responsibility here, to them…if I don’t agree, they’ll die, is that what you’re both saying? You both think that? No matter how much I defend them?”

“It doesn’t matter if you were three times as powerful as you are now,” Jiang Cheng said flatly. “You can only fight against the entire world for so long. You refuse, they die – now, later, fast, slow, whatever. It’s inevitable.”

Lan Qiren nodded in agreement.

Wei Wuxian gritted his teeth, his eyes flickering over to the Wen, to little Wen Yuan clinging to his grandmother’s robes, to the worried-looking Wen Qing, to the cave with Wen Ning’s corpse. All those obligations he had taken on of his own volition, for whatever reason of his own that was driving him, the reason he wouldn’t speak of even to Jiang Cheng.

“Fine,” he spat out, looking pained. “Fine. Last chance to back out, Teacher Lan.”

If only.

Lan Qiren shook out his sleeves and tried to straighten his already straight back.

“Go get some tea for the ceremony,” he said formally, then remembered the foul taste of the earlier stuff and hastily added, “Proper tea, from Jiang Wanyin, if you don’t mind.”

“Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Cheng said sharply. “What have you been poisoning Teacher Lan with?!”

Chapter Text

The rules said Have a strong will and anything can be achieved.

Lan Qiren had often hoped that that was true, although the evidence of his own life showed him that external circumstances often had just as much if not more impact on events as did one’s will. For instance, in the situation with his brother, he did not know how it could have gone another path – perhaps if he had loved his sect less, or himself more, he would have found it in his heart to fight harder…but then what would have become of Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji?

No, another path was impossible, unthinkable.

The same was true now, when he found himself upon his current road.

After Wei Wuxian had finished formally presenting Lan Qiren with (better) tea with the approval of his current sect leader and Lan Qiren had accepted, allowing Wei Wuxian the honor of calling him shifu, Jiang Cheng, looking uncomfortable and more than a little regretful, asked, “Do you plan to return to the Cloud Recesses at once?”

Lan Qiren had, and had intended to say as much, but that was the point where Wen Qing apparently lost her patience with the eavesdropping she’d been doing up until that point. She marched over and snapped, “Absolutely not! Do you want to kill him? With his qi in the state it is, he shouldn’t be walking, let alone flying!”

That had set off an entire set of completely unnecessary dramatics.

“You’re exaggerating,” he said flatly after listening to far too much of Wen Qing, Wei Wuxian, and Jiang Cheng all somehow managing to needle each other into worrying about him, each one very effectively tormenting the others to greater heights of concern. Had he known that Wei Wxuian had such mother hen tendencies? Or Jiang Cheng, for that matter? “Yes, I’m not in the best of health. No, it’s not curable, neither by rest nor by surgery. I have permanent damage to my lungs and meridians, and excess stress or significant emotion will cause my qi to become disordered more easily than most; that’s all. No, it is not related to why I have accepted a disciple, really, Jiang Wanyin! What do you think I’m going to ask Wei Wuxian to do, resurrect my lungs?”

He meant it harshly, a sarcasm, but for some reason that made Wei Wuxian let out a rather undignified snort, which had made the others go abruptly quiet for about three breaths, and then all three of them abruptly and simultaneously started laughing to the point of hysterics.

Lan Qiren sighed.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand the cause. Even as an adolescent, Wei Wuxian had had the sort of sense of humor that made him laugh at everything no matter the situation, Wen Qing was probably sick with grief thinking about her brother that Wei Wuxian was currently in the process of resurrecting, and who even knew what sort of trauma Jiang Wanyin had dealt with in his past…really, an inappropriate bout of humor was the least worst way they could be using to vent their emotions. That did not mean it was not incredibly annoying, particularly since Lan Qiren was not currently laughing along with them. Certainly not the chest-heaving, throat-choking, eyes-watering, have-to-sit-down sort of laughter they were currently suffering from.

All for the best, really, given his condition.

Lan Qiren decided to go somewhere else to wait it out.

Unfortunately, in the Burial Mounds, the only real other place to go sit was with the Wen sect, which he didn’t especially want to do. Still, as Wei Wuxian’s shifu, Lan Qiren had taken his disciple’s responsibilities upon himself, and that that included the Wen sect remnants. He wouldn’t be able to avoid them forever, so it was best to make a start now, lest he be tempted to put it off endlessly, which would help no one at all. Be harsh on yourself, be easy on others, after all…

So decided, Lan Qiren went over to where they were milling around like a bunch of pheasants, looking anxious.

“A decision has been reached,” he informed them, hands clasped firmly behind his back so that they wouldn’t see how hard he was grasping his own wrists or how white his knuckles grew at the sight of that much-hated insignia that still decorated their robes. He hoped they could be convinced to change it, though given their role model he didn’t exactly have much faith in their reasonableness. “You will all be returning with me to the Cloud Recesses in Gusu, where you will be provided with some land to call your own and a place to live freely, albeit under supervision. In truth, this time, no matter what you might have encountered in the past.”

Wei Wuxian might claim that the Jin sect lied to the cultivation world, deciding to use the Wen sect as slaves rather than letting them live in peace the way they’d said they would, and Lan Qiren might even be inclined to believe such a thing of Jin Guangshan, knowing the other man’s character as he did, but the sad fact of the matter was that there was no proof. No matter how much Lan Qiren might personally trust Wei Wuxian over Jin Guangshan, in eyes of the public the word of a demonic cultivator was worse than worthless, and the Wen sect’s own testimony would be seen as self-interested and inherently uncredible – there was simply no way for them to obtain any remedy now. If any of them were to have peace, they had no choice but to forget the past and move on.

Or, well, they should. Whether Lan Qiren would be able to make Wei Wuxian see reason and keep his mouth shut for once in his life was still to be seen. And if he couldn’t, and he expected that he couldn’t, he’d just have to figure out a way to manage the fallout…somehow.

Truly he had tied a heavy anchor to his legs this time.

“Thank you, Teacher Lan,” one of the old women said politely – it was the old granny that had been minding the young child earlier.  “We appreciate what you’re doing on behalf of Wei-gongzi.”

Lan Qiren jerked his head in a stiff nod. He wasn’t sure if she actually resembled old Lan Yang, who’d died with a child in her arms fighting a rearguard action to defend the women’s quarters and get their sect’s youngest and most vulnerable children to safety, or if it was just his mind playing tricks on him. Regardless, the combination of that memory and the Wen sect robes was off-putting in the extreme, making his stomach churn.

The rules said Do not hold grudges, but Lan Qiren didn’t know how to do that. He never had, but even less did he know how to do that here, when there’d been so much loss and so much hatred. It didn’t matter whether these people in front of him had actually wielded a sword or not, whether they were cultivators or innocents like the small child; their family had attacked his family, senselessly and unprovoked, and he would not be human if he did not resent them for what had happened.

But he’d given his word to Wei Wuxian, and more than his word, his oath. Wei Wuxian had taken these men and women under his protection, and as his shifu, Lan Qiren had accepted that task as well. Having so accepted it, he would live up to it to the fullest extent of his abilities.  And if, despite that, he could not bring himself to forgive them in his heart, then at least he would have the decency to be rigidly neutral in his manner with them, adhering strictly to the rules of etiquette.

“If you have any concerns, either now or later, you should let me know,” he said politely, and they murmured back, equally polite, that they would.

The conversation then ground to an awkward halt.

Lan Qiren glanced back at where Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and Wen Qing were, wondering if those three howling monkeys had managed to get control of themselves, but he was out of luck – they’d apparently graduated to some sort of argument, with Wen Qing having clasped her hands over her mouth as if she’d said something she shouldn’t and Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian both pale-faced and talking as much with their hands as with their mouths. It was thankfully inaudible at this distance, but it was definitely not something Lan Qiren wanted to get into the middle of.

Perhaps Jiang Cheng had finally figured out why Wei Wuxian was so obsessed with saving these Wens. It was certainly something Lan Qiren had planned to ask now that he had the authority to expect an answer…though, again, whether Wei Wuxian would actually answer his fake shifu was as yet unknown.

At any rate, the argument did leave Lan Qiren in an awkward place. He couldn’t go wandering the Burial Mounds around freely, he couldn’t go back, and staying here without speaking was becoming increasingly torturous in its sheer awkwardness. And given how bad he normally was at even noticing awkwardness, that meant it must be even worse for the Wen around him…

It would be better to start a conversation.

Luckily, the Wen sect members around him were old, and old people were the same everywhere.

“Your little A-Yuan seems like a bright boy,” he said, pulling his teacher’s manner over himself like a shield. “How old was he when he first learned to speak?”

The grandmother he’d been speaking to blinked owlishly, seeming surprised to be addressed, but eventually answered with an approximation. Lan Qiren, determined to make this conversation flow even if he had to do it all himself, praised it as being remarkably early (it was actually about average based on his experience with young children, but under the circumstances the boy learning to speak at all was a miracle) and the sign of high intelligence in the future, adding in comparisons to how his own nephews at that age had been similarly talkative (well, Lan Xichen anyway) and sweet (…also Lan Xichen).

The combination of flattery, references to his own family, and an oblique mention of the term ‘future’ in relation to a child did the work he’d been hoping it would, making them relax and start talking – sure enough, like all families, they had high hopes for their children. There was a long-running argument between two of the uncles as to whether Wen Yuan had selected the path of the scholar or that of the sword on his first birthday, since he’d apparently gone for both items at once. There was usually an argument like that, in most families, and as Lan Qiren had expected, the first moment they had a chance, they jumped right back into the practiced cadences of it no matter who was in attendance.

“It could always be both,” Lan Qiren pointed out at one point when it seemed like they were about to run out of energy. “My Lan sect both values scholarly traits and cultivates the sword, and I would expect that your Wen Yuan would be a guest disciple of ours, in time.”

That made them all go quiet for a moment. Lan Qiren realized belatedly that it served as an awkward reminder of their unfortunate circumstances, but before he could apologize, Granny Wen burst out with, “What’s that like, then?” and Lan Qiren was suddenly being peppered with all sorts of questions about how the Lan sect treated its guest disciples.

He answered them all, stressing the importance of the rules, especially the ones about not bearing grudges, and the attempt that they made to have fair and equitable teaching. It was still only an attempt, of course, but they’d come a long way since Lan Qiren’s father’s time, when things had been quite dire in terms of favoritism and bias, and he had hope that Lan Xichen would continue his tradition of both seeking to model fairness and grace where possible and to enforce the requirement thereof in others.

(Lan Qiren was well aware that his nephews were his favorites, and that he wasn’t as good as he might be about hiding that fact, but there was only so much he could do about it – they were the perfect pupils, and to refuse to show them favor when they had done so well would be just as unfair as favoring them unduly would have been if they had lacked such diligence. Or so he comforted himself, anyway.)

Somehow, perhaps inevitably, the conversation turned from Wen Yuan to the other clan child the Wen elders were concerned with, Wen Qing. It took Lan Qiren, eternally oblivious to conversational undercurrents, a good while before he realized that they had moved on from wondering what was wrong with Wei Wuxian that he wasn’t at all interested in marrying her, since he clearly didn’t mind the baggage associated with their surname – given that Wen Qing was objectively an attractive girl, this was an entirely reasonable speculation, and it occurred to Lan Qiren that there might be some basis to have hope (or possibly fear) that Lan Wangji could actually have a chance of his own at winning Wei Wuxian – to subtly probing out Lan Qiren’s own marriage situation, apparently on the basis of him being the only other person they knew of who didn’t appear inclined to try to kill them on sight.

“Absolutely out of the question! She’s the same age as my eldest nephew!” he exclaimed as soon as he realized the nature of their questions.

“It’s not bad for a girl to marry someone steady and already settled,” Granny Wen said peaceably. “And you shouldn’t shortchange yourself: you have experience in raising children, but you don’t have any of your own, and no wives already. Plenty of girls would be very pleased to have such a prospect –”

Lan Qiren made some hasty excuses and fled.

Truly old people were the same everywhere, he thought sourly. His own elders back home had started making very similar noises the very moment Lan Xichen had come of age. If there hadn’t been a war on, he feared to think where he might have ended up…

Unfortunately, the argument between Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian, and Wen Qing had not calmed down, and had in fact increased considerably in volume – they were now retreading the ground of Jiang Fengmian’s painfully obvious favoritism, and something about which of them deserved or was required to be the standard-bearer of their family’s revenge on the Wen sect, which seemed to Lan Qiren to be a somewhat odd conversation to involve Wen Qing in – and the options regarding where Lan Qiren could go had not gotten any better.

Out of lack of other alternatives, Lan Qiren headed back into the cave that housed a contained fierce corpse in the process of being refined.

This was the life he’d chosen, he thought glumly, looking down at Wen Ning’s body. Fierce corpses and Wen sect, Wen sect and fierce corpses…

At least he’d had some practice at dealing with strange experiments from Lan Yueheng. Not fierce corpses, of course; the most his alchemist cousin had ever done was try to store a few unexploded explosives in his house – though on second thought, that one set of makeshift fireworks that accidentally released mildly hallucinogenic fumes when damp was in fact probably worse than fierce corpses. What Lan Yueheng had been thinking, Lan Qiren would never know.

And at least the worst his nephews had brought home was –

Take him back, though he is unwilling.

Lan Qiren flinched at the memory, then chased it off with a force of will. The worst his nephews had brought home were some rabbits, which was nothing. Lan Wangji had not brought anyone home against their will, and now would never, given that Lan Qiren was bringing Wei Wuxian back to Gusu for him, and the worst Lan Xichen had done was take on a somewhat shifty sworn brother in addition to the perfectly respectable Chifeng-zun. Neither of them had ever acted in any way that might be comparable to their father’s situation. Lan Yueheng remained the better comparison by far; his cousin had eventually learned to keep all his experiments up in his mountain laboratory and far away from others, and Wei Wuxian could undoubtedly learn to do the same with his experiments, too.

However unorthodox those experiments might be.

“This is for your good as well as mine,” Lan Qiren informed the unmoving figure before settling down and starting to play some music designed to help calm and steady the emotions. Normally, when bringing back fierce corpses for his students to learn from, he would use, or instruct others to use, songs designed to help taper off the resentful energy in order to make the corpses less violent and more safe, insofar as anything evil could be safe. However, since he didn’t know exactly what Wei Wuxian was doing with his talismans, he refrained from using any of those and focused only on the ones that could sooth the spirit rather than suppress it. He had no idea if his music was actually helping or not, since the fierce corpse seemed completely inert, but it was certainly helping him, so he continued.

After a while, there was a dry cough.

“T-teacher Lan,” someone said. Stuttered, really, but Lan Qiren was deep into the music, having settled into a form of meditation as he played, and he wasn’t really listening to the outside world any longer. “Teacher Lan?”

Whatever they wanted could wait.

“Teacher Lan, your fingers are b-bruised, you shouldn’t play so much. You might hurt yourself.”

Bruised?

Ah, yes. He remembered now. Zhang Xin, the unexpected arrival of the baby – flying to Jinlin Tower – hearing Lan Wangji – flying away, falling, Nie Mingjue – coming to the Burial Mounds – taking Wei Wuxian as a personal disciple…

Lan Qiren slowly emerged from his trance, bringing the music to a proper conclusion at the next ending point. He’d shifted away from playing qi-regulating and emotion-soothing melodies at some point, meandering off into playing whatever came to mind the way he normally did when he was in seclusion, letting the music and spiritual energy flow through him to do whatever it wished…

He abruptly realized that he was exhausted.

Not just emotionally or physically, which might have been expected, but spiritually as well – he’d been cultivating while playing, as he always did, and it felt as though he’d made some progress in his cultivation while also simultaneously doing something that had all but emptied him out, as if he’d been using his qi to accomplish something while playing. It was embarrassingly undiscipled of him to do something like that, especially when he wasn’t even paying attention to what he was doing with his spiritual energy – he hadn’t had a lapse like that in years.

He lifted his head to apologize to whoever had come in to find him, and found himself looking at the only other person in the cave with him.

“Ah,” he said faintly, and Wen Ning ducked his head in embarrassment, seeming to wish that he could still blush. “I see Wei Wuxian’s experiment was successful. I should probably…tell someone.”

“…probably,” Wen Ning agreed meekly.

Lan Qiren got up and brushed himself off, putting away his guqin, and turned to head outside, but then paused. Wei Wuxian had only used the name ‘Wen Ning’, but the boy was old enough, even by Wen sect standards… “What’s your courtesy name?”

“Uh,” Wen Ning said. “Wen Qionglin?”

“Why did you phrase that as a question?”

“I…don’t know?”

Lan Qiren sighed and headed out.

“Are you done?” he asked Wei Wuxian, who was sitting on the ground with a pale face – Wen Qing was sitting not far from him, looking equally grim, and Jiang Cheng was nowhere in sight.

“Yeah,” Wei Wuxian said, then laughed, a sharp and unpleasant sound, jagged and painful. “Yeah, I think we are.”

“You don’t know that,” Wen Qing murmured. She sounded as tired as Lan Qiren felt. “He’s just angry.”

Lan Qiren eyed them both, wondering what exactly it was that had managed to drive Jiang Cheng, who earlier that very morning had been willing to at least consider overturning the entire cultivation world and his own rebuilt sect for Wei Wuxian’s sake, to behave so foully that Wei Wuxian believed himself genuinely abandoned.

“This was a mistake,” Wei Wuxian muttered, then scrubbed at his face. “Teacher Lan, I’ve wasted your time. You should –”

“I’ve already accepted you as a disciple,” Lan Qiren reminded him, his own voice sharp. “There is no such thing as a ‘waste of time’. What’s done is done, and there will be no denying it, and no hiding it, either.”

Wei Wuxian winced. As expected, whatever it was that they’d been fighting about had to do with some secret he’d been keeping, and probably Wen Qing and Wen Ning as well.

“We can discuss your issue later. For the moment, disciple, you are going to stop moping and go do your duty,” Lan Qiren commanded. “Your experiment worked, or at least seemed to, and you need to tend to it.”

“My experiment?” Wei Wuxian asked, looking confused. “What experiment? The only thing I’m doing right now is…”

“Wen Qionglin,” Lan Qiren agreed. “He’s awake and talking. I thought you might –”

“A-Ning!” Wen Qing blurted out, jumping to her feet and running into the cave, and Wei Wuxian was only a few steps behind her.

Lan Qiren sighed and looked down the hill, wondering if Jiang Cheng had only gone down to rejoin his people or if he’d left entirely. If they were going to transport so many people to the Cloud Recesses, they wouldn’t be able to fly on swords, and neither could they walk, given the ages of the people involved – they’d need to hire a cart, probably several carts. It would have been better if they could be guarded by cultivators as they travelled, given the way the roads remained rife with bandits and evil creatures, dangerous even to experienced cultivators like him…though he supposed he didn’t need to worry too much about the latter, given Wei Wuxian, and probably not too much about the former, also given Wei Wuxian. The stories that had gone around during the Sunshot Campaign claimed that his demonic cultivation made him a match for two dozen cultivators by himself, and with the Tiger Seal he could even defeat an army.

Best not to think about that.

Nor to think about how long it would take for them to get back to the Cloud Recesses.

Indeed, even if his Lan sect knew to come escort them –

Oh no.

It suddenly occurred to Lan Qiren that his nephews would have probably returned to the Cloud Recesses by now. They would have come to pay their respects to him the way they always did when they returned home from their travels, and once they found out he wasn’t there, they would ask around to find out where he’d gone. They would find out that he had planned to head towards Jinlin Tower, and that he’d departed all alone – and then they would realize that since they hadn’t seen him, that he must not have made it –

Lan Qiren probably should have had Nie Mingjue pass along a message for him, though of course at the time he’d had no notion of what he intended to do. If his nephews became panicked over his absence and raised an alarm…

No, wait, there was still hope. He was supposed to be in seclusion, which meant that his nephews would not feel the need to come pay respects to him. His Lan sect respected privacy – the door guards probably wouldn’t mention his departure, and only Lan Yueheng knew the reason he’d left instead of going into seclusion, yet his cousin would of course be busy with his own new arrival. He’d think to tell his nephews about it, in time, but it might take a few days.

Of course, it had already been something like three days, counting the two he’d been unconscious. If they didn’t know of his absence by now, they’d know soon, and Lan Qiren didn’t want to think about what type of fuss they might cause in looking for him. His sect needed to be mindful of its face during these uncertain times…

He was being rather hypocritical in thinking something like that, given what he’d just done.

Actually, that was another thing. He was exhausted; he could push himself a little longer if he had to, but he wasn’t in any state to be flying a sword, and the Wen had the elderly and a child to account for. They would definitely have to take carts, slow-moving ones, and that meant it would take them a fair bit of time to reach the Cloud Recesses – it was quite probable that rumors, because there were always rumors, would reach them first.

No, it would be better for Lan Qiren to send a message alerting his nephews to his location, to his safety…to his latest activities.

His new disciple.

Lan Qiren winced at the thought of explaining everything he’d done in a letter. He’d never been a coward, or so he flattered himself, but there really weren’t words for what he wanted to explain, since he certainly wasn’t going to tell them that he’d done it for Lan Wangji’s sake.

Truly, the rules said do not act impetuously for a reason…

Glancing back at the cave, where there was no doubt tearful reunions and possibly demonic cultivation afoot, Lan Qiren decided to instead ignore his exhaustion and go down the mountain to try his luck instead.

Chapter Text

Lan Qiren’s luck, for once, turned out to be good: the Jiang sect disciples were still there at the base of the mountain, milling around with confused expressions on their faces.

“What happened to your sect leader?” Lan Qiren asked, and was promptly informed that Jiang Cheng had stormed down the mountain in an utter fury and then left without saying a word to anyone.

He suppressed a sigh.

“When your sect leader runs off in a bout of emotional disorder that potentially renders him deaf and blind to the threats around him, you must follow him at a distance so that you may ensure his safety, while still respecting his privacy,” Lan Qiren informed the lost Jiang disciples. They seemed relieved to be instructed – but then, he supposed, they were very new to the details of being a sect outside of war. “Also, you shouldn’t tell outsiders, such as myself, too much about it. Just say that he left, without including the additional details.”

“Thank you, Teacher Lan!”

“Mm. Could I ask one of you to send a message to the Cloud Recesses on my behalf?”

“I’ll take it there myself!” one of them said enthusiastically.

Ah, youth.

Lan Qiren commissioned the young disciple to carry a simple message – that he was not in seclusion, that he would be delayed but was on his way back, that he would explain everything once he’d arrived, and not to listen to scurrilous rumor, should there be any, prior to his arrival – and went to the town to make the initial travel arrangements.

Once the carts were arranged, he promptly entrusted the remaining details to his new ‘disciple’ and took the opportunity to sleep for a little as they made their initial lumbering way back towards Gusu.

‘A little’ turned out to be two days again.

Even after he woke up, Lan Qiren spent most of the remaining parts of the trip in meditation, stabilizing his disordered qi and centering himself, trying to heal. It was probably a little inappropriate for him to leave the burden of managing their transportation to Wei Wuxian the way he might with his nephews, given the newness of their relationship as master and disciple, but Lan Qiren thought it was nevertheless acceptable – Wei Wuxian was a master in his own right, even if of demonic cultivation, and anyway he’d been head disciple for the Jiang sect for years and years now. Besides, what was the alternative? Lan Qiren was sick and Wei Wuxian still understandably bitter about being forced to accept other people’s help; he was fairly sure neither of them wanted to spend the travel time talking.

(Lan Qiren did permit Wen Qing to bandage up his fingers and forearms, even if he refused to allow her to treat him further without some supervising presence. After examining them, she’d asked him how he’d incurred such bruises, pronouncing that his fingers looked as though they’d been “smashed up in a grinder to make a sauce”.

“My right hand was the victim of a lady in the throes of labor, who was using both hands to express her feelings regarding her husband,” Lan Qiren said, and Wen Qing had let out a startled laugh.

“Well, that’ll do it,” she said wryly after she’d recovered. “But if she was using both hands on your right hand, what happened to your left?”

Lan Qiren sighed. “That was the husband.”)

They were able to make very good time with their travels. Although they encountered the dangers Lan Qiren had feared, Wei Wuxian did an excellent job at keeping them both on track and safe – or perhaps, more accurately, Wen Ning did. His obviously dead skin and blackened veins were sufficient to frighten away any mortal bandits, while his extraordinary strength was more than capable of fending off any animal pests. Wei Wuxian supervised the battles with a fearsome aura that was somewhat undercut by Lan Qiren’s realization that he had a particular manner of spinning Chenqing that was suggestive of anxiety, and by his fussing over Wen Ning immediately after any encounter, no matter how brief – though the few times that Wei Wuxian had felt obligated to provide Wen Ning with some back-up had made very clear to Lan Qiren how unmatched he really had been against Wei Wuxian at the Burial Mounds; if Wei Wuxian had truly been aiming to kill him at that time, he would have been dead, element of surprise or no element of surprise.

Only once were they confronted by actual cultivators. Lan Qiren had worried about that most of all, since he could not in good conscience fight against anyone seeking a justified revenge against the Wen sect, but Wei Wuxian managed to solve the problem quite neatly, hopping around in the shadows and deterring the would-be attackers with the now-famous sound of Chenqing without ever actually summoning anything.

(“An acceptable compromise?” he asked cockily when he returned to the cart, chest puffed up and entire demeanor as pleased as a cat bringing a dead bird home to show off its ability as a provider. “If they were really out for revenge, they wouldn’t let themselves be scared away so easily.”

Lan Qiren doubted that – a gentleman could wait ten years for revenge, rather than risk their own lives in a suicide charge against fearsome demonic cultivation – but he supposed it really was a good solution, under the circumstances.

“Well done,” he said, and Wei Wuxian briefly looked actually surprised before his reckless grin started up again, a thousand times brighter than the previous version. “Now write me an essay explaining your motivations so that we can have a contemporary record of the events that occurred tonight.”

“A – what?! No! Teacher Lan, be reasonable –”)

In the end, before Lan Qiren entirely knew it, the area surrounding their cart had grown familiar.

There was a certain joy to coming home, he reflected, that was unlike any other.

Even when you knew you would be getting a cold reception, even when the familiarity grew tedious in its repetition, even if that home sometimes felt confining as a prison, even given everything, it was still home. Everything welcomed him back: the grounds, the buildings, the plants…the people.

“Shufu!”

Lan Qiren was in the process of getting off the cart with Wen Ning’s assistance, his legs having grown a little stiff from all the sitting he’d been doing, when he heard the shout.

He looked up to see his two nephews coming forward to greet him, both walking slowly and gracefully, as the rules commanded. Lan Xichen looked anxious, running his eyes up and down Lan Qiren as if to confirm that he was intact, gaze darting around to take in the Wen sect huddled behind him and Wei Wuxian by his side. He did not look surprised, but rather was very clearly matching rumor to reality in his mind, trying to figure out what he could of the truth.

Lan Wangji…

Lan Wangji only had eyes for Wei Wuxian.

Lan Qiren’s normally reserved and even expressionless nephew was looking at Wei Wuxian the way a flower inclined towards the sun or a compass pointed north. It was as if everything else in the world had faded away in importance, becoming secondary – as if Wei Wuxian was his whole world.

In all honesty, Lan Qiren was…

A little relieved?

He was distraught, of course. That wild and overwhelming sort of love, the sort of love that blinded like looking straight into the sun, was everything he had always counseled his nephews against, everything he had tried his best to prevent. It was the sort of love that let a man do terrible things and make terrible choices, if only he could convince himself that it was on behalf of the one that he loved – a hateful, selfish sort of love, a love that allowed for no rivals. A love that allowed for nothing else, a love that cast aside all else, a love that was selfless only in that there was nothing held back.

A love like a disaster.

But Lan Qiren had already known that Lan Wangji had fallen in love like that from the very first moment he had heard him say take someone back, heard him say unwilling; even if Lan Wangji never took any actions, he felt it enough to say the words – and that was proof enough. Lan Qiren had already resigned himself to being unable to stop the tsunami in its tracks, and had satisfied himself with being only able to do what little he could to ensure that the rising flood did not cause too much damage in its wake.

So the overwhelming emotion in his heart at the moment was not pain and sorrow, although both were present, making him think wistfully to himself that there was truly no stopping children from making the mistakes of their elders, but rather a far simpler feeling of plain relief. As they had journeyed to the Cloud Recesses, Lan Qiren had started to wonder, with no little anxiety, whether he had gotten things wrong – whether it was someone else that Lan Wangji loved, not Wei Wuxian. After all, he’d never been told directly who it was, but had only put it together through supposition and logic; it was entirely possible that he’d guessed wrong.  

But…no. He’d been right.

Lan Wangji loved Wei Wuxian.

He was in love with him – more than that, he was mad for him. It was plain on his face, right there out in the open where everyone could see.

“Heeeeey, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian said, bouncing a little on his toes and trying on a smile. “I’m guessing you heard the news, right? Looks like you’re struck with me now! Try not to be too angry about that, all right? For your uncle’s sake!”

Lan Qiren’s eye twitched.

Apparently his original assumption that Wei Wuxian had been making light of Lan Wangji’s feelings in a deliberate attempt to needle him had been overly generous, and he had instead been in earnest in thinking that Lan Wangji disliked him. While Lan Qiren begrudgingly admitted that that could be understandable, given the rumors about their bad relationship, the fact that this view apparently remained intact in the face of Lan Wangji’s utterly besotted expression…

Lan Qiren reminded himself that Wei Wuxian was a genius. They said geniuses were often deficient in other parts of their lives, didn’t they? The more technical expertise, the less common sense, the more, ah, limited the social awareness…no, let him be accurate: Lan Qiren had limited social awareness.

Wei Wuxian was just blind.

“Wei Wuxian is…inaccurate, but not incorrect,” Lan Qiren said, deciding to save wondering what sort of idiot he’d bound himself for life to for later. “I have accepted him as my personal disciple, and have invited him to remain at the Cloud Recesses for a time.”

Until the Jiang sect was strong enough to accept him back, which could be a very long time indeed.

“Shufu, we should probably – talk,” Lan Xichen said delicately, then turned and greeted Wei Wuxian with a polite, “Wei-gongzi, welcome.”

It was a somewhat distant greeting under the circumstances, but Lan Qiren understood the delicacy of the moment. They were standing here out in the open beside the gateway to the Cloud Recesses where anyone could see. As sect leader, Lan Xichen would need to consider very carefully all of his next steps, mindful both of the sect’s face before the outside world and of what was likely the fierce internal opposition to Lan Qiren’s actions. They would, in fact, need to talk.

“Mistress Wen, the same to you,” Lan Xichen said, giving her a polite bow, which she returned, looking surprised. She shouldn’t be, of course; Lan Xichen had excellent manners, even under dire circumstances. Though he was hesitating now, glancing briefly at Lan Qiren – it took a brief moment, but then Lan Qiren understood the implicit question. He inclined his head in very faint affirmative, encouraging his nephew to continue. “And…Wen-gongzi as well.”

“Ah,” Wen Ning said, looking even more surprised to be addressed. He saluted back. “T-thank you, Zewj-jun.”

Lan Xichen nodded.

“I have given my word that the Wen sect will be permitted to remain at the Cloud Recesses without harm, in return for their promise of good conduct and agreement to remain under supervision,” Lan Qiren said, more for his sect’s benefit than Lan Xichen’s, who would have acted properly regardless.

“I will ensure it myself,” Lan Wangji said at once, and Wei Wuxian turned to look at him in surprise. Lan Wangji looked stiff as ever, but inclined his head a little towards Wei Wuxian. “If you would – allow me.”

Lan Qiren would deal with that later.

“You should all rest and refresh yourselves,” Lan Xichen murmured, peerlessly diplomatic. “We can discuss all details later. Shufu, there are several here who would very much like to speak with you.”

Probably the doctors, Lan Qiren thought, feeling a little annoyed at the thought. He was fairly sure that at least some of the rumors would have made it out that he’d been ensorcelled, as Jiang Cheng had mentioned as a possibility, and it was no surprise that his sect would want to check on that. It was probably better to let them, rather than to resist, no matter how annoying he found their hovering…

“Qiren-xiong! Qiren-xiong!”

Lan Qiren blinked.

“Third Uncle,” Lan Xichen said, his eyes irrepressibly curving into a very faint smile at what was probably his favorite relative besides Lan Wangji – even above Lan Qiren, if Lan Qiren were being honest about it. “I thought I asked you to wait in shufu’s quarters.”

“Why would I?” Lan Yueheng asked, hobbling forward at speed. He was using the crutch, which usually meant he was having problems with his leg prosthetic again, but under the circumstances might just mean that he was opting for speed over dignity – it was a very Lan Yueheng choice to make. He was only just barely obeying the rule against running. Again. “You’re too filial! You’re not going to wring Qiren-xiong’s throat for worrying everyone to death, and someone’s got to do it.”

“Yueheng!” Lan Qiren said sharply, speaking simultaneously with Lan Xichen’s similar exclamation of censure, albeit more respectful given the age difference between them. The censure was well deserved, to Lan Qiren’s mind – what was Lan Yueheng thinking? His cousin was impulsive and more free-spoken than most in their sect, but he usually knew better than to do or say anything in public that might embarrass the sect.

“What? The Wei boy’s your disciple, isn’t he? That makes him one of us,” Lan Yueheng said with an airy shrug. “I’m only not allowed to talk when there’s outsiders around, right?”

Lan Qiren’s heart suddenly stuttered with an unexpected burst of worry as he abruptly understood what his cousin was doing.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t expected that his sect would be highly displeased with what he had done, even enough to make even Lan Xichen tread carefully – he’d known that would undoubtedly be the case. But for Lan Yueheng to so very firmly and very publicly be planting himself on Lan Qiren’s side of the debate, signaling to everyone where he stood, well, that suggested that they were even more upset than he had anticipated. Of course, Lan Yueheng would have been on Lan Qiren’s side regardless, being one of Lan Qiren’s best friends. Lan Qiren had not doubted for a moment that he’d have his cousin’s support, even in his lowest moment of terminal stupidity – but the support was welcome nonetheless.

Welcome…but still worrying.

How bad was the reaction inside the sect that Lan Yueheng felt the need to make a scene in front of everyone?

Lan Xichen looked like he was developing a headache.

Lan Qiren was very, very familiar with that headache. He regretted that he was now its cause, adding another burden to his nephew, but…surely Lan Xichen would understand once he’d explained, and together they would think of a way to make the rest of the sect accept it.

He hoped, anyway.

“Yueheng-xiong, do not act impulsively,” someone said. Lan Qiren recognized the voice as another of their sect elders, Lan Bocheng, and that was concerning, too – there was bad blood between them. Lan Bocheng was even more of a conservative than Lan Qiren, wanting to keep things the same just for tradition’s sake, and just as stubbornly unyielding; he’d been quite close to Lan Qiren’s brother, and Lan Qiren had ended up having to make an example of him in his early years as sect leader even though he hadn’t been one of the worst offenders. That Lan Bocheng felt comfortable scolding Lan Yueheng in front of everyone was not a good sign in the least. “Putting aside the matter of Wei-gongzi, there is still the Wen sect here. Avoid imparting knowledge to the wrong individuals.”

“Feh, it’s all the same,” Lan Yueheng said, glaring right back. “Win friendship through kindness, see friends as neighbors, Bocheng-xiong.”

Lan Qiren cleared his throat pointedly, drawing attention.

“Both of you are of course right,” he said, a warning to them both. “The interplay between those rules is undoubtedly something we can all discuss later.”

“That would be for the best,” Lan Xichen interjected smoothly, and Lan Qiren suppressed a wince – he’d fallen back into the habit of being acting sect leader, which he wasn’t any longer; it should have been Lan Xichen that had censured the two of them for bringing a private dispute out into public. “Shufu and his guests have just returned from a long journey, and they are undoubtedly tired. We should see them settled first. Wangji and I will handle it from here.”

That was a clear enough dismissal, verging on the painfully blunt – also not a good sign, given Lan Xichen’s natural inclination towards gentle diplomacy – and the others in the sect that had come to observe quickly dispersed. Lan Yueheng did not, wearing that stubborn expression that suggested that he was about to become selectively deaf if anyone decided to be even more direct about where he should or shouldn’t be located at any given moment.

“Guest quarters have been prepared,” Lan Wangji said, his eyes flickered over to Lan Qiren with a guilty sort of expression – probably more for ignoring him up until now rather than for having made preparations in advance, even though that was a little presumptuous as well. Lan Qiren would have words with him later. “Please follow me.”

Wei Wuxian fell into step with him at once, which was…interesting. “Hey, Lan Zhan,” he whispered, voice not quite quiet enough not to travel. “Who’s the cool Lan?”

Lan Wangji didn’t answer, thankfully, even when Wei Wuxian nudged him with his elbow. Lan Yueheng glanced hopefully at Lan Qiren, seeking confirmation, and grinned proudly when Lan Qiren nodded to confirm that Wei Wuxian had been talking about him. The things he put up with, really…

Another thing to discuss later, he supposed. There were getting to be quite a lot of them.

They were about halfway to the guest quarters when Lan Yueheng nearly stumbled into Lan Qiren’s back. It was atypical of him given how careful he was these days, so Lan Qiren twisted to look: Lan Yueheng was looking down, blinking, at Wen Yuan, who’d somehow gotten free of his grandmother’s care and was now tugging at Lan Yueheng’s robes.

“Stick uncle!” he said, looking up at him with big eyes. “Why do you have a stick? You’re not old like Granny.”

Lan Qiren had a perfect view of his cousin’s face, so he could see the exact moment Lan Yueheng decided it was critically necessary for him to informally adopt yet another child, as if the seven he’d had a personal hand in creating and most of the rest of the sect children, all of whom scented weakness in the air like wolves and liked to swarm to him whenever they saw him, were insufficient.

“You’re right! What a smart boy you are,” Lan Yueheng said, crouching down a little to get on Wen Yuan’s level, making Wen Yuan beam. “I don’t use as stick because I’m old, I use a stick because a dragon ate my leg.”

Lan Qiren pinched his brow with a sigh that wasn’t quite a groan even as Wen Yuan gasped loudly.

“A dragon?” he said in admiration. “Really?”

“Oh yes! A great big old fire-breathing dragon. He marched through the grass like a wicked old snake, burning everything around him –” Lan Yueheng was doing the hand gestures and all. Between seven children and years of being one of the sect’s most enthusiastic volunteer babysitters, Lan Yueheng had a lot of practice charming children; Wen Yuan was already eating out of the palm of his hand. “He was making such a big fuss! Like you wouldn’t believe! There was all sorts of yelling, all sorts of loud noises – boom! crash! –  and a lot of buildings fell over, too. He was awfully mean. And when he got to me…chomp! There goes the leg!”

Wen Yuan squealed in ghoulish delight, clapping his hands.

“He didn’t really, though,” he said, clearly wanting to believe but suspicious in a way that suggested he’d been successfully tricked before in regard to missing body parts – in fairness, Wei Wuxian looked like the sort of person who would ‘steal’ a nose or ‘lose’ a thumb. “Right?”

Lan Yueheng pretended to pout. “What, you don’t believe Uncle? Do not lie is a rule. Look!”

Shameless as ever, he hiked up his robes to show off the prosthetic leg he and the other alchemists and artificers of the sect had put together. It was a strange-looking thing. The initial efforts made had been more along the lines of the prosthetics created before the burning of the Cloud Recesses, when the people who needed them were mostly retired and wanted limbs made of jade that were carefully painted to look as much like the real thing as possible, but they’d all quickly realized that those things were cumbersome and impractical for people like Lan Yueheng, who were very much still active participants in daily life. They’d eventually settled on something not unlike the simple peg occasionally seen to be used by sailors, only they had made it gently curved like a wave, using blue steel like a spiritual sword, with arrays for all sorts of purposes etched into the metal.

It was both practical and rather pretty.

“Wow!” Wen Yuan exclaimed, his eyes wide. “It’s like a dog’s paw!”

Lan Yueheng laughed hard enough to bend over at the waist. “Just don’t call me dog-uncle!”

“A-Yuan, A-Yuan, get back here!” Granny Wen bustled forward, scooping him up. “Thank you for your indulgence, Master Lan.”

“Not at all,” Lan Yueheng said, straightening himself up. “He’s only a little older than my youngest boy. I hope they’ll be good friends in the future.”

Granny Wen looked a little dumbstruck by the statement.

“Definitely the cool Lan,” Wei Wuxian opined not-so-quietly from where he was standing alongside Lan Wangji, and Lan Qiren couldn’t help but agree, feeling warmed by his cousin’s regard, knowing that it was primarily for his sake that Lan Yueheng was putting himself out there. Though given Lan Yueheng’s fondness for children and inability to bear anyone a grudge, he might’ve done it regardless…

“How is Zhang Xin?” Lan Qiren asked as Lan Yueheng fell back into step alongside him, leaving Wen Yuan to babble happily in Granny Wen’s arms. “Recovering well from the birth?”

“Oh, yes, she’s fine – scratching at the walls to go outside already, same as always,” Lan Yueheng said with a smile. “And A-Shen is wonderful, too! Bawling his eyes out every moment he can, the little brat. He’s got a wonderful set of lungs. I think he misses you.”

“I doubt he remembers me. He’s only met me the once, and he was a little busy at the time being born.”

“He still misses you!”

(“Oh, so that’s the husband,” Wen Qing remarked from behind them. “Teacher Lan’s poor fingers. No wonder!”)

Chapter Text

The Wen sect were all settled in one of the courtyards reserved for guests, but Lan Qiren suggested that Wei Wuxian be put into one of the rooms adjacent to his own courtyard, both to reinforce the fact that he was now Lan Qiren’s personal disciple and to forestall Lan Wangji from completely embarrassing himself by deciding to move in with the Wen under some paper-thin excuse of needing to protect them.

He would have hoped that Lan Wangji would have slightly more self-restraint than that, but his nephew still seemed dazed, even stunned, by the fact that Wei Wuxian was in Gusu at long last.

Wei Wuxian, for his part, was growing increasingly merry as he realized that whatever terrible things he’d feared awaited him in Gusu were not about to come to pass – things he had apparently feared as a result of Lan Wangji constantly beseeching him to return with him, no less. Oh, Lan Wangji was going to get the scolding of his life the moment Lan Qiren got him alone…!

Wen Qing and Wen Ning had come along to as well for the time being, Wen Ning because Wei Wuxian was still in the period of supervising him – despite how calm he was, and no, Lan Qiren was not taking credit for that – and Wen Qing to keep an eye on them both.

“A-Ning can stay with Wei-gongzi if he thinks that’s necessary, while I prefer to stay with the rest of my family,” Wen Qing said begrudgingly. “But I want to be involved in whatever’s going to happen next.”

“You wouldn’t be invited to stay here anyway,” Lan Qiren said bemusedly, minorly appalled at her presumptiveness and trying not to show it. “Adult men and women live separately in the Cloud Recesses, excluding those married couples who choose otherwise.”

Zhang Xin and Lan Yueheng, for instance. To no one’s surprise, they’d opted for the founder’s choice, sharing a single courtyard and spending every night together in the same bed – perhaps it wasn’t actually that surprising that they had managed seven living children, even if one set were twins. Supposedly Lan An had originally proposed the arrangement with his dao companion as a result of their commitment to poverty, him being first a secluded monk and then a wandering musician, but Lan Qiren personally suspected that it had less to do with their sect founder’s inclination to live like a peasant and more to do with his reputation (within the sect, anyway) for overwhelming ardor. Not unlike Lan Yueheng, he and his wife had made a very solid start at expanding the family line and setting up branch families from the very beginning…

“Ah, yes, right, of course,” Wen Qing said, flushing a little in embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

Thinking about the Wen elders’ comments, Lan Qiren subtly moved away from her.

“I’d love to look your prosthetic more closely,” Wei Wuxian said to Lan Yueheng, blissfully unaware of the other ongoing discussion. “There’s arrays on there, aren’t there? They were muted, but I assume you can activate them – using the same principle as a spiritual sword?”

“Almost,” Lan Yueheng said, always willing to be drawn into a theoretical discussion rather than have to talk politics. “It’s based on the same thing, but obviously you’re really only supposed to have the one sword unless you practice a dual style. If you like, I can set up a meeting for you with the others who helped make it. I’m only an alchemist, what you really want are the artificers.”

“I didn’t even know the Lan sect had alchemists and artificers!”

“Well, you’re not wrong – we’re in the great minority, it’s mostly sword and music, music and sword, the usual,” Lan Yueheng said. “You’ll need to meet the rest of them anyway, since I assume you’ll be joining us! We have laboratories up the mountain where we keep away from everyone else, to avoid a fuss. Some people just don’t appreciate explosions no matter how many times we explain that it’s a necessary part of the creative process –”

Wei Wuxian was looking a little starry-eyed, and Lan Wangji like he was considering possibly picking up an interest in forging or potion-brewing again despite having hated all his lessons in such things when he was younger, but Lan Xichen cleared his throat.

“Third Uncle, don’t get ahead of yourself,” he rebuked gently. “What Wei-gongzi’s situation is has not yet been settled.”

The bad feeling Lan Qiren had immediately got distinctly worse. There was a bad reception to his actions and there was bad. He had expected the former, not the latter; he wouldn’t have thought it would be so bad that Lan Xichen would feel the need to use his diplomacy to mediate against him, something his nephew would only do if he felt it was necessary to preserving peace in the Cloud Recesses as a whole.

It was only just and right that he do so, of course. How many times had Lan Qiren lectured his nephews on the need for a sect leader to prioritize the sect before everything else? Justice required equity among all, without special treatment, and if Lan Qiren was sometimes unable to model it, doting and over-fond as he was of his nephews who deserved every last bit of his love, then at least he had sought to convey the correct behavior whenever he could. It was good that Lan Xichen had learned that lesson.

It was good. It was. It was what Lan Qiren wanted, genuinely and sincerely – that Lan Xichen could be the best possible person he could be, and the best possible sect leader as well. Lan Qiren had no desire to be exempted from the rules simply because he was his nephew’s guardian, and he would have been incensed if Lan Xichen had suggested such a thing.

The churning feeling in his stomach wasn’t about that. It was just…he just hadn’t expected his nephews to stop needing him so soon, he supposed.

“Fine, fine, we’ll talk it to death instead,” Lan Yueheng grumbled, taking a seat and stretching out with a sigh. “Just the way we always do…hey, Wei-gongzi, you wanted to look at my leg, right? Catch.”

He drew his finger across the seam, deactivating the array that connected the prosthetic to his body, and tossed the extremely expensive and complicated result of months of effort across the room like it was a sack of potatoes.

Wei Wuxian caught it with a cackle of delight. “You’re really weird for a Lan, you know that?” he said with a grin, sitting down with the leg – sitting next to Lan Wangji, Lan Qiren noticed, even though he could have taken a seat closer to Lan Yueheng. “Oh, this is interesting…say, how’d you actually lose the leg, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Oh, Wen soldiers cut it off,” Lan Yueheng said with a shrug. Lan Qiren shook his head a little when he noticed how Wen Qing flinched and Wen Ning’s shoulders went up around his ears – they were going to need to get used to hearing things like that if they planned to stay at the Cloud Recesses. Lan Yueheng wasn’t even aiming his words at them, good-natured soul that he was; he was only stating a fact. There were plenty of facts like that in the Lan sect. “Well, I mean, actually they just cut the ankle tendon to keep me from being able to move, but I didn’t have access to a doctor for a while so by the time one did finally get to me, it was too late to fix it back up. They had to cut it off at the knee, since the lower bits’d already started rotting…”

That was approximately the point at which Lan Qiren gave up on trying to use facial expressions to subtly hint to his cousin that he should shut up and tapped a quick patter on the table, sending out a sharp pulse of qi designed to feel like a kick to Lan Yueheng’s now-absent shin.

Lan Yueheng yelped, and then seemed to belatedly realize the problem – possibly he had finally noticed the increasingly ghastly expressions on the faces of the Wen siblings, and the awkwardness on everyone else’s – so he added, rather hastily, “Anyway, now I have a very nice leg that I can throw at people when I’m mad at them, so it’s all right, really. We use the dragon story for the children too young to understand what happened; when they get older, we explain that it’s a metaphor. For, er, war.”

It was a metaphor for the Wen sect, to be precise.

“Yueheng-xiong has a great deal of experience with children,” Lan Qiren said, deciding to move the conversation along. “The one he mentioned earlier, who will be receiving the courtesy name Jingyi, is his seventh.”

“Seven?” Wen Qing squawked, clearly relieved by the change in subject. “Your poor wife!”

“Don’t make assumptions,” Lan Xichen said dryly, looking equally thankful. “I think Auntie Zhang handles them better than Third Uncle does. She’s the one always insisting she wants more…shufu, while we’re on the subject, you should be seen to by a doctor.”

Lan Qiren sighed.

“Your health isn’t what it was,” his nephew reminded him, polite but firm. “I know you dislike being treated by doctors, but it would give us all some peace of mind to know that you are well.”

And not cursed or ensorcelled, yes, he was aware. He grunted, waving a hand in reluctant agreement.

“Thank you, shufu.” Lan Xichen looked around the room. “Naturally, the rest of you are welcome to whatever resources of the Cloud Recesses you find yourself in need of.”

“We appreciate the offer,” Wei Wuxian said, still fiddling with Lan Yueheng’s leg. “Now, do you want to talk about the whole disciple thing, or are you planning on waiting until you’re alone with Teacher Lan for that?”

Lan Qiren picked up a writing block from his desk and threw it at Wei Wuxian’s head.

His new disciple apparently hadn’t been expecting that, so he only belatedly dodged, causing it to brush by his shoulder rather than missing him entirely.

(Lan Wangji caught it easily, because of course he did.)

“Do not be insolent,” Lan Qiren told Wei Wuxian sternly. “You are my personal disciple, and Xichen is my sect leader. No matter if you belong to another sect yourself, you will show him the respect due to him, as if he were – ”

Hmm, he’d been about to go with if he were your own sect leader, but Wei Wuxian didn’t seem to be very good at respecting Jiang Cheng, who was the shidi he’d cheerfully dragged around and teasingly bullied for much of their childhood.

“ – as if he were Madame Yu,” Lan Qiren amended.

Wei Wuxian hadn’t been expecting that, either; he snorted in laughter involuntarily. “All right, all right,” he said with an amused smile that suggested he was currently picturing Lan Xichen dressed up in Madame Yu’s preferred style of clothing. “I get the picture! I’ll be good. But surely we need to talk about it at some point.”

“‘We’ do not need to do anything,” Lan Qiren said censoriously. Did Wei Wuxian really not understand the situation right now? Lan Qiren knew the Jiang sect did things differently, and naturally he wasn’t privy to the internal discussions of another sect, but surely it couldn’t be so far away from the Lan sect’s own; before the massacre, the Jiang sect must also have had prickly elders and influential people whose voices must be heard and respected. “Didn’t you hear Xichen? The matter is not settled yet.”

“But – you said –”

Perhaps he really didn’t understand.

“You are my personal disciple, that matter is settled,” Lan Qiren said, trying to be patient. “But I am no longer sect leader, only an elder. My conduct reflects only myself, and not my sect, which I no longer have the ability to bind – only Xichen can do that. Therefore I will speak with Xichen first and foremost on the subject of my conduct, and only once that discussion is concluded will we have a discussion that involves you.”

Wei Wuxian’s jaw worked for a moment, his eyes narrowing and taking on a slight reddish hue, but when Lan Qiren pointedly reached for something else to throw, the expression swiftly passed and he seemed to regain his equilibrium. They would need to find a way to deal with that, Lan Qiren reflected –soul-calming music, perhaps. Cleansing? Even Clarity? The latter would require regular playing, which he could certainly manage…though perhaps Lan Wangji would be interested in volunteering his services for that purpose instead.

“Well, if you’re sure. You’re the teacher, I’m merely the student,” Wei Wuxian said with a smile that was only a little forced, and then he mischievously threw an arm around Lan Wangji’s shoulders, the smile becoming genuine. “Lan Zhan can keep me company while you two talk. You can trust the great and wise Hanguang-jun to keep me out of mischief!”

Lan Qiren wasn’t too sure about that. Still, it wasn’t a bad idea – Lan Wangji had an excellent reputation for being scrupulously fair, and it had belatedly occurred to Lan Qiren that, Lan Wangji’s blatant display of puppy-eyes earlier aside, the majority of the sect had probably not yet figured out that he was in love, the one thing that might affect his fairness. If Lan Wangji stood sentinel, the sect would not worry too much about Wei Wuxian causing trouble, and because Lan Qiren did know of Lan Wangji’s affection, he wouldn’t need to worry about Wei Wuxian getting instigated or framed, or in any other way inveigled into a perilous situation the way he might with some other guard. His nephew would both speak and act in Wei Wuxian’s defense, whole-heartedly sincere, and with any luck his behavior might clue Wei Wuxian in a little as to the regard Lan Wangji had for him.

Anyway, even putting aside Lan Qiren’s half-hearted desire to help his nephew be successful in love, Lan Wangji was Lan Qiren’s finest student. He would be able to start the process of helping improve Wei Wuxian’s temperament at once – after all, he’d even managed to get Wei Wuxian to memorize the Lan sect rules back when they were both adolescents…wait.

Surely that hadn’t been when Lan Wangji had become infatuated? Had Lan Qiren done this to himself?

He dearly hoped not.

Well, even if he had, it was a moot point now, anyway. What was done was done.

“I think that that is an excellent idea,” he said briskly. “Wangji, take Wei Wuxian to the jingshi and conduct an initial level review of his abilities with Cleansing as the base song.”

Lan Wangji looked startled. As he should – an initial level review to determine someone’s skill level was something usually done for children, not adults, and certainly not for acknowledged masters of musical cultivation like Wei Wuxian.

It did, however, have the advantage of taking quite a long while to complete.

“Hey, hey, wait,” Wei Wuxian said, frowning. “That’s unnecessary, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” Lan Qiren tapped the desk thoughtfully. “I believe that’s up to me to decide as your master. I noticed you taking some shortcuts with cleansing songs on our journey here – Wangji will be able to see if those were intentional or if you have simply forgotten the basics.”

“But…!”

Lan Yueheng sniggered and formed a hand seal, summoning his leg back. “It’s always good to brush up on the basics,” he said cheerfully, his good humor managing to make what could have been an insult to Wei Wuxian’s trustworthiness into little more than a teacher’s petty snit. “Just you wait, he’ll have you doing handstands soon enough.”

“…handstands?” Wen Qing asked.

“To copy the rules,” Lan Yueheng said, then blinked when she gaped at him, displaying a reaction that seemed to Lan Qiren to be far outsized for such an innocuous statement. “What? Copying rules is a standard punishment, but if you break the rules that require that punishment repeatedly, you get the next level up.”

“And that involves…handstands? How?”

“You copy the rules while in a handstand,” Lan Xichen said, hiding a knowing smile even as Lan Qiren frowned at his guests, unsure as to why his guests seemed so bemused – Wen Qing was still gaping, Wen Ning’s eyes were wide, and Wei Wuxian had put a hand to his temple as if to contain his reaction. “It’s a type of punishment rarely imposed on guest disciples, since they’re rarely present long enough to violate the rules ‘repeatedly’. You would not have seen it.”

“No wonder you all have those arms,” Wei Wuxian said, shaking his head. “All right, all right, fine, you win! Lan Zhan, I’m at your mercy. Put me through my paces.”

Lan Qiren observed that the tips of Lan Wangji’s ears had gone red.

He was pretty sure he didn’t want to dwell too long on why.

“I’ll show you two the way back to your family,” Lan Yueheng said to Wen Qing and Wen Ning, standing up himself. “Mistress Wen, you’re a doctor, right?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Good! You can come visit my wife tomorrow. She’s still in retreat following A-Shen’s birth – she needs company. Let me tell you a bit about her…”

Lan Yueheng could sing Zhang Xin’s praises for an entire night and day if he so wished, so Lan Qiren could rest assured that neither of the Wen siblings, trailing behind him, would be making any trouble in the near future, and neither would Wei Wuxian, following Lan Wangji over to the jingshi.

That left only Lan Qiren and Lan Xichen alone, with Lan Xichen rising to his feet to go and close the door behind the others, activating the privacy arrays and adding in an extra talisman to strengthen the effect before turning to look at Lan Qiren.

“Shufu,” he said. “What were you thinking?!”

Chapter Text

Lan Qiren’s first instinct was to bristle at being questioned in such a presumptuous tone.

Lan Xichen was his nephew, a child he’d helped birth with his own two hands that he’d raised ever since – Lan Qiren had a short temper for insolence in his students, and the additional leniency he gave to his nephews on account of his love for them did not mean that he did not insist on proper etiquette or that they show him the respect due to him as their elder.

Still, he swallowed the reaction back down.

The question was justified by Lan Qiren’s own irresponsible conduct, after all, and Lan Xichen wasn’t just his nephew, he was also his sect leader. He had the right to question anyone he wished in the sect, and while that position did not exempt Lan Xichen from the restrictions on honoring one’s elders – the sect elders wouldn’t have such sway if he was – his role still gave him far more leeway than most. Lan Qiren himself had taken advantage of that leniency on a number of occasions to impose his will despite the other sect elders’ concerns, and he firmly believed that his nephew deserved to do the same. He would be a rank hypocrite if he switched his views now that his position was different.

Still, there was lenience, and there was tolerating rudeness. Lan Qiren was neither a child nor in his dotage – he would not be scolded by his own nephew as if he was. Who did Lan Xichen think he was?!

“I have my reasons for my actions,” Lan Qiren said stiffly, his displeasure obvious in both body and voice. “To which are you referring?”

Lan Xichen at least had the self-awareness to look shame-faced and embarrassed by his exclamation.

“Forgive me, shufu,” he murmured, coming to sit. “It is only…ah, but you told me in your message not to listen to rumor. Do not make assumptions about others.”

Lan Qiren nodded, a little appeased. That was the rational, thoughtful Lan Xichen he’d spent so much time raising.

“But…if shufu could perhaps explain…”

And there was the stubborn one.

Lan Qiren inclined his head very slightly, a concession and a little bit of approval.

“I know that in doing what I have done, I have taken on the burden of the cultivation world’s disdain in Wei Wuxian’s place,” he said slowly. “As his teacher, I am beholden to him and him to me; his crimes become mine. More than that, by taking him on as a disciple after he has committed them, I appear to have implicitly condoned his behavior in defying the cultivation world. I have insulted in the Jin sect in particular, and they will be expecting the Lan sect to make right my actions.”

That was the benefit of a sect, after all. Wei Wuxian’s problem was only that the Jiang sect was too weak right now to defend him – if they had been at their full power, the Jin sect would never have been so bold as to demand retribution so blatantly. At most they would have made noises about aggrieved rights, about righteousness and justice, but they would have left the matter of how a sect conducted its own internal discipline in the hands of Jiang Cheng; in the end they would have accepted whatever punishment was inflicted and some compensation and then shut up about it. As Wen Ruohan had so ably demonstrated, forget a few guards, if you had enough power, you could even go so far as to kill the sect leader of another Great Sect without facing any real consequences.

“My actions have created a profound burden. I am aware of that,” Lan Qiren continued. “But… I am willing to bear that burden. I accept the consequences of my actions, and the punishment due to me for my having in turn burdened the sect. I understand that I have brought it upon myself.”

He couldn’t apologize for the burden that he’d put on Lan Xichen’s shoulders. While he regretted it, the way he always regretted anything that made his nephews’ lives harder, that regret did not mean that he would have changed his actions. An apology would therefore be meaningless and hypocritical, and the rules said be of one mind, decisive and honest with both oneself and others.

Lan Xichen nodded slowly. “I understand, shufu. But…why?”

Lan Qiren’s fingers tightened on themselves.

“For Wangji,” he said, and from the way Lan Xichen paled, he knew his nephew understood.

Lan Xichen floundered for a moment or two after that. Finally, he said, “Wangji wouldn’t…he wouldn’t have done anything – against the rules.”

Lan Qiren snorted.

“Indeed,” he said scathingly. “And yet, Xichen, I would challenge you to identify precisely which one I broke, as well. The rules counsel upholding justice, and do not condemn the taking of personal disciples – one need not break the rules in order to go astray.”

Lan Xichen faltered, then bowed his head, acknowledging the point.

(It was not actually as good a point as it might be – do not accept disciples without careful screening came immediately to mind as a possibility, and do not act impulsively was another – but Lan Xichen, at least, wouldn’t argue with him on this point, the way Lan Wangji might have.)

Still, point or no point, Lan Xichen deserved a more fulsome explanation.

“Wei Wuxian intended to remain on the Burial Mounds with the Wen sect, using its power as a means of defense…you saw with your own eyes what was left of the Wen. Virtually all of them can be described as elderly, infirm, or an infant; they wouldn’t have lasted three days without him,” Lan Qiren said, his gaze dropping to his hands. “The Burial Mounds is a foul place, inimical to human life, seething with resentment. It is wholly contrary to our cultivation path. Perhaps Wei Wuxian could find a way to thrive there, with his demonic cultivation, but…to think of Wangji there, amidst the filth and grime, each breath full of corpse ash and unanswered grudges…”

He shook his head.

“I understand, shufu,” Lan Xichen murmured. His eyes were sad. Unlike Lan Wangji, he had been old enough, albeit barely, to understand something of what had happened between his parents while his mother still lived, and to have to wrestle with that understanding. “But – the rest of the sect –”

“The choice was mine,” Lan Qiren said firmly. “Wangji has broken no rules. No matter where his heart leads him, whether his affections are requited or not, he has taken no action and cannot be censured.”

“He cannot, no. But shufu, you can be.” Lan Xichen looked at him beseechingly. “There are those in the sect that resent how you have managed sect matters all these years or the decisions you’ve made, those who have been waiting for an opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with you. In all this time, shufu has never given them a chance to do so, but now…”

Lan Qiren knew far too well what Lan Xichen was referring to.

It had been his brother that was meant to be sect leader, not him, and the Lan sect was after all a Great Sect, powerful and extensive; even with their family rules to help restrain them, it was impossible that they would lack in people with ambitions and schemes, divergent self-interests leading to petty infighting.  Plenty of people had invested time and energy in supporting his brother with the hope of reaping future rewards, only to be disappointed in Lan Qiren, who was far more orthodox and rule-bound than his brother, and far less inclined towards favoritism. Still others had disliked his strict insistence on ethics, hating how he forced them to actually live up to the rules that bound their family rather than simply pay lip service to them – he had made examples out of several, killing the chicken to warn the monkey, and now both chicken and monkey hated him down to the bones.

Doing what he had done was, in fact, giving them an opportunity to rake him over the coals, and he had no doubt that they would take advantage of it. The voices arguing against his behavior would be all the louder simply because it was him – and the eventual punishment that might come for having breached the rules, however good his motives, was likely to be worse as well. He was very good at following the rules, after all; his enemies within the sect might not ever get another chance as good as this to obtain their vengeance while hiding behind the façade of sect discipline.

Lan Qiren knew this, had known this, and had proceeded regardless.

If he had ever lived his life out of fear, it was fear born of love, whether love for his nephews or his brother or his sect. Not once had he ever made a decision simply because he feared his sect’s punishment. Those petty vultures that still mourned those immoral things he forced them to stop doing…no, he’d never change his mind or his actions simply because of them.

“It’s not just the usual ones, this time,” Lan Xichen said. He was fidgeting in a most uncharacteristic manner, a bad habit that Lan Qiren thought he’d broken long ago. “It’d be one thing if it were just some people with old resentments, I could put a stop to that; the rules say do not hold grudges. But there are also others… You’ve angered more of the sect this time than you might think, shufu.”

Lan Qiren frowned at that, and thought of Lan Yueheng, so enthusiastically shoving himself where he wasn’t needed in order to make a declaration that was probably unnecessary – that Lan Qiren hoped was unnecessary. The implications of Lan Yueheng feeling the need to make such a public statement had worried him when he’d noticed it earlier, and they worried him now.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“It’s…” Lan Xichen hesitated, cheeks coloring. “They say…they said…”

“Do not be of two minds. Tell me what they said.”

“They said you were as bad as Father,” Lan Xichen blurted out, and Lan Qiren stared at him in shock. “They said you’d just been waiting all this time to put down the burden of the sect leadership so that you could do what you wished, and that you’d proved it because the first thing you did after that weight was gone was to act as vilely he had, dragging someone back just the way he did.”

It was the most offensive statement that Lan Qiren had ever heard.

And yet, the thing was, they weren’t…entirely wrong.

Hadn’t Lan Qiren had the same thought himself, comparing his taking of Wei Wuxian as a disciple to his brother’s taking of He Kexin as a wife? In each case they were deliberately making use of the norms of the cultivation world and their sect’s face, knowing that the sect would have no choice but to support them or else be embarrassed by them, in both instances both he and his brother had used themselves and their reputations to hide the crimes of another and to make their sect their unwilling accessory in doing so.

But Wei Wuxian had come to Gusu willingly, even if the circumstances had conspired to put him in a situation where coming to Gusu was a far better choice than his alternative – he had still had an alternative, however dire and distasteful the thought of staying at the Burial Mounds was to Lan Qiren. Wei Wuxian had not been forced, he would not be forced; there would be no seclusion for him, no eternal penance, no dying by inches. The Lan sect valued human life the most, but like most families, rated the lives of their Lan sect members at a little bit more than that; He Kexin’s crime of deliberately murdering an honored teacher had won her a far harsher penalty than the deaths of few Jin sect guards under questionable circumstances would ever amount to – Lan Qiren had meant it truly when he had told Wei Wuxian that he would take the full weight of that punishment onto his own shoulders. His action were meant as a gift, to Wei Wuxian and to Lan Wangji both, and he had asked permission to give that gift, obtained that permission without coercion…he was not acting selfishly, thinking only of himself.  

Lan Qiren was not stepping on the faces of his ancestors nor forgetting their grace through his actions, as his brother had.  He was not forcing someone into accepting something that would ultimately kill them. He was not bringing someone back unwillingly and trapping them away. He wasn’t –

He wasn’t his brother.

He wasn’t.

The shock took a little while to pass, but when it did, it was followed by anger. How dare his sect say such a thing? His brother had cast aside everything for He Kexin, up to and including the duties of sect leadership, those same duties to which Lan Qiren had sacrificed the entirety of his life, casting aside his dreams and turning himself into a substitute that serve the sect only as a bridge between his generation and the next. He was nothing like his brother.

Even his decision now was a decision he’d made thinking of others, wholly unlike his brother’s complete self-involvement…ah, but he couldn’t tell anyone about Lan Wangji! To admit that he feared that Lan Wangji would behave like his father before him had, thinking of nothing but love – he would never lay such a burden on Lan Wangji. He would never willingly insult him so grievously for a fear that had really been more about Lan Qiren’s own demons than his nephew’s conduct, present or future.

Once cooler minds had prevailed, Lan Qiren had understood that his worries were less about Lan Wangji than for him. Even if Lan Wangji wouldn’t disobey the rules all at once, his good character formed from being raised by a stickler like Lan Qiren, in the end his Lan sect heart would never allow him to stand aside as Wei Wuxian was chased to the end of his rope and then beyond. Eventually, someway, somehow, he would take action to support his beloved and no matter what happened then, his end would be miserable.

If Lan Wangji forced Wei Wuxian back to Gusu against his will, it would destroy any hope of love between them and break Lan Qiren’s heart in the process, destroying their family; if Lan Wangji went to Wei Wuxian’s side, choosing to live in the Burial Mounds, he would be setting himself against the entire cultivation world and even escaping with his life would be a challenge; if Lan Wangji defied his sect for Wei Wuxian’s sake, they would punish him, perhaps severely; if Lan Wangji failed to protect his beloved, whether through refraining from action or by trying to aid him without success, he would be as if one widowed, doomed to never again find happiness or a dao companion in his life now that the one who had captured his heart was gone…

Lan Qiren had prevented that, doing what he’d done. He’d prevented all of that.

Lan Wangji had broken no rules.

Let it stay that way.

No – Lan Qiren knew in his heart that he wasn’t like his brother. No matter what anyone else thought, no matter if they never knew the truth, he knew that he’d acted out of love, selfless love, rather than selfishness. That was enough.

“I…will deal with it,” he said, struggling to maintain his composure, his voice breaking only briefly, and Lan Xichen bowed his head to hide how he was biting his lips out of sheer worry. “Xichen – whatever the motive, the decision was mine. I should bear the weight of it. That is what our rules counsel, and I have always sought to live by the rules for better or for worse. No matter what the others may think of me, I acted as my heart directed me, and I have no regrets.”

Lan Xichen nodded. His distress had not abated.

Lan Qiren wanted to pull his nephew into his arms to comfort him the way he had when Lan Xichen had been young and too full of feelings to understand how to manage them. It would be inappropriate now, of course, and yet, the desire had never left him.

“Perhaps I spoke wrongly,” he said quietly, and Lan Xichen looked at him. “My sole regret is that you must deal with the trouble I’ve caused you.”

Lan Xichen looked surprised, then chuckled a little, the sound of it watery. “Shufu knows that with Wangji’s happiness at stake, I would likely do the same.”

In truth, Lan Qiren didn’t think he would. He loved his eldest nephew dearly, but he knew his character well – Lan Xichen was instinctively inclined towards peace, often meditating between rivals and genuinely convinced that everyone in the world could get along and all things forgiven if only some effort were put into it. He was not as grimly stubborn as Lan Qiren and Lan Wangji were, each one coldly and ruthlessly convinced of their righteousness, obstinate as mules, utterly unwilling to waver in their positions because of their conviction.

Lan Xichen would be a better sect leader than Lan Qiren ever was because of it.

His sect would love him, and he them. He would give them peace without letting them tear him apart. He would do the same for his family, who he loved dearly and deeply…but not excessively.

Not like his father. Not like Lan Wangji.

Not like Lan Qiren, either.

Perhaps because of Lan Qiren’s experience with his brother’s selfish madness, he had never valued the sort of love that would lead a man to pluck out his eyes to let his beloved see – the type of love that gave too much, giving for the sake of giving even when the recipient didn’t want the gift. He had spent so many years trying to teach his nephews the same lesson, trying to show them that they could love in a way that was productive rather than destructive, that they could be measured and moderate with their love and still be true. He’d thought that he himself served as a model of that alternative, a type of love that was no less deep and passionate for the fact that it was quiet and calm and left room for prioritizing oneself.

What irony.

What a joke.

Lan Qiren had, he now realized, modeled the precise opposite. He had wanted to keep his nephews from following his brother’s path, a love so selfish that it did not think about the harm it was doing to the one it supposedly for, but he had gone too far the other way. The rules said Love and respect yourself, but what was there in Lan Qiren’s life that he had not given of himself to that which he loved? It was only that he loved his sect, loved his nephews, loved the Cloud Recesses and the rules and the rest of it rather than a person that had obscured his vision and made him think, foolishly, that he knew the meaning of restraint.

Lan Xichen would be better than Lan Qiren. He would listen, and everyone would know he was listening; he would make decisions, and everyone would know that he had considered all aspects before deciding. He would compromise when he needed to, and stand fast when he had to, and at all times would remain sober, remembering not to lose himself in favor of his love.  

If Lan Xichen had one fault, it was that he was too inclined to forgive, to bend and compromise, to see the best in people. But that fault, too, was something that could be mitigated – and would be, because he still had Lan Wangji standing beside him to advise him. Lan Xichen trusted no one in the world as much as he trusted Lan Wangji, trusted him more than Lan Qiren and Lan Yueheng and either of his sworn brothers, trusted him as if they were twins in truth rather than merely brothers. With Lan Wangji safe, with Wei Wuxian already at his side and no horrible future to devastate him and take him away from Lan Xichen during this critical time of rebuilding when the latter needed the former most, they would be able to together lead the Lan sect into the future that they deserved to have.

If Lan Qiren could achieve that, no matter what else, whatever he faced now would be worth it.

He just had to keep reminding himself of that.

“Let us go and speak with the other sect elders,” he said to Lan Xichen, who nodded grimly. “We will see what can be done.”

Chapter Text

“– absolutely ridiculous. They’ve been talking for three days!” Wei Wuxian was saying loudly when Lan Qiren returned to his quarters. “What could they possibly still have left to discuss? I know your family have a lot of rules, Lan Zhan, but surely everyone here already knows them by heart!”

Wei Wuxian sounded spirited and lively, Lan Qiren noted. He sounded almost like he had when he’d been a visiting student, before the war.

It was a vast improvement over his behavior at the Burial Mounds, alternatively arrogant and impetuous, then cold and ruthlessly indifferent. How much of that behavior had been genuine, whether stemming from the trauma of war or his demonic cultivation, and how much was an act designed to repel unwanted outsiders, Lan Qiren did not know and doubted he ever would, but he was pleased that Wei Wuxian felt comfortable enough in the Cloud Recesses – and with Lan Wangji – to relax enough to be himself.

He supposed he was, anyway. Everything felt very distant at the moment, as if he were observing his own emotions rather than feeling them. It was almost as if he were separated from the entire world, locked into seclusion, only the seclusion was within his own body. He had felt that way before a few times, disconnected and disinterested – He Kexin’s trial, his father’s death, Cangse Sanren’s, Lao Nie’s – and although he knew it was likely unhealthy, it was very helpful in ensuring that he got done what needed to get done instead of wasting time reacting to things.

As he should now.

“The rules have many permutations,” Lan Qiren said, stepping into the room. “But not as many as life itself. The application of the rules in any given circumstances is therefore a matter subject to debate.”

“Teacher Lan!”

“Shufu.”

“Qiren-xiong!”

Lan Qiren blinked, somehow not having expected the rush of noise that greeted him. It was the same group that he’d dispersed before he went to speak with Lan Xichen: Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, and Lan Yueheng; even Wen Qing was there, with Wen Ning hovering unobtrusively in the corner trying to make tea with stiff fingers.

“Ah,” he said. “You’re all here.”

“And you’re in shock,” Wen Qing said, coming forward with a frown to grab rather rudely at his wrist. Doctors were the same no matter where they went, Lan Qiren supposed, and permitted it, less out of a desire to be treated than lack of energy to get into another fight. With the exception of the first night, where Lan Xichen had insisted that Lan Qiren see the doctors in order to be pointlessly harangued for nearly half a shichen about how he couldn’t just go running around putting himself in danger given his ill health and then shouted at for the next half after he’d politely declined their recommendation that he be confined to bedrest for the next four days on account of his need to meet with the sect elders the following morning, Lan Qiren had been tremendously busy. He’d been arguing and negotiating more or less ever since, from morning to night; he’d returned to his quarters precisely in time to prepare for sleep, leaving no time to talk with anyone, and departed again first thing in the morning – if it hadn’t been for their family rules, the others probably would have insisted on staying in the meeting hall non-stop. “What’s wrong with your sect? Don’t they know that your health is poor?”

They were aware. If they hadn’t been aware, they certainly were now – it had been one of the factors at stake while they’d tried to decide on what would be an appropriate punishment for him, something that would both serve to appease the Jin sect’s demands for justice and appropriately serve as consequence for his behavior, since Lan Qiren was unwilling to repent of his behavior or disclaim what he’d done.

Or at least, that was what they were supposed to have been deciding. Lan Xichen had been right that the sect’s internal divisions had been aggravated by his actions and that Lan Qiren’s long-standing opponents within the sect were seeking to take advantage of this mistake to get back for wrongs they believed had been done to them, no matter how much the rules counseled do not mix private and public interests. There were those who hated him personally, those to whom his lingering presence was an obstacle to the influence they hoped to have over Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji, those who were simply opportunists…and, as Lan Xichen had also noted, there were those that would normally have been on Lan Qiren’s side, whether through habit or aligned interests, yet who were appalled by what they saw as the commonality between Lan Qiren’s actions and those of his brother’s all those years before.

He still had his supporters, of course, which included not least of all Lan Xichen as sect leader. He had himself, with his deep knowledge of the rules and the reputation he had built over decades, and if his tongue was still slow and his voice monotonous, then he had at least learned how to be eloquent and persuasive – he had done what he could to blunt the rage of his sect members and turn at least some of them to his side, and manage the objections of the rest. He hadn’t been sect leader for so many years for nothing.

Even with conduct as foolish as his had been, it had been very hard for them to pin him down.

The only thing that had given Lan Qiren pause was the accusation that he had weakened their sect at a time when they needed to be strong, bringing them shame instead of glory, and in doing so had hurt Lan Xichen, who was sworn brothers to one of the Jin sect and whose reputation would be harmed by the dispute.

His opponents had seized upon that unwise pause at once.

That had been when it had gone wrong, he supposed. If Lan Qiren hadn’t hesitated, tripped up by too much love for his nephew, or if Lan Xichen had stood up and unflinchingly defied them for Lan Qiren’s sake at that time, defying his own inclination towards peace in favor of assertiveness, things might have been different. But Lan Xichen had hesitated, too, perhaps thinking of his sworn brother, and then there had been no stopping it; it had all gone rather badly after that.

Lan Qiren hoped that he hadn’t just ruined Lan Xichen’s friendship with Jin Guangyao.

Poor Lan Xichen had been so horrified when he’d realized what he’d inadvertently allowed to happen, mere moments after the mistake had been made, but by then it was too late – the other side had the momentum, and they were running with it as far as they could, pressing their advantage.

It wasn’t that they didn’t have a point, of course. The whole problem was that they had a very good point. The Lan sect was depending on Jin sect for funds to assist in rebuilding, one of Lan Xichen’s decisions that Lan Qiren had disagreed with and disapproved of but which he had ultimately acquiesced to, wanting to respect Lan Xichen’s autonomy as sect leader; failing to respect and preserve that relationship now, in the middle of construction, could be a big problem if it meant that that flow of gold suddenly stopped. They had other financial sources, of course, but having chosen not to depend on them in the beginning would make it tricky to go back to them now.

Therefore, his enemies said, savagely wolfish in their victory, seeking to hide their anger behind pretty words, it was essential that they impose a punishment severe enough that the Jin sect be properly appeased. Not that Lan Qiren thought Jin Guangshan could be appeased, especially if his goal was to weaken the other sects, their own included, and potentially also deal with Wei Wuxian’s unorthodoxy, but that obviously wasn’t his opponents’ real goal either. To them, it must have seemed like a perfect victory: they’d be able to shut Jin Guangshan up, firmly reestablish the Lan sect’s sterling reputation for unhesitating justice throughout the cultivation world, and take Lan Qiren down at the same time.

The rules said do not take advantage of your position to oppress others. If only it were that easy!

When it had been his turn, Lan Qiren had used his position as sect leader to impose his view of what his sect ought to be like – to enforce the rules strictly, to require all to act ethically, to dispense with the unnecessary – and in doing so he had trampled on the contrary wills of others in his sect, using their failings to his advantage. Now that he had erred in turn, they were all too eager to get their own back, and without the full-throated support of his sect leader, hamstrung as he was by his own nature and his own choices, there was nothing he could say about it that would not be hypocritical.

Still, it hadn’t all been worthless. He’d at least been able to negotiate his punishment down to something he was willing to accept…

Lan Qiren hoped Lan Xichen would forgive him for having accepted it.

His nephew had been furious at himself for having hesitated, furious (however incorrectly) at Jin Guangyao for having inspired that hesitation, furious at the other sect elders for having proposed the punishment at all, and that fury had turned onto Lan Qiren when he’d first indicated that he was inclined to accept the resolution. Lan Xichen had wanted to keep fighting; he had even been on the verge of using his position as sect leader to defy the elders and refuse the selected punishment absolutely. But bitter experience had taught Lan Qiren that such disrespect by Lan Xichen to his elders would poison the well for the future – they wouldn’t forget what had happened, and they wouldn’t forgive, either. That, in turn, would mean that Lan Xichen would find it harder to implement whatever future plans he wished to put in place as a result.

Lan Qiren, far too familiar with that struggle, hadn’t wanted that for him.

He was the one in the wrong, in his sect’s eyes, and even in his own. The burden should fall upon him.

He’d accepted that from the start.

And so he had quietly overruled Lan Xichen’s objections and accepted the punishment that had been proposed, rendering it final through his acceptance. He had observed as his allies’ faces turned green with regret and even his enemies seemed uncertain and shocked, as if they’d profaned their family rules by proposing a punishment beyond what they thought would be acceptable merely as a negotiating tactic…but it was too late now for remorse.

For them, or for him.

“– a normal symptom of shock,” Wen Qing said, putting a hot cup of tea into his hand and doing something or another to the meridian closest to his elbow, jerking Lan Qiren out of his temporary stupor and back into awareness. “He’s more prone to succumbing to shocks like this, given his weak circulation, not to mention weak lungs – it’s too easy for him to have problems breathing, and that spurs on the rest.”

“There is nothing wrong with me at the moment,” Lan Qiren said.  

Wen Qing huffed disdainfully, and everyone else around him looked skeptical as well. “Whatever you say, Teacher Lan. You still shouldn’t be up at all hours arguing. Hasn’t anyone told you that emotional strain is a danger to you?”

“At length.” It wasn’t the only danger facing his health now. “However, I wasn’t up ‘at all hours’. I slept and rose at the typical times for my sect. The exhaustion is purely mental, not physical. I do not require the assistance of a doctor.”

Wen Qing threw up her hands, clearly despairing of him. “Fine! Have it your way.”

“See, I told you he’d be fine,” Wei Wuxian said to Lan Yueheng, his voice almost forcefully bright as if he thought he could make things actually be all right through willpower alone. “You’ve been hovering around a storm-crow, looking all bleak and mournful, just worrying Lan Zhan for no reason!”

Lan Yueheng ignored him in favor of looking anxiously at Lan Qiren, and, yes, he did rather resemble a bird, although Lan Qiren probably would have compared him to an anxious pigeon. “Qiren-xiong, has the sect made a decision? What have they decided?”

Lan Qiren looked at the room around him. Wen Qing was muttering angrily under her breath about the wretchedness of stubborn old men, bad patients one and all, as Wen Ning tried to convince her to calm down with offers of tea, while standing behind Lan Yueheng, Lan Wangji had drawn close to Wei Wuxian with an expression on his face that could indeed be described as worry. Perhaps over Wei Wuxian’s fate?

Well, that was at least something Lan Qiren could help with.

“The sect decided not to override my decision regarding taking Wei Wuxian as a disciple,” he said, trying to assuage their concerns, but instead Wei Wuxian only scowled.

“Was that an option?” he asked. “I didn’t think you could force someone to reject a disciple they’d already accepted."

"They cannot,” Lan Wangji said. He still looked worried. “But they can strongly recommend it.”

“They can threaten to throw Qiren-xiong out of the sect if he doesn’t,” Lan Yueheng clarified, and Wei Wuxian looked alarmed, as did the Wen siblings.

“That is not at issue,” Lan Qiren said sternly. “I remain a member of the Lan sect.”

“You mean it was possible? Teacher Lan, you didn’t say – mmpf!”

Wei Wuxian reached up to his mouth with an expression of annoyance. Not that it would him any good, since Lan Qiren had silenced him.

“You are my disciple,” Lan Qiren told him. “If you do nothing else, you will at least show me sufficient respect to be quiet when I am speaking.”

Wei Wuxian looked mulish.

“I made the decision to take you as a disciple,” Lan Qiren reminded him. “The rules say maintain your own discipline. I am responsible for my own conduct, and for the risks that I am willing to take.”

It did not change Wei Wuxian’s expression. Nor did Lan Wangji, standing next to him, look any less worried.

“Shufu,” he said. “What did the sect decide? Will you have to face punishment for taking Wei Ying as a disciple?”

“Not for the act of taking a disciple in itself, which is not contrary to the rules – the rule do not take disciples without careful screening cannot said to have been breached when I am in fact highly familiar with Wei Wuxian’s qualifications, both positive and negative,” Lan Qiren said, taking refuge in the familiarity of pedagogy, treating his own case as if it were a historical example of how the rules were applied. “But what can be said to be a breach is the spirit behind my doing so, which was to shield Wei Wuxian from facing consequences for his behavior rather than a genuine desire to instruct him in our ways. The rules say No dishonest practices. Furthermore, as you know, the Jin sect has been demanding justice for what happened at the Qiongqi Path, and they are entitled to know that justice has been meted out.”

Lan Wangji’s expression of worry only worsened. “So shufu will be punished.”

“…yes, I will be. But Wei Wuxian will not, and the Wen sect remnants, under his auspices, are similarly guaranteed our protection.”

“But shufu will,” Lan Wangji insisted, and Lan Qiren felt warmed by his nephew’s concern. It was a dull sort of warmth, muted through the shock, but he was relieved that Lan Wangji was still able to be concerned about things and people other than Wei Wuxian. He hadn’t gone all the way down his father’s path; Lan Qiren’s goal of all these years had been achieved. “What is the punishment?”

“Yeah, Teacher Lan,” Wei Wuxian said. He looked worried, too, which was still a little unexpected. Prior to their encounter on the Burial Mounds, Lan Qiren hadn’t even known that Wei Wuxian’s facile face could make an expression of genuine worry, and neither had he thought that he himself would ever be the recipient thereof. “What’s the punishment? Is it something I can help with?”

Lan Qiren didn’t want to tell him. Wei Wuxian’s mood had improved, but he kept slipping back far too easily to the way it had been before, cold and vicious; a shock would not be conductive to his continued improvement, especially since Lan Qiren had not yet had the opportunity to try out healing songs on him other than by using Lan Wangji as proxy.

He didn’t want to tell any of them, actually. The Wen siblings and their family didn’t need to see the streak of viciousness that lurked beneath the Lan sect’s tranquility, especially since they’d be staying with them in the future – he’d managed that, at least, with Lan Xichen’s support. Lan Xichen had reminded everyone that he had been the one to advocate clemency for the Wen survivors, before the Jin sect had volunteered to implement it, and he’d cleverly framed his argument that taking care of them would only be honoring that original agreement rather than anything to do with Wei Wuxian or Lan Qiren. They’d be getting the farmland that Lan Qiren had promised, under strict guard and lacking the right to leave at will, but it would be theirs, without even the need to pay tax to the sect the way the other local farmers did.

Lan Qiren had even managed, in a rather inspired twist on do not forget the grace of your forefathers, do not be wasteful, and nurture aspirations, to win the right for little Wen Yuan granted admittance to the Lan sect as a disciple as long as he was adopted out to some another surname. He’d very carefully omitted any indication of what type of disciple, leaving the door open for Lan Wangji to adopt the boy if he wished to make him one of the main line Lan clan, but also making it equally plausible for Wei Wuxian to choose to give the boy his surname instead if that was what the family preferred.

There had been objections, of course, but Lan Qiren pointed out that such a generous offer was likely the only thing that would allow them to totally eradicate Wen Ruohan’s surname from the earth without lifting a sword – little Wen Yuan was the only male left who might conceivably have children in the future, what with Wen Ning being dead, the other Wen men quite elderly, and Wen Qing a woman, whose children, should she have any, likely to carry their father’s surname, given that no one would reasonably choose to marry into the Wen rather than marry her out. It was a good offer, keeping in mind both justice and mercy, in accordance with what the Lan sect rules sought to achieve, and by coincidence it would also make it easier for Lan Wangji in the future when courting his beloved.

No, Lan Qiren didn’t want to tell them. It would be harder to convince the Wen of the virtue of allowing their precious child to join the Lan sect, if he told them.

He didn’t want to tell Lan Yueheng, who had been his friend since childhood. Lan Yueheng had been by his side through the disastrous days when his brother had been sect leader, mind warped by his unrequited passion, anger sometimes or even often taken out on his irritating younger brother who kept harping on him to do his job rather than spend all his time chasing his ladylove.

But least of all, least of all, did he want to tell Lan Wangji. Lan Qiren might no longer be his nephews’ guardian, now that they had both come of age, and he had never been more than that – the sect had been very careful to grant him no more rights than they had to, hasty to remind and correct the children if the way that they said ‘shufu’ ever sounded a little too much like the way other children said ‘father’. But Lan Qiren had been their bulwark for so long, in their eyes a figure that was implacable and untouchable and able to defend them from everything, and even if that illusion of invincibility had been thoroughly destroyed by the Wen sect attack and its lingering effects on his health, an enemy attack was a different thing entirely from a punishment imposed from within.

A punishment ordered and then meted out by his sect.

He didn’t want to tell anyone, but not telling them wouldn’t be worth anything. It wouldn’t change anything.

One way or another, they’d find out eventually.

“Teacher Lan?” Wei Wuxian prompted. “Is there something I can do to help?”

Be of one mind.

Lan Qiren sighed. “You will not have much of a choice,” he said, looking down at the tea that had at some point been shoved into his hand instead of meeting anyone’s eyes. “As my disciple, you will be expected to aid me in my recovery.”

“Recovery?” Wen Qing said sharply. “I thought you said your condition was chronic, and stable?”

“So it’s physical discipline?” Lan Yueheng asked at the same time. “Not seclusion?”

“Third Uncle!” Lan Wangji exclaimed.

“What? I’m just asking –”

“Physical discipline?” Wei Wuxian interrupted, scowling. “You mean like being hit with the discipline rod? Teacher Lan?”

He sounded scandalized, as if the very thought were unthinkable. It was a little amusing, actually. Did Wei Wuxian think that Lan Qiren had been raised in the Lan sect and not faced sect discipline before?

“Absolutely not,” Wen Qing said, as if she had any say in the matter. “With his health? They can’t seriously expect a man who can barely breathe to take a beating! I don’t care if they mask it in the name of sect discipline, it’s ridiculous –”

“The sect has already made its decision,” Lan Qiren interjected, or tried to, anyway; there was too much yelling. “And I have accepted it. There is no point in debate –”

“What type of physical discipline?” Lan Yueheng asked, sounding suspicious, and Lan Qiren glared at him – he at least should know better than to be so loud. Though if he thought back on it, he supposed Lan Yueheng’s most common infraction had always been a violation of causing noise is prohibited, and his children took after him in that regard. His house had always been uncommonly raucous, though usually Lan Qiren enjoyed it…perhaps it was his ears that were overly sensitive at the moment, rather than the room being too noisy. “What? Qiren-xiong, you’re acting strangely, and that’s worrying! I know you’re not scared of the discipline rod, you used to get it all the time when that jerk was in charge –”

“Yueheng-xiong, how dare you! Desist at once,” Lan Qiren cried out, horrified, silencing his cousin with a spell as if he were an unruly junior. “Do not criticize other people!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Wei Wuxian said. “Who’s this jerk? I want –”

“Shufu,” Lan Wangji said, ignoring everyone else. “What is the punishment?”

Lan Qiren faltered.

His younger nephew was looking at him with worried eyes. Out of all the children Lan Qiren had ever taught, Lan Wangji was the one most like himself, only better in every respect – he was the baby of the family, the treasured pearl both Lan Qiren and Lan Xichen doted on and had never been able to deny anything, the one they had both agreed without ever saying a word ought to be left out of sect business to live and do as he pleased, ought to be spared any hardship they could.

Lan Wangji was too smart not to be able to figure out why his uncle, who had never particularly liked Wei Wuxian, would suddenly go so far out of his way to rescue him, and then upon his return promptly send them off in such a way as to guarantee them time alone together.

He would take this to heart.

But neither could Lan Qiren not tell him.

Do not tell lies.

“The sect has decided that my conduct in taking Wei Wuxian as a disciple, and adopting his actions as my own responsibility, has violated six of the greater rules,” Lan Qiren said, his voice as dry and emotionless as it had ever been, or even more so, as he sought to make it sound as mundane as any other statement. “In order that I not forget myself in the future, they have determined that the punishment ought to be sixty times the amount in strikes with the discipline rod, three hundred and sixty in total, and – ”

He refused to let his voice hitch or hesitate.

“– and six with the discipline whip.”

“Shufu!” Lan Wangji cried out, horrified, and Lan Qiren couldn’t blame him. Strikes with the discipline whip was a punishment reserved for the most severe crimes – the marks made by the whip would never fade for the rest of someone’s life, and they didn’t heal right, either; one would take even a hale and hearty young man in full health down, a half-dozen would put them out of commission for months, and any more than a dozen would invariably require a recovery that would span multiple years, even for an exceptionally powerful cultivator. Several such strikes inflicted at once was better described as torture, not punishment.

Even though the Lan sect honored human life above all else, the lives of a few Jin sect guards, however unlawfully taken, did not call for such a severe sanction. But that wasn’t what the rest of Lan Qiren’s sect were sanctioning – they were condemning Wei Wuxian for his rebellion against orthodoxy, condemning Lan Qiren for having given his approval and that of his sect’s to that rebellion, condemning them both for taking the side of the Wen sect that they all hated, condemning the Wen sect for having not refuted their tyrannical kinsman when it mattered…

But not just that.

In his heart of hearts, Lan Qiren believed that the main focus of their ire was not even really him, but his brother.

His brother, upon whom so many of the sect had placed their hopes, only to be betrayed and abandoned. The great Qingheng-jun, the shining star of the Lan sect’s last generation, who had been safe in his self-chosen seclusion, untouchable, a target for resentment that had only grown worse as the years had passed; Lan Qiren had always been his standard-bearer, governing the sect in his name and raising the next generation of leaders on his behalf, and every single one of the things Lan Qiren had done over the past few decades, decisions he’d made that his brother wouldn’t have and yet never stirred himself to overrule, could be laid at his brother’s feet in blame.

But his brother was dead, killed by the Wen, and Lan Qiren was here to take his place. Just like always.

Six strikes: there were six great rules that Lan Qiren could be said to have broken, but in his mind, and perhaps only in his mind, those six strikes stood for something else instead. One for his brother. One for his brother’s wife. One each for their children. One for Lan Qiren himself. And the last…

The last for Wei Wuxian, who Lan Qiren had now brought into their family.

Wei Wuxian, who was now yelling at the top of his lungs, Lan Qiren noted with a wince; Wei Wuxian was visibly furious, his eyes crackling red with resentful energy.

“Jiang Cheng had one and he could barely move,” he was arguing, his hands flung out in his fervor. “Six is unthinkable – even Wen Chao couldn’t bring himself to inflict more than one at a time, and he was trying to cause hurt and permanent damage! And that’s not even considering Teacher Lan’s health! Even if he survives taking all six, he’ll be bedbound for months, maybe years, and recovering for even longer than that!”

“That is, in part, the point,” Lan Qiren said, and they all looked at him. “Wei Wuxian is my disciple, and required to be filial to me. He will be expected to act as my caretaker during the time when I am – indisposed.”

It would serve as a convenient means of keeping him out of trouble and away from the rest of the cultivation world, Lan Qiren serving yet again as the unwilling jailor of another person, and despite not knowing the background, Wei Wuxian’s face went pale with rage when he understood.

“Shufu,” Lan Wangji said, his lips pressed tight and his hands trembling in his sleeves. He was just as pale. “Shufu… xiongzhang agreed to this?”

“It is the punishment I negotiated and accepted,” Lan Qiren corrected, because it was true. Any other alternative would have been worse – for him, anyway. He would have lost his mind in any sort of seclusion other than the purely voluntary, having grown unduly terrified of forced seclusion because of what had happened with his brother, and he had given his word to both Wei Wuxian and the Wen sect that they would be safe under his protection. He had been unwilling to compromise on either of those points, which he might otherwise have traded in return for more of a reprieve.

The initial proposal of strikes had been even higher, but he had fought it down: he had only injured the sect’s face, not any of its people, and even his worst opponents had been hard pressed to point to any permanent damage that he had wrought. There was also the mitigating fact that he was no longer in the line of succession to rule the Lan sect, that he could be said to have shamed only himself, and there was also the compounding factor that he had declined privacy for his punishment, trading the shame of having his wrongs known throughout the sect and then the world in exchange for fewer strikes…it still seemed almost cruel and disproportionate, and he thought that some number of his cousins were regretting their harsh words against him now.

Some, but not all – there had still been those that even at the end felt no remorse, and instead had expressions suggesting that they would have pushed for such a vicious end result regardless. Lan Xichen hadn’t been wrong to say that Lan Qiren had angered far more people than he realized – Lan Qiren was the Lan sect’s pride on one hand, the respected teacher that drew students from sects throughout the cultivation world, and on the other hand their scourge. He had always been too stern, too strict, too harsh…

“Shufu,” Lan Wangji said, his voice sharp and strident. “Did xiongzhang agree to this?”

Lan Qiren hesitated, because for all of his objections Lan Xichen had, and that was answer enough for Lan Wangji. His nephew closed his eyes, shuddered from the top of his head to the bottom of his heels, then spun suddenly and stormed out the door, throwing it closed behind him with a clatter.

Lan Qiren wanted to call him back, but the words died in his throat.

What was he going to say, anyway? Causing noise is prohibited? Running is prohibited?

Do not grieve in excess?

“Is this punishment something that can be borne by others?” Wei Wuxian asked, crossing his arms over his chest, his expression defiant. “I’d be happy to take them on in your place, Teacher Lan. I’m the one that actually killed them, after all.”

“The punishment is not about the deaths of the Jin sect guards,” Lan Qiren said, tearing his eyes away from the door. Lan Xichen would need to learn to deal with Lan Wangji in a temper, rare as such a thing was; it would be better if he did not interfere. Lan Xichen would be able to explain how dire the other alternatives had been and that this result had been was what Lan Qiren was willing to accept, and with luck, perhaps a great deal of luck, Lan Wangji would accept it. “It’s about our sect rules, and – internal matters. There is no possibility of substitution. It would be inappropriate.”

There was a thump, and Lan Qiren glanced over – Lan Yueheng had slammed his hand down on the table, his eyes red. His lips were still pressed together…ah, of course. Lan Qiren had silenced him, and so he did not speak even though the actual binding of the spell had already passed, out of respect for Lan Qiren’s wishes; that was the way of their sect.

“You realize this will kill you,” Wen Qing said flatly, drawing Lan Qiren’s attention away from yet another person he did not know what to say to. Her eyes were red, too, which he wouldn't have expected, just as he wouldn't have expected Wen Ning's mute but very visible misery. “A regular cultivator could tolerate maybe twenty, if they were willing to lie in recovery for three years, and an especially strong cultivator even a few dozen, but you…your health is already so poor – whatever happened to you, it affected your cultivation and bodily strength both. You get injured faster and recover slower, and you’re already bad enough about resting and recuperating. Doesn’t your sect know that this will kill you?”

“It won’t,” Lan Qiren said, and he even mostly believed it. “I have the best understanding of my own strength. Even weakened as I am, six strikes is within the range of my tolerance. I would not have accepted it if it wasn’t.”

“What if you’re wrong?” she persisted.

“I’m not.”

“But –”

“Qiren-xiong knows himself best,” Lan Yueheng said, finally speaking. He sounded miserable. “And he won’t change his mind, either, no matter what, so both of you can stop bothering. If this is what the sect wants, it’s what he’ll do. That’s…who he is.”

Lan Qiren couldn’t say anything to that.

It was true.

Chapter Text

“I should never have accepted your offer, Teacher Lan,” Wei Wuxian said.

“We all make mistakes,” Lan Qiren said evenly. “You asked for my help in refining this song and you shall get it, but you still need to demonstrate that the key variation ten more times before I accept your conclusion that it has a measurable effect on the spiritual energy of the song.”

“I wasn’t talking about the music and you know it,” Wei Wuxian grumbled. “Also, why does it matter if we lock down the specific effect of the key variation? It’s not transferable to other songs.”

“It is worth knowing for the sake of knowing. Do not –”

“Do not give up on learning, I know, I know.”

Lan Qiren ignored him. “Moreover, while it is not currently transferable to other songs, that does not mean that there may not be other songs in the future that would not benefit from our gathering the information in a systematic fashion,” he said. “If you do something, do it right. Do not leave matters half-done to be completed by future generations.”

“Teacher Lan, the song we’re refining is one I use in demonic cultivation, there won’t be any future generations,” Wei Wuxian said, rolling his eyes. “Why would anyone choose to walk a single-planked bridge when there’s a broad road beside it?”

“Mm. Why do you?”

Wei Wuxian opened his mouth, then closed it again, aggravated.

“In that case, the key variations, if you please, disciple,” Lan Qiren said. He was fairly sure by now that the whole demonic cultivation business had something to do with the still-absent Jiang Cheng, so he wasn’t actually going to press for an answer – that was the trouble of taking a personal disciple from another sect, really; there were always going to be split loyalties. “Now.”

Wei Wuxian resentfully raised Chenqing up to his lips, and Lan Qiren nodded in approval, listening with half an ear – the key variation they’d introduced really did have the effect of increasing the range and efficacy of the summoning song, he’d identified that by the third repetition, but if Wei Wuxian wanted to be accepted by the Lan sect’s alchemists, he needed to learn the importance of providing solid repeatable evidence – and allowing his gaze to go over to where little Wen Yuan was trying to entice A-Shen into playing with a toy. He wasn’t having any success, given that Lan Yueheng’s youngest son was, as newborns generally were, currently only interested in eating, crying, and sleeping, but that wasn’t deterring Wen Yuan in the slightest; he was a very patient little boy. If Lan Wangji ultimately did end up adopting him – which was Lan Qiren’s preference, given Wei Wuxian’s still-rotten reputation in the cultivation world – he would probably be an exemplary member of their family, bringing glory to the Lan sect.

Being the son of someone as respected as Lan Wangji would also help deter anyone who might want to discriminate against him due to his original surname and bloodline, since any suggestion of fault in the child would suggest an error of teaching by the parent. They would just need to make sure to keep an eye on him to help him throw off any classic Wen sect traits that might crop up: traditionally speaking, their arrogance, their self-involvement, their tendency towards doing things by themselves to the point of pointless isolationism…

Wen Qing’s unsuccessful attempt to continue to study and practice medicine on her own without interacting with the Lan sect doctors even for the purposes of getting ingredients came to mind – foolishly stubborn and pointless, of course. Though luckily both sides had finally managed to bridge the gap between them through a united grumbling and nagging campaign aimed at Lan Qiren.

(They’d been particularly peeved by his argument that it didn’t matter if he was excessively stressed since there was nothing he could do about it. At least they were talking?) 

Anyway, it was nothing that couldn’t be compensated for with a rigorous education, especially one implemented from the very beginning.

“I wish you’d told me this type of punishment was a possibility when you offered to make me your disciple,” Wei Wuxian said, interrupting Lan Qiren’s absent-minded daydreams of a future classroom full of enthusiastic and obedient disciples, Lan sect or otherwise. “I wouldn’t have agreed.”

“It is indeed very obnoxious when people do things on your behalf without telling you about the consequences to themselves,” Lan Qiren agreed peaceably, and enjoyed watching Wei Wuxian flinch. Just because he didn’t know the exact details what had happened with Jiang Cheng didn’t mean he couldn’t guess some of the parts, and use them to his advantage – sometimes he could be a very petty person, and Wei Wuxian was just going to have to learn to deal with that. “I will admit I did not expect this degree of resistance or harshness from my sect, or perhaps that I would be able to mitigate it better. I therefore could not have told you, or Jiang Wanyin, what I myself did not expect.”

“Still, surely there must be something we can do to stop it,” Wei Wuxian insisted. He seemed genuinely distressed – he had seemed genuinely distressed from the start, and had only gotten more so as time went on. “We’re not just going to sit back and allow you to get beaten to death right before our eyes!”

“There’s nothing to be done,” Lan Qiren said, not for the first time. “The alternatives were all worse, or at least they were for me. It was my decision to accept the punishment. Anyway, surely this isn’t the first time you’ve witnessed sect discipline on a serious scale? The Jiang sect has a discipline whip as well.”

“I’ve seen it before, but the crimes involved were far worse – it was only used when the only other alternative would be to put someone to death or expel them from the sect. Not for helping other people.”

“I took on your crimes as my own,” Lan Qiren reminded him. “From the perspective of my sect, it is no different than if I were the one who went to the Qiongqi Path and slaughtered Jin sect guards using evil cultivation on behalf of people bearing the surname Wen, which has been the root of so much harm, of justified anger and even hatred.”

“But you didn’t. I did!”

“And I have already explained to you that there are other compounding circumstances involved here,” Lan Qiren said with a faint sigh. He was pretty sure someone – probably Lan Yueheng – had already aired out all of their sect’s dirty laundry in front of Wei Wuxian. That side of the family was as blunt as the Nie… “Circumstances that have nothing to do with you.”

“Circumstances,” Wei Wuxian fumed. “You mean a bunch of old farts with a grudge against you for having done too good a job leading the sect – don’t look at me like that, I’ve heard plenty about it! There’s no wall that doesn’t leak air!”

That didn’t sound too much like Lan Yueheng, actually. If anything, it sounded more like the things Lan Xichen muttered to himself when he thought his uncle couldn’t hear him – though what Lan Xichen thought he was doing complaining to Wei Wuxian, Lan Qiren had no idea.

“I have half a mind to do something about it,” Wei Wuxian added, and his eyes had started to turn red, resentful energy leaching in with a crackle of light. His hands were curled into fists, his knuckles white to the point that Lan Qiren felt mildly concerned for Chenqing. “I could, you know. No one could stop me. If I decided that those elders had gone too far…”

“But you won’t,” Lan Qiren said firmly. “Because you know attacking my sect would only hurt me more.”

He had been rather surprised the first time Wei Wuxian had threatened violence on his behalf – sure, he’d done him a favor, and at some considerable personal cost, but he hadn’t expected Wei Wuxian to take it so much to heart. He didn’t even like Lan Qiren – prior to the Burial Mounds, he had scarcely tolerated him…! Yet to hear it from Wei Wuxian now, it was as if a member of his family had been threatened – as if Lan Qiren were Jiang Cheng, or Jiang Yanli.

How strange.

Gratifying, but strange.

“…yes, you’re right,” Wei Wuxian said, deflating all at once. He still looked dissatisfied, as if he resented the fact that Lan Qiren was unwilling to let him swoop in with an army of the dead to carry him off to safety. “If I’ve learned anything by now, it’s that you are second to none when it comes to being stubborn…it’s not just me, you know.”

Lan Qiren looked at him in question.

“It isn’t.” Wei Wuxian crossed his arms. “From what I heard, every single person in the Cloud Recesses under the age of thirty is absolutely furious. Your entire sect. If it wasn’t for your rules about respecting elders, I think they’d riot at the idea of their teacher getting whipped – and they still might!”

It wasn’t going to happen, of course, but Lan Qiren did take no small amount of pleasure in hearing that. Even he hadn’t dreamt of there being such unified revulsion to the notion of his punishment among the younger generation.

He’d taken up teaching as a refuge from his duties as sect leader and found that he was good at it, or at least good enough to be appreciated, and so he’d kept doing it, taking on more and more of those duties over time. It hadn’t really occurred to him – or, he supposed, to the other elders – that his students might remain quite so attached to their stern and boring old teacher so long after the fact. The saying might go a teacher for a day, a father for a lifetime, but there were many teachers in the Cloud Recesses besides Lan Qiren. In all honesty, he’d imposed enough discipline on his students over the years that he’d almost thought they’d enjoy the idea of seeing some imposed on him in turn.

Apparently not.

“I mean, look at Lan Zhan! I’ve never seen him so upset. He’s just – he’s so viscerally angry…here I thought I’d seen him angry before, but it was nothing at all like this,” Wei Wuxian said, his voice suddenly distracted. He sounded almost dreamy. “You know, I think he’s gone feral.”

Lan Qiren frowned. “What?”

“I think he might have bitten Zewu-jun.”

“Not again,” Lan Qiren blurted out, then flushed crimson when Wei Wuxian turned to him with an expression of surprise and sudden delight. “Ah, it’s not – don’t misunderstand. He hasn’t bitten anyone since he was seven at least.”

Those few years in between Lan Wangji growing teeth and realizing how he could use them and then ultimately maturing out of doing so had been quite hard to deal with, though.

“…I have a sudden a desperate desire to pester you to tell me all of Lan Zhan’s baby stories,” Wei Wuxian said, then visibly struggled with himself. “No, that’s not the point. I’m not getting distracted.”

“You are getting distracted, but from the music, not the discussion, which is pointless,” Lan Qiren scolded. “I have already accepted the punishment. It will be implemented in a few days, at the end of the month, and no matter how upset you are or anyone else is, that is what will happen. It is better for us to focus on music for now, as I will not be able to provide hands-on instruction for some time –”

Wei Wuxian abruptly got up, face suddenly gone pale as if it had been drained of all blood, and walked away.

Lan Qiren sighed.

Such a temperamental student.

Out of lack of other options, he turned his attention back to his own music. He’d been reconstructing, to the best of his ability, the music he’d played for Wen Ning, since neither he nor Wei Wuxian knew whether it had anything to do with how gentle Wen Ning’s temper remained despite being a fierce corpse – Wei Wuxian had said that Wen Ning had been just like that when he’d been alive, but also that he’d been completely out of control on the Qiongqi Path and thereafter, white-eyed and full of rage whenever he wasn’t confined. Therefore something had managed to calm him and create the world’s first conscious fierce corpse, but whether it was Lan Qiren or Wei Wuxian remained yet to be seen.

Lan Qiren personally believed it was Wei Wuxian – if for no other reason than, putting everything else aside, Wei Wuxian was truly and undeniably a creative genius. As much as Lan Qiren disdained his utilization of resentful energy as unorthodox, the fundamentals of music that underlay most of what he was doing were equally applicable to regular spiritual energy, and that meant that Wei Wuxian’s demonic cultivation innovations could lead to innovations on the orthodox path as well. Comparing one against the other was actually quite interesting…

He would ask Lan Wangji to take his place in such experimentation during his convalescence, Lan Qiren decided. It would give his nephew a natural way to spend time together with the object of his affections – Wei Wuxian didn’t seem to mind Lan Wangji’s presence nearly as much as might have been expected given the rumors about their bad relationship, which meant that Nie Mingjue had been right about their fighting being misunderstood by most people – and it would provide them with an orthodox example to measure against Wei Wuxian’s unorthodox approach.

It would be easier if Wei Wuxian would practice both styles himself, of course, but Wei Wuxian’s unwillingness to resume orthodox practice bordered on the pathological. It had gotten to the point that Lan Qiren was forced to wonder if he were not merely unwilling but unable to do so, and therefore to speculate, if only to himself, as to why that might be. Perhaps there was something in the demonic path that barred entry back to normal cultivation, or perhaps something had happened during the war to affect his ability to cultivate normally…either way, Lan Qiren would ask Wei Wuxian to tell him the story once they’d had more time together and were more comfortable.

Demanding too much from a student too early was the surest way to destroy trust, and they were stuck together for good, now. He didn’t want to disturb the peace between them too soon - it wouldn’t matter if he waited, nothing would change.

Well, nothing that he could control, anyway.

Lan Qiren reflected grimly to himself that the trust between them was likely to be damaged regardless once the punishment was enacted. Wei Wuxian already felt betrayed by the Lan sect’s choice to punish Lan Qiren for trying to help him, and it was not something he would be able to turn aside and disregard – for severe punishments, other than those the sect agreed to keep confidential, it was necessary for those close to the transgressor to act as witnesses, reminding both themselves and the transgressor of the importance of obedience and to share in the punishment collectively. As Lan Qiren’s disciple, someone now as close to him as family, and as the true instigator of the events, Wei Wuxian would be naturally obligated to attend and watch.

Just as Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen would have to watch.

Ah, Qiren, Qiren, Lan Qiren thought. You were trying to do good, but look at how you’ve messed it all up!

The rules said do not act impulsively. He should have heeded them.

He had briefly considered trying to negotiate for privacy, as was his right, but Lan Xichen had overridden Lan Qiren on that point, insisting with fervor that the additional severity associated with private punishments was not acceptable in this instance, and Lan Qiren had given in. It was pointless, anyway – as Wei Wuxian said, there was no wall in which the wind couldn’t blow; he would only hear about it a thousand times over afterwards, anyway. The reduction in blows would therefore be worthwhile, even if only to reduce his nephews’ frenzy, which was due to their fear that any further severity would leave Lan Qiren dead or permanently crippled to the point where death would be a mercy, rather than merely convalescent for a long time.

After all, given his health, the number of strikes selected meant that he was likely to lose further mobility, perhaps permanently. If the strikes went awry, he could even suffer damage to his shoulders that would make playing music more difficult…

He would have to hope that the strikes did not go awry.

Still, Lan Qiren comforted himself that this was not like what had happened after the Wen attack on the Cloud Recesses. He would have access to treatment immediately, both medicine and surgical if required – Wen Qing had rather presumptuously threatened to cry at him if he refused her aid, appalling a statement as that was, and laughed in his face when he pointed out that it did not seem characteristic of her; apparently a good doctor did whatever it took to get a patient care. And unlike back then, it would be once and one, over in a single session – he wouldn’t be subjected repeatedly to vicious beatings and further torments, left without succor, tormented as much by the fear that it could and would happen again at any time without warning as by the pain itself. The punishment would be painful and damage his health further, but he would survive and it would be…

It wouldn’t be fine, but it would be over.

That was the way of their sect, harsh but fair. Their punishments were strict and liberally distributed, but once the punishment was complete, the mistake was forgiven whole-heartedly, that chapter of life closed, and a future unburdened by the past, unhindered by grudges, was possible.

His brother had voluntarily chosen seclusion, using what might have been a punishment as a weapon and escape all at once instead. He had therefore never been truly punished, and then he had died – there could be no moving on from that, and so the anger remained, looking for a different outlet.

Lan Qiren was different, though. He had no wish to escape from his punishment, no matter what certain others might wish. His life, as far as he was concerned, was his sect’s to do with as they pleased. If punishing him was what his sect elders needed to do to move on from his management of the sect, from the war and all its hatreds, then he would accept it without rancor or resentment.

He just…needed to convince Wei Wuxian of that.

Wei Wuxian, and also Lan Wangji.

Lan Qiren sighed and shook his head, leaning out to summon one of the nearby disciples – there were always some passing by his window these days, it seemed, each one of them with pinched-up features that suggested that they had not only heard about what was going on but also disapproved of the sect’s decision, as Wei Wuxian had observed – and bid them to return Wen Yuan and A-Shen to their respective families.

Lan Wangji…

Lan Qiren had not seen very much of his younger nephew for a while. He had heard rumors that Lan Wangji had taken to sweeping through the Cloud Recesses like a vengeful ghost, but whenever Lan Qiren was around, it was as if his nephew were the type of ghost that became insubstantial at will, disappearing into the morning dew. But today was the day that Lan Qiren had always reserved for tea with Lan Wangji alone, just the two of them; Lan Wangji wouldn’t miss that.

Lan Qiren had long ago implemented a requirement that each of his nephews have one afternoon with him alone, Lan Xichen towards the start of each half-month and Lan Wangji towards the end. It had been his attempt to ensure that each of his nephews had time with him alone so that they never felt overlooked – he had wanted to make sure they never felt as though they had an obligation to remain silent to let the other speak and never lacked an opportunity to tell him things that they didn’t want to say in front of a sibling, whether Lan Xichen’s mumbled red-faced questions about his first crush or Lan Wangji’s confused jealousy of Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue’s budding friendship, where he couldn’t decide which one he resented for taking away his time with the other. It had been Lan Qiren’s attempt to make up for his own childhood’s failings, where he’d never felt the freedom to share anything with the father he’d only seen only once a month at best, the absence and distance all the more stark in comparison to his brother’s every day visits.

Once his nephews had reached adulthood, he had indicated that they were excused from the duty, but each one of them had stubbornly refused, showing up at his door at the appointed time regardless of anything he said. They had faithfully maintained that practice right up until the Sunshot Campaign had started, and they had resumed it as soon as possible once the war was over, a welcome return to normality…

No, Lan Qiren was certain that Lan Wangji would not miss their appointment, no matter how much he was struggling with his feelings. He’d always been like that, even as a child, his feelings too large for his little frame; by now he had grown taller, but the feelings had grown as well, leaving him still floundering.

Lan Qiren put away his guqin and prepared the room, selecting a few of the teas Lan Wangji liked most and laying them out for Lan Wangji to choose between. He wondered idly if Lan Wangji knew that Lan Qiren prepared himself differently for their conversations depending on which tea was selected – the sweeter flavors for more serious conversations, Lan Wangji seeking comfort when he had a heavy subject on his mind; that particular smoked varietal for political matters causing anxiety, maybe due to Lan Qiren having long relied on its enervating properties when he had to stay up late to manage them; that one unusual flavor that Lan Wangji had developed a taste for in his adolescence that usually meant it was a personal issue…hmm, now that Lan Qiren thought of it, that one was one of the ones they imported from Yunmeng, wasn’t it? Perhaps the signs of love had been there for longer than he’d thought.

“Shufu,” Lan Wangji said, entering his door at precisely the right time.

“Wangji,” Lan Qiren said, and inclined his head towards the teas.

Lan Wangji hesitated over the selections briefly – perhaps he did know – and then chose…Lan Qiren’s personal favorite.

Usually Lan Qiren associated that one with Lan Wangji wanting to speak of old times, in need of familiarity and stability, but this time he thought it was probably a deliberate gesture.

Of what, he wasn’t entirely sure. Support, maybe.

When the tea was served, Lan Wangji did not take his seat as Lan Qiren indicated. Instead, he knelt down and would have pressed his head to the ground if Lan Qiren, startled by the sudden movement, had not caught his shoulder and prevented him.

“Shufu, forgive me,” Lan Wangji said, head bowed.

“What are you doing?” Lan Qiren asked. “You have done nothing that requires forgiveness.”

“Haven’t I?” Lan Wangji asked, looking up at Lan Qiren. His face was closed off, wooden the way it had been during the war, and Lan Qiren’s heart hurt.

“Unless there’s something you haven’t told me, no,” he said. He did not bother to pretend not to know why Lan Wangji was so distraught. “Wangji, my actions are my own, my decisions are my own. The sect’s decision is its own. The rules say maintain your own discipline. None of this is your fault.”

“The rules also say honor good people,” Lan Wangji argued. “Shufu is a good person. Wei Ying is a good person. Why does the sect not see this?”

“They are trying to do their best as they see it. Wangji…”

“Shufu did this for me,” Lan Wangji said, and lowered his head once more. “Because I – because of what I feel for Wei Ying.”

Do not tell lies.

“Yes,” Lan Qiren admitted. “Yes, I did. But it was not because I doubted you. It was because I know what a good child I raised.”

Lan Wangji looked up once again, his eyes wide.

“You are good, Wangji,” Lan Qiren told him, wishing to impress it into his mind. He hesitated momentarily, but then spoke further, wanting to be clear, to erase doubt. “You are my finest student, and I am proud of you. I have always been proud of you, and I will always be proud of you. You live your life by our sect rules, knowing good from evil. Even when you fell in love, you did not do wrong.”

Of that much, Lan Qiren was certain.

There’s someone I want to take back to Gusu, Lan Wangji had said. Take them back and hide them away. But they are unwilling.

Lan Qiren, mired in his own doubts and his own fears, the terrors of his past looming large before his eyes, had been horrified when he’d heard it, hearing in it everything he had ever been afraid of, but he had been wrong.

Wei Wuxian was unwilling, and Lan Wangji was in love – and Lan Wangji had done nothing.

He had not taken his father’s path, the one Lan Qiren had spent his whole life trying to teach him to avoid. He had not forced Wei Wuxian to return with him; he had not pressured him, insidious and covert. He had not tried to achieve his aims by force physical or emotional. He articulated his wishes only to his brother, secretly, issuing it as a cry from the heart, an expression of pain.

Lan Qiren’s fears had been only the results of his own ancient wounds, those scars that never fully healed. That was his fault, his burden – he should not have doubted his nephew. His nephew, his Lan Wangji who was so much like him, who gave so much of himself away.

“It is because I know you and trust you to act righteously that I felt that I had to act,” Lan Qiren continued. These past few days of travel and of contemplation had allowed him time to think through his behavior and to achieve clarity for himself, clarity on his reasoning, his purpose and meaning. “You always remain true to yourself, choosing always to uphold the value of justice, just as our rules demand. You have never hesitated to shoulder the burden of morality, to have courtesy and integrity, to perform acts of chivalry…you have always done the right thing. In this case, you erred towards Wei Wuxian’s side because you did not doubt him. You did not doubt Wei Wuxian, because you trust him.”

Because you love him.

Lan Qiren had doubted because he was afraid of love.

But he had never, in his heart, truly lost faith in Lan Wangji. If he had, he would never had gone by himself, alone and unprotected, to try to solve the problem of Wei Wuxian’s break with the cultivation world.

“I did not know Wei Wuxian, nor trust him, as you do, but I trust you. Knowing what I did about how you felt, I had to go to the Burial Mounds myself to – to see what there was to see. To do what I could, if there was anything I could do.”

A few Jin guards, the stolen Wen sect members…everyone in the world would have agreed to let the matter rest if there’d been a suitable punishment. If Jiang Cheng had expelled Wei Wuxian from his sect, as they would have undoubtedly agreed between themselves to do, that would have been the end of it.

Only it wouldn’t have been the end of it, because Lan Wangji was in love.

Madly in love, the way it always was when a Lan fell in love. If Lan Qiren had done nothing, even if no one had ever come to make trouble for Wei Wuxian ever again, Lan Wangji would have eventually found his way to his beloved’s side. If someone did make trouble, and Wei Wuxian, his temperament unsteady and easily provoked due to his demonic cultivation, were to commit some horrible crime…Wei Wuxian had attacked Lan Qiren when he’d come to the Burial Mounds, thinking he was there to attack him, thinking that he was acting in self-defense. Lan Qiren had not held it against him, but someone else would have.

And once that happened, Lan Wangji would need to make another set of choices entirely.

“The only matter where I do not trust you is to know when to stop when defending those you love,” Lan Qiren said. “But that, too, is not your fault. It is mine.”

“Shufu –”

“Hush. It is true. I have not modeled appropriate behavior for you and Xichen. When the student, badly taught, goes awry, it is the fault of the teacher, not the student.”

If Wei Wuxian were ever truly threatened, Lan Wangji would act. He would have no choice but to act; his heart would not let him stand aside. He would act, of course, with every intention of behaving properly, but he wouldn’t know where to stop, wouldn’t know when to draw the line. Love confused everything. There would be a pit dug beneath his feet, and every choice he made would lead to tragedy. If he chose righteousness and the cultivation world, he would be betraying his beloved; if he chose to trust and stand by his beloved, he would be betraying his sect and family.

Lan Qiren did not know whether Lan Wangji would choose Wei Wuxian over the whole world, over his brother and his uncle and his sect, over the dictates of his own conscience – but he might.

Lan Wangji was not like his father, to let love curdle and turn into selfishness. But he was like his uncle –like Lan Qiren before him, when he loved, he did not hold anything back.

Lan Qiren would not let him have the chance to make that mistake, either.

“I am your teacher and your elder. It is only right for me to act in your place.” Lan Qiren lifted up his hand and smoothed Lan Wangji’s forehead ribbon, that precious item that only spouses, children, and parents could touch. Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen were his nephews, but Lan Qiren had always loved them as he would have sons of his own. “Do not apologize, Wangji. I will not accept it.”

He waited a long moment as Lan Wangji’s shoulders shuddered, his feelings too large for him as always.

“Now get up and drink your tea,” he added when the moment had passed. “Don’t you know it’s getting cold? And you should eat something as well.”

Lan Wangji jerked a short nod, and sat at the table.

They did not speak further on the matter of Lan Qiren’s upcoming punishment.

Chapter Text

The end of the month dawned bright and clear.

Lan Qiren woke with a great sense of gratitude for the consistency of his sect rules. He was habituated to them down to his bones: no matter how great his distress, his body knew when to rise and what to do after he had risen, marching him straight through his usual morning routine without any contribution from his consciousness. The physical activity, whether freshening up, dressing, or going through his morning training, was refreshingly mindless, even soothing.

He couldn’t even imagine what he’d do if he had to actually think this morning.

Lan Qiren had, with all the stubbornness his familial heritage gave him, been pretending very firmly to one and all that he had no concerns about what was to come, refusing to lend an ear to anyone else’s worries on the subject, but naturally he wasn’t actually anywhere near that calm on the inside. The discipline whip was seldom used for a reason, and even in that tense period with his brother he hadn’t ever really had reason to be seriously concerned by the risk of it. To have to face it now, when he was so much weaker…

At best, he’d be injured for months, if not years. At worst, he could be facing permanent incapacitation, paralysis, or even death.

Lan Qiren hadn’t been lying when he’d told Wen Qing that he believed six strikes to be within the range he could tolerate, but he knew better than anyone else that he wasn’t always the best judge of that. After all, hadn’t he so recently fallen from his sword when fleeing from Jinlin Tower? What if he’d misjudged this, too?

He wasn’t afraid of death in battle, had fought just as furiously as any other despite his injuries, but this would be a miserable death – worse, an undeserved death, because Lan Qiren still didn’t think he’d done anything wrong enough to deserve it. His actions had been impulsive, maybe even foolish, but he didn’t regret for one moment having intended the best. But good intentions would mean little, and matter less, when the time came…

Lan Qiren’s mind was full of such thoughts, inescapable, but his body marched on.

By the time his morning exercises were complete and he was fully awake, he had finally managed to settle his restless thoughts.

It was, in the end, very simple. A punishment had been proposed and accepted; absent some external reason for reconsideration – even if his fellow sect members regretted their decision, their pride wouldn’t allow them to change their mind for anything less – it was going to happen. At this point, his options were to accept it and face it with dignity, or else leave the sect.

He wasn’t going to leave his sect.

Wei Wuxian had at one point dropped half a mention of it, resentful and fuming, and according to him, Lan Qiren had (apparently) given him such a glare that he’d needed half a day to recover. Lan Qiren didn’t actually remember doing that, but it seemed about right. Leave the sect – what utter nonsense that was! The Lan sect was his home, his family, and his responsibility, for which he’d sacrificed half a lifetime; how could anyone expect him to give it up? If it was broken, if it was wrong, he ought to fix it, not abandon it, for even if he could save himself, he would forever remember all those he’d left behind.

There were certainly some instances in which a sect became so thoroughly unreasonable that there was no choice but to leave – the Wen sect under Wen Ruohan came to mind, of course, but there were others, less terrifying and more petty, in which the rot had settled so deep that there was no fixing it – but if Lan Qiren’s sect had gotten to such a state despite more than two decades of his supervision, the condemnation ought to fall onto his head as much as anyone else.

Lan Qiren had explained as much to Wei Wuxian when he’d mentioned the glare, though Wei Wuxian had very glumly compared his explanation to a scolding and promptly bemoaned his fate in accepting such a teacher, albeit in such an amusing fashion that Lan Qiren suspected he was trying to be distracting.

(It was in fact rather funny, in an obnoxious sort of way. This suggested to Lan Qiren that humor was likely a quality inherited from one’s ancestors, on account of both Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze having been both humorous and irritating in exactly the same way.)

At any rate, the options available to Lan Qiren were straightforward, and therefore the answer straightforward as well. Lan Qiren would not leave his sect, which meant he would not be able to evade his punishment, and that, in turn, meant that the punishment was going to happen. He could be calm and secure in his knowledge of this inevitability, and face it with the dignity and pride that a member of his sect ought to have.

So reassured, Lan Qiren meditated and played music for a brief period, settling his nerves still further, and then headed out of his courtyard towards the discipline hall.

He made it halfway there before he noticed.

The Cloud Recesses was well-situated and spacious, with gardens and natural forestry alike incorporated into the design to provide some measure of privacy and add to the overall sense of tranquility. Lan Qiren was accustomed to seeing flashes of white out of the corner of his eye at all times, Lan sect disciples moving to and fro upon errands of their own. He was familiar with instances where the white-clad disciples of his sect gathered together, whether it was mealtime or a holiday dinner or something else.

He was not accustomed to seeing row upon row of disciples sitting in perfect posture, expressions grim as if they were preparing to play songs against evil, in ever-expanding concentric circles surrounding their sect’s disciple hall.

Lan Qiren stared blankly, coming to a brief halt. “What in the world…?”

“Your students, Teacher Lan,” Wei Wuxian said, appearing by his side as if out of nowhere. When Lan Qiren looked at him, bemused, he shrugged. “Didn’t you say yourself that those close to the person being punished were required to be present as witnesses and share in some of the punishment themselves…? It’s not their fault that your Lan sect’s discipline hall is too small to contain those who consider themselves close to you.”

Lan Qiren stared at him, speechless.

Wei Wuxian smirked at him. “I told you that most of your sect was angry about this!”

It wasn’t that Lan Qiren didn’t know that, but he hadn’t realized that that anger had extended to the point of – of – of some sort of public demonstration.

This was positively embarrassing.

Although not…bad.

Unable to think of anything to say, or even any way to describe his own overwhelming feelings at the moment, Lan Qiren put his hands behind his back and continued on his way to the discipline hall, nodding in response to the respectful murmurs of “Teacher” that greeted him from each of the disciples as he passed. He had been aware that to most of the younger generation of the Lan sect, he was referred to solely as ‘Teacher’, as though he were the only one rather than one among many, but he’d always assumed that that deference had been given to him on account of his preeminent role in the sect, the acting sect leader. He hadn’t thought that even after he’d stepped down from that role and even cast aside all dignity for his own selfish motives, breaking the rules both publicly and within his own heart, that they would still seek to honor him like this.

Lan Qiren’s chest felt full of emotion to the point of choking on it.

(He’d never empathized with Lan Wangji more.)

The ones sitting respectfully were his students, meaning all those younger than twenty-five – had he really started teaching so long ago? – but there were others there, too, standing politely but immovably. His peers were there, along with some of the young men and women who hadn’t been young enough to be in his classes but rather those in which he had served the teacher as an assistant, which he’d done starting at the age of sixteen, and even, as he neared the discipline hall, some older folk, his elders. There were those that had been on his side, and some of those that hadn’t, but they were still there. Not the ones who hated him most – and there were plenty of those, and some of them, too curious to resist, just lurked at the outside and glared at the sea of white as if it were personally offensive to them – but certainly enough.

Not for nothing, he thought, and felt the same way he had when he’d seen the familiar sights of Gusu on the trip back from Yiling, a profound sense of homecoming and belonging, strong enough to make his eyes sting for want of tears. No, it was not for nothing.

It was not for nothing that Lan Qiren had given his life to his sect. His sect, his clan, his family – he had devoted himself to them, and they were, in their own ways, equally devoted to him.

His mistakes, and theirs…what were those, compared to that?

His nephews and best friend were waiting for him, and his disciple accompanied him. With a light heart, Lan Qiren arrived at the discipline hall and presented himself wordlessly to the hall master, a tight-lipped Lan Bocheng – he was the third in line for the position, meaning that the first two hall masters had absented themselves on the grounds of a conflict so grave that they felt incapable of maintaining impartiality.

It was a nice gesture, albeit not his preference. If he’d had the choice, Lan Qiren would have preferred that the person inflicting the punishment be someone of his father’s generation, rather than his own peer, and if it had to be a peer, then preferably one he liked a little better – if it had been Lan Wangji enduring the blows, he certainly would never have allowed anyone other than himself or someone he trusted to inflict a punishment of such magnitude, no matter how much it would have broken him to do so. But there was nothing else for it now; the rules were the rules. He would simply have to trust to Lan Bocheng to be impartial and fair while imposing the prescribed discipline.

(Or at least trust that his old rival’s thin face and officious dignity would ensure he took care to be impartial and fair in front of so many witnesses, anyway. Perhaps that thought was a little too ungenerous. The rules said, Be easy on others…)

Wei Wuxian walked off to stand next to Lan Wangji, the two of them glancing at each other in a way that suggested a great deal of meaning explicable only to them was being conveyed – when had that happened? – and, as if they had agreed upon it in advance, they saluted Lan Qiren in a single movement.

Lan Xichen, beside them, mirrored the gesture a moment later.

Lan Qiren waved them away, and glanced at Lan Yueheng, who was standing there with his arms crossed over his chest and a solid glare on his face – just the way he always looked when Lan Qiren was being punished for whatever reason, then, even when the punishment had been self-imposed.

Ah, family.

“Kneel,” Lan Bocheng said, and Lan Qiren knelt.

He listened impassively as the terms of the punishment were read out, and then Lan Bocheng gave the order for the first round, three hundred and sixty strikes with the discipline rod, to begin.

That much was easy, or if not easy, then at least less difficult. Three hundred-odd strikes with a rod were nothing to a powerful cultivator – for particularly grievous infractions, Lan Qiren had in the past assigned himself far more if necessary. Even with a tortured body and poor health, making him more susceptible to pains he would have once dismissed out of hand, he still had sufficient self-control to not so much as flinch as the strikes came down on his back.

He even had the presence of mind to resist rolling his eyes when he overheard Wei Wuxian proudly muttering “Yeah, shifu, show them how it’s done” under his breath, as if he hadn’t himself wailed like a small infant when Lan Wangji had assigned him less than a hundred strikes in their youth.

When the first round of punishment was complete, there was a pause as the discipline rod was put away and the discipline whip produced. A quiet hiss emerged, the strange sound produced by dozens of mouths inhaling all at once – it added a certain sense of drama to proceedings which, in Lan Qiren’s irritated opinion, could have used a great deal less drama.

He was aware that his irritation came from the pain, pain that scorched his back and radiated throughout all his bones, and also that the real pain had yet to begin. He was sorer than he would have expected to be – retrospectively, it occurred to him it was probably the lingering side effects of having fallen from his sword, bruises laid upon bruises not yet healed. Even without anything more, this punishment would take some time to recover from…but there was more yet to come.

Much more.

Lan Qiren made a snap decision and used the brief pause to ensure that he was in a stable position, his center of gravity low so that he would not fall so quickly even if he lost consciousness, and sank into meditation. He hadn’t been able to decide in advance whether he should or not – meditating would make the injury worse in the long run, damaging his meridians more than it otherwise would given that meditation was used as a medium to connect the inner and outer worlds, but it would reduce the pain he suffered at the time, enabling him to take the blows with greater dignity. If it had been merely pride driving him, he might have chosen to refrain and take the pain, but he'd been concerned about the impact on those watching – and that had been when he’d only thought about Wei Wuxian and Lan Yueheng and his nephews. With so many people watching, the choice was clear.

Distanced from the world, he felt more than saw the whip being lifted up high –

And then lowered back down without striking.

What?

Lan Qiren slowly roused himself, sliding back into his own body piece by piece. Eventually, his ears started working again, and he was suddenly surrounded on all sides by a rush of noise – it seemed like everyone was talking all at once. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but a little bit of listening and a great deal of deciphering later, he managed to gather that a very urgent messenger had shown up, interrupting matters, and Lan Xichen had agreed in his role as sect to hear them at once rather than wait until sect discipline had been concluded.

Within his rights, of course, but relatively rude, as such things went…

“ – something to do with what happened at Qiongqi Path!” someone was saying loudly; Lan Qiren, still dazed, couldn’t quite figure out who, though he thought that the volume level suggested it might be his new disciple. “New evidence relating to the underlying event – according to the rules, if it’s persuasive enough, it could be a basis for a reassessment of imposed discipline, right?”

Lan Qiren blinked slowly. It could, of course. His sect was strict, not insane: they did not impose undue punishment, or at least they weren’t supposed to, and neither did they permit punishment for wrongdoing discovered to have no basis. If there was new evidence suggesting that discipline was inappropriate, the discipline would be modified in accordance with that new information.

He could see why Lan Xichen, terrified of what was happening under his watch and helpless to stop it, would grasp at every straw to find a way to prevent it. He could see the excitement plain on Wei Wuxian’s face, and only scarcely more subtly on Lan Wangji’s; he could see Lan Yueheng trying to bounce up and down on his toes the way he used to and swaying unsteadily as a result, still not fully in tune with his new leg. He could feel the excitement and hope surging all around him; he could hear the excited chatter of all the students surrounding the discipline hall, all those individual whispers – did they not remember that the rule was causing noise is prohibited not be yourself quiet? – joining together into a veritable roar.

But…what new information could possibly have come up in regards to the Qiongqi Path?

And who had brought it?

The latter point soon had an answer – the messenger had come running from the front gate, but the earth-swallowing length of Nie Mingjue’s strides meant that he arrived only shortly after the hurrying messenger that had preceded him.

What in the world was Nie Mingjue doing here? The Nie sect had borne heavy losses from the fighting, always the first in the vanguard to fight evil and win glory at the cost of blood, and they had their own rebuilding to focus on. Yes, Nie Mingjue had made some statements about supporting Lan Qiren when it came to the matter of Wei Wuxian, but that matter was settled; this current punishment reflected only the internal matters of the Lan sect. Besides, the Qiongqi Path was a thorny issue, with Nie Mingjue’s quite justified hatred for the Wen sect being well known, even famous, and only slightly better than his equally public disdain for the Jin sect – how could he of all people have found new information to provide? He hadn’t been there, and he had no reason to continue investigating the issue. And furthermore, why would he? He was a complete outsider, whose presence wouldn’t be welcome there, just like Lan Qiren had been…

Nie Mingjue opened his mouth.

“We require an audience with the sect leader at once,” he said, his booming field-marshal voice rolling through the assembled ranks of normally quiet Lan sect like a stone dropped into a lake.

Lan Qiren blinked: we?

But yes, it was true – Nie Mingjue was not alone. There was Jiang Cheng there, too, tagging along in Nie Mingjue’s shadow and looking sour as if he’d bitten into something that didn’t sit well in his belly, and a few further steps behind him still was the newest of Lan Xichen’s comrades, his new sworn brother Jin Guangyao, hurrying to catch up with the two tall men he was trailing after. His face was the same neutral pleasant smile as always, although Lan Qiren bemusedly thought to himself that from his current angle it seemed almost as though he were forcing the expression.

Still, the representatives of three Great Sects were here, demanding an immediate audience. Regardless of whether they had new evidence or not, even Lan Qiren had to admit that such a request was sufficient reason to postpone sect discipline. Of course, if they didn’t have any new evidence, or evidence insufficient to make a difference, it only meant that the discipline would be resumed again later, and the idea of having to steel himself to face the blows yet again was not especially appealing…could he really hope that there was some reprieve?

Did he dare?

Lan Xichen stepped out to meet them. His face was not as even and controlled as usual – his brow was creased, his eyes tense, the smile he tried to put onto his own face even more forced than the one on Jin Guangyao’s. “Welcome, sect leaders,” he said, saluting politely, if a little perfunctorily. “What brings you here?”

“We have new evidence to share regarding the events of the Qiongqi Path,” Nie Mingjue said, and Lan Qiren’s heart seemed to jump up to his throat. Could he really…?

Ignoring the whispers that started once again all around him, Nie Mingjue inclined his head towards Jiang Cheng, who cleared his throat pointedly and glared.

The whispers settled down.

(Jiang Cheng had a very good glare. He would make a good teacher, if he had the inclination for it.)

“My Jiang sect has been investigating the incident at the Qiongqi Path, given that our head disciple has been accused of misconduct in connection with that incident,” Jiang Cheng announced, his voice also pitched to carry, though not quite as naturally as Nie Mingjue’s had been. It was a good start; it justified his presence and his offer of information in a way that Nie Mingjue was wholly incapable of doing for himself. “What we have discovered is this: The Jin sect guards at the Qiongqi Path were acting outside of the Sect Leader’s authorization, and we have found proof of it in a letter they sought, unsuccessfully, to destroy. Their actions were in violation of Lanling Jin’s previous agreement as to the disposition of the Wen sect, settled in advance with Sect Leader Lan, and in violation of the morality of the cultivation world, for they were disobedient to the sect leader to whom they have sworn allegiance in order to fulfill a private grudge. They have now been denounced by their own sect, and we have brought Jin Guangyao, here as the representative of Lanling Jin, to attest to this. In light of this, Wei Wuxian’s attack against them has now been recognized to have been acting on behalf of their sect leader, and therefore recognized as being in the course of upholding justice –”

His remaining words were drowned out by the sea of noise, everyone suddenly talking at once. Shouting, even, in some cases, in blatant breach of the rules against too much noise.

Nothing individual could be heard, only seen, but he could see it all: the way Lan Xichen’s shoulders abruptly relaxed, the tension flowing out all at once; he smiled at his colleagues, the relief evident on his face. Wei Wuxian had leaped over to embrace Lan Wangji, who looked dumbfounded by his good fortune at having his beloved in his arms, and Lan Yueheng was laughing uproariously at them both, bent over in the middle and teetering as if he were about to trip over his one good leg.

Lan Qiren…

Lan Qiren closed his eyes, and exhaled.

With friends and family that loved you, anything could be accomplished.

Chapter Text

“I’m just happy we made it in time,” Nie Mingjue said, having stopped by Lan Qiren’s rooms to take some tea with him privately before he returned to his own sect. He looked tired underneath his seemingly boundless energy, faint circles under his eyes that his cultivation was already erasing. “Convincing Jin Guangshan to give in and denounce his own guards, even in the face of contrary evidence, was…difficult.”

“I can’t even imagine how you managed it,” Lan Qiren said, drinking another swallow of the bitter concoction Wen Qing had created for him to drink, which the Lan sect doctors had very strongly endorsed. He was all in favor of her abandoning her solitude and finally making common ground with her colleagues, but was it necessary for that to happen over them ganging up against him? “Any of it. Convincing Jin Guangshan is one thing, he’s always been one willing to cut off his own tail to protect himself, but finding the evidence necessary to do so, and then gathering it up in time to prevent the imposition of discipline…Xichen told you about the precise timing, I assume?”

“Don’t be ridiculous; he would never violate your privacy like that. It was Wei Wuxian.”

Of course it was, Lan Qiren thought, finding to his mild bemusement that the tenor of the thought was amused, resigned and fond rather than annoyed.

“Mm,” he said out loud. “And as for how Wei Wuxian managed to get you a message in time – say, by using the post reserved for the sect leader –”

“I’m very sure Xichen has no idea,” Nie Mingjue said, very virtuously. “He would never look the other way while someone absconded with his post.”

Lan Qiren rolled his eyes.

He would need to remind his nephew that propriety stated that a sect leader did not skulk around doing things underhandedly, but he wouldn’t put too much effort into the scolding; it was good for Lan Xichen to have finally gotten some of the harsh truths about politics into his head. He had already seen the fruits of it, with Lan Xichen being very firm in arranging matters around Lan Qiren’s recuperation regardless of any resistance.

Not that there was much, of course. Lan Qiren’s enemies in the sect had seemingly realized the extent of how their pig-headedness had blown up in their faces – putting aside Lan Xichen, who was now far less inclined to be swayed by their advice than he had ever been before, there was also the majority of the sect’s younger generation that had very publicly thrown in their support to Lan Qiren, which was enough to sway those who were generally on the fence into supporting his approach over theirs. The other Lan elders would be licking their wounds for quite some time after this loss of face…

“I’m still surprised you found evidence of misconduct,” he remarked. “It’s highly implausible that a few low-level guards could have acted without their sect leader’s permission, but for it to be in writing…”

“Yes, it was lucky that I’d already started looking into things when I first heard the rumors about your new disciple,” Nie Mingjue said, then added, “Huaisang helped.”

Lan Qiren nearly choked on his medicine: as Nie Huaisang’s teacher, he was well aware of Nie Huaisang’s talents, or lack thereof. Nie Huaisang was clever, but his primary interest was in avoiding work, not doing it. There was only one thing that Nie Huaisang was good at, beyond wasting money, and that was making forgeries, having honed mimicking his brother’s signature into an art long ago.

Nie Mingjue couldn’t possibly mean…!

He did.

Nie Mingjue grinned at him, utterly shameless. “I told you I’d support you,” he said cheerfully. “Did you doubt me?”

“Only your good sense,” Lan Qiren scolded. “Aren’t you supposed to be righteous?”

“I’m preventing an injustice. That’s righteous, isn’t it?”

Sometimes Lan Qiren could see the relation between Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang – and their scoundrel of a father – more clearly than others.

“We don’t have a rule against lying,” Nie Mingjue teased, looking far too cheerful. “Anyway, we were only able to blackmail Jin Guangshan into agreeing to letting the whole thing blow over because there must have been evidence of something else going on – it’s not like Huaisang did anything more than mimic the old bastard’s handwriting on a few scraps of burned paper. He must have been afraid of what else we might have found out…besides, lying or no lying, it’s only righteous to keep your promises, and I promised you.”

“That’s its own problem,” Lan Qiren huffed, though he was having trouble concealing his amusement. That sounded remarkably like a pit that Jin Guangshan had dug for himself. “You shouldn’t be making that sort of commitment blindly.”

“Aren’t you my teacher, too?” Nie Mingjue chuckled. “Or is your students’ devotion something you think limited to the Lan sect?”

Lan Qiren couldn’t say anything about that, given the display Nie Mingjue had happened upon. He felt his ears go hot. “Then why – I mean, Sect Leader Jiang –”

“Also one of your students, and with his own interests in it, given Wei Wuxian. Besides, do you think he wouldn’t do such a thing for you after you did him such a favor?”

Nie Mingjue had a point. Jiang Cheng was a good child.

Though he had been very angry…

“Was Wei Wuxian the one that got him involved as well?” Lan Qiren asked, and was pleased when Nie Mingjue nodded. “Good.”

“Very good, given that we couldn’t have pulled it off without him,” Nie Mingjue said dryly. “I’m pleased to report that your good disciple has a black eye but that both victim and aggressor have gotten over whatever it was that was lingering between them and are currently competing to see who can drink the most Emperor’s Smile without getting pickled.”

Of course they were.

“And while we’re on the subject, you really did a good thing when you took Wei Wuxian as your disciple.”

“Oh?” Lan Qiren stroked his beard. “Because of his scheming to preserve my life?”

“That’s all well and good, but actually it’s because I’ve never in my life seen Jin Guangshan caught so flatfooted.”

Lan Qiren tried valiantly to keep a smile off his face, though he suspected he wasn’t wholly successful.

“In fact, I genuinely think that’s the real reason we were able to get him to agree to condemn the actions of his sect – or at least of some guards whose deaths he could write off,” Nie Mingjue said, making a face of displeasure at his fellow sect leader’s callousness. “Your acceptance of Wei Wuxian as a personal disciple unnerved him, and then the Lan sect announcing such a disproportionate punishment unnerved him even further…he thought you were all up to something. No, more than that – that you knew something, and that it was all a dodge to get you out of the public view in order to allow you investigate it, and that us finding the ‘letters’ were us warning him off.”

Lan Qiren stared.

Nie Mingjue was, he knew, possessed of a sense of humor, sometimes an unnecessarily deadpan and even morbid one, but despite Lan Qiren’s initial hopes, it did not appear to be in evidence at the moment – Nie Mingjue was being completely serious.

“That man’s paranoia knows no boundaries,” Lan Qiren finally said, reluctantly accepting that it was the truth, regardless of how ridiculous it seemed. All of that, a façade meant just for the purpose of deceiving Jin Guangshan..? How talented in lies did he think they were? And worse, what did it suggest about Jin Guangshan’s own actions, present, past, or future, that he thought such a thing was the most reasonable conclusion…? “And here I thought Sect Leader Wen was bad…”

Nie Mingjue snorted.

“You realize, of course, that this means he is up to something that he fears will be uncovered by investigation,” Lan Qiren said, because he knew Jin Guangshan too well after all these years.

Nie Mingjue sighed. He knew him, too.

“You only think you’re being extorted when you have something worth extorting,” he agreed, then looked down at his hands, playing a little with his teacup. “I’m concerned that Meng Yao has gotten involved in it, whatever it was. His reaction in terms of agreeing to help us was – a little slower than righteousness or fellow-feeling might have preferred. I think Xichen was a little disappointed in him.”

“Meng Yao…Jin Guangyao? Your sworn brother?” Lan Qiren hadn’t had much interaction with him so far. There hadn’t really been time… “He came in the end, didn’t he? As a representative of his sect?”

That had been extraordinarily useful, in fact. Right or wrong, by the rules of the cultivation world, even Lan Qiren’s bitterest opponents couldn’t exactly continue to push for a punishment when the aggrieved victim was disclaiming any injury.

“Yes, he did, but it took some convincing.”

“That’s reasonable, though, isn’t it? Jin Guangshan is his father, which makes it difficult for him to contravene him, and add to that the fact that he’s only just recently been recognized… It would make sense that he might want to be cautious about moving forward in acting on his sect’s behalf.”

“Not that. We sought his assistance in convincing his father in the first instance, putting forth our reasons, and his initial inclination was to try to stall us, even though he knew the reason for our urgency.” Nie Mingjue shrugged. “He did eventually agree to help, and I don’t doubt that his genuine affection for Xichen played a large part in it. We wouldn’t have settled things nearly as quickly or satisfactorily without him knowing just how to best push his father.”

“But..?”

Nie Mingjue sighed. “I just wish I knew if it was because he genuinely changed his mind or because he realized that it was going to happen whether he liked it or not, and wanted to get on board as early as he could. After all, there’s not much that can’t be done if you can get enough of the Great Sects behind you, and we had them, whether Lanling Jin wanted to help or not. And who wouldn’t want to be on the winning side..?”

“You distrust him,” Lan Qiren observed. “If that’s the case, why would you swear brotherhood with him?”

“Because I have faith that he could be better. If he wanted to be…”

A classic Nie Mingjue problem, really; he always wanted other people to live up to his expectations for them. Lan Qiren would have to charge Lan Xichen with keeping a close eye on that situation, in the event that Nie Mingjue’s too-freely-given trust was betrayed – the Nie sect didn’t have rules about careful screening or imparting knowledge to the wrong individuals, but they should. Lan Xichen was partial to his sworn brothers, of course, but a timely reminder that trust should follow verification was probably in order. With the recent example ahead of him, Lan Xichen might even be inclined to listen.

“Admirable,” Lan Qiren said, because it was. “But still, you can’t solve everyone’s problems, you know.”

Nie Mingjue arched his eyebrows at him. “Really, Teacher Lan? Are you saying that one shouldn’t run around putting oneself on the line to fix other people’s issues?”

Lan Qiren gave him a stern look. “The sarcasm is unnecessary. I’m aware of the foolishness of my actions.”

Nie Mingjue shrugged. “It all worked out in the end,” he said pragmatically, then, eyes curving into a smile, added, “Except now you’re stuck with a personal disciple that’s a bit of a handful.”

“I’d already resigned myself to that. I think we’ll get along quite well, actually – he’s matured a little since his youth, unavoidable in a time of war, and we share an interest in music.”

“Mm. Think you can control him?”

“Most certainly not.”

Nie Mingjue laughed.

“That being said, I have some further insight into his behavior,” Lan Qiren said, thinking of the fight Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian had had, the rumors of how the Jiang sect leader had isolated himself after, the little hints that had come out here and there over the past month about Wei Wuxian’s debt to Wen Qing in particular and his refusal to use orthodox cultivation even in miniscule, irrelevant ways…it was fairly obvious what must have happened, once one thought about it. The execution of the Core-Melting Hand had been especially vicious. “And his demonic cultivation, while abhorrent in implementation, is at least being used for beneficent purposes, to pursue justice. Or it certainly will be in the future, anyway…I think we’ll manage, one way or the other.”

“I’ve never had the slightest doubt. Teacher Lan can turn even the worst trash into a gentleman.”

Lan Qiren wished he could find whoever it was that had first described him that way, primarily so that he might be able to wring their throat.

“I also see that Wei Wuxian seems to have improved his relationship with Wangji.”

“…mm, indeed,” Lan Qiren said. “You were right about that. They didn’t dislike each other as much as all that.”

“Glad to hear it. Though if I were to ask exactly how much they – ah – don’t dislike each other at the moment…”

“Talking behind the backs of others is forbidden,” Lan Qiren said austerely. “I’m not above violating that rule, Sect Leader Nie, but I’m not going to do it in order for you to win a bet with your little brother.”

“But it’s in a good cause,” Nie Mingjue protested, eyes curving with laughter again. “Huaisang promised me a whole season of saber training!”

“Good saber training? And did he specify which season? Or for that matter, which year or century?”

Nie Mingjue opened his mouth, then paused, looking abruptly annoyed.

Lan Qiren felt the desire to laugh starting to bubble up from his chest and suppressed it firmly.

“Huaisang is an exceedingly clever young man,” he said instead. “And most of all in how well he convinces people to underestimate him.”

“And don’t I know it,” Nie Mingjue sighed, then shook his head, standing up once more. Unexpectedly, he put his hand on Lan Qiren’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re all right, Teacher Lan. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

Lan Qiren was appalled by such a ridiculously blunt statement – to someone from another sect, no less! – but Nie Mingjue strode away before he could start lecturing him. Or worse, thanking him.

“Hey, shifu! Shifu!”

Lan Qiren suppressed a sigh. He’d done this to himself.

Wei Wuxian skid to a stop in front of him. He looked better than he had in the past – no red in his eyes, only minimal resentment floating around him like a haze…he did in fact have a bruise on his face, though not quite the black eye Nie Mingjue had made it out to be, and he did stink of wine, rules against consuming alcohol or no. He was less gaunt than he had been in the past, though, which seemed to help mitigate the rest. Apparently, despite all the complaints about the Lan sect’s food that Lan Qiren had been subjected to on their way to the Cloud Recesses, Wei Wuxian didn’t disdain it as much as that.

Well, that, or else Lan Wangji had been sneaking down the mountain to buy his beloved snacks. As courting methods went, it wasn’t a bad one, especially if he ever managed to obtain chili sauce.

Hm, perhaps Lan Qiren could drop his nephew a hint at their next meeting. There were some spice merchants that came by every once in a while, surely one of their merchant contacts in town would still have something left over that they could buy.

“What is it?” Lan Qiren asked, and Wei Wuxian grinned at him.

“You answered,” he crowed. “You’re really stuck with me now!”

Lan Qiren stared at him. “Wei Wuxian. How drunk are you? I was under the impression that you prided yourself on your tolerance –”

“I’m not that drunk, don’t be ridiculous. What would I even be drunk on? Your sect’s idea of a party involves tea and peach-blossom water.”

Lan Qiren gave him a stern look. “Sect Leader Nie has already told me about your little contest with Sect Leader Jiang.”

“Oh good, that spares me the effort of evading the subject,” Wei Wuxian said, utterly shameless. “Anyway, don’t distract me. I wanted to thank you.”

“There’s no need for thanks between master and disciple.”

Wei Wuxian waved a hand dismissively. “Yes, yes, whatever,” he said. “Jiang Cheng said the same thing.”

Lan Qiren nodded, then, trying not to be too blunt, said, “I understand you were the one who reached out to him to ask for assistance…?”

“I wasn’t going to let you get in trouble on my behalf if I could help it,” Wei Wuxian said, fierce for a moment before relaxing back into his usually spirited cheer. “It’s a fault of mine, I’ve discovered, though one I’m pleased to share with my shifu. It’s because of you that we managed to make up, you know.”

“Because of me?” Lan Qiren asked, surprised. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You exerted yourself to save me, even though it caused you great trouble, and you refused to share that trouble with me,” Wei Wuxian said. “And let me tell you: it was awful. I hated it.”

Lan Qiren rolled his eyes.

Wei Wuxian smirked at him, but then grew a little more serious. “I did the same thing to Jiang Cheng. I did it because he means the world to me – he’s my shidi and my friend, and he deserves everything. I wanted to give him everything, do anything for him. I thought I was helping him by not sharing my burdens with him. By taking it all on myself, by being selfless, by giving away pieces of myself without counting the cost, without even letting him help.”

That sounded…familiar, yes.

“Well, that was utterly asinine of me,” Wei Wuxian proclaimed, and grinned when Lan Qiren glared at him. “You’ve figured out what it was, haven’t you?”

“I have my suspicions,” Lan Qiren allowed. “If you ever wish to confirm them, you may do so at your leisure.”

Wei Wuxian snickered.

“You know he does the same for you, correct?” Lan Qiren asked, curious. “Make stupid decisions, that is. If Jiang Wanyin did not care for you as much as he did, he would – and should – have wrapped you up in Zidian and dragged you back to the Lotus Pier from the Burial Mounds whether you would or wouldn’t.”

“I’d like to see him try!”

Lan Qiren merely arched his eyebrows pointedly.

“…all right, yes, I know,” Wei Wuxian said, wrinkling his nose. “That’s the problem, though. If I’m giving up things for him and he’s giving up things for me, then what’s the point? We both end up losers. I don’t want to end up doing things that actually hurt the person I want to help just to appease my own pride.”

“That way is a dead end,” Lan Qiren agreed, thinking of his brother’s terrible selfish love – the type of love that Lan Wangji had not followed, would not follow. Would never follow, especially if both he and Wei Wuxian managed to learn now what Lan Qiren’s brother never had. “Love is no excuse, even if it is an explanation. I admit my own faults as well…I am pleased Jiang Wanyin is no longer angry with you.”

“Oh, no, he’s furious, and he’s going to take it out on me for months to come,” Wei Wuxian said. He seemed quite proud, in a manner that suggested that he thought that being the target of Jiang Cheng’s continued rage was the finest gift he could possibly imagine receiving. Presumably he had deluded himself into thinking that Jiang Cheng would have chosen to turn away from him and become indifferent, instead.

Ridiculous disciple.

“I’m glad my shifu admits his faults,” Wei Wuxian said, interrupting Lan Qiren’s thoughts – he had an expression on his face as if he were being clever about something. “Naturally, as a my teacher, he will have to model better behavior in the future in terms of valuing things that other people care about.”

“Are you trying to scold me for not cherishing my health?” Lan Qiren asked, his eyes narrowing. The master scolded the disciple, not the other way around.  

“What, me? I wouldn’t dream of it!”

What a rotten little liar Lan Qiren had taken on as a disciple.

“Anyway, that’s not what I came here to say,” Wei Wuxian said hastily, seeing Lan Qiren starting to reach for something to throw. “I talked with Jiang Cheng a bit, and he said that while he still wants my help in the Lotus Pier from time to time, he thinks it’s best if I stay here for now, focusing on learning and contemplation and meditation and all that stuff, so as to improve my reputation by association with the tranquil and orthodox Gusu Lan.”

Jiang Cheng, Lan Qiren surmised, had not yet heard about the alchemists’ group Wei Wuxian had been invited to join. That was probably for the best.

“And I just wanted to thank you.”

“I already said –”

“I know, I know. But still – thanks for bringing me back here!”

With that, he left as well, leaving Lan Qiren behind him, blinking owlishly.

I want to bring someone back to the Cloud Recesses, Lan Wangji had said. But they are unwilling.

Not so unwilling anymore.

Lan Qiren smiled faintly.

“Shufu?”

Lan Qiren turned – his nephews were both there. They looked anxious, as if they thought he would scold them for having schemed to get his punishment lifted: Lan Wangji by rallying the sect to protest, causing the elders to grow concerned over the reception of their decision and drawing their attention, such that they wouldn’t notice Wei Wuxian and Lan Xichen’s efforts to find a way to overturn it.

And neither would Lan Qiren, whose devotion to his sect and his rules would have compelled him to ask them to desist.

His devotion to his sect, to his rules, which was greater than everything – everything other than his love for his nephews.

Lan Qiren probably would scold them, later. For…something.

Eventually.

“This medicine is very bitter, but in the end it is good for me,” he said mildly, and saw both his nephews start to brighten. “Mistress Wen and the other doctors have said that it can be drunk alongside tea. Perhaps it would be suitable to wash it away with a better flavor. Would you two like to select one for me?”

Lan Xichen beamed so widely that it seemed painful, and even the reticent Lan Wangji smiled.

“Yes, shufu!”